The Register

Lawless man sold lifestyle devices at Cash Converters A university IT technician stole Apple Macs valued at £22,200 and flogged them for £200 a piece at rail pawnbroker Cash Converters to fund his drug habit, a court has heard.…

Researchers develop method to sniff out forum conflicts A group from Stanford University says conflicts on Reddit forums follow a reliable enough pattern to be predicted before they happen.…

We're told Bruce Willis is standing by The next time a giant asteroid threatens the Earth, Russia may just know how many megatons of explosives are needed to blow the thing to smithereens.…

Less weird, less clunky, and a four day+ battery life Fitbit has taken the wraps off its second (or fifth, depending on how you're counting) smartwatch, Versa, claiming the new model has inherited Pebble DNA.…

Rocket veterans blame explosion on design flaw NASA has fingered design failings by SpaceX in a much-delayed report (PDF) on the 2015 explosion of a Falcon 9 on its way to the ISS.…

Flaws meant others could read, meddle with encrypted emails Recently resolved vulnerabilities in SecurEnvoy's encrypted email transfer SecurMail created a way for encrypted emails in users' inboxes to be read, overwritten and deleted by others.…

Survey finds almost half track students' internet use Privacy activists have called for more transparency and parental control over web monitoring in British schools after a survey indicated that almost half track their students online.…

Control. Control. Control The Mozilla Foundation has released a Firefox for Enterprise with sysadmin controls to manage deployment. F4E arrives in beta form today.…

Spring mini-statement for the UK: Who gets broadband cash etc UK Chancellor of the Exchequer* Philip Hammond unveiled the first areas to receive £95m from the government's full-fibre fund and suggestions for how the UK could tax large digital businesses - in a slimmed-down "Spring Statement" light on details.…

Court docs reveal women filed over 230 internal complaints of discrimination, harassment More than 230 internal complaints of harassment and discrimination within Microsoft were handled in a “lackluster” way by the business, according to documents made public yesterday in a class action lawsuit.…

Amid rumours that handset add-ons initiative is for the axe Motorola has acknowledged reports that it's cutting its workforce in the windy US city of Chicago – just not by the 50 per cent rumoured.…

Kitty Hawk is also personally backed by Larry Page A “self-flying” electric air taxi, as built by a startup backed by Google moneybags Larry Page, has reportedly been undergoing flight tests in New Zealand.…

'Cos the garden was soooo rosy before that Outsourcers are anxious their hard-earned reputations are being besmirched by the recent collapse of Brit multinational construction firm Carillion, so much so their representative organisation is seeking a drastic image rebrand.…

Moomins and Lordi on the board? It's in the national interest! The Finnish government has snapped up 3.3 per cent of Nokia Corporation in a bid to shore up national ownership.…

Final countdown for CLL18 early bird tickets If you want to get up to speed on the key ideas changing software development and deployment AND dive deep on the technologies most important to you, grab your early bird tickets for Continuous Lifecycle London while you can.…

But do they really need to worry? Analysis UK.gov is investing more and more taxpayer cash on Amazon Web Services, with spend through the G-Cloud digital marketplace growing eight fold year-on-year to £16m in 2017.…

Right To Be Forgotten trial continues in London The Right to be Forgotten trial has heard arguments on whether a man who gave interviews to national newspapers about his criminal past should be able to have those reports, among others, deleted from Google Search.…

Unloved by customers, and less and less loved by retailers Microsoft's Windows Mixed Reality technology hit the shelves five months ago and the signs aren't good: dropped by retailers and ignored by developers, Redmond could be facing another Windows Mobile moment.…

Open source or Hotel California, there's something for everyone Container orchestration comes in different flavours, but actual effort must be put into identifying the system most palatable.…

And for politicians to regulate before disruption disrupts disruptively London Mayor Sadiq Khan has called for social networks and sharing economy platforms to act for social good, rather than profit.…

But first, the big catchup: adding proper mail, scalability, mobility and JavaScript for devs IBM and HCL have outlined their plans for the Notes/Domino portfolio that the former offloaded to the latter last year.…

No 'legitimate users' of modded Blackberries, says FBI An arrest by US authorities last week has brought to light alleged associations between encrypted phone supplier Phantom Secure and international drug trafficking.…

Spat with activist investor continues as companies feud over voting procedures The spat over activist investor Starboard Value's plan to have Mellanox sell itself or do something else to enhance its value has resumed.…

Light and proximity sensors blocked for Firefox 62 Firefox has revealed it will bin more privacy-invasive APIs, deprecating access to the light sensor, device proximity sensor, and user proximity detection.…

Virtzilla's Amazonian cloud is also tooling up for managed services providers VMware has started planning to bring its Amazon Web Services tie-up to Australia and Japan.…

Full-fare payers can travel anonymously, but not concession-card holders The public transport authority in the Australian State of New South Wales has been told to limit the amount of data it collects with its stored value "Opal card", after a decision released by the state's Civil and Administrative Tribunal in February 2018.…

'Great, great company' to 'security risk' in six months The White House crushed Broadcom's bid for Qualcomm, declaring the deal cannot go due to national security concerns.…

Judge Koh trims class-action complaint, but suit will proceed The remains of Yahoo! will be forced to defend the class action complaint filed by customers whose data was exposed in the 2014 megahack.…

One of the 'super-Earth' finds might even have liquid water A team of astronomers have spotted 16 exoplanets, including a ‘super-Earth’ that might hold liquid water, hovering around 12 low mass stars hundreds of light years away from the Solar System.…

ISP cut off our secure mail service, says dev The creator and co-founder of Tutanota is blaming Comcast after his encrypted mail service was briefly taken offline earlier this month.…

United Church of Christ not serene about Sinclair media ownership rule relaxation The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has picked up another foe in its ongoing love-in with Big Cable. But this time it's the Big Guy. Yes, we're talking about Jesus.…

Computer outage leaves Canucks grounded The famed politeness of Canadians was put to the test on Monday after the nation's largest airline suffered a massive computer outage, leaving travelers stranded.…

Boffins shows that sound output devices secretly capture audio Computer speakers and headphones make passable microphones and can be used to receive data via ultrasound and send signals back, making the practice of air gapping sensitivite computer systems less secure.…

Using wearable to get wrong kind of gains get Big House visit A US stock trader has been sentenced to two years in prison for running a pump and dump operation involving wearables vendor Fitbit, albeit one that earned him only a few thousand dollars.…

More posturing from presidential aide The Russian government has again intimated that it is prepared to cut itself off from the global internet, with a presidential aide telling a Russian news network that it is "ready for anything."…

Slacklike turns one Microsoft's Slack competitor Teams hit its first birthday this week, trumpeting some big numbers and a slew of new features.…

Yes, yeesss, give us lots of new things to do, say academics Giant US tech platforms are spreading misinformation and deliberately hiding their algorithms to evade scrutiny, according to a report for the European Commission.…

Report claims vuln-botherers share building with Ministry of State Security China has altered public vulnerability data to conceal the influence of its spy agency in the country's national information security bug reporting process.…

Sorry if this sounds a little… Xenu-phobic The Church of Scientology, founded by sci-fi author L Ron Hubbard, is set to start broadcasting its own TV programmes tonight.…

... even though the sound of it to Qualcomm's quite atrocious Broadcom plans to bring forward its redomiciliation to the US to 3 April in a move that, of course, has nothing to do with Qualcomm's delayed stockholder meeting happening two days later.…

'We need the families' assistance' says AAIB A British government agency has been downloading data from iPads and similar devices used by pilots of crashed aircraft, it has emerged.…

Outsourcer blames HMRC's new PAYE portal Troubled outsourcer Capita accidentally charged 17,000 former miners in the UK tens of thousands of pounds in extra tax, and has blamed the error on a change to HM Revenue & Customs' online PAYE portal.…

Ailing firm's appeal against court verdict binned Ailing ZX Spectrum reboot firm Retro Computers Ltd has had its appeal against a county court judgment in Luton, UK rejected, with the judge telling chairman Dr David Levy that his no-show in the dock over troll fears was unfounded.…

No, it's not a laundry detergent... it's a microservices flinger Nutanix is gobbling Netsil, a startup that develops tech for the discovery, mapping and management of microservices in distributed cloudy spaces.…

But it's underground! Elon Musk's audacious plans are usually met with acclaim, and sometimes even awe – but not this time. Fresh details of The Boring Company's urban transport plans have been lambasted on social media.…

April no longer deadline for compliance Smut gazers today breathed a sigh of collective relief as UK government delayed controversial age verification checks for online porn – because the new regulator set up to oversee them still hasn't issued guidance.…

Oh plus this GREAT idea... 14-and-ups should hand over their data UK Minister of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Matt Hancock said this weekend he wants to social media sites to enforce a cut-off for youngsters on sites such as Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat.…

Assures us his self-driving cars to be 200% safer than puny humans SpaceX and Tesla chief Elon Musk assured the audience at Austin, Texas media 'n' tech megafest South by Southwest last night that his big rocket would fly next year.…

Execs tell earnings call how they will rescue unit Analysis Three top Dell execs told the earnings call that they were taking the fall in storage results seriously, were doing all they could to fix them, and that early signs were encouraging.…

There's a learning curve, but you too can be Mr Worldwide When companies started to build applications at web scale and needed services to scale to millions of requests across the globe, it quickly became apparent that relational databases just didn't work well enough.…