The Register

Bit of a Dixons, terribly sorry Google executives have been hyping tomorrow’s Android event as the most significant since the platform was first announced in 2008. But there’s little need to tune in for one part of it, thanks to British mobile phone retailer Carphone Warehouse.…

Share option boost prompts exec bliss Comment There’ll be a spring in the executive offices of Cohesity, Rubrik, Tegile and other storage startups this morning; senior managers will have checked Nutanix’s share price and have that rosy glow that comes when your prospects have suddenly brightened.…

Complies with regulator ahead of time. Fancy that TalkTalk is scrapping line rental charges and freezing price increases for 18 months, in a bid to comply with forthcoming regulatory changes and retain its declining customer base.…

Head on spike Barring a last minute deal, the European Commission is set to impose a swingeing fine for Google parent Alphabet’s anti-competitive behaviour in Europe, with specific terms addressing its control over Android in contracts with phone-makers.…

Up to £80k on a platter for future Skynet overlords Defence boffins are running a competition to see who can develop a drone platform capable of running up to 20 UAVs “to achieve military effect across the electro-magnetic spectrum”.…

Product's what we want from you... Part Two You like the idea of “doing” a startup, but what about actually starting a startup? You can see the end point - success, hopefully - but what of the hoops and hurdles?…

IBM's cognitive computing can now take jobs away from compliance officers. Yay! Never mind cancer research or climate change: IBM is finally bringing its Watson AI technology to bear on one of the real challenges still facing human civilisation – regulatory compliance.…

Qualcomm signs up, but not Google or Apple – or even Nokia Analysis There are many interesting aspects to the announcement that Qualcomm, among others, is joining Ericsson’s Avanci patent pool scheme.…

Mozilla decides to crib some of Google's browser interfaces Mozilla is investigating hooking up Google Chrome's builtin plugins to Firefox.…

Think SQL injections on steroids Amazon, Baidu, Facebook, Google and Microsoft, among other technology companies, have been investing heavily in artificial intelligence and related disciplines like machine learning because they see the technology enabling services that become a source of revenue.…

Newsweek Cuban connection story enrages miscreants It has been an odd day for Newsweek – its main site was taken offline after it published a story claiming a company owned by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump broke an embargo against doing deals with Cuba.…

Rights warriors gives their two cents on Tencent's nonsense Pic Chinese internet giant Tencent is the newly minted holder of a US design patent on the concept of placing rectangles on a display screen.…

Next move in EFF's plans to regain the right to tinker Assistant Professor Matthew Green has asked US courts for protection so that he can write a textbook explaining cryptography without getting sued under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.…

While comms commish faces a doxing for defying Silicon Valley Analysis US broadband regulator the FCC dramatically cancelled the much-anticipated vote on its secretive TV set-top box plan on Thursday – and it's keeping the details confidential.…

Judge refuses injunction, handover of global DNS etc at midnight The most significant change in the internet's functioning for a generation will happen tonight at midnight.…

Fuming frenchie causes a oui bit of damage A French man has been charged after he stormed into an Apple store and smashed up iPhones and MacBooks using a metal ball that is more commonly used for the traditional game of pétanque.…

Mad dash on eve of critical IANA transition A slew of internet organizations have come to the support of the US government in a last-minute lawsuit designed to prevent the handover of critical internet functions at midnight on Friday.…

Reduce it for Redmond's engineers, that is – not you Microsoft wants to hire a particularly thick-skinned person to help run its Windows Updates team.…

Web giant offers open-source AI-powered X-rated pic hunter Having laid bare over half a billion usernames and passwords through meager funding and witless indifference, Yahoo! is putting its faith in artificial intelligence to protect people from bare skin.…

Sales of connected autonomous vehicles by 2025 projected to be 70% of light-duty vehicles Israeli car security startup Karamba Security has banked $2.5m in fresh investment, which it plans to use to extend its technology to autonomous vehicles.…

Former Royal Signals SNCO previously convicted of making indecent images of children A disgraced former Territorial Army sergeant convicted of making indecent images of children has pleaded guilty to using private browsing mode on his iPhone and iPad.…

Directors disqualified Five senior staffers at security reseller Quadsys managed to avoid imprisonment today.…

Tits=medium, bellend=strong NSFW UK comms regulator Ofcom has released in-depth research into the British public’s attitudes to fucking swearing.…

Citizen boffins: Help find the alien that ultimately kills us all The SETI project, which hunts for alien life and has generated hundreds of terabytes of data every day, has poured its bits over IBM’s cloud for citizen scientists to pick over.…

Capacity margin 0.1 per cent this winter – prepare to shiver Britain signed off on the most costly energy deal it has ever made this week – but the price we agreed for energy from Hinckley is still lower than the peak prices that will hit British wallets even harder, and sooner.…

Open-sourcier Redmond talks up speed, security gains for Azure HDInsight Microsoft has overhauled its cloud-hosted Azure HDInsight Hadoop big data mill with extra security in the shape of enhanced authentication and identity management features plus a claimed 25 times performance boost in crunching big data queries.…

BT alone expects its rates to more than quadruple Broadband providers have rallied against draft plans to hike up the cost of business rates, which will result in a "steep" increase for broadband providers laying infrastructure.…

FabricPool takes Data Fabric further with dynamic data movement to AWS NetApp has previewed a FabricPool technology which combines on-premises and AWS cloud storage into a single repository.…

Do we block unsanctioned ones? Well half of us think we do... Almost half of NHS Trusts make no attempt to monitor cloud app usage, according to the results of a Freedom of Information request.…

How Brussels made its copyright sausage The European Union's plan to get YouTube clean up its act – the proposed updates to copyright for the Digital Single Market – went through 37 revisions before emerging earlier this month: and the movie chiefs were nervous.…

Watch out on the Isle of Wight Dredgers clearing Portsmouth harbour have found yet another unexploded Second World War bomb.…

Breathless reporter probes curbside crapper An after midnight muckspreader who has been terrorising a Dublin* neighbourhood has been caught in the act by the very shopkeeper whose forecourt he’d been befouling.…

Return trip, ya say? Sure, in another two years Admit it. You were tempted to fulfil your sci-fi fantasy – no, not that one – and apply to Mars One Foundation to become a Red Planet pioneer three years back.…

Building IOT CFP deadline looms Reg Events The deadline to get your proposals in Building IOT London is just a week away, so if you want to tell an audience of real world tech pros about your real world experiences developing and implementing the internet of things, don't delay.…

BBC DG intervened in sexy puppet row The BBC Director-General was forced to intervene in a row over providing children’s puppet Sooty with a lady friend.…

Providing ISPs have signed 'up to' the voluntary code, that is UK businesses are to receive more accurate data on broadband speeds before signing up to a contract, under a voluntary code coming into force from Ofcom today.…

Slow drop finale The European Space Agency was set to crash its Rosetta space probe into comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko as the final stage of its 12-year research mission at 12.18pm BST today (7:18am EDT).…

Chatbot interaction needs to be 'natural', though Amazon is offering teams of university students the chance to claim their share of a $2.5m prize for developing the best “socialbot” capable of holding a natural language conversation.…

Ghosts in the Machine Analysis Early next year you should able to buy Nokia phones and BlackBerry phones, two of the giant names of the Noughties. None of these phones will be made by Nokia or BlackBerry, and all of them will be Android phones. The famous brands will inhabit new bodies, with the licensees hoping to rekindle some nostalgia both giants once enjoyed.…

Sentiment analysis might just be useful Comment At Google's Horizon cloud event in San Francisco on Tuesday, the ad giant demonstrated its Cloud Vision API through what it called the GCP Emotobooth. Less of a booth than a corner of a room covered by a connected camera, the experience combined all the forced fun of making faces on demand with the dubious pleasure of having one's mind read by a machine.…

Don't believe the marketeers Sysadmin blog Once all the marketing is cleared away, just what is big data, and how does it help real businesses of all sizes? Marketing would have us believe that big data is new, huge, terrifying, complicated, impossible without their help and yet will deliver unmatched benefits. Like many things in tech, however, big data is really just an iterative evolution of things most businesses already do.…

That's the one a human drove during its public launch The Ministry of Defence has licensed its Advanced Unmanned Surface Vehicle robot boat tech to roboat biz ASV Global.…

Claims bendy battery won't burn, is ideal for credit-card-sized gadgets Panasonic says it's built a bendy Lithium-Ion battery safe enough to be built into “Card devices, devices attached to the human body, smart clothing [and] wristband wearable devices.”…

'We really are serious about the enterprise,' insists enterprise head Greene Analysis The invitation for Google's latest cloud sales pitch, dubbed "Horizon" because the company has already had its way with "Atmosphere", on Thursday directed attendees to The Mint.…

From the Giant Magellan 'scope to science and what the nightlife is like in Chile Pics + vids Construction has now started on the Giant Magellan Telescope, which will be the world's largest optical viewing device mankind has ever built by using record-breaking mirrors and advanced electronics.…

Nuclear-powered laser space tank loves the smell of exotic xenon isotopes in the morning Mars' atmosphere is wafting up from its cold, dead soil, according to new findings from the Curiosity Rover.…

Says five-strong 'Group E' may have lifted a billion Yahoo! records, sells to states Five hackers are said to be behind breaches totalling up to a staggering three billion credentials from some of the world's biggest tech companies including the Yahoo! breach that led to the loss of 500 million credentials.…

New rules in New York to stop American ISPs and power companies charging dead folks The US state of New York has had to pass a law to stop telcos and utility companies from charging fees to the deceased.…

Also misplaced cables … erm ... creatively ON-Call Thank Cthulhu it's Friday, because that means the weekend is at hand and we can offer you another instalment of On-Call to show what happens when support calls ruin your personal time.…

And asked on the day EC competition tsar gave speech on 'Big Data and Competition' Salesforce has called on the European Commission to block Microsoft's acquisition of LinkedIn.…