The Register

Since when was 'intervening' in TV shows a good idea? Comment Google has begun to infuse American TV and movies shows with propaganda – "good propaganda", the company insists. However, it's unlikely to please two groups who rarely agree on anything: those who think Google isn't diverse enough, and conservatives who fear its political and media power.…

Learn how to stay strong Promo There’s not much that can go wrong with the back of an envelope. Not so with modern systems: they become increasingly complicated as they take on more tasks, often spanning multiple technologies, groups and different organisations - and are liable to fail in unexpected and spectacular ways.…

Bunch of resumés citing secret government work exposed Thousands of files containing the personal information of US citizens with classified security clearance have been exposed by an unsecured Amazon server.…

Looking to buy the elderly American Ponce Argentina reportedly wants to buy the US Navy’s laser death ray testbed warship, the fearsomely named USS Ponce.…

Meanwhile, China says of ICOs: That's hot, we mean, er, banned Just in case we were in any doubt that we were in a crypto bubble, Paris Hilton has announced she will back an Initial Coin Offering venture.…

£390 per meter... £420 ... pff, it's public money, who cares? Smart meters will cost each British household £420 and save people just “a tenner a year”, according to reports.…

Anniversary special brings back much-loved features The long-awaited "retro" Thinkpad will be based on the guts of a contemporary T470 laptop, Lenovo's business workhorse, according to a German certification site.…

Freedom of Information request to DoJ turns up... nada The US Department of Justice has "no evidence" that Obama's administration wiretapped Trump Tower, contrary to a much-publicised accusation by President Trump to the contrary.…

Storage pigeons roost as we munch on cabbagey treats Comment Did you overdo it with the bacon and buttered toast at the weekend? Never mind, who among us can resist cooked cabbage leaves wrapped round nutritious meaty storage fillings? Get your knife, fork, spoon and napkin ready and load up your plate with what we have in store.…

Scatters £10m across country out of £200m pot Government has revealed the first six areas in Blighty to trial speeds of 1Gbps in a £10m pilot, as previously revealed by The Register.…

Might not seem relevant, but the smart cruncher knows better So, you want to be data driven. About time too. It amazes me to watch companies basing their forecasts on experience, assumption and instinct when their storage area networks are teeming with data that they could use to make what they do more scientific.…

Half of gov techies quit following tax clampdown, says survey The vast majority of UK government IT projects are suffering delays due to freelancers quitting over the IR35 tax clampdown, according to a survey of contractors.…

But not by much: shows Google touched still had lonely hoodie-wearing white male geeks Google operates a “Computer Science in Media Team” that stages “interventions” in Hollywood to steer film-makers towards realistic and accurate depictions of what it's like to work in IT.…

Oxford doomsayers sees bleak future for those employed in retail, transport, warehousing, and logistics About 80 per cent of jobs in retail transportation, warehousing and logistics and 63 per cent of jobs in sales are at risk of disappearing, thanks to increasingly capable automated systems.…

Researchers reverse hashes in Troy Hunt's password release. PS, don't forget the salt The anonymous CynoSure Prime “cracktivists” who two years ago reversed the hashes of 11 million leaked Ashley Madison passwords have done it again, this time untangling a stunning 320 million hashes dumped by Australian researcher Troy Hunt.…

Purple Palace's corporate carcass to cop a kicking as class action gets green light The corporate carcass of Yahoo! must face trial over its notorious data breaches.…

Who or what had 10 million trillion trillion joules to play with, 3 billion light years away? Fast Radio Burst-hunters have suffered London Bus syndrome again: fifteen have shown up at once.…

LogDevice: how to make sense of 10 hyperscale data centres Sysadmins struggling to manage lots of logs may want to Like a new "friend", after Facebook last week decided to share its distributed log management system.…

SMB 1.0 also deemed better out than in, as TLS makes it into the kernel Linus Torvalds has released Linux 4.13 to a waiting world and in so doing detailed a tricky work week in which he endured “seven hours of pure agony due to a kidney stone”.…

Storage products in peril, too, but Big Red declines to comment Soon-to-be-former Oracle staff report that the company made hundreds of layoffs last Friday, as predicted by El Reg, with workers on teams covering the Solaris operating system, SPARC silicon, tape libraries and storage products shown the door.…

Thanks for using Asterisk. Your call is transparent to us, so stay on the line to get p0wned One of the Asterisk bugs published last week is worse than first thought: Enable Security warns it exposes the popular IP telephony system to stream injection and interception without an attacker holding a man-in-the-middle position.…

$1m prize is still up for grabs if you want to prove them wrong A trio of computer scientists from the University of St Andrews in Fife, Scotland, has published results showing that a classic chess puzzle dating back 150 years is so computationally taxing that it could take thousands of years to solve.…

Newly minted software giant formally begins operations HPE says it has closed the $8.8bn deal to spin off much of its software business with Micro Focus.…

New products, cheaper kit and company tie-ins Every year for the past ten years has been the one when virtual reality will finally break out.…

First time boffins have detected water in the planetary system The Hubble Space Telescope has spotted possible signs of water on the outer planets of TRAPPIST-1, the system with the most exoplanets in a star’s habitable zone.…

Workers take automaker to labor relations board Electric carmaker Tesla has been hit with an official complaint from the US National Labor Relations Board following allegations from a number of employees that it was illegally blocking union activities.…

After Lenovo leaks the details Microsoft has used the IFA conference in Berlin to announce the next big update for Windows 10 users – the Fall Creators Update will be released on October 17.…

Una-peeling pulp-straining gizmo maker shuts down On Friday, embattled "smart" juicer startup Juicero shut down.…

California's Supreme Court rules authorities must justify denying data requests Police departments cannot categorically deny access to data collected through automated license plate readers, California's Supreme Court said on Thursday – a ruling that may help privacy advocates monitor government data practices.…

Oh, what can it mean to a Daydream believer ♪ More than 300 business leaders including the CEOs of Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google have signed a letter slamming Donald Trump for his plan to remove legal protections from immigrant children born in the United States.…

Just don’t call us cloners IFA The mainstay of Microsoft's boutique Surface range faces tougher competition as rivals sharpen their act.…

Blame SatNad, not NYPD, for the mobile blues Comment Back in the day, the old IBM was famous for never breaking a promise to customers. For example, when IBM bought Lotus it was to honour a commitment to provide customers with office group productivity software that its own teams of programmers couldn't keep. IBM kept Token Ring and OS/2 customers happy long after the products were obsoleted.…

UK watchdog echoes Home Sec in anti-crypto comments The UK’s “independent reviewer of terrorism legislation” appears to have gone rogue, saying that encryption should be withheld from people who don’t verify their identities on social media.…

You understand it's not the final version? Hmm Hands On PC vendors are showing off Windows Mixed Reality headsets and controllers here at the IFA consumer electronics show in Berlin, and this writer got to try new devices from Dell, Asus and Lenovo.…

Is Daddy going to live somewhere else? +Comment Western Digital boss Steve Milligan has apologised to Toshiba's CEO in an August 11 letter.…

Asks for 12 pence for 'unfair competition' One of the top third-party smartphone accessory manufacturers in China* is suing Apple for all of one Chinese yuan (about 12 pence; 15 US cents; 13 euro cents).…

Asks for 12 pence for 'unfair competition' One of the top third-party smartphone accessory manufacturers in China* is suing Apple for all of one Chinese yuan (about 12 pence; 15 US cents; 13 euro cents).…

Sees itself as VMware rival Nutanix closed its first year as a public company with a beat-and-raise quarter, firing on all fronts and heading confidently to a billion-dollar run rate next quarter.…

Broken the law while spying? Someone will write to you, later The latest agency that audits state spying in the UK, the Investigatory Powers Commission (IPCO), formally started operating today.…

Goldsmiths boffin wades into platform war stories at Reg lecture Reg Event Geeks have often enjoyed a fractious relationship with non-techies, but nowhere near as toxic as their relationships with other geeks who dare to have slightly different tech preferences.…

Relinquish your IP or lose one of the world's largest markets China's new cybersecurity law will enable its government to discover potential security vulnerabilities of any company doing business in the country, threat intelligence firm Recorded Future warns.…

What a beautiful mess It ain't over till the fat lady sings and Toshiba isn't singing yet, failing to meet its own August 31 deadline and resuming talks with Bain and Hon Hai bid groups alongside the WDC consortium.…

There's no security on holiday when you're a bellend Something for the Weekend, Sir? Stop the digital presses, hold the home page – I have breaking news for you! An organisation somewhere in the world has NOT been hacked into today!…

What if I told you it's possible to store both raw and summaries Working with data can be a pain in the butt. You do it because you need to, and because there's value in it – data-driven enterprises thrive on being able to eke as much concrete information as possible out of the stuff in order to maximise efficiency and attack the market share of the competition.…

Project tries to move on to lifecycle management rather than initial setup With the release of OpenStack Pike, the OpenStack Foundation has focussed on making the foundational software-defined networking environment look more digestible and better-suited to the world of microservices that's grown up around it.…

Head of IT then used happy user's praise to score a bigger budget On-Call Welcome again to On-Call, The Register's Friday frolic through readers' memories of jobs that turned into oddities.…

Shocking! Lab experiments prove promising, but predicting real destruction is a lot harder Earthquakes are, by their nature, unpredictable. Although geologists understand why and how the tremors occur, forecasting them more than a few minutes ahead is very difficult.…

IP telephony server discloses three vulns, one critical. You know what to do next Admins of the popular IP telephony application Asterisk have a lovely end to the week ahead of them - there's two moderate vulnerabilities, and one critical mess, that need patches.…

Just the usual procession of firmware vulnerabilities Infosec consulting firm Nomotion has reported vulnerabilities in Arris broadband modems and which it says are trivial to exploit, and could affect nearly 140,000 devices.…

Build will end in 2020, stay in the financial envelope.