The Register

Party can expect a call from the Information Commissioner The Conservative Party has been accused of pushing its message on potential voters in a way that may have breached data protection laws.…

Effort to notify patients falls flat – under pizza pamphlet A midlands NHS group has committed face-palm after face-palm in its efforts to inform residents about its patient data-sharing plans.…

Let’s invent a dustbin that throws itself away Something for the Weekend, Sir? What the world needs now is an intelligent dustbin. It would be the pinnacle of achievement for the Internet of Things sector.…

Illegal offline? It's illegal online Analysis Algorithms used to track or adapt prices online raise competition concerns, according to a recent submission to the OECD by the European Union.…

VPS blinkenlights dim for some of the customers Fasthosts hasn’t exactly draped itself in glory during this week of the summer solstice, what with the four day blackout of its virtual private server service and a partial eclipse of webmail.…

Wiping out the problem needed a brush and a pump, but didn't make a stink ON-CALL Welcome yet again to On-Call, The Register's weekly column in which we take readers' tales of odd jobs in odd places, tart them up and present them to you as a bit of light relief on a Friday.…

When is a server a hyper-server? When it bundles V12N, RHEL, Gluster and Ansible Red Hat's having a crack at a hyperconverged software stack.…

Zuckerberg preaches connectivity gospel, sends faithful to do good works ANALYSIS Mark Zuckerberg's given Facebook a new mission statement: “To give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together", in the process rediscovering The Social Network™'s original purpose and exposing web utopianism as hopelessly optimistic.…

Danger, Will Robinson! Autonomous space robots are going to be key to making new discoveries and exploring the furthest reaches of our Solar System and beyond, according to NASA scientists.…

There's an opening and good will to use it, says Ecuadorian foreign minister Ecuador's foreign minister Maria Fernanda Espinosa says the country is working with the UK to find a way for Julian Assange to leave its embassy.…

As Azure Stack's launch approaches, AWS bolsters its hybrid storage story Amazon Web Services dominates the public cloud, but its hybrid cloud story is currently weak.…

Rival ARM-wrestling cloud Scaleway has added 64-core Caviums Qualcomm looks to have a customer for the Centriq 2400 , the 48-core CPU it's aiming at the server market: the minor cloud player Packet has signed up “to introduce” the architecture to its customers.…

RIP Cisco-Dell friendship? Dell EMC's converged infrastructure portfolio is changing. The Vblock – with its Cisco Nexus 1000v switch – is going away, while VxBlocks – with software-defined networking – are taking over.…

Military comms developer says Android and iOS are trampling its patents A software company that makes tracking tools for military and 911 crews says some of the biggest mobile phone makers on the planet are stealing its technology for their own security tools.…

Redmond adds UI tweaks, more emojis and Edge enticements Microsoft has released the newest build of Windows 10 Insider, version 16226, to developers on its fast-track release list.…

Brutal Kangaroo jumps network breaks, according to leaked classified info WikiLeaks has published online more top-secret documents it has obtained from the CIA describing the agency's hacking tools. This time the dossier details software codenamed Brutal Kangaroo that agents can use to infect targets' air-gapped computers with malware.…

Allegations of digging up rivals' cables, breaking promises A Texas telco says Comcast sabotaged its cable network after it refused a buyout offer.…

Software glitch led to algorithm emitting 90-year-old info A Los Angeles Times article-writing bot sent shockwaves through the internet Wednesday – by falsely reporting a hefty 6.8M earthquake had hit Santa Barbara county, California.…

As taxi app maker staff demand T-Bone Kalanick is restored to the throne Waymo has proof Uber execs knew their star engineer Anthony Levandowski was in possession of designs stolen from Waymo well before Uber acquired Levandowski's self-driving vehicle startup.…

Strangely lucid and lawyerly statement from Tweeter-in-Chief President Trump has, in a tweet-burst today, backtracked on his earlier menacing claim that he may have secretly recorded his meetings with then-FBI boss James Comey.…

Sauce on a plane Heightened security at airports clearly doesn't apply to all liquids, at least not in Italy. An airport in Genoa is now allowing flyers to travel with jars of the local speciality sauce – pesto.…

Redmond shrugs, says PC would already need to be thoroughly pwned Flaws in Microsoft PatchGuard create a means for hackers to plant rootkits on Windows 10, 64-bit OS devices.…

He'd have been aiming higher than the top of London's Shard to hit his mark A Canadian sniper has reportedly shot dead an Islamic State terrorist from the astonishing distance of 3,450 metres – more than two miles away.…

Organised crime coppers cuff young men Detectives have arrested two men in the UK this morning in connection with an international "conspiracy" to break into the Microsoft network.…

Data on flash or disk? Er, it's complicated, says Reduxio Reduxio, the startup that stories data in unique indexed, tagged and timestamped chunks, has introduced v3.0 software with unified primary and secondary storage.…

Government opens Industrial Strategy linked funding call The UK government's long-promised Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund is open for business.…

Flash? It's all flash, mate NetApp has introduced an all-flash SolidFire-based FlexPod.…

Researchers finger trojan-slinging AdGholas group Security researchers have suggested that the ransomware attack on University College London last week was spread through a "malvertising" campaign.…

More speakers join MCubed Lineup Events Ethics, algorithms and finance are all key areas for machine learning and AI, which is why we’re chuffed to announce three more excellent speakers who will be joining us at MCubed London in October.…

Alt-net providers call for ads to be reviewed Adverts using the word "fibre" to describe services deployed over copper lines are leaving consumers baffled, according to research commissioned by alternative network providers.…

UK and Ireland boss nowhere to be seen UK and Ireland boss of Fujitsu Lucy Dimes has gone on gardening leave just one year into the job, according to multiple well-placed sources.…

We've already got one tried and tested system, huffs MoD The Ministry of Defence has insisted it has made “no decision” to install the US Navy’s JPALS aircraft carrier landing system aboard HMS Prince of Wales, the second of the Royal Navy’s two new 65,000-tonne aircraft carriers.…

Clash with tech titan continues Trouble struck British chip designer Imagination Technologies has confirmed it is for sale amid an ongoing dispute with Apple that has crushed its valuation on the London Stock Exchange.…

'Dragon'-owned biz shifts focus to B2B market Mobile gadget souk Expansys shuttered its digital doors to consumers – a natural conclusion for a business that lost direction under the ownership of lanky Dragons' Den badass Peter Jones in a commoditised space.…

NVMe over Fabrics box bashes Dell EMC, Pure and Infinidat NVMe over Fabrics flash array startup E8 says its box out-performs Dell EMC and Pure arrays by up to 20 times.…

Not all figures are equal If you want to develop your ML and AI skills, you will need to pick up some statistics and before you have got more than a few steps down that path you will find (whether you like it or not) that you have entered the Twilight Zone that is the frequentist/Bayesian religious war. I use the term "war" advisedly because war, by definition, has moved beyond debate and discussion. "Religious" because the war is based on belief systems, not information.…

Strapline on van: 'Where your vote is your choice'. Meow! Pic A rival of the reseller who threatened to sack Labour-voting employees hired a billboard van to drive past their HQ with the words “we’re hiring – where your vote is your choice” emblazoned on its side.…

If LINPACK would pack wood... and other computer sports posers HPC Blog As part of our continuing coverage of the most exciting events in the computer sporting world, Student Cluster Competitions, we like to meet each team individually.…

Curiosity Rover's autonomous operation experiments have been a great success, say astro-boffins In late 2015 NASA gave the Curiosity Mars rover a software upgrade to let it operate autonomously. The Autonomous Exploration for Gathering Increased Science (AEGIS) code was uploaded because the rover can't be told what to do during the long periods communication with Earth is not possible. A little autonomy, NASA reckoned, could mean Curiosity could do more and perhaps better science.…

Troll your WebEx-loving execs with a crafted recording file We all know the only thing more fun than a WebEx conference is a recorded WebEx conference, which is why WebEx Network Recording Player exists – and if you use it, you need to patch it.…

ESA to start the construction of space telescope network The European Space Agency’s PLATO mission hunting for habitable exoplanets has been given the green light to move from blueprint into construction.…

Forget free sushi, gyms or Steve Jobs clones. Netflix values fearless sharing In 2009, Netflix published what became an influential slide deck explaining its culture, including a policy of not hiring “brilliant jerks” because the benefit of their moments of excellence are outweighed by the cost of their other behaviours.…

Borg's boxen can now figure out if there's malware lurking in encrypted traffic Cisco has turned research published nearly a year ago into a product it hopes will protect enterprises against malware hidden in encrypted traffic.…

Calls for standards-setting conference to consider security, privacy, whatever other regs distributed ledger types want The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has decided the time is ripe to start talking about what standards might be developed for distributed ledgers, aka Blockchain and fellow-travellers.…

Borg plans 'AI-assisted operations in IT', but first we get new HCI boxen for ROBO Cisco will next week reveal something called “Project Starship” that it promises will allow greater and easier automation of UCS servers and its HyperFlex hyperconverged appliances, no matter if they run in the data centre, remote office or a small business.…

Patches for servers and clients already out there – get updating just in case OpenVPN has patched a bunch of security vulnerabilities that can be exploited to crash the service or, at a pinch, potentially gain remote-code execution.…

International Trade Commission says its kit should be fine to import again Arista's long slog back to the shelves in America continues with an initial determination from the International Trade Commission okaying its product redesign.…

Senate Intelligence Committee frustrated by lack of details Russian attempts to hack key American election systems are more advanced than first thought, according to Homeland Security officials on Wednesday.…

IT giant's market cap soars after (mostly) strong financials Oracle says it has finally turned the corner with its cloud compute transition as it reports big gains for the business, both in the quarter and the fiscal year.…

Grab your camping gear and prepare for August 21 America will witness, for the first time in 99 years, a total solar eclipse stretching from coast to coast on August 21.…