The Register

A worthy challenger to the Echo, but no home run Review There's really no way to write about Google Home, the search giant's digital assistant, without comparing it to the Amazon Echo.…

Promising, but needs some work Review Earlier this month, Google announced its Pixel range of smartphones – two models intended to replace the Nexus line the Chocolate Factory has carried for the past six years.…

Zut alors! An 18-year-old broke France's anti-terror laws by naming his home Wi-Fi network "Daesh 21" – after the medieval murder bastards ISIS.…

Screw online, we're going back to paper, say officials After keeping quiet for days, the city of El Paso, Texas, has finally admitted that it has fallen prey to "CEO fraud" emails that saw scammers funnel $3.2m from the authorities using bogus invoices.…

Remember when social media was going to bring about a golden age of interaction? Twitter trolls are undermining what political analysts had predicted would be a new form of responsive democracy.…

Duo follow Facebook in using space war game to improve neural networks Vid Google DeepMind is partnering with Blizzard Entertainment, the producers of the hugely popular StarCraft game, to set the real-time strategy game as the next challenge in AI.…

Successful launch takes payload into orbit Pic China has successfully launched its first Long March-5 rocket, a heavy lifter that is going to be pivotal to the Middle Kingdom's ambitions for a space industry of its own.…

EPO president ignores his own admin council President of the European Patent Office Benoit Battistelli has fired a key member of his organization's staff union despite being explicitly told not to by the EPO's Administrative Council.…

Maybe it would be easier to just give us a list of what won't blow up? Samsung says it will recall millions of washing machines that are prone to blowing up.…

Alleged crooks said to have used Dridex and Dyre software nasties The UK’s National Crime Agency has arrested 14 people suspected of using the Dridex and Dyre malware to launder £11m in stolen cash.…

Optimism on Optane with 4X better throughput than Intel P3700 NAND SSD Analysis Lenovo x86 servers fitted with Intel Optane SSDs will be available by the end of the year.…

95 per cent of the 650,000 messages not relevant Analysis Since igniting a political firestorm and triggering major changes in US presidential voting intentions by revealing some emails passing through Hillary Clinton's private email server had been found in an unrelated criminal investigation, the FBI has gone to ground.…

Entire country gets to enjoy life without the web thanks to huge DDoS attack, it is claimed The West African country of Liberia was allegedly flooded offline this week.…

Researchers are finding ways to protect users from cross-device tracking Black Hat EU Marketeers are coming up with ways to invade our privacy in the interests of serving us ads in a way that goes far beyond the dire predictions of films such as Minority Report. Security researchers are already thinking about countermeasures.…

Californians have lust for S3 targets but Azure is on the list too Scality is developing a software-defined storage controller (SDS) to archive objects off to the public cloud or tape using the S3 protocol.…

Papworth's timely backups saved the day World-leading Papworth Hospital has escaped a full-on zero-day crypto ransomware attack thanks to the "very, very lucky" timing of its daily backup.…

And why Hillary will lose – she didn't listen to me ¡Bong! The people had not just spoken, I realised as I woke up in the late afternoon (as usual) on June 24th this year. They'd sworn and puked up all over my Sayl office chairs, and pissed gleefully in my Puyehue water.…

CMA beams: Look what we've done for consumer rights! BT, Dropbox, Google and Mozy have promised not to screw over their British consumer cloud customers with dodgy terms and conditions, according to the Competition and Markets Authority.…

You gotta spend money to make money, after all – that's why top brass are getting millions in payouts once HPE's Enterprise Services are brought on board Sales at outsourcing and integrator basket case CSC are growing again – all it took was hundreds of millions of pounds worth of acquisitions.…

Natural History Museum under suspicion amid demands of "Justice for Dave" The Twitterati have pushed aside ephemera such as Brexit or the prospect of a Trump White House with protests about the fate of "Dave”, a prodigious annelid that may or may not have been murdered in the name of science.…

Undergrads will receive a salary and work alongside Dyson professionals After years of supporting traditional academia, Sir James Dyson is putting serious cash behind a new startup – his own engineering university.…

Despite today's crowing about cutting steel, nowt's in writing BAE Systems hopes it will start cutting steel on Britain's new Type 26 warships next year – but the contract has not yet been signed, despite lots of positive spin from the Ministry of Defence this morning.…

Because endless coffee and DNA replication goes only so far Radbot Pleading poverty, we don't have huge quantities of cash to throw at the necessary elements of a crowdfunding campaign such as the main video and its fleet of videolets for social meeja channels.…

CRM Online morphs into Dynamics 365 and 'confusion' reigns supreme The classic CRM Online suite is no more, it has ceased to be, is bereft of life and rests in pieces. Microsoft has overhauled its licence and for some the price has become a lot more expensive, trade customers have told us.…

We're still getting 138 jets but nobody knows if they'll all be F-35Bs, as planned, or not The Royal Air Force might buy F-35As instead of F-35Bs, according to a Parliamentary statement by the minister for defence procurement.…

How not to behave at tech press launches Something for the Weekend, Sir? Toy bears and model aeroplanes. Mini tubs of Pringles. Super-expensive watches that look like rusty bicycle parts adorned with a mashed insects.…

Get out your phones, people, and turn 8487 into letters ON-CALL POSSIBLY NSFW Welcome again to On-Call, The Register's Friday ramble through readers' recollections of unfortunate IT problems.…

No more call-outs if HPE, Cisco et al live up to promise – stop laughing at the back Tech's big names have jumped into bed together to create an industry standard that's supposed to make products less prone to failure in the cloudy era.…

Ad giant 'may actually believe it's a force for good in the world' – FairSearch Google has sought to blunt the European Commission’s three-prong inquiry into its business practices – by claiming the Eurocrats don’t understand antitrust law.…

But crewless boats are a long way off In January, the British firm Automated Ships and its Norwegian partners Kongsberg Maritime will begin work on the first offshore vessel that can be run with no captain, crew, or engineers.…

HackerOne's Jobert Abma spots import/export credential persistence problem The co-founder of HackerOne, Jobert Abma, has reported a critical GitLab vulnerability that allowed remote code execution on application servers.…

Sudo how 'bout a quickie? A cafe owner from Switzerland is planning to open a coffee shop sex parlour staffed by robotic filles de joie.…

Ministry of Justice will hire 50 to decipher data from currently un-analysed illicit phones The UK's Ministry of Justice has revealed it is trying to have drone-makers hard code prison locations into their products, to ensure jails become no-fly zones.…

Windows Vista, 7 and 8 users can keep using code Redmond says has 'serious limits' Microsoft has extended the support life of its enhanced mitigation toolkit (EMET) affording Windows 8 laggards an extra 18 months of protection.…

€40 St. Gallen-Altenrhein to Friedrichshafen hop takes you from Switzerland to Germany Austrian airline People's Viennaline this week started flying the world's shortest international flight: a 21km hop from the Swiss town of St. Gallen to the German town of Friedrichshafen.…

LastPass' free tier now works on all devices, which used to cost a buck a month With major breaches regularly turning up a prevalence of laughably predictable passwords, you'd think that the likes of password locker LastPass should find it easy to sell its wares for US$1 a month.…

TorchCraft to build machine-learning agents from cosmic battles StarCraft could be the next battleground for AI, as researchers create an open framework that tests deep-learning methods in the real-time strategy game.…

First comes a cloud testbed so we can figure out what non-volatile memory is good for IBM has quietly revealed that in “In the second half of 2017” its Bluemix cloud will offer “a broad services suite fuelled by Intel Optane”.'…

Code.gov is live and Gitting The United States government has made good on its policy of requiring agencies to release 20 per cent of their bespoke code as open source by making code.gov live, complete with lots of code.…

Android Studio 2.2 beckons, because what choice is there? Google's lengthy deathbed vigil for its Eclipse Android Developer Tools plugin has finally ended. After announcing its intention to pull the plug on ADT at the end of 2015, the company on Wednesday found the nerve to do so.…

PCs and devices will only pull the changes you need, in theory Microsoft will begin public trials of a new update system it says will dramatically reduce the size of Windows updates.…

Meanwhile, analysts say Blackberry and Windows Phone aren't even worth measuring Android smartphones currently account for nine tenths of what analysts say is now strictly a two-brand market.…

ClusterHQ debuts information time machine for better production testing Flocker is a mouthful. It's an open-source container data volume orchestrator, which means it helps migrate data when containers shift hosts. It makes data volumes portable within clusters.…

AKA how to look like a supermodel on camera to an AI Researchers armed with some nifty algorithms and a set of paper glasses frames have found a way to trick facial recognition systems.…

As NASA warns rover's instruments are failing Pic The Curiosity rover has discovered what appears to be a partially melted meteorite and has been testing it out with its on-board laser.…

Uni eggheads discuss track-and-trace threat Black Hat EU Wi-Fi networks can tease IMSI numbers out of nearby smartphones, allowing pretty much anyone to wirelessly track and monitor people by their handsets' fingerprints.…

And there's a swanky Porsche version, too Pics Huawei's chance to seize upon Samsung's Note 7 woes has come, with a new phablet and a Porsche Design-branded sibling.…

Navinder Singh Sarao will be sent for trial in America Navinder Singh Sarao, the British trader accused of illicitly making $40m and causing a stock market "flash crash" in 2010, has lost his attempt to appeal against extradition to the US.…

CoreOS is introducing software to simplify cluster configuration CoreOS, which makes a container-oriented version of Linux and the Tectonic platform for Kubernetes, on Thursday plans to introduce software called "Operators" to make it easier to configure and manage distributed applications.…

Hundreds axed in another round of layoffs NetApp has made another round of layoffs in the USA and elsewhere.…