The Register

Annual report reveals boost in complaints, breach notifications The Irish Data Protection Commissioner received 79 per cent more complaints last year than in 2016, while data breach notifications rose 26 per cent.…

Claw back your stuff without paying asshat for pricey cracker White hats have released a free decryption tool for GandCrab ransomware, preventing the nasty spreaders of the DIY malware from asking their victims for money.…

The Streisand effect: Diva double-duplicates dead dog In the ultimate barking mad diva act, Barbara Streisand has revealed she cloned her beloved dead dog Samantha, creating two more replicant canines.…

High Court hears hair-raising claim from ads behemoth Google is claiming that journalistic exemptions from data protection laws should apply to its search results, in the first ever trial of the so-called Right To Be Forgotten in the High Court of England and Wales.…

Cut red tape to revive stalling e-cig revolution, medics tell MPs Experts told Parliament that a post-Brexit Britain should think about axing the most draconian EU-wide e-cigarette regulations to encourage people to quit smoking tobacco.…

Business as we know it almost certain to be broken up Updated Maplin has slipped into administration after PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PWC) failed to find a buyer for the hard-pressed gadget emporium.…

Handy with a blood draw? Medics' jobs up for grabs Faulty Apple units can now be taken in for repair, with Cupertino having reportedly opened a care service dedicated to fixing staff.…

Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink. Or fuel a rocket. Yet... Boffins at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center have announced that water on the Moon may be actually be more widespread over the surface than first thought, and less prone to moving about.…

Earlybird ticket offer due to fall off perch tonight You’ve got just hours left to save upto £100s on up to four days of the best of DevOps, Continuous Delivery, serverless, microservices and containers.…

That 49,000-vehicle fleet won't be going green any time soon Royal Mail considered shifting its fleet of small vans in London to electric vehicles but concluded that doing so would lead to a power meltdown at its central hub in the capital.…

They're bots, not freakin' Skynet It’s almost impossible to talk about Agile software development without mentioning bots. If you think that's a bit of a stretch, maybe try and talk about DevOps without some sort of collaboration tool. Then realise that the two are beautifully linked.…

Last time Big Blue tried to bin TLS 1.0 and 1.1 it turned them back on two days later IBM's cloud faces a big test this week: turning something off without botching the job.…

Yeah, I’m so totally Sarah from accounts… Various single-sign-on systems can be hoodwinked to allow miscreants to log in as strangers without their password, all thanks to bungled programming.…

Service providers no longer have a reason to resist, yet DNSSEC adoption is declining DNSSEC, which secures the ancient domain name system, is important to Internet security and privacy, but as APNIC luminary Geoff Huston wrote last week, there's evidence that its use could be declining. “From the validation perspective, the use of DNSSEC appeared to have peaked in early 2016 and has been declining since then”, his post stated.…

Q&A touches on tough topics like 'Tabs or Spaces?' Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates has labelled cryptocurrencies "a rare technology that has caused deaths in a fairly direct way".…

Proxima Centauri b roasted by colossal solar flare, probably not for the first time Seekers of new worlds for humans to colonise will have to look further afield than Proxima Centauri after the detection of huge solar flares showed its planets are probably uninhabitable.…

Unless you're rooting for the American government The battle between the American government and Microsoft over emails on an Irish server has reached the US Supreme Court – and so far, the judges seem wary of Redmond's position.…

Now that it's not Windows-only, you can simulate a theoretical computer on a real computer Microsoft has ported its Quantum Development Kit to Linux and macOS.…

Using memcached? Get it behind the firewall and turn off UDP if you want to live Attackers have discovered a new amplified denial-of-service attack vector, and have launched attacks reaching hundreds of gigabits per second in Asia, North America and Europe.…

Chipzilla and Oracle are working their way back through time to deliver fixes Intel slipped out a new Microcode Update Guidance on Monday, revealing that lots of Haswell and Broadwell Xeons can now receive inoculations against the Meltdown and Spectre CPU design flaws.…

Don't you worry your pretty little heads about it, says web giant In a series of alternatively baffling, amusing and darn-right ridiculous letters, Google-parent Alphabet has told America's financial watchdog to effectively mind its own business when it comes to its income.…

And Uncle Sam's limp-cock response means Putin will keep on meddling with our affairs NSA boss Mike Rogers told a US congressional panel today that Russia’s online mischief-making in America's elections is not going to stop – because Uncle Sam isn’t hitting back.…

Ring-a-ding ker-ching! A lot of bling for an Internet-of-Thing...s Fully squaring up to Google in the smart home world, Amazon has gobbled smart home upstart Ring, apparently paying more than a billion dollars for it.…

Payment app pinky-swears to not trample people's privacy PayPal has avoided that terribly tedious act of coughing up a fine, and instead has agreed to play nice with people's privacy – thus settling a complaint against its payment app Venmo by America's trade watchdog, the FTC.…

Service knackered for several hours today We knew Virgin Media was going down the toilet – but not quite this way. For several hours on Tuesday, its business broadband has been offline in the UK, leaving folks unable to reach the internet.…

Google – plus Facebook and Twitter – also gets a shoeing from Obama, newspapers There is no love for online giants Google and Facebook right now, with even their friends sticking the boot in.…

If we have to remote control it, we hope you'll never notice The US state of California will allow fully driverless, human-free autonomous vehicles on its streets from April 2.…

But only delists about half Google has received takedown requests for 2.4 million URLs since 2014 – but said yes to less than half.…

We weren't involved in Leave, says data co boss The daughter of Alphabet chairman Eric Schmidt interned at controversial data company Cambridge Analytica, the company’s CEO confirmed today to the UK's Culture Media and Sport select committee.…

Branded 'a breeding ground for depression and broken souls' A nightclub that spiritually stimulates dance zealots to peel off their clothes and shake their booty was branded a "breeding ground for broken souls" by a totally different sort of radical.…

Hello? Hello? Can you hear me?! Vodafone and Nokia have joined forces to bring 4G to a barren, characterless expanse (no, we don't mean Surrey suburbia). From 2019 LTE will be available on the moon.…

Better than nothing! The adoption of HTTPS among the top million sites continues to grow with 38.4 per offering secure web connections.…

How to get things moving on platforms, architectures and budgets Webcast On 14 March at 11am we've got a studio full of experts discussing how you can take your infrastructure to the next level, make it more agile, and help the company deliver on its goals.…

Includes Hull-based Connexin and US subsidiary Airspan Ofcom has given all four UK mobile operators the go-ahead to bid in the forthcoming 4G and 5G auction, as well as Hull-based fixed wireless ISP Connexin and Airspan Spectrum Holdings, a subsidiary of US outfit Airspan.…

Errant UAV missed aircraft on final approach by 15ft A drone being flown next to an active airfield on New Year’s Day caused a serious risk of an in-flight collision with a glider trying to land, the UK Airprox Board has ruled.…

Move over, doggy. 2018 is 'the year of the graph' apparently Database upstart TigerGraph has launched its latest platform, pitching the ability for enterprise customers to collaborate in real time.…

Yet Corporation refuses to say if it asked for fewer independent inspections The BBC got top marks from the artists formerly known as the Office of Surveillance Commissioners (OSC) – but has refused to say if it will push for fewer external inspections of its use of creepy surveillance powers.…

No one expects the CFIUS! *Bless you* The tale of the Qualcomm and Broadcom merger has taken a turn for the surreal, with The Men In Black (aka the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States – CFIUS) taking an interest.…

Settlement in long-running case now pocket change for the Zuckerborg Facebook and its top execs have agreed to pay out $35m to get shareholders off their case over allegations the biz knew mobile use was affecting ad revenue before it went public in 2012.…

Not an avoidable road accident waiting to happen #F_AI_L Never base a promotional campaign around a satire of the thing you're trying to promote. You'd think that's an easy rule to follow, but Huawei seems to have forgotten.…

Battle of the tycoons US cable giant Comcast has put a rival offer of £22bn for Sky, in an attempt to snatch the company from the grasp of media tycoon Rupert Murdoch.…

Are we supposed to, like, read a book or something? Updated EE customers have been hit by a nationwide data outage this morning, leaving grumbling UK commuters with nothing to mindlessly tap on their way to work.…

Are we supposed to, like, read a book or something? EE customers have been hit by a nationwide data outage this morning, leaving grumbling UK commuters with nothing to mindlessly tap on their way to work.…

But the new standard has at last found a home among verticals MWC18 5G is – surprise, surprise – dominating this year's Mobile World Congress as more emphasis is heaped on how non-telco vertical sectors can use the fledgling technology.…

Challenge accepted, ONS bod Becky Tinsley tells El Reg The UK's Office for National Statistics is under pressure. Every decade since 1801, it has carried out one of the world's most comprehensive statistical undertakings, the census. Now, it has until 2021 to prove it can do so without the massive surveys it still relies upon.…

And don't forget to negotiate when vendors are most desperate for cash Pricing and licensing "are central to all data and analytics initiatives" and vendors are using organisations' enthusiasm for the field to coin it at your expense. But controlling costs is more than possible, Gartner principal analyst Etisham Zaidi said yesterday at the firm's Asia-Pacific Data and Analytics Summit in Sydney.…

Bum note: you could Rickroll an artist live on stage Guitar amp manufacturer Fender's recently-introduced Mustang GT 100 guitar amplifier can made to play whatever audio an attacker fancies, security researchers have discovered.…

When too many cloudy ports are barely enough Microsoft has rewritten the operation of its Source Network Address Translation (SNAT) protocol in a bid to improve Azure's load balancing performance.…

Heart Of Gold meets Piece Of Crap Musician Neil Young has spent years railing against the poor quality of digital audio.…

We wouldn't say 'barely', says Coinhive Few sites are bothering to use the opt-in version ofCoinhive, the controversial ride-along JavaScript crypto-mining package that requires end-users' consent to run.…