The Register

To ensure privacy, stay offline, don't maintain public repos that trace back to you Talk about the ultimate Git Blame.…

New commercial alt-cash crafters turned away from slurping cheap electricity A city in upstate New York has become the first in America to effectively ban any new commercial-grade cryptocurrency miners from powering up.…

Governments refuse to get sucked into policy shambles, kibosh DNS GDPR plans An effort to resolve conflicts between upcoming European privacy legislation and the global Whois service for domain names has, predictably, failed, raising fears that cybercriminals will take advantage of the impasse.…

Bezos Bunch under the microscope of anti-monopoly cops Amazon has had its Japanese headquarters raided by police as the web giant finds itself the focus of an antitrust probe.…

CCTV commish welcomes amendment 3 years after first suggested UK government will be forced to debate a code of practice for cops' use of automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) systems after Labour MPs tabled an amendment to the Data Protection Bill.…

Study examines the cutting edge of cybercrime Crooks are increasingly turning to Monero over Bitcoin, according to a new study on the economics of cybercrime.…

Yeah, well... can they do it on a cold rainy night in Stoke? A neural network can wipe the floor with fleshy researchers at that most tedious of cosmic tasks – spotting craters.…

Slurps HyperFile chum for file, cloud storage gateway chops Object storage supplier Cloudian is buying Italian firm Infinity Storage to add file access and cloud storage gateway functionality to its services.…

App biz's Nice Guy makeover yet to convince all regulators Birmingham authorities have asked for more information on Uber's business model and operations before granting it a new licence.…

Oh, and billionaire owner Li Ka-shing retires Mobile operator Three UK reported a fall in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA)* of 2 per cent to £437m for its full-year results – largely due to an IT and network upgrade.…

It's your body Notch your mind "The Notch"* is either the curse of 2018 phone designs – or the only interesting thing about boring phone designs in 2018, depending on how you look at it. Now details of a Microsoft phone patent have emerged that could make future phones less Notchy.…

'Entrepreneurs!' 'Elon Musk!' 'Smartphones!' chirps Lord as UK space stares into abyss Countries are pouncing on space work originally destined for the UK like a “feeding frenzy of hyenas” according to a selection of representatives from the UK industry and education sectors.…

Citizens not keen on having habits tracked are watching closely A spec for online age verification is due to be published on Monday, a decision backers hope will pacify opponents of the smut checks.…

Forced punters to cough extra £40 for pre-configured laptops Currys PC World today apologised for forcing customers to pay an extra £40 for pre-configuration on their laptops that they didn't request – a dodgy practice brought to light by consumer charity Which?…

Streaming monolith starts move into home gear Analysis As Spotify nears an IPO, it is edging towards making home music gear, with a voice-powered speaker the most likely debutant.…

Parallel access filesystem for disks gets new life Case study IBM Spectrum Scale (GPFS) started out as a parallel access filesystem for disk-based arrays – so some may have expected it to fall over and die in the face of lightning fast access NVMe SSD and NVMe fabric access arrays.…

Pop this in your mouth and say 'Rastapopoulos' Something for the Weekend, Sir? Like to get wet, confides (or asks) the manufacturer in suitably moist English.…

Meet our new roundup of networking news, this week feat. Cisco, Juniper and more This week's network-news-in-five minutes has Palo Alto Networks acquiring a startup, a slew of Cisco switches, Juniper's fabric fetish, network monitoring and more.…

Continuous Lifecycle earlybird offer facing chop at midnight Events We’ll be pulling down the shutters on our earlybird ticket offer for Continuous Lifecycle London this evening, meaning you’ve got just hours left to save £100s on conference and workshop tickets.…

Come and chillax with us, nontrepreneurs! The taxpayer is helping fund a "Decelerator" for burnt-out startups in Shoreditch to help them "reflect and reprioritise".…

Earth-shattering change to biz? You'll be the judge of that It's hard to believe there once was a more innocent time when if somebody used the phrase "digital transformation" you might think they were being pretentious about making the switch from renting films on DVD delivered in the post to Amazon Prime downloads. But there's still a lot of confusion around the term – even more so when people start to ask organisations that have started down that path whether it has worked.…

$142 billion in kit shipped last year, half from Dell, Cisco and HPE Analyst firm Canalys has claimed 2017 saw record shipments of data centre infrastructure.…

And he couldn’t do that, until tech support showed printers and staplers don’t mix On-Call Why look at that! Friday is upon us, which means it’s time to read this week’s edition of On-Call, our weekly column featuring Register readers’ recollections of tech support jobs gone wrong.…

Britons never, never, never shall be wage slaves. Oh wait Cyber security professionals in Germany earn on average 17 per cent more than their UK counterparts.…

Face it, you're not going to adopt ChromeOS without integrating stuff you already run Google’s beefed up Chrome Enterprise, its US$50-a-year management service for Chrome OS devices.…

Subcutaneous smart card doesn’t cut it in Sydney A self-described “cyborg” who slipped a public transport smartcard under his skin has pled guilty to riding trains without a valid ticket and copped a fine, plus costs.…

Which may be why Google’s changed the name to ‘Wear OS’ LogoWatch LogoWatch Google’s re-branded Android Wear, the cut of Android for wearable devices, as “Wear OS by Google” and added the tag line "make every minute matter".…

How far down does water drip? Water covers most of the Earth’s surface and flows deep beneath it as well. But how deep it travels is unknown.…

And how it works doesn't leak. Gulp! A secretive unlocking tool offered to cops and government agents has some computer security bods worried over its privacy implications.…

Alert adds detail to 'Dragonfly' cyber-attack disclosed last year The US Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Thursday issued an alert warning of ongoing cyber-attacks against the West's energy utilities and other critical infrastructure by individuals acting on behalf of the Russian government.…

For those planning an out-of-the-world trip, solar radiation is on the rise Space is getting deadlier. The amount of solar radiation has increased from previous solar cycles, according to new measurements made by a team of researchers.…

In Constantinople it works, not good news for the Turks Encrypted email provider ProtonMail says its service has been blocked in Turkey, but can still be accessed via a VPN, DNS, or Tor.…

Code-sharing websites may be forced to install automatic infringement filters Code-repository GitHub has raised the alarm about a pending European copyright proposal could force it to implement automated filtering systems – referred to by detractors as "censorship machines" – that would hinder developers working with free and open source software.…

Top exec talks to El Reg on shifting 130,000 staff Interview Collaboration rather than cost is the reason Airbus has given Microsoft’s old-world Office app bundle the heave ho and is migrating 130,000 staff – the entire workforce – to Google’s G Suite.…

Но все же никакого сговора The US Treasury is freezing the assets of 19 people and five groups from Russia who launched cyber-attacks and interfered with America's elections.…

Meltdown, Spectre-free CPUs coming this year, allegedly Intel has claimed its future processors – shipping as early as the second half of this year – will be free of the security design flaws it totally told you not to fret about.…

App biz flings travel info at capital's transport regulator ahead of licensing decision Much maligned not-a-taxi biz Uber has pledged to hand over travel data to Transport for London.…

To forget, or not to forget? That is the question RTBF trial The man demanding Google deletes search links to interviews he gave about a criminal offence he committed has been accused of giving “demonstrably false” answers in court by Google’s barrister.…

Directory traversal + log injection = I can see your privates A pair of recently patched security vulnerabilities in SAP NetWeaver Application Server Java* could have been combined to hack customer relationship management (CRM) systems.…

Compliance with Home Office data-slurp not cool, say MPs The heads of the Digital arm of the UK's National Health Service have been accused of acting as suppliers, rather than guardians, of the data belonging to patients under their care by handing address information to the Home Office for immigration enforcement.…

What can you do about it for now? Sweet 2FA Email newsletter distribution service MailChimp has promised to act on the abuse of accounts to send (frequently) malware-tainted spam.…

Handouts from March but you're on your own for line rental fees The UK government has unveiled its £67m broadband voucher scheme, flinging £3,000 at SMEs to set up gigabit connections and handing £500 ones to regular folk*. After that users have to stump up the rest in ongoing rental fees.…

Jumped-up asteroid experiencing 'icy activity' There is icy activity on the surface of dwarf planet Ceres, according to researchers studying observations from NASA’s probe, Dawn.…

But will that prevent another burning effigy? BT's Openreach is to hire 3,500 trainee engineers in a bid to support its 'full-fibre' proposals for Britain.…

We can't see alien radio signals because they were snuffed out If we ever detect signals from extraterrestrial civilisations, they are likely already dead, a somewhat downbeat update to the venerable Drake equation suggests.…

Hotspot Shield patched; Zenmate and VPN Shield haven't ... yet? A virtual private network recommendation site decided to call in the white hats and test three products for bugs, and the news wasn't good.…

Airlines want another 4,600 of the single-aisle workhorse that debuted in 1967 Boeing has revealed that the 10,000th 737 rolled off the production line this week.…

Just what the world needs after a year of component shortages PC-and-server-makers spent most of 2017 complaining about profit erosion due to shortages of key components.…

Adds bug bounty class for Meltdown and Spectre attacks on Windows and Azure Microsoft has created a new class of bug bounty specifically for speculative execution bugs like January's Meltdown and Spectre processor CPU design flaws.…

Extraordinary letter to EPO Admin Council blows up management claims An extraordinary letter from nearly 1,000 patent examiners has confirmed what critics of the European Patent Office (EPO) have been saying for some time: patent quality has fallen thanks to a determined push by management to approve more of them.…