The Register

Try being useful to customers Interview Samsung has responded to a saturated market – and the mortal threat of Huawei – by ramping up its mid-range phones and promising much more rapid repairs.…

Oh, and we need A3 sales skillz Canalys Channels Forum 2018 Spending $550m on Apogee was as much a defensive measure to stop rivals buying the print services dealer as it was to beef up its place in the copier market, HP Inc chief Dion Weisler has said.…

RPI or CPI? A percentage point really can make all the difference Can UK telco giant BT move its pension scheme increases off the RPI inflation measure and onto CPI? Earlier this year the High Court said no, but now the telco and 300,000 of its pensioners are awaiting the Court of Appeal’s verdict on this thorny question.…

Is it Project Fear? Tech trade doesn't seem to think so Canalys Channels Forum 2018 Product shortages, additional price hikes and a recession could become a reality if the UK crashes out of the European Union without any sort of trade agreement in place. This was the message that came loud and clear at this week's Canalys Channels Forum in Barcelona.…

How does a complimentary ticket sound? Events We have a limited number of complimentary tickets for Serverless Computing London next month to give away, so if you want to get up to speed on Serverless, FaaS and related technologies with us get in touch quick.…

Faulty fluoroscopes and malfunctioning monitors make for an On Call two-fer On Call It’s Friday at long last and that means it’s time for On Call, our regular trip down readers’ memory lanes.…

So says Alex... Graham... Dan... Something for the Weekend, Sir? My name is McLeod. Graham McLeod. If you're looking me up in a list, you'll find me under M as "McLeod, Graham".…

Preaching network-as-software, bidding farewell to the CLI Juniper Networks has taken the wraps off what will be one of the year's biggest efforts for the biz: the EngNet network software developer toolset and its associated education, technical exchange, APIs, training, and ecosystem.…

'Smart' home tech now only a half-accurate description Yale Security UK says it is working to restore service after some unplanned maintenance turned into a total outage on the smartphone app customers use to control their home alarms.…

Senator calls for real probe into 'Chinese-controlled' outfit The “weirdest acquisition ever” – Broadcom's $19bn proposed takeover of CA Technologies – ran into a rather strange road-bump this week: a fake US military memo passed around American politicians on Capitol Hill.…

SpaceX, Boeing running behind schedule, and don't get me started on SLS Comment Thursday's failed Soyuz launch, carrying kit and astronauts to the International Space Station means NASA is fast running out of options for shipping stuff into orbit. Especially since its homespun solutions aren't living up to their earlier promise.…

Patched server, or working server. Pick one... IBM has withdrawn a patch for a significant security vulnerability in its WebSphere Application Server after the code knackered some systems.…

Auto-updates come with a sting Updated Microsoft on Tuesday posted KB4464330 (Windows 10 1809 Build 17763.55) in an effort to halt the damage done by last week's Windows 10 version 1809 update, but it hasn't quite worked.…

Pinedo avoids serious time after spilling beans to Mueller on account sales A California man who provided bank accounts to Russian online trolls seeking to monkey with America's 2016 elections will spend the next six months or so behind bars.…

Incremental titbits aimed at time-poor techies Google Cloud Next Google has released another handful of networking features for its cloud, including Cloud NAT, which lets devs build cloud-based services that do not have public IP addresses.…

Chaebol charges back against Chinese SIM-only onslaught Hands On Samsung has launched the Galaxy A9 – its most comprehensive offensive against the twin threats of SIM-only subscribers and Chinese giant Huawei. The fightback involves a stronger mid-range, trade-ins, and promises better turnaround for faults and repairs.…

Staff snapped up and IP licensed by iPhone giant Apple has agreed to hand $600m over to Dialog Semiconductor in return for a slice of the chipmaker's business and brains.…

Crouching tiger, hidden APT The UK's National Cyber Security Centre and its western intel pals have today put out a report spotlighting the most commonly wielded hacking utilities.…

New bits from Amsterdam Config management and automation outfit Puppet rolled out a slew of updates to its DevOps toolset in front of a crowd of excitable engineers at its Puppetize Live event in Amsterdam this week, with an eye on security and automation.…

Startup now valued at $3.5bn Cloud data warehouser Snowflake has raised nearly half a billion dollars in its latest tranche, taking total funding to $923m.…

UK operators this summer look much like they did last year Monitoring biz OpenSignal has found no major gains in mobile broadband performance since spring in its latest quarterly UK survey [PDF] as network operators focus their investments more carefully ahead of the upcoming 5G spectrum auction.…

Pixel Slate: Nero for a Day Comment Common sense says you can't make a Veblen good out of a dumb computer terminal – but that isn't going to stop Google trying.…

DNS infrastructures still vulnerable to attacks The majority (72 per cent) of FTSE 100 firms are vulnerable to DNS attacks, nearly two years after the major Dyn outage.…

Take your foot off the accelerator, admins told VMware has warned users about an "important" denial-of-service vuln in ESXi, Workstation and Fusion that hinges on a problem with 3D rendering.…

Delay 'in the overall best interest' of Firefox users Mozilla has postponed its plans to distrust all legacy digital certificates from Symantec, spreading dismay in security circles.…

'Nauts safe, but the ISS may have to be abandoned The post-Space Shuttle era of reliability spearheaded by Russian space agency Roskosmos came to an abrupt end this morning as the booster carrying the Soyuz MS-10 spacecraft to the International Space Station failed a few minutes after launch.…

Middle Kingdom is a rising threat once again – research Infosec pros might have already noticed some familiar IP address ranges in their system logs – China has returned to the cyber-attack arena.…

Getting practical with machine learning and AI There are many ways machines can learn, but for humans nothing beats getting together with like-minded souls who’ve trodden a similar path.…

Fondleslabs continue to be borked by flaky firmware Unhappy Surface Pro 4 owners continue to fill Microsoft's support forums with complaints over an update that is leaving the touchscreen untouchable.…

Runs SPEC SFS 2014 software builds 25% faster than E8 Optane system Enterprise HPC storage vendor DDN has run the SPEC SFS 2014 benchmark 25 per cent faster than an E8 NVMe storage system using Intel Optane 3D XPoint drives.…

The spikey satellite is not for the faint hearted Exploring Jupiter’s moon, Europa, will be a treacherous task after scientists discovered its surface is covered in sharp icy daggers towering at almost 15 metres tall.…

The spikey satellite is not for the faint hearted, it appears Exploring Jupiter’s moon Europa will be a treacherous task, it seems: scientists reckon its surface is covered in sharp towering icy daggers.…

Oh, and there are 21 other vulns to patch It's time for Juniper Networks' semi-regular bugfest, with 22 fixes announced today, two of which carry a “critical” rating and should be applied immediately.…

The tech that is, not this made-up mystery Backgrounder IT infrastructure has become more complex as virtualization and private clouds have added more cream and sponge to the technology layer cake within businesses.…

The bad news: PC sales went down a little, says IDC It's time for the quarterly PC market predictions from analyst houses Gartner and IDC and, as usual, they disagree on the state of the trade.…

MikroTik. Stupid name. Stupid bugs. Get those fixes If you haven't installed a batch of patches for bugs in your MikroTik routers – and two thirds of owners apparently haven't – then stiffen the sinews and summon up the blood: you really need to update your firmware.…

Xu can play at this espionage game, Feds allege US prosecutors have unsealed charges against a collared Chinese national, accusing him of stealing trade secrets from American aerospace companies.…

Deal or no deal – what's in the bot? Artificially intelligent bots are notoriously bad at communicating with, well, anything. Conversations with the code, whether it's between themselves or with people, often go awry, and veer off topic. Grammar goes out the window, and sentences become nonsensical.…

Open-source suite defies doomsayers with millions of downloads Analysis Last year Brett Porter, then chairman of the Apache Software Foundation, contemplated whether a proposed official blog post on the state of Apache OpenOffice (AOO) might discourage people from downloading the software due to lack of activity in the project.…

Hack to thaw account freezes reported, fixed, hopefully never exploited Experian's website exposed to world-plus-dog the PINs needed to unlock frozen accounts, allowing crooks to potentially apply for loans and credit cards as their victims.…

Likely state hackers make do with 'living off the land' and going after tardy Office patchers A newly discovered spy gang is eschewing boutique attack tools to instead use publicly available exploits against unpatched systems.…

But Oracle shot first IBM has officially griped to a top US government watchdog about JEDI – the Pentagon's proposed 10-year $10bn single-vendor IT system for America’s Green Machine.…

350-year monkish mystery could be down to a merger Astrophysicists have finally solved a mystery lasting almost 350 years to uncover the first documented merger between a white and brown dwarf star.…

Finally, Jeff Bezos can sleep easy on his cash pillow Canalys Channels Forum 2018 The billions of dollars in ad revenue that Amazon is turning over each quarter will bankroll the capital expenditure of new data centre builds at AWS for years to come, sustaining the business model.…

Membership of WD's OpenFlex club has its perks Western Digital has invested in all-flash array supplier Kaminario, which supports WD's composable systems technology.…

That 60,000 patents in your pocket or are you just pleased to see us? Who would have thought it? Not content with signing with LOT Network, Microsoft has taken the next step in patent cuddling and joined the Open Innovation Network.…

That 60,000 patents in your pocket or are you just pleased to see us? Who would have thought it? Not content with signing with LOT Network, Microsoft has taken the next step in patent cuddling and joined the Open Invention Network.…

Hopes to lure new cloud-sniffers with location lockdown feature Google Cloud Next At the Google Cloud Next conference in London today the adtech company's enterprise tech arm declared that business clients would soon enjoy location restriction policies and other new tools of control freakery on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).…

Microsoft tweaks firmware for kiosks and users that love the power cord In news that will make Surface Pro 3 owners twitch involuntarily, Microsoft is fiddling with Surface battery settings yet again.…

Comparing Middle Kingdom's hacker forums to Russia's? Apples and pears Underground hacker forums in China and Russia are as different as each country's regular shopping bazaars, according to research from Recorded Future.…