The Register

Schrems 1 - 1 Facebook Ireland in latest legal opinion Austrian privacy activist Max Schrems' bid to bring a class-action lawsuit against Facebook has been dealt a blow by the advocate general advising the European Court of Justice.…

Which? found this year's hot playthings lack basic security Consumer advice outfit Which? has today published a report detailing how easy it is to hack some of the most popular "connected toys" on the market and has called on retailers to stop selling those with "proven security issues".…

Not known if electric car's autopilot was in use An 80-year-old man has died in County Durham after being struck by a Tesla Model S.…

Builder's merchant tells punters their privates might be out in the cold Builders merchant Jewson has confirmed in writing to customers that their privates could have been exposed in a cyber break-in that occurred late this summer.…

Food could be left rotting in trucks at the border MPs have today warned of the "catastrophic" scenario of HMRC failing to have a back-up system in place if its Customs Declaration Service (CDS) programme is not ready in time for Brexit.…

Industrial chic 48-Hour Test The oddly named "Motion" – not an odd word, just an odd choice – is BlackBerry Mobile's second phone as a new venture, a quasi-startup housed within Chinese giant TCL. It's a hefty slab of durable, full-touch, midrange metal modelled after a Scandinavian industrial workshop.…

Facial recognition isn't the most reliable authentication right now Apple's iPhone X is one of several technologies bringing facial biometrics into the mainstream. It seems to have everything bar a heat scanner; the TrueDepth camera projects an impressive-sounding 30,000 infrared dots on to your phiz, scanning every blackhead in minute 3D detail.…

If you’re looking for power, you probably haven’t got any Reg Lectures Reg readers were introduced to a who's who of digital power players last week, from Kosovo’s king of fake news, and the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs planning floating startup countries, to, of course, grumpy cat.…

Money spent, money invested and money to be made Business – it's all about making bigger pies, either by buying in pie and adding it to your own, building a new pie-making plant, or supplying your filling as part of somebody else's pie. Which brings us to Barracuda, Toshiba and WANdiso plus a few short news bites.…

'Myca' has staff eating cognitive dog food, which may taste better than prevailing bitterness IBM staff are being asked to eat the company's dogfood in the form of an AI-infused career advice chatbot named “Myca”.…

ICOs meet advertising in the end-game for the gig economy Cryptocurrencies open the door to a world where everyone has their price.…

You didn't miss a new standard: CMF is 'colour, materials and finish' and PC-makers use it to make us fashion victims HP Inc says it has flipped its relationship with the PC supply chain, and made colour, materials and finish as important to PCs as CPUs, screen sizes and disk capacities.…

Bezos' cut price bit barns sell to comply with local laws Amazon Web Services has sold some of its infrastructure in China.…

Less than a quarter of world has freeish internet communication While America explores quite how much its election was interfered with by outsiders, the news isn't good for the rest of us, according to independent watchdog Freedom House.…

Assange .org tried to help coordinate Trump's election campaign Julian Assange's WikiLeaks – that bastion of fiercely independent journalism – privately urged the Trump campaign to not concede the 2016 presidential election, to contest the result as rigged, and asked for one of Donald's tax returns so as to appear impartial and nothing whatsoever to do with Russia's meddling in the White House race.…

This could work: Gandalf, Aragorn and Sauron all get busy between The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring Amazon's television limb has announced it will make multiple series based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s the Lord of The Rings.…

RHEL now ready for power-efficient server-grade chips Red Hat Enterprise Linux for ARM reached general availability Monday, underscoring the growing competition confronted by Intel's x86-64 platform in the data center.…

When supermassive black holes collide, we'll feel it The most violent gravitational waves in the universe from supermassive black hole prangs will be detected to within ten years, according to research published on Monday.…

Duopoly guys do duopoly thing US telco giants AT&T and Verizon are joining forces to install cellphone towers throughout America.…

New Tesla GPU sends single precision performance past 62 TFLOPS Dell EMC has accelerated its workhorse super/high-performance computing C4130 server with newer CPUs and GPUs.…

Once again, a rich powerful entity forgets that no means no Broadcomm says it will continue its efforts to acquire rival chip designer Qualcomm despite a unanimous rejection of its $103bn buyout offer.…

Once again, a rich powerful entity forgets that no means no Broadcomm says it will continue its efforts to acquire rival chip designer Qualcomm despite a unanimous rejection of its $103bn buyout offer.…

'Someone has to stand up to these tech giants' declares VC Thiel-backed Hawley Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley on Monday said his office is investigating Google's business practices, adding fuel to the long smouldering antitrust fire that the Chocolate factory has been unable to extinguish.…

l'd like to take his... his Face ID... off Video Apple's facial-recognition login system in its rather expensive iPhone X can be, it is claimed, fooled by a 3D printed mask, a couple of photos, and a blob of silicone.…

Antitrust body tries to keep up with business in the digital age The Competition and Markets Authority is to assemble a dedicated team to handle the use of algorithms, artificial intelligence and big data in business.…

Look at the Danish, chides biz body Low take-up of readily available tech is fuelling Blighty's "deep-seated productivity problems", the club for supposed captains of industry the CBI has said.…

How many devices? Wow, tricky question! Hard to say... Police forces have been urged to keep better records on how much data they slurp from the hundreds of thousands of digital devices they seize, and how it is used.…

And ex-CEO Kalanick will be praying it goes through Cash-flinging Japanese tech firm Softbank will sink up to ten billion dollars into Uber, following a vote of approval by the taxi app's board.…

Biggest ever tech deal held up Qualcomm's board has unanimously rejected Broadcom's $103bn buyout proposal, slamming its rival's bid as having "dramatically undervalued" the multi-billion-dollar chipmaker.…

What did ORM ever do to you that you just don't care anymore? Developers are done with Microsoft's Silverlight and Apache Flex, but they've been entranced by Android Studio, the Swift programming language, and Angular, a JavaScript framework.…

Good news for Canadian HPC models A Canadian supercomputer centre using a fast access parallel file system has stuffed an Excelero burst buffer between this storage and the compute nodes.…

Tech distie veteran Graeme Watt set for April Fool's Day start Ever wondered how much the CEO at a big box shifting reseller gets paid? Wonder no more, for Softcat has revealed its new head honcho Graeme Watt will be on a cool £450,000 yearly base salary.…

OpenStack to power first version of scalable clouds, Azure and VMware to follow Rackspace says it will be teaming up with HPE to build a private cloud service that bills customers based on usage.…

Pie love thee, Lord Jesus Nothing quite says Christmas like greasy, calorific overindulgence, and this year budget sausage roll shop Greggs is ready to get you in the mood with its "treat-filled" limited-edition advent calendar.…

You keep using that word, dox. It means more than you think it means... Amazon's audio surveillance personal assistant device, Alexa, has acquired an external battery pack called Dox.…

Scottish vessel gets a refit by team that restored Cutty Sark A Playmobil pirate ship has been launched off the west coast of Africa after stowing away on a full-size Norwegian vessel.…

GraphCore blimey AI chip startup Graphcore has announced today a $50m deal with venture capital firm Sequoia Capital.…

It's all about AR... and iPhone has the X factor This month's release by Apple of the iPhone X with FaceID begins the first wave of consumer products designed from the ground up for continuous awareness of space, place and face - crowning a half a century of research in augmented reality destined to fuse our rising sea of data onto the real world.…

Offering cloud-to-cloud backup and data intelligence +Comment Druva has nabbed a new Druva Cloud Platform (DCP) service gig for protecting, governing and looking into data in Amazon Web Services' Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Simple Storage Service (S3), Elastic Block Store (EBS), and the Relational Database Service (RDS).…

Never go full Windows Munich city council's administrative and personnel committee has decided to move any remaining Linux systems to Windows 10 in 2020.…

Chair says he needs to kill copper network, maybe build 5G backhaul too Openreach chair Mike McTighe says the carrier has concluded its consultation on how to deliver fibre-to-the-premises connections across Britain by the year 2025 and will deliver its plan to do so “before Christmas”.…

Scale-out on-premises filer can burst processing to Amazon Scale-out file start up Qumulo has revealed all-flash filer nodes.…

It's an exercise in learning to cluster, and could soon scale to 10,000 nodes The Los Alamos National Laboratory will this week reveal its latest "High-performance computer" - a cluster of 750 Raspberry Pis.…

Companion app recorded audio you while you - ahem - played, but it never left your phone Sex-toy maker Lovsense has told its customers to stop moaning about one of its products, which recorded audio of users as they – ahem – played, and stored it on their Android phones.…

Also does MIPS, PowerPC, Sparc, and AARCH64 Hacking ARM processors just became a little easier after a researcher who operates under the name Azeria Labs put together virtual machines that emulate common hardware.…

'Dream Chaser' is signed up for ISS re-supply six missions Sierra Nevada Corporation's “Dream Chaser” automated spaceplane has successfully flown and landed.…

Like Uber but for leaking personal data: a million customer records left on unsecured Hadoop Boston-based ride-hailing hopeful Fasten has coughed to a million-customer data breach that happened because someone left a database lying around unsecured.…

Hardened Android vendor found third parties eating its lunch The folk in charge of the hardened Android distribution CopperheadOS have run into problems with licence violations. Over the weekend, they temporarily disabled over-the-air updates for Nexus devices, and pulled some downloads from their website.…

Which is nice as it's the next long-term release and gets Linux into the GPU game Linus Torvalds has given the world version 4.14 of the Linux Kernel.…

It's your weekly security news bytes Roundup Phew, we made it to the weekend. Let's take a look at everything that went down in IT security beyond what we've already covered this week.…