The Register

Plus: Alphabet boss tells us not to worry about the Singularity RSA USA Alphabet exec chairman Eric Schmidt is worried that the future of the internet is going to be under threat once the world’s militaries get good at artificial intelligence.…

It's life or death, says guru unhappy with net neutrality regulations Interview One of the grandaddies of VoIP is taking America's comms watchdog, the FCC, to the US Supreme Court over net neutrality – and he's told us why.…

Liability issues with self-driving cars is key concern The European Parliament today called for EU-wide liability laws to cover robotics and artificial intelligence. MEPs also want researchers to adopt ethical standards that "respect human dignity".…

Real time results from old time data IBM is adding the machine learning technology from Watson to its z/OS mainframe for smarter, faster analytics of transaction data.…

Glitch left fans without seats Eurovision fans purchasing tickets to the event in Ukraine this year were left frustrated due to a number of technical and payment issues with the website last night.…

We're! not! even! bothering! with! exclamation! mark! this! time! Yahoo! is reminding folks that hackers broke into its systems, and learned how to forge its website's session cookies. That allowed the miscreants to log into user accounts without ever typing a password.…

Hyper-converged nodes get turnkey hybrid cloud software Dell EMC says smaller enterprises are rushing to combine their on-premises IT with the public cloud and is offering a turnkey scale-out hyper-converged VxRail appliance so they can do just that.…

'Imagineer's declaration' betrays industry-wide apathy Comment French Internet of Things bods Sigfox have published a “Universal Declaration of IoT Rights”, which, as well as being a bit awful, sheds light on a wider boredom with proper security.…

If we had a pound for every time a biz cited UK currency woes Microsoft has increased hardware prices in the UK for a second time this year, citing the decreased value of the weaker sterling currency when repatriated as dollars.…

UK broadband biz posts unexciting results Revenue at Virgin Media rose 1 per cent to £1,227m for its fourth quarter results, with the firm having also signed up 215,000 more users to its £3bn Project Lighting network expansion.…

Also locks down automotive and aviation electronics F-Secure has acquired hardware and embedded system security firm Inverse Path. Financial terms of the deal, announced on Thursday, were undisclosed.…

Immuta to free up data scientists in 'highly regulated' environments Immuta, a data governance startup run by former US National Security Agency technicians, has announced the conclusion of its Series A funding round, pulling in $8m.…

Google's machine learning library hits 1.0 Tensorflow, Google’s opensource machine learning library, has toddled into whole figures, just over a year after the first release - with the proviso that version 1.0 might not be entirely backwards-compatible with early adopters’ programmes.…

HCI plans reveal overshadows Q3 numbers +Comment NetApp met its revenue predictions for its third fiscal 2017 quarter and talked openly about a coming SolidFire-based hyperconverged product suited for scalable hybrid cloud and mixed workload enterprise deployments.…

The language isn't the problem, it's you and your PC The R language has enjoyed a great reputation in statistical computing and graphics for decades. However, it is also known as something for statisticians. Born around the time of Java, PHP and Python, R lags behind all three by a long chalk on the TIOBE rankings.…

A bit less self-assurance goes a long way Comment One problem writing about UK government IT is that after a while it feels a bit like Groundhog Day – a syndrome that must be even more pronounced for the folk working in it.…

In the city or up the country? Promo The obvious difference between using a data centre in the city centre compared to the country is cost, but other factors such as proximity to fibre connections, accessibility, security and just plain convenience, might well lure you back to the centre. Let’s help you decide whether you’d prefer your infrastructure to be uptown, top ranking, or just on a farm.…

European providers team up A number of cloud infrastructure providers operating in Europe have signed up to a new data protection code of conduct.…

Former US sub-hunter boasts 1980s décor, serious sonar, workstations galore and so much printer ink Slideshow Chances are this story was brought to you by a submarine cable, the world-girdling network of optic fibres that just about make the internet possible.…

Avoid this wonderful malware on your network by black-holing connections A detailed analysis of the Shamoon malware – which is playing a huge role in the cyberwar between Saudi Arabia and Iran – has identified servers used to spread the software nasty.…

'We're learning every day'. But does 'test your backups' really need to be learned? When GitLab suffered its database deletion, outage and related failure of five backup tools, the company quickly offered The Register an interview. Which sounded like a good opportunity to learn just how a startup aiming for serious developers, and with US$25m of serious investors' cash in its keeping, could have failed to operate a proper data protection regime.…

Really, guys? Really? Videos AI may be more human-like than people think. DeepMind’s latest research shows that once resources dwindle, the selfish instinct kicks in and virtual AI agents turn against each other, becoming aggressive to get what they want.…

Should bugs that don't expose user data be left alone, saving time and effort? Poll The Xen Project is asking if it can disclose fewer bugs.…

If 'cute' means 'explosively re-writes plenty of our theories about how stars behave' In the kind of observational serendipity that astro-boffins live for: spotting the explosion of a supernova mere hours after the explosion's light started reaching Earth.…

Look, don't copy: 'this is not an open source license' Ephemeral messaging application Wickr has opened up the core crypto software of its Wickr Professional app so others can review it.…

Security working group has decided it wants to know what it needs to know The International Telecommunication Union has decided the time has come to consider whether Blockchain deserves its attention so it can be considered for future security standards.…

Big headaches in big iron, hyper-servers aren't taking off, but software biz all smiles Get out the pen, walk to the whiteboard, and draw lines heading downwards: Cisco's Q2 2017 results showed year-on-year falls in revenue and earnings, and a router business close to free-fall.…

Smart card support busted? Redmond says: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ For months now, the Windows 10 Anniversary Update has broken two-factor logins using certain smart cards – and Microsoft has refused to discuss it.…

Resistance is futile as probe demanded into environment agency staffers US House Republicans Lamar Smith (R-TX) and Darin LaHood (R-IL) have demanded a probe into staff at the US Environmental Protection Agency who are apparently using private encrypted communications.…

Exhausted with never-ending internet exhaustion You may have heard this before, but we are really, really running out of public IPv4 addresses.…

And tech groups are starting the fightback now Analysis While the entire US political machinery has been caught up with one Trump-based scandal after another over the past three weeks, larger underlying issues are starting to re-emerge. And top of the list is mass surveillance.…

Fat-fingered fumblers of Australia, untie! Your Office 365 errors are now recoverable Dell EMCs software-as-a-service backup outfit, “Spanning”, has expanded into Australia.…

A top life tip, there, from the Linux kernel chieftan OSLS Linus Torvalds believes the technology industry's celebration of innovation is smug, self-congratulatory, and self-serving.…

'When the internet crashes into the real world and people get killed' you'll be sorry RSA USA We all know the vast majority of Internet-of-Things devices haven’t anything more than a fig leaf for protection. Now the unlikeliest of folks are calling for rules to improve IoT security: libertarians.…

Ra, Ra Rasputin. SQL injection is his thing A Russian-speaking miscreant dubbed "Rasputin," who potentially hacked into the US Election Assistance Commission and sold access to its systems, has struck again, it is claimed.…

Can't get that bonus if the merger falls through, so meh, shave off 5% and let's go Verizon will savagely slash its acquisition offer for hacker-ransacked Yahoo! by, wait a minute, just 5.2 per cent, it is claimed.…

But customers welcome to taste IBM's own-brand Hadoop sauce... +Comment Cognitive Watsonian and mainframer IBM is making Hortonworks available for its Elastic Storage Server (ESS) and Spectrum Scale products.…

Consent wording not enough to prevent a spanking by the ICO A UK credit broker has been fined £120,000 for sending more than five million unlawful text messages.…

Doctor Blue says a little of what you like does you good IBM's i and AIX customer bases can buy a cheaper box; its latest Power S812 server comes with just one socket and a single or quad-core processor.…

Get to keep hardware home, gain machine learning anyway Microsoft has created and released a simulator for drone pilots to help them avoid destroying their toys while running machine learning experiments.…

Researchers could listen in on meetings and plant backdoors Security researchers have uncovered a flaw in conference phone systems from Mitel that create a means for hackers to listen in on board meetings.…

As promised, story about space poo US Air Force Colonel Thatcher Cardon, MD, has won a competition to develop a new diaper to cradle astronauts' soiled nethers for up to six days of spacefaring.…

iPhone backups can be slurped for Mother Russia, say researchers Kremlin-linked spies have been blamed for cooking up malware called Xagent, which targets victims running macOS to steal passwords, grab screenshots and exfiltrate iPhone backups stored on the Mac.…

Unfinished APIs in JDK and Java SE Experimental and unfinished Java APIs could soon appear in new versions of Java under a plan from Oracle.…

New Orleans firm partner takes charge Comment Nexsan, newly sold by Imation to private equity house Spear Point Capital Management, is now run by that firm's co-founder and managing partner, Ron Bienvenu.…

Intel shipping Kittson samples into Itanium-land There have been reports that Intel has already started shipping its latest, Kittson version, Itanium processor chip.…

More moaned about than rail and energy, says ombudsman Shoddy customer service is costing telcos £2.9bn per year, making the sector the second most moaned about, according to the Ombudsman Services.…

Dumping a mainframe – now that's another story

Broaderband fight Analysis Some are talking about 3.5 GHz as a 5G band, but Hutchison’s deal to acquire UK Broadband to bolster its 3UK arm is all about the good old fight for LTE spectrum.…

Unleash operation Thrash Chrome Opinion The Mozilla Foundation has recently announced that it will refocus its development efforts on Firefox. Again.…