The Register

26 security fixes for 55 packages. You know what to do! Debian Linux has hit version 9.1.…

Another day, another botched government contract In a slowly-unfolding scandal in Sweden, it's emerged that the country's transport agency bungled an outsourcing deal with IBM, putting both individuals and national security at risk.…

County had hoped to protect land from gamer stampede Milwaukee County's rules to keep its parks from being overrun by augmented reality gamers have been suspended by a judge over concerns that they violate the First Amendment.…

Get this retired surveillance van for all your totally legitimate above-board activities A rather unusual auction on eBay could appeal to aspiring spies and X‑Files fantasists alike.…

Feds made Naples man an offer he can't refuse A scammer who imported fake iPods, iPads, iPhones, and Sony hardware worth $15m into America was today sent down for 37 months.…

Chipzilla takes number, joins queue to kick Snapdragon biz in the ball arrays Intel has backed Apple in the iGiant's almighty scrap with Qualcomm – which is trying to ban sales of iPhones and iPads in America.…

Google's machine-learning gurus see promise in simulated creativity Google's AI boutique, DeepMind, known for dispelling human delusions of intellectual superiority by soundly beating the world's top Go players with computer code, has found that instilling its software agents with something like imagination helps them learn better.…

That's the bad news. The good news is they've banned Bieber, too Analysis A disturbing trend toward ever-greater censorship in China has seemingly crossed a line with the banning and blocking... well, fun, basically.…

At this point does anyone still care? After months of hype and missed deadlines, it seems as though Andy Rubin's new smartphone might actually make it onto the market.…

Consulting firm fibbed about hirings to import more workers The owner of a Silicon Valley tech consulting biz has pled guilty to making up job offers in order to obtain US H-1B visas for overseas workers.…

You know what they say: Money makes the world go round Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple are finding the Trump Administration a very expensive prospect, at least according to their newly released lobbying figures.…

But Muuuuuum... A mudslide of storage news has mired Vulture Central and we're up to our waists in it. Alas, this seems to be becoming a weekly occurrence. We waded through it, sorted it out, tidied it up, and mopped the floors.…

Recommend amendments on privacy, tracking and encryption The European Commission's proposed ePrivacy law needs significant amendments, particularly on location tracking and keeping people's communications confidential, according to an in-depth study.…

Nytro new PC disk replacement line of SSDs Seagate has a new line of Nytro consumer SSDs coming using 3-bits/cell flash.…

Psychology of ransomware threats unpicked Ransomware crooks have become skilled psychological manipulators in their attempts to fleece victims of file-encrypting malware.…

Artificial Intelligence? How the future was back in the '80s Among the stupider things I said in the 1980s was a comment about Artificial Intelligence, including neural nets - or perceptrons as we called them back then - saying we needed "maybe a processor that worked at a hundred megahertz and literally gigabytes of storage".…

World+dog: Oh no you haven't! The world's best business self-publicist since Richard Branson reckons he has been given a "verbal contract" to build an unrealistic high-speed tube train system across America.…

And India still a mighty struggle Vodafone's UK reputation is improving thanks to network improvements, the company said, pointing to a higher net promoter score as it revealed its results today.…

'Please stop leaking info to The Reg,' says UK boss Exclusive Less than four months after DXC Technologies was created and the Frankenfirm is already embarking on a second round of jobs cuts, with hundreds of frontline support techies earmarked for the chop.…

Investors shove another $30m into Bristolian startup's mitts Bristolian AI chip startup Graphcore has had a fast B-round 12 months after its $32m A-round funding was first revealed.…

The cringe is strong with this one Do you need a "smart" wallet with a built in front-facing camera and GPS? Of course you don't. Not even with a built-in Wi-Fi hotspot? Well, enough people do to make a success of an Indiegogo project promising just that.…

Promises firmware fix for superhub 3/Intel's Puma 6 'shortly' Latency issues with Intel's Puma 6, used in gigabit broadband modems, have yet to be resolved for Virgin Media customers using the company's superhub 3.…

Too lazy to plug GPS co-ords into satnav? Fear not, gypsythief has saved you A forward-thinking Reg reader has put the entirety of our Geeks’ Guide series onto a Google Map, for your navigational and geographically organised reading pleasure.…

Let's assume you've already heard of 'clickbait headline' Something for the Weekend, Sir? I'll never forget the day I found my children looking at Spam for the first time. My son was particularly perplexed, asking: "Is that what I think it is?"…

Waterfalling for the, er, 'boring' stuff Comment Hey, psst. Come over here, I have a secret to tell you. My fellow DevOps hoodwinkers would cement-shoe me for saying so, but you don't always need to do the DevOps. In fact, in many cases, it's likely a waste of effort. Let's start walking this way, briskly, now – I think I see some pink and chromatic blue fade-tipped Thought Lords and Ladies coming down the hallway towards us. They look like they're ready to do a blameful pre-mortem.…

The Devil is in the enhanced data model The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is now less than a year away, coming into effect in May 2018, and any legal or compliance department worth its salary should already have been making waves about what it means for your organisation. As a technology pro, you know that these waves will lap up against the side of your boat. You're probably going to have to recode something somewhere. The question is what, why, and how bad is it going to be?…

Reg reader was shouted at for a problem the customer created, but won his respect and apologies ON-CALL Hey, hey, it's Friday! Which means frolicsome weekend fun is just a day away … if you can survive work and this week's instalment of On-Call, The Register's weekly column in which we recount readers stories of jobs gone weird.…

AKA how to watermark 3D printed stuff with air bubbles To mark and track 3D printed objects, boffins propose injecting them with air.…

Just learn them all and stop worrying about the popularity contest Among developers, Python is the most popular programming language, followed by C, Java, C++, and JavaScript; among employers, Java is the most sought after, followed by C, Python, C++, and JavaScript.…

When transfers go really, really wrong, allegedly A home break-in that resulted in two men being shot – one of whom was later charged with burglary, robbery and kidnapping – was the result of a domain name dispute, cops have said.…

Go compare the original opt-out request, firm told Price-comparison darling Moneysupermarket.com has been fined £80,000 for sending 7.1 million emails to customers who had opted out of receiving direct marketing emails.…

Is that a DIMM in your pocket or have you been at this banned bean again? How's this for a stiff one to start the day? We now go live to America, where watchdogs have recalled a batch of coffee for containing an active ingredient very similar to Viagra.…

Windows 10 enterprise licences to gain virtualization rights, plus roaming to personal devices Microsoft's dispensed with a licensing oddity that saw it prohibit hosted virtual desktops running on multi-tenanted hardware.…

Up to 32,000 nodes without routers in the middle and battery life measured in years The Bluetooth Special Interest Group has released the spec for Bluetooth Mesh, a many-to-many extension of the technology.…

SaaS-y business process simplifier adds security chat rooms, cloud management and more to new release ServiceNow's Jakarta release went live on Thursday, bringing with it plenty of new toys for IT departments and hints of artificially intelligent things to come.…

Paid -17% tax rate for Q4 despite making $72m every day In its final quarter of its fiscal 2017, Microsoft more than doubled its profits, saw massive cloud growth, and managed to get a rebate from US taxpayers at the same time.…

Like trying to get blood out of a stone Updated America's broadband watchdog, the FCC, has declined to share any more details on the cyber-assault that apparently downed its website shortly after it announced its intent to kill net neutrality.…

Fscking nerds, Secretary John Kelly sighs Flying into America? Don't worry about that crackdown on laptops and similar gear in your carry-on luggage. It's no longer happening. No, instead, the US has something else up its sleeve.…

Feds track owner of dark-web market, thanks to abject idiocy The owner of dark-web marketplace AlphaBay was tracked down by Feds because he was stupid enough to include his real Hotmail address in the CMS used to run the site.…

...or the Feds will get you ♪ Analysis The alleged owner of dark-web marketplace AlphaBay was tracked down by FBI because he was stupid enough to include his real Hotmail address in the content management system used to run the site.…

Behold, the neural network gizmo Chipzilla will quietly kill in two years, like its wearables Intel, having accepted the inevitable, has dropped out of the wearables and fitness band game, and canned the teams working on that strap-on tech.…

'Unable to find a sustainable model' complains crashed programming crash course The Iron Yard, a four-year-old coding bootcamp based in South Carolina, USA, said on Thursday that it is shutting its doors.…

♪ You shall have a phishy on a little dishy when the hack comes in Foreign students looking to experience the stochastic joys of a year at Newcastle University in England are being warned that phishers are after their cash – using an unusually well-crafted attack.…

We're assuming Chinese giant will use ARM in ML processors. It probably will, right? Chinese systems colossus Huawei claims it is developing chips optimized for artificial-intelligence tasks.…

Court orders only prolong bid process, and winter is coming Toshiba regained a right to lock WDC (SanDisk) employees from their joint-venture fab in Yokkaichi, Japan, reversing WDC's court-obtained Temporary Restraining Order, which was won earlier this month.…

VBlock-like converged systems Building servers, switches and storage are a good racket for ODM Supermicro but building Vblock-like rack scale systems is an even better one.…

Tor won't shield you, warn Feds Two of the largest dark net marketplaces - AlphaBay and Hansa - have been shut down following an international police operation.…

Boost to 2017 cloud guidance as revenue rises 29% SAP has reported revenues of €5.8bn in the quarter ending June 30, up 10 per cent on the previous year’s figure.…

Biometrics, certificates combo to shore up security TSB has announced plans to roll out iris-scanning technology for its mobile banking app from September.…