The Register

Tic, tic, tic... With fitness gadgets fading fast, and the smartwatch category gathering flies, it’s strange to report a blazing success in wearables. Even stranger, it hasn’t come from an established consumer electronics brand or even a “wearable company”.…

Stop worrying about check-boxes and start thinking about how you delete data Not enough companies understand how to properly delete the data they hold – and need to address this if they are to comply with new data protection rules, privacy and security experts have said.…

History tells us none of the big four will dominate forever and that niches matter COMMENT In recent weeks I didn't write stories about Packet.net splashing down in 15 new nations to start an edge compute service, or the plans that Tata Telecoms' shared with me to expand its data centre footprint by targeting partnerships with users of its submarine cables.…

Amazon Turk serfs have their own problems Analysis Convinced that intelligent conversational assistants like Amazon Alexa, Microsoft Cortana, and Apple Siri are neither particularly intelligent nor capable of sophisticated conversation, computer boffins last year began testing a crowd-powered assistant embodied by Amazon Mechanical Turk workers.…

Publisher described murdered woman in revoltingly sexist and hateful terms Domain name retailer and hosting outfit GoDaddy has given a right wing web site that describes itself as “The World's Most Genocidal Republican Website” 24 hours to find a new hosting company.…

After version 57, plugins go to browser heaven The end of legacy Firefox plugins is drawing closer, with Mozilla's Jorge Villalobos saying they'll be disabled in an upcoming nightly build of the browser's 57th edition.…

Plan new networking and compute architectures, plus 'topology-aware storage' Toyota, Intel, Ericsson, with friends, have formed a new “Automotive Edge Computing Consortium” to “develop an ecosystem for connected cars to support emerging services such as intelligent driving, the creation of maps with real-time data and driving assistance based on cloud computing.”…

Privilege escalation is baked in to mobile OSes, if you look for it Oxford researchers reckon they've spotted the next emerging trend in Android advertising (and possibly malware): using common libraries to “collude” between apps with different privilege levels.…

Awaken not the Elder Things, lest they and their shoggoths again battle foul Cthulhu Boffins from the University of Edinburgh's School of GeoSciences have found 91 previously unknown volcanoes beneath the West Antarctic Ice Shelf, a total that suggests it might be the most volcanic region on Earth.…

'Error 418: I'm a teapot' scores 'reserved' status in IANA Status Code Registry The august and serious folk at the IETF have always had a soft spot for their April Fool's jokes, and so do others – so much that a proposal to deprecate a joke has met with successful resistance.…

DBAs: strap on your patching boots. Every DB in your clusters needs work PostgreSQL has released three security patches for versions 9.6.4, 9.5.8, 9.4.13, 9.3.18, and 9.2.22.…

Singaporean group that funded Dell EMC buy among bailout funders as new CEO steps in SoundCloud has avoided collapse, announcing that it has secured “the largest financing round” it's ever secured.…

Git, Mercurial, SVN patched; CVS hasn't got around to it yet Users of the world's most popular software version control systems can be attacked when cloning a repository over SSH.…

Putin's favorite attack dogs APT28 fingered by FireEye Russian hackers accused of ransacking the US Democratic party's servers last year may now be targeting hotels in Europe and the Middle East, it is claimed.…

NASA about to find out, thanks to SpaceX launch to ISS SpaceX and HPE will put a modest little supercomputer into space next week to test how computer systems operate in extreme conditions.…

Carp diem, indeed Scientists have discovered how goldfish and their wild ilk survive months of winter in frozen-over lakes of oxygen-free water. The answer is alcohol – the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems.…

BAH GAWD! BAH GAWD! In the past hour or so, an AI bot crushed a noted professional video games player at Dota 2 in a series of one-on-one showdowns.…

Automatic over-the-air upgrade will knacker front-door gear for at least five days Hardware biz Lockstate has managed to brick hundreds of internet-connected so-called smart locks on people's front doors with a bad firmware update.…

Discriminatory highlights from hell Comment Right off the bat, let's get this straight: on average, ignorant bigots and well-rounded human beings biologically differ in many ways. These differences aren't just socially constructed; they're universal across human cultures.…

Malicious gadgets can snoop on keypresses, other data, through ports, it is claimed Malicious USB gadgets can secretly spy on data flowing in and out of devices plugged into adjacent USB ports, security researchers in Australia have warned.…

So you wanna get into AI? Get ready for a lot of handholding and coddling Despite the vendor-driven hype, machine learning is not a miracle cure for businesses. In fact, it's something of a problem child, one that requires quite a bit of handholding and coddling.…

China's Amazon steps up efforts after stinging criticism Alibaba says it has taken significant steps to speed up how it cracks down on counterfeit goods sold on its online marketplaces.…

Law slowly shutting down Sun cofounder's legal campaign Sun cofounder and billionaire venture capitalist Vinod Khosla has lost another legal battle over his efforts to shut off public access to a California beach – but still won't be required to let people onto it until a second lawsuit concludes.…

I'm sending out an SAS Bobbing around the Sargasso Sea of storage news this week we see cast-off sandals, bits of plastic, seaweed... oh, what's that?! A lifeboat? No, just some Flash Memory Summit jetsam. Let's dive in and see what we have.…

Local photographer took pics of 'ghost ship' deck, then flew off unchallenged An amateur photographer has reportedly landed his £475 drone aboard the largest warship ever built for the Royal Navy – without permission and completely unchallenged.…

Captain rescued but questions remain over passenger's whereabouts One of the world's only privately built submarines has reportedly sunk under mysterious circumstances on the Danish coast.…

#FirstWorldProblems The web browser for power users, Vivaldi, has gained a Reader mode and some accessibility features, but one new feature stands out. The reaction GIF may be one of the wonders of the 21st Century, but what if you don’t want your CPU cycles sucked dry by hilarious and ironic animated images?…

'Counter-terrorism not the only national security threat we face' A former boss at UK domestic spy arm MI5 has cautioned against a crackdown on encrypted messaging apps.…

Say goodbye to 12.2.0.2, and hello to 18 Analysis Big Red has changed its database release cycle, scrapping names that see decimal points and numbers added on for an indeterminate amount of time, instead plumping for annual releases numbered by the year.…

Sergey Neverov accused of posting Petya-A tutorial + ransomware links A middle-aged Ukrainian has been arrested on suspicion of acting as an agent in distributing the infamous NotPetya ransomware.…

Tackling cloud and ransomware takes firm to a happy place Email and data archiver Mimecast reported a year-on-year increase in revenues of 40 per cent for Q1 2018.…

Translated spiel reveals less spiky relationship Instead of being set on going it alone, Toshiba is actually willing to invest in Fab 6 foundry development with Western Digital.…

Murine mouths mangle broadband - outage hits Gnaw-wood... Giant cable-nomming rodents have caused "extensive damage" in South London by chewing through fibre, leaving customers without broadband since last night.…

Margaret Hodge calls for boycott. So where does that leave Whitehall? Analysis Amazon - whose AWS business has been increasingly drumming up biz with the UK government - has once again come under fire for its tax arrangements in the Blighty.…

Marketing trumpets sounding off +Comment High-end array startup Infinidat might start attracting acquisitive interest from other suppliers soon.…

Cisco's WebEx to gain sound-screening powers so you clam up at noisy moments Cisco's updating the old internet anonymity maxim - "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" - by training its WebEx conferencing wares to recognise sounds.…

Gopher user dug themselves a deep, deep hole On-Call Another weekend beckons, which means another edition of On-Call, The Register's weekly reader-contributed story of dirty jobs, done dirt cheap.…

Ancient Moon rocks vital clue in space dynamo study Scientists studying prehistoric lunar rocks have found evidence of a lava-lamp-like dynamo at the heart of our Moon’s metallic core that generated a long-lasting magnetic field.…

Like a boozy fry-up. Or maybe not. Maybe we have too much booze on the brain Some people start their mornings with coffee. Some opt for a classy mimosa. Some just drink straight out the vodka bottle. Well, just for you, a little something something to kickstart your Friday: a quick hype-free roundup of stuff in the world of AI this week.…

Microsoft scales Windows 10 to support four CPUs, 6TB of RAM, ReFS and RDMA Microsoft's reviving Windows Workstations with a new cut of Windows titled “Windows 10 Pro for Workstations”.…

Boffins had to break gene-reading software but were able to remotely exploit a computer Scientists from the University of Washington have created synthetic DNA that produced malware of a sort.…

Open source hypervisor's devs say qoding around legacy features qomplicates quality Open source hypervisor QEMU is contemplating a code cleanup.…

A behind-the-scenes look at the cat and mouse game played by publishers and devs Analysis Netizens may choose to block unwanted content – such as intrusive and misbehaving ads – but some advertising companies do not to accept that choice.…

Benchmark Capital tries to thwart Troubled Travis' Jobs-style return to power Benchmark Capital on Thursday filed a lawsuit against former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick alleging fraud and contract violations.…

But probably not in the way you'd hoped Special report In the last week of January, America's internet is going to get a long-awaited boost. More Americans than ever are going to have access to fast internet as well as a greater choice of providers.…

Nice birthday gift for clever kid who found a way to access web giant's confidential info A teenager in Uruguay has scored big after finding and reporting a bug in Google's App Engine to view confidential internal Google documents.…

ESA tells everyone to calm down and carry on The European Space Agency has confirmed there is no danger of asteroid 2012 TC4 hitting Earth in October, despite what some panicky YouTube videos might tell you.…

US officials' online spaces – a public forum or private haven? More US public officials have been sued for blocking people from their social media pages.…

Nonprofit estimates 25% will break down within 2 years Consumer Reports has a message for its readers: one in four of your shiny Microsoft's Surface laptops and tablets might not outlast their new computer smell.…

Builtin antivirus will make room for rival products Kaspersky Labs is dropping its antitrust complaints against Microsoft in Russia and Europe.…