The Register

The dark side of easy R&D cash A Chinese firm's buyout of a British semiconductor company may have directly led to China developing railgun weaponry and electromagnetic aircraft carrier catapults for its navy, according to reports.…

Campaigners say proposed law would create a 'discriminatory' system for data access rights Campaign groups have increased pressure on the UK government to remove a section of the Data Protection Bill that could effectively prevent people gaining access to immigration data held on them.…

I don't care about running water, where are my internets? Up to a quarter of new builds still lack access to superfast internet, according to a study by comparison site Thinkbroadband.…

Webinar gives the full picture Promo Launched in August at VMWorld in Las Vegas, Supermicro’s vSAN Hyperconverged Solution promises to optimize performance for specific workload uses and make the world a greener place, thanks to its superior power efficiency.…

And takes a swipe at American UAV regs An American upstart says it is the first company to implement the EU's vision of drone air traffic management – over the skies of Switzerland.…

Red giant revives a nearby corpse through the emission of cosmic wind The European Space Agency's INTEGRAL space observatory has captured an unusual piece of stellar voodoo: the moment when a dead star was brought back to life by a nearby red giant.…

CFIUS sends Broadcom deal TITSUP* for 30 days American national security bods at the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) have asked Qualcomm to delay tomorrow’s vote on Broadcom’s proposed $117bn (£84.7bn) takeover.…

Alleges ex-sales bods copied files and solicited former clients Dell EMC has tossed a trade secrets sueball at two ex-sales employees who left for Rubrik, alleging that they solicited other EMC staff to jump ship and approached Dell EMC customers.…

Country says no in licence referendum Swiss voters have decided to retain the country's costly TV licence in a referendum.…

Similar to Apache Struts flaw that stuffed Equifax Pivotal's Spring Data REST project has a serious security hole that needs patching.…

Nail down your tickets by St Patricks If you’ve been caught out by the end of our early bird ticket offer for Continuous Lifecycle, don’t despair...we’re extending it till March 16, giving you another chance to enjoy the best in DevOps, Containers, Agile and Continuous Delivery AND save a bundle.…

CityFibre applies for review, says ASA is failing consumers CityFibre has applied to take the Advertising Standards Authority's to court over its decision to approve the continued use of the term "fibre" to describe services delivered over copper-based networks.…

Using the Dart language for apps on Android and iOS MWC2018 Fancy a Flutter? Google is hoping users will take a bet on its new cross-platform mobile development framework, whose first beta was announced at Mobile World Congress last week.…

The promised land of VCSA – time to start packing Up until relatively recently, VMware’s vCenter was a Windows-only affair. With version 5 came the VCSA (vCenter Server Appliance) based on a hardened Linux installation. It essentially left behind the legacy issues around management and patching (and all manner of other issues) that impact Windows. The next major release of vSphere is to be the last that supports a vCenter sat on Windows.…

French minister says around two per cent of turnover sounds about right Bruno Le Maire, France's minister for the economy, has revealed that a plan to levy a special tax on Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon will soon be revealed by European authorities.…

Samsung's 3840 x 1080 CHG90 gives you 2,891 Excel cells ... and a sore neck Review In 2017 we learned that Samsung had given the world the CHG90, a curved, 49-inch, 3840 x 1080 monitor with a 32:9 aspect ratio. Rather a lot of Reg readers read and/or commented on the story about the screen and more than a few of you seemed intrigued by the ideas of having your heads just-about-surrounded by display.…

Tedious Y2K maintenance made chap a bit vague, then a bit sore Who, me? Welcome to the seventh instalment of Who, me? The Register's new column in which readers share stories of the times they broke stuff without any help at all from users.…

Open source dominates the content management system market The web-watchers at WTechs have just noted a milestone: WordPress now accounts for 30 per cent of the world's web sites.…

Icelandic cops cuff 11 on suspicion of data centre robberies Icelandic police have cuffed 11 people in connection with four raids on data centres that targeted cryptocurrency mining equipment.…

Five-qubit creation is behind the great firewall and outside it at the same time! Alibaba reckons the world needs another quantum computer in the cloud, so it's opened up access to an 11-qubit system.…

User location spoofing? Check. Fake emergency alerts? Check. Plenty more nasties, too A group of American university researchers have broken key 4G LTE protocols to generate fake messages, snoop on users, and forge user location data.…

Oracle released the code, but not the name, so now devs have to make sure package names make sense The open source version of Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) has been renamed Jakarta EE to satisfy Oracle's desire to control the "Java" brand.…

The ups and downs of security this week Roundup Here's a quick summary of infosec news from this week, beyond what we've already covered.…

Green Party's Jenny Jones calls for immediate ban British cops’ use of automated facial recognition technology has come under fire from peers, with the Greens’ Jenny Jones calling on the government for an immediate ban.…

It's the wacky week in AI Roundup Your weekly dose of tidbits from the AI world, beyond everything we've already covered, begins with a senate committee hearing in which a US lieutenant general, currently a nominee for the role of the director of the NSA, spoke about his concerns around the technology.…

Internet engineers warn this is only the beginning Analysis What's claimed to be the first IPv6-based distributed denial-of-service attack has been spotted by internet engineers who warn it is only the beginning of what could become the next wave of online disruption.…

Unlucky gig economy serfs make less than min wage, on average, according to uni study An analysis published by MIT has found that Uber and Lyft drivers in the US only net around $3.37 per hour on average, and nearly a third are probably losing money after car costs.…

Trade body gets sued by Uncle Sam, insists no wrongdoing The US Department of Justice on Thursday filed an employment discrimination lawsuit against the Wi-Fi Alliance – a non-profit based in Austin, Texas, that promotes Wi-Fi technology and standards – for allegedly laying off an employee because of his ongoing military service obligations.…

Looming GDPR Euro law sends ICANN back to drawing board You may no longer be able to see the name, email or house address for whoever owns a specific domain name under new rules proposed by DNS overseer ICANN.…

FCC boss turns down showpiece rifle gong Ajit Pai, the boss of America's communications watchdog, the FCC, says he won't be picking the collectable rifle awarded to him by the NRA as a prize for killing net neutrality.…

CHiPs deploy bait bus to catch Silicon Valley sniper Over the past 45 days, a mystery sniper has been shooting the windows of 20 charter buses driving Apple staff and other geeks to work in Silicon Valley.…

YouTube wanted 'only' women and other underrepresented groups in coding roles A former recruiter for Google and YouTube has sued the search ad beast, claiming he was fired for objecting to hiring policies that discriminated against white and Asian men.…

Ah, the stable and reliable cloud Problems at an Amazon Web Service data center in Virginia today are being blamed for outages affecting some major websites and online services today.…

Turnover's up 44%. Dell, VMware probably raging Hyperconverged player Nutanix reported second fiscal 2018 quarter revenues of $286.7m, up 44 per cent on a year ago and 4 per cent on the prior quarter.…

Baidu users, beware A newly discovered strain of Android malware makes live recordings of ambient audio around an infected device.…

It is supposed to 'dazzle' drones rather than fry them Lockheed Martin, makers of the F-35 and various other bits of defence hardware, has been handed a $150m contract by the US Navy to build two bloody great laser cannons.…

Complete with loop of neighing noises and phone alerts An American company has devised a system that takes over your entire home, makes all your lights start flashing and broadcasts neighing noises through the whole house when your pregnant horse starts giving birth.…

No safe limit? Yerjokinarentyer? A University of Sheffield study has found that controversial new alcohol guidelines published in 2016 had no discernible effect on British drinking habits.…

Plus: Leaping robotic spiders, anyone? No? From the department of "just because we could, doesn't mean we should" comes news that researchers are planning swarms of robotic bees and spiders.…

Lawmakers express concern about data protection Chipmaker Broadcom's proposed $142bn (£103bn) hostile takeover of Qualcomm has given European lawmakers the willies over data protection implications for EU citizens.…

Flash arrays are their business and business is a'ight – finally Flash array shipper Pure is now officially a billion-dollar turnover organ and appears poised to finally reach profitability as competition from Dell EMC and HPE contines to wane.…

Parky Prius? Frosty fondleslab? Help may soon be at hand Brits may soon have one less thing to whinge about during cold snaps – thanks to research into the performance of Li-ion batteries in freezing temperatures.…

Three months to get your houses in order... or this time we really might legislate The European Commission has given tech firms three months to set up systems that will allow them to take down terrorist content within an hour.…

Nor Drake. Nor Bruno Mars. You'd think they weren't trying very hard Analysis Spotify has ended five years of speculation about an IPO, and has filed for a public share offering likely to make its founders – and large record labels – extremely rich indeed.…

Please allow me to introduce myself (woo-woo) Something for the Weekend, Sir? "Wow, that was quick!"…

Up for auction, rare Spanish copy flown by both British and German aces A super-rare Spanish copy of the Messerschmitt Me109 fighter of Second World War infamy, which was flown by both British and German aces, has gone up for auction.…

Get prep’d for certs to prove your worth Promo As cyber threats seem to multiply and mutate at ever-increasing speed, it becomes difficult to be sure you are able defend your organisation against an attack that could come from any direction.…

And why was Microsoft tucked away in startup event? MWC18 As Mobile World Congress draws to a close in relatively warm Barcelona (13°C - balmy), it's time to tally up on whether it delivered on the hype.…

They might have to worry about it, but you'll be 'doing it' I spend a lot of time telling people that information security isn't the IT department's problem. And it's not: everyone in the business is responsible for making his or her contribution to the security of the organisation's information, and for protecting the personal data the organisation uses.…

vGPUs, edge and automated containers are the headline acts for the 17th release The 17th version of OpenStack is upon us.…