The Register

The week's other stories in AI Roundup Hello, here’s a very quick roundup of some of the interesting AI announcements from this week. Read on if you like robots and GPUs.…

Plus, Safari security foiled by… a finger swipe? Roundup This week we wrangled with alleged Russian election meddling, hundreds of millions of username-password combos spilled online, Oracle mega-patches, and cliams of RICO swap-gangs.…

Killer jailed for life after fitness kit data tips off plod Avid runner and hitman Mark Fellows was this week found guilty of murder after being grassed up by his Garmin watch.…

Microsoft to hang up support on 10 December Microsoft has formally set the end date for support of its all-but-forgotten Windows 10 Mobile platform.…

Big Blue brands claim 'outlandish' in non-denial denial A former senior executive at IBM has claimed she was ordered to lie to the US government about just how many older workers Big Blue was laying off.…

Identical sisters with same genetic makeup get different results from test kits Updated Mail-order genetic testing kits, which are all the rage right now, have been put through their paces by identical twins, and the results are a little baffling.…

Лучшая защита – нападение? Russian hackers attempted to infiltrate the Democratic National Committee (DNC) just after the US midterm elections last year, according to a new court filing.…

Anti-censorship demo reaches Chocolate Factory's London HQ A small handful of protesters turned up outside Google’s London HQ today to protest against the ad company’s censored search engine, developed as part of an unholy bargain to gain access to the Chinese market.…

UK and Nordics each get their own boss Privately owned shape-shifting Veritas has removed its northern European head Jason Tooley and split the role in two, externally hiring one person to run the UK and one to oversee the Nordics.…

Aussie Jira flinger celebrates a bonzer quarter Atlassian, home of Jira, Trello and Bitbucket, has rounded out calendar 2018 with over $1bn in revenues as it continues to persuade customers that the cloud is really where they’d like to be.…

NAND revenues and disk drive topline downbound until mid-year - Wells Fargo The slump in Western Digital's SSD and disk drive sales is forecast to deepen for the current and next quarters, according to analysts.…

Apple and others also in firing line as complaints filed Streaming services aren't complying with EU data protection law - namely the General Data Protection Regulation's right of access - according to a fresh suite of complaints aimed at the likes of Netflix, Amazon and Spotify.…

No customer data visible but hell's bells, Redmond, what have you borked now? Exclusive Alarmed Microsoft support partners can currently view support tickets submitted from all over the world, in what appears to be a very wide-ranging blunder by the Redmond-based biz.…

Up to 750 staff transferring to Big Blue. Good luck people... you might need it Exclusive Vodafone is offloading its cloud and hosting unit to IBM in a $550m eight-year outsourcing deal that will include up to 750 staff packing their bags as they're sent off to new employer Big Blue, sources say.…

Friday morning is an ideal time for transfers to have a glitch, agree customers Lloyds and Halifax bank customers have been warned not to make repeat transactions as the group grapples with a technical glitch with Faster Payments.…

PING, PING, PING … it's your networking roundup for the week Roundup To cure some persistent security, implementation, and performance problems in the Domain Name System, the lords of the DNS have proclaimed older implementations as end of life.…

75,000 lawyers subject to potential fortnight of faffery Updated Barristers and court prosecutors have been left scratching their heads this morning after Egress Technologies' CJSM email system went down – with the firm saying it could take up to a fortnight to fully restore it.…

We'll know for sure when Huawei reveals a shoe-shaped smartphone Something for the Weekend, Sir? The name's McLeod. Alessandro McLeod. I am a spy for the secret services.…

'Net greybeard Douglas Comer talks SDN with El Reg Interview Software Defined Networking (SDN) has changed the landscape of networking, but along the way it has created its own problems. Doug Comer of Purdue University thinks disaggregating SDN controllers like the Open Source Network Operating System (ONOS) could be a way forward.…

Did this story make you angry? Y/N On Call Roll up, roll up, to On Call, your weekly instalment of fellow readers’ tech triumphs and frustrations.…

Why can't robots just learn to do things without being told? Vid Robots normally need to be programmed in order to get them to perform a particular task, but they can be coaxed into writing the instructions themselves with the help of machine learning, according to research published in Science.…

Azure DevOps Services invites hackers to test its limits There's more money to be made from bug hunting in Microsoft code after Redmond announced its 10th active bug hunting reward scheme, the Azure DevOps Bounty Program.…

Bet you were expecting a rude ring pun here? Well, not today Saturn’s characteristic rings may only be as old as 100 million years, and thus formed during a time when dinosaurs still roamed on Earth.…

Out of 284 flaws, 33 are rated critical. Big Red admins have big patches ahead Oracle admins, here's your first critical patch advisory for 2019, and it's a doozy: a total of 284 vulnerabilities patched across Big Red's product range, and 33 of them are rated “critical”.…

Open-source CMS gets a pair of critical fixes Drupal has issued a pair of updates to address two security vulnerabilities in its online publishing platform. The vulns are a little esoteric, and will not affect most sites, but it's good to patch just in case you later add functionality that can be exploited.…

Cock-up went unnoticed for two Olympics, one World Cup, an EU referendum, and a US presidential election Twitter has fessed up to a flaw in its Android app that, for more than four years, was making twits' private tweets public. The programming blunder has been fixed.…

Amazing how a big cash payout focuses the mind A Vermont state employee drove 6,000 miles in six weeks to prove that the cellular coverage maps from the US government suck – and was wildly successful.…

Not so fast, there, Ajit... Updated America's broadband watchdog, the FCC, has asked the courts to postpone an appeal against its net neutrality repeal out of "an abundance of caution" due to the partial US government shutdown.…

'The Server Side Public License v1 does not meet standards' MongoDB justified its decision last October to shift the free version of its NoSQL database software, MongoDB Community Server, from the open-source GNU Affero General Public License to the not-quite-so-open Server Side Public License (SSPL) by arguing that cloud providers sell open-source software as a service without giving back.…

Set to update automatically? Say hello to my little friend… Select Windows 10 devices are now automatically downloading Microsoft’s troubled 1809 update, according to the support page for the operating system.…

No more Chinese tech vendor grants for at least three to six months, compsci students told Oxford University is reportedly suspending all research grants and donations from Chinese tech giant Huawei, according to a Chinese newspaper.…

Redmond to throw cash at the problem, hopes some might stick to affordable homes Microsoft has revealed it is to spank the best part of $500m on attempting to deal with the lack of affordable housing in the Seattle area.…

Mark Hurd confesses: I didn't take my passport – but usually that's not an issue Forget cyber security or emergency hamburgers – the real impact of the US government shutdown is only just beginning.…

Prof Maureen Baker told tribunal info security and clinical safety are two separate things The founders of medical symptom-checker app Your.MD knew that a number of key medical information databases were "open to anyone who knows the URL", emails seen by a London tribunal have revealed.…

'They used to be seen as the good guys, and Oracle was the bad guy'. So that means... everyone is the bad guy now? Open-source vendors that haven't already switched to less permissive licences will do so this year as the move to the cloud threatens their business models, a senior Oracle exec has said.…

Sueball lobbed at Brit government over Data Protection Act The High Court has agreed to hear a campaign group's case against the UK's Data Protection Act, which they say leaves immigrants with fewer rights over their data.…

Hipsters choke on pumpkin spice latte as the beloved original is tipped into a dumpster Hipster laptop lids are in for a scraping as messaging-for-millennials platform, Slack, has taken a beating with the rebranding stick.…

Has it gotten backuppers' backs up? You bet it has Amazon has rolled out its own backup service for AWS apps and data, a move that will inevitably hit independent suppliers of backup for the cloud computing service right in the wallet.…

'Ecncouraging' numbers as it switches from licensing to subs push Shape-shifting accounting software biz Sage issued a trading update this morning and the good news - for investors at least - is that it didn't contain any nasty surprises, but did highlight a bounce in cloud sales.…

Microsoft introduces the Schrödinger Linux Subsystem. (It might work. It might not.) Hot on the heels of a patch for the version of Windows 10 that Microsoft hopes will undo the woes of 2018 comes a fresh insider build to break stuff just a few days before the company's bug bash.…

Now is a good time to get a password manager app Infosec researcher Troy Hunt has revealed that more than 700 million email addresses have been floating around “a popular hacker forum” - along with a very large number of plain text passwords.…

They see AI, cybersecurity as 'battle fronts' - and rising populism will make it worse - former UN official Oracle OpenWorld Technology and cyber security will be the "battle fronts" of global competition, and artificial intelligence will become crucial to the US-China trade war, a former UN official has said.…

Why the battery story doesn't add up Analysis Apple’s iPhone slump may be down to the company’s generosity and kindness - according to Apple-friendly blogger Jon Gruber.…

It's Amazon how quickly these monopolies begin Column At the annual spectacular of crap that we optimistically term the Consumer Electronics Show, I found myself locked into a room with Alexa.…

No idea who could have been behind this one... The South Korea Ministry of National Defense says 10 of its internal PCs have been compromised by North Korea unknown hackers .…

You mean they are collecting our opinions to sell ads? Who would have guessed it? Most Facebook users have no idea that the ad biz compiles data profiles of their online activities and interests, according to research conducted by the non-profit Pew Research Center.…

Israeli company was 'feeling lucky' but lost out Google has won a patent dispute over its famous "I'm feeling lucky" button that immediately connects a user to its top-raking search link with a single click.…

Lawsuit claims coin thief was part of a gang targeting crypto whales The victim of a $24m cryptocurrency heist is suing his assailants in what is believed to be the first ever RICO claim involving digital currency.…

The poor cotton seedling froze to death as temperatures plunged during the lunar night The budding cotton seed hailed as the first plant to ever grow on the Moon, has, erm, died.…

Community outcry over exile of cloud networking biz leads to terms of service revision Game engine maker Unity Technologies has reversed its excommunication of cloud service provider Improbable with a revision of its Terms of Service that allows game developers to work with unapproved technology providers.…