The Register

Sort out Blighty's not-spots and let industry do its thing, peers urge Autonomous vehicles are more than just cars, the House of Lords’ Science and Technology Committee has warned the UK government in a report, as it urges greater focus on boats and farming equipment.…

New version 2 integrates better with Google's tough but essential software library Keras, a popular deep learning library, has been updated with a new API to make it easier for developers to use machine learning in Python.…

Fluffier bottom line after expensive cloud meal Oracle thinks it's done the hard work as it transitions to become a cloud company and is now poised to convert swathes of its customers from software licences to SaaS and infrastructure-as-a-service subscriptions.…

But more could be done through better programming With the recent arrival of a new version of its Chrome browser, Google is celebrating its software's energy saving potential, even as it overlooks its electricity addiction.…

Open-source storage software adds a hypervisor and Docker support FreeNAS, the FreeBSD-derived software that turns a server into a network-attached storage box, has upgraded, changed its name and now asserts it's a hyperconverged platform.…

And you can now use Google Compute Engine storage as a disk, you lucky people Raspberry Pi Zero users have another operating system to choose from, with the release of NetBSD 7.1.…

Spacecraft might need lighter rad-shields, which means more payload! Video After a three-year search, NASA's Van Allen Probes have worked out there's far fewer high-energy electrons in the Van Allen Belts than previously thought.…

Cunning plan: get AIs co-operating in bricked VR, hand prizes to winners Microsoft wants PhD researchers to pitch their bots into a Minecraft landscape, but it's not some simple “robot wars” remake: to win, your AI will have to learn to co-operate with humans.…

Australian Taxation Office reveals more about outages plus plans for Easter upgrade The Australian Taxation Office will install a new Hewlett Packard Enterprise storage area network over Easter.…

The Borg's 'This kit has Struts 2 trouble' list is also getting longer If you've implemented Mobility Express on a Cisco 1800 access point, it needs patching against a critical authentication bypass.…

32 cores on a Xeon E5 V3 with up to 5.6TB of SSD, counted in gigabytes or gibibytes Microsoft's decided Azure needs virtual machines optimised for storage, so has given us all the new L-series to play with.…

It's 2017 and a VGA driver can take down a cloud. Seriously The Xen Project has bent its own rules of vulnerability disclosure for a buggy and possibly exploitable video component that needs urgent attention.…

Old monopoly crumbles as competition is introduced The US Air Force has awarded a $96m contract to SpaceX to launch one of its next-generation GPS satellites, in a competitive contract that left the United Launch Alliance in the dust.…

They've had years to fix things up, but they can't even deliver on known best practice Australia's Taxation Office, Department of Human Services and Department of Immigration and Border Protection are heavyweights of the public service, but only one has managed basic infosec protections on its systems.…

And why won't the NSA open up about Section 702 spying? Two of the most technically literate US politicians want to know why America's Homeland Security is dragging its feet over SS7 security flaws in our mobile phone networks.…

Containerd plumbing shelters on neutral ground at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation As it promised in December, Docker has bestowed containerd, its core container runtime, upon the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, putting an important piece of container infrastructure under neutral governance.…

Study could explain how star systems go from amorphous blobs to beautiful spirals The mystery surrounding dark matter deepens: scientists have discovered that the puzzling substance was less dominant in our universe's early galaxies.…

City puts together team to bring 1Gbps dark fiber to Bay Area The City of San Francisco has already put in place numerous plans to resist the policies of the Trump Administration – from immigration to healthcare to labor agreements. Now it is moving on to internet access.…

Two FSB agents and two stooges fingered for 2014's 500m webmail account raid Two Russian spies and two hackers were the miscreants who broke into Yahoo!'s servers and swiped at least 500 million user account records.…

Rob Joyce is heading to US National Security Council NSA hacking crew bossman Rob Joyce is set to join US President Donald Trump's National Security Council as a cybersecurity adviser.…

Newbury HQ awash with tie up talk Exclusive A corporate tie up between Vodafone UK and Liberty Global is back on the negotiating table, multiple sources have told The Register.…

Window XP moment for penguins Canonical is extending the deadline for security updates for paying users of its five-year-old Ubuntu 12.04 LTS – a first.…

Same issue in Telegram, says researcher Security researchers have found the same type of vulnerability in the respective web platforms of WhatsApp and Telegram (WhatsApp Web and Telegram Web), two of the world’s most popular messaging services.…

And the fraudsters making bank applications are doing so online UK identity fraud has hit its highest recorded levels, according to a new report.…

Using neural nets and machine learning to set the tone Events We’re thrilled to announce that Skymind.io’s Melanie Warrick will be a keynote speaker at M.…

Finds it's against own party's 2015 manifesto plans Chancellor Philip Hammond is to scrap a planned hike in UK National Insurance Contributions (NIC) in an embarrassing U-turn today.…

MPs accuse social media firms of profiting from hate Google, Twitter and Facebook were hauled over the coals by MPs yesterday in a select committee hearing in where they were accused of "having no shame" and engaging in "commercial prostitution".…

Something Erdogan, something something cardigan A hack against the Counter third-party Twitter app was used to push propaganda messages containing swastikas through numerous high profile accounts on Wednesday.…

Our server, your software - let's play a SAN symphony together Lenovo has struck a partnership with DataCore and plans to offer a Storage DX8200D appliance using DataCore software.…

Minor miner revolt as blockchain gets (artificially) backed up

Internet of Little Things – same vulns, same mistakes as IoT brother I have a new name for the abundance of widgets springing up around the world: the Internet of Little Things. I’m playing with an IoLT starter kit in my office right now, and it lets me do things like sense when doors open or close, turn sockets on and off and fiddle with the mood lighting.…

But... we didn't mean you! Darn it. We'll have to make compulsory layoffs IBM UK could have almost filled its quota for voluntary redundancies in the Technical Services Support division given the number of folk that had put their hands up to leave, but will make some compulsory cuts instead.…

What do we need? High capacity. When do we need it? Soon Comment There will be far tighter integration between fixed and wireless connectivity in 5G than ever before. Dense virtualized networks will require huge numbers of high-capacity fixed links; fixed broadband will be delivered over wireless as well as wireline; fixed/mobile convergence for content and service delivery will become table stakes; edge computing and the Internet of Things will be supported by a mish-mash of connection technologies (even ETSI’s Mobile Edge Computing has now been renamed Multi-access Edge Computing).…

It's on by default, right now, with extra love for Outlook and SharePoint Microsoft's formally launched Teams, its messaging-centric collaboration tool for Office 365.…

'PetrWrap' tries to blame its predecessor for attacks Researchers have spotted a variant of last year's Petya ransomware, now with updated crypto and ransomware models.…

HANA User Self Service isn't meant to give crims self-service, but it can. And you can plug it Once you stop reeling from Microsoft's monster two-month patch dump, VMware's new patches and news that Dungeons & Dragons is going digital, brace yourself again because SAP has popped out has 25 patches and two patches for patches for you to consider.…

Phones blindly trust what their sensors tell them. So they're open to spoofing. Sigh Smartphone vendors might be learning to mistrust software, but what about the hardware? University of Michigan boffins have put this question to the world by sending unauthorised data to a Samsung turns-out-to-be-not-so-smartphone by buzzing its accelerometer.…

Crew douses flaming 'phones in bucket of water, but passenger couldn't escape nasty singeing Travellers who favour noise-cancelling headphones should watch vendor announcements for battery recalls, because a pair has caught fire on a China-to-Australia flight.…

Vodafone's network wasn't talking for a few hours on Wednesday In the year 2010, Vodafone Australia's networks suddenly became horribly unreliable. Dropped calls became common, outages semi-regular.…

How about switching to a recent version that's actually secure, Nintendo? A couple of console enthusiasts have run up a proof-of-concept showing a Nintendo's new games machine, the "Switch", being p0wned thanks to an old Webkit vulnerability.…

Tovarishch Cook accused of sending retailers to gulag unless they follow price list Russia's anti-monopoly regulator has taken a bite out of Apple, finding that Cupertino's local outpost fixed iPhone prices in the country.…

Get busy for the Critical one, nail the Important one while you are at it Time to patch your desktop hypervisors, folks: VMware Workstation and Fusion have a pair of problems apiece.…

Character sheets and bits of the rule books look like they're coming to the Web Seminal role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons looks to be going digital.…

Secure programming is hard, kids Patch Tuesday After taking a month off, Microsoft's Patch Tuesday is back – and it's a blockbuster edition. There are 18 bundles of patches covering 140 separate security vulnerabilities.…

'We have a problem and we intend to fix it' Video In a hearing at the US Senate Armed Services Committee in Washington DC, the commandant of the Marine Corps, General Robert Neller, promised swift action against those swapping pornographic pictures of his troops.…

Up your application policing, fruit-branded phone maker is told Faced with an existential threat to its hot patching service, Rollout.io is appealing to Apple to extend its app oversight into post-publication injections of JavaScript code.…

But why? In a bizarre, fawning letter, Oracle has given America's broadband watchdog, the FCC, the equivalent of a telco reach-around.…

Look over here! Federated identity! Secure cloud! User-centred design! The former Digital Transformation Office's vaunted “gov.au” project collapsed because it duplicated work that other government departments were already doing for themselves, and didn't do what agencies wanted.…

And hate speech, too The German government has formally proposed fining Facebook and Twitter up to €50m ($53m) for failing to remove slanderous fake news and hate speech within 24 hours.…

Like virtual machines but, well, like virtual machines Intel has tweaked its Clear Containers software so that it is compatible with Docker Swarm and Kubernetes orchestration.…