The Register

El Reg vulture gets his claws into Canonical's latest OS Ubuntu 18.10 is about to make its scheduled appearance: Cosmic Cuttlefish will take centre stage from previous incumbent, Bionic Beaver.…

Firmware update fingered for draining power as folks sleep Samsung Gear smartwatch owners are complaining the batteries in their strap-on gizmos are mysteriously and rapidly draining overnight – and it's only just started happening.…

He tells investigators: 'I was hacked!' Microsoft's former director of sports marketing has been indicted on five counts of wire fraud, based on allegations that he created fake invoices to defraud the software giant and sold its property as his own.…

Thrown in the small house rather than the big house An Equifax executive – who knew the biz had been hacked before it was made public and banked over $75,000 in stock trades using this inside knowledge – has avoided jail.…

German ERP giant's revenues up, operating profits down A successful quarter for SAP's cloud business has been tempered by a 6 per cent drop in profits and a dip in its share price.…

Star analyst uses 2020 vision to predict macOS move Apple will abandon Intel processor chips for its Macs in favour of homegrown Arm-based chips, according to a securities analyst. Formerly at KGI, Ming-Chi Kuo of KeyBanc Capital Markets, has a strong record of reliable Apple predictions.…

Learn to love the browser instead Microsoft loves Linux. Unless you are a Linux user who happens to want to use Teams. In that case, you probably aren’t feeling the love quite so much.…

What do you get for 50 per cent more layers? Not a lot Western Digital has a 96-layer NAND chip for smartphones and has spoken of higher embedded storage capacity while seemingly delivering exactly the same capacity as before.…

National Programme for IT Mark 2? Given the track record of project failures in NHS IT, some might say that Matt Hancock - former Minister for Fun who now runs the Department of Health - is marching with ill-founded confidence towards what he describes as a “tech revolution”.…

Promises 'truly game changing consumer product'... Please, not the Clippy mobe The phone startup founded by Andy Rubin – creator of WebTV, the Sidekick and Android – has reportedly laid off 30 per cent of its staff. Essential is still in the game, but only just.…

Irish eyes won't be smiling that much – operations and taxes are staying in Blighty As the wailing and gnashing of teeth over what will become of the UK space industry in a post-Brexit world continues, British firms are sidestepping the flapping of politicians and making their own plans.…

Talks to cover oversight, enforcement, US surveillance The deal governing transatlantic data flows – branded not fit for purpose by privacy watchdogs – enters its second annual review today.…

Army short of 5,000 grunts, MPs warned The UK Ministry of Defence could terminate Capita's disastrous military IT contract following confirmation that the Recruiting Partnering Project (RPP) was 90 per cent below recruiting targets for calendar Q1.…

Or at least uninstall some of the bits you really don't want Microsoft has announced that its customers will finally be able to remove more of the cruft that arrives with a Windows 10 installation. In 2019.…

Aww, ain't that sweet Earlier this week, Arm drew Intel into its warm embrace when Chipzilla joined its Pelion IoT platform. The Softbank-owned design house has said it's now preparing to release a Linux-based OS, taking advantage of the Intel-backed Yocto Project tools.…

Oh, and the £1.1bn Airwave extension hasn't yet been triggered The fine minds behind Britain's bungled Emergency Services Network comms system have admitted that its projected £200m savings might not kick in until 2020.…

(It's good news, really) Good news, Cisco admins: there are no bugs rated “critical” in this week's batch of security patches – but there are seven that copped a “high” rating, and four of those are remotely exploitable.…

Eclipse Foundation seeks to replace the Java Community Process for Jakarta EE The Eclipse Foundation, saddled with oversight of Java EE last year after Oracle washed its hands of the thankless business of community governance, wants to revise the process by which enterprise Java – rechristened Jakarta EE when Oracle declined to grant use of its Java trademark – gets improved.…

Man-made satellite to eliminate need for street lamps Video A Chinese businessman has announced plans to light Chengdu at night by launching an artificial "moon" to direct the out-of-sight Sun's rays down onto the city's streets.…

Chocolate Factory opens lid, just a little, on secure boot and crypto phone coprocessor People in the Googleplex need to talk to each other more: the Chocolate Factory has launched a third product with “Titan” in its name, and it's only related to one of the other two bits of kit.…

'No evidence' vulnerability was abused, though, we're told Tumblr today reveal it has fixed a security bug in its website that quietly revealed private details of some of its bloggers.…

Code-hosting biz tries out a more automated delivery process Analysis At its annual developer conference on Tuesday, GitHub unveiled a way to automate software deployment workflows called Actions. It sounds rather underwhelming, given all the different automation tools available, but the executives discussing it brimmed with Apple-level enthusiasm. Sam Lambert, head of platform for GitHub, called it "truly remarkable."…

Leaky AWS S3 bucket fingered by infosec bods Now, now, America. Don't go overboard. Again.…

Grubby Grubbs' grifting days are gone A programmer who wrote and sold software that backdoored PCs so they could be remotely controlled has been jailed for 30 months – and forced to give up his stash of 114 Bitcoins.…

So. Much. Glue. Torx twirlers iFixit celebrated the release of Microsoft's Surface Pro 6 by ripping the thing apart only to find that its still pretty much unrepairable.…

They don't *seem* so different if you check digits (though your real world results may vary) Micron's consumer SSD brand Crucial has pushed out an NVMe minicard flash drive that looks almost identical to Intel's 600p.…

Cloud comms upstart touts more authentic engagement through artificial intelligence At its Signal show in San Francisco, California, today, cloud comms biz Twilio intends to debut a chatbot platform called Autopilot for creating chatty software agents suitable for integration with a variety of services, including interactive voice response (IVR) systems, SMS, chat, Alexa, Slack, and Google Assistant.…

But that's not as bad as Barbie flinger Mattel or, indeed, Oracle It has been a bumper year for Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, whose compensation soared to $25.8m in fiscal 2018. Quite a bit more than the median salary of the rest of the company, which hovered at an admittedly none-too-shabby $167,689.…

Not quite the native experience Google's shooting for Version 70 of the Chrome browser has begun to slither onto Windows 10, bringing with it Google's desktop take on Progressive Web App functionality.…

...ahem, as is 'normal in our industry' Though the wheels keep rolling at unstoppable reseller juggernaut Softcat, fuelled by a Windows 10 refresh and returning demand for servers, the CEO has voiced caution about the potential implications of Brexit.…

By servers, it means boxes that do networking, storage, security Analysis One million Arm-powered data center servers will ship in 2018, the processor design house claimed on Tuesday.…

It's playing a long game Comment Google's artful but risky response to the European Commission highlights the weakness of Brussels' strategy dealing with big Silicon Valley companies.…

Programming interfaces, threat models, and more pop up online One year on from launching its Platform Security Architecture – a recipe book and ingredients for securing Internet of Things gizmos – Arm has opened it up some more to get more manufacturers and developers involved.…

If you punt 33% pr0n or less, you're in the clear, say draft rules The UK government is bracing itself to face legal challenges when it implements controversial smut age check rules, and has said it could cost up to £10m in the first year alone.…

If this all feels rather familiar, you'd be right Analysis For a company that just four years ago vowed not to "engage in significant advertising campaigns", Huawei now puts on vast displays of wealth and technological prowess. Yesterday's extravaganza drew over 5,000 to London's Excel centre to see four new phones and two wearables, ranging from €99 to €2,099.…

Fear not! A swift sudo and your computational prayers will be answered Knickers have become ever so twisty over the last few days as fans of the diminutive Raspberry Pi computer and its Raspbian operating system noted that Mathematica had been "removed".…

Second Insider build with more fixes for 1809. Could third time be the charm? Microsoft’s efforts to recover from the Windows 10 October 2018 Update debacle continued last night as a fresh build of the troubled operating system was emitted to Windows Insiders.…

Plain text password storage? Check. Directory traversal? Check. SOHOpeless? Check Eight D-Link router variants are vulnerable to complete pwnage via a combination of security screwups, and only two are going to get patched.…

New right to appeal findings of Investigatory Powers Tribunal The British government has finally offered up its proposed changes to the way the UK's spy court operates – including the right to appeal its decisions – for approval by the country's Parliament.…

There are many mistakes you can make – learn how to avoid them from gurus Webcast For those of you who missed out on our live online broadcast on the the seven deadly sins of multi-cloud last week, fear not, a catch-up video is available now.…

Ad giant to charge for key applications amid license shakeup and antitrust fine In an effort to placate Europe's regulators furious at its anticompetitive tactics, Google has overhauled its Android licensing practices for the continent.…

Malicious code in VMs can leap over ESXi, Workstation, Fusion hypervisor security Get busy, VMware admins and users: the virtualisation virtuoso has patched a programming blunder in ESXi, Workstation Pro and Player, and Fusion and Fusion Pro products that can be exploited by malicious code to jump from guest OS to host machine.…

Hiding under an assumed name to avoid discrimination, Repairnator is unmasked Luc Escape leads a double life. The software engineer on the Spirals research team at the University of Lille in France goes by another name, Repairnator.…

Hiding under an assumed name to avoid discrimination, Repairnator is unmasked Analysis Luc Esape leads a double life. The software engineer on the Spirals research team at the University of Lille in France goes by another name, Repairnator.…

Big Blue's $18.8bn revenue falls short of expectations IBM saw its stock price take a hit Tuesday afternoon after the enterprise tech giant saw quarterly revenues miss the mark.…

Big Blue's $18.8bn revenue falls short of expectations IBM saw its stock price take a hit Tuesday afternoon after the enterprise tech giant saw quarterly revenues miss the mark.…

Nothing to do with lousy infrastructure, poor public transport etc As any Bay Area resident knows traffic is bad and getting worse, but San Francisco thinks it has found the culprit - ride-hailing companies.…

Nothing to do with lousy infrastructure, poor public transport, etc etc etc As any San Francisco Bay Area resident knows traffic is bad and getting worse, but the city's officials think they have found the culprit: ride-hailing companies.…

And you'll definitely want to check out the libssh flaw Oracle has released a wide-ranging security update to address more than 300 CVE-listed vulnerabilities in its various enterprise products.…

Social code biz makes bid to turn workflows into code At San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts on Tuesday, GitHub held its annual tech touting talk in a space that once housed the city's Exploratorium science show.…