The Register

Silicon Valley boffins bag Nobel Prize of computer science The two engineers who further developed and popularized the concept of RISC microprocessors have won the 2017 ACM Turing Award.…

Shortage of tech talent has government pondering end to age, gender restrictions A US government commission has asked the public for its thoughts on possible changes to the military's selective service rules to allow the conscription of technical talent, including those with computer-oriented skills, regardless of sex or age.…

No-name brand software to help push Leonardo toolkit German ERP giant SAP has launched an Application Edition of its Predictive Analytics software – part of its Leonardo toolkit.…

Big Blue claims POWER9 kit with beastly GPUs gives Google Cloud a thrashing Analysis IBM boasts that machine learning is not just quicker on its POWER servers than on TensorFlow in the Google Cloud, it's 46 times quicker.…

Fine for gaming, not so much for modeling, it is claimed Nvidia’s flagship Titan V graphics cards may have hardware gremlins causing them to spit out different answers to repeated complex calculations under certain conditions, according to computer scientists.…

Fast and slow high-cap disk lines coming In 2020 Seagate will introduce its first multi-actuator disk drives using Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) tech with 20TB capacities.…

Project hopes to bring dev skills to developing nation A Filipino developer is hoping his handmade Ruby port will help bring coding skills to some of the Philippines's poorest communities.…

Not the only possible theory, say infosec types A British surgeon whose instructions over the internet helped to guide operations in war-torn Aleppo fears his PC was hacked in order to target a makeshift hospital that was subsequently bombed.…

Users will stop trusting you, warns researcher Many high profile UK sites still use Symantec certificates just days before Google will begin the process of dropping support for them with the next and upcoming releases of its Chrome browser.…

Faster GPUs, more FLOPS HPE has updated its Apollo 6500 deep learning server with a threefold performance boost over its precursor by stuffing it with eight Tesla V100 GPUs, which speak to each other via Nvidia's NVlink 2.0 interconnect protocol.…

System may be full of waterworlds, boffins find New research published in Nature Astronomy has poured, er, cold water on hopes that it may be possible to detect life on Earth-sized planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system.…

It's not. ♫ It's beginning to sound a lot like Brexit ♪ In the latest report slamming preparations for the UK’s departure from the European Union next year, and the subsequent transition period, Britain's Commons Home Affairs Committee has said it has “serious concerns” about the future of data flows.…

Kumoscale software presents fabric access NVMe flash drives virtually Surprise, surprise – flash chip and SSD manufacturer Toshiba has announced NVMe fabric-access flash array software. What's its game?…

There's plenty of fish in... Oh European Space Agency (ESA) scientists plan to use satellite shortwave infrared (SWIR) sensing to detect plastic litter concentrations in the oceans.…

Array types, riders and runners It may be a surprise to some, but a tech consultancy has said that the existing all-flash array market is in no danger of losing market share to NMVe over Fabrics (NVMeoF) types – saying they're not competing in the same areas. It also said mainstream storage array suppliers would soon be snapping up the NVMeoF startups for their technology.…

Myth, legend and the lucky escape of Bennerley Geek's Guide to Britain The pell-mell expansion of Britain's railways in the 19th century has bequeathed some impressive feats of engineering. Great stone viaducts like those at Calstock in Cornwall and Harringworth near Melton Mowbray get the glory, but for my money it's the iron bridges that are the real marvels.…

Blockchain voting outfit ran its own count, but only as an observer Blockchain enthusiasts may be a little deflated today, after the nation of Sierra Leone took to Twitter to debunk claims it had conducted “the world’s first blockchain election.”…

DNS-Over-HTTPS set for week of performance tests Last year, an IETF working group mulled whether HTTPS is a suitable mechanism to protect Internet users' domain name requests, to protect them from prying eyes. Now Mozilla have decided to lend a hand by testing the current DNS-Over-HTTPS (yes, the acronym is DOH) implementation.…

The meter-long telescope expected to launch in 2028 The European Space Agency is launching a mission to find out how planets form and how life emerges in space, it announced on Tuesday.…

Russian judge upholds 2016 FSB order, company will appeal Secure messaging service Telegram says it will appeal a Russian Supreme Court order to hand over encryption keys to the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation – the FSB.…

Chrome OS 66 to protect older Intel units, still working on ARM Older Chromebook owners should keep an eye open for Chrome OS updates, because Google has announced they'll get Meltdown protection soon.…

Prepare for 'deep customer experiences throughout a personalized 1:1 journey’ Salesforce has decided to buy API-farmer MuleSoft for a cool US$6.5bn – about a billion bucks above the latter company’s market capitalisation.…

Facebook isn't having a very good time either For the fourth straight day, Cambridge Analytica is scrambling in the wake of damning media reports.…

Free Wi-Fi will be lousy without a Social Network™ login, which in this of all weeks is just dumb Facebook may be up to its armpits in alligators, but that hasn't stopped Australia's Gold Coast Council from chumming up with the ad-farm to offer free Wi-Fi to visitors at the upcoming Commonwealth Games.…

Just give it a few weeks notice next time, not 24 hours AMD has finally weighed in with its opinion of the security flaws in its Epyc, Ryzen, Ryzen Pro, and Ryzen Mobile chips, identified in a rather over-the-top fashion by CTS-Labs a week ago.…

And bad news for healthy types: Active.com thoroughly pwned, too Vacation-booking biz Orbitz has warned that sensitive details on as many as 880,000 credit cards have "likely" been stolen from its servers by hackers.…

Devs told to take responsibility by setting up authentication Software called etcd, used for storing data across clusters of containers, has a problem – it does not implement authentication by default and so poses a security risk if deployed without further fiddling.…

Azure gets more support and Linux still gets Redmond love Microsoft has released more information about the new version of Windows Server, including a time-frame for release and a warning on prices.…

Ex-NRO bod also allegedly swiped $340k of espionage kit plus classified files The FBI has raided the home of US intelligence contractor John Weed who is suspected of leaking classified blueprints online via a fake Facebook account.…

Nightly build fans' hostname lookups piped to Cloudflare in limited security feature trial Mozilla's plan to test a more secure method for resolving internet domain names – known as Trusted Recursive Resolver (TRR) via DNS over HTTPs (DoH) – in Firefox Nightly builds has met with objections from its user community due to privacy concerns.…

Let me at 'em, growls EU privacy watchdog Relying on internet giants' goodwill to stop the spread of misinformation online and prevent the manipulation of netizens has failed, Europe's top data protection watchdog has said, adding that regulators now need to take action.…

RIM's job of allegedly hiding smartphone sales snafu now back under the microscope A US judge has opted to resurrect a case claiming Blackberry illegally propped up its stock amidst the calamitous Z10 handset release.…

April event promises intensive training Promo Small to large enterprises around the globe rely on Cloud Foundry to automate and scale cloud applications across multiple clouds, in any language, through their lifecycle. Whether you are new to the platform or have some knowledge but would like to take it to a new level, the Cloud Foundry Summit in Boston, MA from April 18 to 20 looks to be your essential destination.…

Telly software goes open source (again) The mighty little OS that could is open source again. LG has revealed webOS OSE (Open Source Edition) under an Apache licence and ported it to the Raspberry Pi hardware.…

UK High Court refuses to certify point-of-law appeal The US government has had its final shot at arguing for the extradition of accused hacker Lauri Love snuffed out by the High Court in London, England.…

Cambridge Analytica brouhaha fallout continues The Parliament’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee has demanded Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg “appear before us to give oral evidence” in the fallout over Cambridge Analytica – while an ex-Facebooker is due to spill the beans tomorrow.…

Cracking idea or chocolate-coated nightmare? A Nottingham pub reckons it has cracked Easter PR with the launch of a Cadbury Creme Egg Yorkshire pud*.…

Technical gubbins still mostly under wraps Seagate has unveiled a 14TB helium-filled disk drive in the Exos line.…

Why do people forget they're a customer outside the office? Businesses risk losing millions from the investments they made in data and analytics if they don’t respect their customers’ privacy, according to Gartner research director Bart Willemsen.…

Only a bucket of semen remains Sudan, aka "The Most Eligible Bachelor in the World” as per hook-up app Tinder, the last male northern white rhino, shuffled off this mortal coil yesterday, aged 45.…

On the ground... and for staff only, that is London Gatwick Airport in the UK has declared that it is trialling autonomous cars for moving staff around the airfield.…

£1.3m over three years? Get with the times, plod The police force covering the base of the UK's electronic spy agency, GCHQ, in Cheltenham, England, has admitted that it has spent nothing at all on cybercrime training over the past few years.…

Many .gov websites 'broken, misconfigured or insecure' The security of UK government websites is inconsistent, and local authorities are among the worst offenders.…

Here's what happened on the Drive of the Machines What’s it like to ride in a Level 4 driverless car? About the same as sitting on the bus, really – until you think closely about what a driverless pod whizzing down a riverside cycle path is actually achieving.…

Storage mezze to start your week Roundup In this week's roundup of bite-sized storage snacks: Infinidat has added a second data protection partnership, NVMe-oF startup Pavilion Data has lost one of its two co-founders, a peer-to-peer storage startup nabbed a Docker high-flier, and Pivot3 downsized its HCI product to a slim 1U shelf.…

Late great physicist finished on an attempt to unify gravity and quantum mechanics Sorry: Stephen Hawking's last paper doesn't favour the so-called “multiverse”, but there's some cool stuff in it if you ignore the headlines.…

And disaster recovery too, by painting a target on AWS VMware has pondered baking backup and disaster recovery into its VSAN software-defined storage tool.…

Making the phone a touchpad for the desktop is a good idea FIRST FONDLE When Samsung gave the world its DeX dock last year, we rated the device a solid, thoughtful job for its feat of allowing a smartphone to deliver a decent desktop experience.…

Ubiqube's CTO Hervé Guesdon talks to El Reg Interview In February, network automation company Ubiqube released another network management framework into the open source world. The Register spoke to CTO Hervé Guesdon to understand the company's hopes for its OpenMSA tools.…

'Oumuamua produced by solar system that makes more asteroids than comets Pic 'Oumuamua, the mysterious and oddly shaped interstellar asteroid spotted by astronomers, was probably ejected from a binary star system.…