The Register

Staff refused stat minimum terms to exit voluntarily, you can guess what happened next IBM is preparing a redundancy chute for the good folk working in its Digital Business Group (DBG), The Register can reveal.…

A vision softly creeping... of an exoplanet or two Astronomers are building the world’s largest and most advanced superconducting camera – with the goal of snapping clearer shots of exoplanets for scientists hunting alien life.…

Intelligence agency a pipeline for women in infosec RSA 2018 Former members of an Israeli intelligence unit say their operation could serve as a model for the tech companies looking to bring more women into their ranks.…

Oh dear, Intel... look who's getting cosy with Cray Cray is adding an AMD processor option to its CS500 line of clustered supercomputers.…

Judge allows face recognition lawsuit class action status A US federal judge on Monday ruled that a lawsuit filed over Facebook's use of facial recognition technology can proceed as a class action, raising the possibility the social network could face billions in damages.…

Less checked online services bear brunt Identity fraud in Blighty hit a record high of 174,523 incidents last year – and the vast majority of it happened online.…

Onwards and upwards...until the next reorg Brit mega-comms firm BT has given its flagging b2b divisions a corporate facelift, merging the wholesale, public sector and business units into BT Enterprise.…

Boffins find supersized bits do not stand the test of time A study published by Nature this month suggests less is more when it comes to male genitals and species survival.…

And they're not the only software-defined object storage biz ready to cash in Analysis Software-defined object storage biz Scality has scored an extra $60m in funding to help along development of its cloudy storage tools.…

No, BT and Plusnet, you're not off the hook either Despite efforts to return to its roots as a broadband-only biz, TalkTalk remains the most moaned about ISP in the UK, according to data from regulator Ofcom.…

CLL18 workshops cover easy clustering, Agile trailblazing and more Whether you’re limbering up for Agile, going serverless or getting into containers, we’ve got a cracking lineup of workshops at Continuous Lifecycle London this year.…

And *checks watch* of course it'll be really useful for GDPR Data management biz Hortonworks has lifted the covers off a service that aims to make it easier for enterprises to identify, secure and connect data stored both on-premises and in the cloud.…

Brit boffins save planet A new enzyme developed at the University of Portsmouth will enable the recycling of plastic used for disposable drinks containers.…

Rifling through riff: Another option that's not Amazon's Lambda Seduced by serverless functions? Lured by Amazon's Lambda? If so, why not build a serverless framework at home? Project riff, an open source serverless platform from EMC/VMware spinoff Pivotal Software, aims to let you do just that.…

Cyber resiliency of the UK's health service still in disarray Nearly a year has passed since the unprecedented WannaCry cyber attack and the UK's NHS has yet to agree an action plan, according to a report by MPs.…

Lucky 66 lands – and also gives a lucky few a Spectre-protector Chrome the 66th is upon us and has added some features that Google previewed in months past.…

No roadmap. No timeframe. No success metrics. Not much grip on reality, either ANALYSIS Thirty-four technology companies inked a "Cybersecurity Tech Accord" on Tuesday which they said represents "a public commitment … to protect and empower civilians online and to improve the security, stability and resilience of cyberspace".…

Same-day delivery of mails, TXTs and docs for investigators probing crime or terror The European Commission has outlined its desire for a new legal instrument that would require carriers, clouds, email service providers and operators of messaging apps to produce a user’s data in six hours to assist investigations of “criminals or terrorists”.…

Members are not amused, ponder summons and debunk legal arguments The recently-sidelined former CEO of Cambridge Analytica has declined the opportunity to make a second appearance in front of the UK parliament's Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee.…

The best thing about beating your head against a brick wall? It feels great when you stop Huawei has acknowledged the US market may be a lost cause, at least for now.…

Repeat after The Vultures: don't re-use passwords IKEA's TaskRabbit app and Website, which links buyers with people skilled with Allen key experts and other errand-runners, remain offline a day after the company announced a data breach.…

Hacking charge for twiddling URL – O Canada!? Comment There's a curious legal situation developing in Nova Scotia, Canada, right now.…

Managing Things, with intent Cisco has pitched its intent-based networking capabilities as a way to get control over the Internet of Things.…

Cough, cough, EternalBlue, cough, cough Wannacry, splutter, Stuxnet RSA 2018 "You don't launch a cyber weapon, you share it."…

Take note Twitter, Facebook et al, it's really not that hard to weed out bots A group of computer scientists have developed a machine-learning algorithm that can sniff out fake profiles lurking on social networks.…

Oh, yeah, and storage sales sucked. There's that, too Revenues for IBM have risen for its second successive financial quarter – after over five years of declining sales – however, profits are down and Wall Street hammered Big Blue's stock price in after-hours trading.…

Yeah that oughta do the trick The US government has waded into the omni-shambles that is the internet infrastructure industry's failed effort to comply with European privacy laws.…

Crypto expert panel tackles the big stories of the year RSA 2018 Speaking at the 2018 RSA conference, a board of some of the most respected names in security spoke on Tuesday and were scathing about Facebook – and the industry's response to the Spectre processor bug.…

RSA panel tackles the big stories of the year RSA 2018 Speaking at the 2018 RSA conference, a board of some of the most respected names in security spoke on Tuesday and were scathing about Facebook and the response to the Spectre processor bug.…

Dublin case closed but very big legal question remains The US Supreme Court has dodged a critical legal question about the reach of America's courts in the internet era, deciding to drop a test case between Microsoft and the Department of Justice.…

59% of our systems are obsolete, agency boss tells congressional hearing Updated US tax returns for 2017 must be filed by midnight tonight – but the nation's Internal Revenue Service is making that difficult.…

Trial of ex-CFO Sushovan Hussein continues Infamous software outfit Autonomy lied to a British financial regulatory panel, an American court has been told by the panel's former chairman.…

Performance and security boost with space left over Mainframes never die, though their architecture has been eclipsed for years.…

Wants to hang on to sales dominance Alongside its update of vSphere, VMware has smoothed off a few of the rough edges from its HCI heavy, vSAN.…

And I 'could' sing a duet with Taylor Swift Comment The British Army's troubled Watchkeeper drones "could still be deployed on operations", a defence minister has insisted.…

Plus: Former CEO snubs MPs The number of Facebook users whose data was compromised via quizzes "is much greater than 87 million", Cambridge Analytica's former director of program development has told MPs.…

Enterprise Edition 2.0 focuses on K8s without the ops hires Container popularizer Docker plans to roll out an update to its enterprise product on Tuesday that has more to do with box juggling than canned code.…

From vapourware to reality Huawei has said its first 5G-capable phone will appear in a little over a year. The Chinese giant made the pledge at its annual global analyst summit in Shenzhen, southeastern China.…

One for vSphere veterans, one for hybrid hipsters, plus a security surprise VMware has given vAdmins a new version of vSphere, numbered 6.7. As predicted and detected by The Register's virtualization desk, it's not a huge release. But it is both a slightly confusing and rather significant one.…

Oracle's Catz: I chatted to Trump about plan, it 'makes no sense' The US Department of Defense (DoD) still intends to choose just one vendor for its multibillion-dollar cloud contract – amid complaints from Oracle's co-CEO that such a plan "makes no sense".…

Microsoft Windows Insider chief 'fesses up to potential blue-screen inducing glitch Windows 10 Springwatch – as it shall henceforth be known – has entered its second week and Microsoft has dropped the first clue as to what caused the delay: bugs.…

Falcon 9 grounded while turning it off and on again works at ESA A Guidance and Navigation Control (GNC) issue scuppered last night's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) launch atop a SpaceX Falcon 9. Conversely, the European Space Agency (ESA) celebrated a successful restart of the Mars Express orbiter following a software update.…

Train to outwit the cyber criminals Promo Even as IT systems grow and become more complex, so new and ingenious methods for stealing vital data or holding organisations to ransom proliferate at an increasingly rapid pace.…

MicroSD cam flash cards, cheap NAS filers and costly prosumer flash drives It has been a hardware frenzy this week, with a pair of microSD cards for surveillance cams, flash drives for video takers and makers, and good old filers from a NAS baker.…

Punters wising up to expensive upgrade cycle Sales of smartphones in Western Europe are expected to fall 7 per cent to 141 million this year, as consumers shun expensive upgrades on devices offering little more than an incremental updates.…

What to do when a productivity app is anything but If I had a dollar for every time someone said Slack was the answer to a business's problems, I'd have retired to a beach in Australia long ago. I'm currently in seven different Slack teams, and I've still got problems.…

Report into fatal air accident shows machines can't be trusted to negotiate a crisis On September 8th, 2015, a pilot left Point Cook Airfield in the Australian State of Victoria for a solo navigational training flight.…

But warns it will bail if something better comes along SAP has revealed its attitude to Oracle’s decision to let go of Java EE and have it tended by the Eclipse Foundation.…

Yes, this is the same France that wants not-backdoors for the rest of us France's government has built an encrypted messaging app for government use.…

Oh that snitch-code? It's just a little thing to make the web more convenient ... for Facebook and its advertisers Facebook's apology-and-explanation machine grinds on, with The Social Network™ posting detail on one of its most controversial activities – how it tracks people who don't use Facebook.…