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It's 1AM, backup's failed and the boss says you're about to lose all insurance On-Call Welcome again to On-Call, our Friday fumble through memories of jobs on which things didn't go as planned. Or sometimes went in ways it's not possible to plan.…

The on-premises pie is shrinking, but perhaps not disastrously Infrastructure as a service sold by public clouds will become a US$43.6 billion market by 2020, according to abacus-rattling firm IDC's new Worldwide Public Cloud Infrastructure as a Service Forecast, 2016-2020.…

Dark matter measured in our cosmic backwater Pics After ten years of work by hundreds of scientists, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III has produced the most complete map of our nearby universe covering over a million galaxies.…

Most droids are not the ones you are looking for if you value security Nexus devices are, unsurprisingly, the most secure Androids, says security outfit Duo.…

If your application faces the internet and you like security, go containers-first says Gartner Containers are more secure than apps running on a bare OS and organisations that like not being hacked therefore need to seriously consider a move, according to analyst firm Gartner.…

Portal to help devs remember that cluster they ran last week and don't need any more One of the problems users run into in the cloud is that the cost of using servers-for-rent can sometimes be surprising.…

F35, F22 and Boeing data sent to People's Liberation Army Chinese national Su Bin has been sentenced to 46 months jail after admitting his role in stealing information on the Lockheed F-22 and F-35 aircraft, along with Boeing's C-17 cargo plane.…

Reminds hunters of fines and jail terms for using recording devices in court houses The Department of Justice in the Australian State of New South Wales has warned Pokemon hunters that if they hunt for digital critters inside courthouses they may find their next trip is to an actual jail.…

People too trusting about tech, mag finds Tesla is misleading drivers about the efficacy of its Autopilot feature and is putting lives at risk, according to Consumer Reports.…

Patch Tuesday wasn't just about browser bugs Microsoft has quietly killed a vulnerability that can be exploited to unlock ARM-powered Windows RT tablets and boot non-Redmond-approved operating systems.…

It's because, you know, there aren't enough of them Facebook has explained away another year of dreadful diversity figures by claiming that there simply aren't enough minorities available for it to hire.…

Tech titans trash-talk Trump – what do they hope to achieve? A veritable Who's Who of the tech industry have signed an open letter aggressively criticizing Donald Trump and his proposed presidential policies.…

Clouds turn to rain to hide your tears Microsoft is cutting its free 15GB OneDrive cloud storage space down to 5GB, and eliminating the 15GB free camera roll for many users. Files will be deleted by Redmond until your account is under the free limit.…

What could go wrong? Nest has launched its first new product in several years: an outdoor surveillance camera.…

Pays out for status/incident communications specialist Atlassian has made its first buy since raising $462m in its December IPO, snapping up StatusPage.…

Judge orders megadeth for Dave Mustain's class action Hewlett-Packard has succeeded in breaking up a class-action lawsuit brought by its tech support workers who say the IT giant stiffed them on overtime pay.…

Drugs bust docs remain sealed, though Google has quietly dropped its legal action to muzzle an investigation into the ad giant's conduct by the State of Mississippi.…

Reseller deal dodges rivals Cisco has decided to get into object storage with its UCS servers – and has done so with a SwiftStack reseller deal, avoiding object suppliers allied to its server competitors.…

And it all boils down to seeing what bats are up to A team of scientists have developed a model that can predict the likelihood of bat species carrying Ebola and other filoviruses using a machine learning algorithm.…

Uncle Sam's email hoovering must stop at its borders, court rules Updated Microsoft has won a landmark legal action against the US government over protecting the privacy of non-US citizens on non-US servers. The appeals court decision invalidates a key legal tool the US government uses to apply extraterritorially.…

Surveying the competitors in the upcoming interconnect war HPC Blog The next big battle ground in High Performance Computing, and thereafter in large enterprise computing, will be centered on high performance interconnects (HPI). These are the mechanisms that tie systems together and enable high speed communication between nodes.…

Getting closer to the source of infinite wealth Analysis The European Commission has opened an aggressive new front in its battle with Google, one that Google thought it had secured years ago. And this is one that starts to gnaw away at Google’s core cash generation business.…

The second of Pure's three flash musketeers Analysis In Alexandre Dumas' novel The Three Musketeers, a Gascon outsider, D'Artagnan, and three musketeers – Aramis, Athos and Porthos – take on De Richelieu, the French Cardinal, along with his allies and troops. In our flash systems world there is a parallel: swashbuckling Pure Storage, led by Scott Dietzen, with three product musketeers: FlashSystem, FlashBlade, and the yet-to-be-revealed third product, are taking on storage king EMC and its forces.…

Oh dear, Big 5. Looks like the Others are growing... Worldwide security software revenues rose 3.7 per cent to reach $22.1bn in 2015, according to analyst Gartner.…

Visa-backed survey gives fingerprint recognition the thumbs-up Two in three European consumers actively want to use biometric technology when making payments, according to a new Visa-sponsored survey.…

For the first time, mobile operators not at centre of ecosystem The 5G standardization timeline is set, demos and proofs of concept are proliferating, and claims to 5G world firsts are on the rise. Yet, many mobile operators and vendors don’t really know what future 5G networks will be needed for beyond better mobile broadband services, and they’re calling on potential industry users for help.…

Favours its own shopping service and restricts third-party websites, claims commish EU antitrust regulators have accused Google of preventing rivals from competing in online advertising and search, deepening its existing probe into anti-competition allegations against the ad-flinger.…

Newly observed behaviour in 'miracle material' Physicists have observed a new behaviour in graphene sheets that causes them to spontaneously grow, tear and peel like self-folding origami.…

David Davis doesn't have a PPE degree – and is now our Brexit Secretary David Davis MP today becomes the highest-achieving computer science graduate in British politics.…

Amber Rudd yet to emerge from blanket of ministerial double-speak IPBill During a committee stage debate in the House of Lords yesterday, the government revealed it intends that the Investigatory Powers Bill will provide any Secretary of State with the ability to force communication service providers (CSPs) to remove or disable end-to-end encryption.…

I need certainty to get on with upgrades, says BT man Interview The Sword of Damocles has not entirely disappeared from above Openreach. Earlier this year Ofcom stopped short of recommending a full decapitation of the broadband provider from its parent BT. Crucially, though, it has kept the option on the table.…

No frikkin' sharks included in deal, sadly A consortium led by French missile company MBDA has reportedly won the contract to build a laser cannon for the Ministry of Defence, according to unconfirmed reports.…

'Trying to resolve technical issues' says bank Customers of Lloyds personal banking have been furiously hitting refresh this morning due to "intermittent" issues accessing their accounts.…

ANZ, Coles, first Aussie giants to make launch Android Pay has launched in Australia, with ANZ Bank being the first of the Big Four able to use the phone-only facility.…

And hear why a mic-dropping, beer hurling AI would be a real advance Reg Events If you’re worried about scientists developing a computer as smart as you are, relax. It’s likely but not certain that “human level” AI could be reached by the end of this century, Professor Murray Shanahan told an audience of eager Register readers at our second Summer lecture recently.…

When white box switches monitor themselves, packets prosper One of the pitch points of open white-box networking is that it makes Ethernet switches extensible – something exploited by some packet boffins to build what they think is a better way to skin the network monitoring cat.…

Ah, that's a blessed relief Here’s a bunch of storage news that shows just how keen our multi-faceted storage world is to fill up our inboxes.…

Dormant Coder module? Kill it quick. Drupal is calling on its users to patch a dangerous remote code execution hole that can let attackers easily hijack sites.…

Second time lucky for SpaceX delivery? NASA has shown off a shiny new piece of hardware that's going to make it easier to bring future gear onboard the International Space Station.…

Decompiled code suggests blocks are embedded in the app Lebanese-Canadian developer Nadim Kobeissi has taken aim at WhatsApp, accusing it of fudging about why calls to Saudi numbers don't work.…

We reckon virtual storage for containers, lots of hybrid cloud and a new vSphere release VMware saves its biggest announcements of the year for its late August VMworld conference. The company of course keeps its cards close to its chest, but the content catalog for the conference generally offers some clues about what we can expect.…

Giant going MANO et MANO with pygmies AT&T says it's just about ready to release its virtualisation automation software, amounting to more than eight million lines of code: its Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management and Policy platform – ECOMP – will soon land at the Linux Foundation.…

Traffic to Pirate Bay and others redirected to AirTel banned URL notice An unknown agency in India, possibly telco Airtel, is quietly capitalising on encryption gaps in sites tended by DDOS-buster CloudFlare to intercept and redirect users.…

Also cancels support for Nexus Tabs, old iOS devices in future apps Cloud darling Salesforce is upsetting end users by giving its Salesforce1 supported devices list a number-one haircut.…

Junos OS has been put through the ringer since that nasty backdoor scandal Juniper has fired off fixes for eight security vulnerabilities.…

New group including Bruce Schneier and Matt Blaze sworn in to oversee anonymizing tool The entire board of the Tor Project has been replaced in an effort to restore credibility in the anonymizing network software.…

And TITSUP Telstra gets to manage them all nbn , the entity building and operating Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN), has named the six companies it has chosen to turn the hybrid fibre coax (HFC) network it acquired from Telstra into a white-hot broadband delivery beast.…

Committee to focus on stringing together cowtown cable The US Senate has formally formed its first informal committee to push for better broadband in America's countryside.…