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Government-sponsored sweat analyzer gets speedy Drunk driving costs thousands of lives every year and, as El Reg tests have shown, personal breathalyzers aren't that reliable. But now government-funded boffins think they've cracked a way of stopping people driving when they've had a skinful.…

Look on the bright side – at least they're not exploding, right Samsung? Microsoft loyalists are up in arms over yet more battery grief with the Surface Pro 3 and that Redmond is, we're told, breaking promises on repair costs.…

IT biz hires new decision-making CEO – a code-executing officer Finnish IT services firm Tieto has added software to a leadership team that oversees a recently formed data-focused business group.…

If someone doesn't think you can be harmed by a breach, they can stay quiet After years of discussion a draft of Australia's proposed data breach disclosure laws has landed and, to The Register's mind, it leaves a lot of wriggle room for those who would keep breaches secret.…

Voyager data raises possibility of pair of new moons Data from the first and only time mankind probed Uranus appears to show two new moons hiding in the dark rings that encircle the gas giant.…

Copper-extender can hit ~500Mbps, CTO says users will settle for 100Mbps Swisscom reckons it's become the first carrier in the world to announce a G.fast service.…

Indian Premier League TV audiences top 100m, online audience barely tapped Amazon, Facebook, Twitter and BT have been revealed as bidders for rights for India's top sporting attracting, the Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket competition.…

A month in space is the plan as China's ambitions escalate The Chinese capsule launched yesterday atop a Long March-2F rocket has successfully docked with the country's space station.…

Just Save Image As to exfiltrate data, safe in the knowledge webmasters trust JPGs Hackers are going to considerable lengths to hide credit cards stolen from site sites victimised in a wave of recent attacks, weaving the data into working images of products sold online.…

One account to rule them all, on mobe, copper, fibre or whatever else can be VodaFailed As widely anticipated, Vodafone's Australian tentacle has announced it's getting into the fixed-line broadband business.…

Mangstor's MX-Series drives enter the vSphere to soup up VM performance Mangstor has launched a faster NVMe over fabrics storage array – the NX6325 – based on an HPE ProLiant DL380 2U server platform.…

15 are critical, some allowing complete system compromise over HTTP Oracle has released its quarterly patch dump, this time offering 253 fixes for 76 products.…

More than one third of queries hit v6-capable servers, says 'net boffin Huston IPv6 might be moving slowly among the general community, but it's penetrating the Internet infrastructure at a much higher rate.…

'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.…