The Register

Enjoy the silence... while you still can Something for the Weekend, Sir? Your safe, cosy home is to become a place of weeping and gnashing of teeth. Don't worry, this is quite normal. It's how you will communicate with your next-generation smart devices.…

Serverless Computing London 2019: Blind bird ticket offer ends soon Whether you're planning your first foray into Functions, are ready to get your initial Lambda experiments into production, or want to take your current FaaS set-up to the next level, you should join us at our Serverless Computing London conference.…

Actually forget the yoga, sea of suits better attend biz sessions. And no pesky kids this time plz Balinese people – especially those in hospitality – are advised to boff up on IBM protocol of not daring to look at, talk to or share toilet space with top execs before the crew descends on the island in May.…

Bruce Vs Sheila: The Floppy Disk Files On Call It is with great pleasure that El Reg welcomes you once more to On Call, your weekly dose of tech support traumas and triumphs.…

After all these political shenanigans, a one-way trip to the Red Planet doesn't sound so bad While Mars looks like a sterile, bleak, and dry wasteland, pockets of salty water may lie deep beneath that rust-colored dust, according to a paper published Thursday in Nature Geoscience.…

One binary to rule them all Mozilla this week announced a project called WASI (WebAssembly System Interface) to standardize how WebAssembly code interacts with operating systems. If the project succeeds, it will do what Oracle's Java Virtual Machine does, but better and more broadly.…

Immersive training courses will help you keep your networks and data safe Promo With cyber-attacks on the rise and constantly taking new forms, organisations rely more than ever on skilled IT security staff who can detect and deal with vulnerabilities in their systems.…

Dying space rock spurts out twin streams of debris Pic The Hubble Space Telescope has captured a rare moment of an asteroid breaking apart, leaving trails of glittering dust in its wake.…

'Hoarder' faces up to nine years in the clink for harvesting Uncle Sam's top secrets Ex-NSA contractor Harold Martin has admitted he took home piles of top-secret US government reports and other materials, contrary to security rules and basic common sense.…

POGO says no-go on money-pit jet fighter The F-35 aircraft remains woefully unprepared against malware infections and other cyber-attacks, according to POGO – the respected non-profit watchdog Project on Government Oversight.…

Nah, of course we're not in favor of vigilante malware knackering people's PCs Hacktivists are spreading booby-trapped copies of the New Zealand mass shooter's Islamophobic rantings, in what is being described as an online "vigilante" operation.…

Google security engineer emits SR20 PoC exploit after manufacturer fails to respond TP-Link's all-in-one SR20 Smart Home Router allows arbitrary command execution from a local network connection, according to a Google security researcher.…

Big win for Renée James' crew Cloud provider Packet has upgraded its most powerful Arm-based servers with 32-core CPUs from Ampere – a plucky startup led by former Intel president Renée James.…

Brad Anderson talks going native and attaching electrodes to journalists Interview We formally bumped into Brad Anderson, Microsoft's corporate veep of Enterprise Experiences, at the software giant's London offices recently amid excited spurtings about the Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) and the newly de-Windowed Microsoft Defender.…

It's not a great look for the home of GDPR, y'know MEPs have urged the Council of the European Union and the bloc's data protection board to take action against cookies following a report about widespread use of commercial trackers on EU websites.…

Hyperscaler demand for colo space growing in double digits Rather than eating into colocation providers' revenues, public cloud vendors have emerged as their fastest-growing customer category.…

WTF? And the screen is on the outside... Chinese tat bazaar Xiaomi has emitted another teaser video for its foldable phone, confirming that vendors are taking different design approaches to the challenge.…

Hyperconverged infrastructure in an itty-bitty box Cisco has buddied up with with Schneider Electric on a range of reference designs for micro data centres, featuring its HyperFlex hyperconverged infrastructure appliances.…

Tech trio put Accenture, EY, WPP on advisory council for 'Open Data Initiative' Organisations that fancy pushing data from Adobe, Microsoft and SAP platforms into a single data lake will soon be able to – and it won't just be on Azure – the firms have said.…

Greenock, bonnie Scotland, ladies and gentlemen Tis a dowie day whin a swan cannae donder doon th' wynd wi'oot bein' pestered by th' polis.…

HCSEC pulls no technical punches in annual report Britain's Huawei oversight board has said the Chinese company is a threat to British national security after all – and some existing mobile network equipment will have to be ripped out and replaced to get rid of said threat.…

Peter Thiel's firm said to have won face-off against Raytheon Trump fan Peter Thiel's data-mining biz Palantir has reportedly won a lucrative US Army contract, prising it out of the hands of established defence supplier Raytheon.…

Maybe they're just smart enough... Don't panic, the Glassholes aren't returning. We think.…

Solve tricky maths in a fraction of the time... supposedly Canadian startup D-Wave Systems has extended the availability of its Leap branded cloud-based quantum computing service to Europe and Japan.…

Hilary Mason: Agile 'doesn't work for research', we need to build 'network' workflow Interview Data science as a profession has a lot of maturing to do, with workflows up to a decade behind those of software engineers and tools that make collaboration hard, according to Cloudera's general manager for machine learning.…

San Jose peeps tout distance-killing file data access California networking startup Vcinity said this week that its networking products shunted a petabyte of data 7,000km in under 24 hours, providing access to remote files thousands of kilometres away with a 250ms round trip time.…

Chinese kit slinger was told of UPnP flaw in 2013, didn't do too much about it Exclusive Huawei bungled its response to warnings from an ISP's code review team about a security vulnerability common across its home routers – patching only a subset of the devices rather than all of its products that used the flawed firmware.…

Watch this science friction in action Video Researchers claim to have trained an autonomous vehicle to drive as well as an amateur race-car driver, a skill set that could be used to build safer artificially intelligent motorists, in theory.…

Action packed day offers training, networking with over 12,000 people Promo Whether you are still considering a move to the cloud or already a seasoned user, you should find plenty to interest you at the AWS Summit London on Wednesday, 8 May, 2019.…

Big Red makes its case to America's highest court that... there's no case to hear Oracle has filed its formal response to Google's plea in January for the US Supreme Court to review the two tech goliaths' long-running war over Java, Android, APIs, and copyright.…

Tech support outfits settle out of court after allegations of bogus infection symptoms to extract repair charges Office Depot and Support.com have coughed up $35m after they were accused of lying to people that their PCs were infected with malware in order to charge them cleanup fees.…

Oh no, these patches kinda blow, go go Switchzilla! Just as Cisco is looking to close up more than two-dozen security flaws in networking boxes, researchers are claiming a set of previously-issued patches are failing to work properly.…

CTO Vogels on phishing emails: 'There is always an idiot who clicks that link' Amazon devs and users are gathering in Silicon Valley as Amazon Web Services hosts its AWS Santa Clara Summit '19 on Wednesday and the former book vendor used the event to announce a veritable cornucopia of new stuff.…

If claims are true, someone in HR is going to be getting their marching papers... shame IBM is once again facing legal action in America after ditching staffers over the age of 40.…

Dodgy accounting? Not according to KPMG due dil – barrister Autonomy Trial Hewlett Packard crashed Mike Lynch’s thriving Brit software biz Autonomy into the ground after buying it, the former Autonomy CEO’s barrister told the High Court today.…

Assuming you can actually install 19H1, as the test build is yanked from the Slow Ring With the next release of Windows 10 looming, adoption of October's Update of the Damned remains woefully low, according to figures from AdDuplex.…

And it bombarded the British PM with personal phone calls Autonomy Trial HP furiously lobbied key British government ministers in late 2012 as part of a desperate effort to "preserve the credibility" of CEO Meg Whitman after its $8.8bn writedown of Autonomy – including direct phone calls to the then-UK Prime Minister David Cameron, London's High Court learned this morning.…

Analyst revises forecast ... further down Top UK pop-pickers CCS Insight have predicted that smartphone demand will decline 3 per cent this year, the latest in a flurry of gloomy forecasts.…

... but a great storage appliance, which is the point, says CTO Phil Straw Storage startup SoftIron has launched three products designed to make it easier to deploy Ceph – a free software storage platform that supports block, object and file storage.…

10 million IOPS and counting Huawei has been knocked off its position at the top of the SPC-1 storage benchmark rankings by Fujitsu, with a 10 million IOPS+ array blowing away Huawei's 7 million IOPS OceanStor.…

Most of the internet: Yikes Google, keen to join the ranks of megabucks firms aiming to convince punters they take the immoral use of their tech seriously, has launched an ethics advisory council with what it terms "diverse" perspectives.…

Will track parts, vehicles and suck up data from the factory floor Volkswagen has thrown its lot in with Amazon Web Services to float a cloud that will suck up data from the scandal-struck car maker's 122 manufacturing plants and systems to manage the effectiveness of assembly kit.…

CRM biz accused of knowingly helping epic rise of abuse website Backpage Salesforce, self-appointed ethical champion of the US West Coast, is facing down a lawsuit that alleges it was embroiled in the Backpage.com sex-trafficking scandal.…

Security exec bemoans impact of cuts, confirms women in cyber recruitment scheme axed Efforts to lure, evolve and hold on to staff are proving quite troublesome for DXC Technology's Security practice as the beleaguered outsourcing biz continues to wage war on its cost base.…

Flawless applications are for time-rich people with endless cash Opinion With Boeing's 737 Maxes grounded and its MCAS anti-stall software being patched, a high-intensity spotlight has been shone on the issue of software reliability. But putting aside whether Boeing's software is ultimately shown to be a risk factor, for some years now the industry has been sleepwalking into a tacit acceptance of unreliable software.…

Switchzilla touts advanced analytics, automation Promo Protecting your network from a barrage of assaults by brand-new as well as tried-and-tested methods of attack is increasingly challenging.…

Every new phone is a hard sell in 2019. Will photo stunts be enough? Comment In a saturated, stagnating smartphone market, Huawei now spends immense resources on publicity to gain attention – not once but twice a year. Yesterday in Paris saw 3,200 – including The Register – attend the launch of the P30 models, with over 2,000 of us witnessing some impressive imaging pyrotechnics not seen on smartphones before.…

Sales execution, product packaging, non-cloud-centric customers don't help Analysis Ambitious online file-silo boxer Box can't enter the heavyweight enterprise content management (ECM) championships because its core platform is too skinny to cope.…

Physics undergrad tells El Reg how she developed planet-spotting machine-learning code Machine-learning algorithms have been used to uncover two previously unseen exoplanets in the archive of data amassed by NASA’s retired Kepler space telescope.…

'We're also racing against our worst enemy' says President Trump's straight man – but who could that be? President Donald Trump wants NASA astronauts to return to the Moon by 2024 “by any means necessary,” Vice President Mike Pence thundered on Tuesday.…