The Register

Spirited away... A new strain of ransomware is apparently being used for targeted attacks in Japan.…

UK DNA Database Ethics Group's final annual report The UK's national biometrics ethics advisory body has promised to reconsider the government's use of custody images.…

And now the focus turns to version 9 Node.js 8 on Tuesday goes into long-term support, which sounds like an assisted living plan for elders but in fact marks the maturation of the surprisingly popular JavaScript runtime.…

We're holding it wrong! Of course! EuphemismWatch Just it was hard for courtiers to tell the Emperor he wasn't wearing anything, the first iPhone X phondlers won't admit that Face ID will frustrate owners and make them work hard just to unlock the phone without a PIN. The reviewers don't want to spoil the fairytale.…

Digi minister confident of adequacy decision post-Brexit The UK's Snooper's Charter should not be a "significant" obstacle to data protection negotiations with the European Union, the government has said.…

Top brass reshuffled after heir locked up and CEO quits Samsung announced new leadership this week following the resignation of CEO Kwon Oh-hyun, and the jailing of the empire's heir apparent.…

Judge throws out Hussain's appeal, case rumbles on... A judge has thrown out an appeal by Autonomy's former chief financial officer, who had asked that the felony fraud charges relating to his role in the ill-fated multibillion-dollar sale to HP be dismissed.…

Snoozing, doing makeup, playing Candy Crush... Google binned its self-driving cars' "take over now, human!" feature because test drivers kept dozing off behind the wheel instead of watching the road, according to reports.…

According to Stack Overflow, anyway. Disagree? Vote now right here Poll Developers really dislike Perl, and projects associated with Microsoft, at least among those who volunteer their views through Stack Overflow.…

It is coming... It is coming... to London. (Yes, UK) Microsoft's Surface Pro with added LTE goodness is due to land in the UK on 1 December, just in time for enterprise punters to request one from the local Santas residing in their procurement and IT department.…

FoI request reveals researchers pressured to tweak base case Academics at the UK's leading alcohol research centre tweaked their model to help the government introduce more Puritanical booze advice.…

It's day 2 at Reading Bridge House picket line. Make 'em laugh UK staffers at outsourcing giant Capita – deep in the weeds of its "turnaround year" – are entering day two of union protests over proposed changes to their pension plans.…

C'est mauvais, le framework de beaucoup d'argent pour le Redmond A French senator has put down a parliamentary motion demanding an investigation into Microsoft's framework deal with France's defence ministry.…

Join us for our final ideas bash of the year Whether you’re concerned about the effect of fake news and political ads on social media or the growing influence of e-sports on today's youth, you should come and join us next Tuesday for the last Register Lecture of 2017.…

Edge computing is awesome and scary Edge computing is the pendulum swinging away from the idea of big, centralised servers back to distributed systems. It's the idea that instead of centralising all of our workloads in big clouds we bring the computing closer to the devices requesting that compute power.…

Wait! A PCM chip that computes as well as stores?! IBM boffins have unveiled new work in-memory computing: doing processing inside Phase Change Memory with no external CPU.…

Proposal offers proper authentication, verification and over-the-air delivery A trio of ARM engineers have devoted some of their free time to working up an architecture to address the problem of delivering software updates to internet-connected things.…

Ford reveals 'metallic butt' used to test car seats. We're calling it Seat-3-P-O Poll Car-maker Ford has revealed a robot that's taken the job of sitting on your arse.…

Location, location, location ... for testing and research only Geonerds, how would you like to work with raw GNSS data at nanosecond accuracy?…

Want to pay for 50GB of Redmond-powered ad-free email? We decode your options Microsoft has shut down new registrations for the Outlook Premium service, directing customers instead to an Office 365 subscription.…

Misbehaving gas giant's poles light up independently Jupiter’s vivid northern and southern lights flash independently from each other, a discovery that has surprised scientists.…

'JUPITER' is made for video, should see first light in 2020, boast 60 Tbps capacity A consortium including Facebook, Amazon and SoftBank has signed up to build a new submarine cable linking Asia and the United States of America.…

FireEye gives the world GoCrack, a Dockerised hashcat implementation for sysadmins FireEye reckons sysadmins need help enforcing enterprise password rules, so it's released and open-sourced a tool that distributes password testing across multiple GPU-equipped machines.…

unCaptcha is the sound of security crumbling Whatever Google has in mind to replace its reCaptcha had better be ready soon: another research group has found a way to defeat it.…

While Softbank's Sprint goes limp on T-Mobile US merger America's comms regulator has signed off on the $34bn merger deal that will see ISP CenturyLink take over internet backbone Level 3.…

Plus: Folks freak out searching for 'brassiere' on their iPhones Good morning, or afternoon, wherever you are. Here's a roundup of recent AI developments on top of everything else we've reported over the past week or so.…

Browser maker turns to anonymizing network for anti-identification technique Mozilla has incorporated a privacy protection option pioneered by The Tor Project into Firefox's code, but plans to make the feature available only through the browser's nightly builds.…

This Kool-Aid is so tasty The creator and lead developer of Google's news-sucking AMP service is unhappy about being called a liar.…

Sure, that won’t go wrong at all The US Deputy Attorney General has told business leaders that Uncle Sam won't demand mandatory backdoors in encryption – so long as companies can cough up an unencrypted copy of every message, call, photo or other form of communications they handle.…

Virus panic pair agrees to never again offer to 'fix' anyone's PC A husband and wife team accused of scamming people with dodgy tech support calls about bogus malware infections have been barred for life from offering IT support and repairs.…

Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Collusion... allegedly Analysis Where to begin?…

Chocolate Factory's anti-malware protections fail yet again Android apps secretly harboring cryptocurrency-mining code have managed to make their way onto the shelves in the official Google Play Store.…

Remote unauthenticated attack bug gets perfect CVSS score Oracle is urging users of its enterprise identity management system to apply an emergency update to stomp a bug that allows attackers take over the system.…

Partisan publishers hide identity from advertisers – study Publishers hiding their identity from advertisers accounted for 60 per cent of Google's news network ad revenue in a study conducted by a non-partisan ethics watchdog.…

Danish seafarer denies murdering Kim Wall The man charged with the murder of a Swedish journalist in his private submarine has admitted dismembering her body and dumping the parts into the sea – but insists he did not kill her.…

Brit military top brass assures us it has coherent plan to harness Brit boffinry The UK Ministry of Defence has unveiled latest its science and technology strategy by writing a jargon-ridden report full of incomprehensible diagrams – but it contains good news for startups.…

Surveillance hardware purpose-built for deep learning, analytics Seagate has bolted "AI" to its SkyHawk disk drive brand, saying it's better suited for next-generation deep learning and video analytics.…

Pure politics? It won't matter by March 2019 Experts are mystified as to why the European Commission has launched a probe into the UK tax arrangements of multinationals.…

Hardware is called hardware for a reason Analysis In recent years, China's high-tech production miracle and globalisation have made it easy – perhaps too easy – for an outsider or newcomer to dabble in hardware.…

Propose 'brand campaign', tax breaks and, erm, standards The UK lacks effective leadership in digital manufacturing technologies, with a fragmented skills system and poor support for startups in the field, a review has said.…

Encryption? Passwords? Nah, why use those... Detailed security arrangements for London Heathrow airport, including the Queen’s precise route every time she passes through, were found on a USB stick left in a West London street, according to reports.…

Can a dancing hot dog save it? Comment Although Snap Inc. still insists on its home page that it's "a camera company", nobody seems to want its "camera". The core user base of millennials have stayed away from its hardware foray, resulting in an expensive flop.…

No home in Chrome Google is abandoning a next-generation web crypto technology it initially championed.…

Budding firm funded by US defence departments Security startup Cryptonite dropped out of stealth ​late last week with a micro-segmentation-based technology designed to prevent​ ​hacker​ ​reconnaissance​ ​and​ ​lateral​ ​movement.…

It's a storage cocktail and it tastes... well, have a sip Roundup Have we got a bit of storage news for you. Our expert mixologist has poured all the bits and pieces into his cocktail shaker, added some ice, and poured the resulting storage fluid into a tumbler because all our highball glasses were in the dishwasher.…

Q4OS. Oh, gesundheit. Oh, that's the distro, is it... Review The Linux distribution Q4OS sounds like textspeak from a teenager from 1997, but it has potential, and it's not a bad option for Linux newbies.…

Handy guide to best and worst amendments tabled for new law The House of Lords will today start poring over the UK’s Data Protection Bill, line by line, as it enters committee stage.…

Be afraid, very afraid Microsoft stands accused of forcing customers to migrate to cloud services by introducing new licensing terms and raising prices for hosted Windows Server 2016, which could see monthly costs more than doubling.…

Nasty but nice: gaseous comet innards included water ice! On July 3rd, 2016 something unusual happened on Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko: a fountain of dust erupted out of a hole and spewed all sorts of stuff into space.…

What is it with (mostly) single party states and crimps on cryptocurrency? The State Bank of Vietman has issued “Information related to the use of virtual currency” that bans use of the cryptocurrency for payments.…