The Register

My computer's crashed! I've lost everythi… oh, never mind, it's working again Something for the Weekend, Sir? "I have something to show you," she purrs, reclining suggestively across the sofa. "Come and have a peek."…

It’s happening, but here are the problems it could cause Enforcing age verification checks for online porn sites could be detrimental to smaller ISPs and significantly increase online fraud, the government has admitted.…

Sorry, we just couldn't resist A freak galaxy is teeming with gigantic stars, say scientists who now reckon these cosmic heavyweights may not be so rare after all.…

Countermeasures to protect apps from attack Analysis Intel has borne the brunt of the damage from the revelation of two novel attack techniques, dubbed Meltdown and Spectre, that affect the majority of modern CPUs in various ways.…

Chocolate Factory hit with ex-Googlers' revised pay-gap complaint The class-action lawsuit accusing Google of deliberately paying women less than men has been revised and brought back to a US court.…

Sysadmins notice performance dip amid security fix rollout. Not everyone hit hard. YMMV etc Amazon AWS customers have complained of noticeable slowdowns on their cloud server instances – following the deployment of a security patch to counter the Intel processor design flaw dubbed Meltdown.…

Check your anti-malware tool unless you like BSoDs Microsoft has released updates for Windows to block attempts by hackers and malware to exploit the Meltdown vulnerability in Intel x86-64 processors – but you will want to check your antivirus software before applying the fixes.…

'Brain-to-Vehicle' driving tech wheeled out RotM Nissan reckons it has developed technology that will allow you to control cars of the future with your brainwaves.…

That'll show Putin who's boss! NATO, the military alliance originally formed to defend Europe against Soviet Russia, has formally adopted its own national anthem-style hymn.…

No ETA yet for West Europe machines Microsoft Azure customers are reporting problems with their virtual machines, which are struggling to come back online after being updated with the Meltdown processor patch.…

Full report obtained by El Reg casts doubt on public test conclusions Exclusive A British drone collision study used as evidence for the government’s flagship drone pilot registration law found UAVs pose less of a risk to airliners than government officials and trade unions have claimed.…

All-time high for industry The temperature is rising in the hot aisle for data centre businesses – $20bn was spent on mergers and acquisitions last year.…

Neural networks sort stuff – they can't reason or infer Deep learning and neural networks may have benefited from the huge quantities of data and computing power, but they won't take us all the way to artificial general intelligence, according to a recent academic assessment.…

Sure about that? Gartner beancounters say price rises driven by memory shortages propelled Samsung into the lead based on semiconductor vendor revenue, vaulting past Intel and its CPUs.…

DHS 'fesses up 8 months after finding ex-staffer had copy of investigations database More than 240,000 current and former employees of the US Department of Homeland Security have had their personal details exposed in a data breach.…

They may take our lives, but they will never take our fizzy drink Angry Scots are protesting against plans to slash the sugar content of their beloved national soft drink Irn-Bru and folk have begun stockpiling the beverage said to be a hangover cure.…

And expresses some anxiety about ex-staff leaving for upstart Citrix has launched a patent suit against rival Avi Networks accusing it of patent infringement and of spreading "false claims" about Citrix's NetScaler networking products.…

Bristol man ordered to pay over £600 for data protection offence A man from Bristol lied to a government agency to get his hands on a private number plate reading "W1 DOW", a court has heard.…

Oliver Meakin quits Maplin CEO Oliver Meakin has quit the troubled geek emporium to run the Gaucho Group, a chain of Argentinean steak houses.…

Why are you doing this? Munich City officials could waste €100m reversing a 15-year process that replaced proprietary software with open source following an official vote last year.…

Full platter access parallelism performance-doubling... we ask around Analysis As we've previously written about here, Seagate has the technology to split a disk drives read-write heads into two independent sets, an upper and lower half, which increases the drive’s IO performance by having the upper and lower platter sets do IO in parallel.…

No bearded desktops with pointy hats to be seen here The Linux Mint project turned out to be an early Christmas present, as it usually does, but this release is perhaps more important than usual given that Mint is much more alone in the Linux distro world than it was just one year ago.…

AMD, Arm also affected by data-leak design blunders, Chipzilla hit hardest Summary The severe design flaw in Intel microprocessors that allows sensitive data, such as passwords and crypto-keys, to be stolen from memory is real – and its details have been revealed.…

As Linus Torvalds lets rip on Chipzilla Analysis In the wake of The Register's report on Tuesday about the vulnerabilities affecting Intel chips, Chipzilla on Wednesday issued a press release to address the problems disclosed by Google's security researchers that afternoon.…

As Linus Torvalds lets rip on Chipzilla Analysis In the wake of The Register's report on Tuesday about the vulnerabilities affecting Intel chips, Chipzilla on Wednesday issued a press release to address the problems disclosed by Google's security researchers that afternoon.…

Welcome to the Hotel California security model An Apple macOS security process called System Integrity Protection can prevent certain apps from being easily uninstalled, which isn't ideal when the code may be vulnerable or malware.…

Big Blue is trippin' over 1980s web tech IBM has filed suit against online travel giant Expedia alleging violation of four patents that harken back to the early days of dial-up internet.…

Battle over dodgy click claims heats up Advertising company Fetch says it wants a federal court to hear its challenge to Uber's claims of 'click fraud' in mobile ads.…

And two other security bugs VMware on Tuesday published a security advisory for its vSphere Data Protection (VDP) backup and recovery product.…

Chinese giant snuffs licensing gossip as 3D NAND glut looms Tsinghua Unigroup has denied it is licensing flash IP from SK Hynix as was reported in December, but is developing its own 3D NAND tech.…

Fancy go-faster filer tech destined for Azure Avere Systems and its go-faster filer frontend FXT tech is to be gobbled by Microsoft.…

Touts using software to snaffle seats would face unlimited fine The British government is to ban ticket touts from using automated software to snap up more tickets than allowed by event organisers.…

Upper Tribunal says commish should have viewed materials in drone strike info request herself Judges have slammed the Information Commissioner’s handling of an appeal against a Freedom of Information decision about a Syrian drone strike, saying it “fell well short” of expectations.…

Crowdfunded $107k to find system just needed a Hoover Sorry to burst your bubble, folks, but the mysteriously dimming Tabby's Star isn't due to an "alien megastructure" after all – it's just obscured by dust, according to a paper published today.…

Japan's third-biggest carmaker inks deal with tat bazaar's mapping arm Honda and Alibaba are teaming up to work on connected car services, becoming the latest big companies to leap aboard the smart vehicle technology bandwagon.…

Plan to cut through hassle of security notifications Security researcher Scott Helme is pushing a scheme to make it easier for bug finders to notify companies about problems with their technology.…

US and Irish firms to hang onto unmarried names, markets VoIP companies Blueface and Star2Star have announced a $500m (£368.8m) merger today, which they claim will create one of the world's largest global unified communications providers.…

Three letters: O E M Analysis When IDC published its third 2017 quarter converged and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) numbers, Dell was in the lead.…

Wixen won't back down, claims Spotify failed to get a licence for 10,000-plus tunes Spotify has been accused of rockin' a little too freely by a Californian music company that claims the streaming biz failed to gain proper licences for its artists' songs.…

Plus McAfee Twitter hack & other stuff that happened while you were partying... The festive period was accompanied by the usual security shenanigans including breaches, cybercrime busts and serious security bugs.…

Arrr! Booze brand in Davey Jones' locker with ads watcher Rum peddler Captain Morgan has come under fire from the UK ads watchdog for using a Snapchat lens that could appeal to underage teenagers.…

Four years ago Brit taxpayers spent £65m doing her up The flagship of the Royal Navy, HMS Ocean, has been sold to Brazil for £84m, the South American country’s government has confirmed.…

Nice try, but no, you're gonna have to cough up for these expensive data center chips Nvidia has banned the use of its GeForce and Titan gaming graphics cards in data centers – forcing organizations to fork out for more expensive gear, like its latest Tesla V100 chips.…

For seven months, fashion shop's POSes were real Ps of S Clothing chain Forever 21 has admitted a malware infection on its cash registers swiped customer payment card details for most of last year.…

Google boffins develop tricks to fool machine-learning software Despite dire predictions from tech industry leaders about the risks posed by unfettered artificial intelligence, software-based smarts remain extremely fragile.…

We had the rug pulled from under our front door, says CEO You won't have a $700 smart lock to kick around any more, as Otto (no, not that one) shut down and sacked its staff just before Christmas – without ever delivering a product.…

Software Freedom Law Center claims Software Freedom Conservancy committed fraud A few days before the Christmas holiday, the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) made a peace offering of sorts in an ostensible effort to resolve its trademark dispute with the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC).…

In America, at least The US government's trade watchdog, the FTC, has finalized its settlement deal with Lenovo on charges the PC builder sold Americans machines crammed with intrusive adware.…

Hennessy quits after just four months Cohesity's chief financial officer Seamus Hennessy has resigned after less than four months in post, judging from his LinkedIn profile.…

Other OSes will need an update, performance hits loom A fundamental design flaw in Intel's processor chips has forced a significant redesign of the Linux and Windows kernels to defang the chip-level security bug.…