The Register

Streams of gas slammed into cloud of baffling cosmic material – new theory The largest and oldest supermassive black holes were created from a giant clump of dark matter and gas after the Big Bang, according to a supercomputer simulation.…

Liberal MPs say FTTN is fine, the rest call for FTTP or FTTC from now on Australia's Joint Standing Committee on the National Broadband Network has released its first report [PDF] of the new Parliament, with a majority of members urging that the rest of the network be built with either fibre-to-the-curb or fibre-to-the-premises instead of fibre-to-the-node.…

Computerized consort goes back to the shop for repairs NSFW In a public showing of Samantha, a sex doll with built-in computing power to make her more realistic, the love droid suffered a terrible fate.…

Financial regulator worries about speculative investments going bad, fraud and crime South Korea has banned initial coin offerings (ICOs), the practice of taking cash for Blockchain-powered services.…

Startup slurped to provide allen-keying-as-a-service IKEA's finally acknowledged what plenty of us have learned the hard way: it's stuff can be so wretchedly frustrating to assemble that outsourcing the job is sometimes the kindest and fastest option.…

Not just for Inception fans: this is how you cloudify tricky-to-migrate workloads In late August 2017 THe Reg's virtualization desk learned that Google was working hard to make KVM better at nested virtualization. And now we know why, as the advertising giant's cloud has just revealed a nested virtualization beta.…

1.8 refurbishment is the third one this year Kubernetes, the popular open-source software for managing containerized applications, is scheduled for a feature infusion on Thursday, in accordance with its bump to version 1.8.…

What's 'Kerr-ching!' in Russian? Like Facebook before it, Twitter has acknowledged that, during the US presidential elections, it collected hundreds of thousands of dollars for ads supporting Russian media messaging, and that it has identified Twitter accounts tied to Facebook profiles known for promoting pro-Russia views.…

Policy hastily cobbled together using woolly advice, lacked clear objectives, measurements Australia's National Audit Office has published a rather unflattering assessment of prime minister Malcolm Turnbull's signature policy, the “National Innovation and Science Agenda”.…

ICANN delays KSK rollover after new data derails plans A multi-year effort to update the internet's overall security has been put on hold just days before it was due to be introduced, over fears that as many as 60 million people could be forced offline.…

Transcript reveals leaker's motivations Reality Winner smuggled a top-secret NSA dossier out of her office at a US government IT contractor by hiding it in her pantyhose, she told special agents.…

Attempt to lure more diverse workers backfires spectacularly In its effort to attract a more diverse workforce, Amazon is sending mixed messages.…

But what of criticism of FCC boss over hurricanes? Updated FCC boss Ajit Pai has publicly criticized Apple for not turning on the FM radio receivers in every iPhone – calling it a public safety issue.…

How about you try winning an election first, folks The Democratic party has asked for an amazingly naive ambitious $40bn investment in broadband internet for broke low-income Americans out in the sticks.…

Overseas cash piles get 'once-in-a-generation' break – again US President Donald Trump has vowed to cut corporations some slack in the form of a tax break that may give Silicon Valley something to celebrate.…

On-premises to Google Cloud platform 2-way interchange speedway Scale Computing has replicated its HC3 hyper-converged platform in Google's cloud and provided app and data interchange between the on-premises and public cloud worlds in its very own data fabric.…

Announces licensing scheme for smartphone features Freed of making phones, BlackBerry continues to "Dolby-ise" its brand, and again recorded a slim profit for the most recent financial quarter.…

Another day, another shot fired at American e-megacorps The EU Commission has fired a shot across Facebook and Twitter's bows, having issued a proclamation decreeing that "social media platforms" must do more to remove "illegal content inciting hatred, violence and terrorism online".…

CTO: Engineers spend half their time on this, customers need educating on the ingredient list Cloudera has become the latest company to offer up a set of tools to unify data management, with its SDX framework, which it describes as the platform's "secret sauce".…

Looks like WDC is scuppered apart from legal blocks +Comment Big flash chip buyer Apple and Korean flash fabber SK Hynix have agreed terms and committed to their Bain-led consortium's buy of Toshiba's flash chip interests.…

Fighting the instinct vs analytics wars Sponsored In business, should you trust your gut, or go by the numbers? Business mythology and Hollywood favour the gut. Both cite stories about maverick geniuses that ignored everyone’s advice and won big.…

Preconfigured single SKU box to skewer ROBO sales Skynet's T-1000 is an advanced cyborg assassin prototype with a liquid molecular brain inside a mimetic poly-alloy body. Tintri's T1000 is a storage array for small and medium-sized businesses. Ho hum. Let's talk about the latter.…

Firm won't explain network failure Final update A network failure affecting the Amadeus online booking platform is continuing to delay check-ins for passengers around the world, although the firm won't disclose the cause.…

No, we're not switching focus to Nimble, spokesman says Hewlett Packard Enterprise is to shutter its 3PAR engineering office in Belfast, Northern Ireland, but the firm emphasised the move does not mean it is shifting focus from 3PAR to Nimble storage.…

Urgent security triage needed A flaw has been found in the way the Linux kernel loads ELF files.…

Have you seen how dependent our armed forces are on them? Analysis The British government is publicly threatening to stop giving defence contracts to American aerospace firm Boeing – even though this is laughably unrealistic.…

But elsewhere experiences contract delays Broadband pusher CityFibre has posted a sales increase of 36 per cent for its half-year results, but has also reported delays to a number of its public sector contracts.…

Azure Stack and Hyper-V support ignition for MS Orlando's Microsoft Ignite conference saw Dell EMC and Veeam worshipping at the cloudy on-premises Azure Stack shrine with protection support offerings and more.…

Easy Access to some small-but-snazzy UK military ideas British military boffins are letting world+dog use bright ideas they devised for, among other things, compact antennas, military bouncy castles and a dog-training programme.…

Says you'd hafta click through a *boatload* of warnings Security researchers have uncovered what they believe is a vulnerability that allows malware to completely bypass Windows Defender. Microsoft dismissed the report as of "limited practical applicability" in practice (i.e. a low-risk threat).…

Now with 3G Only one phone from the "New Nokia" (aka HMD Global) has made any impact so far, and sadly for the startup's ambitions of returning the brand to market leadership, it's the remodelled classic, the 3310.…

A moment of silence, please, for the godfather of the jazz mag As all unabashed masturbators love to point out, pornography has historically driven technological uptake. But before the internet, Playboy was the most famous source in the world. Yesterday its founder, Hugh Hefner, died peacefully at home of natural causes aged 91.…

You did WHAT? WHY! The US government's mighty DARPA last year kicked off a research project designed to make systems controlled by artificial intelligence more accountable to their human users.…

NatWest PR: No, no, no. That person's info was BAD Retail bank NatWest is backtracking on previous claims that it was aware of a security glitch at the log-in stage that requested customers to enter more digits of their password than existed.…

Biggest threat next year, Met Police cybercrime boss says Cybersecurity bods at the Met Police, NHS and the Local Government Association in the UK believe ransomware will be one of the biggest threats facing the British public sector next year.…

Big Blue analytics boss wants to automate, automate, then automate some more IBM has announced a unified analytics system that allows data scientists to work across multiple data stores in ways the company said should eliminate time-consuming data integration and preparation.…

AI boffins find box marked 'Pandora', whack it with the AI-hammer With the Internet already groaning under the weight of d!ck pics and facial scanning increasingly used instead of passwords, do we really want AI to turn flat images into accurate 3D renderings of their content?…

Apple still hasn't been able to seal up keychain access hole for unsigned applications A security shortcoming in earlier versions of OS X has made its way into macOS High Sierra despite an expert's best efforts to highlight the flaw.…

Massive facility will try self-sustaining for a year Three years ago the United Arab Emirates announced plans to stage a manned mission to Mars. Now the kingdom plans to build a massive Mars colony in the desert to test out the technologies they will use to live there.…

A quick guide to this week's reveals Roundup Here's your weekly dose of key announcements in the world of artificial intelligence. The flurry of hardware-related news shows how machine learning software is reinvigorating chip design.…

'Hit Refresh' becomes 'Hit FN+F5' as Azure moves into a tent +Logowatch Microsoft has created a special “Employee Edition” of CEO Satya Nadella's new book, Hit Refresh – and The Register understands every full-time worker at the software giant will find one on their desks.…

Best signal yet received after space void mega-prang Scientists have recorded the most accurate reading of gravitational waves yet by using the upgraded LIGO and Virgo observatories together for the first time.…

Billionaire fight as Zuck decries 'crazy idea' fake news didn't impact election United States president Donald Trump has declared that Facebook was always against him and tossed it into the same bucket as The New York Times, which he regards as fake news, and The Washington Post, which he says is biased against him because it's owned by Amazon's Jeff Bezos.…

1550 nanometres is the sweetest sweet spot One of the hurdles facing photon-based quantum systems using entangled photons is that it's hard to create them at the 1550 nm wavelengths used in telecommunications systems.…

Can't say where. Can't say when. Can't agree on Mars or Moon as target. But it'll happen! Crewed deep space exploration is back on the agenda, after NASA and its Russian counterpart Roscosmos announced they will co-operate on efforts to create a cislunar space station.…

It's as if the data warehouse never happened. Which may not be a bad thing StrataConf Hadoop-flinger MapR has added a host of new capabilities to its database in a bid to offer developers more powerful real-time analytics.…

EXIF through a gift shop full of personal data In what looks like an Apple oversight, a developer has discovered that apps can access image metadata and therefore a pretty good history of iThing users' location.…

Eric Pulier alleged to have bribed execs at Australia's Commonwealth Bank to inflate earn-out payments The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Department of Justice (DoJ) have charged ServiceMesh founder Eric Pulier with attempting to defraud technology services giant of US$98 million.…

Latest lodging for Alexa has clock radio aspirations Amazon expanded its line of Echo cloud commerce intercoms on Wednesday with the introduction of Echo Spot, a spherical hodgepodge of screen, mics and speaker for communing with the company's Alexa software and demanding doorstep deliveries.…

Just 5,000 handsets have been shifted since release – pundits Android co-inventor Andy Rubin's much-hyped Essential Phone has thus far been a flop with consumers in its first weeks on the market, it is estimated.…