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Magic Leap is neither magic nor leaping It was a shared "wow!" for millions across the globe: a video showing kids in a gym watching as a whale appeared to breach the floor, leap high in the air and come crashing down with water flying everywhere.…

Caretaker craft launched today in ISS cargo supply run Vid Good news: the latest resupply mission to the International Space Station has taken off without exploding or any of that kind of nonsense.…

Execution by lethal code injection set for December 19 – unless you're on Verizon Anyone still using a Samsung Galaxy Note 7 has ten days to return their device for a refund before Sammy kills the handset for good.…

Sorry! Too! hungover! from! rum! eggnog! binging! to! shout! in! the! headline! A security researcher says he bagged $10k after discovering and reporting a serious flaw in Yahoo! Mail that could have been exploited by crooks to read victims' messages.…

BT, Plusnet subscribers told to reboot or use static IP addresses Folks using Windows 10 and 8 on BT and Plusnet networks in the UK are being kicked offline by a mysterious software bug.…

Welsh firm G24 Power preps sensor tech for trial A Welsh photovoltaics company has developed a solar-powered LoRa sensor node which it hopes will address current concerns about sensor battery life.…

But ad networks still power 'fake news' Faced with a report showing Google’s advertising network allowed big brands' ad money to be spent funding criminal operations, Google welcomed initiatives to “drain the swamp” in 2013 - three and a half years ago.…

Letters from German lawyers don't mean a lawsuit in Blighty is on the cards Nvidia’s attempt to nix an EU trademark infringement sueball by using the English courts has failed after a judge said a lawyer’s letter from Germany could not be regarded as a threat to sue in London.…

Google's global servers make untangling tax arrangements hard Companies like Google are harder to hold to account than average tax-avoiding businesses because local governments are technologically "always one step behind", chair of the Public Accounts Committee Meg Hillier said at the Global Tax Summit today.…

Brits to fork out more than US or Euro punters Any prospective buyers in Britain wanting to slip a Lenovo Phab2 Pro into a loved one’s stocking this Chrimbo will have to dig deeper than folk in the US or mainland Europe, much deeper.…

BlackBerry rebrands much-feared mail server BES, the TLA that has struck trepidation into BOFHs for a decade, is no more. The brand name has been discarded in the biggest rationalisation of the company’s product lines in the company’s history.…

Gartner report says size can be misleading Organisations spend an average of 5.6 per cent of their overall IT budget on IT security and risk management, according to analyst Gartner.…

Jewish Labour member received barrage of 2,500 tweets over three days A Somerset neo-Nazi with a history of sending false, malicious and racially abusive messages over the internet has been jailed for targeting a Jewish Labour MP.…

Little ray of sunshine as Sammy recovers from Galaxy blows Analysis Some good news has finally fallen the way of Samsung, as the Supreme Court has ruled in favour of the South Korean giant in its ongoing patent spat with Apple - scrapping a $399m damages bill in the latest episode of the hottest legal battle in tech, though certainly not the last.…

Cold-water time for fancy pants players Analysis The enterprise storage market is in a period of data growth according to IDC-forcasted zettabyte heaven, right? Er, no, because it's it entered a recessionary period, with negative growth. Says IDC.…

Gov Secure Internet to be revamped, world still on brink of digital destruction, etc etc The UK government’s first annual report on the implementation of the 2015 National Security Strategy has reaffirmed that cyber-security remains a key priority.…

A thousand spoken words is worth a picture Machine learning researchers are on a mission to make machines understand speech directly from audio input, like humans do.…

Semiconductor bods want Germany to lift roadblocks on acquisition With its proposed acquisition by a Chinese investment group now having been shot down in two hemispheres, Aixtron is looking for government help to get another deal through.…

Bill suggests sending malware authors to the gulag archipelago Malware writers whose wares are used by separate attackers to pop Russian national infrastructure could end up fined and in jail, if a new Russian bill become law.…

New Royal Navy vessel's official motto is somewhat stomach-churning The Royal Navy will receive two more River-class offshore patrol vessels – and the motto of one appears to encourage her crew to vomit everywhere.…

Apparently there's business value in turning 'John B Smith' into 'John Smith' On-Call Welcome again to On-Call, our regular Friday morning foray into readers' stories of being asked to do the right thing, for the wrong reason, at unspeakable times.…

If the world wants a bonk-detecting WiFi mattresses, it must be a malware-free bonk-detecting WiFi mattress Washington DC think tank the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology is calling for regulation on "negligence" in the design of internet-of-things (IoT) devices.…

Used staffer creds, work laptop, to snoop on execs Former Expedia worker Jonathan Ly has admitted to hacking his own chief financial officer and investor relations head to commit US$331,000 in insider stock-trading.…

Gentlemen, we can rebuild it. Better … stronger … faster. And meshier, before long The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) has officially adopted Bluetooth 5 as the standard's new specification.…

Bill Moore is no more team as Emerging Technologies loses another top exec The Register's storage desk has learned that DSSD President Bill Moore has left Dell EMC.…

US telco settles cramming suit with $80m payout in bill credits AT&T will pay out $88m to settle an FTC complaint that it allowed excessive "cramming" charges on customer bills.…

'Allo' Siri-and-Cortana competitor now speaks Hindi Google this week added Hindi to the languages spoken by its "Allo" digital assistance service, the company's Siri-and-Cortana competitor.…

Last of the Mercury 7 crew passes on Obit John Glenn, America's first man into orbit and the oldest person ever to make it into space, has died at the age of 95 after a short illness.…

I said, honey, it's a perfect place to stash data from the N-S-A If you're looking for somewhere to run your computing instances outside the Land of the Free, then Amazon Web Services has an option for the Americas with its first Canada cloud computing region.…

Taxi app maker's stiff no-sex policy grows, thrusts rules in our faces amid Xmas party season Flirting with an Uber driver could be enough to get you banned from the ride sharing service, according to revised Community Guidelines for US passengers and drivers, published by the company on Thursday.…

President-elect considering friend of Thiel as FDA head Having chosen a climate-change denier to head the US government's environment agency, an opponent of minimum wage for the Labor Department, a creationist for Education Secretary, a mine-owner for Commerce, and a wrestling exec to oversee small businesses – president-elect Donald Trump is now considering putting a man with very strange ideas about medicine as head of Uncle Sam's Food and Drug Administration.…

Promises to take 'weed wacker' to internet rules In a speech to a right-wing think tank, FCC commissioner Ajit Pai explained how 2017 will be the year that net neutrality dies in the US, and that municipal networks can forget about existing as well.…

Shame of Thrones Pic It turns out King Joffrey isn't the biggest scumbag at HBO after all.…

New Evo techno-goggles emerge for 3D virtual reality desktops Vid Microsoft has entered the virtual reality race, announcing a new headset called Evo in collaboration with Intel.…

ThyssenKrupp acknowledges attack, claims defense is 'virtually impossible' German steel maker ThyssenKrupp AG on Thursday said trade secrets were stolen in a cyber-attack earlier this year.…

Costs more than double, lobbing Big Mike into the red If revenue growth is vanity but profits are sanity, then Dell EMC made something of an inauspicious start to life as one company: sales expansion was overshadowed by deepening losses.…

Servers fall over after JavaScript file trashed by mistake Trend Micro's antivirus software has flagged benign Sharepoint code as potentially malign and nuked the files, causing the Microsoft package to fall over.…

Android and iOS users get robo assistant Microsoft’s ravenous, data hungry ‘personal assistant’ Cortana has arrived on iOS and Android in the UK, and the app has been revamped.…

Lawyers won't like this The US Congress has published plans backed by both main US parties to reform the Copyright Office - and it wants your views. Amongst the proposals is a small claims track to make fighting The Man easier.…

'All the original function is so incredible' – Peter Mandelson A proposed Chinese theme park has started to build a full-sized replica of the Titanic so tourists can experience over and over again the moment which led to the deaths of 1,500 people – a project endorsed by New Labour minister Peter Mandelson.…

I thought it was getting dark later and later We know the Earth’s rotation is slowing, hence leap seconds, but by how much? Now we have a new number: 1.8 milliseconds per day each century for the last 2,720 years.…

DIY hero made Faustian pact. Now his company is dead Comment We just didn’t know it at the time, but Pebble’s fate was sealed in May 2013 when it surrendered control to outsiders who saddled it with debt.…

Not everything in the all-flash garden sparkles As part of a recent survey we asked Register readers to give us some thoughts on a hot area in the storage world but with a slightly provocative edge, namely: “What frustrates you the most about how storage vendors sell their products, and are there any specific irritations in relation to all-flash in particular?”…

No breaches should result from compromised identities, say gov bods A White House commission on improving cybersecurity has come up with a list of recommendations for US president-elect Donald Trump’s administration – including a target for no big hacks to involve identity-based compromises.…

Tech titan searches for corporate soul, discovers it hasn't got one Troubled outsourcing giant Capita is reacting to a post-Brexit slowdown by confirming it will axe roughly 2,250 staff, which includes sending more jobs to India and using robots to automate certain parts of the operation.…

Infosec folk spot web of compromised British devices Hundreds of Mirai-infected home routers across the UK are currently acting as DDoS bots.…

And a load of them say they'll keep using it in 2017 The NHS is still running Windows XP en masse, two and a half years after Microsoft stopped delivering bug fixes and security updates.…

Chinese chaps see these drives and fabric their own way Interview Huawei is a believer in the use of NVMe drives and fabric. Yet it thinks that shared array controller software and hardware will need upgrading to take full advantage of NVMe drives.…

National Audit Office puts head in hands, weeps for taxpayers' wasted dosh The government's plan to move all of Whitehall's back office IT into shared services centres has been such a flop, all but one department has pulled out of the scheme, according to the National Audit Office.…

Fat helium spinners and fast and fat flash stores Western Digital Corp wowed analysts with exec spiel and five – or was it six? – product announcements. We have helium gas-filled drives, a 3D TLC NAND microSD card, two SSDs and a promised furiously fast flash platform array overflowing with IOPS.…