The Register

Call us a taxi, uh, a Virgin train um... yep, that's it Virgin founder Richard "Beardy" Branson has been named non-executive chairman of Virgin Hyperloop One, with the superfast tube train company having also won another $50m (£37.39m) in funding.…

Any ideas how we can improve Blighty's infrastructure? The government has opened a consultation to understand what makes investing in full fibre and 5G "attractive".…

200 litres an hour? Fetch the kettle, we could fill it from that New British aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth has sprung a leak. The warship takes on around 200 litres of water per hour thanks to a faulty propeller shaft gland packing, according to reports.…

You pillocks, that was never goin' t'werk in this Lanky town The northern council of Rochdale has scrapped its plan to fine people £100 for swearing in the town.…

You pillocks, that was never goin' t'werk in this Lanky town The northern council of Rochdale has scrapped its plan to fine people £100 for swearing in the town.…

Multi Actuator arms will boost data access as capacities grow Seagate is increasing IO performance in disk drives by separating read-write heads into two separate sets which can operate independently and in parallel.…

New rules to help you break things off within single day. Cold Mobile users will be able to divorce their providers by text within a single working day, thanks to new Ofcom rules announced today.…

Rebel firms have been seduced by the dark side and Darth Reg must bring balance to the force Storage wars are ongoing across the galaxy and of course every supplier claims the force is with them. Here's the latest news overheard from the wretched hive of scum and villainy otherwise known as the storage industry.…

Immature tech still has a bunch of growing up to do 2017 was a big year for containers. One of the biggest container events came from the Linux Foundation, and it was – by its own admission – one of the most boring.…

Join us for a New Year’s brain recharge If you’re worried about hitting 2018 feeling a little jaded and in need of intellectual stimulation, have no fear. We have a series of brain-stretching lectures to see you through to spring time, spanning deception detection, Britain’s WWII underground Spitfire manufacturing programme, and the death of the combustion engine.…

Good heavens, look at the time – it's nearly 2018 Quick 'n' dirty analysis General Data Protection Regulation scare season is in full swing and suppliers are pretty much saying "buy our stuff or risk fines up to 4 per cent of your annual revenues". If you haven't done any preparation yet, is it really that bad and what should you do?…

Good heavens, look at the time – it's nearly 2018 Quick 'n' dirty analysis General Data Protection Regulation scare season is in full swing and suppliers are pretty much saying "buy our stuff or risk fines up to 4 per cent of your annual revenues". If you haven't done any preparation yet, is it really that bad and what should you do?…

A glimpse at the algorithms powering card shark AI The blueprints for Libratus – the poker AI bot that crushed professional players in a Texas hold ’em tournament earlier this year – were published on Monday in a research paper.…

Sparky stories of dim folks succumbing to electrical shockers On-Call Welcome again to festive On-Call, in which we delve into the mailbag of not-quite-worthy-as-standalone contributions to keep the site busy as the world runs out of tech news before Christmas.…

Living off grid, in the woods, away from all tech not such a loony idea after all Analysis A study of 913 pregnant women in the San Francisco Bay Area, California, found those exposed to high levels of magnetic field (MF) non-ionizing radiation had a 2.72x higher risk of miscarriage than those exposed to low MF levels.…

Loapi found in smut apps, fake virus scanners Kaspersky researchers have turned up a strain of malware lurking in adult content and fake virus scanners, and it can run a victim's Android mobe so hard they might suffer physical damage.…

IETF RFC writes-out weak Diffie-Hellman A recent Request for Comment at the Internet Engineering Task Force calls for SSH developers to deprecate 1,024-bit moduli.…

Crawling transparency logs, so you don't need to Facebook has expanded its year-old certificate transparency project to make it easier for developers to watch for dodgy certs.…

Subpoena demands he fly from Florida to Cali by Thursday Former Uber attorney Craig Clark on Monday filed an emergency motion in a Miami, Florida, court to quash a subpoena directing him to testify in Waymo's trade secret lawsuit against Uber on Thursday on the other side of America in California – because he has holiday plans with his family in the Sunshine State.…

Social network says police, government requests for data and takedowns booming Facebook says police and government agents' requests for users' information as well as takedown demands are increasing.…

NCI gets AU$70 million to replace Reijin Australia's National Computational Infrastructure is getting ready to open the wallet and buy AU$70 million worth of new iron.…

Crackdown on hate kicks off, non-racist world celebrates Twitter today started imposing rules designed to reduce hateful and abusive content on its service – to the delight of many, and fury of others.…

Russian biz sues US govt for torpedoing anti-malware tool installations Embattled Russian security software maker Kaspersky Lab has taken the American government to a US federal court to overturn Uncle Sam's ban on its antivirus tools.…

This is the browser maker's Apple U2 moment Updated Mozilla automatically installed a weird add-on to Firefox on people's computers – an add-on that turned out to be a marketing promotion for the hit telly show Mr Robot.…

Kozinski walks out, blames his 'broad sense of humor' for downfall Top US tech judge Alex Kozinski has resigned, effectively immediately, amid claims of sexual misconduct.…

Probe found unfair contracts for sellers The French government is seeking to fine Amazon €10m (£8.8m) for using its market dominance to unfairly treat vendors.…

Filing: Explosive allegations against ride-hailing biz revealed in letter from former staffer Uber has been accused of illegal intelligence gathering, using non-attributable hardware and software, impersonating drivers and bugging private events, in an explosive set of allegations from a former staffer.…

We'll wait for you! cries spurned suitor After turning down a €4.3bn (£3.8bn) buyout offer from Atos last week, Dutch security and chip biz Gemalto announced today that it has accepted a €4.8bn (£4.2bn) deal from French defence group Thales.…

Ahead of only Nigeria when it comes to fibre Blighty is one of the top countries when it comes to superfast broadband but one of the worst for full-fibre connections, according to an in-depth report by Ofcom comparing the UK with 16 other nations.…

Well you do need to start with 13... Tintri has made a FlexDrive facility available so cash-strapped customers can expand all-flash array capacity one drive at a time.…

All I want (to eat) for Christmas is you A woman from Kent, England, intends to redefine the meaning of a cremated Christmas dinner this year as she plans serve her mother's ashes with her festive meal.…

The MEF came, saw, and conquered Bezos' vaults of cash Amazon and the Italian government have agreed that the online shopping colossus will pay €100m (£88.3m) in back tax for 2011 to 2015, after a year of arguing.…

The Great Egg Race presenter was 89 Obit Professor Heinz Wolff, the bonkers-haired boffin who brought delight and joy to millions of BBC viewers in the 1970s and 1980s, has died aged 89.…

A grand for an animated poo emoji, and a NOTCH? Anyone hoping that the 10th anniversary iPhone hype – including the revolutionary 3D poo emoji – would reinvigorate consumer interest in the product line may be disappointed.…

Euler Hermes slashes limits to zero... Worry not, says geek emporium Exclusive Yet another major credit insurer has abandoned geek emporium Maplin Electronics. Euler Hermes – the biggest trade indemnifier in the tech sector – has entirely removed all lines of coverage, El Reg can reveal.…

Oo, awkward Christmas is typically a busy time of year for the Holy Father, but thankfully Pope Francis has found time to decree that made-up stories are a "serious sin".…

Supermicro's battery backup module will fit another rack in Supermicro has added battery backup power to its disaggregated rack-scale server product line to improve power efficiency and server density ratings.…

Erm, just like Google doesn't. It's an Adwords thing, innit? Google asked rival browser Vivaldi to add uninstall instructions on its website download page – something Google doesn't do itself – after deactivating Vivaldi's advertising account earlier this year.…

'It's not a publicity stunt,' says BusinessWaste.co.uk People have bin going mad for Bitcoin lately and, as it appears some refuse to see sense, companies are queueing up to get on the bandwagon.…

It’s a container Jim, but not as we and Docker know it UK startup Cloudhouse has taken on the Windows migration crowd with a product to take Windows 7 era applications, wrap them inside an operating system interface code layer, and make them Windows 10-compliant.…

Sheffield boffins win UK prize, Kardashian's '69' scoops international gong The Royal Statistical Society has bestowed the coveted title of UK statistic of the year on 0.1 per cent – the percentage of land that's densely built on in the nation.…

White boxers a constant and growing threat Slumping enterprise data centre server sales are set to recover in 2018 driven by the Purley refresh cycle and the need for more compute.…

Plus: It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye, or freezes off their toes On-Call theregister.co.uk…

Debt restructuring checked off, $300 million in the kitty Almost a year after filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, Avaya last Friday announced the process has completed.…

The difference between George Clooney and Dustin Hoffman? Just a couple of pixels Would you like to join the merry band of researchers breaking machine learning models? A trio of German researchers has published a tool designed to make it easier to craft adversarial models when you're attacking a “black box”.…

Keeper exposed punters to drive-by click-jack pwnage Google Project Zero's Tavis Ormandy has turned up a howling blunder in a password manager bundled with Windows 10.…

Melbourne researchers warn government: don't publish data down to the individual, ever Governments should not release anonymised data that refers to individuals, because re-identification is inevitable.…

And more in your machine-learning news summary Roundup Here's your quick guide to news in the AI world beyond what we've covered this week.…

RetDec will turn binaries into something more legible Malware hunting biz and nautical jargon Avast has released its machine-code decompiler RetDec as open source, in the hope of arming like-minded haters of bad bytes and other technically inclined sorts with better analytical tools.…

Alex Kozinski accused of showing women clerks porn, sexually harassing staff A misconduct inquiry has been opened into top US tech judge Alex Kozinski over allegations that he showed female law clerks pornography and repeatedly asked inappropriate sexual questions.…