The Register

Dungeon generator also excellent at training agents in procrastination How do you train AI agents in language and understanding? Easy – drop them into a Zork-alike dungeon and let then find their own way out.…

Civil liberties group visits Washington for four-day data and privacy talks The US is under increasing pressure over Privacy Shield as an EU lawyers' association backed MEPs’ calls for a suspension of the deal.…

And definitely not copper, argues Cityfibre Most Brits think ads for “fibre” broadband ought to mean “fibre to the premises” and not “fibre to the cabinet”, according to a survey sponsored by a FTTP company.…

Microsoft's apology for Windows 8 is maturing nicely Sunday is a big day in Vulture Central. No, not the football. Sunday is three years to the day when Microsoft’s apology for the Windows 8 generation was released to computer makers.…

Dive deep with our quartet of workshops If you want to put machine learning to work in your organisation, you should really consider securing a place at one of the four all-day workshops we’re running as part of MCubed before our early bird ticket offer expires in two weeks time.…

A decade of technical promise and open-source fall-outs Ten years ago this month, when Lehman Brothers was still just about in business and the term NoSQL wasn't even widely known, let alone an irritant, Facebook engineers open-sourced a distributed database system named Cassandra.…

Third language added to security scanner GitHub's added Python to the list of programming languages it can auto-scan for known vulnerabilities.…

Trouble started with a boiling battery and got worse when a ladder fell over Who, me? Welcome once more to “Who, me?”, in which we help Reg readers to unburden themselves by telling anonymised stories of big, bad, mistakes.…

Chipzilla wants to stick its nose into yet more sections of semiconductor design cycles Intel has acquired fabless designer eASIC, a specialist in the structured ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit) business.…

Analytical email, modern web dev tools and more, for both of you who still care IBM’s effort to make its Notes/Domino platform relevant for the future kicks up a gear this week, as the company prepares a second beta of a new version 10.…

AWS increasingly accepts hybrid cloud is a thing, but would it really get into support? Rumours emerged late last week that AWS plans to make and sell white box switches for you to use on-premises.…

Some qode qleanup, some tweaks and also an arbitrary numbering thing The QEMU machine emulator and virtualizer has decided the time is right to give the world version 3.0 and seems also to have acted on a vow to qlean up its qode.…

US commerce dept. counts escrow cash, warns it's always watching, Congress still split Chinese telco kit-maker ZTE is back in business in the USA after doing everything asked of it by the nation’s authorities.…

Plus BIND bugs, billion-Euro Nokia deal, and push-to-talk gets LTE-rrific Roundup Juniper Networks has issued its semi-regular bug-dump, with sixteen advisories arriving late last week. There's a Spectre/Meltdown patch in there, but you need to go looking: it's in the Junos Space management platform, along with various other items.…

Also, make sure you update your Juniper kit quickly Roundup This week, when we weren't watching the football and sobbing uncontrollably, we saw security headaches at NPM and Ticketmaster, and a priest in hot water with cybercrime charges.…

A wonderful week in machine learning Roundup Hello, here are some quick AI announcements from this week. A researcher reminds us to be wary of the hype around Montezuma's Revenge, there are some new framework updates from Google and Microsoft, and a new Google Brain office in Amsterdam.…

A network's only as strong as its weakest link or worker Hackers can potentially obtain access to Microsoft Office 365 emails and calendars even if multi-factor-authentication is in place, we were warned this week.…

Same being used against ordinary US citizens? Analysis Back in 2013, Canadian John Darrel Krokos got 11.5 years in a US jail for leading a massive cocaine smuggling ring. Two years later, his colleague Zaid Wakil was given a 20-year sentence.…

Extortionists snatch weak passwords to shame victims Scumbags are trying to extort money from netizens by threatening to leak to friends and family videos of their marks watching X-rated videos.…

Redmond also insists ICE is not using its AI to snare immigrants, split families at the border Microsoft has urged US Congress to regulate the American government's use of facial-recognition technology provided by, er, Microsoft and others.…

Oh, and vaccines.news? Yep, anti-vaxxers. The same guys In what may be the perfect combination of everything wrong with 2018, the operator of the .news dot-word has sold a batch of premium .news domains to a purveyor of what can be best described as conspiratorial content for cretins.…

Single-socket job wakes up and smells the Coffee Lake Intel has done a bit of Xeon processor range in-filling, and brought its single-socket Kaby-Lake-based entry-level E3 workstation family up to date.…

We can’t have Matt Hancock calling a hospital and hearing: baa-ruhr-reee-uh-reeee-uh-reee The NHS has been told to stop clinging onto the past, after it was revealed trusts have more than 8,000 fax machines still in use.…

Move over ransomware – CPUs are being hijacked for alt-coins, now Promo No sooner have organisations fought off one type of security nightmare than another one looms even larger.…

Rumours of email's death have been greatly exaggerated Comment Slack chief exec Stewart Butterfield is one of the more thoughtful Web 2.0 CEOs, but his software is like those movie sets in Westerns: all facade, no house.…

Baker's dozen pwned by tricksy attack Business iPhone users in India have been targeted in a sophisticated and attack run through bogus Mobile Device Management (MDM) servers.…

We won't say who we think it is but we'll point with our elbow... A Ukrainian intel agency has claimed it stopped a cyber attack against a chlorine plant that was launched using the notorious VPNFilter malware.…

Hey love, just click on this link... what do you mean, you're seeing loads of creepy articles? Struggling to have a conversation with your partner about getting down and dirty? Well here’s an idea – use embedded native advertising to con them into initiating sex instead.…

With a nudge and a wink, a spy in the mailbox will tell you stuff you probably already know Microsoft yesterday squeezed out a couple of technologies aimed at encouraging teams to adopt a healthier approach toward meetings and, you know, maybe think a bit before firing off that midnight email.…

One day, your gizmos can bellow nuclear power station info at each other too IoT audio networking tech firm Chirp has punted out a free version of its software development kit.…

No, this story didn’t come through a wormhole in time. Q2 2018 was the best since 2012 Sales of personal computers rose in 2018’s second quarter, making it the best time to be in the PC business since 2012.…

‘Benevolent dictator for life’ tired of the hate, leaves behind no successor or governance Guido van Rossum – who created the Python programming language in 1989, was jokingly styled as its “benevolent dictator for life”, and ushered it to global ubiquity – has stepped down, and won’t appoint a successor.…

We’re the lawyers your mom warned you about The NFL, the home of America's favorite form of recreational brain trauma, will find itself a bit less wealthy, after it settled a lawsuit brought by a streaming video software developer.…

Annoying flaws found, patched in Fabric Services, NX-OS, StarOS, VOIP kit Cisco has advised net admins using switches that run its Fabric Services on FXOS, or NX-OS software, to update their boxes following the discovery of a critical security flaw.…

Time for rodents to retrain as PHP programmers Machine learning algorithms can help scientists predict chemical toxicity to a similar degree of accuracy as animal testing, according to a paper published this week in Toxicological Sciences.…

Site Isolation keeps pages fully separate on Windows, Mac, Linux, Chrome OS Google is touting the benefits of a recently rolled out browser security feature called Site Isolation.…

Plan is killed at the last minute after outrage all round America's comms watchdog – the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) – stooped to a new low on Thursday when it made last-second changes to a new complaints procedure just minutes after it denied the changes were necessary.…

Total Inability to Support Usual Purchases Updated Register readers, and quite a few other people, have been left with dead credit cards after Mastercard's payment system took a dive on Thursday.…

Tokens killed after eslint-scope utility compromised Updated An unfortunate chain reaction was averted today after miscreants tampered with a widely used JavaScript programming tool to steal other developers' NPM login tokens.…

Learn the tenets of the AWS Well-Architected Framework’s Cost Optimization pillar Promo The Amazon Web Services (AWS) Well-Architected Framework is designed to assist organizations in building secure, resilient, performant and efficient infrastructure able to optimally support their applications.…

And if you could shift Windows and SQL Server 2008 to the cloud that would be fine Microsoft is continuing to extend the tentacles of Azure into the enterprise with a new Data Box Disk, WAN and Firewall functionality and a speed bump for its SQL data warehouse. Oh, and asks would people please stop using the 2008 editions of Windows Server and SQL Server?…

Didn't we have one of those already? Yes, but this empowers ideation! Microsoft has made its Whiteboard Windows 10 app generally available in a move that Redmond hopes will see an end to dried-out marker pens and inky fingers.…

Redmond broadsides Slack with unlimited message history and more storage On the eve of its 2018 partner conference, Inspire, Microsoft has launched a freebie version of its Slack-alike collaboration platform, Teams.…

Minnow takes on pretty much every other primary storage supplier Storage startup Datera has spread its primary storage wings and added containerisation and object support.…

Look at our information protection laws and well-resourced watchdog The UK government has insisted it's in the European Union's best interests to grant it a souped-up agreement on the protection and sharing of personal data post-Brexit and wants to start talks now.…

They say it is 'quiet(er)'. Well, quite... Apple gave part of its MacBook Pro line of laptops a speed bump today. But all you'll want to know really is whether the machine can still be paralysed by a crumb, or a speck of dust.…

It's an Office runtime, for students Microsoft has avoided cannibalising its boutique, premium Surface line by making one that's a lot less boutique and premium – at around half the price.…

Plus: Hackers take crack at cloud, phones come pre-pwned, malware's going multi-plat The number of organisations affected by cryptomining malware in the first half of 2018 ramped up to 42 per cent, compared to 20.5 per cent in the second half of 2017, according to a new report from Check Point.…

Loan notes to build war chest – yet firm denies it's eyeing up a fresh buyout Palo Alto Networks is trying to raise $1.5bn in cash for "potential acquisitions" and "strategic transactions", the company said today – though it claims not to have any buyout targets in mind just yet.…