The Register

Lessons from the NHS's 1.6 million data-records shovel Imagine you’re in charge of technology and data for part of the UK’s chronically cash-squeezed National Health Service. A world-famous technology firm offers you a cool new service, either free or for very little money. All it wants in return is access to the patient data that will make the service work. What are you going to do?…

Ad regulator says kids unlikely to watch Britain's Got Talent Spotify has been cleared of exposing children to sexual and masturbatory innuendos because the Advertising Standards Authority thinks Britain's Got Talent is unlikely to be watched by kids.…

Should you keep your in-house crew? What's your plan... It makes sense to have a solid collection of security expertise within your organisation. And in fact most of us do: security is so core to most of what we do in IT that it’s a standard part of the syllabus for all the courses we do on, say, router configuration or Windows administration.…

HMRC: But we got less than 1,500 complaints about the tech… The UK government has resorted to manually issuing childcare payments, and has paid out £45,000 in compensation, after technical glitches meant parents couldn’t access their accounts on a new childcare benefits website.…

You've got until October 2018 to bail, or pay business rates Code42 Software, operator of the Crashplan cloud backup service, has decided it's had enough of providing its services to consumers.…

Google pulls 500 apps that used the Igexin SDK Mobile developers, listen up: when you pick up that easy-to-use advertising API, make sure it's not snoopware.…

Clients being advised of migration plans from vintage Cumberland Forest bit barn IBM's Australian tentacle is considering the closure of a data centre in 2019, The Register has learned.…

Redmond Hat will run each other's containers in each other's clouds Red Hat and Microsoft have extended their partnership with a containerised cross-cloud cuddle.…

Netvisor gets a crack at the consumer and SME channel in new 54-port switch D-Link has decided that white-box open networking might just be its ticket out of the consumer and small business ghettos, and into the rich enterprise market.…

Refreshed Workstation, Fusion, add network simulators, Win 10 fun, container-friendly APIs VMware's refreshed its Workstation and Fusion desktop hypervisors, which are now in version 14 and 10 respectively.…

Rigged a random number generator and tried to cash in The lottery sysadmin who fooled around with random numbers has a new variable to consider: how much up to 25 years he'll have to serve of his latest sentence.…

Tool to 'spontaneously and ephemerally involve others in your work' hits existential crisis Microsoft has spontaneously and ephemerally killed GigJam, a collaboration tool it billed as empowering “people with a co-working mindset” to “spontaneously and ephemerally involve others in your work.”…

Google still enjoying its Irish sandwich Nice work if you can get it: Microsoft has told Australia's Senate committee into Corporate Tax Avoidance that it's negotiated how much of its hard-earned cash it'll fork over to the Australian Taxation Office.…

Astronomers Without Borders asks you to think of the children On Monday, millions of Americans watched nature's ballet play out across the Sun (excluding those of us in San Francisco, where we were fogged in). Now an appeal is going out for used glasses to be donated to charity.…

Loafing competitors are 'horrible,' says Benioff Chalk up another big quarter for SaaS icon Salesforce.com, as the cloud CRM provider saw revenues jump by 26 per cent year-over-year.…

Just like they always promise to stop having rubbish customer service Faced with an escalating crisis of consumer dissatisfaction over the National Broadband Network rollout, the federal government called an all-hands meeting in Canberra at which everybody promised to do better.…

Attempt to undo arbitration award gets nixed by judge Oracle's effort to avoid paying star sales rep Felicia Wilson an arbitration award of more than $250,000 has been rejected [PDF] by a judge in New York.…

Your data, or we cut you off Sonos, the maker of networked speakers, plans to revise its privacy policy next week, and customers who decline to accept the changes will no longer be able to download future software updates.…

Pipelining, on-die memories exploited in Azure Hot Chips Microsoft today teased chip designers with Brainwave, its cloud-hosted pool of FPGAs designed to perform AI stuff in real time.…

Getting a bit crowded in here, isn't it, Microsoft? Google is making a push for its Chrome OS in the business space with a new Enterprise edition of the cloud-centric operating system.…

The DNS signing keys are changing for the first time The world's internet providers and sysadmins need to make sure they are running up-to-date software or they risk cutting their customers off from the internet in October, DNS overseer ICANN has warned.…

Your plastic pal who's psychotic Robots are increasingly common in the 21st Century, both on the factory floor and in the home, however it appears their security systems are anything but modern and high tech.…

*By 'unlimited' they mean 'significantly limited' US telecom goliath Verizon has replaced its single unlimited phone plan with four new options that all throttle video and bandwidth.…

Credentials stored in the cloud succumb to forensic software ElcomSoft, the Russia-based maker of forensic software, has managed to find a way to access the data stored in Apple's iCloud Keychain, if Apple ID account credentials are available.…

El Reg talks to experts on Kim's capabilities Feature When they said a week is a lifetime in politics, they weren't kidding.…

Anand Jayapalan replaces Darren Thomas Micron has replaced its storage business unit VP, Darren Thomas, with a former SanDisk exec, Anand Jayapalan.…

There is no 'my way or the highway', just my way Hackers have boasted that DJI's latest Spark drone firmware update was bypassed in mere hours – including downtime to enjoy the recent solar eclipse.…

Making raves great again, like, the best you've ever been to Cops in northwestern Germany have seized 5,000 ecstasy tabs fashioned in the image of Donald J Trump's head, indicating the prez continues to inspire people to seek out an alternative reality.…

Funding round lifts startup's profile and firepower End-point backup and data governance starup Druva has just raked in an $80m funding round less than a year after it pulled in $52m.…

Deaths of sailors prompt admirals to halt all warship ops The accident-prone US Navy has suspended all of its warship operations around the world following its third collision at sea this year.…

Data loss prevention bot patrols Amazon's cloud storage solution Analysis Data loss prevention is about to get a whole lot smarter.…

Affecto's 1k staff to merge with CGI if all-cash deal goes through Canadian outsourcer CGI has made an all-cash offer for the Northern European data analytics firm Affecto.…

How's that 'digital transformation' going? For its latest "digital transformation", Fujitsu is trying to sell off its mobile phone business, according to reports.…

Not looking good for cheesed off customers Updated Virgin Media is seemingly suffering a series of outages accross the country, with aggrieved customers using alternate methods to air their ire at the telco.…

New survey polls developers' 'unmet needs' About half of 3,880 participants in the 2016 "State of Agile" industry survey reported using continuous integration. Now new research from Oregon State University and University of Illinois suggests that the platforms still leave a lot to be desired.…

Cloud cost rises, growth pushes staff demand up again Research has found businesses need to hire more server staff – but they're in limited supply.…

Facial and voice recognition – just beware translations In just over a year, Microsoft has launched and expanded a set of APIs called Cognitive Services, which handle everything from face and emotion recognition, to a Language Understanding Intelligence Service (yes, LUIS for short) and a Custom Decision Service.…

This whole 'Esport' thing looks serious – for games developers looking to boost sales Formula 1 has announced it's getting into “e-sports”, the preferred phrase for competitive computer gaming, with a new “Formula 1 Esports Series” that will see a virtual F1 champion crowned later this year.…

Clash of the machine-learning titans In a machine learning tug-of-war, Microsoft may have just barely slipped ahead of IBM for speech transcription accuracy.…

Emerging markets are where it's at Following a rocky year of recalls and other exciting events, Gartner has found that phone-slinger Samsung could be doing quite well.…

Plenty of other teams have some security responsibility, so why not end the overlap? Disbanding your security team may not be an entirely dumb idea, because plenty of other people in your organisation already overlap with their responsibilities, or could usefully do their jobs.…

Listed company's creditors are circling so it's auctioning assets Colorado security startup Root9B is teetering on the edge, with its creditors sending over a foreclosure nastygram after it defaulted last week.…

Was it the EPO? Brexit? Insufficient support? Yes The German federal court has finally revealed why it ordered a halt to the ratification of the Europe-wide Unitary Patent Court.…

'Windows Server Software-Defined' program signs HPE, Lenovo, Fujitsu and Supermicro Microsoft's revealed it's signed up several server vendors to make hyperconverged appliances running Windows Server natively.…

Your Amazon Echo could live a double life as an echo-location device Researchers at the University of Washington have devised a way of conducting surreptitious sonar surveillance using home devices equipped with microphones and speakers.…

Groupize denies report by researchers at Kromtech, but locks down repo anyway Another day, another unsecured AWS storage bucket leaking corporate data, this time from hotel booking service Groupize.…

Gill us now Netcraft 'net watchers have cast a fly over the lake of generic TLDs, and turned up the first .fish domain dedicated to – wait for it – phishing.…

Crowdfunded submersible story somehow gets weirder The story of a Danish inventor and a missing Swedish journalist has taken a bizarre turn, as Peter Madsen now claims he buried Kim Wall at sea.…

100 Mbps? Call it the 60 Mbps customers might actually experience at peak hour The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has fired off its latest salvo in its decades-long argument with the telco industry about internet speed claims in Australia, telling them to advertise typical speeds rather than theoretical maxima.…

The Chocolate Factory's mobile operating system comes with saccharine emoji filling Google on Monday released Android 8.0 Oreo, the latest update to the world's most widely used operating system, as measured by internet usage.…