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Tesla bigwig hints at music algorithms and other assorted nuggets at shareholder meeting Tesla might turn tastemaker, CEO Elon Musk let slip yesterday at the annual shareholders meeting, suggesting that the company may move into music "matching algorithms".…

Ks Clean: Run and install: OK, OK or, er, OK? A malicious Android app that downloads itself from advertisements posted on forums strongly resists removal, security firm Zscaler warns.…

Grants of up to £100k to figure out implications of big data, blockchain The UK's data watchdog is offering up to £100,000 for projects looking at how emergent tech affects information rights, saying that practical research "needs a stronger voice".…

AR doesn't qualify for free speech protection Analysis In the blue corner: Candy Lab, a maker of augmented reality games, which doesn't want people banned from playing its distractions in public places.…

NXP acquisition part of IoT push, say market-watchers Analysis The $39bn acquisition of Dutch chip company NXP is central to Qualcomm's strategy to expand its Internet of Things and connected car activities, getting to scale more quickly than it could through in-house developments alone, even with its renowned engineering teams. But it may face obstacles in the European Union, according to Reuters reports.…

Only Dell EMC manages to expand its waistline in Q1 Sales stats for the server market are out for the first three months of the year and they are bad – bad meaning bad, not bad meaning good.…

Former spymaster Stella Rimington on cyber espionage, terrorism and more Former MI5 boss Stella Rimington says complex communications "make it very difficult for our intelligence services" to keep pace against "hideous ideologies" whose sole aim is to kill, while cyber espionage is something "no one really knows effectively how to deal with".…

Demand outstripping supply ahead of GDPR... and, hot damn, those salaries The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will force European organisations to expand their cyber workforce, causing demand to outstrip the supply of expertise.…

Waiting for the next industrial revolution. Still waiting... Mountains of cash keep pouring into the titans of big data despite the world's inability to do much of value with their software.…

Donors' money funds outgoing managers' nest eggs The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) recently released a Form 990 for its 2015-2016 financial year. Once again, the foundation took almost a full year to do so rather than the standard five months.…

An HPC boffin predicts system trends HPC Blog Dratted laws of physics. Cranking up frequencies is difficult due to leakages from ever smaller guard rails on the electron highways inside the processor. You have to jack up the power to make sure the instructions make it through, which leads to thermal problems.…

EGNOS overlay service's HQ refresh will ensure GPS accuracy to three metres The European Space Agency has announced plans to upgrade the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service (EGNOS).…

Reveals candidate European routes, two tunnels under the Med, under under Baltic Sea Hyperloop One, the company trying to commercialise the train-in-a-vacuum-tube tech proposed by Elon Musk, has unveiled its proposed European routes.…

Czech boffins say source of Tunguska event has new asteroid-sized bits to watch The regular and often-unspectacular Taurid meteor shower has a dangerous side, with Czech boffins warning it's a likely source of dangerous debris.…

System Center app monitoring wouldn't play nice with .Net and still doesn't after 78 days Back in March Microsoft warned that “The [Application Performance Monitoring] APM feature in SCOM 2016 Agent may cause a crash for the IIS Application Pool running under .NET 2.0 runtime.” IIS Application Pools improve the reliability of web applications.…

Former director of National Intelligence James Clapper has no doubt who hacked the Dems and spread fake news James Clapper, US Director of National Intelligence under president Barack Obama, has used a speech in Australia to unload on US president Donald Trump and on Russia.…

vRealize refresh sees Virtzilla play nice with Puppet, AWS and Azure VMware's forthcoming “Cross-Cloud Architecture” will be its big effort to manage workloads and resources across any on-premises or cloudy stack. But it's not due to debut for a month or three and when it lands will embrace Virtzilla vRealize range of management and orchestration products. And as it happens that range has just received its bi-annual refresh, revealing a few hybrid-cloud-wrangling features that hint at how Cross-cloud will evolve.…

What you need to know, HPC competitors HPC Blog Some people are afraid of public speaking, others fear spiders or snakes. Still others fear having to put together and benchmark high performance computing clusters in front of thousands of spectators and a worldwide audience of millions online.…

Agents that don't wait for polling Cumulus Networks reckons netadmins need more than ping and traceroute to understand large-scale data centre networks, and is hoping its NetQ offering will fill that role.…

Intelligence Committee member says Russian hacked lots of US States, some don't know it yet The strange tale of former NSA contractor Reality Winner just got stranger, after a US senator alleged the information she leaked about Russian hacking under-stated the extent of Russia's activities.…

Search warrants can crack crypto are reasonable, says PM's infosec advisor Australia has joined the list of countries whose politicians hope to crack encryption by fiat, with the nation's attorney-general George Brandis saying he’s going to take the government’s concerns to “Five Eyes” partners the USA, UK, New Zealand Canada.…

What's a Do-Not-Call list? An eight-year investigation into Dish Networks, a direct-broadcast satellite service provider, resulted Monday in the largest fine ever levied for privacy invasion, with Dish facing a $280m bill.…

Spoilers: Kalanick still CEO Updated Uber has told its 12,000-plus employees it's sacked more than 20 staff after investigating harassment at the San Francisco startup.…

Hope he enjoyed the extradition flight – it'll be his last for a while A hacker who screwed airlines out of millions of dollars was jailed on Monday for four years and ten months.…

Bet his mum's going to be livid Japanese cops have, for the first time ever, arrested a ransomware maker – a teenage tearaway.…

'Anomaly' drained my bank account, techie complains Updated An eBay staffer says her bank account was wiped out and her rent check bounced – after the New York hotel she stayed in started charging other guests' reservations to her card.…

Tech biz call for ideas to get FCC, lawmakers listening A slew of internet companies, including Amazon, Kickstarter, Reddit and Mozilla, have signed up for a "day of action" on July 12 in an effort to retain net neutrality rules.…

Their decision to join NATO likely played a part The prolific Kremlin-backed hacking crew blamed for attacking the US Democratic National Committee last year has targeted the Montenegro government with cyberattacks, according to cybersecurity company FireEye.…

No, really... Japanese tech monolith Fujitsu's long awaited sale "synergy" of its PC business with Lenovo will happen "soon", the firm's president has today promised.…

Windows Defender is the alleged offender Kaspersky Lab has filed an antitrust complaint against Microsoft over allegations that Redmond is hobbling third-party antivirus software.…

More thinking, less doing in FY2018, reckons naval service The US Navy is not bolting its new electromagnetic railgun to any of its warships in the coming year, a move sure to disappoint those who rejoice at innovative methods of blowing stuff up.…

Former gov.UK advisor Rohan Silva branded 'utterly clueless' Calls by a former special advisor to ex UK Prime Minister David Cameron to allow the circumvention of end-to-end encryption to monitor terrorist suspects have come under fire from security experts.…

1,500 staff and contractors to be shipped over Exclusive Lloyds Bank has today inked a mega 10-year cloudy outsourcing deal with IBM, with 1,500 staff and contractors to be shipped over to Big Blue - according to internal memo seen by The Register.…

Cruel mistress science throws astroboffins a curveball WASP-67 b and HAT-P-38 b are two far-flung exoplanets orbiting near-identical stars at similar distances. Their size and temperatures are also pretty close. So, naturally, astronomers thought that their atmospheres wouldn't be too far apart. They were wrong.…

Era of automated ads risks brand image, apparently Vodafone will block its advertising appearing against so-called "fake news" and hate speech from today.…

You're not sticking criminal charges on me, says Levandowski The one-time Google engineer who is said to have handed a pile of the Chocolate Factory’s trade secrets to taxi app Uber is pleading the 5th Amendment of the US Constitution because he is worried about criminal prosecution, according to reports.…

Quality beats quantity, though – and having a decent boss is a game-changer Deployment is up in the world of DevOps.…

And machine learning is the solution Researchers have developed a method to improve the characterisation of superfast X-rays that they say will allow data to be collected up to a thousand times faster.…

How to weather the storm Like it or not, the cloud in all forms is approaching at great speed, irrespective of your employer's size. All sysadmins need to get onboard or be left behind. Me? After 17 years working in a range of environments, I did at one point believe I had ages before the cloud arrived at large-scale enterprises like the one where I'm employed. Plenty of time to skill up. Or so I thought.…

Page through this profiler... HPC Blog The HPC Advisory Council exists to spread the word about high-performance computing tech, provide a network of expertise, equipment for members, and generally educate all-comers about the wonders of HPC.…

Cryptocurrencies, globalisation erode Kremlin's coercive power Russia's control of cybercrime groups that have come to play a part in its espionage activity is crumbling, according to Cybereason.…

Fresh wave of outsourcing could slash UK IT team from 600 to less than 100 Exclusive Consultancy goliath Ernst & Young is planning to offshore hundreds of IT jobs to India in its latest wave of outsourcing.…

Minimalist makeovers for iPad, Mac, iOS and MacOS leave Cupertino perhaps looking iterative, not innovative WWDC When Microsoft revealed its Surface Studio last year , more than a few observers looked at its 28” touch screen and accompanying Dial touch wheel and wondered whether Apple could offer something similarly startling for workstation-class users.…

Left Australian National University 'by mutual agreement' in 2014 To suddenly leave one prestigious university CIO gig may, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, be regared regarded as misfortune. But to suddenly leave two? In three years?…

Colossus suffers cosmic tanning session from hell Astronomers have discovered KELT‑9b – the hottest giant exoplanet yet seen. It is twice the size of Jupiter, has a dayside temperature of 4,600 Kelvin, and is being stripped by ultraviolet radiation from its star, KELT‑9.…

Spinning up VMs is so 2010. What you need now are services HPE Discover 2017 HPE is looking to win customers for its Gen10 suite of hybrid cloud enterprise IT platform by first offering them some tough love.…

May's scapegoat and Trump's Twitter rants are damaging society Comment In a predictable but still shocking pronouncement, UK Prime Minister Theresa May has put much of the blame of recent terror attacks in London and Manchester on the internet and internet companies like Google and Facebook.…

Quick, let the Daily Mail know – add the Red Planet to cereal, cheese, tea, joy and other crazy carcinogens you must avoid Aspiring astronauts might want to think twice before going to Mars, as scientists estimate that the risk of cancer doubles for long-term missions outside Earth’s magnetic field.…

SEC pounds Ponzi prospectors ZenMiner and GAW Miners America's Securities and Exchange Commission has won its case against two bogus – and now shuttered – Bitcoin companies operated by Homero Joshua Garza.…

Death by blinkenlight thanks to dodgy firmware Back in February, it was hard drive lights that leaked data. Now, the side-channel experts at Israel's Ben-Gurion University have applied a similar principle to routers.…