The Register

Elon Musk's AI effort lobs into Azure, which now has Functions, bots and very grunty instances A little over eight years ago, then-Microsoft-CEO Steve Ballmer came to Australia, told developers that Microsoft loved them and predicted that within a decade average homes would have screens on just about every wall. Thanks to Microsoft and the earnest efforts of clever developers, he said, we'd always have information and entertainment at our fingertips.…

It could be both if Teradici's new plan works Teradici's launched a new range of zero clients powered by silicon it did not design, a departure from its usual practice the company hopes will spread its PCoIP protocol far and wide.…

Understanding the source could aid space missions Electrons are being whipped to speeds close to the speed of light just outside the Earth’s magnetic field, and scientists aren’t sure why.…

Beardy & Co plan first commercial service by 2023 On the 20th anniversary of the last Concorde flight, Boom Technology and Virgin Galactic want to start a commercial supersonic passenger jet service that will be faster than its older counterpart and cost no more than a business class ticket.…

Exciting new way to pay your Cupertino idiot tax Just in time for the holiday shopping season, Apple has unveiled its latest method for separating fanbois from their hard-earned money.…

Chemistry laughs at your strong passwords Mobile phones may reveal as much about their owners as the data inside them, a finding that complicates device privacy issues.…

HPC Lustre and Ceph cold stores get hot speed SpectraLogic is cementing its BlackPearl gateway deeper into the Lustre and Ceph user communities with two new integrations.…

Brass says Bitmanagement case doesn't hold water The US Navy is hitting back at the allegations it illegally copied more than a half-billion dollars worth of software.…

Kryptowire uncovers firmware sending texts, contacts and everything else Security researchers have uncovered a secret backdoor in Android phones that sends almost all personally identifiable information to servers based in China.…

Telco to boost options for getting online in smart cities US telecom giant Verizon says it will buy the Big Apple startup LQD WiFi with the goal of improving network access in crowded cities.…

Free speech is fine, just don't expect anyone to be listening Rather than draining its swamp, Twitter aims to muffle the trolls that have taken up residence there.…

Only change what you really need to Dirty code is a fact of life, and working out which software really needs changing and leaving the rest will help many IT organizations gain at least some of the benefits of going Agile, ThoughtWorks’ CTO told the Continuous Lifecycle conference today.…

Investigation into emergency diesel generators A local power cut has interrupted the services of UK government cloud provider Memset.…

On-premises S3-accessed object store WD has announced an ActiveScale P100 system for storing object data, scaling from 720TB to 19PB (raw), and forming an entry-level archive product tier well below the 672TB to 35PB Active Archive system.…

Americans break open panel to access dictionaries Nigel Farage thinks Donald Trump's success in the US presidential election echoes Brexit.…

Farewell old hat T3000 and say hello to bright and shiny T4000 All-flash and hybrid array vendor Tegile has updated its product range, with the T3000 series of all-flash, hybrid and high density arrays becoming the faster and more capavcious T4000 series.…

Beyond the writedown, though, it's bad news in the UK too Vodafone struggled with declining revenues and profits in its first half of this fiscal year, despite blaming its €5bn net loss on a writedown of its Indian arm's value thanks to increased competition.…

95,000 subs left after hack – 94,000 joined in last six months TalkTalk has unveiled a healthy jump in post-tax profits on the same day a 17-year-old boy pleaded guilty to hacking the British telco.…

Trust us. It's not like we had a fortnight-long... um. Trust us Exclusive Despite losing a lot of user data from shared folders in October's mega-outage, King's College London is asking staff not to save work independently of the university's IT facilities.…

NoSQL business moving towards revenue generation? NoSQL-business DataStax has today announced its acquisition of the similarly-named DataScale, as well as plans to launch its own managed cloud offering next year.…

Customer Identity and Access Management Broadcast It was never easy to put a business case together for Identity Access Management (IAM), but the stakes are getting higher all the time.…

Hourly billing? Puff puff PaaS Hortonworks is launching a new cloud service on Amazon Web Services for customers who don't fancy working on Azure.…

Incubator partnership unveiled EasyJet will focus on digital and new technology to cut costs and increase revenue after its results received a Brexit-sized pounding.…

They might suck, but cloud security crew are poised to become major players Analysis The Dummies' Guide to Cloud Storage Gateways for Suppliers says: "Cloud Storage Gateways are incoming data tornadoes that will suck up data from your on-premises arrays and splat it down on cheaper competitors' kit or, worse, send it to the public cloud forever."…

We speak the language of disruption. And we love Tacos! ¡Bong! The Mar-a-Lago Club is like the 1960s. If you can remember it, you weren't there.…

But it's totally benign, say developers A security researcher has discovered that when the Mac version of Shazam is switched off, it simply stops processing recorded data. The recording itself continues.…

Names.co.uk blames 'regional' problem A power outage has felled servers running UK domain name register and web host Names.co.uk and simplyhosting.com.…

96-core servers packing 2 Cavium ThunderX CPUs yours for the crunching Packet.net, a bare-metal cloud aimed at developers, has flicked the switch on cloud-running servers powered by a pair of Cavium's 48-core ARMv8-A ThunderX processors.…

Student rack war begins at SC16 HPC Blog The tenth annual Student Cluster Competition kicked off Monday at the SC16 conference here in Salt Lake City, Utah. This is a competition for the ages, with some wildly divergent hardware configurations, more teams than ever before at a SC competition (14), plus some special features that are sure to throw the budding HPCers for a loop.…

Beta version of Toscana? It's barely an alpha, yell biz partners IBM is testing out a group chat collaboration tool branded Project Toscana, but judging by the reaction from channel partners involved in the beta, it’s not going to worry Microsoft, Slack or anyone else for a while yet.…

Don't bother going laptop shopping A low-end notebook drought is likely coming to a town near you, multiple analysts and tech distributors have told The Reg.…

Gee, thanks. I guess We made it very clear in our October 20 review of DirecTV Now that no set top was going to be commissioned for the service and yet it would deliver to any TV, because it would use a digital media adapter such as Apple TV. So it wasn’t the biggest surprise we have come across when 3 weeks later another story ran, suggesting the devices could be given away.…

Now we're talking: these new babies have 8 vCPUs and 1,536 GPU cores Amazon Web Services' (AWS') desktop-as-a-service “WorkSpaces” just grew up. And got all muscly, too: the cloud colossus has announced a new option to add 1,536 CUDA GPU cores with 4GB of graphics memory.…

Azure Pack gets six more years of active development and support until 2027 Microsoft's revealed that it will keep working on its first Azure-in-a-box product, Azure Pack, until 2022 and support it until 2027.…

Yesterday Facebook said it could not judge the truth and had no fake news problems Google and Facebook have both announced they'll try to stop their ads making it onto fake news sites.…

But only if there's water there, which other boffins doubt One of the reasons it's so hard to find life on Mars is that hardly anwyhere we've spotted on the red planet combines liquid water and survivable temperatures.…

These boots were made for walking. Not charging batteries. Just walking We've said it before, but because “walk on this pavement for renewable energy” remains a recurrent news story, it's worth saying again.…

Windows Server compatibility requirement removal means x86-to-Power port is possible Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) has clarified its requirements for a new supercomputer, after an inquiry from The Register pointed out an inconsistency in its tender.…

One user complains to his MP Virgin Media's spam filter has once again blocked companies' and users' legit emails, in what appears to be an ongoing issue with its filters.…

'Open-O' is backed by Huawei, China Mobile, Ericsson and Intel, among others If you didn't think the world needed another Software Defined Networking (SDN) project, bad luck: you've got one anyway: it's called Open-O and hopes to put SDN and Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) in the same yoke.…

Spectrum uncertainty giving mobe industry the chills The mobile industry's global lobby, the GSMA, is starting to worry about fragmentation in the 5G market – even before there is one.…

Developer outreach failed for WIndows Phone, Firefox OS and BlackBerry. It will work on Tizen why, exactly? Samsung will throw US$9m at developers willing to have a go at making apps for smartphones running Tizen.…

Forward Networks builds a private Matrix for your networks The Stanford University research team that gave the world OpenFlow and VMware's NSX has spawned another interesting startup: Forward Networks de-cloaked on Monday US time with a network modelling technology.…

Drag-and-drop let users escape their VMs VMware's rushed out a patch for the serious desktop hypervisor bug turned up at the Pwnfest hacker convention.…

Tim Cook still trying to figure out how he got caught up in this China says the rhetoric of US President-elect Donald Trump could lead it to block the sale of products by Apple and other US tech companies.…

Humans still the weakest link Targeted password guessing turns out to be significantly easier than it should be, thanks to the online availability of personal information, leaked passwords associated with other accounts, and our tendency to incorporate personal data into our security codes.…

Traffic can be both good and bad It may be possible to crack the mystery of why the universe is expanding at an accelerated rate, if gravity can be measured through a “quantum traffic jam” of ultracold atoms.…