The Register

Hello, can I speak to Rob please? Second name Ber

Criminologists have long known petty crooks to be dumber than law-abiding citizens. Throw in some Dunning-Kruger and you have the perfect storm of a moron who thinks they're a criminal mastermind.…

Omnishambles just keeps on rolling and you're paying for it

Sussex Police's probe of the infamous London Gatwick airport drone fiasco of Christmas 2018 has doubled in cost to nearly £900,000 – and the bungling force still hasn't arrested the person or persons responsible.…

The boss that went rogue and cocked a snook at the corporate policy he wrote

On Call With the gateway to the weekend upon us, it is time to crack open the On Call files once again to enjoy a tale from one of those brave engineers at the front line of the tech world.…

Join us at MCubed and dive deep into practical, hands-on knowledge

Event It’s great to see hear about the possibilities of machine learning, and AI, but to really understand their potential, nothing beats getting your hands dirty under the watchful eye of a bona fide expert.…

ICO wants to know if AI surveillance systems in central London are legal

The UK's privacy watchdog last night launched a probe into the use of facial-recognition technology in the busy King's Cross corner of central London.…

Bypass our tracking controls at your unspecified peril, warns maker of minor browser

Apple's WebKit team on Wednesday formalized the company's oft-repeated pro-privacy stance (provided you're not in China) by declaring that privacy-piercing browser code will be treated as a security abuse.…

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Kaspersky and Trend Micro have released updates to address vulnerabilities in their respective security tools.…

Extending DNS security protocol to multiple platforms takes root

A plan to expand the current DNSSEC security protocol to cover multiple DNS platforms has received the backing of Salesforce, with a first proof-of-concept implementation of the approach announced on Thursday.…

A human driver is still needed, for the moment at least

Package delivery giant UPS has invested in TuSimple, a self-driving startup based in San Diego, California, to develop autonomous trucks, the mega-corp announced on Thursday.…

Google Assistant can now send reminders to friends and family – this won't end well

Having failed to grasp the lesson of Microsoft's annoying animated Office assistant, Clippy – humans hate being hectored by software – Google has empowered its Assistant software to remind people to do things at the behest of another.…

Reminder: They're not allowed to do that without permission

The Attorney General of Ohio has banned cops and the Feds from accessing the US state's database of drivers' license plates and faces until the officers and g-men receive adequate privacy compliance training.…

Small percentage of workforce but sign of the times

Cisco is laying off 500 programmers in its home state of California amid disappointing financial results and a sagging share price.…

SD-WAN, bam, thank you, ma'am

Backgrounder Businesses relying on hybrid clouds need to be especially mindful of how they protect the sensitive data that flows between their on- and off-premises systems. Employees can be anywhere, using multiple devices (sometimes simultaneously) and any type of network (including public Wi-Fi) to access cloud services, all of which need to be secured against malware, unauthorized access and eavesdropping.…

Translation: they're in Blighty to stay and they know it

Huawei has reportedly boasted that it will continue investing in the UK even if the British government U-turns on allowing the Chinese company to supply critical 5G mobile network equipment.…

Now you need only briefly see the cabin interior

Good news for well-heeled British Airways customers! Now you can transport yourself away from the carrier's aircraft interior through the wizardry of Virtual Reality.…

That's a rocket by the way, not half-horse, half-Spock

Wannabe space station supplier Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) has selected ULA's Vulcan Centaur rocket to launch its Dream Chaser freighter in 2021.…

It's true most blame put on China-linked woes, but it'll hire staff in s-a-a-a-a-a-a-ales

A sharp slowdown in enterprise customers' all-flash array purchases has sucker-punched NetApp, and though it is hiring more sales heads to fix this worry, things aren't forecast to get better anytime soon.…

Mostly the public adversely affected

A young man who DoSed two British police forces' websites has been sentenced to 16 months in a young offenders' institution.…

'Automated and manual' data processing – so humans, yeah?

Microsoft has responded to the furore over its use of humans to listen in on Skype and Cortana recordings by tweaking its privacy policy a bit.…

Axe fell on sales, marketing and product development

One in 15 IBM jobs in the UK were rubbed out during calendar 2018 despite local financials returning to growth.…