The Register

'Non-credible event' triggered safety settings The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) says wind-powered electricity generation's “intermittency” had nothing to do with the blackouts following South Australia's catastrophic storms in late September.…

Heroik Labs to become part of Cloud Collaboration Technology biz Cisco's Spark collaboration platform – billed as the communications service that “does it all” – didn't do quite enough, it seems: Switchzilla has acquired the “meeting productivity” application Worklife.…

45 per cent of load balancers threw 502 errors for an hour last Thursday Google has revealed that it broke its own cloud again, this time because of two failures: a software error and alerts that proved too hard to interpret.…

Mayer silent on Verizon's discount demand, too Yahoo! had little to say on its looming tie-up with Verizon, as the Purple Palace turned in quarterly numbers that managed to beat analyst expectations.…

Belichick says he's done with the Microsoft slab Microsoft's multi-year deal with the National Football League has lost some of its luster after one of the game's top coaches says he would rather use paper printouts than rely on the Surface Tablet.…

10 points to Gryffin, er, Ecuador Ecuador's Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores y Movilidad Humana – its foreign ministry – has admitted the nation cut off Julian Assange's internet access.…

Why we may all be calling movies 'flatties' in a few years With the launch of PlayStation's VR headset, we are clearly entering a brave new world of virtual reality – everything from the low-end Google Daydream to the far-too-expensive Oculus Rift.…

Big Blue's cash cows saunter into the slaughterhouse Analysis IBM's Systems segment saw dismal revenues in its third quarter results, with declines in both servers and storage.…

Git, Go, Swift, pish – that's so last year, darling Between Git and Mercurial, the two most popular distributed version control systems in use today for managing software development, Git gets most of the attention.…

Redmond under fire for allegedly broken rating scheme Microsoft has failed in a bid to shoot down a lawsuit alleging that its employee rating system was biased against women.…

Is anyone buying it – figuratively or literally? It's been four months since Apple half-launched its smart-home/internet-of-things service through the introduction of a new app in iOS 10 called "Home."…

STARTLE'd code to make decisions from waves of information The Royal Navy is planning to step up its use of AI to improve maritime defence, beginning with STARTLE, which is AI software that can can spot potential threats.…

No joke. Electromagnetic fields could help achieve dream of quantum computing Dressing qubits in an electromagnetic field can make them 10 times more stable and able to perform more calculations over time in future quantum computers, according to new research in Nature Nanotechnology.…

Yanks have the edge on selling it to the public Analysis Research in AI is expanding quickly, and the UK and US governments have begun to notice. Official reports about the new technology and future strategies were dropped by both governments this month.…

FreeNAS's 2003-looking grown-up sibling examined Review Data storage is difficult, and ZFS-based storage doubly so. There's a lot of money to be made if you can do storage right, so it's uncommon to see a storage company with an open-source model deliver storage that doesn't suck.…

Learn how in Automic Webinar Promo Definition: Continuous delivery (CD) is a software engineering approach in which teams produce software in short cycles, ensuring that the software can be reliably released at any time.[1] It aims at building, testing, and releasing software faster and more frequently. The approach helps reduce the cost, time, and risk of delivering changes by allowing for more incremental updates to applications in production. A straightforward and repeatable deployment process is important for continuous delivery.…

Best part of update is taste of much-promised GNOME beauty Canonical's Ubuntu 16.10, codenamed "Yakkety Yak", is nowhere near as chunky an update as 16.04 LTS was earlier this year. But that doesn't mean there's nothing new. In fact, the firm's second release of the year has quite a few fresh features to hold users over until the bright and shiny future of Unity 8 and Mir arrive some time next year.…

CIA said to blame Russia for voter database hacks Hacking attempts against more than 10 US state election databases have increased fears about Russian efforts to disrupt or influence the 2016 presidential election.…

Deal or no deal Comment A UK consultant claims he had such a poor experience with Maxta's hyper-converged infrastructure software that he asked for his firm's money back. But the vendor has told a very different story.…

Final salary scheme to be axed UK employees of multinational Honeywell are considering strike action over the closure of their final salary pension scheme.…

Combining public funding and public data for whose benefit? Bemoaning the results of a survey showing that more than a third of people don't trust the NHS with their personal information, a new EU-funded lobby group has stressed the need for a “new culture of openness” in allowing patient data to be shared between studies.…

Third-party addition not the time-saver the boss thinks it is Nearly all (97 per cent) of Java applications contain at least one component with a known vulnerability, according to a new study by app security firm Veracode.…

It's about artists' rights, argues Harry Shearer Actor, writer and director Harry Shearer, who played Derek Smalls in the band Spinal Tap, is suing the owners of the movie This Is Spinal Tap over royalties. The 1984 film is often cited as the best comedy of all time.…

Reluctant to cash in on Samsung’s calamity For beleaguered Android phone makers, you might think a juicy prize has just appeared. For some of them, it could be a life-saver.…

Tell us what it’s like in your organisation We’ve received plenty of feedback from Reg readers over the years telling us that business managers and execs often don’t get IT. Sometimes it’s not listening to advice and requests for budget from the IT team, on other occasions it’s not heeding warnings on security exposures, capacity running out, and other forms of risk.…

Remote backhaul for rural millionaires? Not so, they say Vodafone and satellite phone firm Inmarsat have inked a deal to provide backhaul for Internet of Things devices in far-flung corners of the globe.…

Primary Data converges files and blocks for VSAN +Comment Primary Data is providing file services for VSAN and its block-based storage.…

It's not like the public will think any worse of you Top techies at British banks are being encouraged to share information about cyberattacks following revelations that the financial sector is under-reporting breaches to regulators.…

Former Home Sec's 'obsession' with immigration put kibosh on EU free trade deal Former business secretary Vince Cable has said Theresa May blocked plans to bring in Indian immigrants in the area of IT, claiming the former Home Secretary was "obsessed with immigration".…

The UI – seriously, the UI – is the bit VMware thinks is most significant this time around VMware has finally shoved vSphere 6.5 out the door, more than a year after it was deemed good enough to run VMworld Europe 2016, eight months after its formal beta began and the better part of two years since vSphere 6.0's February 2014 release.…

Starring on a Dell-powered box near you soon, if you feel like buying one, of course Caringo has updated its Swarm object storage software and will flog the code on appliances based on Dell PowerEdge servers.…

Should there be a base amount of cash given to all? Analysis Philosophers, economists and other academics have long discussed the idea of “basic income” – an unconditional monthly check from the government to every citizen, in an amount at least high enough to cover all basic necessities. Recently, this idea has gained more political traction: Even conservative parties consider it, and government-initiated trials are running or about to start in Finland, the Netherlands, Canada and New Zealand.…

Oooo, oooo, that smell… Of all the agile practices out there, “pair programming” is the one that elicits the most heckles, confusion, and head-scratching. The idea is that rather than having one person sitting at a screen, coding, you have two who program together. Those who practice it speak of it like most people do of their first time at Burning Man, while those who have never had the “experience” just can’t see what the big deal is.…

Some products may go, too, once private equiteers take over The deal restoring the independence of the entity formerly known as Dell Software is expected to close in early November, which is when The Register understands things are going to get very interesting for customers and staff alike.…

Dell-EMC's virtual virtuoso cuddles containers, plus more news VMworld Europe Containers are docking at this week's VMworld Europe Barcelona shindig – with VMware supporting containers in its compute, storage and management product set (vSphere, VSAN and vRealize) for production use.…

Zetta handsets might have been marked-up Chinese phones An Android phone maker in Spain is facing allegations that its flagship product is just a rebranded Chinese model.…

Accidental DDoS with Facebook and Google redirects The French Interior Ministry suffered an unexpected denial of service attack yesterday – after ISP Orange mistakenly routed heaps of traffic to the government's website.…

Snapdragon X50 will push 5G bps through 800 MHz of mm-wave spectrum Qualcomm's stuck its flag into the desert island labelled “5G”, hoping to turn it into a lush paradise.…

Hydrofluorocarbon ban to start 2018 in developed countries The world has agreed to begin phasing out hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), whose greenhouse effect is 10,000 as strong as carbon dioxide.…

Patches slung at 11 bad bugs Security researchers have found eight critical, three medium, and 15 low -severity vulnerabilities in a one month audit of popular encryption platform VeraCrypt.…

5,000 pounds of astronaut-fodder fly without flame-outs It ran five minutes late, but NASA's ISS resupply launch atop an Orbital ATK Antares rocket has gone off without a hitch.…

Researchers say it looks like Dyre wolves are back in the wild, despite February arrests Malware now targeting Australian users could be based on one of the world's worst banking trojans.…

Sync 'n' share survives if you cough up. The rest of you, download before November 16 LogMeIn is mostly-closing “Cubby”, it's little-known Dropbox clone.…

Ye Olde hash standard looks like it can beat the coming of the quantum cats While it's reasonable to assume that a world with real quantum computers will ruin traditional asymmetric encryption, perhaps surprisingly hash functions might survive.…

Argues that users don't control where data resides, so Redmond should pretend its within reach of US law The United States Department of Justice has asked the nation's Second Circuit Court of Appeals to re-open its three-year-old case attempt to have Microsoft hand over e-mails stored on servers in the Republic of Ireland.…

Progress! Pocket explosives maker Samsung claims it has started the "mass production" of the world's first 10nm FinFET system-on-chips.…

Placating fibre fetishists has nbn™ in a twist and distracts us from bigger issues nbn™, the organisation building and operating Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN), has announced trials of fibre-to-the-curb and broadband-over-copper technology XG-fast that hit 8Gbps on 30 metres of copper in lab trials, and “5Gbps peak aggregate speed being achieved over 70 metres of twisted-pair copper”.…

Kneel before Watson The legal system may need to be changed to allow artificially intelligent computing systems to file their own patents, rather than their operators stealing all the glory.…

We chat with hub makers WigWag "Open is always going to win," states Ed Hemphill, CEO of WigWag, a company that hopes to make sense of the ever-expanding and ever-more-complex Internet of Things market.…