The Register

From the creators of Apache Spark, comes a new tale of friendship and imagination American startup Databricks, established by the original authors of the Apache Spark framework, has launched an open source project designed to solve the reliability issues plaguing data swamps – those huge (cess)pools of raw corporate data that are supposed to deliver value from analytics.…

Net income halved as antisocial network preps for big slap Facebook's financial figures for its first quarter of 2019, published Wednesday, had an interesting twist.…

Unsealed warrant in Massachusetts adds to growing privacy debate Analysis A US judge gave the cops permission to force people's fingers onto seized iPhones to see who could unlock them, a newly unsealed search warrant has revealed.…

Two weeks and no sign of a proper solution, Avast and McAfee affected, too Updated Unlucky Sophos antivirus users face a dilemma: either uninstall the software, or install April's Windows security fixes. That's because having both in place at the same time will bork their machines.…

Container biz cuddles with chip whiz in quest for kismet Container wunderkind Docker and chip architecture scribblers Arm on Wednesday said they are working together to help make containerized apps comfortable on Arm hardware.…

Plans to hire 15k heads in R&D and production, taking on TSMC in contract manufacturing Samsung Electronics will plough Won133tn (£116bn, $155bn) over the next 11 years to develop its logic chip business and boost manufacturing lines to produce those non-memory processors to order for other corporations.…

Aging awful art app to remain in May 2019 OS upgrade after its, wait for it, wait for it... brush with death For anyone upset about the fate of doomed art application Microsoft Paint, bundled with Windows for as long as we can remember, here's something to set your mind at easel.…

Huawei was just the beginning While some governments obsess about Huawei, the impending launch of 5G is giving lesser-known Chinese upstarts a hope of cracking elusive Western smartphone markets – as Oppo demonstrated today in Zurich.…

Venture with a vengeance US-based start-up investor Clear Ventures has set up a second fund to bankroll businesses that deal with the ridiculously nebulous notion of the fourth industrial revolution.…

Mind the gap You'd think a forensic teardown of the first commercially available foldable smartphone – the Samsung Galaxy Fold – may be less challenging than most, given the device's propensity to do it itself.…

If we all chip in, we can help secure old Blighty Cyber UK 2019 "We're talking about how to design telecoms systems properly for the long term," National Cyber Security Centre CEO Ciaran Martin told press at UK.gov's infosec event in Glasgow today. "That is a bigger and sometimes different issue from the Chinese."…

Qualtrics slurp and restructure aren't making any money yet SAP's cloud biz is ballooning, but aggressive restructuring efforts and charges related to the recent $8bn buy of Qualtrics have resulted in an operating loss of €136m for Q1 of its fiscal 2019.…

GCHQ U-turns, wants Joe Public onside as well as industry Cyber UK 2019 GCHQ's director-general has called for more public trust in the controversial British spy agency.…

If you ever wanted to write an extension for Microsoft's long-dead media hub, you can One of the original managers of the Microsoft's ill-fated Windows Media Center has made the SDK available on GitHub.…

UK Lords cite 'irresponsible rhetoric' and communication as factors. Sound familiar? Never mind the climate, things are looking decidedly dicey on the nuke front, according to the UK's House of Lords.…

Commander-in-chief whined about waning e-peen – report When the "leader of the free world" hauled Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey into the White House for a meeting yesterday, you would be forgiven for thinking they'd attempt to address the issues that have bedevilled social media of late – bots, disinformation, unsolicited DMs, Nazis...…

Now Samsung wants its samples back Analysis So. Gartner was right to be cautious about the foldable phone after all. Samsung has postponed the 3 May launch of the Galaxy Fold handset, and now Reuters reports that the Korean giant wants all the samples back.…

Database biz shifted its assets to another biz mid-trial In January last year, after four years of litigation, a former Oracle sales rep in Qatar won a lawsuit against the database giant to collect unpaid sales commission.…

USBs and SD cards can result in a drive-letter switcheroo Fans of the underused and little-known technology mostly referred to as "external storage" have found themselves blocked from installing the Windows 10 May 2019 Update.…

But only on the edge, Chinese giant not trusted in the core Britain will allow Huawei infrastructure kit on 5G mobile networks, according to reports, but not into the core of those networks, which is where UK spies fear Chinese backdoors exists.…

Astroboffins rejoice over tiny rumblings underground Video NASA’s InSight lander has detected seismic waves on Mars for the first time and the space agency is letting everyone else listen in too.…

Quick summary as your morning coffee brews Roundup You're busy. We're busy... looking busy. Here's a quick catch up on this week's chip news for you.…

Teen loses driving permit, gets wrongly linked to spate of thefts A teenager is suing Apple in the US for $1bn, claiming he was misidentified as a thief by a mysterious facial-recognition system in the iGiant's stores.…

Rental firm fuming after consultancy 'never delivered a functional site or mobile app' Car rental giant Hertz is suing over a website redesign from hell.…

Meanwhile, the only pro-privacy proposal gets quietly pulled Analysis The right for Californians to control the private data that tech companies hold on them may be undermined today at a critical committee hearing in Sacramento.…

TLS 1.3, speedups, reduced memory overhead, and more Node.js, the popular JavaScript runtime that relies on the Chrome V8 JavaScript engine, hit version 12 on Tuesday, bringing with a handful of potentially useful features and capabilities.…

Yes, converged infrastructure model is still a thing Dell EMC and Cisco have renewed the dark pact under which the two collaborated on converged infrastructure (CI) products for a decade.…

Is it a nerd? Is it a control plane? No, it's... SuperSSD Israeli NVMe/TCP pioneer Lightbits finally showed up to the all-flash array market today with an Ethernet-attached SSD appliance – the imaginatively named SuperSSD.…

NASA schedules walloped, Cynus launches, and Owen Garriott's final voyage Roundup It has been an eventful past seven days in space what with SpaceX making a big cloud o' orange smoke, Cygnus docking, and veteran astronaut Owen Garriott taking his final journey into the black.…

Ministers can't tell Ofcom to ignore the law after all UK comms regulator Ofcom can't be ordered to ignore its legal duties, the High Court has ruled, paving the way for GSM gateway operators to claim compensation after Home Office ministers and mandarins destroyed their businesses.…

The 'E' is for 'Ersatz' US network operators Sprint and AT&T remain coy about the details of a 5G ceasefire they have just agreed.…

Residents' scheme flags up scourge of lazy dog owners Is there anything more triumphantly British than fields strewn with dog toffee? Well, there is now: fields strewn with dog toffee with Union Jacks proudly planted in them.…

iPhone maker set to feed competitor even more dollars over the next five years Apple has been identified as one of the largest customers of Amazon Web Services, splashing tens of millions of dollars each month on public cloud infrastructure supplied by its rival.…

Plus: Windows 10 May 2019 Update on MSDN, Surface Hub 2S has a trolley Roundup Last week was all about Windows as Surface Hub 2 crept closer to availability and Windows 10 arrived on MSDN. But the Easter Bunny didn't deliver Sets this year.…

Giffgaff tops satisfaction ratings, Vodafone brings up the rear Updated Cheapo MVNOs have again scored far higher than the UK's big four mobile networks in Which? magazine's customer satisfaction ratings.…

3 variants become 2 with lower latency and just the one format Updated Micron has replaced its U.2 and AIC-format 9200 SSDs with an U.2-only 9300 line, beefing up capacities from 11TB to up to 15.36TB.…

One-day event promises to cover all angles Promo Whether you are an experienced techie or a newbie still mulling over the prospect of venturing onto the cloud, there will be plenty to sink your teeth into at the Amazon Web Services Summit taking place on 8 May at London’s ExCel.…

Platinum-class MRAM exchange bias is the key Taiwanese spintronics boffins have made an important finding in magnetic random access memory (MRAM) tech: a faster way to switch MRAM states by using a nanometre scale layer of platinum.…

...and here's a quick summary of what's been going down in infosec land Roundup Welcome back, Brits, from your Easter break – assuming you weren't working or on-call over the four-day weekend.…

Help! Help! We're being held prisoner in a software factory! A protest by tech employees in China over the expectation of 72-hour work weeks has this week attracted the support of 30 workers from Microsoft and its GitHub subsidiary.…

Uncle Sam wants to run fliers' fizogs through photo databases by 2023 Water cooler Hey El Reg, help me out with this. I saw someone on Twitter complaining that she had to have her face scanned by US airline JetBlue before flying overseas from America. Why would they be doing this?…

Good bye to Nvidia, hello to the Samsung-fabbed FSD Tesla claims to have built a "fully self driving" (FSD) system using custom-designed math processors, allowing its vehicles to potentially drive themselves completely autonomously.…

Mastermind of armed snatch that went rather wrong is found guilty, awaits sentencing A 26-year-old internet entrepreneur faces up to 20 years behind bars in America, and a potential $250,000 fine, after attempt to steal a really not-very-good domain name.…

Plus: Employee diversity, harassment brouhahas within Microsoft, Google Special report Three of the five people axed from JavaScript package management biz NPM Inc last month claim bosses got rid of them for trying to form a union.…

You've got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk away, and know when to run Samsung has confirmed that its dual-screen Galaxy Fold handset, which was due to go on sale for $1,980 apiece this week in the US, has been delayed due to the touchscreen easily breaking.…

Sh*t! Sh*t sh*t sh*t Who, Me? Welcome once more to Who, Me? where readers share their panic-inducing moments of tech support cock-ups.…

'I regret these actions and accept full responsibility for my mistakes' Marcus Hutchins, the British security researcher who shot to fame after successfully halting the Wannacry ransomware epidemic, has pleaded guilty to crafting online bank-account-raiding malware.…

Boffins from Belgium break people recognition software with a colorful placard A trio of Belgium-based boffins have created a ward that renders wearers unrecognizable to software trained to detect people.…

Researcher disturbed at availability of very personal data More than two years of billing records from a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center were made freely available on the internet, a security researcher has discovered.…

Rideshare company lied about market share, claim investors Rideshare company Lyft has been hit with two class action lawsuits by investors who claim the company lied about its market share.…