The Register

Personal assistant that needed human help gets the boot Facebook is axing M, the wobbly digital personal assistant tacked onto its Messenger chat app.…

Yup, because this one will stop virtual network functions falling over because of fine print Yeah, we know: even the headline probably started you yawning, and the European Telecommunications Standards Institute's (ETSI's) quiet December announcement of a Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) Licensing Management effort doesn't seem that arresting.…

Journo who bought data has been named in police complaint The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has refuted claims the country's Aadhaar identification system was hacked as “clearly a case of misreporting being incorrect and misleading”, but has also filed a police complaint against the journalist who reported a breach.…

Sources say USA 'lost' absolutely-classified top-secret bird? You Musk be kidding SpaceX and Northrop Grumman have refused to address rumors that all may not be well with the classified "Zuma" satellite launched on Monday.…

For very, very, small bombs. Like the ones that set off car airbags As anybody who's emerged from a car crash in good shape can tell you, it's good to have some explosives around - they pop modern vehicles' air bags. Of course explosives are also hard to manufacture and handle, which is why researchers at Purdue University in the US tried to print them.…

Spacefaring veteran flew into space six times, once with a corned beef sarnie Obit John Young, the first pilot of a space shuttle, and longest serving astronaut in NASA's history, has died at the age of 87 due to complications caused by pneumonia.…

We're now into minute 21 of his 15 minutes of fame James Damore, the software engineer fired from Google after ironically firing off a neurotic memo about "neurotic" women, has launched a class-action lawsuit in the US against his former employer.…

Chip flaw fixes not so insignificant after all Analysis Having shot itself in the foot by prioritizing processor speed over security, the chip industry's fix involves doing the same to customers.…

Toymaker coughs up $650k after three million youngsters have info swiped The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) today agreed to a settlement deal with a children's electronic toymaker it had accused of collecting kids' personal information and then failing to properly secure that data.…

Biz baron will kiss goodbye to Roadster if launch goes wrong SpaceX fans this morning celebrated their favorite rocketry upstart's latest boringly successful launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida, USA.…

Oh, won't someone PLEASE think of the children! Updated A group of Apple shareholders are asking the Cupertino idiot-tax collector to do more about getting kids to put down their iThings.…

Smart home gizmo maker could do with a few extra bucks Smart home doorbell maker Ring has had a bad start to the year with the delivery of a patent infringement lawsuit courtesy of competitor Skybell.…

Comes just days after final details published by FCC The controversial repeal of net neutrality rules in America will go to a formal vote in Congress after sufficient lawmakers backed an effort to scrap it.…

When watchdogs don't watch Analysis Nothing expresses Silicon Valley's cynicism about privacy like its fondness for rewarding its friends from privacy class-action settlements – while class members get nothing. Now the US Supreme Court has been invited to consider whether such settlements are fair.…

Proliferation of video tracking in Blighty 'undermines' efforts to improve The UK's surveillance camera commissioner has told the British government to adopt a "common sense position" and bring all bodies using surveillance camera systems under its code of practice.…

Proliferation of video tracking in Blighty 'undermines' efforts to improve The UK's surveillance camera commissioner has told the British government to adopt a "common sense position" and bring all bodies using surveillance camera systems under its code of practice.…

But you still have to do it, kids GCSE computer science coursework will no longer count toward the final grade after answers to set tasks were leaked online last year.…

Buyer of HPE Software rejigs board for more M&A action Amid a boardroom rejig to pursue more M&A action, shares in London Stock Exchange-listed Micro Focus crashed today after financial results filed for the half-year ended October 31 fell short of analysts' expectations.…

This is going to take a while More examples have emerged of security fixes for the Meltdown vulnerability breaking things.…

Will continue to work on 3D XPoint together Micron and Intel have blown their joint 3D NAND project apart but will continue to develop 3D XPoint memory together.…

It's been a bad year, dude Action camera maker GoPro is exiting the consumer drone market and slashing 254 after issuing a sales warning.…

CEO focused on 'methodically building a sustainable company' Exagrid says it's steering a methodical path to an eventual IPO unlike reckless cash-burning storage startups that fail or need to be acquired (rescued).…

Balancing the workloads Supported You’re a business running on traditional IT, using banks of servers with monolithic applications and backed by traditional storage arrays as well. You’ve heard about a more modern way of doing things, using cloud services and hybrid IT to deliver greater flexibility and agility, but wonder how to get there.…

Elon Musk's Team Rocket blasts off again SpaceX's first mission of 2018, carrying the secret US government payload "Zuma", successfully launched and landed in the early hours of this morning.…

Thinks ain't what they used to be Analysis For some professionals and enterprises there's only one name in laptops: Thinkpad, and there are hardcore Register writers who will agree. Now Lenovo has given three key business lines – the T, X and L series – their first major overhaul in four years. But there's good news and bad for traditionalists.…

Staffers, 'guests' are also on network, mutters spokesbod The Houses of Parliament's network was used to access pornographic material 30,876 times from March to October, it has been revealed today.…

Russia, Norks and dog lovers all potential perps, say pundits A malware campaign has been unleashed against organisations involved with next month's Pyeongchang Winter Olympics.…

More worries for storage admins scouring environments for holes Analysis How will the bugfixes for Intel's Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities affect storage?…

Fully obliged Uncle Sam in almost half of cases Amazon received more than 2,000 requests for information from governments – and approved almost 900 in full - in the first six months of 2017.…

Well what do you expect... Another day, another embarrassing gaffe for the Tory party. This time it seems someone forgot to renew the site's security certificate.…

Add in Flatpak/Snap and it could be a revolution Open Source Insider The biggest open source story of 2017 was unquestionably Canonical's decision to stop developing its Unity desktop and move Ubuntu to the GNOME Shell desktop.…

President and COO leaves gaping exec responsibility hole Object storage supplier Scality has lost its president and COO, Erwan Menard.…

Adjust for THIS loss, says court as it hands out record penalty A firm of loss adjusters and two rogue private investigators it hired have been given record fines for illegal trade in personal information.…

You delete one word and then this happens Exclusive The UK's Financial Conduct Authority has quietly transposed an EU rule without including a crucial bit of detail, thus effectively banning BYOD policies in all financial services organisations across Blighty.…

Let's bring them down from the hill and see what we have El Reg's storage sheepdog has been out on the hill and gathered a flocklet of storage news.…

Don't worry about what people say they're doing on Twitter Hang around Twitter long enough and you'll need a double helping of antidepressants to cope with the obvious truth that you are WAY BEHIND ON THE CONTAINER REVOLUTION. Microservices? Everyone else is doing them. Kubernetes? Most CTOs are naming their kids after the popular project. And you? Well, you're still fiddling with VMs, green screens, and mainframes.…

Zuck says The Social Network™ knows nothing about anything important If the weekend’s excesses suggest that your New Year’s resolutions aren’t going to happen, spare a thought for Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg because he’s given himself 365 days to fix The Social Network™.…

Is that incriminating data in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me? Over the holidays I bought Apple’s newest, shiniest face scanner. For the first fortnight - and periodically since then, that constant lift-and-scan felt weird. As though my smartphone had suddenly become too intimate, too familiar.…

KB4056892 is not your friend if you run an Athlon Microsoft’s fix for the Meltdown and Spectre bugs may be crocking AMD-powered PCs.…

Birds have figured out how to light fires to scare their prey into the open Already replete with sharks, crocodiles, snakes and poisonous jellyfish galore, Australia may also be home to arsonist birds that spread fire so they can feed on animals as they flee.…

'ARTEMIS' spots bad deliberately rotten routes and sets things to rights The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is one of the Internet's basic pieces of plumbing technologies, but it's also so old it was designed before the security needs of a multi-billion-user network were understood.…

This is how Azure just hit 30Gbps of throughput – and how clouds are being built now Microsoft’s switched on new network interface cards packing field-programmable gate arrays and announced that doing so has let it hit 30Gbps of throughput for servers in Azure.…

This is serious: some of the messed-up machines can host VMs and databases If you have a Western Digital My Cloud network attached storage device, it's time to learn how to update its OS because researcher James Bercegay has discovered a dozen models possess a hard-coded backdoor.…

Newly re-merged open router project goes live The OpenWRT and LEDE open router projects have merged and promised a major release in the coming months.…

Software couldn't tell when its own arse was on fire The South Australian State government has announced it will end its contract with Victorian company Ripe Intelligence after an app intended to provide "real-time, relevant and personalised event and warning information" repeatedly failed to do so.…

Googler drops bug bomb in public – but don't panic Cfir Cohen, a security researcher from Google's cloud security team, on Wednesday disclosed a vulnerability in the fTMP of AMD's Platform Security Processor (PSP), which resides on its 64-bit x86 processors and provides administrative functions similar to the Management Engine in Intel chipsets.…

Just in time for Friday night Qualcomm has confirmed its processors have the same security vulnerabilities disclosed this week in Intel, Arm, AMD and IBM CPU cores.…

Customs officials will at least need 'reasonable suspicion' to slurp device contents With device searches at American border crossings reaching an all-time high, the US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) this week tightened its rules for when agents can pull data from phones and computers.…

Class-actions start piling up after El Reg blows lid on CPU security cockup Just days after The Register revealed a serious security hole in its CPU designs, Intel is the target of three different class-action lawsuits in America.…

Turn cafe punters into unwitting coin crafters Thanks to the ridiculous valuation of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, cryptomining code has become a common mechanism for converting authorized and stolen computing cycles into potential cash.…