The Register

Pick a partner, eat the Nougat, feel the love Analysis There was a distinct whiff of the retro about Google’s launch of its Pixel smartphone. Exclusives with selected large mobile operators; yet another attempt to create a unified Android experience; even the clear focus on Apple as the primary competition – all these should be issues of the past.…

Well done for not being a naughty girl Her Britannic Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second has been awarded the Long Service and Good Conduct medal for 65 years' military service without a criminal record.…

Select committee slams Blighty's techno-ignorance The UK government does not have a clear strategy on how to maximise AI and robotics for economic benefit, according to the Commons Select Committee for Science and Technology.…

Testing reveals the past, not what someone will do once you make them bitter and twisted A former top US Government investigator into classified document leaks by Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden has criticised the effectiveness of background checks - saying such checks will not prevent further leaks.…

Move to the cloud and you may need 'vendor managers' and more governance In Australia fast-food history played out differently to the rest of the world and the nation no longer has Burger King. So when you want a Whopper down under you head to a chain called “Hungry Jack's” that is pretty much a BK clone.…

Operators to show their MANRS, aka Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security For all its robustness, the Internet is built on remarkably fragile systems.…

68 million units a quarter and falling as 'Some consumers may never upgrade a PC again' New data from analyst outfits IDC and Gartner suggest the PC market continues to crater.…

The plan is to to build wider experience useful for Izzy's successor NASA has opened the door to allow private sector companies to add modules to the International Space Station (ISS).…

Region needs to skill-up, says minister Singapore is slinging S$10 million (around US$7.2 million) into a fund to help infosec in ASEAN (the Association of South East Asian Nations).…

Reader, Acrobat, Flash get fixes. Adobe has patched 83 vulnerabilities in its Reader, Acrobat, and Flash offerings including remote code execution holes.…

For example, not-China* didn't “hack the BoM's supercomputers” Sensationalist language is making it hard to educate businesses and the public about infosec risks*, according to the Australian Cyber Security Centre's 2016 threat report.…

Stick this on your pole, instead of fibre Fabless G.fast silicon house Sckipio hopes to give the fibre-most-of-the-way, copper to the home market a kick along with silicon that gets close to symmetric performance, at whatever data rate the copper can support.…

SOHOpeless CCTVs and video recorders It shouldn't surprise anyone that closed circuit television (CCTV) rigs are becoming the world's favourite botnet hosts: pretty much any time a security researcher looks at a camera, it turns out to be a buggy mess.…

Holding back Assistant and apps drawer for Pixel Developers can get their hands on Android 7.1 by the end of the month, Google has said.…

One string to bring them all and in the installation bind them Facebook, working with Exponent, Google, and Tilde, has released software to improve the JavaScript development experience, which can use all the help it can get.…

From cute game dev to serious mass production Pics The team behind the popular $9 C.H.I.P. single-board-computer has come up with a version for engineers, startups, and larger organizations to embed in their products.…

Dell drops antitrust claims over power pack pricing Samsung has received a welcome bit of news about its batteries that doesn't involve the words "fire" or "explosion."…

Will Australian privacy researchers still be at risk of hard time? Privacy and data researchers will, later today, get to see what's in the Australian government's proposed bill banning re-identification of anonymised data.…

Hyper-converged infrastructure comes home Hyper-converged appliance and all-flash system vendor Pivot3 has produced Edge Office, a hyper-converged infrastructure appliance (HCIA) for remote and branch offices and small/medium businesses.…

Redmond kicks off the era of the force-fed security update Microsoft is kicking off a controversial new security program this month by packaging all of its security updates into a single payload.…

Telco weeps as three hours of profits go up in smoke Updated The US Federal Communications Commission is trumpeting the “largest civil penalty assessed from a cable operator” after it fined Comcast $2.3m for charging its customers for services they didn’t ask for and equipment they didn’t need.…

Tracking for marketing, that's fine – but the cops? No way Updated Twitter has suspended its commercial relationship with a company called Geofeedia – which provides social media data to law enforcement agencies so that they can identify potential miscreants.…

Might help cover the cost of scrapping the Note 7 Samsung received good news of a sort on Tuesday, when the Supreme Court heard arguments for why Apple should reimburse the company $399m.…

Big Red says it wants to integrate intelligence into existing apps Oracle, like so many other enterprise IT specialists, is talking up plans to integrate machine learning into its software.…

Odinaff shares links with Carbanak A second group of hackers – Odinaff – has broken into the SWIFT system, the fulcrum of the global financial payments system.…

Old telco, rather than Silicon Valley, tops the list Which corporations invest most in the USA? A ranking by the favourite think-tank of the Democratic Party leadership might leave the Party's net roots choking on their muesli.…

'Nothing to do with Brexit' says corporate mouthpiece IT giant Fujitsu is to axe 1,800 jobs in Blighty – around 18 per cent of its UK workforce.…

New command has better info-sharing practices, apparently UK police sat on intelligence about more than 2,000 child abuse suspects for 15 months, according to a damning report from independent watchdogs published on Tuesday.…

Everyone but Intel and Cisco working together to build storage-class memory A group of suppliers have got together as a consortium to develop Gen-Z - a scalable, high-performance bus or interconnect fabric linking computers and memory.…

Data data everywhere Promo Data, data everywhere and not an insight in sight. Tableau, the business intelligence and analytics software firm, is on a mission to help you see and understand your data and enable you to make informed, fast decisions.…

Under -16s involving themselves with other under 16s, potentially criminally The majority of suspects in underage "sexting" cases are actually underage themselves, according to South Yorkshire Police.…

Funnily enough, BT really doesn't agree Mobile telcos Three and TalkTalk told MPs today they want more power to go to Ofcom in the forthcoming Digital Economy Bill, in order to rebalance the market away from the dominance of BT/EE.…

The trouble doesn't stop here. It starts here Analysis Samsung’s rivals in the cut-throat flagship phone market shouldn’t pop open the champagne just yet. While in the short term, Sony, HTC and Google could see some upside from Samsung’s now-deceased “Death Note”, in the long term the market and the consumer benefit from a high margin leader.…

Hi-cap drives, inline compression, cloud tiering to chop flash storage costs Dell EMC is driving full tilt to extend flash support and lower costs in its storage array hardware and software product set, with in-line compression, high-capacity SSD support and the spinning off old data to the cloud.…

But by god we're developing some niches. Starting with shoe-based analytics Cisco may have conceded defeat to Amazon in the mass market for public cloud consumption, but there are a raft of niche areas that are ripe for the plucking, starting with, er, footwear.…

Chinese firm's Noah's Ark lab to hook up with US brainboxes Huawei is handing $1m to the University of California Berkeley’s AI lab to foster a research and development partnership between industry and academia.…

Cheap doesn't mean nasty Review Not so long ago, the idea of buying an operator-branded phone would have filled most people with horror. For years these were typically budget feature phones for skint punters, too time-poor to do their own homework.…

They're all simulated – but the drones aren't RotM The Royal Navy's Unmanned Warrior roboat exercise is currently taking place off the coast of Scotland.…

Parliamentary committee needed to make global businesses accountable Former chair of the Public Accounts Committee Margaret Hodge has renewed calls for greater transparency of global companies' tax affairs - following revelations of Facebook and eBay's recent tax affairs.…

They're fast, sure, but they have so much more to offer Enterprise solid state drives are gaining traction, but their predominant focus is still performance. The need for speed has driven SSDs into applications where HDDs previously reigned, but for those of us who aren’t high-frequency traders, solid state will need to demonstrate some other benefits. What are they, and how important will they be in mainstream enterprise apps?…

Enabling the Digital Workforce Live at 11am In this age of digital transformation, do employees still matter?…

And they want to do more online? An alarming proportion of cops’ websites lack any form of automatic secure connection, meaning potentially sensitive data is communicated in plain unencrypted text - according to research.…

Grab some popcorn: the fun starts on the 16th and will climax as Schiaparelli lander touches down next Wednesday Grab some popcorn, space enthusiasts, because this coming weekend the joint European Space Agency/Roscosmos “ExoMars” mission will arrive at Mars.…

Doing SaaS right needs at least half-a-dozen add-ons Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is sold to line of business people as a way to get the applications they need, without all the hassle, time and expense required to have an IT department build and run an application.…

Don't panic: nothing happened, but there's also the matter of some missing uranium ... The director of the International Atomic Energy Agency has said he's aware of a successful hack of a nuclear power plant. And as if that isn't bad enough, he also knows of an attempt to steal enriched uranium.…

It looks like lock-in, swims like lock-in and quacks like lock-in … this could be lock-in! Yahoo! has “temporarily disabled” the ability to forward email from its messaging services.…

Board shakeup and new 'buy our code McNuggets' plan follows lousy sales Android alternative Cyanogen looks to have given up on trying to sell a full mobile operating system.…

None for ages then two at once? How curiou-aaS SAP's Australia/New Zealand tentacle is on the hunt for new senior leaders after its general manager and chief operating officer (COO) both handed in their resignation and “ decided to pursue opportunities outside the company.”…

Android auto-updater lands on GitHub Chinese giant Tencent is dipping a toe into the open source world, with its own hot patch system for Android apps.…

Australian National University poll finds peeps more afraid of terrorists than exploding phones Australians who don't what the nation spends on defence also don't mind the country's data retention regime.…