The Register

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.…

Stonkingly good grunt, battery life, some rough edges Review In October, the Chinese firm LeEco announced bold plans to storm the American market with a range of consumer electronic devices, ranging from smartphones to a futuristic electric car.…

I'm tall, handsome, ready to commit and don't know how to operate the ENTER key On-Call Thank the Galactic Spirit it's Friday: your correspondent is beat! But not so beat I can't dip into the On-Call mailbag to dredge up another story in which your fellow Reg readers explain how they've rescued clients and colleagues from chronologically-inconvenient computational cock-ups.…

Thanksgiving turkey: Free turns out to be what you were willing to pay November lies behind us in all Reg-reading jurisdictions, so it's time to again consider the state of the desktop by gazing at the three services we use to assess desktop operating system market share.…

Clouds, boffins, businesses all keep hands in pockets. And ARMs are nowhere Abacus-shuffler IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker for the year's third quarter makes for ugly reading: the firm says just about all categories of server sales have stalled.…

What would happen if someone sticks this USBBQ into an airplane seat socket? VIDS Hackers are destroying everything from the latest gaming systems, phones, and even cars with a dangerous circuit-frying USB device that could put critical systems at risk.…

With a leap second coming up, smearing's quite a good idea Google's turned on a set of public network time protocol (NTP) servers.…

Pundits note growth in Lambda, database efforts as highlights of conf AWS re:Invent Amazon made news in a big way this week, kicking out more than a dozen new features and services for the AWS cloud at its annual re:Invent conference.…

Iran suspected as likely source of re-vamped nastyware Thousands of computers in Saudi Arabia's civil aviation agency and other Gulf State organisations have been wiped by the Shamoon malware after it resurfaced some four years after wiping thousands of Saudi Aramco workstations.…

Four-year op by US and EU culminates in arrests, server seizures On November 30, simultaneous raids in five countries by the FBI, Europol, and the UK's National Crime Agency (NCA) finally shuttered the Avalanche criminal network that has been spewing malware and money laundering campaigns for the past seven years.…

Narcissist in Chief recruits another anti-net-neut bod for US comms regulator Supporters of net neutrality are preparing to defend FCC regulations passed two years ago in the face of what is increasingly looking like a determined effort by the Trump Administration to undermine them.…

Vogels channels his inner Ballmer with pitch to code monkeys AWS re:Invent Amazon Web Services turned its focus to developers in day two of its re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, kicking out a handful of new features designed to make life easier for those who develop and maintain cloud applications.…

The race is on to be the best in the world Analysis At a US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation hearing this week chaired by Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), artificial intelligence experts were grilled on how to keep the US ahead of its competitors.…

BB to be 'a pure software company' BlackBerry finally released an update for its BB10 OS, eight months later than promised.…

Senate, House pass law against automated tix snatch-and-resell The US Senate has unanimously passed a bill that will make it illegal to grab large quantities of online tickets with an automated bot.…

Europe's FBI sheds light on security bungle An investigator at Europe's FBI Europol took home a USB stick packed with terror probe documents and accidentally spilled the files on the internet.…

Suspected third-stage failure in Soyuz rocket, again A Progress capsule filled supplies for the International Space Station today blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome spaceport in Kazakhstan. Now its controllers have admitted the MS‑04/65P mission has been annihilated.…

Consumer Watchdog fears it's all in the name US advocacy group Consumer Watchdog has renewed its demands for a recall of Tesla's Autopilot feature following a number of crashes.…

2015 legislation review is laid before Parliament There is still too much discretion in what the State is talking about when discussing terrorism, according to the outgoing independent reviewer of terrorism legislation.…

Smartwatch pioneer looks set to call it a day Crowdfunding hero and smart bling pioneer Pebble is about to be acquired by Fitbit. The Information was first with the story, and subsequent reports suggest the price is modest: around $35 to $40m.…