Congratulations, Australia: somehow after chaotic scenes in parliament, the government last night managed to secure after-the-bell passage of its encryption-busting eavesdropping legislation.

Swiping CPU cycles from Kubernetes container clusters to mine crypto-coins is the latest rage among cybercrooks.

Microsoft's president has issued a clarion call for more government regulation in response to the rapid evolution of facial recognition technology.

The inner designs of today's artificial intelligence are often inspired by the human brain, yet there other biological structures perhaps better suited to crafting next-gen machine-learning software and hardware.

The complex legal headache of linking to controversial material on the internet has been given additional, but qualified, protections by the European Court of Human Rights.

On CallTo no one’s surprise, Friday has arrived again, and brings with it On Call, El Reg’s weekly foray into the best (and the worst) technical problems our readers have helped solve over the years.

Episode 12 "I just want to check the state of a job," the Boss says, burbling away on the PFY's hands-free.

CommentIt's a bit of a cliche that "everything's connected", but O2's stunning outage yesterday – chalked up by Swedish kitmaker Ericsson to an expired software certificate – is a reminder of how true that is.

BackgrounderSitting on many enterprise networks is a constellation of equipment. A lot will be legacy network-connected industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) gear, together with some relatively new IIoT gear installed within the last few years as a move to what has been sweepingly called the "digitalisation" of business.

Clocks on a pair of Galileo satellites have given physicists the first refinement of gravitational redshift since 1976.

Indian software outfit HCL Technologies is snapping up $1.8bn worth of IBM's software in a deal expected to close by the middle of 2019.

The UK's highest court has this week heard arguments in Privacy International's long-running attempt to challenge decisions made by Britain's shadowy spying oversight court, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT).

It's decluttering time at Google again, and the Chocolate Factory has decided to chuck its Allo messaging client into the skip.

The team at Red Hat has continued its toiling in the Big Blue shadow of IBM, and has churned out some tweaks to its OpenShift Dedicated platform and also sliced a few prices for the Kubernetes service.

Lawyers for a man who sued the Cambridge Analytica group for £20,000 claiming misuse of his personal data have suggested the controversial data-mining biz misled a High Court judge when the companies were put into administration.

Toshiba, like Western Digital, is going to use Microwave-Assisted Magnetic Recording (MAMR) to escape the inability of current PMR tech to go beyond 15-16TB disk drive capacity.

A teenage bomb hoaxer from Watford who taunted the UK's National Crime Agency on Twitter while pretending to be a hacker crew called Apophis Squad has been jailed for three years.

Bloodhound, a British project to strap a rocket to a car and fling it at the horizon, is officially dead, as administrators finally pulled the plug on the venture.

Networks roundupWhat if all you had to do to block SYN-based denial-of-service attacks was drop the first incoming SYN packet?

The Linux.org domain was hijacked on Friday morning, with the hacker plastering the message "G3T 0WNED L1NUX N3RDZ" complete with expletives and a very NSFW image (a hairy asshole).

Wikileaks alumnus Julian Assange has apparently turned down a proposed deal that would have seen him leave the Ecuadorian embassy he has been camped out in for over six years.

Next time you're closing a big drug deal you may want to watch the cleaner. Or more specifically their vacuum cleaner.

AnalysisAn ugly struggle over the .Web top-level domain may soon spill into public view again, after one of the companies vying for control of the dot-word demanded an independent review of DNS overlord ICANN's handling of the saga.

Hotel-chain turned data faucet Marriott says it will help some customers cover the cost of replacing stolen documents.

AnalysisYou've patched your Intel, AMD, Power, and Arm gear to crush those pesky data-leaking speculative execution processor bugs, right? Good, because IBM eggheads in Switzerland have teamed up with Northeastern University boffins in the US to cook up Spectre exploit code they've dubbed SplitSpectre.