The Register

And tech plays a huge part because Death Star plans have no password and are too big to upload in a hurry SPOILERS Rogue One is a fine addition to the cinematic Star Wars canon, and almost perfectly tailored for Register readers to mock.…

Says machine learning, predictive analytics squashed downtime to under 25 secs/yr Nimble says its storage arrays (all-flash and hybrid) have reached six “nines” availability.…

Rents third party space for London region... not that anyone wants to talk specifics Amazon has opened its long-awaited AWS jumping off point for UK cloud customers by renting racks in two separate third party-run British-based bit barns.…

Plus: Visual Basic in 21 days?

IDC marketscapers scope out rankings IDC has updated its object-based storage marketscape to show IBM has leapt to a chart-topping position through buying Cleversafe. Scality is second. Dell EMC has hustled up the charts to third place, pushing most other players down the rankings.…

Get stuck into a containerization runtime this Xmas. Go on Docker on Wednesday plans offer the open source community a "boring infrastructure" component that nonetheless should excite those focused on software-based containers and benefit the blissfully unaware masses.…

Planning for the worst 'just in case', says chief exec Seb James A spectre is haunting Dixons Carphone - the spectre of Brexit. Despite posting a 19 per cent jump in half-year profits to £144m, the reailer is warning of stormy times ahead.…

Euro upstart's distributed database eyes up NoSQL rivals After more than a million downloads since its introduction two years ago, CrateDB, an open-source distributed SQL database suited for real-time analysis of machine data, has reached to its 1.0 release.…

Deloitte-led forensic review shows debts up, profits way overstated The extent of the financial mismanagement at London-listed managed services outfit Redcentric were outlined today, and they are way worse than the company signalled when the mistakes were first found.…

Armed forces, cops and others get patched Three of the 31 patches pushed out by SAP on Tuesday tackle flaws in the ERP giant’s technology for Defense Forces & Public Security.…

Lord Adonis calls for a mobile universal service obligation Blighty has worse 4G coverage than that of Albania, Panama and Peru, according to major report by the National Infrastructure Commission today on 5G and telecommunication technology.…

More workshops added to Building IoT London programme We’ve added two more workshops to the agenda for the third day of Building IoT London, giving you even more opportunities to get down and dirty with the Internet of Things.…

Deja vu for mapping nerds Open Source Insider One of the great bright lights of open-source software and user-driven community projects is OpenStreetMap, which offers an open-source mapping platform similar to, but also very philosophically different than, Google Maps.…

Imagining the Eric, the Larry and the Donald After meeting Kanye West, President-elect Trump will meet Google and other Silicon Valley leaders today. We've imagined how the conversation might go.…

Say hello to your AI-powered robo-chatbot-barista Storage Blockhead How on Earth did this nonsense about a basic income come about, with its inability to understand governments' thinking on paying benefits?…

Bluetooth 5 unveiled, boosts range and coexistence, but no mesh yet Analysis Bluetooth 5 has finally been unveiled, with headline claims of 200-metre range (quadrupling that of Bluetooth 4) and doubled bandwidth (now 2Mbps). There is a clear focus on Internet of Things devices and applications, but no sign of the proposed mesh protocol, which would do even more to improve the spec’s capabilities.…

Mostly landfill Androids from odd places, but Lenovo makes the list too More than two dozen cheap Androids have been found to host pre-installed malicious apps capable of downloading persistent adware and making phone calls.…

Don't worry, there won't be any more Hitler outages this time, we're told Microsoft has officially unveiled its AI chatbot Zo, and a series of bot-building applications all geared toward improving machine communication.…

Number one: Make designing special-purpose hardware as easy as writing software The International Symposium on Computing Architecture has revealed the five architectural challenges it thinks computer science needs to solve to meet the demands of the year 2030.…

Make sure you reboot your box the right way Microsoft has sneaked out a patch to get Windows 10 PCs back online after an earlier update broke networking for people's computers around the globe.…

DNC figure John Podesta told to follow phishing link, instead of link to enable 2FA A single typo from a Clinton campaign aide gave Russian hackers access to a decade's worth of emails, some 60,000 in total, owned by Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.…

Job ad says software is lousy at this task and it needs a human to do the job! London language translation firm Today Translations has advertised for an TEXT “Emoji translator/specialist.”…

Current BMC CEO Bob Beauchamp to hang around on the board BMC Software has a new CEO: Peter Leav has won the role, and that of president, after leaving Polycom where he had the same two titles for the past three years.…

Why Veeam's new backup agent for Linux, of course! Veeam has given the world a Linux Backup Agent.…

It'll be virtual, natch, but so is the rest of your bit barn – in a bad way Israeli outfit Stratoscale has updated its Symphony suite so it can effectively become an on-premises Amazon Web Services (AWS) region.…

In limited quantities, some time next week. So don't bank on getting them under a tree Apple has finally put its Air Pod wireless headphones on sale.…

While Trump recruits Mickey Mouse CEO to advise on growing US jobs Thirty former IT staffers at Disney, who were replaced by foreign H-1B recruits, are now suing their ex-employer for alleged racial discrimination.…

All the single ladies... your ex-techbro boyfriends may have snooped on you, too A former Uber staffer claims the amateur taxi app maker routinely pried into customer records to spy on people, including celebrity riders and ex-partners of employees.…

Apple, Microsoft, and Adobe all have fixes galore to test and install Security patches for Windows, macOS, iOS and other Apple firmware, and a host of Adobe products, were emitted this week.…

Comms Minister puts a price on your head: a lousy AU$1.25 Australia's communications minister Mitch Fifield has put a price on Australian Reg readers' heads: a lousy dollar and twenty five cents.…

Or smut in South Dakota, Anarchist Cookbook in Alabama or Windows 10 in Wyoming Online retailers in America will soon be required by law to disclose to state governments what purchases their customers – meaning, you – have made.…

Flash for free or pick up a Nexus that's ready to roll Antipodeans can now buy secure, if pricey, Nexus 5x and 6P phones running the lauded hardened Android operating system dubbed "Copperhead".…

NSA whistleblower is trying not to let extradition possibility worry him NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has warned Donald Trump, as US President, may do a deal with Russian leader Vladimir Putin to extradite the whistleblower.…

And Brillo becomes Android Things Google has expanded its corporate grip over smart home company Nest, announcing that it will fold the company's developer platform into its own.…

CEO Brendan Iribe steps down from the top – was he pushed or did he jump? Facebook-owned virtual reality company Oculus is splitting in two, with one arm working on its Rift standalone high-end headset and the other focused on its Gear VR cellphone headset.…

Now, each of you, take this check for $95 and get the hell out of my sight A California court has ruled in favor of Apple Store workers who accused the iPhone giant of trampling over their employment rights. It is a bittersweet victory.…

We don't like to brag or anything, mumbles IT giant Analysis NEC has the biggest, baddest scale-out deduping backup-to-disk array on the planet and we virtually never hear about it. NEC is not a top-six purpose-built backup supplier, according to IDC, being neither a unit ship or revenue leader.…

Growth priority causes delayed cash flow break-even gratification Cloud storage gateway and enterprise file services startup Nasuni has had a funding round to grow its business further expansion in Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies, meaning expansion outside North America.…

Multi-touch screen claims Microsoft has released highly selective figures on sales of the Surface Hub, its Windows-10 powered multi-touch whiteboarding wall.…

Alleges patent infringements by ... hang on, they work together? Having had its patent infringement lawsuits against Veeam seen off by the US courts, Symantec has now filed an IP infringement lawsuit against cloud-based security outfit ZScaler.…

Clean tech on the list Bill Gates is leading a $1bn climate-change venture with a roll-call of tech’s biggest names.…

Unnamed teen also gets rehabilitation order The 17-year-old lad who confessed to hacking crimes against UK ISP TalkTalk was today slapped with a 12-month rehabilitation order and had his iPhone confiscated.…

Setback follows Falcon 9 explosion Elon Musk's SpaceX has delayed the first manned launch of its Dragon capsule intended to carry astronauts into orbit by one year.…

Hole in retirement pot widens to £35m, remains 'fly in ointment' for investors Staff at cost cutting education tech supplier RM discovered today the deficit in the company pension pot has widened substantially.…

We can't give you what you need right now... Broadband-pusher 186k – as well as ISPs it supplies including Fast.co.uk and Firenet – is advising customers to seek other providers as it is unable to "continue to supply" its current service, in a notice sent to customers today seen by The Register.…

UK, Germany, Greece and others rapped for not acting on evidence The European Commission has begun legal action against seven member states over emissions cheating in the "dieselgate" scandal.…

What is it 741 people do exactly? The government's procurement arm, the Crown Commercial Service, has failed to save UK taxpayers' cash - according to the National Audit office.…

Supergrass Samsung walks free The great battery scam has reached a milestone in Europe. The European Commission this week imposed a settlement fine of €166m on a trio of Japanese manufacturers for operating the price-fixing cartel.…

Restructuring could be over by end of Feb next year Violin Memory has cut its CEO’s base salary from from $750,000 to $150,000 a year – although it's just for three months.…

Tech efficiency threatens to clobber old timers Analysis Squeezed between the giant pressures of hyper-convergence, the public cloud, object storage and software-defined/cheap commodity hardware, the old guard storage suppliers face shrinkage into shadows of their former dominant selves.…