The Register

Can't blame middle managers - they always get the stick What drives organisations to change their ways? What's the match that lights the powder keg of actually doing something new and different in IT? That's the question I usually get from organisations that want their approach to software to be more "agile", who want to go through "digital transformation", and, yes, "do DevOps".…

Boffins pinpoint homes based on people's device movements Anonymized location data won't necessarily preserve your anonymity.…

Fake sites spread fake stories to fuel pump and dump or other foul ends Criminals are exploiting “fake news” for commercial gain, according to new research.…

Convolutional neural networks aren't foolproof nor fully documented, that much is clear Face ID has been a bit of a thorn in Apple’s side for its iPhone X, no thanks to claims the AI-powered login mechanism can be tricked by cheapish masks or relatives of handset owners.…

User's busted PC was on a network, so she demanded the network help desk On-Call Why hello there Friday and hello there, also, this week's instalment of On-Call, The Register's weekly column that recounts readers' tales of tech support terror.…

Epson old-timers go from dot matrix to not matrix Microsoft's latest batch of software updates for Windows has been blamed for a mysterious ailment befalling some poor old Epson dot-matrix printers.…

Breaker, breaker Electric Ducky, we got ourselves a one-driver convoy. And a new Roadster Elon Musk has launched the “Tesla Semi”, complete with a guarantee that it will not break down for one million miles of driving.…

Navigating the hype Sponsored There is no doubt it can be difficult to navigate the various claims made by storage vendors when it comes to performance of their products.…

Naughty you: 'No show rate is at historic highs' for tests and that pollutes Redmond's data Microsoft can't give away enough of its beta exams, so it will start charging for them.…

Back to capex spending, but refunds offered to those who bail on multi-year commitments Microsoft's added reserved instances to Azure, with an out-clause for cloudy quitters.…

'New editing experience' called Gutenberg coming too, but it might hate your plugins WordPress 4.9 has debuted, and this time the world's most popular content management system has given developers plenty to like.…

It's mostly an IoT-centric system integrator now, but may sprout new scale-out arrays Hitachi Vantara, the mash-up of Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), Pentaho and the Lumada IoT assets from the Hitachi Insight Group, is working on new scale-out storage products to support its ambition to become a system integrator for analytical workloads and the myriad data sources that feed them.…

Fresh round of overhauls, and some aren't happy about it US broadband watchdog the FCC signed off on a pile of new rules Thursday – including laws that will dictate how telcos handle robocalls, cut access for poor Americans to subsidized phone service, add controversial changes to TV station ownership rules, and regulations for fiber cable installation.…

Knew we shouldn't have told you about the Stingray A New York judge has told cops that they need to get a warrant before they can use the controversial Stingray phone-tracking device to hunt down suspects.…

Lab suspects Chinese spyware was on home computer Kaspersky Lab, the US government's least favorite computer security outfit, has published its full technical report into claims Russian intelligence used its antivirus tools to steal NSA secrets.…

Algorithms will label innocent people terrorists, DHS warned A group of 54 computer scientists and academic researchers on Thursday asked the US Department of Homeland Security to rethink its plan for employing software algorithms to determine whether immigrants to the country should be admitted or deported.…

Just didn't get round to fixing it – our bad Alt-coin wallet software maker Parity has published a postmortem of the bug that put millions of dollars of people's Ethereum on ice – and has admitted it knew about the flaw for months. It just hadn't got round to fixing it.…

'Advance video content' and years of backups dangled in the cloud The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) has joined the long list of organisations to leak sensitive data from a poorly secured public-facing Amazon Web Services S3 bucket.…

Patch incoming, hardware recall required to fully address underlying problem Analysis Amazon has pushed out an emergency security update to its door-unlocking system called Key – which is used by couriers to let themselves into people's homes to drop off packages inside when folks are out.…

Nothing like unauth'd hijacking, Heartbleed-style bugs to patch ASAP Oracle has published an out-of-band software update to address a handful of security flaws in parts of the PeopleSoft HR software.…

Plus AWS creds, public-facing S3 buckets packed with info Chinese drone maker DJI left the private key for its dot-com's HTTPS certificate exposed on GitHub for up to four years, according to a researcher who gave up with the biz's bug bounty process.…

Analytics biz now a first-party service on Azure Databricks and Microsoft are getting cosy in the cloud, in a move that will give the Spark-wrangling company access to a new set of customers.…

Is the Oracle of Omaha cutting his losses? Legendary investor Warren Buffett appears to be cutting his losses on his IBM investment, slashing his shares by one-third in the last quarter.…

GPDR compliance and deduped cloud backend Backup Exec, Veritas' SME backup product, now sports a subscription-based payment scheme, deduping cloud backends and offering GDPR compliance help.…

MPs kick the ethics question back into touch AEV Bill A new law won't force driverless cars' software developers to explicitly consider the infamous Trolley Problem – but the UK government may later decide to implement something similar.…

Details from decommissioned UK webshop scoured Pawnbroking and secondhand goods outlet Cash Converters has suffered a data breach.…

You've grown so much, you piece of @£$ Terdot, a banking Trojan that has been around since mid-2016, has been re-engineered with updated information and credential thievery as well as social media account monitoring functionality.…

Smacked in Florida, California Tezos, the blockchain startup that raised $232m in July, has been served with at least two US class-action lawsuits for allegedly defrauding fundraisers as well as breaking rules for offering securities.…

Yes, and Azure NFS and HCI also looking good While still well short of its fiscal 2015 revenue glory days, NetApp has said its all-flash array sales are on fire, and expects more of the same.…

Non-disclosure agreement prompts uproar Chinese drone maker DJI faces questions from infosec researchers about its bug bounty programme. Sources have told The Register that a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) they were invited to sign would result in the company "owning their actions".…

Also, we’ve not delayed the spectrum auction. Anyway, Three started it! Chief exec of BT, Gavin Patterson, has admitted the telco is struggling to make a business case for 5G investment, given the huge costs of getting the network off the ground.…

You win some, you lose some – proposals snuffed out at vote Oracle's stockholders have voted against the company's amended executive pay plan, along with a proposal for greater transparency on its gender pay gap.…

They also want to geofence motorways AEV Bill A cyclists' association wants software developers for any "errors" in driverless car software to be "criminally prosecuted".…

IoT is not the same as IT... normal infosec does not pply Michael Dell, chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies, last month announced a $1bn investment in IoT R&D over the next three years.…

Productivity melts, economy dives... actually, neither is true Slackers of Europe, it might be a good time to enjoy a little me-time as techies at the messaging and collaboration app biz attempt to wake the supposed productivity improvement tool from its slumber.…

Commentards didn't hold back and some experts disagreed The Register's recent story about the failure of most UK high street banks to follow web security best practices has provoked a lively debate among security experts.…

Ever heard of 'GDS'? Yup, that was me ¡Bong! Every man must make a reckoning, and now I must make mine. มาลัย (which means 'Garland of Flowers' in Thai), please note the following.…

Criticises European Court of Justice before deadline for comments on looming cases Google's general counsel has signalled the company intends to fight, hard, against broad interpretations of the European Union's right to be forgotten.…

Boffins look on the bright side of detecting basically nothing Physicists have ruled out the existence of axions once considered possible dark matter candidates.…

Chipzilla goes back to the drawing board on expensive math accelerator line Intel has scrapped Knights Hill, an upcoming addition to its high-end many-core Xeon Phi chip family, and will go back to the drawing board for its microarchitecture.…

Uh, er, hey look, VS 2017 fans – there's some AI tools, though! Microsoft and GitHub on Wednesday announced real-time collaboration in their respective code editors, almost as if they'd been collaborating.…

Stopping the powerful changing history, Orwell style At the Internet Archive's headquarters in San Francisco, California, on Wednesday, technologists, educators, archivists, and others fact-oriented folks gathered to discuss how they and the like-minded can save news from the memory hole – a conceit conjured by George Orwell to describe a political mechanism for altering the truth.…

Size does matter... especially when you've got launch deadlines to hit Intel and Micron have expanded their XPoint production fab in Utah, USA, as the clock ticks down to the launch of XPoint DIMMs in the second half of 2018.…

This week in fact Earlier this week, the official Facebook and Twitter accounts of the Russian Ministry of Defense said it had "irrefutable evidence" the US was aiding ISIS in Syria – and revealed four grainy photos apparently backing up its claims.…

Microsoft classified as a telco, so told to cough up. It may gaufre an appeal Skype has failed in its appeal against a 2016 fine in Belgium for failing to help authorities tap calls in a criminal investigation, with the court saying it must comply with the country's telecommunications laws.…

Chips to the rescue Sponsored One of the greatest barriers to broader cloud adoption is security.…

Boffins find smartmobe accelerometers can turn your gait into a biometric A trio of Indian boffins have studied the use of smartphone accelerometers as biometric sensors and concluded they could be a handy way to identify users.…

And this time it's caught up by adding data de-duplication Microsoft's revealed that Storage Spaces Direct will return in the next semi-annual version of Windows Server.…

Sensor in pill, bluetooth patch on arm, app in phone ... and crossed fingers nothing leaks What could possibly go wrong when drug companies embed into a pill, so that after you swallow it connects to a smartphone app and then sends data over the internet?…

Sales down, orders up, hopes pinned on intent-based networking (A.K.A. a dash of AI) Cisco suffered a decline in revenue for Q1 2018, weighed down by ongoing weakness in its switch and router business.…