The Register

Children of Time features talking space spiders The book Children of Time by British sci-fi author Adrian Tchaikovsky has been announced as the winner of this year’s Arthur C Clarke award.…

Channel partners and customers left in dark since 8am service blackout Business broadband comms outfit Gamma is experiencing a service outage.…

A reader's tale of life, love and programmable robotics Romance isn’t dead. Just ask a Reg-reading engineer who made his own wedding cake... from Lego.…

Breaking through the wall of silence, one brick at a time Nutanix bought a company recently and is days away from announcing another acquisition.…

Not quite autonomous food-flinging, mind Multinational pizza megacorp Domino's claims it is trialling pizza delivery drones in New Zealand.…

Plus one greybeard lands at enterprise licensing biz Crayon A couple of industry greybeards at Lenovo and Hewlett Packard Enterprise have quietly packed their bags for a permanent vacation while another vendor old timer has moved to another channel biz.…

Committee says press should uncritically repeat what government tells it to say A parliamentary committee has claimed that Facebook, Twitter and Google are responsible for terrorist attacks in the West by “consciously failing to combat the use of their sites to promote terrorism and killings.”…

Perhaps he’s a non-Eurocrat too? Comment European Commission vice president Andrus Ansip has denied plans to impose “a tax on hyperlinks”, even though the EU can’t tax hyperlinks, and nobody has asked for URLs to be taxed. URLs, as you might suspect, would be very hard, if not impossible, to “tax” anyway.…

'Connected Cow' kit, including 'managed mating', will fatten tenfold to $10bn market If you worry the Internet of Things is bollocks and that the industry's just milking an old idea, think again: research outfit Arcluster has declared that the “Connected Cow and Farm” market will become a US$10.75 billion concern in 2021, a rather nice jump from today's $1.27 billion.…

Arduino-fiddling kids, and the rest of us, owe Papert a debt of gratitude Back when dinosaurs ruled the Earth and I was a kid, I received the gift of a "100-in-1 Electronics Kit" that taught me the basics of electrical circuit design as I strung pre-cut wires between springy posts. At the very centre of this kit - its beating heart - a single transistor could be wired to work in an amplifier, or AM radio, or tone generator.…

Australian boffins say the problem is between users' ears and in the spreadsheet's formatting genes Scientific literature often mis-names genes and boffins say Microsoft Excel is partly to blame.…

NASA, China traffic jam on fourth rock from the sun The Chinese space program has taken a massive step forward as the country unveiled its design for a rover to scoot across the surface of Mars.…

Free Windows Server 2016 licences for all my virtual friends! Microsoft is having another go at displacing vSphere.…

More Anniversary Update woe reported by frustrated users Plugging a Kindle Paperwhite into a PC running Windows 10 with the Anniversary Update installed sparks a full system meltdown, it is claimed.…

He wasn't there again today, I do wish he would go away How much like a face does an image have to be, to trick the standard Voila-Jones facial recognition algorithm? Not very much, it turns out.…

Only Cassini's been there since, V'ger 2 is now 15 light-hours away The Voyager mission is celebrating another remarkable milestone, the 35th anniversary of Voyager 2's closest encounter with Saturn.…

Mandiant study finds western orgs plug holes faster Organisations across the Asia Pacific are terrible at information security, a Mandiant report contests.…

US authorities checking celebrated doc dump to make sure it's not revealing too much Last week, NASA announced that all of its published research would be aggregated into a single portal and published for free.…

We think that's cross as in 'across', not as in 'angry'. But an angry cloud would be cool Dell has filed a trademark for 'Cross Cloud' that covers just about everything it does.…

HP Inc manages to not lose quite as much cash as Wall Street expected. Go team HP Inc says it will move forward with its plans to cut costs and refocus its business as it posted better than expected quarterly numbers.…

'We apologize for any inconvenience that this might cause' You'd be forgiven for thinking Microsoft is actively trying to stop people using Windows 10 Anniversary Edition. A patch this week broke one of the key features of the OS: PowerShell.…

And Apple's Geniuses can't help you when it happens Apple's latest iPhones can suffer chip failures that can render the touchscreen unusable.…

C'mon Marlene, we don't need opt-in consent, we're locals! An advocate group for rural broadband providers is asking the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to omit small ISPs from its planned privacy rules.…

All together now: I like big butts but I cannot fly, you boffins can't deny... Video The Airlander 10 hybrid – part airplane and part airship – has had a bumpy touchdown after piling into its landing site nose first.…

But is it just a matter of looking tough with elections around the corner? A meeting this week between the interior ministers of France and Germany has focused on the issue of encryption and its potential impact on security.…

Annoying banners will send phone-friendly sites to hell – aka the second page of search Google will be rejigging its search algorithm to downgrade websites that slap up a large advert, aka an "interstitial," before readers can actually get to see the content.…

All you can eat is never quite all you can eat Analysis Sprint and T-Mobile US are introducing "all you can eat" internet plans, and as you might expect, someone at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco is horrified. Somebody always is.…

Judge knocks out claims it stole competitor's trade secret An effort to ban health-tracking Fitbit gadgets in the United States has fallen apart, with a final decision against competitor Jawbone.…

Proxima b is a likely target for Starshot project Rumours that a terrestrial planet orbiting Proxima Centauri – the Sun’s closest neighbour – may be Earth-like have been confirmed today in a paper published in Nature.…

Strong bait for new customers. Not good news for Dell or EMC IBM has launched more cost-effective Storwize all-flash arrays and announced a Flash In migration program aimed at Dell and IBM customers looking for a warm comfort blanket from Big Blue.…

Only we should have the power to enforce our tax laws across the world, scream Yanks The US Treasury is preparing a pre-emptive strike against a long-awaited probe by the European Commission into Ireland's tax arrangements with tech firms such as Apple.…

California demand closes the pay gap US techies are earning more than their counterparts in Europe, with those in California doing better off than their US peers.…

Virtualisation? Of course (we still do 'Enterprise' too) Red Hat has fully embraced OpenStack’s Neutron in a convergence-targeted virtualisation package.…

Plus: Shadow Brokers may have been an inside job

Shrinking losses, embiggening revenues Nimble Storage's revenue of $97.1m for the second quarter of its fiscal year 2017 beat its guidance of $93m - $96m, which is good, and it generated a loss of $40m; better than the previous quarter's $42.7m loss but worse than the $30.1m it lost in Q2 last year.…

Refurbs will cause handset vendors pain Analysis Last year Huawei launched its Honor smartphone into Western markets: a cheap and cheerful way to showcase its advantages. Over in China, the Honor was about yoof, but over here, Huawei followed the well-trodden path by lower cost Asian manufacturers for decades: sell decent tech at low prices and urge the punter to overlook the eccentricities.…

Email to its channel reveals depth of Switchzilla's ire Dis is not welcome so we're going to diss it. That's Cisco's view, in a nutshell, of Nutanix jumping on its UCS servers as a means of selling its hyper-converged system software into the Cisco customer base and channel.…

The French are said to be going ballistic India is investigating a security breach affecting its French-built Scorpene-class submarines after more than 22,000 pages covering its secret capabilities were leaked.…

Ausgezeichnet, ein Rekord-Fang? Leider nicht A plucky German nudist out for a swim at a local lake was left in agony after an angler hooked his worm.…

Weak pound means higher prices for Brits Domain name biz Vidahost has hiked up the cost of its pricing by 33 per cent, blaming Brexit-induced exchange rate woes.…

All flashy beings, great and small, quiver before the chart Gartner's latest all-flash array Magic Quadrant contains expected news, a few surprises and a demotion that has prompted a public response from Violin Memory.…

But freshly cut grass is the olfactory equivalent, right? An alert that the Northern Lights would be visible across all of Great Britain last night was wrongly issued because a sit-on lawnmower disturbed scientific instruments.…

Fork off, cash is king Interview MySQL daddy Monty Widenius has dismissed claims the MariaDB fork is veering away from open source.…

If only we had self-driving processors that were stupidly fast, says web giant Hot Chips After cruising two million miles of public roads, Google's self-driving cars are still flummoxed by traffic lights, four-way junctions and other aspects of everyday life.…

Embedded is the web's next frontier Google’s latest operating system project, Fuchsia, may be largely a mystery, but it reinforces a truth that the platforms vendors are having, grudgingly, to acknowledge: one operating system does not fit all. For a company which has put so much effort into making Android an OS for all purposes, Google has a remarkable number of potentially conflicting platforms, now including Chrome OS, Brillo and Fuchsia.…

Hackers chuffed. The third version of the Pwntools exploit showbag has been released, sporting new Android p0wnage functions and a host of additional modules.…

New observations don't contradict Martian wet patch theories, but dry them up a lot The idea that seasonal dark streaks on Mars indicate the presence of liquid water turns out to be a dry argument.…

Big Red nods to plugin-hostile browser-makers, outlines proper Applet pension plan Oracle has revealed its interim plan to help Java devs deal with browser-makers' imminent banishment of plug-ins.…

Cold war relic beneath Paris now houses cold storage at €0.002/GB/Month French hosting company Online.net has revealed its new data centre resides in a former nuclear fallout shelter.…