The Register

Dying OS abandoned by carers Comment Although Microsoft officially supports Windows 10 Mobile, each update breaks new things – and it has reached comical proportions. Or tragic, if you're still using it.…

Faces off with Intel's Optane, says product bod Western Digital has been using software to turn SSDs into virtual memory so applications are accelerated without having to deploy DRAM or be constrained by memory capacity.…

As UK and Ireland user survey suggests awareness of 4-year-old S/4HANA finally on the up German giant SAP has slurped up "experience management" biz Qualtrics for a cool €8bn cash after reportedly persuading the firm not to IPO.…

CLL19 blind bird ticket offer expires soon Do you want to tap into the most up to date knowledge on DevOps, Containers, Agile and Continuous Delivery, and do it in the most cost-effective way you can. Well it sounds like what you really need is a blind bird ticket for Continuous Lifecycle London 2019.…

Critics warn it's complex and off-putting for international firms Critics have complained that the UK government's proposed digital services tax is complex, confusing and off-putting for international business.…

Damn, your expectations for fiscal '18 were that low? Dell Corporation's UK wing has reported a net profit of £22.77m on a turnover of £1.556bn, according to Profit and Loss accounts (PDF) for fiscal '18 filed with Companies House.…

Scrap the HiCrap and UI, and we'd have a winner Review When, four years ago, I predicted Huawei was coming to eat Apple and Samsung's lunch, derision swiftly followed. Either it couldn't, or it would take a very long time. For years, Japanese and Korean cars were nasty little tin cans, jokes on wheels, remember?…

Probably the best database recovery in the world Who, Me? The days are drawing in and the mornings are getting darker – so why not take a dose of Who, Me? to help lighten up your day.…

But don't expect one in your mobile phone any time soon British boffins have developed a self-contained and tamper-proof compass that doesn't rely on GPS signals to provide a highly accurate measure of where it is in the world.…

The week's other news in machine learning Roundup Hello, here is a very quick roundup of this week's AI goodies you may have missed.…

Loads of bonus infosec news for your weekend Roundup This week we had broken promises in China, broken keys in Steam, and broken ..err, everything in Apache Struts.…

So there is fife on Mars? Video Scientists in England have documented the five thousandth sunrise spied by NASA’s Opportunity rover in the form of interpretive dance music.…

Would-be bomber thrown in the cooler for six and a half years A 43-year-old fella has been sentenced to six and a half years in prison for attempted murder – after sending a bomb to a British cryptocoin firm over its failure to reset his account password.…

Sorry kids, it was patched weeks ago by Valve A bloke has told how he discovered a bug in Valve's Steam marketplace that could have been exploited by thieves to steal game license keys and play pirated titles.…

Big Red sends its regards Support biz Rimini Street's net losses have skyrocketed to $48.4m in the latest quarter as a result of debt payoffs.…

We don't need no server cluster, we don't need no power controls The headmaster in China is in hot water after being caught using his school to house a crypto-mining operation.…

I'm best, you're worst, cries telecoms watchdog man If you ever had any doubt that the triumvirate of FCC Commissioners – the Pai Men – who decide America's federal telecoms policy are always right, it was confirmed Friday.…

Tens of users inconvenienced Microsoft has thrown gasoline on its quality-assurance dumpster fire by disabling the Mail and Calendar apps on some of its Lumia Windows 10 Phone devices.…

Look Ma, no not much malware! Google has claimed to have cut Android malware by half.…

Aw heck. Put away the party poppers. The storage is soldered to the board The once humble Mac Mini has received the iFixit treatment following its long overdue 2018 refresh, and the verdict? The dinky box might just be the most repairable machine in the whole line-up.…

Plus: Burned by licence issues? ReactOS promises a retro world with no activation servers Windows 10 Autumnwatch continued this week as licences got tossed on the bonfire and then hastily retrieved while Santa’s elves wondered what to install on their Arm laptops.…

Electronic fingerprints put in verifiable ledger Seagate and IBM are using IBM's blockchain tech to verify a disk drive's authenticity using its electronic fingerprint.…

Everything within reach on oversized phones Samsung has embarked on a tasteful overhaul of how its phones look and work.…

Oh, and IETF standards got sloshed this week Roundup Cisco admins, you thought your week was over, right? Sorry: if you have kit that runs Adaptive Security Appliance software or the Firepower Extensible Operating System, there's one more item on the task list: updating your certificate.…

Physicians call for increased use of tech for outpatients in England The pressures the NHS in England and Wales is under, with creaking IT systems that aren't fit for purpose but which are facing the increasing tightening of purse-strings, have been laid bare in two reports.…

And the chairman is Not Happy At All about that The times, they are a-changin’ at flailing ZX Spectrum reboot biz Retro Computers Ltd as two of the firm’s original directors have rejoined it – with a furious chairman insisting this is “illegal”.…

Strengthen your defences against marauding data thieves Promo The internet is full of powerful hacking tools and the cyber criminals are devising ever more ingenious ways of using them. Keeping abreast of their latest tactics and techniques is more vital than ever for those defending their organisations against ever-present threats.…

Net metrics collectors ping performance pain points in a multi-cloud world Sending packets from Singapore to Mumbai over AWS? Fetch a coffee, the latency is horrible – according to cloud performance data released yesterday.…

'Size isn't everything, it's how you decorate it' Yeah, yeah, "It's November, I don't want to hear the C word until the 24th of December" and so on – tell that to the denizens of Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, who have been left feeling cold after the arguably premature erection of the town's Christmas tree.…

Fear not, Apple fanbois, they're also running Macintosh Boatnotes The Royal Navy is running Windows ME – and XP, and even an early version of Apple Macintosh. But all is not as alarmingly obsolete as it may appear.…

Particularly when those projects overrun and overspend Slicing police funding to inject cash into national programmes – a big chunk of which is funnelled into tech – might not be an effective use of public cash, and some projects face a cliff edge when funding runs out.…

Infosec's cool uncle says to hell with the carrot Any sort of lasting security standard in IoT devices may only happen if governments start doling out stiff penalties.…

Together, let us help the wolves regulate the sheep Sir Tim Berners-Lee is doing the dirty work of giant internet companies, according to critics who want to see governments lay down effective regulation – and not what they regard as a wishy-washy "Magna Carta".…

But no more Bradford Exchange collector plates, I beg you Something for the Weekend, Sir? Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens. Internal hard drives with dust, fluff and shit on. Bundles of CAT5 all tangled like string. These are some of my least favourite things.…

Father of Jenkins, Kohsuke Kawaguchi, talks Sun, software and secret sauce Interview The father of popular code pipeline Jenkins has big plans for its future while admitting that it owes its existence to his habit of introducing bugs to code.…

Wins biz the contract, and earns bottle of wine to boot On Call Have you got that Friday feeling? Well, you should, because it's just hours away from the weekend and we've got another great Reg reader story in this week's On Call.…

Our gentle introduction to mixing on- and off-prem kit Backgrounder Where once it was public, now hybrid cloud is the future – and by hybrid, we mean a mix of public and private. Virtualised, elastic, and on-demand resources hosted by someone else combined with on-premises infrastructure.…

Beijing Institute of Technology launches a new programme to further defense interests A top Chinese university has recruited a select group of whizkids straight from high school to develop new AI weapons.…

Luckily no one else spotted flaw before we did, say infosec bods who reported vuln Chinese drone giant DJI has fixed a critical security hole that left its customer account data and quadcopter videos potentially up for grabs.…

I liked it so much, I bought the company – and fired 40 per cent, 2,000, of its US staff Broadcom has confirmed to The Register that staff have been axed in its just-acquired CA Technologies business, though declined to reveal numbers.…

IBM's latest tape drives make 2EB-plus library feasible Spectra Logic's TFinity ExaScale tape library can store more than 2EB of compressed data, 2,000 petabytes-plus, using IBM's latest TS1160 tape drives and JE cartridges, double what it could store before.…

Everything little thing Xi does is magic, everything Xi do just turns me intrusion alarms on Three years after the governments of America and China agreed not to hack corporations in each other's countries, experts say Beijing is now back to its old ways.…

Brace for cost, job cutting in the aftermath Network infrastructure giant CommScope has decided to buy some growth, shelling out US$7.4bn (£5.67bn) for broadband and video gear slinger Arris International.…

Don't mess with second-hand tome peddlers Amazon has backed down from a growing dispute with secondhand booksellers, in an almost unprecedented act of reasonable behavior from the online behemoth.…

Mega-hacks nudge Congress to consider privacy standard The rash of high-profile IT security breaches, data thefts, and other hacks that have erupted over the last year or so may push US legislators to consider laws similar to Europe's privacy-protecting GDPR.…

Net neutrality probe finds it's not the end of the world, though Analysis US cellphone networks are all throttling video to some extent, providing lower-quality stream to their customers, and some are purposefully undermining Skype as an alternative to their services.…

Meanwhile, SpaceX forges ahead with BFR, pretty chill A third Soyuz was successfully launched yesterday, effectively clearing the way for crewed operations to resume, while the results of the US midterms may have unfortunate consequences for NASA.…

CEO apologizes following mass walkout by Googlers, then bungles justification for censored Chinese search Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Thursday announced internal policy changes in an attempt to address employee demands. This comes after thousands of Googlers walked out last week over executives' handling of sex pests and sexual assault within the ad giant.…

Watchdog tells manufacturers to reveal what they slurp on tots Connected toy makers should make clear what data they slurp up, the UK's Office of the Children's Commissioner has said in a report warning of the long-term impact of amassing data on kids.…

Full teardown necessary should butterfly keyboard need service The team at iFixit took a screwdriver set to Apple's refreshed MacBook Air and found it a step in the right direction for repairability.…