The Register

Er, sorry, ignore that, say red-faced admins Edinburgh University in Scotland has insisted a "system error" caused this year's graduands to be told by email that they wouldn't be receiving their degrees after all.…

Lectures, workshops and networking (both kinds) this October Events We’re thrilled to reveal the first batch of conference speakers for the Minds Mastering Machines (M3) three-day dive into machine learning, AI and advanced analytics this autumn.…

Foreign firms may suddenly find doing business there difficult China's new cyber-security laws, which come into effect on Thursday, may make it harder for foreign businesses to trade in the country.…

More like Giffgaffe... but good news if you're going to Spain Giffgaff customers may want to think twice before holidaying in tax havens such as the Channel Islands as new roaming charges will hike calls to back to Blighty to £1 per minute – up from the current 0.5p rate.…

Containers just wanna be hypervisors Just occasionally, you get it right. Six years ago, I called containers "every sysadmin's dream," and look at them now. Even the Linux Foundation's annual bash has been renamed from "LinuxCon + CloudOpen + Embedded Linux Conference" to "LinuxCon + ContainerCon".…

Who're you calling remote? One commonly thinks, when the word "hybrid" is used, of an infrastructure that combines on-premise (or at least private data centre) and public cloud. But "hybrid" also works in the other direction - across the heterogeneous systems within a particular location.…

Not an option for underpinning payment systems at present Underpinning wholesale payment systems with distributed ledger technology (DLT) would introduce greater costs and risks for institutions than those which apply under existing wholesale payment systems, the Bank of Canada has said.…

Blog reveals breach. Email warns of data compromise. Support page says crypto at risk Identity management outfit OneLogin has revealed it's suffered a security incident that's seen “unauthorized access to OneLogin data in our US data region”, but has offered rather scarier information in different documents.…

Twin-fusealge, six-engined satellite-slinger has wider wings than the Spruce Goose Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has shown off the “Stratolaunch”, a colossal aircraft he hopes can soon help to hoist satellites into low earth orbit.…

You're only as secure as your suppliers and some military contractors look to be well leaky “Cyber resilience” company UpGuard claims to have found a publicly-accessible AWS S3 bucket full of classified US intelligence data.…

Evidence could uncover how oceans formed on Earth NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has captured evidence that shows that parts of the Moon may be coated in thin bits of frost, and it could help scientists unlock the mystery of how water ended up on Earth.…

Eight weeks needed to sort out missing pieces of Jigsaw platform module system Oracle's asked for more time to sort out Java 9 in light of the community's rejection of the proposed Java Platform Module System.…

Another thing cloud's changed: it used to be be server-makers that trumpeted CPU exclusives A member of Intel's new “Xeon Scalable Family” has appeared in Google's cloud.…

'Approximately US$100m' to change hands for assets hoped to generate $200m a year Avaya and Extreme Networks have confirmed that the former will sell its networking business to the latter, for “approximately US$100m”.…

Indian services firm says it will hire more Americans too, but MAGA plan isn't a setback Indian tech services company Tech Mahindra last week revealed that US president Donald Trump's tightening of H-1B visas for skilled workers will be a minor irritant at worst, and perhaps an opportunity to send more jobs offshore.…

Appeals court sees no problem with life sentence Ross Ulbricht has lost his bid to set aside his life sentence for selling illegal drugs through the now defunct underground website Silk Road.…

Tesla boss says he won't work with The Donald if global warming deal snubbed Elon Musk says he will cut ties with President Trump, should the US walk away from the Paris Climate Accord.…

Dems want to get to the bottom of comment flood A group of Senate Democrats is asking the FBI to take a close look at the reported "denial of service" the FCC blamed for the collapse of its comment system earlier this month.…

It's all in the name of medicine, they say A group of scientists has focused the world’s most powerful X‑ray beam on a molecule to test out the Linac Coherent Light Source at the US Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.…

Adds Kubernetes and etcd as services in Tectonic CoreOS Fest CoreOS CEO Alex Polvi spent his morning on Wednesday biting the hands that fed attendees at his company's conference, CoreOS Fest 2017.…

Berlin bench rules against parents' access to teen's account A German appeals court has ruled that Facebook does not need to give the parents of a deceased teen access to the child's account.…

Jail for one, pass for so-called celebs in sex tape case Two Tuesday court rulings in the strange Sunshine State of Florida have given very mixed messages on the rights of phone users to keep their passcodes private.…

Gang used lifted codes, stolen logins to bypass onboard security A Tijuana-based biker gang is accused of hacking hundreds of trucks over two and a half years as part of a multi-million-dollar auto theft ring.…

Contextualising Corbyn's improving numbers I hate to say I told you so but, tell a lie, I told you so. As the election campaign heads into the home straight, could the unthinkable be on the cards? Could Theresa May, who started some four weeks ago with what was widely regarded as an unassailable lead, be on the verge of losing?…

Medical details exposed in online planning application An Essex council has been fined £150,000 for publishing highly sensitive personal data, including medical information, of a traveller family via online planning documents.…

Nip/tuck hack Thousands of private photos have been leaked by cybercriminals following the hack of a Lithuanian cosmetic surgery clinic.…

Space weather announcement, forecast: SCORCHIO Breaking with the recent focus on flinging probes and bots at our planetary neighbours, around July next year NASA will set the controls for the heart of the Sun.…

Plus: Surviving AirBnB in Slovakia, BA outage, are you normal? and more

Dost thou know the Seven Immutable Laws of FP? Stob "Today, object-oriented programming (OOP) rules the IT industry absolutely. It is impossible to dislodge. While functional programming (FP) has seen a resurgence of late, it is typically used as an adjunct to OOP." – Louis Cyphre, 'Why are functional programming languages used so rarely in practice?'…

Anything to do with mass contractor walkouts? The UK National Health Service has repealed its blanket decision to shove contractors inside the IR35 tax clampdown by default.…

Could govt press-gang you into 'helping'? Provision in the UK's controversial surveillance laws create a potential means for the UK government to press-gang "any" UK computer expert into working with GCHQ. Computer scientists and researchers are concerned about the provision - even though the consensus is that it is unlikely to be applied in practice because it would damage wider co-operation.…

How much effort does it take? Do alarms still keep you awake at night? Study Monitoring the IT infrastructure is essential, but often comes across as a boring necessity, rather than an exciting area that can move the business forwards. We want to know if the tools you use help you deal with the things that matter, namely keeping services running and users off your back.…

Union says it will fight to keep scheme open for its members Former state monopoly BT is considering shutting its "gold-plated" defined-benefit pension scheme in an attempt to close its looming deficit.…

Blockchain for data integrity and regulatory compliance In a well-timed release Acronis has announced its Backup 12.5 product with automated ransomware protection and data integrity checking via blockchain.…

The Office cloud deconstructed If you were to start a business today, would you bother buying desktop software for productivity and collaboration? Probably not, you'd employ some software option delivered as a service. For enterprises with a history of legacy, the move to online versions of on-prem is trickier but is being done.…

Teams unveiled for student cluster wettbewrb HPC Blog We’re only a few weeks away from the 6th annual ISC Student Cluster Competition, and student cluster aficionados worldwide are gearing up to watch the battle. ISC Cluster Competition Taipan Pak Lui and I shot a video at SC16 where we unveiled the teams for the ISC event, you can watch it below.…

Shame on you for not going back in time Comment WannaCry is Microsoft's fault. Microsoft, of course, blames the victims and system administrators get fired. But every one of us is to blame because we refuse to force our governments to hold software-makers to account.…

It's not cheap, but it is good Nest has restated its position as the poster-child of the smart home with a new indoor camera, the NestCam IQ.…

Chinese and Australian crews peer into the abyss and find weird things looking back Scientific expeditions into the deep, deep ocean are like buses: none for ages, then suddenly along come two at once!…

What a time to be alive: the BSOD has become a useful feature Yes, WannaCrypt can infect all those machines that still run Windows XP, but because XP is so flaky the zombie boxen are unlikely to have contributed much to the spread of the worm.…

Liberté, égalité, connectivité The European Parliament, Council and Commission have all decided that the in-El Reg's-view-inexplicable WiFi4EU project is a fine idea worthy of €120m to ensure “every European village and every city with free wireless internet ac­cess around the main centres of public life by 2020."…

Homegrown tech dumped for trendy native code scheme Google says it will stop supporting Portable Native Client in the first quarter of 2018, with some exceptions, because WebAssembly has become more popular.…

Empty cubicles galore to be had in Silicon Valley Cisco pink slips have started landing, with the company notifying the Californian government of 250 farewells.…

GSLV Mk III to test itself on a 3,136kg sat, plans for 8,000kg payloads real soon now The Indian Space Research Organisation has set June 5 as the next milestone in the country's ambitions to build a heavy-lift rocket.…

Bless me father for I have SYNTAX ERROR A church in Germany has built a robot priest to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation.…

Chipzilla's Compute Card also comes into focus in four models Intel's Core range of CPUs now comes in a new "family" and has a new upper limit.…

If they know where it comes from and how fast it's going: America defends against itself In a show of strength aimed at ever-belligerent North Korea, America has shot down what it calls a “simulated ICBM” with an intercept missile.…

Scalability sucked when multi-core machines got busy, so DB's devs will find another way The developers of MySQL Server have decided its Query Cache feature is a bottleneck and killed it off.…

Enceladus might have been knocked over by an asteroid Enceladus, Saturn’s watery moon, may have been tipped on its axis after being battered with an asteroid, new evidence reveals.…

ISP claims voiceover bloke read without being digitally sped up Plusnet has been rapped over the knuckles by the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority after the regulator ruled the terms and conditions of its radio ads were too garbled to understand.…