The Register

Email AI assistant will close by next month Microsoft has bought aspiring digital assistant start-up Genee and will roll it into Office 365.…

Phones and laptops taken amid Games' tickets investigation Laptops and mobile phones of a trio of Ireland’s Olympics’ officials have been taken by Rio police. The Brazilian cops are believed to be investigating the illegal sale of Games tickets.…

$400 gets you a pretty good smartphone Hands on Huawei might be the third biggest smartphone seller on the planet but it has very little traction outside Asia. The Chinese firm is hoping the Honor 8 will change that.…

Efforts to preserve aircraft carrier for the nation failed Aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious will be sold for scrap in spite of efforts to preserve her for the nation as a museum ship, according to reports.…

TCP exploit lets hackers get at your plaintext web traffic A previously identified Linux flaw, which allows anyone to hijack internet traffic, also affects 80 per cent of Android devices.…

This time 220 staffers face chop in Blighty HPE is aiming its guns at 220 roles in the UK and Ireland in what appears to be becoming its quarterly firing exercise at the biz.…

And still no criminal conviction in sight +Comment Former IT contractor John O'Neill has lost his appeal against the Sexual Risk Order imposed on him last year – but the judge said the 24 hours' notice he had to give police in advance of having sex was “unpoliceable”.…

It's all fun and games till a little wizard appears The collaboration wars are back, only – for now – they're more like a bush battle, where the hindmost are picked off first.…

Don't worry CA Technologies – we're being looked after Private equity ownership has given anodyne old backup biz Arcserve a huge energising kick in the behind.…

One quadcopter was stopped in mid-air Cops have seized drones being used to fly drugs into London's Pentonville prison – and are now on the hunt for the people operating them.…

Deliver a development process as secure as it is dynamic Broadcast On the September 27 2016 at 11am we're running a live broadcast that will explore the changing game of application security.…

Never gonna give EU up, never gonna let you down... er At some point in the next few years we will be in a post-Brexit world, and the UK will have regained complete control of its borders. Or maybe not. At this juncture, it's worth taking a long hard look at how that might work.…

Verizon and Qualcomm slam Wi-Fi Alliance’s proposed test framework One of the presumed outcomes of the 5G process is full convergence of licensed and unlicensed spectrum, with one or more air interface standards which can span both, using frequencies entirely flexibly according to requirement. This is a very long way off, if the current quarrels over extending LTE into licence-exempt bands are anything to go by.…

Cat departs, mice start giant bunfight Analysis Government departments are winning significantly more exemptions to splash the cash on expensive IT projects since the departure of former Cabinet Office minister Francis “Mad Frankie” Maude last year, according to a Register analysis.…

Backpack ban for Oktoberfest beer bash Germany's interior minister Thomas de Maiziere wants facial recognition systems in the country's airports and train stations to identify terror suspects.…

NEON is so 80s, er, 90s, no, 2000s, wait, 2010s Hot Chips ARM is bolting an extra data-crunching engine onto its 64-bit processor architecture to get it ready for Fujitsu's Post-K exascale supercomputer.…

'Chrome packaged apps' to be snuffed, except on Chrome OS Chalk up another fail for Google, which has decided it's time to do away with Chrome apps on Windows, Mac OS and Linux.…

Strawberrynet says it's convenient for customers, security chaps say it's stupidly convenient for crims Popular online cosmetics site Strawberrynet has asked customers if a function that allows anyone to retrieve its customers names, billing addresses, and phone numbers with nothing more than an email address is a bug or a feature.…

Where have you seen Windows #fail? And at what scale? Send them in, readers Windows crashing and producing the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) is seldom pleasant, or convenient.…

It never gets better, does it? The latest “your IoT security is rubbish” takes the world one step closer to “burn it all and try again”: a “smart” electrical outlet that's actually a whole-of-network attack vector.…

Pwnable any way you like It could be the worst router in the world: a cheapie from China that IOActive reckons is completely pwnable all ways from Sunday.…

Linux mount gets a systemd wrapper The developers behind Systemd, the alternative to sysvinit, have added a mount tool to their user space bootstrapper.…

Vuln-hunting robot ready to roam the world One of the top-three in DARPA's recent cyber-challenge, Mechanical Phish, has been open sourced at GitHub.…

For sale: Space station, several owners, billions of miles travelled NASA has signalled its intention to offload the International Space Station (ISS) some time in the 2020s.…

Vale Owen Bruce Slee, who helped our universe expand One of the pioneers of Australian radio astronomy, Owen Bruce Slee, has died in Australia aged 92.…

Packet serialisation means processors waste up 20 per cent of their time OpenFlow's architecture is inefficient, and caps performance while sucking unnecessary power.…

Cupertino's project hosting enters the long dark tea-time of the soul Apple's Mac OS Forge is losing one of its highest-profile non-Apple projects, with the news that MacPorts is moving to GitHub.…

City of Melbourne, population four million, placed in the wrong hemisphere Microsoft has misplaced Melbourne, the four-million-inhabitant capital of the Australian State of Victoria.…

All is forgiven, you gaffe-prone cyber-cooks. You're one of us A university study has found that adding basic facial expressions to a robot can be enough to forge an emotional bond with humans.…

Tech world faces summer of emergency security patching Documents from the Edward Snowden archive prove that the malware and exploits dumped on the public internet on Monday originated from the NSA.…

Official Redmond response: Customers love Win10 Microsoft says a fix is on the way for a video encoding issue in the Windows 10 Anniversary Update that has left people unable to access their USB webcams and applications.…

Chocolate Factory asks court to block Greenspan's complaints Google has asked a US court to stop a former MySpace investor from repeatedly filing suit against it.…

350 US and Canadian stores catch sales till malware Clothing chain Eddie Bauer has admitted the payment terminals in more than 350 of its stores have been siphoning customers' bank card details to criminals.…

We're not your traditional venture capitalists, says firm Cambridge Innovation Capital, an investment fund which commercialises science and technology advances made at Cambridge University, has raised £75m in a funding round.…

Don't drop that wrench, whatever you do Two astronauts from the International Space Station have started their spacewalk to install the new International Docking Adapter.…

We have a look at the latest cut Hands On Microsoft’s Continuum is one of the spookiest computing experiences you can have. Either plug a phone into a dock, or turn on a nearby wireless display and keyboard, and the phone doubles up as an ersatz Windows PC. No more lugging a laptop around.…

We need to outpace malware-flingers, securo folk warn Motorola pushes out Android updates faster than any other manufacturer bar Google Nexus manufacturers, according to a new study.…

Despite umms and aahs, GCHQ is home free to hack IPBill An independent review into bulk surveillance powers in the forthcoming Investigatory Powers Bill has warned that there is no proven case to let British snoops hack the planet.…

Status quo déjà vu, for the mobile generation Apple under Tim Cook has delivered six new makes of iPhone, with a further four derivations based on the overall brand.…

More not-quite-remote memory speeds apps Plexistor has unveiled specs on its Persistent Memory over Fabric (PMoF), which it says gives app servers access to disaggregated persistent memory in fabric-connected PM Bricks.…

Homeless Yorkshire man must tell plod in advance if he wants to have a flirty text chat +Comment A homeless IT consultant will learn today whether his challenge to a draconian order, which forces him to tell police in advance if he is going to have sex, will succeed.…

Dept loses at least £80m due to fraud The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) collected £400m less in tax during the first 12 months of moving paper tax discs online, according to a Freedom of Information response.…

We love your deep learning benchmark 'mistakes' HPC blog NVIDIA just fired the first salvo in what promises to be a classic and long-lived benchmark death match vs Intel. In the webpage titled "Correcting Intel's Deep Learning Benchmark Mistakes," NVIDIA claimed that Intel was using outdated GPU benchmark results and noncurrent hardware comparisons to show off its new Knights Landing Xeon Phi processors.…

'A virgin? In his right ear, perhaps' Something for the Weekend, Sir? It only takes a minute to capture a 3D model of my orifices. They tell me it’s the only way I can be sure of a tight fit.…

It's a meet-in-the-channel affair for resellers Nutanix has independently validated Cisco UCS C-Series servers to run its hyper-converged Enterprise Cloud Platform software.…

Broadcasting authent keys over the air is just asking for trouble A cunning Polish developer has hacked an Android food and drink rewards app to grant himself unlimited free beer.…

Automated trucks and – gasp! – SUVs could be here in five years' time Volvo and Uber are taking on Ford to usher in the next decade with a fleet of self-driving vehicles.…

Android is the Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt of mobility, even Apple is far behind BlackBerry and Microsoft have continued their tumble down the mobile operating system market share charts, clocking in at just 0.1 per cent and 0.6 per cent respectively.…

Freedom. Justice. Openness. And some entirely avoidable p0wnage for good luck WikiLeaks is hosting 324 confirmed instances of malware among its caches of dumped emails, a top Bulgarian anti-malware veteran says.…