The Register

Rural businesses will be living the dream in 2018 nbn™, the entity building and operating Australia's national broadband network (NBN), has announced it will launch a 100Mbps fixed wireless service in 2018.…

Got nine-figure problems but a strategy ain't one The track record of the UK's Government Digital Service has come under fire by the National Audit Office, which today said it has “unclear accountabilities".…

CEO and pal faked letters from Cisco, Brocade, Stanford, prosecutors claim Jayavel Murugan, CEO of staffing agency Dynasoft Synergy, is accused of faking letters from Silicon Valley bosses so he could ship cheap foreign workers into America.…

Tasman Global Access sees the light An NZ$100 million submarine cable has given New Zealanders a bit more diversity in their connections to the outside world.…

Tech dragon cleared after admitting to sanction violations The US Department of Commerce has scrapped trade restrictions that left Chinese tech monster ZTE unable to import components from America.…

State investigator, Oregon DoJ attorney lash out in lawsuits A chap whose job was to investigate threats on social networks is suing the Oregon Department of Justice – for allegedly retaliating against him after his online sleuthing led him to the agency's own director of civil rights.…

Suds to be you, Kenny Samsung was handed a rare win this week when a judge decided not to pause its defense of a lawsuit over faulty washing machines.…

Gor blimey, guvnor! A prominent contributor to the open source Drupal content management system has been asked to distance himself from project because "his belief system is inconsistent with [the] project's goals."…

And doesn't explode. Hopefully Samsung arguably made the best Android phone last year – but it lost any bragging rights by committing one of the biggest consumer electronics PR disasters in history.…

Seductive twofer licence deal if you switch Nutanix wants SimpliVity customers upset by HPE's purchase to move across to them instead.…

Samsung Galaxy S8 can do it natively, Virtzilla thinks it can do better VMware's going to have a crack at delivering desktops through smartphones.…

There’s nothing wrong with our forecasti.... Er, pardon us for a minute Exclusive IBM UK has tried to justify running two redundancy schemes concurrently in the Infrastructure Services Delivery team, telling staff that financial pressures forced its hand and it may take similar action again.…

First look at this iteration's more grown-up aspects Microsoft's big Windows 10 Creators Update platform release is now available if you want it, but the long-promised UX makeover and People Experience feature will wait for a future update to Windows. Probably this year, but possibly not.…

Varmints cooked up variant after malware code went public Hackers have created a potent new variant of the Mirai IoT malware.…

Chatbots are boring. What’s next? Promo Artificial Intelligence has crested the top of the Gartner hype cycle, and is on the lips of every technical marketing exec. Companies are doing things with it, but many projects are still proving out the concepts. You can’t talk about the weather these days without a gimmicky, gee-whiz weather chatbot trying to impress you with its opinion on the rain – and sometimes getting it wrong. And let’s just pretend Microsoft Tay never happened.…

And they need some financial help getting there. Fancy chucking a few quid in? A pair of primary school girls from Hertfordshire will represent the UK in the World Robotics Championships finals next month – if they meet their crowdfunding target.…

US Trustee suspects rewards for 11 execs are more an employee retention scheme The US federal bankruptcy has slammed telco Avaya for its decision to award 11 execs $3.7m (£3m) in bonuses after the company filed for bankruptcy protection earlier this year.…

Plus: Vegemite. Don't slather it on. Just a smear

Open letter to Amber Rudd: more time needed to read '413 pp of dense legal text' The UK's Home Office has been accused of making "it near to impossible to provide a meaningful response" to the public consultations which campaigners fought legal battles to have included in the Investigatory Powers Act.…

Buy sh*t, get hit Nearly one-fifth of mobile phones and one-quarter of video game consoles shipped abroad are fake, according to a report by the the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).…

Shakes up top brass after 142k misrepresented in £3bn Project Lightning Virgin Media has admitted to overstating its £3bn Project Lightning superfast broadband rollout by 142,000 premises – a move that has led to the suspension of four staff and a reshuffle of its top brass.…

After burning hundreds of millions into the bargain The Ministry of Defence has started replacing the flight control software on its all-but-useless Chinook Mk.3 special forces helicopters, a mere 16 years after bungled attempts to bake its own software without involving manufacturer Boeing.…

As ransomware rapidly evolves, defenders look for help keeping up Promo To many Internet users it must look as if ransomware arrived out of the blue. Pioneers such as Cryzip started circulating at very low levels in the UK as early as 2006 and yet it wasn’t until 2013 that this type of malware suddenly spiked with the appearance of its first big global superstar, CryptoLocker.…

But mouthpiece then denies they're a spokesman Backers of the troubled ZX Spectrum Vega+ handheld gaming console have told The Register of long delays and seemingly ignored messages when requesting refunds from the company behind the project, Retro Computers Ltd.…

What you see and what you might actually get could differ Analysis Intel has now had its brace of Optane P4800X SSD and M.2 2280 motherboard card releases and we’ve learned there is no straightforward performance comparison with equivalent flash product – Intel is eschewing that on the grounds of Optane being a significantly different storage product.…

And it might be winning them: Windows Insiders program has cracked the ten million mark Microsoft's revealed it doesn't just want Windows users, it wants Windows fans. As in queue-all-night, constantly-offer-unsolicited-feedback, faint-at-the-sight-of-pop-stars fans.…

Welsh corner of Mars makes the final list, along with once-wet Oxia Planum The European Space Agency has narrowed its candidate list of landing sites for the ExoMars rover to two choices.…

Run the classic Model III on Windows Antique Code Show If you get misty-eyed over the expression 20 IF N=1 GOTO 10 (or reach for the pen to correct me), there's another open source TRS-80 BASIC emulator available.…

Ebury infections for fun and profit, sentencing in August A Russian citizen behind “tens of thousands” of Ebury trojan infections has entered a guilty plea in the US and will face sentencing in August.…

Mobile base stations to be treated as computers in their own right The European Telecommunications Standards Institute has decided its Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) effort needed a bigger brief, so it's renamed it as Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC).…

Who needs a plastic bag and civic pride when two drones can do the job? Finding dog poo in public places and picking it up before it can besmirch a sole probably isn't high on the list of things humanity needs to get better at, but that hasn't stopped Dutch folk throwing two drones at the problem.…

A statistical model for cluelessness named after the president. Because why not? Let's give this points in the Academic Sense of Humour stakes for 2017: the wryly-named Data-mining Textual Responses to Uncover Misconception Patterns, or D.TRUMP, looks to automate the process of working out just how confused someone might be, from how they answer open-response questions.…

Three to do, pronto, unless you like guest-host escape mirth VMware's reported three bugs that probably deserve your urgent attention.…

Johnny Depp to play John McAfee in biopic depicting A-V man as Colonel Kurtz POLL Nobody's confirmed anything except Big Mac himself, but John McAfee reckons he's going to be played by Captain Jack Sparrow himself, Johnny Depp.…

Republican politico has something of an obsession with onanism Yet another American state has seen legislation introduced to include mandatory anti-pornography filters on any internet-capable device – or else.…

Rain is wet, sky is blue, Oracle is expensive, etc Uber has published its first ever diversity report today, revealing that the car-hailing biz is, unsurprisingly, dominated by white males like most major American technology companies.…

No NBN revenue top up for you, says regulator Australia's Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) is crowing today after the nation's Federal Court agreed with its ruling on how much dominant telco Telstra can charge for wholesale services on its fixed line networks.…

All your calls are belong to us Amazon Web Services on Tuesday introduced Amazon Connect, a hosted contact center service that allows any business to consign customers to voice jail with minimal effort.…

So much for the utopian techno future, according to this study Industrial robots are depressing wages and increasing unemployment, according to a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a private, non-profit, non-partisan research organization in America.…

Would you mind telling me what you're doing with my phone? US Customs and Homeland Security are being sued to get them to hand over the rules by which people have their electronic devices seized and searched at the border.…

'Who leaked the leak? Not us', claim feds, 'talk to them' The Australian Senate's Committee of Privileges decided yesterday that documents seized from former Senator Stephen Conroy and a staffer last year are covered by parliamentary privilege, and can't be used in any police investigation into who leaked them.…

Car firm says discrimination claims false, points to promotion Tesla is facing a lawsuit from an employee at its car factory who is making lurid claims about racial discrimination in the workplace.…

Find a good VPN So, the US House of Representatives has voted away internet privacy (in concert with the Senate), and the legislation will be heading to the White House for Trump's imprimatur. He's expected to sign quickly, so as internet users it's time to get really serious about privacy.…

No, it's not a gun, I swear... I just want to pay for my milk. Let me go! A “quantum gadget” prototype capable of sending quantum keys using polarized light could make contactless payments on mobile more secure if it can be squeezed into a smartphone.…

As House passes law, here's what you should do about it The US House of Representatives has just approved a "congressional disapproval" vote of privacy rules, which gives your ISP the right to sell your internet history to the highest bidder.…

Not exactly getting with the program Despite being the third-largest internet provider in the UK, Virgin Media is not exactly looking toward the future.…

IBM does help, too OpenStack drove a chunk of Red Hat’s largest deals during the fourth quarter, with cloud proving more lucrative than its trademark Linux business.…

Trend Micro CTO suffered fatal heart attack Colleagues and friends are mourning the sudden death of distinguished antivirus industry veteran Raimund Genes last Friday.…

You mean they still have some customers left? Long-suffering customers of troubled hosting provider 186k are unable to access the firm's hosting and email services in what appears to be a major outage.…

Due to investment in content, it reckons Mobile operator EE has confirmed it will be hiking the prices of new customer contracts on its broadband and TV packages.…