The Register

Urine a wee spot of dribble, sysadmin says when offered stinking fused mess On-Call Welcome again to On-Call, our Friday re-telling of readers unforgettable on-the-job experiences.…

Web giant wants to accelerate collaboration amid Western competition Analysis Chinese tech powerhouse Baidu plans to "open up" its self-driving car designs to help automakers in China overtake Western rivals.…

Vulnerable unpatched systems expose exploitable SMB networking to world+dog The NSA's Equation Group hacking tools, leaked last Friday by the Shadow Brokers, have now been used to infect thousands of Windows machines worldwide, we're told.…

Vulnerable unpatched - or unpatchable - boxes expose SMB networking to world+dog The NSA's Equation Group hacking tools, leaked last Friday by the Shadow Brokers, have been used to infect thousands of Windows machines, we're told.…

Now, now, don't be mean about Moby, dicks Docker seemingly became Moby this week, a rebranding exercise that sparked more confusion than clarity among those following container software.…

And would you believe it? The Kardashians are front and center America's trade watchdog has warned more than 90 celebrities that they need to disclose when they are paid to promote a product – or risk facing an investigation.…

Charges against white-haired-one have reportedly been drafted United States attorney-general Jeff Sessions says the Trump administration will make it “a priority” to arrest leakers, including Julian Assange.…

Crushed CEO says critics are comparing apples with oranges Meet this week's bonkers startup Juicero – the San Francisco maker of a $400 fruit juicer that's bagged $120m in funding from investors.…

Drift tests on actual 777 part show plane probably hit ocean north of search area Australian scientists have released a new analysis of debris from missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 and again asserted that the search for the Boeing 777 was conducted in the wrong place.…

Sysadmin holidays cancelled in March and September, starting in 2020 Updated Microsoft's explained how often it intends to offer “feature updates” to Windows 10: twice a year in March and September.…

Tianzhou-1 will now refuel the Tiangong-2 orbital lab as China prepares a proper space station China's ambition to launch a permanently-crewed space station is a little closer today after the nation successfully launched its first robot space truck.…

Musketeers bag $100,000 after hitting the brakes on allegations Less than three months after Tesla sued a former manager, claiming he'd stolen its blueprints and tried to poach staff, the flash automaker has settled out of court.…

If you can access them in California, so can the Feds Google has been ordered by a US court to cough up people's private Gmail messages stored overseas – because if that information can be viewed stateside, it is subject to American search warrants, apparently.…

Row over Yelp review menaces web immunity Analysis Tech giants and rights groups have flooded the California Supreme Court with a dozen friend-of-the court briefs pleading for the reversal of a defamation ruling that threatens online speech protections.…

Understatement of the month: 'Mistakes were made' The CEO of computer security biz Tanium has admitted his staff logged into hospital networks and accessed live IT systems during product demos with potential customers.…

Understatement of the month: 'Mistakes were made' The CEO of Tanium has admitted staff at his computer security biz logged into live hospital networks for product demos with potential customers.…

Quick clue: President Snowflake is a compulsive liar Analysis On January 6, president-elect Donald Trump had a meeting with the heads of the intelligence services and came out with one action point: cybersecurity.…

Don't worry guys, Yahoo! is coming to the rescue Verizon today turned in financial results of a nightmare first quarter of 2017 that saw the nation's top wireless carrier shed more than 300,000 postpaid subscribers.…

We WILL make you open up infrastructure access, vows regulator Ofcom has set out exactly how it plans to prise open BT's grip on the UK's telecoms infrastructure, in a move designed to make it easier for competing telcos to install fibre broadband connections.…

Ambassador, with these 1,800 layoffs, Fuji really is spoiling us Unite the Union wants Japan's ambassador to the UK to intervene in the long-running dispute with Fujitsu over the company's proposals to axe almost two thousand employees locally.…

Watch out, whitelist mafia, you might be swimming with the fishes The world's biggest digital advertising company Google is reportedly building an ad-blocker into Chrome – and it's already attracted the attention of Europe's most important competition regulator.…

Traffic Alchemist turns base metal into gold An elaborate online ad scam that disguised junk traffic as views on reputable sites has been costing advertisers as much as $7m per month.…

Welcome to Lex: AWS's AI-as-a-platform-service If you couldn't feel the love this week, you're lacking a heart.…

Another day. Another strategy... If a week is a long time in politics, it must be an eternity at Redmond, where the strategy team is seemingly obliged to create a new one every few minutes. Here's another for you.…

Claimants say features not included, updates were dangerous A class-action lawsuit has been launched against Tesla on the basis that updates to its cars' autopilots are "vapourware."…

There's a steering wheel in my pants. It's driving me nuts Something for the Weekend, Sir? Stop squeezing my knob. No seriously, I've had enough.…

Sweet MFA... but there's no documentation available for users Mastercard has unveiled its new biometric card which adds a fingerprint sensor to the chip as a replacement security measure to the four-digit PIN.…

Engineers working on firmware updates Multiple models of Linksys Smart Wi-Fi Routers have vulnerabilities that might be exploited to create a botnet, security researchers at IOActive warn.…

€500,000 to improve expertise and regulatory capacity The European Commission plans to set up an observatory and forum on blockchain and distributer ledger technology (DLT) to help it understand what role public authorities should play in developing and helping uptake of the technologies.…

OK... that's a new one Former critics' darling HTC will unveil its 2017 flagship on 16 May, hoping that a squeezy case will win back buyers.…

Vote with your feet and join us in Westminster Events There's just four weeks till we throw open the doors for Continuous Lifecycle London 2017, so if you want to enjoy three days of the best in DevOps, Containers, Agile, CD and more, act now.…

Concern as to whether new administration will abide by Obama's promises The US administration has been keeping schtum regarding President Trump's plans to adhere to promises made by Obama's government on how EU citizens' data would be protected from the NSA's mass-surveillance activities.…

Fielding most IOs from memory blasts 'em out of the park Infinidat has run performance tests against Pure and EMC all-flash arrays and surpassed them with its array.…

La la la nothing to patch here la la la An independent security researcher claims to have uncovered a security flaw in Microsoft Edge.…

Yes, the pesky creatures that break your code are often worth listening to Users are those strange creatures who break the computer you put on their desks, and for whom software that has worked perfectly in the test lab suddenly decides to crash.…

Not cool, man VMware's recent decision to block third-party virtual switches on its platform could put a serious crimp in, among others, Cisco's plans for Software-Defined Networking (SDN).…

It's all about how you spend that sweet R&D dollar Steve Jobs once said that "innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have" – it's all about how you spend it.…

£40k or more for initial contracts up for grabs The Ministry of Defence is looking for drone startups to throw their hats into the ring for a Just-Eat-for-bullets ‘bot competition.…

It's too warm to store booze. Renting it out is risky. Slowing things down can do the job On-premises data centres are expensive to build and operate, which is one reason public cloud is so attractive … albeit not so attractive that organisations will immediately evacuate on-premises data centres.…

Amazon VP takes Big Red's co-CEO to task over server boast Amazon's AWS infrastructure boss has slapped down Oracle co-CEO Mark Hurd after the latter boasted that Big Red needs fewer data centers because its systems are, apparently, twice as good.…

Not-so-bright API means web pages can use a W3C idea to pop your phone or laptop Security researcher Lukasz Olejnik says it is possible to slurp sensitive data with the ambient light sensors installed in many smartphones and laptops.…

Oh no, don't let data slurpers know we love Coldplay A chap in Chicago is suing headphone maker Bose after discovering how much personal information its app was phoning home to base – this slurped data includes songs listened to, for how long, and when.…

NASA moving to 'Perseverance Valley' where we can see Martian erosion in action The thirteen year-old Opportunity rover is moving on from the region of Mars it's been exploring since 2014.…

Let us level with you... Medical robots should be split into different categories of autonomy, just as driverless cars are, a group of academics proposed today in Science Robotics.…

Olympic Council of Asia will award gold medals for fragging in 2022, helped by Alibaba Gold medals will be awarded to players of computer games at the 2022 Asian Games.…

Because internet things should probably talk on secure virtual networks, not punter-grade WiFi Riverbed has acquired Xirrus for an undisclosed sum and will now try to build a software-defined WAN that stretches all the way to Wi-Fi access points.…

Billionaire dreamer to see your thoughts 'by 2019' F8 2017 Facebook sees such promise in virtual reality that it has taken to celebrating products and services that don't exist outside laboratory settings, like brain interfaces, augmented reality glasses, and "hearing" through one's skin.…

Patent royalty check dings profits but nothing Snapdragon biz can't handle Qualcomm is blaming a $974m pile of cash it had to fork out to BlackBerry for huge drops in revenues in its second quarter.…

Four-year study will bung patient records in the cloud Alphabet’s healthcare arm, and Google stablemate, Verily Life Sciences has today announced Project Baseline: a study that will glean massive amounts of healthcare records by monitoring thousands of patients over four years.…

Yet more evidence that nbn™ just won't change its mind and build fibre-to-the-premises Yet more evidence, as if we needed it, that nbn™ has little interest in more FTTP nbn™, the organisation building and operating Australia's national broadband network (NBN), has won membership of CableLabs, the global R&D body that develops technologies and standards that help cable operators deploy new services on existing hybrid fibre coax (HFC) networks.…