The Register

If you sign up to be a tester Microsoft has bunged end-to-end encrypted communications into beta versions of Skype using the open-source Signal protocol.…

Early contender emerges for 'least surprising story of 2018' Uber is once again standing accused of shady behavior, this time allegedly developing mechanisms to rapidly shield documents and other files from the eyes of police.…

Google-owned biz cancels Logan's run YouTube has revealed where decency standards lie in the internet era: mocking suicide victims while standing next to a corpse.…

Postmortem sheds light on brief dependency hell On the defensive after a malware kerfuffle last year, code registry npm shot first before asking questions over the weekend – and is now apologizing for the errant execution.…

CEO, CFO under fire as lawsuits mount up An Intel stockholder filed a class-action lawsuit yesterday accusing the chipmaker of artificially inflating its stock prices by omitting to tell anyone about the Spectre and Meltdown flaws in its products.…

As America's very stable genius weighs in with his one cent The US House of Representatives has passed a six-year extension to the controversial Section 702 spying program, rejecting an amendment that would have required the authorities to get a warrant before searching for information on US citizens.…

Actually no, we don't want an app for that, techbros Comment "Don't ruin the moment. Asking to sign a contract to have sex can be awkward."…

Beef and lamb prove to be inferior escape tools A butcher channelled the power of Ecky-Thump to escape being locked in his freezer when he saved his skin by using black pudding.…

No-deal predicted to lop £46.8bn off Blighty investment A no-deal Brexit scenario could scrap 92,000 science and technology jobs across the UK, a report has claimed.…

If it's owned by Hillingdon, you can't do that Heathrow Airport's local council has effectively prohibited the flying of drones anywhere within the borough's public spaces – including parks near airfields.…

ICO fought dodgy contracts, buck-passing, and less than concrete proof The Information Commissioner's Office has fined four companies £600,000 for spamming customers millions of times.…

'Mummy, what's feltching?' Security researchers at Check Point have found nearly 70 apps containing malware that slipped past Google's code-checking systems and exposed kids and parents to potentially unwanted sex education lessons.…

Wait. Did you say 'insecure chips'? Comment Let no one say that America's political elites are losing their talent for hypocrisy. Washington DC has welcomed the New Year with a display of selective Sinophobia – and it likely spoiled Huawei's CES.…

SCADA mobile app security is getting worse The security of mobile apps that tie in with Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems has deteriorated over the last two-and-a-half years, according to new research.…

What – no bonkers projected cost savings? You disappoint us, UK.gov Another year, another government shared services strategy. This time Whitehall wants to roll out Oracle Cloud across departments - a move it says will require "substantive negotiations" with the Sopra Steria-run joint venture.…

Group says UK healthcare isn't benefitting from advances in AI The Reform think tank has told the UK government to improve the quality of NHS data and stop relying on paper-based systems to take advantage of the purported benefits of artificial intelligence.…

Group says UK healthcare isn't benefitting from advances in AI The Reform think tank has told the UK government to improve the quality of NHS data and stop relying on paper-based systems to take advantage of the purported benefits of artificial intelligence.…

Serverless, Kubernetes ... or both Events The lineup for Continuous Lifecycle 2018 is almost complete, with more workshops and conference sessions, giving you even more reason to snag an early bird ticket now.…

The result? One-third of GTS to be 'redeployed' or not replaced when they leave Exclusive IBM has indicated to senior Global Technology Services management that a third of the global workforce will be “productively redeployed” in 2018 with tens of thousands of personnel “impacted”.…

That time the Nazis hollowed out a mountain Lurking just outside the Polish village of Sierpnica is a relic of World War II Nazi ambition. The Osówka complex is the largest and most accessible remnant of the huge Project Riese (translation: “Giant”), an effort to create an underground city capable of housing 20,000 or more Nazi troops and workers.…

'It was a bit tricky,' admits DSTL worker The British government has put a seven-year-old boy's design for a submarine into production, saying the lad had "really thought about" his work.…

A multi-billion dollar hype built on gullibility, says railway man Interview Dive beneath the hype and the dry ice of CES, and it becomes apparent. The connected cars and electric cars being shown off in Las Vegas this week are not self-driving cars; and it has proved a lot harder to make an autonomous car than to sell the idea to an AI-obsessed think tank.…

This is Switchzilla’s kit-plus-cloud plan in action Cisco’s switched on latent features in its recent routers and switches, plus a cloud service, that together make it possible to detect the fingerprints of malware in encrypted traffic.…

Could it be... no way, seriously? Aliens? It's probably not aliens A neutron star or a massive black hole may be the source of mysterious and highly energetic radio pulses that light up skies across the universe.…

Old man shouts at a bubble he admits he does not understand Famed investor Warren Buffet has predicted a nasty landing for cryptocurrencies.…

Digital dog whistles: AI hears signals humans can't comprehend The development of AI adversaries continues apace: a paper by Nicholas Carlini and David Wagner of the University of California Berkeley has explained off a technique to trick speech recognition by changing the source waveform by 0.1 per cent.…

We live in a cannibal: data dump shows Milky Way has eaten smaller galaxies If you've got a penchant for lots of data, astrophysics, and mystery, the Dark Energy Survey (DES) has announced its first public data release.…

No word on demo bird's range or speed, but the carrying capacity looks decent Boeing’s revealed it hastily-cobbled-together a cargo drone.…

Doing business in China means keeping everything in Chinese hands behind the great firewall Apple has announced it will hand over iCloud operations in China to government-owned local partner Guizhou-Cloud Big Data Industry (GBCD) on February 28.…

Citrix and VMware are both close to allowing live migration of GPU-powered VMs The wonderful world of x86 server virtualization is so settled that analyst firm Gartner last year decided it no longer needed to bother with a magic quadrant comparing the handful of remaining suppliers. But the big players are still finding a few ways to advance their wares and niggle each other at the same time, and 2018’s kicked off with a little battle around moving VMs that use GPUs.…

Ten bug-berries fall from the bush, including the return of 2003's Etherleak Juniper Networks, come on down: you have won the dubious honour of being responsible for CVE-2018-0001.…

Alleged Fruitfly creator faces decades in prison if guilty A computer programmer has been accused of hacking, committing identity theft, and creating child pornography after allegedly developing custom malware to take control of thousands of computers.…

I think you ought to know why I’m feeling very depressed Two research papers argue that the risk of AI-driven automation isn't so much the destruction of jobs as the amplification of wealth inequality.…

Developers (again) find preferences hole (again) that bypasses login box (again) It just works. For anyone.…

But a big question remains: how fast will it actually be? Analysis President Donald Trump has signed two executive orders aimed at pushing broadband internet into more remote parts of the US, capping a multi-year effort to get America online.…

White men complain they're held back by 'reverse discrimination' A bunch of blokes in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics – STEM – jobs reckon they are the victim of "reverse discrimination" from efforts to diversify the ranks in tech companies.…

That Equifax hack would have cost the outfit $1.5bn New legislation introduced in the US Senate by Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Mark Warner (D-VA) would result in credit reporting agencies being slapped with stiff fines if they play fast and loose with data security.…

Hard to remain neutral on this one In an inadvertent homage to Samsung's combustible Galaxy Note 7, an Apple iPhone battery overheated in an Apple Store in Zurich, Switzerland, on Tuesday morning, resulting in minor injury and prompting customers and employees to step outside while the smoke cleared.…

Difference in opinion over what constitutes an 'update' The chairman of the US Senate Commerce Committee and the French government want answers from Apple about its software "update" that slows older iPhones.…

The rest? Well... y'know, they store digital information Toshiba, Western Digital, Kingston and Micron's Crucial unit have all introduced drives in time for CES – the standout being WDC announcing voice-activated media streaming features via Smart Home devices.…

What comes in a box, but doesn’t rhyme with tragic squad plant? Research firm IDC has rated and ranked the all-flash array players, placing Pure Storage in the lead of its Marketscape, ahead of Dell, HPE, NetApp and IBM.…

The speech recogniser that coulda Analysis Somewhat harshly, Microsoft's Cortana was pronounced dead this week.…

This is not just cost-cutting, this is M&S cost-cutting Middle-class nirvana Marks & Spencer – the British purveyor of classy date-night grub and frumpy clothes – is slashing its tech supplier base and sending 250 staff to Tata Consultancy Services under an IT outsourcing accord.…

Good luck with that one, internet dwellers A petition calling for "an end to hate speech laws" has passed 10,000 signatures – requiring a formal response from the UK government.…

Also: UK viewers like to take a break for Bake Off and Strictly PornHub's annual deep dive into user stats and searches has revealed that, in 2017, people decided to take the fidget spinner trend to new levels.…

The European regulator cometh I’ve spent many hundreds of hours listening to sales pitches from technology vendors but it’s only during the last year I’ve started to find them rather depressing. That’s been thanks to the arrival in 2018 of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation.…

Responsibilities unclear amid leadership shake-up Responsibility for broadband delivery in the UK has been handed to Margot James following Matt Hancock's promotion to Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport in prime minister Theresa May's reshuffle of the top jobs this week.…

Storage layer issues slow code access Atlassian's code version control system Bitbucket has been suffering an ongoing failure in its storage layer, affecting developers across the globe.…

Details of HMRC deal remain behind closed doors Apple has agreed to cough up £136m in back taxes to HMRC following an "extensive audit" by the tax man.…

Employment Tribunal hears sex discrimination and wrongful dismissal case A sacked former Intel senior sales head has accused the company’s global IoT partner director of perjury – and was told to “not put the spin on” by the judge.…