The Register

Newcastle firm takes rap on knuckles from Ofcom A TV newsreader in Newcastle, England, opened the station’s Friday night news bulletin by asking to start again before shouting “yes you f*cking do” at off-camera colleagues just 10 seconds after the watershed.…

These breaches ain't bad for business... Bradford-based cyber security consultancy ECSC Group is set to float on the AIM stock exchange on December 14.…

Free, free at last and with new software to boot Veritas has announced a major release of NetBackup, v8.0, and says it's ready to help businesses respond to the 2017 EU General Data Protection Regulations.…

HC 250? HC 380? What are they actually for? Analysis HP has two hyper-converged systems for two different but overlapping markets – SMB, ROBO, and LOB at the low end, and LOB/data centre at the high end. Both the HC 250 and HC 380 are based on ProLiant server hardware and have different software environments layered on the common Store Virtual SAN. Their branding seems the opposite of what one might expect, though.…

Funding target missed, potential IPO date slips right Internet of Things connectivity outfit Sigfox has delayed its IPO plans by a year after falling €50m short of its VC funding target.…

Economic forum shuns Zuck, Google, but finds seat for IBM Team Trump has announced the composition of the President's Strategic and Policy Forum – and there's no place for internet oligarchs like Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, Jeff Bezos or the world's fifth-richest man, Mark Zuckerberg.…

What took you so long? Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but what if BlackBerry had produced a smart, secure Android QWERTY in 2011, rather than waiting until 2017? A photo purporting to be BlackBerry’s final phone – which happens to be a smart, secure Android QWERTY expected in Q1 next year, popped up at the weekend, inviting counterfactual histories.…

Suppliers get automatic recompense, punters get nowt Consumer rights charity Citizens Advice has slammed the UK's broadband compensation scheme which fails to pass on compensation to customers.…

iFlix, Viu flicks – they're all coming for Netflix Analysis Hong Kong pay TV operator PCCW Media claims it has racked up 4 million active users on its OTT video service, Viu, after just one year of activity. An uptake of this pace presents Netflix, which recently made its belated entrance into South East Asia, with an almighty mountain to climb.…

Japanese superdupercomputer kept fed with data by burst buffer beast This is a we-can-pee-up-the-wall-higher-than-anyone-else story – one which we'd normally give a miss - only the numbers are past 1TB/sec – head-scratchingly high.…

Media open season on prediction number crunchers The media have spoken and they are unimpressed: the polls – this time the US presidential polls – got it woefully wrong, and therefore burn the witch! Or in the absence of witches, let's set fire to Nate Silver, who until around 2am (GMT) on November 9 was the doyen of US polling and go-to person for all US forecasts.…

Cash to update 'antiquated network infrastructure' The Government in its Autumn statement promised to invest £1bn on "digital infrastructure", an extra £2bn annually on UK R&D, and at least £400m on new venture capital funds through the British Business Bank, which it hopes will unlock a further £1bn in private finance for growing firms.…

SpaceShipTwo passes first glide test since 2014 tragedy For the first time in more than two years, a Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo has been unclipped from its carrier.…

Brit researchers find a way to figure out VISA card numbers just by going shopping Fraudsters can guess credit card numbers in as little as six seconds per attempt thanks to security gaps in Visa's network, academics say.…

Another nail in the coffins of the anti-evolution crowd A common chant from the anti-evolution crowd is that you can't demonstrate speciation – the creation of new species – in action. Now a team of scientists can do just that for anyone with a few weeks to spare.…

Cupertino's ambitions to apply machine learning to transportation revealed in letter Apple's long-rumoured interest in autonomous vehicles appears to be real.…

Reinforcement learning environment hosts virtualized video games and more Hoping to teach AI agents the common sense they need to solve arbitrary tasks without specific training, OpenAI on Monday will introduce Universe, a collection of virtualized video games, browser interfaces, and applications that serve as a training ground for code-based decision making.…

Apologises for 'serious mistake' in older kit, says latest things are secure Titathink has become the second vendor to respond to the modified firmware that exposed a variety of surveillance cameras to a malicious URL attack.…

'Consolidation' plan will shutter once office but is hoped to unify dev team Mobile OS outfit Cyanogen has made further sackings and parted ways with founder Steve Kondik.…

Kernel devs weren't quiet enough so the world has Linux 4.9 rc8 to consider Linus Torvalds told the world that if it wanted a new Linux he needed a quiet week. But he didn't get it and now the world has an eighth release candidate of Linux 4.9 to consider.…

Earth imaging gap means Landsat 9's been fast-tracked to 2020 NASA and the US Geological Survey (USGS) are moving to plug the looming gap in its Earth-observation capability by accelerating the Landsat-9 mission by three years.…

'We'll be back', Choc Factory devs growl at listless body Google's long-promised farewell-to-Flash took another step last week , with the Chocolate Factory announcing it's off-by-default for most users, in most cases.…

We be in uncharted waters now Iceland's president Guðni Th. Jóhannesson has asked the nation's Pirate Party to form government.…

Battistelli's agency also slapped down by international tribunal for unfair disciplinary hearings President of the European Patent Office (EPO) Benoit Battistelli is a disgrace to his country, the French National Assembly heard Wednesday.…

Software fix coming after Puma 6 code bug hits Virgin Media, Comcast, Arris and other boxes Intel's Puma 6 chipset, used in gigabit broadband modems around the world, suffers from latency jitter so bad it ruins online gaming and other real-time connections.…

Texas pastor and spouse sue automaker, sales boss cuffed A Texas couple is suing Toyota and one of its car dealerships after one of its staff allegedly stole saucy snaps off their cellphone and emailed them to a swingers website.…

Silicon Valley sugar daddies want more cash to throw at startups A group of venture capitalists are asking US President-elect Donald Trump to implement a series of tax cuts and policies they say will bring more funding for startups.…

US giants balk at demands to reveal source code, schematics Microsoft, IBM and Intel have given Chinese officials short shrift after the government demanded to see their top-secret source code and blueprints.…

Tired of desktop apps that respond instantly? Banish them to the browser Acknowledging that the initial version of application streaming service AppStream failed to appeal to customers, Amazon Web Services is ready to try again.…

Cash gift-wrapped to keep beancounter sweet for next couple of months Violin Memory is cutting staff while rewarding chief financial officer Cory Sindelar with a bonus to persuade him to stay for another two months. Merry Christmas, Silicon Valley style.…

Battery woes blamed on indecent exposure during manufacturing Apple says a defect caused during manufacturing is to blame for some iPhones randomly shutting themselves down.…

Printed VR, you say? The Financial Times' latest Google-funded VR project emerges blinking into the daylight tomorrow. Entitled Hidden Cities, this masterpiece of western journalism is a guide to Dublin, but optimised for nerd goggles.…

#PrayForKCL Exclusive More than a month after the catastrophic incident that brought King's College London's entire IT system down, the head of infrastructure services, Russell Frostick, is being replaced.…

She might as well wear the Stars and Stripes at this rate Britain's new aircraft carrier will operate as a fully fledged offshoot of the US Marine Corps, the UK's ambassador to the US accidentally confirmed on Thursday.…

Let's get ready to rouble Russia has accused unnamed foreign spies of launching a concerted effort to undermine its domestic banking system.…

Bursting the filter bubble with Dr Layton Interview The newest member of the Trump's Transition Team sounded bemused by the tech blog headlines when we caught up with her today.…

EOL for hyper-converged, rack-scale, turnkey turkey EMC is end-of-lifing its hyper-converged, rack-scale, scale-out, turnkey VxRack Neutrino product.…

Zuck finds a friend One of Silicon Valley’s harshest and most powerful critics has leapt to its defence over the “fake news” controversy.…

Coughing up for spectrum might be worth it for quality of service Internet of Things folk the LoRa Alliance reckons its LoRaWAN may move from unlicensed to licensed spectrum to help guarantee quality of service, according to reports.…

Not compulsory... yet! On track to shift 60% of service staff to 'low-cost countries' Cost-cutting at Hewlett Packard Enterprise's CSC-bound services business looks set to continue right up to the point it is sold in the spring, leaked documents have indicated.…

Heads in sand time. If service providers don't admit a problem exists, does it? Microsoft snubbed an invitation to join a brigade of tech titans that linked arms to work on minimising network crashes that can cripple cloud service availability.…

Now ZyXEL and D-Link routers from Post Office and TalkTalk under siege Analysis The Mirai botnet has struck again, with hundreds of thousands of TalkTalk and Post Office broadband customers affected. The two ISPs join a growing casualty list from a wave of assaults that have also affected customers at Deutsche Telekom, KCOM and Irish telco Eir over the last two weeks or so.…

Inventor of polymer banknote: Veggie £5 refuseniks are being 'absolutely stupid' Professor David Solomon, the inventor of the polymer banknote, has told vegetarians that they're being "stupid" over their opposition to its trace amounts of animal fat.…

Early bird tickets? Don’t mind if I do We’ve added more speakers to the lineup for Building IoT London and are ready to announce our first two workshops, meaning it’s really a good time to slip a few early bird tickets into your pre-Christmas shopping basket.…

Adoption starts in 2017 and will be leading flash interface protocol by 2019 +Comment At a high level, Pure believes NVMe is poised to unlock the next generation of performance and density gains, and any modern all-flash array needs to be ready to take advantage. It plans to enable NVMe with tier 1 resiliency and enterprise data services for everyone, refusing to see it as expensive, exotic, high-performance niche technology.…

... for your data? Apparently the Brexit result has caused some IT leaders to look at repatriating data to the UK to “comply with data protection laws and especially GDPR”. But wait a minute – this seems to be more about a lack of understanding of data protection laws. Again.…

Murphy’s Marrakech Express leads to metaphorical storage goal Analysis It’s said that hockey players wear numbers because you can’t always identify the body from dental records, or that someone went to a fight and a hockey game broke out.…

Transport provider... Information purveyor... Both? The EU's highest court has begun hearing arguments on how Uber's business should be legally defined in a case that could have widespread implications for other businesses, an expert has said.…

Redmond blames currency for UK-hosted Azure hike “My own story would not have been possible but for the democratizing force of Microsoft technology reaching me where I was growing up,” CEO Satya Nadella told shareholders this week.…

'SAMRi10' script hides the creds hackers crave, making box-to-box jumps harder Microsoft hacker Itai Grady has created a tool to help prevent blackhat scouts from stealing Windows credentials, an effort the firm hopes will make network compromises harder to achieve.…