The Register

Promises to reveal reasons for unfashionably phlammable phablet next week Samsung's figured out why its Galaxy Note 7 phablets burned up the mobile phone market last year, but won't say why until next week.…

New VMs will use over-provisioned RAM reserved by other apps The Register's virtualisation desk is back from holidays, just in time to report changes to desktop Hyper-V before they go completely stale.…

Data diggers' dumpster dive demonstrates dumb and dumberer defences The security industry's ongoing efforts to educate users about strong passwords appears to be for naught, with a new study finding the most popular passwords last year were 123456 and 123456789.…

It's time to debate damages. To Apple and to common sense A US appeal court has opened the next round of the long-running Apple versus Samsung patent case, this time to recalculate the damages Sammy owes Cupertino.…

Distributed 'supercomputer' prises open Fermi 'scope's secrets, sometimes with just 10 photons a day The Einstein@home project has announced the discovery of 13 neutron stars in its distributed analysis of gamma ray data from the orbiting Fermi telescope.…

13-year-old aircraft left gate 13 and landed at 13:31 Finnish flag carrier Finnair has successfully flown the devil to hell on Friday the 13th.…

The cake is a IIe Videos What do you get when you cross a 10-year-old game with a 40-year-old computer? The weekend at El Reg.…

Both robo-players ace humans – in one-on-one matches DeepStack is the first AI computer programme to beat professional poker players in a game of hands-on no-limit Texas hold’em, a team of researchers claim in a research paper out this week.…

What a Shames A 21-year-old computer science student, who won a Programmer of the Year Award in high school, has admitted selling key-logging malware out of his college dorm room.…

From the phones of Montezuma to the servers of Tripoli The head of the US Marines wants to recruit about 3,000 troops skilled in online warfare and espionage to make sure the Corps is ready for 21st-century battle.…

49 kids rescued so far An administrator of Playpen – the notorious dark-web trading post of child sex abuse material – has been jailed for 20 years and faces a lifetime of parole.…

Aiming for 'literate machines that can think, reason and communicate like humans' Microsoft reckons it can advance its efforts in conversational AI by today acquiring Maluuba – a Canadian machine-learning startup trying to “solve artificial general intelligence” through language.…

Execs recruited onto US govt panel, will meet next week The US government has pulled together a high-powered bunch of execs to form a new committee focused on self-driving cars.…

All a coincidence, we're told Lily Robotics says its decision on Thursday to shut down and return pre-order payments for a never-delivered drone, which came on the same day that San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón charged the company with false advertising and misleading business practices, was purely coincidental.…

$840,000 punishment isn't even a tap on the wrist Canada's Competition Bureau has administered what it thinks is a stinging fine for Amazon, but it's unlikely that CEO Jeff Bezos will be losing much sleep over it.…

Appeals court breathes life into App Store legal challenge A US Court of Appeals has resurrected a class-action lawsuit accusing Apple of monopoly behavior with its iOS App Store.…

But will it make any difference? Video Tom Wheeler, chairman of America's comms watchdog the FCC, has given a passionate defense of net neutrality rules in his last public speech – and warned his fellow commissioners not to go backwards by removing them.…

Plug pulled on Barts Health computer gear to prevent cyber-disease spread Malware has infected hospital computers at the UK’s biggest NHS trust.…

♪ I've got the key, I've got the secreeeee-eeet ♪ Google has released an open-source technology dubbed Key Transparency, which is designed to offer an interoperable directory of public encryption keys.…

Someone's keeping the neckbeards in Doritos Knock knock. Who's there? This Wednesday, officers from the City of London Police's Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) trying to get your advertising agency to stop helping pirate sites generate revenue.…

300,000 coins to count but just one digit that mattered, the middle one Reg Standards Bureau There are supposedly two certainties in life, death and taxes, and while we've never seen death by wheelbarrow, Nick Stafford from Cedar Buff, Virginia has sorted us out on the latter.…

Sounds odd but it could work - disk controller heads are stateless Storage Architect There’s an almost religious divide between those who see containers as entirely stateless objects and others taking a more pragmatic approach that says state and containers is an inevitable thing.…

It's good to talk... with Acas It might be damn cold outside, but Unite the union is trying to thaw relations with Fujitsu by cancelling strike action scheduled for January 19 to enter conciliatory talks over job cuts, pay and pensions.…

Over a year late, but it's not like we need 745,000 workers with digital skills or anything The Science and Technology Committee has today slammed the UK government for dragging its feet in releasing a digital strategy, now more than a year late.…

Pricing, dates... Mario? Just over a decade after it challenged home gaming with the Wii, Nintendo has aimed a new weapon at Sony’s Playstation and Microsoft’s Xbox.…

S'OK. Just turn on your notifications – green messenger Update A vulnerability in WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption creates a potential mechanism for Facebook and others to intercept and read encrypted messages, reports claimed today.…

Corporate veteran to re-invigorate big-data sales Hortonworks has named Raj Verma as its new president and chief operating officer in the latest of a string of shakeups designed to reinvigorate the Hadoop business following sliding sales.…

Nope, don't see any problems shaping up there. None whatsoever. Exclusive In the week that Lloyds Banking Group suffered multiple outages, it has emerged the financial giant is negotiating to outsource management of its bit barns to IBM Global Business Services.…

Follows move by much-complained about parent BT British mobile phone network EE has brought 1,000 customer service operator jobs in-house - claiming to be the first operator to "in-source" all call centre roles to the UK and Ireland.…

A lot of buzz, little lift in quadcopter market? Surely not Lily Robotics, which three years ago set out to create a flying camera, is shutting up shop and returning $34m to customers who had placed pre-orders.…

Legal fallout from the ill-fated $11bn HP takeover continues The ex-chief financial officer of Autonomy, Sushovan Hussain, has pleaded not guilty to charges he inflated the price of his company's $11bn (£9bn) acquisition by Hewlett-Packard.…

StorNext bringing in the scale-out, tiered storage bread Quantum has surprised itself with preliminary quarterly revenue numbers well ahead of plan.…

Victory for SMBs? Not quite, Reg research reveals UK government IT spending is still dominated by a few big suppliers – but they are losing some of their grip, according to publicly released data and Freedom of Information responses covering five of the biggest-spending organisations.…

Blames 'sly' suppliers, Great Firewall, plans to ship in March TappLock, a startup promising the "world's first smart fingerprint padlock" has claimed that issues with manufacturing in China were behind the months of silence which provoked aggrieved backers to contact The Register, fearing fraud.…

Reach your target fitness climax and then close your rings Something for the Weekend, Sir? Would you like to play with me? I’ll show you how to do the moves. Sure, everyone will be watching us online but I promise to take you to the next level. Oh, and I’m well fit.…

Anonymised app data silos impede movement EU policy makers are considering introducing a new licensing regime for anonymised "machine-generated data".…

The future belongs to bubble tabs; or maybe not Opera, the Norwegian browser maker acquired last year by a Chinese investment consortium, on Thursday introduced the browser equivalent of a concept car.…

Just in case we need to give our talking toasters a brainxit The European Parliament Committee on Legal Affairs has proposed a legal framework for robots that clarifies whether they should have the legal status of people, even as it recommends the inclusion of kill switches in automated systems.…

Microsoft smuggles suicide encouragement manual into operating system Pic By now, Windows 10 users have grown accustomed to the photos and inspirational quotes from Microsoft adorning their lock screens.…

Admittedly, we'd all want to tear everything apart if we had kit shoved in our heads Video Scientists have turned wimpy mice into ferocious hunters by zapping their brains with a laser.…

Cross-site scripting, request forgery, and more! WordPress has patched a series of vulnerabilities in its content management system shuttering bugs affecting more than 10 million users.…

So much for the 'alien megastructure' theories Tabby's star – formally KIC 8462852 – has attracted a new and possibly-plausible explanation for its excess of twinkle: the remnants of a planet destroyed in a collision.…

Open season on open services It is open season on open services as net scum migrate from sacking MongoDB databases to insecure ElasticSearch instances.…

Search the universe with qbsolv Want to fool around with some quantum-ish computing? D-Wave has open sourced a software tool that prepares optimisation problems to run on its hardware.…

Anonymity just got harder It just got a lot harder to evade browser fingerprinting: a bunch of boffins have worked out how to fingerprint the machine behind the browser, using only information provided by browser features.…

Stunned security experts tear strips off president-elect pick hours after announcement US president-elect Donald Trump's freshly minted cyber-tsar Rudy Giuliani runs a website with a content management system years out of date and potentially utterly hackable.…

DNS servers are crashable until they're patched BIND administrators, get patching: there are three irritating flaws you need to splat.…

US Dept of Commerce green paper reveals that, er, it's a bit of a mess The US Department of Commerce has published a green paper [PDF] on the Internet of Things, the first step in a process to develop formal governmental policies on the technology.…

Hard Rock Hamilton claims Cole Train was modeled on him – and he wants damages A former football player, professional wrestler, and motivational speaker is suing Microsoft, claiming an iconic character in Redmond's Gears of War game ripped off his likeness.…

♪ Stop your messin' around, better think of your future ♪ The transition team for US president-elect Donald Trump has announced that former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani will advise the incoming administration on how to secure America's digital infrastructure.…