The Register

Press record, make some noise into your mic, press play, voila – all in your browser Vid AI can now beatbox for you for hours on end using your voice, if you're into that kind of thing.…

Patch wpa_supplicant and/or kill off key protocol, thanks It’s been a mildly rough week for Wi-Fi security: hard on the heels of a WPA2 weakness comes a programming cockup in the wpa_supplicant configuration tool used on Linux, Android, and other operating systems.…

GLB Director keeps those packets humming even when new servers are added to pools If you’ve got a big bare-metal data center, or if you’re just BM-curious, head on over to GitHub, where there’s a new load balancer on offer by, um, GitHub.…

Prove us wrong, kids, and bag $250,000 Black Hat Not that many moons ago, Microsoft was seemingly reluctant to open a bug bounty program. It also once described Linux as a cancer. Now it claims to love Linux, and is offering bounties on bugs. How times change.…

Self-medicating with booze is no answer, hackers warned at conference Black Hat In a personal and powerful presentation, a computer security veteran has warned that too many infosec bods are fighting a losing battle with the bottle.…

Economist sheds light on US broadband rivalries Analysis If Americans want fast internet access, they need to tighten the screws on Big Cable, not give it yet more power.…

Optane DC persistent memory ships to Google, Xeon roadmap, and more revealed At Intel's Data-Centric Innovation Summit today in Santa Clara, California, Chipzilla reiterated its commitment to deliver 10nm Xeon processors in 2020, to maintain its market leadership, and to adapt its silicon to AI-oriented workloads.…

Parisa Tabriz talks Chrome, HTTPS, and more Black Hat Parisa Tabriz, a director of engineering at Google and head of the web giant's Project Zero bug-hunting squad, today opened this year's Black Hat USA conference with a reminder that partying is key to securing software.…

Why not waste it on some not-very-good Magic Leap techno-goggles? The day has finally arrived! After years of delays and endless over-hyping, Magic Leap has launched its augmented-reality goggles.…

Internet underground outside the West takes a different tone The concept of the "dark web" in Asia is way different to what peeps in Europe and the Americas are used to.…

Data biz trumpets international sales and IBM partnership Hortonworks, once criticised for burning through cash, has reported a fair second 2018 quarter, with revenues up 40 per cent and net losses down 27 per cent.…

Only losers pay, er, sell retail Analysis Samsung has pledged to splurge $160bn on technology investment over three years, as the global smartphone market matures.…

Frankenfirm sets up 'integrated practice' with AWS to eat its lunch before others do DXC Technology, fed up with the cloud brigade eating into its own IT outsourcing (ITO) business, has set up an "integrated practice" with AWS to get in on the action itself.…

Room for another ego at the top, Benioff? Salesforce chief operating officer Keith Block is to become co-CEO with Mark Benioff, in a move echoing their former employer Oracle's setup.…

Shhh, little VMware, go back to sleep Dell is wooing investors with the promise of profits leaping by more than two-thirds if they back Big Mickey D's plans to take the eponymous tech group public again.…

Cunning plan to push top staff out? Firm keeps schtum Symantec is cancelling an Employee Share Purchase (ESP) programme, angering some workers in the process.…

Schools can't do it alone, says education secretary The British government has admitted teachers need help tackling lesson workloads and admin burdens – but wants tech firms to fix the problem.…

Rewrites storage server rules with 32 of Chipzilla's rulers Supermicro has crammed 1PB of Intel flash rulers into the slimmest possible 1U rack storage server.…

Less disruptive and accessible, with added Clippy Analysis So little has changed in the latest annual update to Android, 9.0 Pie, you may be forgiven for thinking "8.2" is a far more appropriate release number.…

Viptela vManage comes to boxen running IOS XE Cisco has made the next move in its integration of 2017 acquisition Viptela, prepping an SD-WAN upgrade it is going to ship to a million routers.…

Save on MCubed tickets while you still can Events You’ve got just over a week to grab early bird tickets for MCubed and ensure cut-price, front row spots for three days of prime machine learning, AI and analytics goodness.…

'Kid, take a nap, I have a project to save' The popular Homebrew macOS package installer has moved to plug a serious vulnerability – it accidentally left a GitHub token visible to the public. Luckily, a team member on paternity leave had a moment while their child napped to fix it.…

Adoption is inevitable, and yet we all keep putting it off It has been twenty years since the publication of the first draft of the IPv6 standard, in response to the growing realisation that the IPv4 address space would sooner or later be entirely filled. Fast-forward to today, and amazingly the world is clinging stubbornly to IPv4, with the rate of adoption of IPv6 possibly slowing.…

Meanwhile, fakes fill the banana-shaped void HMD Global insists its much-delayed Nokia 8110 4G "banana phone" will officially hit UK shelves this month, half a year after it was announced and Amazon began to take orders. In the meantime, imported models and outright fakes have flooded the market.…

Seems obvious but this case is messier than you'd imagine The European Court of Justice has determined that a website must get permission from the copyright owner of an image before it use the picture itself – even if that photo or illustration is readily available elsewhere.…

When will I, will I be internet famous? When will I see my picture in the 'pedia pages? Boffin-loving bots are penning potential new Wikipedia pages to recognize the work of notable scientists who are missing from the online encyclopedia.…

Redmond blames user error, invites further feedback to improve its service Microsoft's Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) was launched to world+dog in June, however, a few disgruntled customers say the managed container confection isn't fully baked yet.…

We apologize in advance for this machine-learning basketball player pun Skynet is getting closer. Ish. Artificially intelligent software has now picked up a devastating new skill after observing humans. It can now, er, dribble a basketball. Boomshakalaka!…

Also: Juniper jumps on its stack Hard on the heels of the Linux kernel's packets-of-death attack dubbed SegmentSmack, a similar vulnerability has been disclosed and fixed in FreeBSD.…

Ffw-dumm... Ffw-dumm... Ffw-dumm... Ffw-dumm... IBM this week introduced a 16-socket Power9 server monster.…

Data herding upstart stamps foot on the gas, bags another $100m in funding Four years after picking up a $100m E-round, data wrangling biz Actifio has picked up another $100m in an F-round.…

Touts storage boxes, dreams of code-composable infrastructure Western Digital is setting out to go beyond hyper-converged kit, and create a software composable server, storage, and networking infrastructure, starting with new flash and disk boxes.…

Get patching after team gets under the skin of OpenEMR Fresh light has been shed on a batch of security vulnerabilities discovered in the widely used OpenEMR medical records storage system.…

Where? Not saying, but it'll be nearly everywhere by 2020. Pinky-promise DOCSIS 3.1 has finally landed in Australia, courtesy of a currently-limited rollout to HFC-connected National Broadband Network (NBN) customers.…

Mobile ballots dubbed 'horrific', blockchain reliance questioned The US state of West Virginia plans to allow some of its citizens to vote in this year's midterm elections via a smartphone app – and its seemingly lax security is freaking out infosec experts.…

After all, never say never! Analysis Facebook has denied it is seeking to suck up netizens' bank account details, claiming it just wants to connect bank customers to their bank's chat accounts and give useful financial updates.…

If you want to do some ML, and you've got a fat budget, they've got some tech to sell you Hoping to take advantage of the alleged any-minute-now boom in artificially intelligent software for enterprises and service providers, Dell EMC has announced a pair of "AI Ready Solutions."…

Development of new language funded to boost Ethereum client Status.im, the makers of the Status mobile Ethereum client app, has allied with the team developing the Nim programming language, promising funding to support at least two full-time developers.…

Biz files official complaint to auditors over prices, configs Oracle has filed an official complaint with US government over plans to award the Pentagon’s lucrative cloud contract to a single vendor.…

Patches incoming for kernel versions 4.9 and up A networking flaw has been discovered in the Linux kernel that could trigger a remote denial-of-service attack.…

Plus: Web access penetration static, according to ONS survey Nearly a third of Britons don't think they have the required computer skills to do their jobs despite 9 in 10 households having internet access, according to the Office for National Statistics.…

NEC to provide NeoFace kit to 40-plus venues for the games Automated facial recognition systems from Japanese biz NEC will be used on staffers and athletes at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics.…

'Disoriented and dazed' pair had to be dragged back Anyone ever told they're "too old for this shit" can take heart in this tale from Germany, where two elderly gents skipped out on nurses, apparently to rock out at Wacken Open Air – the world's largest heavy metal festival.…

Flips poacher turned gamekeeper notion on its head Exclusive The UK government’s top tech adviser Liam Maxwell is to swap public life for the private sector, with a global role at tax-efficient cloud titan Amazon Web Services, The Register can reveal.…

Fastest software builds – if you go by benchmarks NVMe-over-Fabrics storage array supplier E8 has reclaimed the SPEC SFS 2014 file storage benchmark title from WekaIO.…

Web giant sends spare resources into the mines Does the world need another streaming platform? Cloudflare thinks so, and today it set its Cloudflare Stream beta (running for nearly a year) to general availability.…

Activists sick of 'neither confirm nor deny' excuse British cops' efforts to keep schtum about their use of IMSI grabbers to snoop on people's mobile phones is to be challenged in court.…

Activists sick of 'neither confirm nor deny' excuse British cops' efforts to keep schtum about their use of IMSI grabbers to snoop on people's mobile phones is to be challenged in court.…

Drive and Docs may end up in Tencent-owned DCs Google is pondering a cloudy move to China and a hookup with local operators Tencent and Inspur, according to reports.…

One rule for banks, another for us, says white hat Updated Halifax Bank scans the machines of surfers that land on its login page whether or not they are customers, it has emerged.…