The Register

Microsoft hired her, but Big Blue sues to stop her exporting its succession planning secrets Microsoft has named Lindsay-Rae McIntyre as its Chief Diversity Officer and IBM has sued to stop it happening.…

Pwned credit-score biz quietly admits more info lost Last year, Equifax admitted hackers stole sensitive personal records on 145 million Americans and hundreds of thousands in the UK and Canada.…

Sleepless in Seattle after shakeup Amazon has confirmed a round of job cuts are taking place at its headquarters in Seattle, USA.…

The numbers, not the spin, from nbn™'s half-year presentation and corporate plan nbn™, the organisation building and operating Australia's national broadband network, is the subject of endless controversy.…

Demands blanket rather than specific repo shutdowns Apple's fruitless attempts to remove its leaked iBoot source code from the internet have escalated into requests to have community code site GitHub disable all downstream forks made from identified infringing repositories.…

Cheer up – by 2030, we'll have flying cars, too President Trump's administration has handed down a budget for 2019 to NASA – and it effectively kills off key projects in exchange for a vague promise to go back to the Moon.…

Chocolate Factory overhauls search engine to end brouhaha Google's deal this month with stock-photo agency Getty to end their legal spat carries one very noticeable provision: an overhaul of the "View image" button in Google Images search results.…

Sigh with relief, fellow geeks, if you're using them on your home or business network You will never be able to own an official .home, .mail or .corp domain name or email address on the public internet.…

TensorFlow math accelerators available to rent Google’s Cloud Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) chips are now available to rent on its cloud platform as a beta-grade service.…

Redmond extends ATP to older builds, adds third-party links Microsoft has back-ported its Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) antivirus tool from Windows 10 to Windows 7 and 8.1.…

Huge advertiser threatens to turn off Zuck's money tap In a highly unusual public rebuke, monster-company Unilever gave Facebook both barrels over its "toxic content" – and threatened to pull its advertising from the antisocial network.…

Court favours consumer group in long-running dispute A German court has ruled that Facebook has not done enough to alert people to the pre-ticked privacy settings on its mobile app.…

Chinese firm blows past costly Cisco and Lenovo Analysis Behind the numbers in Gartner's third 2017 quarter server tracker are some startling revelations concerning Cisco's server pricing and Inspur's arrival as a top-three supplier.…

Tweak VFAT volume to execute arbitrary code A recently resolved flaw in the KDE Linux desktop environment meant that files held on a USB stick could be executed as soon as they were plugged into a vulnerable device.…

If you can fly bombs through there, you can fly parcels, too Military efforts to approve the flying of Predator military drones through Britain’s skies could pave the way for point-to-point drone deliveries, newly disclosed correspondence has revealed.…

Firm in mega cloud tech push Oracle has announced plans to roll out its self-described autonomous technology to all of its Platform-as-a-Service products.…

Short-term greed risks long-term irrelevance Analysis Rarely has a phone been as widely trailed as Samsung's 2018 Galaxy flagship. When the S9 is formally unveiled in Barcelona in a fortnight there will be few surprises – not only are the design and specs widely leaked but so are the carrier variants. But what does Samsung want from its phone range – and what does the world actually need?…

Don't pay the miscreants – don't even fix a price Free decryption keys for the Cryakl ransomware were released last Friday – the fruit of an ongoing cybercrime investigation.…

More kit to boost connectivity in rural UK Vodafone has unveiled an eight-metre high "telescopic" 4G mast, intended to boost speeds in rural areas to 200Mpbs, following a trial in Porthcurno, Cornwall, UK.…

Civil rights groups slam trial as 'breathtakingly invasive' A police force in Yorkshire has been kitted out with fingerprint scanners to run identity checks in the street.…

Cambridge comes to Clerkenwell to talk Existential Risk A sneaking fear that the machines might turn on us is just not good enough - we need to be able to quantify that risk if we want to avoid it, or at least manage it. Or we could just push on regardless and see how things work out.…

Quickly now, before the suits show up Open Source Insider The Open Source Initiative, a non-profit that advocates for open-source software and coined the term, celebrates its 20th anniversary this month. It's difficult to conceive of where the internet, indeed the world, would be today were it not for open-source software and, perhaps more importantly, the free software movement that preceded it and continues to promote free software today.…

Magic quadrant shows HPE has its work cut out Analysis What a difference a year makes: just 12 little months ago HPE was ruling the integrated systems roost, but fast forward and it has slipped behind as Nutanix and Dell EMC streak ahead - the latter with help from its VSAN gear.…

That's 'I hit the power button my mistake, SIR!' Do you understand? Who, Me? Welcome to the fourth edition of Who, Me?, The Register's new column in which techies share their shameful secrets.…

Voice assistants get samples of our voice that can be remixed and faked In the middle of the night, the 83-year-old woman received a call. A caller identifying himself as a policeman angrily reported that her grandson – identified by name – had landed in jail. He'd hit a policeman while driving and TXTing.…

Netflix chap and predicts streamer will cop slowdown between 0.1% and 6% Netflix engineer, dTrace Daddy and famed shouter at hard disk drives Brendan Gregg has cooked up a "microbenchmark" to assess the Linux kernel page table isolation (KPTI) patch for the Meltdown CPU design flaw and come up with predictions of significant-but-manageable performance degradation.…

Nematode only has 300 neurons - a snack to simulate Boffins from the Technische Universität Wien have created a simulated brain, run it in a computer and taught it a trick.…

That's if the ITU can get telcos talking standards, and it looks like it can There's a race to apply machine learning to networking applications (especially for 5G), and as so often happens in periods of frenzied development, there's an emerging standardisation gap the International Telecommunications Union hopes to fix.…

Also: Big Blue's Meltdown, Spectre status updated, and a mystery bug in AIX IBM has warned that bugs in its Notes auto-updater mean the service can be tricked into running malicious code.…

Global government affairs Veep wants trade rules to apply Huawei has told an Australian parliamentary committee it believes national security is sometimes being used to hide protectionist trade policies.…

There was nothing to see here, but please move along, nothing to see here, say authorities The Pyeongchang 2018 Winter Olympics' website went down just before the event's Friday opening ceremony, thanks to a cyber-attack, and stayed down for about 12 hours.…

Biz scrambles to shut down crafty coin crafting operation Thousands of websites around the world – from the UK's NHS and ICO to the US government's court system – were today secretly mining crypto-coins on netizens' web browsers for miscreants unknown.…

Lax policies, coder laziness don't mix well Analysis The sudden departure of a developer from GitHub, along with the Go code packages he maintained, has underscored a potential security issue with the way some developers rely on code distributed through the community site.…

But it's not all good news! Roundup Here's a roundup of this week's security news, beyond what we've already covered, to kickstart your weekend.…

Bloke claims expensive audio kit detonated mid-workout A Florida man claims one of his Apple AirPods blew up as he worked out at the gym.…

Funds to prop up critical service diverted to bankroll other stuff, watchdog not impressed The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has warned that multiple US states are using money designated for emergency services to fund other unrelated projects.…

Don't mean to harsh your buzz: Hackers weed out access hole The US state of Washington says a miscreant was able to access the system it uses to track the manufacturing and sale of marijuana.…

Cops frustrated by lack of movement in the case A suspected drug dealer accused of swallowing his stash has become internet famous – after refusing to take a dump, and thus provide the cops their evidence, for 22 DAYS and counting.…

Nor C-- or Should Have Used Go or Screw Ellison... Unable to convince Oracle to allow the use of its trademarked term "Java" to refer to the open source version of Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE), the Eclipse Foundation is asking those who care about such things to vote on proposed names for the software project.…

Travis: A pain in the ASCII right to the end Comment The man responsible for dragging the reputation of one of the tech world's biggest names through the mud, into the gutter, and in circles around raw sewage has claimed today's out-of-court Waymo-Uber settlement vindicates him.…

Kremlin goes nuclear on sly digi-cash-crafting eggheads Engineers at Russia's top nuclear weapons lab have been arrested – after the eggheads were caught using one of the supercomputers to mine cryptocurrency.…

Taxi app biz expresses 'regret' for being scumbag outfit Analysis It was just one more twist in an extraordinary story: this morning Uber settled its San Francisco court battle with rival Waymo for $245m in stock.…

Waving bye to some execs, 3% of grunts + real estate helped too Tax reforms in the US helped shore up the bottom line of cost hurling Frankenfirm DXC Technologies, but the top line slid at the company for third straight quarter since it came into being.…

Bitter legal brouhaha ends with smiles... from Uber, anyway Uber and Google-owned self-driving car biz Waymo have reached a settlement in the infamous lawsuit between the two.…

Who else will dish the storage dish? What went on in storageland this week, you ask? Keep your saucer level, but we had Cisco saying its kit will be needed because the cloud is spreading, Delphix snuggling up to SAP, Zerto going even more multi-cloud, plus a good few smaller items.…

CEO stresses biz is more than just a Hadoop-flinger now Data biz Hortonworks shaved $50m off its operating losses in 2017, describing the year as "pivotal", as it continues efforts to rebrand itself as more than just Hadoop.…

'Pon their Oath, they're not having this Should a court-appointed lawyer be allowed to rifle through your email account after you die? The artist formerly known as Yahoo! has asked the US Supreme Court to answer that question for users in the United States.…

Problem? It's, er, only 60 calls per UK resident UK communications regulator Ofcom and the Information Commissioner’s Office have awarded themselves a pat on the back for reducing the amount of nuisance calls in the islands to a mere 3.9 billion last year.…

Social media titans take heat over kremlebots and fake news No matter their protestations, the big tech firms will always be asked to do more to tackle the manifestations of society's problems on their platforms. And yesterday's four-hour evidence session in front of British parliamentarians was no different.…

Top suggestion: eat the thing! Giveaway The winner of our “what would you do with a terrible Morrisons Yorkshire Pudding Pizza concoction” competition can, at long last, be announced to Reg readers of the Great British Public and beyond.…