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Race against Amazon demands rapid iteration, and cash Google I/O Eager to catch up to Amazon and its Echo interactive speaker, Google at its annual developer conference on Wednesday offered everyone in attendance free Google Home hardware and $700 in Cloud Platform service credit to create apps that converse with the Google Assistant inhabiting its device.…

But FBI blunder may let alleged pedo walk free from court A judge has ruled that people who give their knackered computers to Best Buy's Geek Squad for repairs have no comeback if technicians find and report any illegal material to the Feds.…

Eyeball-chasing ad giant literally traps your eyeballs Google I/O Google wants more for its Daydream virtual reality platform than phone displays framed in cheap cardboard.…

FCC report finds lessons, mentions no fines as yet A wrongly updated whitelist was behind the five-hour nationwide outage of AT&T's emergency 911 service in March, a report by America's phone regulator, the FCC, has revealed.…

Bipartisan bill wants to stave off another WannaCry Two US senators have proposed a law limiting American intelligence agencies' secret stockpiles of vulnerabilities found in products.…

CWA says members in 36 states prepping for stoppage A union representing 40,000 AT&T Mobility workers is threatening a nationwide strike this weekend after negotiations with the telco stalled.…

FCC parties like it's 1996 As expected, on Thursday America's broadband watchdog, the FCC, voted 2-1 to start the process to gut net neutrality rules.…

Redmond's OS needs to be cool for consumers, but its best chances are with business Microsoft presented its latest Windows 10 strategy to developers at its Build event in Seattle last week.…

Pointblank weaknesses have since been patched Three home security systems were riddled with bugs, according to new research made public this week.…

Melondream devs seek investors Miles Deep, the porn AI editor we wrote about last year can now be found in an app, called MelonDream.…

'We had no option' claims former director Troubled ZX Spectrum reboot firm Retro Computers Ltd has been ordered to repay two of its shareholders’ £52,000 legal fees by the end of this month.…

We read the manifesto so you don’t have to… The Conservatives have pledged to introduce a digital charter in the party's manifesto today, which also rehashes a number of familiar-sounding ideas about “digital by default” government and backs the failing identity authentication platform Verify.…

Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron burp as PC memory prices jump 30 per cent Global DRAM shortages might have proved a pain in the butt for buyers of PCs, smartphones and servers, but – unsurprisingly – they were a boon for the memory manufacturers.…

Fintech firms not that thrilled about the idea The European Banking Federation (EBF) has asked the EU Commission to support a ban on "screen scraping".…

Google shows its hand Analysis Nothing in the new version of Android O, revealed for the first time at Google's annual developer conference yesterday, is as significant as the changes to the way Google releases code to phone makers.…

Parties warned to follow rules ahead of General Election The UK's Information Commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, has opened a formal investigation into the use of big data analysis during the Brexit referendum.…

Sales suffering – should it quit the market? Comment Cisco has missed out on a blade to rack server shift, sales growth has turned negative, it doesn't sell to cloud providers and it has a small market share. Should it invest to grow or get out of servers altogether?…

Brexit and loss of oversight casts doubt on reform agenda – sources The British government's plans to overhaul £6bn in large IT contracts expiring within the next three years have fallen by the wayside, according to sources.…

Pilots: Um, you want all those lithium batteries in the hold? The European Commission (EC) and the US have pushed back against moves for a wider ban on laptops on aircraft but talks on the subject will continue in Washington next week.…

'Errors' in 2014 filings 'not intentional', apparently The European Commission has fined Facebook €110m (£94.4m) for giving misleading or incorrect information about its takeover of messaging giant WhatsApp.…

Spend big or go home Comment Google Cloud Platforms's chief thinks the service will surpass AWS by 2022. Speaking at Forbes CIO Summit in Half Moon Bay, California, last month,Diane Greene claimed Google has "a huge advantage in our data centers, in our infrastructure, availability, security and how we automate things. We just haven't packaged it up perfectly yet."…

Precautionary disconnect – patients still being looked after The internationally famous Great Ormond Street Hospital has been taken offline as a safety measure following last week's catastrophic WannaCrypt outbreak.…

Motherboard say what? Dell's latest BIOS update is bricking some machines – apart from a power light, they refuse to boot up at all, say users.…

Operating at scale is easy. Changing culture to accept and cope with failure is harder Organisations that hope to improve their own data centre operations by adopting the techniques used by hyperscale operators like Google or Facebook need to consider the stuff between their ears, not just the stuff on their racks, because changing data centre culture is more powerful than changing equipment.…

So you wanna build a robo-ride? Start saving up, get a ticket, get in line Analysis A closer look at LIDAR sensors – a key component in autonomous vehicles – reveals the lucrative and competitive nature of the self-driving car industry.…

Artificial Van Allen belts, auroras, geomagnetic storms, just another day in the Cold War Space weather is usually driven by the Sun – but a bunch of data about Cold War nuclear tests has given NASA boffins the chance to measure whether humans can affect what goes on in Earth's neighbourhood.…

First they came for the activists and I did nothing… British police have charged a man under antiterror laws after he refused to hand over his phone and laptop passwords.…

Microsoft advises how to harden cloudy Windows, cos it runs a cloud not your OS Microsoft Windows users already know what to do to defeat WannaCrypt (unless they've been asleep for a week). Now the company's published its advice for its Azure customers.…

Julian Assange tweets his delight, but nothing on his promise to visit the USA As expected, leaker extraordinaire Chelsea Manning has left the United States Army's Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, after her sentence was commuted in the last days of Barack Obama's presidency.…

By our reckoning this means a mouse could let a RAT into your computer If you're using an HP Inc wireless keyboard/mouse combo and the cursor starts behaving badly, someone might be pranking you.…

Trumpian chaos and router collapse clip Switchzilla's wings, again Administrative chaos in America has put a dent in Cisco's financials, and the company has announced its intention to cut another 1,100 jobs.…

Centrelink's buggy “Robodebt” program to get another audit Australia's Department of Human Services (DHS) might have given itself a clean bill of health over its notorious “Robodebt” data-matching program, but Privacy Commissioner Timothy Pilgrim wants to check it out for himself.…

Some greenfields won't get fibre, company tells Senate Remediating and backfilling copper networks for Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN) was always going to need new copper, and now Australians know how much: 15,000 kilometres.…

Plutus Payroll's owners arrested, aircraft seized, tax office suspends senior staff … and tech contractors sweat When Australian payroll-for-contractors outfit Plutus Payroll stopped paying its customers, several pointed out that the company looked too good to be true – because it did not charge for its services. And now we know why: the biz has been named at the centre of an AU$165 million (US$122.5m, £94.5m) fraud against the Commonwealth of Australia.…

Appropriately named Panic has its repository raided after founder gets infected The head of a Mac-centric software studio is coming clean today after a malware infection on his OS X machine last week resulted in the loss of source code for several products.…

Compatible with 'droid libraries, statically typed language is leaner and safer Google on Wednesday said it has made Kotlin a first-class language for Android development, alongside Java and C++.…

Beauty website suffers ugly IT security breach Cosmetics peddler Tatcha is warning customers after hackers were able to compromise its website and harvest payment card details as orders poured in.…

Biggest issue may be Partisan Pai and his Trump-like behavior Analysis Despite more than a million comments opposing it, tomorrow at around 12:00pm Eastern time, the three FCC commissioners will vote 2-1 to approve a so-called "notice of proposed rulemaking" and start on the rocky path to rescinding net neutrality rules.…

Ads giant flashes TPU 2 machine-learning ASIC Google I/O On Wednesday, Google kicked off its annual developer conference and media spectacle, Google I/O, at the Shoreline Amphitheater, a stone's throw from its Mountain View, California, headquarters.…

Windows Server 2k3 kit yanked, replacement slow to arrive Fasthosts left some customers without access to their backups for roughly six days – after it tore down systems it feared were vulnerable to the WannaCry malware.…

Effort to redraw online copyright rules receives furious response Internet giants Google, Facebook and a wide range of organizations from Pinterest to Kickstarter to Wikimedia have responded furiously to a recent decision by the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that could have huge liability implications for online companies.…

Oi, Amazon. Still think you're going to do domestic drone deliveries? The UK's Department for Transport and the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy “don’t understand” airspace traffic management – and UK‑focused drone software startups might be closer to the government view than they like to think.…

It's all to play for Samsung has finally launched its mobile payments service, Samsung Pay, in the UK. The chaebol acquired the technology by buying LoopPay and launched the service in South Korea in August 2015.…

Files complaint over claims contract makers withholding license payments Qualcomm is suing Chinese iPhone and iPad contract makers it says have stopped paying it royalties at the behest of Apple.…

Data centre CPU boasts more cores, IO, memory bandwidth than Intel's AMD has renamed its Zen-based Naples processor as the EPYC brand, pitching it as a data centre server CPU, and hopes to make inroads into both the dual-socket and single-socket server markets.…

The SS300 comes in 2bits/cell and 3bits/cell variants HGST has released the Ultrastar SS300, an enterprise server SSD that's 1.6 times faster than its predecessor.…

Stand down, folks. Back to Defcon none A ransomware variant, dubbed Uiwix, that abuses the same vulnerability as WannaCrypt has turned out to be something of a damp squib.…

SolidScale software supplier gets closer relationship with up-the-stack moving MIcron We understand Micron has invested in Excelero, the software supplier for its SolidScale all-flash NVME array.…

If you want to slash overheads, you're learning from the best Beleaguered Canadian train and plane giant Bombardier has signed a six-year $700m contract with IBM to outsource tech management and, er, cut costs – something Big Blue has expended considerable effort doing itself.…

Mr Slurpy lives next door Review The Galaxy S8+ is like a nine course meal of desserts – tiramisus, trifles, ice creams, one after another – that you have to eat with chopsticks and a straw.…