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Sports ready, LTE ready, but still a solution looking for a problem? Real World Test Back when Captain Scarlet was still fresh, in the 1970s, I wanted a watch that made phone calls. I think I might have drawn one on my arm with a Biro. This has been a sci-fi staple since Dick Tracy in the 1950s. Now I’ve got one, I wonder why I ever wanted it.…

Or I could press 'Play' via the evil internet Something for the Weekend, Sir? Mrs Dabbsy is getting cross. I know this because she has said "grrrr".…

Once you're through the web interface the email-to-printer address is easy to find ON-CALL Well what do you know? The working week is all-but over, which means it is time to share a story from a reader's working life in our weekly On-Call column.…

Special error correction techniques work around degrading drives' dying cells Japan's Takeuchi Lab has proposed a “value-aware” solid state drive that it says can recognise images faster than rivals, while also extending drives' working life.…

Analyst firm IDC just made one of these three improbable predictions for the year 2019 Analyst outfit IDC thinks the PC market will grow again, although things are going to get worse before they get better. And the growth will come because people like Windows 10.…

Data centre unit 'still under transformation' and losing money, as is mobile business Lenovo has returned to growth, posting a pleasing set of fourth quarter numbers, but apparently has plenty of work to do in the mobile and data centre markets.…

Big Blue is 'shifting service delivery model to dedicated employee workforce' but clients aren't happy Exclusive IBM is not just banning the hire of new contractors and telling existing contractors they won't get new gigs: now it is telling some current contractors they will have to take a pay cut.…

Devuan 'Jessie' is done and will get long term support beyond the life of Debian Jessie POLL The self-described “Veteran Unix Admin collective” that in 2014 promised to give the world a cut of Debian without systemd has delivered: Devuan 1.0.0 LTS hit the web today.…

Study shows energy readings off over 90% Your fitness tracker might measure a heart rate accurately, but not the amount of calories burned, according to a study published in the Journal of Personalised Medicine.…

Sadly no black monolith found Scientists were expecting a lot of new data from the Juno space probe orbiting Jupiter, and they haven't been disappointed. The most massive planet in the Solar System is turning out to have a lot of surprises.…

'Digits' marks a shift for the phone industry T-Mobile is taking a leaf out of the tech industry book and separating phones from their numbers.…

Bill would let contractors get unemployment and paid leave Two US legislators are drafting bills to provide "gig" contract workers many of the same benefits afforded to those who work full time.…

But Belkin's new bridge only reinforces the problem of a locked-down ecosystem It's been a year since Apple officially launched its internet-of-things smart-home service – an event that we noted at the time was somewhat undermined by the fact that there were virtually no products that worked with it.…

Don't expect princely borrowing emails to stop any time soon A court in Mississippi has sentenced three Nigerian men to 235 years in prison for running online scams that duped people out of tens of millions of dollars.…

Allegedly astroturfed Americans speak out over net neutrality filings Fourteen Americans (with the help of an advocacy group) are complaining to the FCC that their names were used without permission to file fake comments on the proposed net neutrality overhaul.…

Legislators mull over modernizing legal process for seizing cloud data The Senate Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism on Wednesday held a hearing to explore the government's inability to have its cake and eat it too.…

Star formation rate is a hundred times faster than our Milky Way A team of astronomers has stumbled across a new kind of galaxy that may be the missing piece of the puzzle regarding how ancient galaxies grew to such massive sizes.…

Latin American country going the China route Venezuela is increasingly censoring its internet and expanding online surveillance of citizens.…

Bounty for invalidating Blackbird Tech patents increases Cloudflare has today stepped up its efforts to run patent litigator Blackbird Technologies into the ground.…

'Major incident' in data centre Capita Pay360 service, which allows small businesses and councils to accept online transactions such as paying parking fines, has gone down in the UK and Ireland due to a "major incident" in its data centre.…

Some of which comes from Alexa top 500 websites A strain of adblocker-aware malvertising is responsible for a range of scams, exploits and general skulduggery.…

Pranksters game promo to feature sex crims, murderers, terrorists.... Walkers' Crisps is desperately scrabbling to clean up a Twitter promo campaign after miscreants gamed it to broadcast videos of Gary Lineker holding up photos of paedophiles, murderers, terrorists and other such scum of the earth.…

Moving into co-processing with the big 3 public cloud players All-flasher Pure Storage has a feeling this could be its first billion-dollar year and is moving into tightly coupled co-processing between Pure and big 3 public cloud players.…

Look at me go, Mum! For the first time in more than half a decade HP Inc has managed to report quarterly growth in both its PC and printer businesses, a point CEO Dion Weisler described as a watershed moment in the company's recent history.…

Final quarter is third in a row to show revenue and profit growth No drama, no worries, just the slick sounds of a well-oiled machine doing its stuff. That's NetApp with its latest quarterly results.…

Customers offered Amazon vouchers or a full refund The Beeb is to shut its online paid-for streaming service BBC Store from November, just 18 months after it launched.…

Trusts may have had corrupted backups... or none at all NHS Digital stopped short of advising health organisations in England not to cough up for the WannaCrypt ransom attack because it couldn't be certain that all hospitals had backed up patient records.…

Streaming service argues it'll result in lower quality work The European Parliament has set content quotas for OTT video services like Netflix and Amazon Prime even higher than the Commission originally wanted. 30 per cent of the services' catalog must be European works, Parliament has decreed.…

Heathrow flights were diverted to avoid errant UAVs A pair of errant drones over East London caused so much airspace disruption that flights to Heathrow had to be diverted for fear of collision, it has emerged.…

People must really love Snake If you blinked, you missed it.…

Thought £400k TalkTalk fine was big? Try €20m Companies are unprepared for the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) coming into force a year today, and some small businesses "might not even know" a new regime is looming, the UK Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham has warned.…

Wang gets the call to arms, stands to attention Exclusive Lenovo UK boss John Harber has quit just 15 months after taking the hot seat, El Reg can confirm.…

Malicious combination of legitimate permissions A distinct class of Android vulnerability has been unearthed by computer scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.…

Those bloody procurement guys did what? Study You, dear readers, continually tell us in surveys how hard it is to get the investment needed to help you do your jobs effectively. Regardless of the topic – core infrastructure, middleware, management tools, etc – it’s common to hear stories of execs not "getting it", while expecting IT to muddle through as more pressure is piled onto already stretched teams.…

Elementary OS, my dear penguin? With the death of Unity, Canonical will focus more attention on Ubuntu servers, Ubuntu in the cloud and Ubuntu in the so-called Internet of Things.…

The roots of multithreaded rendering software Star Wars New Hope @ 40 In the 40 years since the release of the original Star Wars, special effects have changed beyond recognition.…

'It is happening again' Analysis The final lap nears in Oracle's epic seven year battle with Google over Java. It's reached the Federal Appeals Circuit, where Oracle is confident that three appeals judges with a strong track record of upholding IP will decide in its favour.…

Greg Gianforte loses it on election eve Until Wednesday, Greg Gianforte's life had followed a lovely script: he twice sold software companies for millions, the second time for US$1.5bn when Oracle acquired CRM company RightNow Technologies.…

Boeing to build 'Phantom Express' on heir to Space Shuttle's main engine The United States Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency has commissioned Boeing to build a spaceplane capable of ten launches in ten days.…

Anger over Manchester attack may play a part The UK government will push through orders next month to force all communications companies including Google and Facebook to break data encryption.…

16 Psyche mission takes a great leap forward NASA has come up with a cunning plan that will allow it to shave four years of flight time off its mission to the biggest chunk of visible iron in the Solar System, and will use souped-up solar power to get there.…

No, Apple is not practicing to be carrier. This is how you horn in on 5G Apple has filed a request with the United States Federal Communications Commission FCC to run wireless tests in spectrum bands associated with 5G.…

300 GB repo handles 8,421 pulls and 1,760 official builds a day, more once GVFS fix is in Microsoft has adopted Git to manage the vast collection of code that is Windows' source, and has shared performance issues it's had to fix along the way.…

WannaCry? Minister says data is safe, so save your tears for now Hospitals connected to Australian State of Queensland's integrated electronic medical record system (ieMR) are suffering outages attributed to patching against a ransomware attack.…

Former HO and EMC man Joe Eazor gets the job of completing conversion to services company Rackspace has named Joe Eazor as its new CEO, replacing the departing Taylor Rhodes and interim CEO Jeff Cotten.…

Chat forums beyond El Reg just do respectful whimsy, so goodbye 'Imzy' Reddit can be a nasty, nasty place. So nasty that a in 2015 half a dozen Reddit employees – some who said they'd experienced personal abuse or threats of violence from Reddit members - bailed from the company and set their sights on “rethinking the way communities exist on the Internet.”…

Remote code execution in all versions since 3.5.0, so it's patching time! Sysadmins tending Samba need to get patching.…

DeepMind scores another win in marketing its AI AlphaGo yesterday one-upped man as it won the first out of three games against Ke Jie, the world’s number one player in Go.…

Dial-a-ride d-baggery claimed on passenger side too Uber's New York woes are piling up, as the dial-a-ride service has now been sued by riders who believe they were being overcharged.…

Kubernetes cluster cat herding, brought to you by Istio Microservices architecture, in which monolithic apps get broken down into a set of distinct services, goes well with containers and orchestration.…