The Register

Aims to have Apache Spark running in time it takes to make cuppa First apps on Windows, then Linuxes in Hyper-V and on Azure, now big data via Spark. In another effort to win over the open source crowd, Microsoft has made the speedy big data engine Apache Spark easier to set up and use on Azure, giving devs a dedicated tool to help provision clusters.…

Will this be the end of piloted planes? Give it a while yet Boeing is to snap up manufacturer of advanced aerospace platforms Aurora Flight Sciences, in a bid to further expand its autonomous portfolio.…

Maturity, complexity and efficiency Picture the scene. You’ve run your legacy infrastructure into the ground. You bought it six or seven years ago with a view to depreciating the hardware over four years, or perhaps even three, so it’s done its time and then some. Now it’s starting to get flakier than you can live with, and as your channel partner’s spares supply is now drying up you’re finding yourself searching eBay rather more than you used to. It’s time to renew the kit, and as you look around you see your peers, the vendors and people like me talking about how great virtualization is. But is it really time for you to virtualize?…

Big T lags in capacity stakes but could catch up soon Analysis Toshiba lags behind WDC and Seagate in high-capacity 3.5-inch drives, having just reached 10TB. The other two are waving from 12TB and WDC has recently hit 14TB. How can Tosh catch up?…

And it's making threat intel much, much harder, say researchers VB2017 Intel agencies and top-tier hackers are actively hacking other hackers in order to steal victim data, borrow tools and techniques, and reuse each other's infrastructure, attendees at Virus Bulletin Con, Madrid, were told yesterday.…

Do not adjust your set, you are not watching The Day Today Weezer's former bassist has written a "theme tune" for Elon Musk. Why? He was feeling miserable, apparently.…

Great for keeping sandwiches fresh AND de-orbiting sails Blighty's defence boffins are now spending £10m per year on space research, including a satellite mission set for blast-off in 2019.…

Phishing sites only stick around in Blighty for 1 hour, they boast The National Cyber Security Centre responded to 590 "significant attacks" over the last year including WannaCry, MPs' email addresses being targeted due to weak passwords and various threats to other large organisations.…

OK, the sex part not so much... this time Lectures We've got a brace of cracking Register lectures coming up over the next two months that dive into digital culture past and present. And we really want you to be there.…

Russian Business Network alumni still very much in business, research suggests VB2017 Some bulletproof hosting (BPH) operations – wellspring of all manner of online villainy – are moving their operations to the disputed territories of eastern Ukraine and Transnistria on the Moldovan border.…

Not you, Microsoft. You had your chance Canalys channels forum Hewlett Packard Enterprise is reworking the Cloud Server line jointly developed with Foxconn – a unit that was under threat – and plans to launch shiny new products in the not-too-distant future.…

Yet guilty plea to computer misuse offence costs him £250 The former Harrods IT worker accused of stealing a laptop from the luxury department store has been cleared of theft – but was fined for trying to remove it from the department store's domain.…

And what will it become? At long last, Google's cloud has an on-premises extension. That extension is... Scale Computing? The cloud giant and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) vendor have have said they will build a service with some interesting potential.…

That is, if the sheer amount biz uses is anything to go by Scale was big at the JavaOne conference this week. Spotify lauded its success scaling with Java, and Oracle execs practically squealed as they reeled off adoption statistics. Big Red believes the next ten years belong to Java.…

Local security firm says 15 Bitcoin buys enough data to take down the Indian internet Indian antivirus and endpoint vendor Seqrite claims the nation's internet registry has suffered a data breach, but the registry's parent organisation says while it was attacked the information obtained was trivial.…

With our analytics you won’t capsize next time, Lawrence Analytics flinger Splunk has slammed Oracle for what it describes as a “fundamental lack of knowledge and understanding” of the cybersecurity market.…

Sub-orbital rocket worked, but the telemetry indicates a sudden descent Vid NASA has successfully tested a parachute designed for low-density atmospheres like that found on Mars.…

Security blanket for the paranoid among us (OK, all of us reading this) Keybase.io, which began as a cloud key database and has since evolved into a secure messaging and collaboration service, on Wednesday added support for encrypted Git repositories.…

Do not install July Service Pack for ProLiant on ESXi unless you want free hardware Here's a fantastic fail: HPE's July ServicePack for ProLiant servers bricked some network adapters so badly they “must be replaced”.…

Fancy method captures three-dimensional images of biomolecules The 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to a trio of researchers that have developed a new technique that captures three dimensional images of biological molecules.…

Bengali speakers freed from absence of search monetisation Google has learned to speak Bengali and found an extra 200 million people to advertise to along the way.…

Farmers can keep it, but cities' spectrum scarcity needs a fix Intelsat and Intel reckon there's a chunk of spectrum currently devoted to satellite operations that could be useful for capacity-starved mobile comms.…

Federal Police won't need to wait a week any more to see you smile Updated Australia is to build a national database of as many citizens' images as it can, with state premiers rubber-stamping prime minister Malcolm Turnbull's plan to add drivers' licenses to a national facial recognition database.…

Even Extended Support Releases will be naked and alone as of June 2018 Mozilla has announced it will end support for its Firefox browser on Windows XP and Windows Vista.…

Google unwraps toy image rec neural net Google today popped online something called Teachable Machines, a simple demo for programmers interested in deep learning.…

New attack flips bits in uerspace binaries for fun and p0wnage Ever since Rowhammer first emerged, there's been something of an arms race between researchers and defenders, and the boffins firing the latest shot reckon they've beaten all available protections.…

And a slightly creepy but well-intentioned robo-camera Google today showed off some new Android phones, a laptop, two Home assistants, and a genuine surprise: a set of earbuds that attempt to emulate Douglas Adams’ legendary Babel Fish – a real-time language translator.…

And don't forget to add in those backdoors, ta The second-in-command at the US Department of Justice says every business should have its own program to let third-party researchers find and report bugs.…

You can't come in... oh, $20? Right this way, Vlad Analysis Social media giants Twitter and Facebook remain at the end of severe criticism from US Congress and elsewhere as investigations into Russia's interference in America's presidential elections highlight the depth to which the tech giants' platforms continue to be abused.…

Storage software updated and benchmark spanked NetApp has updated its SolidFire Element OS, StorageGRID Webscale, ONTAP, and OnCommand Insight software. These packages, which sit under its Data Fabric umbrella brand, are supposed to unify and manage storage across on-premises kit and public cloud stores.…

Parisian e-learning outfit launches in US Special report An online college focused on the tech industry is promising to find you a job in six months or it will refund your course fees in full.…

Foes flustered by 'dangerous' light-touch regulation America-wide rules for self-driving cars inched a bit closer on Wednesday when a US Senate transportation committee agreed to bring the AV START Act before the full Senate for consideration.…

Mystery of disappearing photos solved, too Apple has pushed out a software update to address the handful of bugs that were nagging its latest iPhone models and flavor of iOS.…

Azure Functions upgraded to woo developers speaking Oracle's language JavaOne Microsoft has announced Java support for Azure Functions, the serverless cloud platform which competes with AWS Lambda. The announcement was made at the JavaOne event under way in San Francisco this week.…

38-year-old said to be appealing Greek court's decision A Greek court has approved the US extradition of a Russian national accused of running a $4bn Bitcoin laundering ring on the now-defunct BTC-e exchange.…

Managing the legacy and you “Legacy” is a word that we tend to associate with big companies. After all, they’re the ones who have vast piles of equipment that go out of date in no time at all but require big money and big projects to replace them with modern stuff.…

And it's all Microsoft's fault 'cos 'we aren't an OS company' – PC giant Canalys Channels Forum HP Inc has finally confirmed it is to kill off X3 device sales and support by the end of 2019, cutting short the proposed roadmap and hanging the blame on Microsoft's "change of strategy" with its mobile OS.…

Or so say a bunch of PC execs and Canalys CEO Canalys Channels Forum Microsoft will quit its loss-making Surface hardware business by 2019, according to execs from PC manufacturers and a channel watcher.…

EU competition commish cracks whip twice in a day The European Commission has ordered Amazon to repay €250m (£222m) for benefiting from illegal and unfair state aid courtesy of Luxembourg.…

Asteroid smacks chunks off a volcano... but not as we know it New research adds extra support for where exactly six meteorites that travelled from Mars to Earth millions of years ago, called "nakhlites", may have originated.…

Better late than never, I guess Google's controversial DeepMind has created an ethics unit to "explore and understand" the real-world impacts of AI.…

A pox on your proxy, seethe Excel-wranglers Microsoft's general one-stop URL for Office news and updates, blogs.office.com, is dead for some IP addresses in Europe and elsewhere in the world.…

This is not just a hut. This is an original Bletchley Park hut Block H has been declared one of England's "irreplaceable places", the National Museum of Computing has joyously announced.…

Decision 'extremely regrettable', says Irish government The European Commission has referred Ireland to the Court of Justice over its failure to recover illegal tax benefits from Apple worth up to €13bn (£11.5bn).…

I'm sorry, I didn't understand the question NetApp has reinvented Clippy with a Watson-powered chatbot called Elio, and is taking a leaf out of Nimble's book by using automated and predictive/proactive support called Active IQ.…

(Nearly) everything you wanted to know about machine learning and AI Whether you're wondering how to cope as your competitors embrace machine learning or are itching to embed AI into your company's DNA, you'd be doing yourselves a big favour by joining us at MCubed London next week.…

Early signs might be positive, but this is holy ground for some 1982 was a good year for sci-fi cinema. ET, Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan, Tron, The Thing. All great in their own ways. It was also the year Blade Runner came out.…

Hyper-V-focused HCIA products pushed out by cloud services takeover +Comment A raft of sales execs, marketeers, architects and two co-founders have exited HyperGrid, the hyperconverged infrastructure appliance (HCIA) startup formerly known as GridStore, over the past nine months.…

Show you're not n00b with these slick analytical skillz Hello, wrong number Analytical skills are in big demand so it is really important not to make the basic, common, mistakes that show you up as a newbie.…

Just 53 per cent of the image made it home, so software thought it couldn't be a photo The European Space Agency (ESA) has been able to squeeze one last photo out of the Rosetta probe.…