The Register

AR Scorpii was the first white dwarf pulsar to be found Scientists trying to crack the mystery behind the fastest-pulsating white dwarf have found that its brightness levels change over a timescale of decades.…

Lord Scriven says UK.gov response 'not worth the paper it is printed on' The use of 20 million facial images by the police "has said gone far beyond using them for custody purposes", according to the Biometric Commissioners’ annual report.…

West London techie trio spurred into action for homeless youngsters A trio of plucky Reg fans from Shepherd’s bush are braving the mean streets of London next month to raise money for Byte Night - and you should really join them.…

Yes, we meant specifications... and think up a name, would you? Oracle has named the Eclipse Foundation as the new host for Java Enterprise Edition, but said the platform won’t get to keep its name.…

That's part one sorted. Now, who's supplying the sharks? The Dragonfire laser cannon consortium has unveiled a fullsize mockup of its shipborne blaster at the Defence and Security Exhibition International arms fair in London.…

Months of patient work by American cops went into this Five “bikini baristas” have been charged with prostitution after a lengthy undercover police investigation revealed the women were serving drive-through customers while only wearing their smalls.…

Matt Hancock uses speech on the internet to pontificate about liberalism... Digital minister Matt Hancock has confirmed that the Data Protection Bill will be published tomorrow, in a speech promising internet laws "based on liberal and not libertarian values" that "cherish freedom yet prevent harm to others".…

iPhoneX feature receives stony-faced reaction from security buffs Security watchers have given Apple’s introduction of facial recognition technology a cautious welcome.…

Samsung has little to fear Comment You may or may not know that the phrase "industrial revolution" was coined by a Frenchman.…

Plus: The podcast says goodbye to The Reg

Last major data deal between EU and third country took 4 years The UK is risking a data economy worth £240bn if it doesn’t secure a “simple” transition deal that minimises disruption of data flows after Brexit, the Confederation of British Industry will warn today.…

Cause, accountability, responsibility When the Knightscope K5 surveillance bot fell into the pond at an office complex in Washington, DC, last month, it wasn’t the first time the company’s Future of Security machines had come a cropper.…

Come and bite the hand that feeds Are you pondering a career in technology journalism? We've got good news for you in that case – El Reg is hiring an intern to work on our London newsdesk.…

It's not like we sell to the Feds, so go ahead and ban us! Kaspersky Lab has laughed off attempts to have its wares banned from US government computers by saying it hardly sold to the Feds anyway.…

Which is why its cameras will stop snapping a day before it smacks into Saturn Space is nasty and sending data across 83 light-minutes of it isn't easy, so the Cassini probe's death dive into the clouds of Saturn will be an instruments-only affair undocumented by photographs.…

BTC isn't explicitly covered by sanctions and Kim could launder it into useful currencies North Korea appears to have commenced online attacks aimed at acquiring Bitcoin so it can evade sanctions.…

Chocolate Factory unwraps developer style guide, squibs the thorny ISO date debate If you want to write developer documentation like a Google hotshot, you'd better kill “kill”, junk “jank” and unlearn “learnings”.…

Crack a Galaxy or bash Bixby and score US$20k to $200k Samsung's mobile limb has become the latest major vendor to launch a bug bounty program, and within its tight rules, it offers a tasty maximum prize of US$200,000.…

Lasers are too pricy, so we're using BLINKENLIGHTS instead As low-cost satellites become more common, researchers are turning their attention to improving their communications capabilities without adding crushing costs.…

US safety regulator finds computer in fatal Tesla crash could have intervened earlier America's National Transport Safety Bureau (NTSB) has decided that late Tesla-driver Joshua Brown was responsible for the crash he died in, but that Tesla's Autopilot contributed by (at the time) allowing him to ignore the road for too long.…

Everything hip is new again Slack has re-invented some stuff Lotus Notes did 20 years ago and declared it will make you more productive.…

This might be the rare case of a bug you don't want patched SAP admins, there's an e-mail system bug that could give your HR department headaches, by blocking peoples from registering their e-mail with its E-Recruiting system.…

Boffins reveal code for turning cow pies into cash The US government wants you to use its software, and if you're into manure, so much the better.…

Radio jets beamed from gigantic black holes are still a mystery Physicists have managed to analyze the hidden "tails" swirling around quasars in supermassive black holes by using a combination of radio telescopes and the Gaia space observatory.…

Cupertino's choice just about wraps it up for the Airfuel Alliance Apple's keynote may be good news for fans of its products, but it must have made grim listening for members of the Airfuel Alliance.…

Look Microsoft, we'll stop these headlines when your stuff stops getting pwned While much of the tech world is still fixating on Apple's $1,000 face-reading iPhone, administrators are going to be busy testing and deploying this month's Patch Tuesday load.…

To be fair, it's a hard hack to pull off Microsoft has downplayed the risks of running a Linux Bash shell command line on Windows 10 via its Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) feature after security researchers said the technology could help hackers smuggle malware past security scanners and onto Windows 10 machines.…

All just part of a broader strategy Mobile World Congress The head of America's telecom watchdog the FCC, Ajit Pai, didn't mention net neutrality by name once during his keynote at the Mobile World Congress in San Francisco.…

Baffling spec sinks security for short-range comms protocol Security experts have long complained that complexity is the enemy of security, but the designers of the Bluetooth specification have evidently failed to pay attention.…

Steve Jobs Theater fittingly opens with cult-like showcasing of overpriced gear Apple has summoned friendly press to its new Cupertino campus to christen the Steve Jobs Theater with the introduction of a new set of products to hit the shelves this Fall.…

'Basically, everything was pwned, from the Lan to the Wan' A security researcher has shamed D‑Link by publicly disclosing 10 serious, as-yet unpatched vulnerabilities in a line of consumer-grade routers without notifying the vendor first.…

But holds out hope that self-driving cars, smart homes and VR can change that Mobile World Congress It may not be happy about it, but the mobile industry has begrudgingly accepted that tech giants Apple, Google and Facebook are driving its industry.…

Wall of silence remains, albeit with a couple of holes An American judge has denied Google’s self-driving car offshoot Waymo access to details of how Uber hunted for allegedly stolen documents handed to it by former Waymo employee Anthony Levandowski.…

We're looking at you, accounting* Azure Microsofties have crossed their fingers - and everything else - that Redmond's new VM family will hit the sweet spot for customers with sporadic cloud computing jobs.…

But HPE, IBM, Cisco and Dell weren't the major beneficiaries... Chinese ODMs were In the server sales growth stakes the big Chinese brands appear to be winning the war against their US rivals, at least if Gartner’s latest stats covering calendar Q2 are to be believed.…

Cambridge-based biz facing £45k fine for 700,000 marketing mailers The company behind a taxi comparison app that sent more than 700,000 spam texts in the space of 10 days is facing a £45,000 by the UK's data protection watchdog.…

That would be you, by the way Reg Event We will be taking a long hard look at AI, ML and data analytics at MCubed next month, but there’s one other element we’ll be keeping in mind throughout: humans.…

Based in Romania? You are safe Exclusive Oracle is cutting costs by shifting pan-European hardware support to Romania in a move that could see hundreds of existing staff made redundant, multiple insiders have told The Register.…

Ivo Rook heads to US telco, picks up Softbank advisory role Vodafone’s Internet of Things boss Ivo Rook has moved to US telco Sprint, against the background of Voda’s well-publicised slowness to get its commercial IoT networks up and running.…

Wall St buys into startup's cloud storage gateway story +Comment Cloud storage gateway business Nasuni has picked up $38m in extra funding to boost research and development, customer success, and go-to-market efforts, taking the total raised to around $120m.…

We've got a little listicle... of missing, must-have features Apple's new iPhone will be packed with new features you didn't know you needed. It almost certainly won't be getting features it absolutely does need. We made a list of what Apple needs to do, but won't.…

Tosh and WDC still talking, say others... is the end is in sight? +Comment Japan’s Nikkan Kogyo Shimbun newspaper says a WDC bid group has won the Toshiba Memory Business auction.…

Learn from 'Bob'. RUN! As fast as your £$% legs will take you Sure, the future is cloud. But it’s not that simple. The days where you could "just swipe a credit card and go" never existed – not at enterprise scale. Legacy applications and data need to be lifted and shifted, new services instantiated, virtual infrastructures architected, networks bolstered, and security scrutinised, adapted and reinforced for the new way of working.…

Veep tells us he wants 'very trustful relationship' with customers “It’s all about how to make the car safer and safer,” German engineering firm Bosch told The Register last week as it exhibited its driverless technologies in London.…

Invests in reborn PDA under the Gemini project Psion founder David Potter has joined the company behind the Gemini project to re-create the classic Psion PDA.…

Also be curious and constructive by working on Linux instead of breaking it Linux Lord Linus Torvalds has offered some lifestyle advice for hackers, suggesting they adopt his admittedly-unglamorous lifestyle but also his ethos of working on things that matter.…

It's all gone potato-shaped for some galaxies already A team led by Sydney University's Dr Caroline Foster has created three-dimensional images of 845 galaxies, claiming it is the biggest collection of of 3D galactic representations ever gathered.…

Microsegmentation for microservices, plus automated key management for all those tiny, transient networks VMware's released a new version of NSX-T, the version of its NSX network virtualization tool that runs in multiple environments.…

From Excel.Application to remote code execution. Lovely A white-hat has taken a good look at whether you can pivot an attack from one machine to others using Microsoft Excel, and you probably won't like what he found.…

PETA and photog agree that 'Legal rights for nonhuman animals' remain unresolved The curious case of the monkey that took a selfie and was denied copyright for its efforts has come to an end, with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and photographer David Slater agreeing on a future stream of royalty payments to simian charities.…