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Illegal, ill-conceived, flawed. You eejit, Ajit A group of 11 Congressmen and women have torn into plans to get rid of America's net neutrality rules in a scathing letter [PDF] sent to US broadband watchdog the FCC.…

Customers gripe more about their bills than bad connections Comcast subscribers say that the US cable giant's notorious billing system is the worst and most infuriating thing about the biz.…

Viking and SMART Modular Technologies top customers Surprise, surprise: Nimbus Data is supplying 50TB flash drive tech to SSD OEMs like Viking and SMART Modular Technologies.…

NVMesh software works with NetXtreme controller card Broadcom's NetXtreme BCM57414 20GB/25GB remote direct memory access (RDMA) Ethernet controller card has been validated to work with Excelereo's NVMesh software.…

Woah there, we'll tell you. It's much quicker The trial of Samsung's vice chairman Lee Jae-yong ended last week with calls by prosecution for a 12-year jail sentence. Mr Lee Jnr had effectively run the group since his father suffered a heart attack in 2014, until his arrest last autumn.…

The eagle has landed Apeiron is speeding its ADS1000 NVMe flash drive array with added Optane drives.…

We're really, really, really big fans of this one. Oh yes A sarcasm detector bot that outputs emojis in response to strings of text? Yep, it’s another brilliant AI project in the quiet days of summer.…

Government draft confirms only minor deviations from GDPR The British government is planning to impose criminal sanctions on people who intentionally re-identify individuals from data that should have protected their identities.…

Sadiq Khan: Social media companies must toughen up their guidelines The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has singled out Google's YouTube for failing to crack down on online videos that "inflame" gang violence and knife crime.…

Any day from next Thursday onwards New aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth could arrive at her home port, Portsmouth, within the next fortnight, according to the Ministry of Defence.…

Cutting edge, blunt edge? We’re interested in both Events If you’re a tech pro doing something incredible around DevOps, Continuous Delivery or Containers we want to hear all about it.…

Government must realise staff use Slack for official business – and make it work with FOI rules Even the most archaic of organisations have been swept up by the march of technology – including the British government.…

And it'll cost consumers an extra £7 per head a month Openreach has estimated it will need to fork out between £3bn and £6bn to invest in 10 million fibre-to-the-premise connections by 2025, according to a leaked copy of its FTTP consultation seen by The Register.…

It's all a bit of a mesh. Oh and expect a patent battle Opinion We suspect there is going to be a patents battle in Wi‑Fi mesh software. The reason this is important is because of a second suspicion: that operators around the world will move lock, stock and barrel to multiple Wi-Fi Access Points in each home, potentially doubling or even trebling the number of devices in next generation Wi‑Fi.…

Engineer's 10-page doc dumps on diversity A Google engineer's 10-page argument for winding back diversity programs inside the ad giant has gone viral and sparked debate about whether Google really is an ideological echo chamber in which its forbidden to ask whether efforts to promote diversity by denying biology are harming the business.…

Goodbye 'mobile-first and cloud-first world', hello 'intelligent edge infused with AI' Microsoft has dropped any mention of mobility from its strategic vision.…

Guidance to Australian public servants says citizens think they know 'what's really going on' Australian government employees have been advised that their social media emissions carry more weight than pronouncements by ministers.…

Privacy and security principles for connected and autonomous vehicles The United Kingdom has published a set of “Key principles of vehicle cyber security for connected and automated vehicles” outlining how auto-makers need to behave if they want computerised cars to hit Blighty's byways and highways.…

NB reports stop flowing, suits don't notice for 3 YEARS... but bank throws devs under bus Australia's Commonwealth Bank has blamed a software update for a money laundering scam that saw criminals send over AU$70m (US$55m, £42.5m) offshore after depositing cash into automatic teller machines.…

FAB grab confab goes bad The Toshiba vs. Western Digital flash foundry scrap has gone up a notch, with the former threatening to cut off the latter's future flash chip supplies.…

'Erroneous policy' upload wound deleted custom apps, IVR menus and custom bling Cisco's admitted to a cloud configuration cockup that's erased customer data.…

Though easy to use, the service's privacy protection isn't fully baked Mozilla has just rolled out an experimental service called Send that allows users to make an encrypted copy of a local file, store it on a remote server, and share it with a single recipient.…

Yeah, try slapping some sanctions on black holes Astronomers have proposed that heavy elements in the universe may have been forged when small, primordial black holes swallowed neutron stars.…

Larry: I don't know about that Earlier this week, El Reg received an unexpected phone call from Google HQ inquiring as to whether we'd be interested in a "color piece" about Google cofounder and Alphabet CEO Larry Page.…

Who's the guy that just got sued for invading privacy? M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E! Disney has been sued in America for allegedly collecting children's personal information without getting parents' approvals.…

He admitted writing software nasty code, Feds allege. Brit's lawyers say he's innocent Marcus Hutchins, the WannaCry ransomware killer and now suspected malware developer, was told by a Las Vegas court on Friday he can be released on bail. He also denied any wrongdoing.…

He admitted writing software nasty code, prosecutors claim Marcus Hutchins, the WannaCry killer and now suspected malware seller, has had his initial court hearing and won't be getting out of jail free, after a Las Vegas court set his bail at $30,000. Handing $3,000 to a bail bondsman will see him able to leave jail.…

Blink and you'd have missed surprise news Analysis Apple has made a huge reversal in its HomeKit smart-home technology, in an effort to keep up with Amazon and Google.…

Quick-thinking preschool teacher clocks, reports fellow passenger's 'vile' messages Two people have been charged with child molestation after their texts allegedly discussing sexually abusing kids were spotted and reported by a preschool teacher. Who was sitting behind one of them. On an airplane. And the messages were in a huge font.…

Service Workers land in WebKit, clearing way for better in-browser applications Analysis About a week after Philadelphia-based web developer Greg Blass pilloried Apple in a widely discussed online post for hindering web development by refusing to embrace Service Workers, the WebKit team, stewards of the open-source layout engine powering Apple's Safari browser, began doing just that.…

Take 'em off the network, docs told, until 2015 patches arrive Hackers can exploit trivial flaws in network-connected Siemens' medical scanners to run arbitrary malicious code on the equipment.…

Bits and bytes from across the industry rounded up in one handy spot Dive into this smorgasbord of lite bites, or light bytes even, of IT storage happenings this first week of August.…

Which is it then? Revenues up but operating losses hit $56m Hadoop-flinger Hortonworks continues to burn through cash, but boss Rob Bearden has said that the biz is on target to cut spending by the end of the year.…

Putting the fault in digital by default The UK government's new website intended to provide financial support for parents has been slammed for experiencing ongoing "technical" problems and outages, leaving parents unable to apply for tax-free support.…

Founders and admen continue their legal fight Snopes creator David Mikkelson has secured half a million dollars to keep the iconic fact-checking website Snopes afloat, thanks to a judge’s ruling in an ongoing court battle.…

Thou shalt not use Chinese flying machines, orders general The US Army appears to have issued a global order banning its units from using drones made by Chinese firm DJI, citing “cyber vulnerabilities”.…

Thou shalt not use Chinese flying machines, orders general The US Army appears to have issued a global order banning its units from using drones made by Chinese firm DJI, citing “cyber vulnerabilities”.…

She may not look like much, but she's got it where it counts, kid Durham University has built itself a secondhand supercomputer from recycled parts and beefed up its contribution to DiRAC (distributed research utilising advanced computing), the integrated facility for theoretical modelling and HPC-based research in particle physics, astronomy and cosmology.…

It actually works – and could foster faster, cheaper science Boffins have built what could be one of the world's smallest working detectors of elusive neutrino particles.…

Ban lifted in UK, France and Ireland as an 'experiment' Google has agreed to let Play Store customers court cruel mistress Lady Luck.…

Win for Big Blue in court showdown over final salaries The Court of Appeal in London, England, has upheld IBM's appeal over the closure of its defined benefit schemes, which guaranteed retired employees a predefined portion of their final salary.…

Come, swim with the sharks Despite predictions of its demise, we've been happily using email in business since it first became widespread more than two decades ago. In many ways it's defined the way we compose, reply or send digital messages. A number of technologies have consolidated and extended it to something that became called "collaboration".…

VMware's event has become the conference of today's refresh cycle, not tomorrow's VMworld 2017 is nearly upon us. The primary event in Las Vegas taking place August 27-31 will be followed by VMware Europe from September 11-14 in Barcelona.…

Soz, SMEs, you can't submit your monthly returns online The taxman's Digital Forms Service, intended to allow small businesses to submit returns online, has been down for maintenance since the beginning of the week, leaving SMEs to return to pen and paper.…

New features? Sorry. Just new colours, because modern monitors give CLIs the blues Microsoft's making over the Windows Console, the tool that throws up a command line interface and which has hung around in Windows long after DOS was sent to the attic and told not to show itself in polite company.…

Replaced everything to no avail, before small talk about the view sorted things out On-Call Salutations dear readers, and congratulations on reaching the last working day of the week, on which The Register runs On-Call, our reader-contributed tales of gigs that get you giggling.…

Finally, Zuck's lot get neural-network-powered translation Facebook’s language translation is now finally powered by several large neural networks.…

Turn your bon mots to meh for the sake of privacy To publish online and remain anonymous, boffins from Bulgaria and Qatar advise being mediocre. And if you can't manage that on your own, they have a technique to make your prose less scintillating.…

Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69 could be two rocks for the price of one The New Horizons probe's next destination, Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69, looks a bit like a duck.…

Michelle Carter banned from profiting from her story in any medium, ever The sad case of the teenager who committed suicide after being urged to do so in text messages has resulted with a 15-month jail sentence for the woman who sent the messages.…