The Register

Are you getting that syncing feeling? DropBox has reportedly filed for an IPO, giving it fresh capital to fund a significant expansion.…

Global sales fall for 13th straight quarter America’s PC market sneezed in Q4 calendar and the rest of the world caught a cold: global sales declined in the final three months of last year, stats from Gartner indicated – although rival IDC did not concur.…

Austrian lawmakers bump up row over criminal content The European Court of Justice has been asked to decide whether Facebook should actively search for hate speech posted by users.…

Unwieldy projects AND leaving the EU? Don't make us laugh The UK government's spending watchdog has warned HMRC is biting off more than it can chew by undergoing major transformational projects while simultaneously coping with the fallout of Brexit.…

Power up your brain with our 2018 lectures If you’re worried you still haven’t gotten your head around 2017, never mind the changes that 2018 will bring, don’t worry: our next tranche of Register Lectures will give you the required brain charge. Or at least give you the opportunity to enjoy some talk, beer and chat with your fellow Reg readers.…

General assumption is yes. But five suppliers say no Analysis Is the performance sapping spectre of the X86 Spectre/Meltdown bug fixes hanging over SAN storage arrays? The general assumption is "yes" but five suppliers say not.…

General assumption is yes. But five suppliers say no Analysis Is the performance sapping spectre of the X86 Spectre/Meltdown bug fixes hanging over SAN storage arrays? The general assumption is "yes" but five suppliers say not.…

Some people will believe anything Something for the Weekend, Sir? Before I take off my Sonic The Hedgehog socks, I want to be sure there is mutual consent. I don't mind being extradited to Sweden but there's no way I want to spend the next five years conducting my daily ablutions under a cold dripping tap in the faux-marble tiled toilet in the Ecuadorian embassy.…

What Bernard Lovell did before Jodrell Bank Geek's Guide to Britain When you first see the view from Croome's church, it looks like an English utopia. The landscape, designed by Lancelot "Capability" Brown during the 1750s, features a lake pretending to be river, winding lazily through fields dotted by scenic trees. To the left is Croome Court, a grand Palladian country house built over the red bricks of an earlier one. The Malvern Hills rise in the distance.…

We seem to be far less religious these days – what happened? 2018 has barely begun, and it already feels like we'll be nibbling techwar milquetoast all year long. If 2018 ends up being at all like 2017, that is.…

Not so fast, please. Ask polar explorers and mountaineers how hard it is to get a drink Mars boffins have spotted lots of almost-pure water ice on Mars.…

Punctuation-averse devs, you're coding it wrong In what non-technical people might take as an attempt to outdo the absurdity of the tabs vs. spaces debate that continues to divide programmers, the TC39 technical group that advises the development of ECMAScript – the specification from which JavaScript is implemented – has proposed telling web developers to terminate statements and declarations with semicolons.…

Four machines on the slate, at almost-exascale and beyond, to nourish local industry The European Commission’s decided to throw €486 million at high performance computers.…

Four machines on the slate, at almost-exascale and beyond, to nourish local industry The European Commission’s decided to throw €486 million at high performance computers.…

X-ray satnav demo'd for future spacecraft Pics After years of research and testing, NASA has demonstrated spacecraft positioning equipment that relies on measuring X-ray bursts. The hardware will help future spacefarers navigate the galaxy and beyond.…

Not even Linux could save the day for odd educational outpost On-Call Welcome back to On-Call, The Register’s weekly tale of – ahem – challenging support jobs that readers have encountered around the world.…

PowerShell Core 6.0 arrives for your CLI-wielding pleasure Microsoft has given the world new versions of PowerShell that bring the popular automation and scripting tool to MacOS and Linux.…

PowerShell Core 6.0 arrives for your CLI-wielding pleasure Microsoft’s given the world new versions of PowerShell that bring the popular automation and scripting tool to MacOS and Linux.…

Customers say PCs and servers reboot a lot after fixes. Meanwhile, AMD admits to Spectre problems Intel has warned that the fix for its Meltdown and Spectre woes might have made PCs and servers less stable.…

It didn’t work, but he got a nice shirt for becoming a citizen Ecuador granted citizenship to Julian Assange and tried to register him as a diplomat in order to secure his release from the nation’s London embassy.…

Why can't we have this in more places? Oh, right, lobbyists A study in the US has found that, where they're still allowed, municipally-owned broadband networks are likely to deliver customers a better value than what the cable giants offer.…

Sorry, make that, exiting IT boss The outgoing head of the Defense Information Systems Agency, which handles computer security for the US Department of Defense, has warned a massive cyber-attack is "looming" at the American military's door.…

Open sesame! Beta build quietly logged mystery activity to Alibaba-hosted cloud OnePlus has admitted that the clipboard app in a beta build of its Android OS was beaming back mystery data to a cloud service in China.…

If you sign up to be a tester Microsoft has bunged end-to-end encrypted communications into beta versions of Skype using the open-source Signal protocol.…

Early contender emerges for 'least surprising story of 2018' Uber is once again standing accused of shady behavior, this time allegedly developing mechanisms to rapidly shield documents and other files from the eyes of police.…

Google-owned biz cancels Logan's run YouTube has revealed where decency standards lie in the internet era: mocking suicide victims while standing next to a corpse.…

Postmortem sheds light on brief dependency hell On the defensive after a malware kerfuffle last year, code registry npm shot first before asking questions over the weekend – and is now apologizing for the errant execution.…

CEO, CFO under fire as lawsuits mount up An Intel stockholder filed a class-action lawsuit yesterday accusing the chipmaker of artificially inflating its stock prices by omitting to tell anyone about the Spectre and Meltdown flaws in its products.…

As America's very stable genius weighs in with his one cent The US House of Representatives has passed a six-year extension to the controversial Section 702 spying program, rejecting an amendment that would have required the authorities to get a warrant before searching for information on US citizens.…

Actually no, we don't want an app for that, techbros Comment "Don't ruin the moment. Asking to sign a contract to have sex can be awkward."…

Beef and lamb prove to be inferior escape tools A butcher channelled the power of Ecky-Thump to escape being locked in his freezer when he saved his skin by using black pudding.…

No-deal predicted to lop £46.8bn off Blighty investment A no-deal Brexit scenario could scrap 92,000 science and technology jobs across the UK, a report has claimed.…

If it's owned by Hillingdon, you can't do that Heathrow Airport's local council has effectively prohibited the flying of drones anywhere within the borough's public spaces – including parks near airfields.…

ICO fought dodgy contracts, buck-passing, and less than concrete proof The Information Commissioner's Office has fined four companies £600,000 for spamming customers millions of times.…

'Mummy, what's feltching?' Security researchers at Check Point have found nearly 70 apps containing malware that slipped past Google's code-checking systems and exposed kids and parents to potentially unwanted sex education lessons.…

Wait. Did you say 'insecure chips'? Comment Let no one say that America's political elites are losing their talent for hypocrisy. Washington DC has welcomed the New Year with a display of selective Sinophobia – and it likely spoiled Huawei's CES.…

SCADA mobile app security is getting worse The security of mobile apps that tie in with Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems has deteriorated over the last two-and-a-half years, according to new research.…

What – no bonkers projected cost savings? You disappoint us, UK.gov Another year, another government shared services strategy. This time Whitehall wants to roll out Oracle Cloud across departments - a move it says will require "substantive negotiations" with the Sopra Steria-run joint venture.…

Group says UK healthcare isn't benefitting from advances in AI The Reform think tank has told the UK government to improve the quality of NHS data and stop relying on paper-based systems to take advantage of the purported benefits of artificial intelligence.…

Group says UK healthcare isn't benefitting from advances in AI The Reform think tank has told the UK government to improve the quality of NHS data and stop relying on paper-based systems to take advantage of the purported benefits of artificial intelligence.…

Serverless, Kubernetes ... or both Events The lineup for Continuous Lifecycle 2018 is almost complete, with more workshops and conference sessions, giving you even more reason to snag an early bird ticket now.…

The result? One-third of GTS to be 'redeployed' or not replaced when they leave Exclusive IBM has indicated to senior Global Technology Services management that a third of the global workforce will be “productively redeployed” in 2018 with tens of thousands of personnel “impacted”.…

That time the Nazis hollowed out a mountain Lurking just outside the Polish village of Sierpnica is a relic of World War II Nazi ambition. The Osówka complex is the largest and most accessible remnant of the huge Project Riese (translation: “Giant”), an effort to create an underground city capable of housing 20,000 or more Nazi troops and workers.…

'It was a bit tricky,' admits DSTL worker The British government has put a seven-year-old boy's design for a submarine into production, saying the lad had "really thought about" his work.…

A multi-billion dollar hype built on gullibility, says railway man Interview Dive beneath the hype and the dry ice of CES, and it becomes apparent. The connected cars and electric cars being shown off in Las Vegas this week are not self-driving cars; and it has proved a lot harder to make an autonomous car than to sell the idea to an AI-obsessed think tank.…

This is Switchzilla’s kit-plus-cloud plan in action Cisco’s switched on latent features in its recent routers and switches, plus a cloud service, that together make it possible to detect the fingerprints of malware in encrypted traffic.…

Could it be... no way, seriously? Aliens? It's probably not aliens A neutron star or a massive black hole may be the source of mysterious and highly energetic radio pulses that light up skies across the universe.…

Old man shouts at a bubble he admits he does not understand Famed investor Warren Buffet has predicted a nasty landing for cryptocurrencies.…

Digital dog whistles: AI hears signals humans can't comprehend The development of AI adversaries continues apace: a paper by Nicholas Carlini and David Wagner of the University of California Berkeley has explained off a technique to trick speech recognition by changing the source waveform by 0.1 per cent.…

We live in a cannibal: data dump shows Milky Way has eaten smaller galaxies If you've got a penchant for lots of data, astrophysics, and mystery, the Dark Energy Survey (DES) has announced its first public data release.…