One-time Intel boffin

Obit Friends of Timothy May have confirmed that the former Intel engineer and co-founder of the Cypherpunks mailing list died of natural causes at his home in California on Friday. He was 67. Bitcoin and blockchain, WikiLeaks, P2P software and information markets all owe a debt to the list.…

Crouching monkey, hidden leader of the free world

A pair of boffins are in hot water after the image of president Donald Trump made an unexpected cameo in a paper on how to gather animal DNA from their poop at scale.…

But US firm must get specific on which trade secrets it claims were nicked – judge

SAP has failed to have a copyright infringement and antitrust lawsuit lodged against it by Teradata thrown out.…

UK space specialist's holding company ups sticks for €11.2m

Chippenham-based space systems specialist SCISYS has announced that it will trouser €11.2m as part of a contract to keep the Galileo project running.…

Great. Big Brother Watch claims tech had 100% fail rate since May

London cops have been slammed for using unmarked vans to test controversial and inaccurate automated facial recognition technology on Christmas shoppers.…

Office nerd saves day with Dungeons & Dragons die

When two candidates running for director of Byron-Bethany Irrigation District in California found themselves locked in a bizarre tie earlier this month, the authority sought to resolve the stalemate in a swift and decisive manner – by reaching for a D20.…

Yuletide cheer for Wing Commander Andy Green and the team

In news that will bring festive cheer to fans of plucky Brit engineering efforts, the Bloodhound 1,000mph car project has been lobbed a lifeline by Yorkshire-based entrepreneur Ian Warhurst.…

It's not just about quality

Research results Whether it's systems-level platforms and tools or full-blown business applications, you want the software your organisation depends on to run reliably and predictably. Our recent Reg survey, however, confirmed what most probably knew from experience, or could guess from press headlines – that software-related failures are far from uncommon.…

'Please stop... you're doing something to the radios'

Who, me? Welcome all, to the merry world of Who, Me?, our weekly trip down memory lane for techies who want to get something off their chest.…

Plus: Listen to some new classical piano generated by an algorithm

Roundup welcome to the last AI round up of the year; thank you for reading.…

Plus, Talos critical of flawed message apps

It was pretty hectic security week, between the Sharpshooter malware attack, a massive Patch Tuesday, and yet another Facebook privacy fail.…

Complaint argues false pixels, notch, and measurements don't fit with ad claims

Two iPhone owners sued Apple on Friday claiming that company misrepresents the screen resolution and screen size of its recent model iPhones.…

Scare tactic efforts may be the work of a single group

Yesterday's 'bomb scare' spam campaign may have been a follow-up to another infamous email extortion effort.…

Says it will give people $100,000 to ditch their smartphone. It won't

It's your lucky day: sugary soft drink maker Vitamin Water has said it will give you $100,000 if you are able to give up your smartphone for a year.…

Utter asshats pull seven-figure heist on Save the Children Foundation

A group of criminal asswipes have managed to steal $1m from the Save the Children Foundation.…

Computers are getting better at generating pictures of humans. This will go down well.

AI systems can now create images of humans that are so lifelike they look like photographs, except the people in them don’t really exist.…

Don't be daft, of course they haven't, we're still in Crazytown USA

Analysis One year ago today, the FCC passed a controversial measure that undermined its own rules, passed just two years earlier, over net neutrality.…

Data gathering biz still having trouble keeping data secure

Facebook on Friday apologized for a bug that may have exposed exposed private photos to third-party apps for the 12 day period from September 13 to September 25, 2018.…

Long-standing cloud enemies to do battle in the courts

AWS has intervened in Oracle's lawsuit against the Pentagon's plans to award a $10bn cloud contract to a single vendor.…

But built-in email and mobile clients still works in progress

Only months after reaching the 2.0 milestone, the independent Chromium-based browser Vivaldi has added a bunch of useful features.…