The Register

But Linux 4.12 rc1 made it out before Mother's day anyway, thanks to new kernel.org plan Linus Torvalds might just be a big softie after all. The Linux Lord, infamous for his occasional foul-mouthed criticism of those who don't meet his standards, has just popped out release candidate one for Linux 4.12 a day early so he could give his undivided attention to Mother's Day.…

That's still a lot of stuff – and we've summarized it for you Our weekly storage news roundups are threatening to become multi-page books.…

Three years of the US's top cop in action Analysis The firing of FBI Director James Comey came as a shock to almost everyone, not least to the man himself.…

The software hippies' minds are going to be blown over this one A question mark over whether the GNU GPL – the widely used free-software license – is enforceable as a contract may have been resolved by a US federal judge.…

Boffins share findings of strange alien world 440 light years away A strange, distant planet HAT-P-26b has an atmosphere full of water vapor, hydrogen and helium – and could change how scientists think of planet formation.…

All you need to know – from ports to samples Special report The WannaCrypt ransomware worm, aka WanaCrypt or Wcry, today exploded across 74 countries, infecting hospitals, businesses including Fedex, rail stations, universities, at least one national telco, and more organizations.…

Ability to screen callers, block people Coming Soon™ Amazon's voice-controlled assistant Alexa and its Echo devices now sport the ability to take your phone calls – so long as you don't ever plan on ignoring calls from anyone.…

Zuck's Open Compute Project stole our designs, claims Brit biz Facebook is set to be dragged before a jury next year to face allegations that its Open Compute Project is built on stolen server and rack technology.…

Judge Alsup denies Waymo arbitration request, refers case to Uncle Sam's legal eagles Uber may face criminal charges over its alleged theft of trade secrets from Google-owned self-driving car upstart Waymo.…

Alsup wants torrent-chasing biz to work that IP detector hard A grumble-flick studio will be blocked from lobbing copyright infringement claims at pirates until it proves its tools for identifying illegal downloaders work.…

EternalBlue now an eternal headache Updated Workers at Telefónica's Madrid headquarters were left staring at their screen on Friday following a ransomware outbreak.…

Dire warnings ignored, plea for unity heard Oracle has suffered an embarrassing setback in its plans for a modular architecture in Java 9.…

Oh-so-trendy infrastructure as code could save your bacon Infrastructure as code is a buzzword frequently thrown out alongside DevOps and continuous integration as being the modern way of doing things. Proponents cite benefits ranging from an amorphous "agility" to reducing the time to deploy new workloads. I have an argument for infrastructure as code that boils down to "cover your ass", and have discovered it's not quite so difficult as we might think.…

Docs use pen and paper after computers scrambled amid global outbreak Final update UK hospitals have effectively shut down and are turning away non-emergency patients after ransomware ransacked its networks.…

Fell at third x86 benchmark hurdle Mirror, mirror on the wall, which is the fastest x86 Java server of them all? HPE leads in two categories but lags far behind in another.…

Locky-style nasty will squeeze you for two whole bitcoins The Necurs botnet has been harnessed to fling a new strain of ransomware dubbed "Jaff".…

Meanwhile Britain is binning it. Well done, admirals The US Coast Guard is well chuffed with its new Scaneagle drone – the same drone that the Royal Navy is ditching later this year, seemingly for lack of funds.…

Fashion! Turn to the left... Fashion! Fashion! Consumers’ love affair with fitness bands looks to have run its course with smartwatches shaping up to be the preferred way to lose the tub.…

Body count of GDS folk grows bigger following arrival of Kevin Cunnington The director of Common Technology Services at Government Digital Service Iain Patterson has stepped down, adding to a growing body count of senior folk to have left since director general Kevin Cunnington took the helm.…

Want to join the party? Act now Events There’s just a few days left till we open the doors at Continuous Lifecycle London, our three-day extravaganza covering DevOps, Agile and Containers, but if you’re quick you can still snag a ticket.…

Also announces partnership with Cisco to throw £80m at London coverage Mobe operator O2 continued to splash cash on its 4G network in its final quarter results, with industry watchers believing it is moving at pace to complete its commitments before an IPO at the end of the year.…

Lucky duckies Google wants you to believe that free music on YouTube doesn't deter people from paying for the same music somewhere else. Pull the other one, it's got bells on, the music industry has replied.…

Israeli firm prepares for DevOps deluge Infosec firm CyberArk has bought Conjur, a provider of DevOps security software, for $42m.…

It's make-up time but nobody's kissing yet Top Western Digital and Toshiba execs are talking after brandishing legal daggers over who can do what in Toshiba's memory business sale.…

Third-party provider blamed Cloud-based password manager LastPass has resolved an issue that left Brits unable to reliably access the service between Tuesday and Thursday this week.…

Combining security and data protection Analysis Data protection and security player Barracuda is being affected by customers moving away from point products, and the resulting combined data protection plus security themes could mean other pure-play backup suppliers are going to be left behind.…

Wrestling with Google's machine learning framework Hands-on Occasionally a technology comes along that changes the way that people work. Docker has had a profound effect on how applications are deployed in the cloud, Hadoop changed how analysis of big data was done and the R language has disrupted the statistics market.…

Well it's sustainable ... it's a single source producer... Yep! Boutique massive outsourcing In an effort to overhaul its massive £2.3bn contract with Atos, the BBC has awarded its Enterprise ICT and Hosting Services contract worth up to £560m over eight years to... you guessed it, Atos.…

Fraudster: Is this Windows? And why is it looking up my IP address? On-Call Why look at that! Friday is upon us, which means it’s time for another instalment of On-Call, The Register’s weekly column in which readers share memories of being asked to fix odd stuff at unpleasant times of the day.…

Moving VMs in fleet of micro-sats for virtual geosynchronous satellites Last week we talked to a space startup that wants to let satellites run XenServer so they can run virtual machines, which sounded intriguing enough that we decided to learn more.…

Hmm, who has a conflict and IMSI catchers, we wonder An ongoing campaign of propaganda-texting Ukranian solders has, unsurprisingly, been attributed to Russian forces equipped with cell site simulators (IMSI-catchers).…

PHPMailer bug leads to remote code execution via HTTP The popular Vanilla Forums software needs patching against a remote code execution zero-day first reported to the developers in December 2016.…

Patch promised Users of Google's PHP API client: watch out for phishing attacks while Google patches a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in the code.…

Virtualisation for daredevils The next FreeNAS release candidate landed last week, hopefully to a better reception than the disastrous Version 10 launch in March.…

Brian, take a look at this ... Last December, Qualcomm said Windows 10 would soon arrive on the ARM architecture, and it's had its first demo.…

When do private companies dictate how we run national security? Federal MP Anthony Byrne wants to re-start the encryption debate in Australia.…

Storage biz's seasonality dip exacerbated by sales fall Quantum almost failed to meet its revenue expectations in its final fiscal 2017 quarter, as a StorNext revenue dip added to a seasonal decline.…

Jury finds that chip giant did not infringe on AVM patent Intel is breathing two billion dollars lighter Thursday, after a jury in Delaware decided that the chip giant had not infringed on a dynamic logic circuit patent.…

'Ghost' calls overload lines, preventing babysitter from getting through for help – suit A Texas mother is suing T‑Mobile USA, alleging technical issues with the carrier prevented her child from getting urgent medical care, which led to his death.…

But court date delayed again and superannuation payments are still in limbo No-longer-AWOL payroll provider Plutus has, as promised, started paying people again.…

Promises to hold agency heads responsible for slipups President Donald Trump has signed his long-promised executive order on cybersecurity – and it says the executive branch will take overall command of securing America's critical IT systems.…

A roundup of things you might actually use Build At its Build 2017 developer conference in Seattle, US, on Wednesday, Microsoft turned its attention to Windows and cozied up to competitors.…

They won't love you like I love you, sniffs Ma Bell Just one month after announcing a $1.7bn acquisition deal with AT&T, 5G spectrum holder Straight Path now says it is instead inking a $3.1bn deal with Verizon.…

Eugene shouts back: Gimme the mic and let me testify Five US spy bosses, and the acting FBI chief, today told the Senate intelligence committee they do not trust software from Russian antivirus maker Kaspersky.…

Well, of course they are It's time to let Benjamin Franklin know that there is a third inevitability in life. To death and taxes, we must add advertisements.…

Dodgy Conexant driver spaffs keystrokes into wide-open log HP Inc ships a creepy key-logger on its laptops, according to security researchers.…

Open-source software to lure devs into Redmond's cloud Build Microsoft has wheeled out open-source software that wrangles Internet of Things devices and beams data to and from Azure.…

Proprietary tape format bits shrink while capacity bulks up IBM has brought out a TS1155 tape drive as an update on the existing TS1150, offering 15TB raw capacity, half as much again.…

For when the robots have taken yours Google has acquired VR games company Owlchemy Labs, makers of Job Simulator. The witty cross-platform VR role-playing game is set in 2050. You're invited to strap on your goggles and engage in now-forgotten activities such as booking a meeting room, finding the office stapler, or other drudgeries associated with early 21st century lifestyles.…

Platforms, platforms, platforms, powering workplace of future, yada, yada Cisco is the latest member of the tech old guard to jump on to the artificial intelligence bandwagon by slurping MindMeld for $125m (£97m).…