The Register

That's not the SSL you're thinking of SSL (previously Space Systems/Loral) has won a contract to build a robot capable of refueling satellites in orbit, whether or not they have been designed to get more fuel.…

Meanwhile, another nasty Linux bug surfaces Google has posted an update for Android that, among other fixes, officially closes the Dirty COW vulnerability.…

Smartwatch market down by one Smartwatch maker Fitbit has confirmed it has bought competitor Pebble – for an undisclosed sum – but only its software. Pebble products are on the scrapheap.…

So says Imperva after trolling the dark web Prefab phishing campaigns cost less to run and are twice as profitable as traditional phishing attacks, according to a new study by security vendor Imperva.…

We must have misheard... Plus - a Windows 10 Xmas

A nice little 'underperformer', apparently Accounting and payroll firm Sage may offload part of its North American business.…

Delayed transaction of US-HQ'd Ingram Micro gets regulatory approval The world's largest tech distributor is now privately owned by the Chinese: shipping titan Tianjin Tianhai has coughed a whopping $6bn to take over US-based Ingram Micro.…

Tech's Mystic Megs also say robotics market will expand. No shit, Sherlock Those crazy tech shamans at IDC have been sniffing the data centre cooling system exhausts again, this time breathlessly informing us that in three years "30 per cent of commercial service robotic applications" will take the form of "robot as a service". We have no idea either.…

'DNA' evidence used to track suspect on trial this week A Danish man being tried for arson offences might have not have been nabbed by cops if he hadn’t stopped for a five-knuckle shuffle in public, a police spokesman told a local TV crew.…

... after Moto gives the wrist a rest Apple typically leaves the phone ringing when reporters call, so an instant rebuttal from the CEO is almost newsworthy in itself. Yesterday Tim Cook broke his monastic silence to respond to a report that Apple Watch sales were in a funk.…

Interesting response to 'lack of clarity' on details moan The UK government has insisted it is effectively communicating the benefits of its controversial smart meter programme – despite MPs having identified a "lack of clarity" over the "problem" the scheme is trying to solve.…

Centriq 2400 now sampling, due to beat Chipzilla by a year Qualcomm says it has started shipping to customers samples of the Centriq 2400, its 10nm 64-bit ARMv8-A general-purpose server-grade system-on-chip.…

More prominent evidence needed to back up claims of 75% faster speeds than rivals Mobile provider EE has had to remove a number of TV, homepage and press ads for advertising "misleading" 4G speeds.…

Resistance is futile The Circle, Dave Eggers' novel about a society dominated by an omniscient, cult-like Silicon Valley internet company, has been given the big-screen treatment, with the trailer emerging this week. The movie's promo site has a witty parody of the "onboarding" process for a web platform – enjoy the unreadable EULA as it flashes past, and all your privacy and personal data is slurped up.…

And maybe over-analysed too HPC Blog It's time to close the books on another highly successful SC Student Cluster Competition. This year was special in a number of ways. First, it was the event's 10th anniversary. At 14 teams, it was also the largest SC competition ever – a far cry from the original five. SC16 was also noteworthy in terms of the performance achieved (more than twice the existing LINPACK record) and the wide variety of cluster configurations designed by the student participants.…

Venerable aircraft carrier makes her final journey Venerable aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious leaves Britain today on her final journey to a Turkish scrapyard, despite efforts to preserve her for the nation as a museum ship.…

Comrades: We present your official alternative to Android Comment The quest for freedom from US technologies and patent fees has been a persistent theme in China and has helped shape the new mobile landscape, in which Baidu and Alibaba, not Google and Amazon, dominate the user experience. Less is heard about another massive market, Russia, but here too, the push for technology self-sufficiency is gathering momentum, creating opportunities for alternatives to Android and iOS.…

The internet of me Sysadmin blog For one brief instant, Microsoft was the good guy. Deep within the often customer-hostile behemoth, left after the arrogance and straight on past the victim blaming is the office of Brian First, with the Microsoft Experience Design Group. Alongside a company called Event Presence, Brian made me feel like a real person, actual and whole.…

Vendors caught between risks and fear of missing out on growth markets Feature China and Russia are populous, wealthy nations that the technology industry has long-regarded as exceptional growth prospects.…

Have you tried not turning it off and on again? Epson Wi-Fi-connected printers are repeatedly crashing due to what looks like a combination of a firmware update gone wrong and Google Cloud Print.…

When vendors tell you what to whitelist, crims are reading too Advanced malware writers are using anti-virus exclusion lists to better target victims, researchers say.…

Browser vendors' Battery API deprecation can't come soon enough Browser authors are abandoning the invasive Battery API W3C specification, but not everybody's got the memo: Uber, for example, still watches battery status.…

Network lifter-and-shifter automates cloud migrations The vendor formerly know as CloudVelocity, since contracted to CloudVelox, has emitted code to lift and shift networks from your bit barn to Amazon Web Services (AWS).…

We can't make this stuff up – Microsoft said this after Europe okayed its LinkedIn acquisition Microsoft says buying LinkedIn will help to address the middle class discontent that saw Britain vote to leave the European Union and America vote to leave politics as we know it behind by electing Donald Trump.…

Official line is they want to be CEOs elsewhere. Or is the culture change chafing? Two of EMC's most senior product line executives have resigned, deciding that Michael Dell's Dell Technologies and the David Goulden-run Dell EMC business unit is not their ideal future workplace.…

Goodbye drudgery - now you can script up your networking business workflows There's a few shiny boxes in the announcement, but Broadcom-bound Brocade hopes punters will find its automation software and DevOps story even more sparkly than its new kit.…

Yuge attacks. The best attacks. Terabit-scale attacks from internet things Big Switch Networks is taking aim at the kinds of IoT-based attacks that have rocked the Internet this year.…

HTTPS? They've heard of it Nearly a decade after it introduced assisted-GPS in its mobile chipsets, Qualcomm has squished a bug that allowed miscreants to mess around with people's location services, or crash their phones.…

The Fifth Element is a problem - the input argument that didn't get checked is an RCE hole The developers of open source webmail package Roundcube want sysadmins to push in a patch, because a bug in versions prior to 1.2.3 let an attacker crash it remotely – by sending what looks like valid e-mail data.…

Avago refuses to beam 64-bit CPU aboard, sources claim Broadcom is shutting down efforts to develop its own server-class 64-bit ARM system-on-chip, multiple sources within the semiconductor industry have told The Register.…

IBM adds deployment and testing toolchain templates Hoping to make its Bluemix rent-a-cloud more accommodating for rapid application development and deployment, IBM on Tuesday added three new services designed to accommodate development – and operations-oriented toolchains.…

Viking raider's longboat filled with erasure codes Analysis Memoscale is a 6-person Norwegian startup, based in Trondheim, that has developed its own erasure coding (EC) technology. It says it's more efficient than classic erasure coding because it needs fewer hardware resources to run and enables higher storage capacity utilization.…

Productivity Commission wonders just what Telstra is doing with the AU$3bn it's being paid to put phones everywhere Australia's Productivity Commission (PC) has suggested the nation can probably scrap the telecommunications universal service obligation (TUSO) that requires every Australian be provided with a telephone connection.…

Gavin Newsom pleads with Vinod Khosla to end dispute over much-loved shoreline With one eye on the governorship of California in 2018, Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom backed down from a fight with billionaire VC Vinod Khosla on Tuesday over controversial access to a beach.…

Equinix takes over bit-barns as telco shifts focus to wireless and fiber Verizon has finalized a deal to hand over control of 29 data centers in the US and Latin America to Equinix, in a deal that will net the telco $3.6bn.…

US Army backs droid for search and rescue missions Roboticists from the University of California, Berkeley, have built the “most vertically agile” robot, capable of jumping better than humans.…

Paris biz gobbled, 'batteries' for distributed storage to be included with Docker containers Docker, creator of easy-to-use software containers for applications and all-round DevOps darling, is adding a storage option to its software.…

Never-ending phone design suit takes yet another turn – $400m check to be reduced Update Samsung has claimed a Supreme Court victory that will see its $400m patent damages bill to Apple significantly reduced.…

Did you know machine-learning systems are pretty forgetful when picking up new skills? Here's how to fix it Analysis Google-stablemate DeepMind thinks it is one step closer to cracking artificial general intelligence with an algorithm that helps machines overcome memory loss.…

Let's hope it protects your information better than it protects its own jobs Veritas has axed 30 percent of its sales staff in the US and Europe, The Register has learned.…

Says virtual NVMe-based SAN beats shared NVMe drive aaray Interview Storage startup Excelero is supportive of NVMe drives and of NVMe over fabrics-style networking. It has a unique way of using NVMe drives to create a virtual SAN accessed by RDMA. An upcoming NASA Ames case study will describe how its NVMesh technology works in more detail.…

How to record it Britain’s shock Euro 2016 defeat to Iceland was the UK’s most tweeted event of the year, according to Twitter.…

Huawei hyper-converged infrastructure appliances running SimpliVity software. Hyper-converged infrastructure appliance and software supplier SimpliVity has certified Huawei hardware for its OmniStack software.…

Still using the password from the back of the router? Oops! Hackers have graduated from planting malware on the vulnerable routers supplied to consumers by various ISPs towards stealing Wi-Fi keys.…

'Reaper' and 'Predator' were too aggressive...apparently The Ministry of Defence has tried to rebrand its latest batch of airborne death machines as “Protector” drones rather than their actual trade name of Reaper.…

Come lay your fibre in BT's pipes, says regulator Ofcom has fleshed out its proposals to open up BT's ducts and poles - intended to encourage rivals to access Openreach's infrastructure and lay their own "full fibre" networks.…

Uber cars, Amazon drones? Pah! Driverless deliveries from a different age Geek's Guide to Britain For the last 13 years, a tiny train tunnel running through the centre of London has remained empty and unused, maintained by just four engineers. But these engineers don’t work for Transport for London or Network Rail – they work for the Royal Mail.…

Location, location, location Promo Future-proofing your data centre is no longer down to a choice of the right servers and storage, it’s now all about connectivity, location and the neighbours.…

Body in lochdown after 'breach at third-party supplier' Phishing emails ostensibly from the Scottish Football Association (SFA) were sent to subscribers on Monday as the result of a breach.…