The Register

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.…

Hey, hey, It's cool, Matt, 'they're Nazis' is reason enough Cloudflare has explained why it made a rare exception to its strident free-speech policy in its decision to cut ties with white supremacist cesspit Daily Stormer.…

Blank audio a handy workaround to in-car annoyance A song that consists entirely of ten minutes of silence has cracked the top 50 on Apple's iTunes charts.…

IT crippled so badly firm relied on WhatsApp The world's largest container shipping biz has revealed the losses it suffered after getting hit by the NotPetya ransomware outbreak, and the results aren't pretty.…

Don't worry, Donald – Dell-EMC-VMware-RSA still has your back Facing mass defections from CEOs repulsed by President Donald Trump's weak handling of fascists marching in America's streets, the White House has disbanded its manufacturing council.…

Potential math challenge solution greeted with skepticism Norbert Blum, a computer science professor at the University of Bonn, has proposed a solution to an unsolved math problem that could win him $1m, not to mention professional accolades, if his approach withstands scrutiny.…

Fox, meet henhouse An ex-Secret Service agent who stole Bitcoins from the Silk Road dark web drugs bazaar he was supposed to be investigating has admitted stealing even more sacks of the digital currency.…

Hopes rest on stock, OZO Audio Hands On To understand the appeal of the first "Nokia flagship" in three years, the Nokia 8, think of what Google was doing with the Nexus line until it caught "Pixelitis"*. Stock Android, monthly updates, decent imaging, and competitively priced. And really no other frills or gimmicks.…

Programming language keeps getting fatter amid awkward version 3 split Analysis The PyBay 2017 conference, held in San Francisco over the weekend, began with a keynote about concurrency.…

Is that 2TB in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me? Samsung has introduced a 2TB T5 portable SSD you can stick in your shirt pocket.…

Charlottesville events force biz to defend acceptable use policy PayPal has vowed to pull its online payment services from sites linked to hate, violence and intolerance in wake of the weekend's tragic events in Charlottesville, Virginia.…

Canonical picks up after Apple – 17 years later Canonical is shifting around the trash can icon on the upcoming Ubuntu 17.10 release, which might give some a sense of déjà vu.…

Watchdog admits it's a legal minefield Comment The UK's advertising watchdog says that generic lifestyle campaigns urging people to improve their health by vaping instead of smoking may fall foul of EU law.…

GoT suspects cuffed Four arrests connected with the leak of an unaired Game of Thrones episode have been made in India.…

Tear down the wall, Tosh, says Cali Court Western Digital Corp has notched up another win in its attempt to force Toshiba to talk turkey about selling its Memory Business to WD, or a bid group with its JV partner in it.…

How are we supposed to enjoy our holiday without streaming? EE customers not on the firm's top-end data tariff have complained they are receiving sloth-like speeds of 2Mbps when using data abroad.…

Oracle-chaser expected to go public later this this year NoSQL business MongoDB has filed confidentially for IPO, according to reports.…

The plaintiffs must be buzzing The case against sex toy maker We-Vibe, which agreed to pay out $3.75m for tracking owners' use, has finally been put to bed, with a judge yesterday signing off the settlement.…

65,000 tonnes and 4.5 acres of British sovereign territory – but is she worth it? Pics Britain’s newest warship, its biggest warship of all time, HMS Queen Elizabeth, entered Portsmouth Harbour for the first time this morning.…

Unidentified hackers attempt to bust open email accounts Hackers are trying to break into Scottish Parliament email accounts weeks after similar campaigns against Westminster.…

Wannacry is just the beginning

We think it probably doesn't involve listening to Sonic Youth Sphere 3D is "reviewing strategic alternatives", a sign that it’s open to a sale or being split up.…

Machine Learning meets human response Britons are getting old: baby boomers combined with a low 1970s birth rate saw the proportion of our population 65 or older increase between 1975 and 2015 from 14.1 to 17.8 per cent. That number’s expected to hit a quarter of the population by 2045, says the Office for National Statistics.…

Yeah, we used a variation of the headline before. And what? Comedy domain and hosting biz 123 Reg will hike its prices 20 per cent later this year.…

Yet 'alternative' UK financial service has complied with law Customers of UK financial services firm FFrees said they were unaware of a breach that took place there four months ago until a security researcher got in touch with them.…

Crashes, data leaks and foul corruption also fixed Xen admins, get busy: the open source hypervisor's issued fixes for bugs that range from data corruption and leakage up to privilege escalation.…

Now computers can sense anger from more than furious button mashing Computer eggheads from Italy's University of Bari have developed what they claim is "the first open-source toolkit for emotion recognition from text."…

'Over-integration' saw x86 business fail to launch In Q3 2014m, the last period before offloading its x86 server business to Lenovo, IBM had server revenue of US$2.33bn, across x86 and its more exotic architectures. And in Q1 2017 IBM still had server revenue of $831.5m. Lenovo hauled in $731.5 which, once we do the math of IBM's old revenue minus Lenovo's current cash count, is a difference of about 750m.…

All you need is a 3D printer, ultrasonic transducers, an Arduino, patience... Engineers at the University of Bristol in the UK have published a rough guide to building a simple levitation chamber that uses sound waves to suspend objects.…

Zinc-air batteries are hard to charge: boffins think new catalysts can fix that Sydney University boffins reckon they've got a handle on how to stop batteries catching fire: quit using lithium ions.…

CPU-wrangler found fame on EC2, becomes Azure business Cycle Computing, a twelve-year-old company which has carved out a niche spinning up big-iron-like CPU collections on public clouds, has been acquired for an undisclosed sum by Microsoft.…

Club Lust bathroom shootup in, you guessed it, Florida A Florida man has been sent to prison for six years and five months after he shot up a strip club toilet while taking a selfie.…

ZFS On Linux adds the proper crypto Google wants before considering Btfrs for Android Red Hat has banished the Btrfs, the Oracle-created file system intended to help harden Linux's storage capabilities.…

Now you can replicate backups to Barracuda's actually-Amazonian cloud Barracuda's backup appliances can now replicate data to Amazon’s S3 cloud silos.…

Unpatched browser, plug-in bugs targeted by and with 'Disdain' kit WebEx on Firefox is among the targets of a new exploit kit that's started circulating on Russian nastyware exchanges.…

'Operator' to wrangle on-prem cloud, with paid course coming soon, natch Microsoft reckons its forthcoming Azure Stack on-premises cloud needs a special breed of sysadmin to keep it humming.…

Do you use this suite? If yes: A July 18 update screwed over your security Researchers at Kaspersky Lab have found a well-hidden backdoor in NetSang's server management software.…

Plus: 10nm+ 9th-gen Core family codenamed Ice Lake Intel says it is still on track to meet its 2020 workplace diversity targets even as the pace of its efforts to include women and underrepresented minorities slowed.…

'OzSTAR' to speed search for gravitational waves using LIGO data Australia's Swinburne University has signed up for a new supercomputer, to help spearhead efforts to detect gravitational waves.…

Human cell study AMA on Reddit all cleaned up Money can't buy you love, but it can remove criticism, at least in the hallowed world of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.…

Court docs give insight into execs' relationship Analysis Hundreds of unsealed text messages between former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick and self-driving engineer Anthony Levandowski have revealed an intriguing insight into the relationship between the two – and raised more questions about whether they conspired against Levandowski's former employer.…

And it's a light bulb from Ikea Comment It's been three years since we, here at El Reg, first started taking the introduction of a new generation of "smart home" devices seriously – and that was mostly focusing on the security implications.…