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China's Google also updated its open-source autonomous vehicle software A joint investment venture backed by China's Baidu is offering 10 billion yuan (£1.1bn) for 100 autonomous driving projects anywhere in the world.…

Things still gloomy after profit warning and restructure At the halfway point of a turnaround year for listing outsourcing ship Capita, the vital statistics are still moving in the wrong direction with top and bottom line slipping and major contract challenges noted.…

Kludge takes shine off ever-improving Watch Analysis Just as the Apple Watch was set to go mainstream, bugs and poor design choices have taken the shine off the latest version of the hardware.…

Mists? Mellowness? Not at these talks... Lectures If mists and mellow fruitfulness aren't your thing, celebrate Autumn by joining us for a pair of hard-hitting Register lectures which examine some of the pricklier issues dogging the digital world.…

Twisting minds, smashing dreams Puppet has rolled out the corporate playbook and turned puppet master for another automation company.…

Easyleads applies to be struck off after investigation The Information Commissioner's Office is claiming another big win after fining marketing firm Easyleads Ltd £260,000 for being a royal pain in the ass – or, more specifically, for making 16.7 million automated marketing calls.…

No digital signature on hipster collab app means it's easy to make dangerous fakes Slack is distributing open Linux-based versions of its technology that are not digitally signed, contrary to industry best practice.…

Roles yet to be filled Two senior top brass at UK telecoms provider O2 have stepped down amid a period of major transition for the mobile operator.…

Librem 5 will run only open-source code, PureOS and feature radio kill switch The GNOME Foundation has backed efforts to create a "freedom-oriented" smartphone that protects users' privacy and runs only open-source software.…

Research suggests maybe the heavy ones should spend less time over people Being hit in the head by a drone won't necessarily end in decapitation. Thanks to aeronautical boffins, we know now that there is a range of possible outcomes.…

Parts-maker Delphi wants BlackBerry-mobiles on the road in 2019 As BlackBerry's handset business died an increasingly rapid death, execs told The Register that the company had a fabulous operating system and secure messaging to fall back on.…

Gives two-fingered salute to IBM designers for forcing us to use three-fingered salute Bill Gates has said that if he had his time again, he would not have chosen CTRL-ALT-DEL as the keypress to interrupt a PC's operations.…

Japanese company sells memory biz to private equity and WD flings sueballs to stop it Toshiba has picked a Japanese-American consortium assembled by Bain Capital Private Equity as the buyer of its memory business. Jilted suitor Western Digital has immediately tried to stop the transaction happening.…

Alternative title for this science paper: Seven-inch bullies humiliate unsuspecting birds Waterfowl situation... Some alpha ducks bully smaller ducks so much when competing for mates that the beta birds' undercarriages barely take off, so to speak, a new study has found.…

Infected Avast tool's payload went after the likes of Microsoft, Intel and Cisco, hit 20 targets Cisco's security limb Talos has probed the malware-laden CCleaner utility that Avast so kindly gave to the world and has concluded its purpose was to create secondary attacks that attempted to penetrate top technology companies. Talos also thinks the malware may have succeeded in delivering a payload to some of those firms targeted.…

HTC insists ad giant didn't scoop all its clever people and it can still make nice things As rumoured since early September, Google has decided to hire the HTC team that designs and builds its Pixel phones.…

Hot graphics and complex worlds provide a good testbed for algorithms Unity, the most popular cross-platform game engine favored by video game developers, on Tuesday opened up its platform for machine learning researchers to test their algorithms.…

Promising query language garbled by legal lingo Using GraphQL, an increasingly popular query language for grabbing data, may someday infringe upon pending Facebook patents, making the technology inherently problematic for corporate usage.…

Chinese national pleads guilty to running a massive counterfeiting ring A Chinese national has admitted he coordinated a massive piracy ring that shifted more than $100m in bootleg Microsoft gear.…

Our vulture gets his claws into new hardware First fondle Nest unveiled a new outdoor camera, doorbell and security system this morning in San Francisco.…

Plus: You can't switch off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on iOS 11 The new LTE-enabled Apple Watch 3 appears to suffer from a bug that can keep the touch-screen wearable from connecting to cellular data networks.…

File-scrambling malware put a bomb under shipping giant's sales growth FedEx has estimated this year's NotPetya ransomware outbreak cost it $300m in lost business and cleanup costs.…

Hope it doesn't freeze out folks like its thermostat Smart home poster child Nest on Wednesday launched two new products: a video doorbell and a security system.…

Blackmailed former employer, redirected company website for porn portal An IT contractor who sabotaged a client's website and demanded $10,000 to restore it was this week convicted of wire fraud and sentenced to four years behind bars.…

Glasshole Bezos sees no shame Something to quicken the pulses of middle-aged men in the shower, whose surname rhymes with "Noble"*.…

It's a massive and ambitious upgrade for iPads, but older hardware can't cut it Review After years of complacency – and falling sales – Apple has transformed the iPad into something it should have been from the start: a proper computer.…

Someone sent somebody else some money – that's all we know, and that's a good thing The testnet for Ethereum's next big update has successfully verified an important part of a transaction with the virtual cryptocurrency Zcash, bringing the dream of making the blockchain network more privacy-focused just a tiny bit closer to reality.…

And you thought 24 hours would be tough… The UK’s Prime Minister has once again raised the tech stakes in the fight against online terror, with her latest, er, bright idea being for internet giants to stop extremist content before it’s even online.…

Demand's there; compensating artists is another issue With Google's user-generated content loophole firmly in lawmaker's sights, global music trade body IFPI has published new research looking at demand for music streaming.…

Increasingly 'legalistic' approach goes against intentions for openness, says ombudsman Public bodies are taking an increasingly “legalistic” approach to disclosing information that doesn’t always support transparency, the European Union’s dodgy management watchdog has said.…

Issue 'endemic' across public sector, shriek experts Cops in Manchester, England, have 1,518 PCs running on Microsoft's dusty operating system Windows XP, according to a Freedom of Information response.…

C'mon, you POS... >:( Lloyds Bank has admitted that unspecified technical problems affected the operation of its Cardnet payment system on Tuesday. The UK bank denied suggestions that it had suffered a cyber attack.…

And now has creepy 'entity' sentiment analysis too Google Cloud's Natural Language API has become a bit more, er, insightful: it can now sort content into 700 different categories, such as Health, Hobbies & Leisure and Law & Government.…

That's 1.9 BEEELLION records – and just you wait till GDPR More data records have been lost or stolen during the first half of 2017 (1.9 billion) than all of 2016 (1.37 billion).…

The question is... will Western Dig give the OK? Struggling Toshiba has picked a group led by the investment firm Bain Capital to buy its memory chip business, Reuters reports.…

Spend £50k to get just £3k per year more than non-grads University in the UK has never been more expensive. But at least doing a computer science degree guarantees a nice fat, well-paid job at the end, right? Wrong.…

Vendors Brexploited, but components dearth played part too The average trade price of computers in Britain shot up by almost a third in the past year since the EU referendum, though a weakened pound might not tell the whole story.…

Those are just the ones known to have downloaded outdated versions Thousands of companies may be susceptible to the same type of hack that recently struck Equifax.…

Behold the new SCv3000 arrays, with auto-tiering, all-flash, twin controllers, 1PB raw capacity all in 3U for <$10k Dell EMC has refreshed its cheapest storage appliance by giving us the SCv3000, a successor to the SCv2000.…

Get creative – bringbackfirefly! will not longer cut it, nerds Eggheads have produced a machine-learning system that has studied millions of passwords used by folks online to work out other passphases people are likely to use.…

HDS, Pentaho and Hitachi Insight Group join forces, promise data-driven IoT fun Hitachi Data Systems is no more: the venerable storage vendor has been subsumed into a new outfit called “Hitachi Vantara” that says it “helps data-driven leaders find and use the value in their data to innovate intelligently and reach outcomes that matter for business and society.”…

Surveillance bots are really just 'a very weird data center' Pics In a modest industrial building in Mountain View, California, on Tuesday, security startup Knightscope unveiled the latest additions to its line of "crime-fighting robots" – the K1, a stationary weapon detector, and the K7, a sensor-laden dune buggy for challenging terrain.…

And then filtering out all the stuff he doesn't need to read Emacs enthusiast Artur Malabarba has put the text editor to work taming Slack.…

Sitting less than one light year apart in spiral galaxy NGC 7674 Scientists have discovered the closest-ever supermassive black hole binary system. It's in the spiral galaxy NGC 7674, and the pair of voids are separated by a distance of less than one light year.…

Larry Ellison also pledges 'Autonomous Database' to cut the cost of – gulp – the people who run databases Oracle chair and chief technology officer has pledged to undercut Amazon Web Services pricing by 50 per cent for infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service, in part by increasing use of automation.…

Early issues arise with new version of OS X 10.13 Apple's next version of the macOS, High Sierra, aka 10.13, is due for general release next week, and users running the beta have already noticed a pair of issues that could cloud the rollout.…

Bumbling fool not so much Jason Bourne as Johnny English A contractor who tried to sell trade secrets on military communication satellites to the Russians has been sent down for five years. Incredibly, it could have been longer after prosecutors alleged that he was also planning to kill his wife.…

Crunch hearing reveals wide gulf in views, evildoer is Backpage The first Congressional hearing into a proposed law that would make American companies liable for online sex trafficking has lain bare the depths of the disagreement between lawmakers and tech giants.…

Advertising firm sued by taxi app maker Updated Uber has filed suit against one of its advertising partners, alleging it bilked the ride-sharing giant out of "tens of millions" of dollars.…

Passwords, server schematics and encryption keys up for grabs in open file store Updated Media monster Viacom has been caught with its security trousers down. Researchers found a wide-open, public-facing misconfigured AWS S3 bucket containing pretty much everything a hacker would need to take down the company's IT systems.…