The Register

Probe found unfair contracts for sellers The French government is seeking to fine Amazon €10m (£8.8m) for using its market dominance to unfairly treat vendors.…

Filing: Explosive allegations against ride-hailing biz revealed in letter from former staffer Uber has been accused of illegal intelligence gathering, using non-attributable hardware and software, impersonating drivers and bugging private events, in an explosive set of allegations from a former staffer.…

We'll wait for you! cries spurned suitor After turning down a €4.3bn (£3.8bn) buyout offer from Atos last week, Dutch security and chip biz Gemalto announced today that it has accepted a €4.8bn (£4.2bn) deal from French defence group Thales.…

Ahead of only Nigeria when it comes to fibre Blighty is one of the top countries when it comes to superfast broadband but one of the worst for full-fibre connections, according to an in-depth report by Ofcom comparing the UK with 16 other nations.…

Well you do need to start with 13... Tintri has made a FlexDrive facility available so cash-strapped customers can expand all-flash array capacity one drive at a time.…

All I want (to eat) for Christmas is you A woman from Kent, England, intends to redefine the meaning of a cremated Christmas dinner this year as she plans serve her mother's ashes with her festive meal.…

The MEF came, saw, and conquered Bezos' vaults of cash Amazon and the Italian government have agreed that the online shopping colossus will pay €100m (£88.3m) in back tax for 2011 to 2015, after a year of arguing.…

The Great Egg Race presenter was 89 Obit Professor Heinz Wolff, the bonkers-haired boffin who brought delight and joy to millions of BBC viewers in the 1970s and 1980s, has died aged 89.…

A grand for an animated poo emoji, and a NOTCH? Anyone hoping that the 10th anniversary iPhone hype – including the revolutionary 3D poo emoji – would reinvigorate consumer interest in the product line may be disappointed.…

Euler Hermes slashes limits to zero... Worry not, says geek emporium Exclusive Yet another major credit insurer has abandoned geek emporium Maplin Electronics. Euler Hermes – the biggest trade indemnifier in the tech sector – has entirely removed all lines of coverage, El Reg can reveal.…

Oo, awkward Christmas is typically a busy time of year for the Holy Father, but thankfully Pope Francis has found time to decree that made-up stories are a "serious sin".…

Supermicro's battery backup module will fit another rack in Supermicro has added battery backup power to its disaggregated rack-scale server product line to improve power efficiency and server density ratings.…

Erm, just like Google doesn't. It's an Adwords thing, innit? Google asked rival browser Vivaldi to add uninstall instructions on its website download page – something Google doesn't do itself – after deactivating Vivaldi's advertising account earlier this year.…

'It's not a publicity stunt,' says BusinessWaste.co.uk People have bin going mad for Bitcoin lately and, as it appears some refuse to see sense, companies are queueing up to get on the bandwagon.…

It’s a container Jim, but not as we and Docker know it UK startup Cloudhouse has taken on the Windows migration crowd with a product to take Windows 7 era applications, wrap them inside an operating system interface code layer, and make them Windows 10-compliant.…

Sheffield boffins win UK prize, Kardashian's '69' scoops international gong The Royal Statistical Society has bestowed the coveted title of UK statistic of the year on 0.1 per cent – the percentage of land that's densely built on in the nation.…

White boxers a constant and growing threat Slumping enterprise data centre server sales are set to recover in 2018 driven by the Purley refresh cycle and the need for more compute.…

Plus: It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye, or freezes off their toes On-Call theregister.co.uk…

Debt restructuring checked off, $300 million in the kitty Almost a year after filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, Avaya last Friday announced the process has completed.…

The difference between George Clooney and Dustin Hoffman? Just a couple of pixels Would you like to join the merry band of researchers breaking machine learning models? A trio of German researchers has published a tool designed to make it easier to craft adversarial models when you're attacking a “black box”.…

Keeper exposed punters to drive-by click-jack pwnage Google Project Zero's Tavis Ormandy has turned up a howling blunder in a password manager bundled with Windows 10.…

Melbourne researchers warn government: don't publish data down to the individual, ever Governments should not release anonymised data that refers to individuals, because re-identification is inevitable.…

And more in your machine-learning news summary Roundup Here's your quick guide to news in the AI world beyond what we've covered this week.…

RetDec will turn binaries into something more legible Malware hunting biz and nautical jargon Avast has released its machine-code decompiler RetDec as open source, in the hope of arming like-minded haters of bad bytes and other technically inclined sorts with better analytical tools.…

Alex Kozinski accused of showing women clerks porn, sexually harassing staff A misconduct inquiry has been opened into top US tech judge Alex Kozinski over allegations that he showed female law clerks pornography and repeatedly asked inappropriate sexual questions.…

Grazing FB is ruining your life, admits social network after probing its army of addicts Facebook has just publicaly slapped itself upside the head, admitting that its very existence is often detrimental to the wellbeing of its users.…

AGs pressure America's top court to make Redmond hand over overseas messages Microsoft should not be able to “shield evidence” held on Irish servers from US prosecutors, a group of 35 US state attorneys general has argued.…

Whoosh... gust of wind - sorry chaps, I'm out Engineers and programmers working on a robot bee project could soon have the faux insects behaving more like real bees, according to engineers and roboticists at Cornell and Harvard.…

In search of cold, hard facts, scientists prep 470-mile adventure A NASA team is heading on a trip arcing around the South Pole to check that their new satellite's measurements from space are just as good as their own back on terra firma.…

Some 4% of properties trundle below 10Mpbs Just over a million premises in Blighty, or 4 per cent of properties, cannot get speeds of 10Mpbs, according to a comprehensive report by regulator Ofcom.…

Yo, NSA maths chaps, can you hear me? – Black Hat man Security researchers regularly set out to find implementation problems in cryptographic algorithms, but not enough effort is going towards the search for mathematical backdoors, two cryptography professors have argued.…

New hinge design looks back not forward The handful of fans anticipating a Microsoft "Surface Phone" should brace themselves for disappointment.…

ACM Sir Stuart Peach is right – but only to a point The head of the British Armed Forces, Air Chief Marshal Sir Stuart Peach, has warned that Russia could cut off the UK by severing undersea communications cables.…

Campaigners say body 'will be pushed to block' large number The British Board of Film Classification will be responsible for regulating age checks for UK users of online porn websites, if the government gets its way.…

Thank you for your support BlackBerry has announced "continuing support" for the legacy BB10 OS phones it once made – but won't be updating its first Android phone, the Priv, regularly any more.…

Intended to boost former state monopoly's 'ailing TV service' BT and Sky have set aside their long-running feud and signed a deal to sell their channels on each other's platforms.…

Claims unfair dismissal, sex discrimination, withholding bonuses Intel Corp's former Europe, Middle East, Africa, and Russia (EMEAR) sales director, who lost her job a year ago, is making an employment tribunal claim against the company which includes a series of accusations including sexual discrimination.…

... and companies need to share their info nicely The UK needs high-quality, standardised and more open data to improve its national infrastructure – and companies need to get used to sharing, a report has said.…

Under-glass fingerprint sensors are HERE Apple is said to have made a virtue out of a necessity with its iPhone X – creating the notorious "Notch" to house a sophisticated facial-recognition system, Face ID.…

Huawei ... who, who, who, who? I really wanna know Analysis Huawei has made a move towards storage class memory that suggests it believes infrastructure driven by the tech is not only possible but inevitable.…

Latest container wrangling bits should drop on Friday Assuming a handful of lingering issues can be resolved, the open-source Kubernetes project will introduce version 1.9 on Friday.…

Dentist’s office disapproved of perceived personalisation On Call Welcome again to On-Call, The Reg’s Friday column celebrating readers’ stories of being asked to fix the unfeasible.…

Kepler-90 has the same number of planets as our Sun Our Solar System is no longer the largest-known planetary system in the Milky Way – after scientists confirmed the existence of an eighth planet, Kepler-90i, around a Sun-like star on Thursday.…

Splendid isolation for VMs, and a hand for ARM servers The Xen Project has released version 4.10 of its hypervisor.…

Woman's nightmare revealed in discrimination lawsuit An ex-Microsoft worker has accused the US software giant of bungling her internal complaint that a fellow employee raped her while she slept.…

Serverless functions running on a set-top box could be a thing before long CableLabs, the organisation that figures out to help pay TV operators sweat their networks, has launched OpenStack installers for its software-defined networking and network function virtualization efforts.…

Lot of invoices to customers, still a small slice of database giant's biz Oracle topped analyst expectations and continued its push into the cloud computing space with another strong quarter.…

Shut your whining, it's going to be great Analysis The FCC voted 3-2 Thursday morning to get rid of net neutrality rules.…

It says so right here, in this paper Scientists have solved a 60-year mystery by figuring out the source of harmful and highly energetic electrons whizzing around in Earth’s inner radiation belt.…

Court makes quick work of techie's long-shot appeal In a not particularly surprising decision, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, USA, this week ruled that Michael Thomas, in his former role as IT operations manager for web hosting biz ClickMotive, was not authorized to trash company files and infrastructure as he claimed.…