The Register

But the MoD will happily tell you how many manned jets we're using to do that exact thing The UK's Information Tribunal has rejected an appeal by campaigners trying to find out how many British Reaper drones are being used for warlike missions in the Middle East.…

Gaming star strikes Atari has sued Nestle, accusing it of "blatantly" impinging on its intellectual property by featuring the 1970s video game Breakout in a Kit Kat ad without its permission.…

New CFO too as data protection firm refuses to give in +Comment It's all change at FalconStor, which has a new CEO and CFO just six weeks after the last chief exec was appointed.…

Security researchers pick up angle grinder, drop £2k-plus in B-sides chat BSides Weighing in at 800kg secondhand, freestanding ATMs - a “safe with a computer on top” - are a logistical nightmare to own and research, security boffin Leigh-Anne Galloway warned delegates at the BSides Manchester infosec conference yesterday.…

HMD chiefs explain their cunning comeback plan Interview For over 20 years The Register has covered the rise and fall of Nokia phones. The story took a new turn this week with the arrival of a flagship, the first for three years, from the brand's custodians HMD. We spoke to the top executives behind the venture about their plans.…

Man pulls out replica rifle after frosty treat disappointment An irate McDonald’s drive-thru punter was so pissed that he couldn’t get his Sunday morning ice cream fix due to a broken dispenser that he pulled out a replica AR-15 rifle from his car boot in protest.…

In the land of decline, sustainable growth is king Analysis Like many enterprise tech dinosaurs, Cisco has clutched at new lines of revenue for some time, positioning its security arm as the centrepiece of a long-talked-about reinvention as a software biz.…

Wang wag's Croatian beach art highlighted... again British Airways’ website is displaying a penis carved into a beautiful sandy beach – the same inappropriate erection that was standing over bing.com yesterday.…

And Server 2003. Yep, this is the year 2017 and we're not making this up Freelance IT type? Know about the gubbins of Windows XP, Vista and Server 2003? Don’t care about all that IR35 guff? We’ve got great news – UK.gov wants to hire you.…

What's that, TidalScale? The Big Friendly what? Analysis TidalScale is building a software-defined server product. But how would that work, as it needs to run in a server and you can’t really redefine the server you are running in, can you?…

Former SAP man Vishal Sikka bails but will be interim CEO's boss Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka has resigned, effective immediately, but neither he nor the company's board are happy he's going.…

And had suits savage an utterly innocent sysadmin for his own ignorance Friday m ON-CALL Friday means a few things at El Reg: a new BOFH. A couple of beers. And another instalment of On-Call, our weekly column in which we take reader-contributed tales of being asked to do horrible things for horrible people, scrub them up and hope you click.…

NVIDIA reckons engineering types do, so it's cut a new GPU and software to carve it up NVIDIA's cranked up the virtual workstation caper by giving the world a new GPU that slots into blade servers, plus software to let it run multiple workstation-grade VMs.…

For now the company is just happy with growth for the first time since buying IBM's servers Lenovo has reported flat quarter-on-quarter revenue, but is content to have achieved that as it reflects stabilisation in its data centre and mobile businesses.…

Phablets sent to AT&T customers with batteries from FedEx are at risk Samsung's got another combustible phablets SNAFU on its hands, after the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission recalled the batteries used in its Galaxy Note 4.…

Federal agency addresses the new world of Alexa, smart cameras and IoT A draft of new IT security measures by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has for the first time pulled privacy into its core text as well as expanded its scope to include the internet of things and smart home technology.…

Money laundering and terror finance laws will stretch to cover digi-dollars Australia has decided digital currencies need the same level of regulation enjoyed by other currencies.…

Verizon says basestation dumps increasingly popular US telecoms giant Verizon says police are increasingly asking it to cough up massive dumps of cellphone data rather than individual records.…

Ladies and gentlemen, start your ARM disassemblers Apple's Secure Enclave, an ARM-based coprocessor used to enhance iOS security, became a bit less secure on Thursday with the publication of a firmware decryption key.…

Data demand 'breaks First and Fourth Amendments' Efforts by US prosecutors to identify up to 1.3 million people who accessed an anti-Trump protest website is unconstitutional, a court will hear on Friday.…

Personal info spills from another poorly secured Amazon service A voting machine supplier for dozens of US states left records on 1.8 million Americans in public view for anyone to download – after misconfiguring its AWS-hosted storage.…

Except at quality titles like El Reg, of course, cough John Wanamaker, an American department store merchant who died almost a century ago, is noted for saying: "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half."…

Judge throws out lawsuit seeking to prevent rollout of broadband cables AT&T's legal battle to stop Google rolling out broadband internet in Louisville, Kentucky, has been halted in its tracks.…

Johnson, get a load of this SFW Some of the dozens of users of Bing today spotted a lewd sand carving semi-hidden in the Microsoft search engine's front page splash photo.…

Year-on-year deployment isn’t really a trial, say privacy groups London's Metropolitan Police have been urged to back down on plans to once again use facial recognition software at next weekend's Notting Hill Carnival.…

Say what now, Gartner? Gartner has predicted a backlash against virtual assistants like Siri – but recommends that businesses deploy them anyway.…

Gyroscopic trams, bunkerbeds! Enter the 'dope' world of Dahir Semenov Earlier this week, Mashable, a clickbait site for millennials, showcased a novel urban transport system. It got very excited, calling it "dope" and the "future of transportation".…

Another record revenue quarter ... even as drought eases While we are recovering from the global DRAM shortage, there's still enough of a drought for chip-slingers to rake in record revenues.…

Authority fined £70k after missing URL manipulation A London council has been fined £70,000 after design faults in its TicketViewer app allowed unauthorised access to 119 documents containing sensitive personal information.…

Anti-shrinkage policy could add millions to firm's wage bill Apple may have to pay its employees extra for time it spends rifling through their personal belongings at work, if it loses a long-running lawsuit that is now in front of the Californian Supreme Court.…

Electric Jukebox has a dildo and wants £100m The company behind what was dubbed the "most ridiculous digital music launch in history" is rebranding its product and hoping to raise $100m by selling shares to the public.…

CSO said to have quit to spend more time with family in UK HPE global sales chieftan Peter Ryan has quit the company after just over a year of relentless travel away from his family in the UK.…

Damages calculated on potential earnings Singapore's High Court has awarded S$4m* dollars ($2.9m, £2.25m) to a former insurance agent after a letter of reference lost him a potential new job.…

Info commish hits back at fake GDPR news The UK’s information commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, has apparently become so infuriated with inaccurate claims about incoming data protection rules that she is penning a series of blogposts to “bust the myths”.…

Slight biz uptick, steady results should keep CEO smiling NetApp has managed to go back to what it used to do do reliably: churn out revenue and profit increases as its customer base lapped up new kit.…

Prising IT systems from decades of EU lawmaking Exclusive The Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) is hiring 1,400 "business policy" folk to work out how the department will untangle itself from Europe after Brexit, according to multiple insiders.…

... try to take over your public cloudy worlds (one array at a time) Newly-IPO’d Tintri has made its storage array bigger, better and faster by extending it out to the AWS and IBM clouds, speeding VMotion, upping its scalability limit and predicting future capacity and compute needs.…

Stop running that or we'll say stop again, so help me god An online PC repair shop was yesterday given a small ticking off by gummy watchdog the Advertising Standards Agency over claims used in promos that one in three PCs are blighted by malware on a daily basis.…

We hardly noticed at first, but records revealed plenty about how star-stuff sails solar winds On October 14th, 2014, the Sun decided it was time for a coronal mass ejection, the irregular hiccups that see it belch out astounding quantities of magnetised plasma. And after careful analysis, we've now fingerprinted the plasma's passing using no fewer than ten spacecraft.…

Even limited board reports now scrapped in favor of worthless 'updates' The operator of the .uk top-level domain, Nominet, has become the latest internet registry to vote itself into greater secrecy.…

Security works better when you write your own rules Analysis Carousell, a mobile-friendly classified ads market, has to deal with fraud.…

Contract ignores lack of strategy, growing criticism The UK Home Office has put out to tender a £4.6m ($5.9m) contract for facial recognition software – despite the fact its biometrics strategy and retention systems remain embroiled in controversy.…

It's okay, though, we've got an iPhone app coming soon says CEO Chuck For a couple of years now, Cisco has said its future lies in selling more software, but it's not quite working out as planned.…

Consultant was all too app-y to break law, claim investigators A banking IT expert orchestrated an insider-trading caper that raked in millions of dollars for him and his pals, it was claimed on Wednesday.…

Project Zero's two-year-old dog learns a new trick It's Rowhammer, Jim, but not as we know it: IBM boffins have taken the DRAM-bit-flipping-as-attack-vector trick found by Google and applied it to MLC NAND Flash.…

Teams get extra wiggle room to hit final deadline The X-Prize Foundation has cut some slack for teams vying to be the first to land a robot on the Moon and scoop millions of dollars as a result.…

French satellite photos suggest something man-made floated beyond search zones New analysis of images thought to depict wreckage from missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH 370 suggest the Boeing 777 came down to the north of the area searched during efforts to find the plane.…

Chipzilla in overlapping naming weirdness mess Intel's leaked a little detail about its next-generation desktop chips.…

Fat dividends that investors love to be diluted, fibre backbone upgrade imminent Expect more layoffs at Telstra, happening faster: in response to the changes wrought by the National Broadband Network on its business, Australia's colossal carrier has decided to bring forward its cost-cutting programs by a year.…

Translation: Please don't take away our govt contracts In November 2016 IBM CEO Ginni Rometty wrote to then-president-elect Donald Trump with a list of ways IBM hoped to help the real-estate tycoon Make America Great Again.…