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Are you deploying this storage tech – or is it barely on your radar? We want to hear from you either way, please Reg survey We've all seen more than enough marketing hype in IT by now, and probably more enough to last several lifetimes.…

He then doubled down on spies' 'ghost user' backdoor plan Solving the Huawei 5G security problem is a question of convincing the Chinese to embrace British "fair play", security minister Ben Wallace said yesterday without the slightest hint of irony.…

God money I’ll do anything for you Something for the Weekend, Sir? "People love being sold to."…

Urgh, OK Google, call 9... Can you hear me?! CALL 9...arghgh Digital assistants such as Amazon Alexa and Google Home may be able to automatically detect when someone is having a heart attack, and call for medical help, one day, according to this latest research.…

'Expect actual number to go to be much less' says firm, as 1k put hand up for voluntary redundancy Exclusive DXC Technology has told UK government and Unite that – in a worst case scenario – more than 2,000 locals could be made redundant in the latest round of expense cuts, which could also include the closure of one site.…

Figuratively, of course On Call As you shut down and wait for Windows or macOS to spend the usual hour installing updates before your weekend can begin, spare a thought for those on the other end of the phone in The Register's weekly On Call column.…

Phone bone grown from shoddy body tone, it's shown Young people are developing "horn-like" bone spurs, it's claimed, and smartphone-induced posture problems are apparently to blame.…

Cluster of rock and ice a sweltering 77K, we're told Astronomers have measured the temperature of one of Uranus’s rings, dubbed Epsilon, for the first time. The result: the cluster of ice and rock is a nippy 77 kelvin.…

If you've dreamed of advancing human obsolescence, your time is at hand Facebook's software can't catch all the vile content uploaded to its servers by its addicts, which is why the multibollion-dollar antisocial network relies on relatively poorly paid contractors, who work in living hell, to cleanse its pages.…

Can't spell SupportAssist without 'ass' and 'u' – other makers may be hit, too Dell's troubleshooting software SupportAssist, bundled with the US tech titan's home and business computers, has a security flaw that can be exploited by malware and rogue logged-in users to gain administrator powers.…

Goodbye Sex.com: Voice.com now #1 at $30m Comment This week saw the greatest sum ever paid for a domain name: Voice.com was sold in an all-cash deal for $30m to a company called Block.one, more than doubling the previous, longstanding record of $13m for Sex.com.…

Apple issues voluntary recall for godforsaken laptops, again Apple has urged its fans to stop using certain MacBook Pro models, and has issued a voluntary recall of the notebooks, after they were found to be prone to battery blazes.…

Patch released after crypto-currency biz sounded alarm The development and release of a critical Firefox security patch this week was, in part, triggered by an attempted cyber-heist of crypto-coin exchange Coinbase.…

Read this for 2 seconds. Pause 8 seconds. Read for 2 seconds. Pause 8 seconds... Video Being an early adopter can be a frustrating experience as kinks are ironed out, bugs are squashed, and interfaces are improved. It comes with the territory. However, there is simply no excuse for what General Electric (GE) has done to users of its smart light bulbs.…

More like 'SHIRK' amirite Messaging outfit Slack has finally done the deed and gone public with an initial valuation of at least $16bn.…

New release is easier to customize, better performance, complex as hell A new release of Kubernetes, version 1.15, today went live with 25 enhancements including support for go modules in Kubernetes Core, a new Events API in alpha and High Availability (HA) improvements.…

We're honestly not making this up Autonomy Trial A former HP senior director told London's High Court yesterday that the IT giant's post-buyout integration of British software firm Autonomy was referred to internally as a "shit show".…

The 'd' in dHCI is for 'disaggregated' HPE has generated a third hyperconverged system from its acquired Nimble Storage tech, providing yet another ProLiant server route to market.…

You need to rifle through my photos why, exactly? Regulators and campaign groups have warned a UK Parliamentary inquiry that the increasing collection, use and storage of data by corporations poses a serious risk to privacy and security.…

Or you could run it on-premises three times cheaper says University of Cambridge bod Descartes Labs, an outfit that analyses big data, has managed to nab the 136th spot on the top 500 list of the world's fastest publicly known supercomputers – with $5,000 and an Amazon Web Services (AWS) account.…

Think of the children (and our revenues)! plead Dell, HP, Intel and Microsoft US tech giants Dell, HP, Intel and Microsoft have submitted a plea to have laptops and tablets excluded from the tariffs imposed by the US government on Chinese imports.…

CEO talks of 'more pain', 'substantial losses' in Mobile amid industry-wide handset sales meltdown Beleaguered retailer Dixons Carphone has warned of "more pain" and "substantial losses" in its mobile business in the year to come after reporting a sharp fall in group profits for fiscal '19 ended 27 April.…

It looks like your OS goes out of support in seven months. Would you like a new browser? The Edge gang has finally grafted versions of Microsoft's take on Chromium into Windows 7, 8 and 8.1.…

One-third of network dependent on Chinese kit maker Interview Vodafone's CTO has urged the government to release the results of its delayed telecoms supply chain review, so that it can get the green light for use of Chinese supplier Huawei in its non-core 5G network.…

Let's hope it goes better than the Comet 67P mission, eh? The European Space Agency is embarking on a new mission to a faraway comet floating on the outer edges of the Solar System that is yet to be discovered.…

Update: Ministry of Fun admits somebody forgot to tell the EU The British government is expected to announce an indefinite delay to its controversial legislation requiring age verification from porn users.…

'Why use a copy when the original is free, proven and battle-tested?' Google is planning to reimplement parts of libcurl, a widely used open-source file transfer library, as a wrapper for Chromium's networking API – but curl's lead developer does not welcome the "competition".…

Same digit could be extended at Google as browser chaps 'evaluate the situation' Amid Google's huffing and puffing over ad blockers, an update to Chromium-based browser Vivaldi puts privacy squarely in its sights.…

A tired Ren Zhengfei'll seek read-and-write heads Analysis If the US persists with Huawei's inclusion on its tech export block list, the Chinese firm's storage array production could be hit hard, effectively leaving it scrambling for components after the reprieve ends in August.…

New cloud services woven into portfolio NetApp has wrapped up Elements HCI and the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) into its Data Fabric en route to building a hybrid multi-cloud orchestration or operating system.…

YMMV – and the second M is doing a lot of heavy lifting, here Analysis YouTube is understood to use machine-learning algorithms to identify copyrighted material in user-uploaded videos, so that, in theory at least, any artists featured are properly compensated for their work. This system works more or less, though it is not without its controversies.…

Meanwhile, database giant preps free as-a-service program to entice developers Database giant Oracle beat market expectations for its fiscal Q4 2019 and FY 2019 financial results, reporting $11.1bn in quarterly revenues and $39.5bn for the full year.…

Senator urges NIST to do something about it Influential US Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) is not happy about Uncle Sam's employees using insecure .zip files and other archive formats to electronically transfer information.…

Plus: MongoDB crams end-to-end crypto into database tech Google on Wednesday released source code for a project called Private Join and Compute that allows two parties to analyze and compare shared sets of data without revealing the contents of each set to the other party.…

Ajit Pai turns logic on its head while doing Big Cable's bidding America's broadband watchdog, the FCC, has unveiled its latest harebrained effort to boost the availability of internet access across the nation: restrict competition.…

Tech giant Tyco finally settles for $5m with 'stiffed' staff Tyco Electronics – a multi-billion-dollar manufacturer of sensors, connectors, and other rugged equipment for defense, aerospace, automotive, IT, and similar industries – has agreed to cough up millions to workers who claimed they were stiffed over lunchtime pay.…

Emergency security fix emitted for remote code exec hole exploited in the wild Oracle has issued an emergency critical update to address a remote code execution vulnerability in its WebLogic Server component for Fusion Middleware – a flaw miscreants are exploiting in the wild to hijack systems.…

When is semi-annual not semi-annual? Never mind that - check out our WAC, SAC and um... never mind Microsoft continued its rich tradition of baffling users with its release dates by dropping a fresh build of the semi-annual channel edition of Windows Server vNext unlikely to actually hit until next year.…

CEO: Stitching together customer profiles in real time is the game-changer Price increase or new customers? That was the question analysts quizzed Adobe on last night as subscription profits swelled in Q2 ended 31 May – the response from its chief bean counter was "both".…

Mountain View's white stuff used more than Azure among 7,000 code monkeys Coders use Google Cloud Platform (GCP) more than Microsoft Azure, though Amazon Web Services (AWS) has a comfortable lead, according to a Developer Ecosystem survey conducted by tools vendor JetBrains.…

Ugh. Fly In, again? Really? And step away from the Comic Sans Microsoft PowerPoint is set to strip away the last vestiges of humanity from presentations with tweaks to its Designer functionality and a coach to help users "deliver the perfect presentation".…

Collaboration software hot with investors Mattermost, the open-source take on enterprise instant messengers like Slack and Teams, has trousered an impressive $50m in funding, less than five months after pocketing a cool $20m.…

Office of the Inspector General brings lab back down to Earth NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab still has "multiple IT security control weaknesses" that expose "systems and data to exploitation by cyber criminals", despite cautions earlier this year.…

PaaS the parcel: Click-and-forget fortification of Redmond's cloud Those suffering sphincter-tightening terror when opening a port to their VMs have been soothed by Microsoft in the form of Azure Bastion.…

Verify not mentioned in list of Government Digital Service man's 'achievements' The boss of the gaffe-prone Government Digital Service, Kevin Cunnington, is leaving to head the newly created International Government Service – presumably to tell the rest of the world how to talk a lot about digital while actually doing very little.…

Privacy browser reckons personalised advertising = personal data processing Lawyers for the privacy-focused Brave browser have written to the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) with what they claim is evidence that Google's online ad-selling policies break the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) – namely Article 5(1)(f).…

Tick, tick, boom? Column Last year I bought one of those nifty new fitness tracker wristwatches. It counts my steps and gives a me bit of a thrilling buzz on when I've reached my daily goal. A small thing, but it means a lot.…

And guess who picks up the bill Comment A government database intended to store the personal details of around 150,000 drone fliers is set to cost around £4m plus to buy and £2.8m to maintain – despite a similar database costing Defra just £300k a year.…

Going underground, where the servers are caged and there's water around Feature Parisian cloud and web-hosting outfit Scaleway invited The Register to poke around an underground data centre last week as part of the company's inaugural ScaleDay shindig.…

Agenda revealed – get your tickets today for November conference Event We’re thrilled to announce the first tranche of conference speakers for Serverless Computing London, which will return to the UK capital from November 6 to 8.…