The Register

Opening salvos Oracle's long-running legal battle to get what it believes is it's fair share from Google's Android reopened this week – the second time an Appeals Court on Federal Circuit has examined the issue. The first hour overran with a bumpy ride for Google.…

It's a small world after all Animation goliath Disney has added Oracle's co-CEO Safra Catz to its growing list of senior tech exec board members.…

Peers table amendment to switch responsibility for drafting guidance from state to ICO A set of clauses the government slipped into the Data Protection Bill "go beyond" their stated ambition and "create different risks", the information commissioner has said.…

Tight lips at both firms but whispers suggest a brewing bromance +Comment Suppressed hints and whispers suggest that Toshiba and WDC are finally about to agree a deal ending their dispute over Toshiba's right to sell its flash fab joint-venture stake and the way it's being done.…

Mother of all bunfights beckons Exclusive European policy makers are considering the unthinkable and reopening the EU's e-commerce directive, according to multiple sources. UK industries have been invited to contribute their thoughts, on the basis that the directive will be amended in the lifetime of this Parliament.…

There's a lot more to life than being really, really, ridiculously good looking – yep, it's AI An AI researcher has taken time out of his busy schedule to appear in an ad for Yves Saint Laurent's scent for men called Y.…

justice.gov.uk website SSL certificate expires The SSL certificate on the criminal justice and court listing site justice.gov.uk expired yesterday, causing browsers to now warn users that their information is at risk.…

Sandhurst personnel short of vital info on officer trainees who start in January Updated Capita's infamous Recruitment Partnership Project (RPP) for the Ministry of Defence has finally gone live, five years after the first deal was signed – and, surprise, surprise, it is riddled with bugs and missing critical functionality.…

IS Delivery gets the memo now too, 1,000+ heads at risk – sources It wasn't only staff in IBM's Technical Services Support (TSS) unit that this week received the memo urging volunteers to come forward to toss themselves on the redundancy heap, folk in IS Delivery (ISD) got it too.…

Infosec boffins raise flags Some of the well-known weaknesses of SS7 Roaming Networks have been replicated in the next-gen telco protocol, Diameter.…

You can't buy or hire a mindset To everyone with DevOps in their job title (and a quick LinkedIn search turned up 45,597 of you just in my network): folks, you're doing it wrong.…

Suffering residents have an 8-hour wait for 45 minutes of telly A street in Suffolk has been revealed as the slowest area in Blighty for broadband, where residents have to wait a painful eight hours to download just 45 minutes of telly.…

Passed data to loss adjusters, who shared it with insurer client Staff at a firm of loss adjusters and two rogue private investigators the biz hired have been found guilty of data protection offences.…

Don't forget to like, subscribe and send a chisel to my PO box A YouTube stunt imbecile was rescued by firefighters yesterday after cementing his head inside a microwave.…

And it's a whopper Toshiba has joined the ranks of helium-filled disk drive makers with a 14TB drive that is not shingled.…

*Cough* Cobol, .NET *cough* Poorly written code is leaving banks at greater risk of attack and poorly prepared for big changes in the financial sector due to come into effect early next year.…

Qumulo and the tree-walking problem Analysis If you ask your notebook's filesystem how many MP3 files it is storing that haven’t been opened in 30 days, you can find the answer reasonably quickly. But ask an enterprise’s file system when it holds a million files and you have a big problem.…

Whitehall's head stuck in sand about upgrading crap IT The UK border could be left exposed after Brexit as departments have failed to plan for new IT systems, according to a damning report by MPs released today.…

Microsoft updates pointer events for Precision Touch Pads to make scrolling great again Microsoft says it will fix "scroll jank" because Edge needs it and Chrome sorted it ages ago.…

And this was after he avoided losing some fingers On-Call The working week's winding down once again and that means it's time for another edition of On-Call, The Register's Friday tech support tale recounted by readers.…

And gives us the news that god-like machines will take over within a decade Elon Musk has revealed that Tesla, his electric automobile company, is developing its own custom chips for its driverless cars.…

Plans to infuse CloudCenter with workload-hopping tech Stop us if you've heard this one before, but Cisco's just made an acquisition.…

Virtzilla's App Defence and CB's endpoint protection combine for whitelist-fest VMware and Carbon Black have joined forces to enhance each other's security wares.…

Server business screamed ahead in Q3, PCs grew, storage stalled and debt is down Dell's posted third quarter results that suggest it is on track to deliver its first profit since acquiring EMC.…

Applied Materials quartet accused of trying to pull a Fairchild Four former Applied Materials employees have been charged with stealing the company's chipmaking technology to use as the basis for their own startup.…

Boffins working to put everyone in glass houses Seeing through walls, a capability available to law enforcement and military authorities for several years, could become a bit more predictable in the future thanks to a technique developed by researchers at Duke University.…

Files brief to make sure US ‘correctly understands’ EU data protection law The European Commission has stepped into the ongoing battle between Microsoft and the US government to make sure European laws are “correctly understood”.…

Black Hat crowd encouraged to be paranoid Delegates to Black Hat Europe have been encouraged to turn conventional security thinking on its head by practicing security through distrusting.…

President punts issue to Administrative Council Despite having conclusively won two tribunals and been publicly supported by the International Labour Organization (ILO) demanding his immediate reinstatement, on Thursday patent judge Patrick Corcoran was refused entry to the European Patent Office's (EPO) headquarters.…

Stop appreciating the irony and go install the patch now Microsoft has posted an out-of-band security update to address a remote code execution flaw in its Malware Protection Engine.…

There's no traffic on that road because it's ON FIRE! As wildfires continue to rage around Los Angeles, the local police have asked drivers to be somewhat skeptical about navigation apps.…

Another week, another Mac patch to install Apple has released a security update to address nearly two dozen vulnerabilities in macOS High Sierra.…

But… aren't you… supposed…aaargh… Pai! One of the US government's top regulators has warned that her department is in no position to take on the mantle of protecting the open internet if its sister organization, the FCC, votes on repealing net neutrality regulations later this month.…

Outages throw a wrench into profit taking The price of Bitcoin (BTC) continued to soar on Thursday, creating chaos among those trying to buy and sell the cryptocurrency currency due to service trouble at several exchanges.…

That's not how bug bounties work, Travis A 20-year-old Florida man who lives with his mom was the "security researcher" that Uber paid off last year not to reveal a massive hack of its systems.…

We'll soon be Xeon the numbers... IBM has launched its first POWER9 server, the dual-socket AC922, saying it is designed for compute-intensive AI work, speeding frameworks like Chainer, TensorFlow and Caffe.…

Up to 40 calls a day, three hours wasted IT buyers are pestered by between nine and 40 unsolicited sales calls from resellers each and every day, collectively wasting hours of their life that they’ll never get back.…

Infrastructure, acquisitions and retrenchments Supported It has been an interesting year in the world of hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) with acquisitions and retrenchments and with new products released.…

At least one part of the 'Year of the Navy' went to plan Britain’s biggest ever aircraft carrier, HMS Queen Elizabeth, has been formally commissioned into the Royal Navy, with Her Majesty attending the ceremony in person.…

Something went bump in the night... over and over It takes all sorts to make a world and some on the fringes of life often turn up on daytime TV. And so El Reg was fascinated by the story of Amethyst Realm, who dumped a human in the, er, physical realm to become a ghostbuster banger.…

Object storage filer front end to ease the load for primary filers Cloudian says you can store unstructured data files on its HyperStore object storage, through a HyperFile NAS Controller, and not burden primary data filers with the stuff, saving lots of lovely money and getting loads of scalability.…

Be safe out there, mmkay, says CAA The Civil Aviation Authority reckons a million and a half consumer drones will be sold over Christmas – and the aviation regulator hopes new dronies will read and obey the law of the skies.…

Mulls further regulation next year The European Commission has urged the likes of Google, Facebook and Twitter to do more to remove extremist content - or face further regulation.…

Not so bad, is it? Real world performance gleaned from thousands of British mobiles sheds light on how LTE in the boondocks performs outside major urban areas. And it may not be as bad as you think.…

For the love of cloud, don't click on anything Google seems powerless to stop its Google Drive file sharing service being exploited by a spammer who has linked other users to their stash of pirated movies, among other dubious files, users have complained.…

Ben Rudall challenged over move to Snowflake Hadoop-slinger Hortonworks has sought a court order against former enterprise sales manager Ben Rudall that would permit it take forensic images of his personal phone and his cloud storage account.…

Parroting Cayla... if she were a bit more sweary The same researchers whose hack on the My Friend Cayla doll prompted regulatory action have followed up with a hack on a talking toy robot bird.…

Free at last, free at last, thank Ginny Rommety... IBM is seeking volunteers in Technology Support Services (TSS) to throw themselves down the redundancy chute by the end of the year.…

And give thanks unto the GSMA Logowatch Progress on deploying the NB-IoT connectivity tech may have stalled but the GSM Association doesn’t want you worrying your little head about that. Instead, take a look at the shiny new logo they’ve come up with for NB-IoT!…

Innovation deep freeze ends with private equity ownership Analysis Public cloud backupper Spanning says it has a new release of innovation energy now that Dell has shopped it to private equity.…