The Register

Hey Dad, why does your old boss call you ‘The Powerdown Kid’? Who, me? Welcome to Monday morning, dear readers. We’ll try to make it bearable for you by offering you a new instalment of “Who, me?”, The Register’s column in which readers share stories of having screwed thing up.…

Sue the giants, says chief constable Sawyer One of England's top police officers, Shaun Sawyer, wants citizens to go after internet giants that have wronged them.…

Sigh. 160,000 un-patched boxen await p0wnage Cisco's Smart Install software has become the vector for a series of infrastructure attacks and politically-motivated defacements.…

Sigh. 160,000 un-patched boxen await p0wnage Cisco's Smart Install software has become the vector for a series of infrastructure attacks and politically-motivated defacements.…

That snapping sound you heard? Italy's got the gloves on for a probe Facebook's slow-motion privacy awakening continued over the weekend, with a data analytics outfit called CubeYou suspended from the platform pending investigation over T&C violations.…

Blink and you’ll have what missed what looks like a premature promo release VMware appears set to launch a new version of vSphere.…

PCs don't have beepers any more, but code to make' em sound off lets you see files Retro programmers may need to reconsider using the Linux beep command as an activity or progress alert.…

It’ll be do svidaniya to secure messaging app if Roskomnadzor succeeds Russian telecoms and mass communications regulator Roskomnadzor has filed a lawsuit it hopes will see secure messaging app Telegram turfed out of the country.…

Your guide to this week in machine-learning Roundup Here is a round up of this week’s AI news beyond what we've already covered.…

Warning: Contains extreme stupidity Roundup While Facebook caught most of the security-related flak this week, there were other infosec stories out there.…

No cheep puns here. Just egg-shell-ent ones Birds can fly, sing, and, er, detect the Earth’s magnetic field behind their eyes, according to a recent paper published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.…

Indictments to be unveiled soon, we're told Updated Before a controversial law bill making websites liable for supporting sex trafficking has even been signed into law by President Trump, US authorities have taken the sort of legal action the pending legislation is intended to enable.…

SEC cops crash crypto coin creeps' alleged crime caper US financial watchdog the SEC has frozen $27m in what it believes are ill-gotten gains generated by a shady cryptocurrency deal.…

SEC cops crash crypto coin creeps' alleged crime caper US financial watchdog the SEC has frozen $27m in gains from what they believe to be a scheme to illegally profit from a shady cryptocurrency deal.…

Big Red all smiles after black-market support biz bosses jailed A California bloke who operated an unlicensed Oracle support company has been sentenced to 24 months in prison.…

Devs get nervous as streams interface sunset approaches with no replacement ready Updated Twitter's planned discontinuation of its streaming APIs in June has third-party developers worried that a replacement service won't be available in time to prevent their Twitter apps from breaking.…

We were better off going it alone, huffs investor A MuleSoft shareholder is suing the dev tools specialist, alleging the biz took a lowball offer when it was gobbled up by Salesforce.…

Fraudsters seize advantage as transfers, balances grind to halt Belgian bank Argenta has apologised for a botched tech plumbing upgrade that delayed transfers and confronted customers with incorrect balance data.…

Fraudsters seize advantage as transfers, balances grind to halt Belgian bank Argenta has apologised for a botched tech plumbing upgrade that delayed transfers and confronted customers with incorrect balance data.…

Royal Mail thought marketing was a service, ICO disagreed Royal Mail, which claims to be the most trusted letter delivery service in the UK, was today fined for sending out more than 300,000 nuisance emails.…

UK-based BladeRoom's founder airs grievances Mark Zuckerberg won't appear in front of Parliament, but Facebook is in the dock again this week as part of a long-running court case over the alleged theft of British trade secrets.…

Tens of thousands of online shoppers' payment details left totally unencrypted Exclusive A popular drone dealership website left its entire transaction database exposed online with no encryption at all, revealing a host of purchases by thousands of police, military, government and private customers.…

Boffins flushed with success as new uses found for cosmic cack Researchers reckon some smart bacteria and a 3D printer could solve the twin challenges of transporting materials on a journey to Mars and dealing with all the solid waste generated by space-faring humans.…

Boffins flushed with success as new uses found for cosmic cack Researchers reckon some smart bacteria and a 3D printer could solve the twin challenges of transporting materials on a journey to Mars and dealing with all the solid waste generated by space-faring humans.…

Replacement for paper-pushing system 'very carefully phased' Flights into London's Heathrow and Gatwick airports face small delays because air traffic controllers are finally upgrading to fully digital systems after decades spent pushing paper around.…

But warns political meddling risks damaging free speech Twitter removed more than 270,000 accounts for terrorism-related violations in the last six months of 2017 – and most of these were detected by internal tools.…

Things on the up after lopping off banking arm, biz claims The Co-op Group claims to have made "significant progress" in updating internal IT systems since ditching IBM, according to the mutual's calendar '17 annual accounts filed today.…

Things on the up after lopping off banking arm, biz claims The Co-op Group claims to have made "significant progress" in updating internal IT systems since ditching IBM, according to the mutual's calendar '17 annual accounts filed today.…

Multiple regions report mass outage It seems Microsoft's Office 365 is having an unscheduled nap as users across the world report difficulties logging into the administration portal.…

Big, red and very, very angry A US judge has slammed Oracle for using "extreme, unnecessary, overheated rhetoric" in its latest submission in an ongoing court battle with HPE.…

Voluntary agreement gets green light – irony klaxon sounded Amazon and eBay are to ink a deal with the UK tax man this month to provide data on potential VAT evaders.…

Beefs for read speeds too Just over a year after the first Black M.2 SSD hit the streets, Western Digital has doubled its maximum capacity to 1TB, doubled sequential read bandwidth and more than doubled the random read IOPS.…

Clock is ticking on Continuous Lifecycle London 2018 There are just six weeks till we open the doors at Continuous Lifecycle London, so to ensure a prime spot at both the conference and our deep-dive all-day workshops, you should really snap up your ticket now.…

It can be cold and lonely at the tip Something for the Weekend, Sir? My nuts are freezing. So are my toes and fingertips. It's chilly here on my remote Tibetan mountaintop.…

Brit telco BT bucks trend. Yep, you heard that right The average gender pay gap across the largest tech and telecoms businesses is 18.6 per cent, an El Reg analysis of UK government stats has revealed.…

It's not just Facebook, it's absolutely everyone Since the number of users slurped by third-party data harvesters only seems to rise, the ugly truth for Facebook may be that its growth-at-all-costs culture has led to a dramatic loss in personal privacy.…

And yet its shares slumped. The reason? Fears of memory glut Samsung Electronics has posted strong earnings guidance for Q1 of FY 2018.…

Ignorance of the giant radio antennae atop the office building was bliss On-Call Everybody’s working for the weekend, the song goes, but here at On-Call, The Register works to bring you a weekly story of a fellow reader’s tech support trauma.…

And pops the sound barrier for good measure VIDEO Virgin Galactic’s space tourism operation conducted its first rocket-powered flight on Thursday, and appears to have recorded a roaring success.…

Uber, have my calendar. And would you at least think about paying for it? Gartner thinks the Facebook data panic will subside as people start to realise the value of their information.…

Only for research, promise. Which was when things went-pear shaped before You’d think recent events might have dulled Facebook’s rapacious lust for data. But now comes news, from CNBC, that The Social Network™ tried to acquire access to patients’ medical records.…

No joke: another security SNAFU for Chipzilla, this time for a popular remote admin app Intel has made much of its NUC and Compute Stick mini-PCs as a way to place computers to out-of-the-way places like digital signage.…

It’s not new money and not a huge slab of Redmond's research budget Microsoft’s announced it will spend $US5 billion on internet of things research over the next four years. But don’t get too excited: they are diverted dollars rather than a new cash splash…

Alt-currency's value tumbles amid malicious mining mishaps The Verge cryptocurrency has seen its value drop by 25 per cent after hackers exploiting a bug in the alt-coin's software forced its developers to hit the reset button and hard-fork the currency.…

And quietly cancels plan to gobble hospital patient info In response to widespread concern about the misuse of Facebook user data, the social ad network on Wednesday hobbled its Graph API and Instagram API, breaking apps sustained by that data in the process.…

Sega golden oldie repackaged as a research testbed OpenAI has launched a new competition using classic Sonic the Hedgehog games as a testbed for transfer learning in AI.…

Who needs phones when you've got IP lawyers? BlackBerry has filed suit against Snap Inc alleging the Snapchat service copied half a dozen of its mobile app design patents.…

MIT eggheads craft creepy covert speech-to-text interface Pic At long last, the war against privacy-invading lip readers and Alexa eavesdroppers may finally be won.…

Silent speech interface turns talking to oneself into text At long last, the war against privacy-invading lip readers and Alexa eavesdroppers may finally be won.…

Hi! How may we pwn you today? Hackers are feared to have swiped sensitive personal information held by two of the best known companies in the US – after malware infected a customer support software maker.…