The Register

Spam and adverts? You bet Google has opened up a major new communications channel for businesses – sending multimedia messages to mobiles using interoperable standards.…

Church supports priests' professional development plans The Vatican cannot be accused of lack of interest in the continued professional development of its staff. Just look at the dedicated exorcism training course it set out this week for clergy interested in advancing their skills.…

Part of plans to boost country's woeful full-fibre investment Ofcom has slashed the price BT’s Openreach can charge operators for superfast broadband, in a package of measures BT said will hit its bottom line to the tune of £120m next year.…

No, your snooping boss did not breach your human rights, Euro court tells sacked Frenchman A Frenchman who was fired after his bosses discovered porn stored on his work computer has been told his human rights were not violated by his employers' snooping.…

Drafts in corp restructuring biz Alix Partners to cut costs, improve margins Veritas Technologies has hired a corporate restructuring specialist in the face of business difficulties.…

Dips Zen toes into embedded world with hot new SoCs The "other" X86 mill-maker, AMD, has unveiled its efforts to position its Zen architecture kit as an embedded solution for networking, storage, edge and industrial devices: a brace of Epyc and Ryzen processors.…

Well, guess it's nearly the weekend Updated The keys Control, C and V are gathering dust around the world as Stack Overflow went for an uscheduled nap last night before going into full blown TITSUP* mode today.…

Paying people better matters just as much. Maybe more so Analysis Oh dear. If all this new technology is so amazing, why isn’t it translating into productivity gains?…

Rolling out (and scraping) the barrel of computing history Something for the Weekend, Sir? Telephone operator, please put me through to… What's that? You want me to address you by your first name? Well, that's jolly friendly. I'm (thinks quickly, decides to use Starbucks name) "Alex". And how should I call you? Right.…

Rushing to ship won't get you to the other side Technical debt: we probably create it every day. It happens when you do things that might get you closer to goal now, but which create problems that you’ll have to pay for later.…

Letters to Congress detail the plan to keep CPU flaws secret Letters sent to the United States Congress by Intel and the other six companies in the Meltdown/Spectre disclosure cabal have revealed how and why they didn't inform the wider world about the dangerous chip design flaws.…

Everyone's using this framework – now you can, too. Source is open Code corner Keeping up with the endless torrent of stuff happening online is a losing battle. In the absence of omniscience, there's just no way to catch every bug, cockup, blowup, and scandal as it breaks.…

Chipzilla needs more than its old PC-making pals to win 5G Intel's breathlessly announced that Dell, HP, Lenovo and Microsoft will deploy its 5G modems in their portable PCs sometime in the second half of 2019, and that it will show off prototypes of said laptops at Mobile World Congress (MWC) next week.…

Flip phones - and their users - were both evolutionary dead ends (but the phones had awesome ads) On-Call+VID Welcome again to On-Call, The Register's support group for tech support pros, in which we share readers' tales of being asked to do unreasonable things for inexcusable people.…

A Frenchman? Running away? Gawd, you don't say A 41-year-old Frenchman is on the run after a court in his home country sentenced him to two years behind bars, and fined him €83.6m (£73m, $103m), for running a pirate movie website.…

Devs stumble into pre-release beta by using command they didn't understand NPM – the biz behind the Node.js package management software used to wrangle JavaScript code and various related frameworks – on Thursday undid a code update less than 24 hours after it was issued because the software was messing with Linux file permissions.…

And now to see it's an unwelcome imposition or a mere inconvenience OpenBSD's Meltdown patch has landed, in the form of a Version 11 code update that separates user memory pages from the kernel's – pretty much the same approach as was taken in the Linux kernel.…

In a good way – Xmas personal computer and printers sales up, tax windfall swells profit Stronger than expected PC and printer sales, plus a tax windfall, gave HP Inc one of its best quarters in recent history, according to its latest financial figures.…

Future Access points will tell clients when to sleep, then make a wake up call In November 2017, the next version of Wi-Fi, 802.11ax, stalled in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers's (IEEE's) standards process, but vendors want to push ahead with at least some of its features, according to Qualcomm Wi-Fi product marketing lead Prakash Sangam.…

Suddenly, everyone's using automation to beat back open networks MWC Juniper's following Cisco's lead into carrier network automation.…

Get ready for antitrust hell if Broadcom buys us, warns biz Qualcomm is hoping to scare its shareholders away from considering Broadcom's takeover offer – by predicting regulatory doom and gloom for the combined company.…

Neri vows to double down on reorg campaign Hewlett Packard Enterprise took everyone by surprise Thursday by turning in better-than-expected quarterly financial numbers.…

Officials are overcharging us, complains comms slinger as it heads into court to scrap fees An American telecoms hardware shifter is fed up with US Customs officials slapping extra tariffs on its fiber-optic tech imports – all because the agents are classifying the IT gear as eyeglasses.…

Despite demanding world+dog gets one, Uncle Sam lacks tools to check crypto-signatures Two Democratic US senators have formally asked Uncle Sam's Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency to get its act together on electronic passports.…

Now all we need is accurate info and prices After four years in purgatory the US government's internet broadband map is back - and it's pretty good.…

Birds launched today... but ship-borne catcher's mitt misses payload fairing catch Video The first two internet-relaying satellites in SpaceX's Starlink constellation have been launched into Earth's orbit – and will begin broadcasting to the world this week.…

What are the chances of that El Reg? 1 in 10 MEEEELION Published today in the journal Nature is a description of a rare and difficult to capture event – the birth of a supernova (and the death of a star).…

Thousands of livestock attacks give police paws for thought Police have revealed plans to take the lead on tracking down hounds that attack livestock - a dog DNA database.…

MPs want to know what the kids are up to The UK Commons Select Committee for Science and Technology has begun taking submissions for an inquiry into the "Impact of social media and screen-use on young people’s health".…

First taste of 5G for consumers, but will it make any cash? O2 UK is the latest operator to jump on the "5G test bed" bandwagon, with plans to trial the tech at the iconic former Millennium Dome in North Greenwich later this year.…

I SIM, you SIM, we all SIM for iSIM Arm has made public the designs to shove SIM technology into ever more connected gizmos by building an iSIM, along with a cellular modem and microcontroller, onto a single chip.…

Chinese phone giants grow, the big 5 are out in cold The global smartphone market is shrinking for the first time as choosey buyers in emerging markets hang on to their mobiles for longer.…

These 'resets take time' says ex IBM head A review of the UK government's delayed emergency services network intended to replace the national radio infrastructure with a 4G network has itself been delayed by more than half a year.…

Pioneering gesture keyboard given bullet by owner Nuance One of the best-loved mobile apps of the past decade, Swype, has been given the bullet. Parent company Nuance confirmed it will no longer develop the letter-tracing keyboard, which will disappear from the Apple and Google app stores.…

Most deployments now complete on time and on budget… It only took 7 years Customer confusion and a lack of technical skills are still dogging migration to SAP HANA, but the days of deployment horror stories are fading, according to a report penned by an integrator.…

Tiers stream.... down your face. When you lose something you cannot replace Analysis Generations of change have produced layers of storage that are a challenge to manage.…

Digi currencies falling under glare of Treasury committee Hot on the heels of Bitcoin’s dramatic rise and fall - and rise, British parliamentarians have decided to launch an inquiry into digital currencies.…

Oh and a touch of HCI, says data protector as it waltzes into adjacent markets Analysis Data protector Acronis is building hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) kit for release in 2019 and developing a security product slated for 2020 – markets in little danger of being under-served.…

Death reports of containerization biz somewhat exaggerated Comment Do you remember those guys that invented virtualization, founded a company, got rich and lived happily ever after, remembered fondly by all? Well, that’s almost the story of VMware. But we might see a different story with some of the people behind Docker.…

Five carriers make the cut, plus 32 mobile management apps - and four Chinese phone-makers Google has launched an Android Enterprise Recommended program it says " makes it simple for businesses to confidently select, deploy and manage Android devices and services that meet elevated enterprise requirements validated by Google" and has left Samsung off the list.…

Don't worry, this technology isn't very convincing... er, yet Artificially intelligent software can listen to someone's voice only a few times, and then speak just like them, like some kind of creepy cybernetic myna bird... according to a paper published by researchers from Baidu.…

Don't say we didn't warn you Users of uTorrent should grab the latest versions of the popular torrenting tools: serious security bugs, which malicious websites can exploit to commandeer PCs, were squashed this week in the software.…

Hör auf damit! The German Constitutional Court has agreed to hear a case about the legitimacy of the European Unified Patent Court (UPC), raising doubts over the future of a single patent court for Europe.…

Perhaps it should start at home, where people are fleeing due to lack of food? Venezuela has launched what it claims is "the first State-issued cryptoasset" and asserts it will fix long-standing problems caused by the USA's 1933 abandonment of the gold standard and restore order to the world economy.…

API holes would let miscreants spy on sexting lovers App developers should take a long, hard look at how they use Facebook's Account Kit for identifying users – after a flaw in the system, and Tinder's use of the toolkit, left shag-seekers open to account hijacking.…

Ad giant says complainant's posts went beyond 'lively debate', on Damore and more The lawsuit sparked by the sexist screed penned by former Google employee has a bitter sequel, after another former Google employee has sued on grounds his opposition to Damore's memo and other discriminatory acts at the company saw him dismissed.…

When government, tech firms agree – check the fine print The attorneys general of 35 US states on Wednesday signed an open letter calling for the quick passage of the Clarify Lawful Overseas Use of Data (CLOUD) Act – with some qualifications.…

And they say there's no money to be made in newspapers A Los Angeles Times' website has been silently mining crypto-coins using visitors' web browsers and PCs for several days – after hackers snuck mining code onto its webpages.…

Big Blue's Duimovich chats cloud and more to El Reg Index At IBM's Index developer conference in San Francisco, on Tuesday, The Register sat down with Big Blue's Java CTO John Duimovich to talk about the Java programming language, IBM, the cloud and other developer-oriented concerns.…