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Spoiler: Social media app was fined last year for not doing that exact thing The owners of Chinese social media app WeChat have denied they are monitoring the service or keeping chat logs for government surveillance – despite evidence to the contrary.…

Tor usage skyrockets as citizens try to bypass blocks Iranian authorities have blocked Instagram and other social media platforms in response to a wave of street protests across the country this week.…

You need to be the bigger supermassive black hole The mass of the supermassive black hole at the centre of galaxies controls star formation and determines how it evolves over time, according to new observations published in Nature.…

Twitter, Facebook boot off far-right politician over racist tweet The grace period for tech firms failing to meet Germany's strict new hate speech law has ended.…

Users can't pay bills or report phones lost in NYE revelry Mobile network EE has had a poor start to 2018 – their customer service data centre has been down since yesterday.…

Plus: GPL row flares again, zapper won't zap people Roundup British drone users will have to take a multiple-guess quiz before using their Christmas toys this year, while drone users appear to have, once again, got around pre-eminent drone maker DJI's software-based flight restrictions.…

Because the state has a great track record of recouping tax from internet giants Tech firms are indirectly costing the UK government millions in "human surveillance" of extremist content and should have a windfall tax levied against them to make up for it, according to security minister Ben Wallace.…

But is anyone actually using it? The Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger project was announced in December 2015. When Apache Web server daddy Brian Behlendorf took the helm five months later, the Foundation’s blockchain baby was still embryonic. He called it “day zero.”…

Predicting a (R)IoT: Maybe it doesn't all need to be processed this instant Software engineer Dave McCrory coined the term "data gravity" in a 2010 blog post. Since then he's come up with equations and otherwise thought hard about how to put numbers on it. He even talks about it today in terms of information theory, network evolution, and similarly heady topics. But it stems from a quite simple idea.…

Sniff... sniff. They can't be far. These animals just ate 1.96 EB! Comment Tech market researcher IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Converged Systems Tracker has found that worldwide converged systems market revenue increased 10.8 per cent year over year to $2.99bn during the third quarter of 2017 (3Q17) – and that the market inhaled a massive 1.96 EB of new storage capacity during the quarter, up 30 per cent on the year.…

Plus: The Christmas kill switch that backfired On-Call Not just the week but The Register's working year has drawn to an end, and that means it's time to wrap things up with the last of our slow-news-week festive editions of On-Call, the column we compile after kind readers send in their stories of support jobs that went south.…

Forget the supernovae, what's this about alien alloys? Our Solar System may have been born from bubbles of material hurled from a colossal Wolf-Rayet-type star, according to a theory published Friday.…

Linux code fortifier is told people are entitled to opinions Linux kernel security biz Grsecurity's defamation lawsuit against open-source stalwart Bruce Perens has been dismissed, although the door remains open for a revised claim.…

Last 2017 roundup: Death Star file protection crap, Samsung DRAM miracles and more Here's a final collection of storage news before Christmas 2017. Imagine you are having Christmas dinner and you get a bunch of crackers. Pull them and, instead of fortune cookie statements and bad jokes, this list of news items tumbles out.…

Will they? Won't they? Liberty Global is rumoured to be near to closing a deal to flog its Austrian biz to Germany's Deutsche Telekom for about $2bn (£1.5bn), which could reopen merger talks with Vodafone in Blighty.…

What's with the sudden boom in latency serial killers? Analysis Storage startup WekaIO has joined a growing crowd of techies making large performance gains and latency lowering file system tech moves.…

Bet they're shaking in their boots Foreign secretary Boris Johnson will warn Russia that the UK will retaliate against cyber attacks in a rare visit to Moscow today.…

A truly AI Christmas to one and all + El Regmas song RoTM "King of toys and hippopotamuses full of the light of that stood at the dear Son of Santa Claus."…

Mass paperwork backlog sets off ICO Final update The UK Ministry of Justice has been slammed for poor handling of requests for personal records made under data protection laws – and told to fix the 700-plus backlog by October.…

Pair pulled over lugging wrong kind of trees The friends and family of an elderly couple from Nebraska may have lost out on their share of almost 30kg of pot this festive season after cops spotted their stash.…

That sliding-doors moment – how Ginni chose the wrong exit The past six years have been unkind to IBM but top brass only have themselves to blame: the firm generated tens of billions of dollars but bought back shares and returned money to investors rather than doing something radical.…

Brit Medical Assoc: 'Urgently' heal these 'ongoing issues' Capita Business Services' shambolic £700m Primary Care Support contract with NHS England will at last be scrutinised by the National Audit Office amid “ongoing issues” with service delivery.…

And the Archangel appeared and said: 'Pssst, someone's making a new Psion' Exclusive Production begins in January on the first new computer form factor since the iPad – Planet Computing's "modern Psion", Gemini.…

NVMe speed meets IoT edge need – analyst Analysis Enterprise flash drive use will surge over the next four years due to price falls, capacity rises, NVMe speed and Internet of Things (IoT) edginess, analysts have agreed.…

Got £3k to burn? You could do worse Hands On You have £3,000 burning a hole in your pocket. You're also an engineer, developer or manipulate visual images. You also absolutely must have a touchscreen portable workstation, preferably with a display that detaches so you can go home and watch Netflix.…

Wireless guard dog Secure has many plus points – but they come at a cost Review Not that long ago, a thermostat was just a thermostat. It was a beige box that was often installed by someone who came out to your house or office. It did what it did. Turned the heat on, turned the heat off. Had a schedule.…

Or perhaps you're an 'OTAKE' – an Opinionated Tw*t who Always Knows Everything On-Call Welcome again to On-Call, which we are running daily this week because lots of you have sent submissions that deserve an airing and also because there's SFA news to write this week.…

If there was life on the Red Planet, it hit the rocks – literally Mars is dry, frozen and arid because its water reserves dried up. A large chunk of that water was lost when the planet’s magnetic field collapsed and it could no longer shield itself from the energetic solar rays.…

Shift in focus spikes drink biz Logowatch This special edition of El Reg's Logowatch isn't strictly about logos, rather it's a rebrand, but since today is Friday and this news is – and this is a technical term here – batshit mad, we couldn't pass it up.…

Only beeping took 10 beeping days to admit it was been beep-beeping beep pwned Nissan Canada's vehicle-financing wing has been hacked, putting personal information on as many as 1.13 million customers in the hands of miscreants.…

Admission of deliberate battery-saving CPU speed limiting in iOS chums water for sharks One day after Apple acknowledged that it has been downclocking the CPUs in older iPhones to prevent sudden shutdowns from battery exhaustion, the first lawsuit has arrived.…

AE1 missing for 103 years After years of searching, the wreck of World War I submarine AE1 has been found in waters off New Guinea.…

Charges filed against pair coincide with arrests abroad Two of the five unnamed individuals cuffed this month in Romania on suspicion of spreading ransomware face US computer crime charges – for their alleged role in taking over 123 out of 187 networked computers that control Washington DC's CCTV cameras earlier this year.…

If you are without phone coverage over the holidays, we are to blame... possibly We would like to take this opportunity to apologize to the residents of Puerto Rico, and especially those who will not have cell phone coverage over Christmas.…

No Schmidt, Sherlock! Former CEO steps down, will take on technical advisor role Eric Schmidt has quit as executive chairman of Alphabet, Google's post-restructuring parent.…

Predictions are like armpits, everybody has at least two and they often stink The technology industry loves to claim that the leaders of its Australian outposts are sages worthy of delivering prognostications from on high, rather than glorified territory managers with a continent to cover. So at this time of year they send El Reg predictions for what will happen on the local tech scene during the next trip around the Sun.…

Free software as in thank God I'm not paying for this Canonical has halted downloads of Ubuntu Linux 17.10, aka Artful Aardvark, from its website after punters complained installing the open-source OS on laptops knackered the machines.…

DXC to appeal verdict after court heard biz giant deliberately shortchanged staff Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) “willfully” misclassified 1,000 of its system administrators to avoid paying the techies overtime.…

App maker wanted to keep 'inaccurate' review private Digital health outfit Babylon has withdrawn a legal challenge against the UK's Care Quality Commission (CQC) concerning a report into its practice's operations.…

Bob Quick, Neil Lewis referred to UK data watchdog by 'disappointed' Met Police The cops who blabbed to the press about the UK's disgraced former First Secretary of State's alleged porn stash are to be investigated by Blighty's privacy watchdog.…

Got cash, must buy BlackBerry's stock rose to a 2017 high despite widening losses and lower revenues than a year ago. This indicates that against a backdrop of pain from shedding those lovely handset sales, the market is betting the sickly Canadian business has turned a corner.…

Analysts predict 400 million users by 2022 The first standards for 5G have been agreed, meaning industry can press ahead with next-gen speeds.…

Availability suite 9.5, update 3 Veeam has extended its backup product (Veeam Availability Suite or VAS) coverage with update 3 to v9.5.…

I have a good... er, I mean a bad feeling about this... Purveyor of, er, marital aids Geeky Sex Toys this month released a "Star Toys" range, a series of intimate tools for him and her brought lovingly to life in the shape of characters from the Star Wars franchise.…

'Free flow of data, free flow of data, free flow of data' Digital minister Matt Hancock has been doing his best to help silly season live up to its name, injecting quips about sport and theatre among prosaic data protection questions.…

NAND thanks for memory, folks... we don't need you any more Industry researchers have reported that three players in China are currently building flash and memory fabs and appear to be working to make China self-sufficient in NAND and DRAM.…

As if London commuters don't have enough to put up with... Transport for London has inked an £80m deal with outsourcing giant Capita to provide Wide Area Network services across all TfL sites.…

Meanwhile, class action sueball flung Public interest publisher ProPublica has once again accused Facebook of misbehaviour, but this time Mark Zuckerberg's ad-farm is pushing back.…

Says X86 doesn't mark the spot... but won't flash its latency numbers +Comment IBM has claimed its POWER9 gear is better placed to help AIs doing "cognitive" work than your common-or-garden X86 commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) kit after tests in New York earlier this month.…

No flowers for 'Disputed' tag's grave. No dancers either. Nobody noticed really A year after deciding to fight fake news with a "Disputed" flag – backed, we were assured, by an army of fact-checkers – Facebook has decided it doesn't work, and will instead apply tweaks to how "Related Content" is handled.…