The Register

NatWest PR: No, no, no. That person's info was BAD Retail bank NatWest is backtracking on previous claims that it was aware of a security glitch at the log-in stage that requested customers to enter more digits of their password than existed.…

Biggest threat next year, Met Police cybercrime boss says Cybersecurity bods at the Met Police, NHS and the Local Government Association in the UK believe ransomware will be one of the biggest threats facing the British public sector next year.…

Big Blue analytics boss wants to automate, automate, then automate some more IBM has announced a unified analytics system that allows data scientists to work across multiple data stores in ways the company said should eliminate time-consuming data integration and preparation.…

AI boffins find box marked 'Pandora', whack it with the AI-hammer With the Internet already groaning under the weight of d!ck pics and facial scanning increasingly used instead of passwords, do we really want AI to turn flat images into accurate 3D renderings of their content?…

Apple still hasn't been able to seal up keychain access hole for unsigned applications A security shortcoming in earlier versions of OS X has made its way into macOS High Sierra despite an expert's best efforts to highlight the flaw.…

Massive facility will try self-sustaining for a year Three years ago the United Arab Emirates announced plans to stage a manned mission to Mars. Now the kingdom plans to build a massive Mars colony in the desert to test out the technologies they will use to live there.…

A quick guide to this week's reveals Roundup Here's your weekly dose of key announcements in the world of artificial intelligence. The flurry of hardware-related news shows how machine learning software is reinvigorating chip design.…

'Hit Refresh' becomes 'Hit FN+F5' as Azure moves into a tent +Logowatch Microsoft has created a special “Employee Edition” of CEO Satya Nadella's new book, Hit Refresh – and The Register understands every full-time worker at the software giant will find one on their desks.…

Best signal yet received after space void mega-prang Scientists have recorded the most accurate reading of gravitational waves yet by using the upgraded LIGO and Virgo observatories together for the first time.…

Billionaire fight as Zuck decries 'crazy idea' fake news didn't impact election United States president Donald Trump has declared that Facebook was always against him and tossed it into the same bucket as The New York Times, which he regards as fake news, and The Washington Post, which he says is biased against him because it's owned by Amazon's Jeff Bezos.…

1550 nanometres is the sweetest sweet spot One of the hurdles facing photon-based quantum systems using entangled photons is that it's hard to create them at the 1550 nm wavelengths used in telecommunications systems.…

Can't say where. Can't say when. Can't agree on Mars or Moon as target. But it'll happen! Crewed deep space exploration is back on the agenda, after NASA and its Russian counterpart Roscosmos announced they will co-operate on efforts to create a cislunar space station.…

It's as if the data warehouse never happened. Which may not be a bad thing StrataConf Hadoop-flinger MapR has added a host of new capabilities to its database in a bid to offer developers more powerful real-time analytics.…

EXIF through a gift shop full of personal data In what looks like an Apple oversight, a developer has discovered that apps can access image metadata and therefore a pretty good history of iThing users' location.…

Eric Pulier alleged to have bribed execs at Australia's Commonwealth Bank to inflate earn-out payments The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Department of Justice (DoJ) have charged ServiceMesh founder Eric Pulier with attempting to defraud technology services giant of US$98 million.…

Latest lodging for Alexa has clock radio aspirations Amazon expanded its line of Echo cloud commerce intercoms on Wednesday with the introduction of Echo Spot, a spherical hodgepodge of screen, mics and speaker for communing with the company's Alexa software and demanding doorstep deliveries.…

Just 5,000 handsets have been shifted since release – pundits Android co-inventor Andy Rubin's much-hyped Essential Phone has thus far been a flop with consumers in its first weeks on the market, it is estimated.…

In Moxie we trust Encrypted call and messaging app Signal gets a lot of love in the security community. Now its developers have decided to toughen it up even more to avoid the possibility of it being turned against its users.…

How about we define the thing we're supposedly deciding on, queries Rosenworcel FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel made her presence felt at her first meeting in a year at the US communications regulator on Wednesday – when she cited an infamous Supreme Court decision over pornography to slam a report claiming there was sufficient competition in the American mobile market.…

Hirsute French hipster 'found with $500,000 in BTC' A French national and suspected online drug dealer has been collared by US government agents – after he flew to America for the World Beard and Mustache Championships.…

Battle to block Bezos from gTLD slams into big biz Analysis In an effort to block Amazon from getting the top-level domain .amazon, Brazil may have put governments on a crash course with the private sector over control of the web.…

Here's the keys to ride Vespa into the sunset Oath, the Verizon-owned parent of Yahoo!, has forsworn control of Yahoo!'s search code, known as Vespa, and turned it into an open-source project.…

Here's some code and Curl commands to get you on the path of milliblogging Twitter's plan to limit public trials of 280-character tweets has been foiled by web devs, who discovered the feature could be enabled by twits on the client-side.…

Total Inability To Support Unusual Projects Exclusive A crippling data center power failure knackered SourceForge's equipment yesterday and earlier today, knocking the site offline.…

Bridging the chasm Research There are many reasons why someone might not be using an All-Flash Array. It might be that you can’t get the budget, say, or that you think it has been over-hyped. Maybe you are sceptical about whether your application set would benefit from it, or if it would fit into your operations seamlessly.…

Mehrotra hints beyond 64-layer tech could land next year Massive revenues from DRAM and flash have made Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra a happy chief. Third-quarter revenues were good but they have just been eclipsed.…

Google and Amazon clash over YouTube on the Echo Show Google's low-intensity rivalry with Amazon has just escalated. Amazon's Echo Show speaker has been barred from playing YouTube videos.…

Adding S3 gateways to Mr Blobby's storage in the Microsoft cloud Both Caringo and Scality are adding S3 gateways between their object storage and Microsoft's Azure Blob storage.…

'Some providers still not doing enough,' says regulator Update BT and TalkTalk are the providers most moaned about, according to UK comms regulator Ofcom's quarterly whinge data between April and June – a result that will surprise no one.…

Put a Red Hat on your virtual machines and steal away Maxta has found a neat way to differentiate itself from the hyperconverged system pack; it can run vSphere and Red Hat Virtualization VMs simultaneously and convert between them.…

National Cyber Crime Unit spills on pre-2015 megahack convo Prior to its disastrous 2015 mega hack, UK ISP TalkTalk had told British spies at GCHQ that should an attack occur, its main focus would be to restore "online sports streaming", according to the head of operations at the country's National Cyber Crime Unit.…

Delisted storage firm now trading stock on OTCQB Struggling storage software company Falconstor has been delisted from the Nasdaq Stock Market and its shares are now trading on the OTC Market Group's OTCQB marketplace.…

Blue-sky thinking... no, you shut up... EasyJet has given its blessing to a mildly bonkers plan to replace airliners with electrically propelled aircraft on short-haul flights.…

65-yr-old woman being held in London The Metropolitan Police has announced the arrest of a government contractor after a tip-off.…

Hundreds earmarked for the chop Cisco is saying farewell to 310 more staff from its corporate HQ in California, according to a filing with the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) system.…

Yeah. We can do that. No problem. Regulators are warming to Google's preferred remedy to the European Commission's vertical search competition investigation, according to a briefing given to Bloomberg.…

Microsoft's general manager talks to Reg about cross-platform SQL Server Ignite “It’s a big milestone for us as a company,” general manager Rohan Kumar told us, referring to the release of SQL Server on Linux, “the biggest server product from Microsoft”, announced here at the Ignite event in Orlando.…

Gas-free drive war with WDC and Seagate ramps up again Toshiba has reached the 10TB disk drive capacity level without the help of helium, providing OEMs with an alternative to Seagate and WDC.…

Or a little historical insight for those not going OpenWorld When reports emerged early in September that Oracle was shedding hundreds of workers, it might have been dismissed as just the latest in a series of such moves. What caught the attention of industry watchers was where the axe was falling. Sources indicated those being laid off included many of the engineers responsible for its SPARC processors and Solaris operating system.…

AWS is way in front, Azure a solid second, server-makers in trouble Google is the world's number four infrastructure-as-a-service vendor, according to analyst outfit Gartner's first ever attempt at calculating market share in the field.…

In-cabin gear gets NAND assist for driver help and infotainment Samsung has 128GB and 64GB eUFS flash cards for automotive use.…

Broadcom sampling chipset that should let navigation apps tell you which lane to drive in Broadcom is now sampling silicon it says will make smartphones' SatNav systems accurate to a centimeter in 2018.…

Dot-cat referendum webpages censored amid brazen internet crackdown As a controversial referendum on the independence of Catalonia draws near, the Spanish government has expanded efforts to shut it down, even blocking access to some websites.…

Project Zero reveal you really shouldn't skip the upgrade to iOS 11 iThing owners, do not skip iOS 11: it plugs a dead-easy-to-exploit drive-by WiFi bug.…

Chap inhaled tiny toy traffic cone 40 years ago and he's been spluttering ever since The British Medical Journal has revealed a mistaken diagnosis of cancer was caused by Playmobil.…

Vacuum-maker to spend £2bn on 'radical battery electric vehicle' due on the road in 2020 Vacuum-cleaner maker Dyson has announced its intention to build a “battery electric vehicle.”…

Also says it's not the best way to save money for most people Google's decided to join AWS in the per-second billing club, point out that it's actually had this constant cloudy ka-ching thing under control since 2013 and offer advice that recommends not using its new billing scheme as your number one cost-cutting tactic.…

Code Citrix sold becomes multi-hypervisor hybrid cloud wrangler full of bursty goodness Accelerite has finally revealed what it's done with Citrix's CloudPlatform, which it acquired in January 2016.…

Full region coming in 2019. Keeping it cold should be fun! Amazon Web Services has announced it will open bit barns in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).…

Mirrors price relief offered to consumer market Updated nbn™, the company building Australia's National Broadband Networ (NBN), has adjusted its wholesale prices so that retailers offering business plans get the same price relief as previously offered for the consumer market.…