The Register

Plus: Rubber-ducky rock may split in half one day Pics Scientists have seen a landslide on a comet for the first time ever, it was announced on Tuesday.…

Boosted capacity of existing fibre by 2.5x. Coming soon: 32 Tbps per fibre Nokia has lit up a trans-Atlantic fibre for Facebook, in a field trial that showed off 200 Gbps and 250 Gbps wavelengths on a 5,500 km link.…

iPhone also now comes in charitable red and the iPhone SE doubles up on memory Apple's best products succeed because they solve non-obvious problems.…

libpurple is a 'binary blob of unknown provenance' says researcher A developer is warning Adium users to pick a different messaging app because of an exploitable vulnerability in its underlying libpurple version.…

Brace yourselves, netadmins, streamer's promising more and chunkier vids everywhere If your Linux-using mates suddenly disappear for a day or two, we can explain why: Netflix has just revealed it's fully and formally available on the OS.…

Also ties up with NetApp, Veritas, Red Hat, gets hot about hybrid everything IBM's decided to play the “our cloud storage is even cheaper than your cloud storage” game, but by a different set of rules.…

Undocumented feature allows installation of persistent malware “Don't create undocumented features” should be tattooed in the corner of every developer's eye: there's one in the Microsoft Application Verifier Provider that provides attack vectors on everything Windows since XP.…

Will Google's operating system be an "oh baby" or an "oh dear" moment for programmers? Google on Tuesday published a developer-oriented preview of Android O, which turns out to be a software sequel rather than softcore erotica.…

High cost of peninsula leads to 'de-location' offer A startup is offering workers a hefty sign-on bonus – if they move out of the San Francisco Bay Area.…

For better work-life balance, work more outside of work In contrast to the restrictions many companies place on their workers, GitHub believes it can loosen the reins through the release of its Balanced Employee Intellectual Property Agreement (BEIPA).…

Two critical bugs found in Chrome, Firefox add-ons Password vault LastPass is scrambling to patch critical security flaws that malicious websites can exploit to steal millions of victims' passphrases.…

Total Inability To Skype Ur Parents Updated Microsoft cloud services have dived offline, taking down Outlook, Hotmail, OneDrive, Skype, and Xbox Live.…

Hit list: Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia The UK has banned airline passengers on direct inbound flights from six countries in the Middle East and North Africa from taking a range of electronic devices into the cabin due to fears of a terrorist attack.…

IT LIVES! Cybercriminals behind the Necurs botnet have reactivated the zombie network and returned to their original business of using compromised machines as conduits for spam distribution.…

Now, how to do that in a stagnant market? The wonderfully named Marco Grieco Wang-Andresen, number two EMEA exec at Acer, is floating across to run rival PC maker Lenovo's ops in the same territory, El Reg can confirm.…

De Rojas to have 're-energised' regional business British software giant Sage has lost a “trail-blazing” executive brought in to help oversee the transition to cloud from on-prem after less than six months.…

So that's OK then, nothing to see here The UK Information Commissioner has cleared the Information Commissioner of an alleged failure to apply Freedom of Information laws correctly, following an investigation into itself.…

'Numerous reports' received Microsoft’s March Windows 10 Update has claimed a new victim: Windows dialogue boxes built using Telerik objects.…

Smartphone hardware school of hard knocks A popular Indiegogo venture to build a secondary e-ink display for the iPhone has shut down after raising over $1m – and donors will not get their money back.…

Don't just fling unsecured open source OSes at world+dog, father of the Internet begs Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the internet, has weighed in on Internet of Things security, warning that a Mirai botnet-style incident could happen again unless vendors start taking responsibility for their goods.…

Announces product integrations and new language for exchanging customer data Adobe and Microsoft have announced new product integrations along with the XDM (Experience Data Model) language for interchanging behavioural and marketing data between platforms.…

Advertisers, please help us build a better swamp Google has responded to a contagious YouTube advertising boycott which yesterday prompted a downgrade on Wall Street.…

Customers able to view account details of other users Mobile operator Three has admitted that some customers were able to view the mobile account details of other Three users via their accounts yesterday.…

Privacy impact assessments? Anyone? Bueller? Councils in the UK have work to do ahead of the EU's General Data Protection Regulations, according to the Information Commissioner's Office's department for good practice.…

Industry bods not keen on mandatory filtering Government proposals to force internet service providers into blocking content inappropriate for children with filters have been branded "disproportionate" by the industry's representative group.…

M call for papers due to close on March 31 There are just 10 days left until we close the call for papers for M, so if you want to tell the world how you’re putting artificial intelligence, machine learning and predictive analytics to work in business, we really want to hear from you.…

Don't decommission that MySQL server – yet The commercial release by Google of its Spanner database as a public beta last month came as both a pleasant surprise and a wake-up call: perhaps the end of NoSQL databases is in sight.…

Pocket powerhouse Review Huawei began to make significant inroads into the premium phone business in the West last year with its heavily promoted P9 models, and the Chinese giant has got this year’s shot at the market in early: ahead of Samsung and HTC.…

Doesn't say it's going to, just that it is preparing to do so... The Home Office has acknowledged that it is preparing to accept a landmark EU ruling from last year which restated that access to retained data must only be given in cases of serious crime, unlike the range of cases provided for under the new Investigatory Powers Act.…

If only there was some way to work out these frustrations... HPE is ensuring that no unpleasant memories linger for Enterprise Services staff being booted to DXC Technology by informing them they are no longer entitled to membership to the employee discount scheme.…

Mid-East airports and airlines hit by carry-on ban on gadgets From today, passengers are banned from flying into the US from specific overseas airports if their carry-on luggage contains devices larger than a mobile phone. The clampdown is a result of counterterrorism intelligence, we understand.…

GPU engines are out and AI translators will help you pull From voice translation to self-driving automobile, AI's impact in everyday life will become more and more apparent this year. The AI and deep learning market will experience even more rapid technological advancement, very rapid growth and adoption, and increasing competition for both hardware and software platforms. While AI fears will remain, the public will become more cognisant and comfortable with social media AI applications.…

Servicing your mechanical overlords Sysadmin Blog The machines are taking over. At the forefront of this change is the US Air Force, which now has more jobs for drone pilots than any other type. This is not likely to be an isolated event.…

If it's cloud connected and has a mic, it'll run it, beams exec Samsung has shed more light on its virtual personal assistant Bixby ahead of the March 29 launch of its flagship – and hopefully non-detonating – Galaxy S8 smartphone. The S8 will be a big user of Bixby.…

01001011 01101001 01101100 01101100 00100001 00100001 Artificial intelligence agents can invent their own language and talk among themselves to work out the best way to get a job done, a study has shown.…

VSAN may get a gig on UK's Astute-class boats. And is definitely getting a filesystem VMware says it's been asked to consider how nuclear submarines might use its virtual SAN.…

This is the stuff that binds Quarks together Boffins poring over data from the Large Hadron Collider's “Beauty” experiment are blinking in surprise, having turned up five new particles in one hit.…

XenApp Essentials pricing revealed Citrix has revealed a little more about XenApp Essentials, its replacement for the Azure Remoteapp application publishing service that Microsoft killed off last year.…

AI. Check. Machine learning. Check. Brand name. Check ARM is today touting a new way of organizing processor chips – one that will squeeze accelerators designed for AI and such tasks into phones, PCs, cars, and so on.…

Fentanyl merchant was good at Tor, rubbish in meatspace and at deleting browser history Delivery is the weakest link in the “dark web” drug trade: the postal habits of a large-scale trader have led to his undoing.…

The fix is simple: turn your modem on and off again to get a new IP address. Or ask your ISP to assign them more often Domain-name lookups only reveal websites visited, not individual pages viewed, right? Wrong: the interaction between a user and the DNS is more revealing than previously believed, according to a paper from German postdoc researcher Dominik Herrmann.…

Australia, of all places, is a tax haven for Apple New Zealand New Zealand has joined the international criticism of Apple's tax arrangements, with NZ$4.2 billion worth of sales over ten years yielding zero tax in the country.…

So far, no patch available to the public Nest's Dropcam and Dropcam Pro security cameras can be wirelessly attacked via Bluetooth to crash and stop recording footage. This is perfect for burglars and other crooks who want to knock out the cams moments before robbing a joint.…

Podule returns home after grim experiment leaves 40 dead After almost a month spent attached to the International Space Station, SpaceX's Dragon capsule has successfully returned to Earth. The podule, laden with science experiments including the bodies of 40 mice, is now on its way to NASA via ship.…

Air travel to the US from eight countries appears to be affected People traveling by air to America from an undisclosed list of countries will no longer be allowed to carry devices larger than a mobile phone in carry-on baggage.…

Search king tweaks rules to human raters Google has asked its search quality raters not to assume that users looking up Holocaust denials, or whether women or Islam or black people are evil, are "racist or bad people."…

City wakes up to emails cancelling long-awaited 1Gbps broadband Analysis Looking back, it should have been obvious: when Google announced in 2011 that it would roll out its own super-fast internet service for just $70 a month, offering 1Gbps over its own fiber, it started out in Kansas.…

Meanwhile, potential Russian campaign links probed Vid Monday mornings are never pleasant, are they? Take FBI director James Comey and head of the NSA Admiral Mike Rogers, for example, who kicked off their week by being grilled by the US House Select Intelligence Committee.…

Claiming you can't remember your passphrase to unlock data is willful defiance The US Third Circuit Court of Appeals today upheld a lower court ruling of contempt against a chap who claimed he couldn't remember the password to decrypt his computer's hard drives.…

Click here to see her stolen nudes, and then here, and here, and again here, and... Scammers are exploiting a new batch of leaked celebrity nudes, using the stolen selfies to lure in gawpers and make a fast buck.…