The Register

Only in India for the time being Amazon today announced a new battery-powered version of its ubiquitous Echo speakers.…

Eh, at least it doesn't need to renegotiate patent deals Qualcomm is to appeal against the decision of a South Korean court to fine the US chip giant $873m for unfairly using patent licensing to stymie rivals' sales.…

Users doubtful 5 years enough to get everyone moved in time German enterprise software giant SAP is in a "standoff" with customers over the 2025 deadline for withdrawing support for its SAP Business Suite range.…

Getting giddy over CI/CD with Anthos and Kubernetes DevOps World Lisbon CloudBees joined the SaaS club today with a preview of its Jenkins X CI/CD product running atop Google's cloud.…

Yes, in all-caps The Council of the European Union has warned member states that the introduction of 5G networks poses increased security risks while also bringing economic and infrastructure benefits.…

Add-ons accused of slurping every URL netizens visit The Firefox extensions built by Avast have been pulled from the open-source browser's online add-on store over privacy fears.…

AWS subscribers, you can forget GPUs (unless you need to train your models) re:Invent Amazon Web Services has made Inf1, its cloud instance for running machine-learning software on its custom-designed AI chip Inferentia, available to all.…

Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Netflix accused of ducking dues Fair Tax Mark, a UK-based civic advocacy group, has accused Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Netflix of depriving public coffers of more than $100bn in taxes since 2010 through aggressive tax avoidance schemes.…

Mozilla continues exploring privacy as a source of revenue Patting itself on the back for blocking more than one trillion web tracking requests through its Enhanced Tracking Protection tech, Mozilla on Tuesday continued its privacy push with a further test of its Firefox Private Network service, an update to Firefox Preview Beta for Android, and the debut of its latest desktop browser, Firefox 71.…

Garbage in, garbage out US Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Cory Booker (D-NJ) are examining how federal agencies and healthcare companies are tackling algorithmic biases – after a recent study found that black patients were less likely to be referred to care programs by software than white patients, despite being sicker.…

Fired four threaten to file complaint with National Labor Relations Board The four engineers fired by Google just before Thanksgiving for allegedly e-stalking co-workers have said they will file a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board claiming they were subject to an illegal intimidation campaign.…

We sat through a three-hour AWS lecture so that you didn't have to re:Invent In a three-hour keynote at the re:Invent conference under way in Las Vegas, AWS CEO Andy Jassy took pops at competitors (especially Microsoft) and announced a wide range of new services, spanning compute, database, storage and machine learning.…

Sergey leaves his first love… again The co-founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, have announced they are stepping down from their respective CEO and president roles of parent company Alphabet – and handing over to Google's current CEO Sundar Pichai.…

Don't be Stalin, you only have until July, thanks to new law Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed off on the law requiring most electronics sold in the country to be pre-bundled with domestically produced software.…

...nd its nt evevn lunchteim yt On Tuesday Qualcomm teased three upcoming Snapdragon system-on-chips at its aptly named Snapdragon Tech Summit in Hawaii.…

Homeland Security also clamping down on H1-B visas The Trump Administration is planning to fast-track a new policy of compulsory facial recognition at the border, and including US citizens and permanent residents in its plans for the first time.…

Amazon cloud teases Graviton2 tech re:Invent In conjunction with its re:Invent show in Las Vegas this week, Amazon Web Services offered a preview of the next iteration of its Arm-compatible EC2 instances, which it will use its customized Graviton2 processors.…

Got a phone for The Reg to stroke a claw across, Roberto? Escobar Inc, the company founded by the brother of late Colombian pharmaceutical executive, Pablo Escobar, has announced it’s getting into the handset business. Welcome to 2019, where that’s a completely normal and factual sentence.…

China is so last year. America (tech giants) first The spectre of warehouses full of cheese, champagne and handbags looms over whomever wins the UK's December General Election and has to oversee the country's own upcoming Digital Services Tax, come April 2020.…

Firm touts self-service portal GreenLake Central in Munich The cost and plate-spinning skills of managing multi-vendor public cloud services and an on-premises environment are enough to test the nerves of any IT manager. HPE reckons it has hit upon a solution – though it has some obvious limitations.…

From 'boy genius' to 'oh boy' Exclusive Den Automation, the once-promising UK smart home startup that raised nearly £4.5m via equity crowdfunding and boasted former Amstrad chief Bob Watkins as CEO, has agreed to go into liquidation, The Register can report.…

Security a popular topic at Las Vegas event re:Invent At its re:Invent event under way in Las Vegas, Amazon Web Services (AWS) dropped the veil on a new tool to help customers to avoid spewing data stored on its S3 (Simple Storage) service to world+dog.…

The 'Hub is not really about Git any more, says Fossil architect The mind behind the SQLite open-source database and Fossil SCM bug-tracking system had a lot to say about his recent meeting with the GitHub team.…

New decade, independent geo-time keeping The US-based GPS, a network of more than 30 satellites, is used by millions of phones, handsets and other devices in this country, for satellite mapping, navigation and communications technology.…

Shipped from expensive shop X? In the shed, you say? Researcher spots badness Parcel wrangler Yodel has caulked up a security hole in which random user data leaked to people using its Android app.…

Fixing the unfixable – AMS-02 gets a new pump The European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA astronauts have concluded the third, and arguably most challenging, of the four spacewalks required to replace the cooling system of the International Space Station's (ISS) Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS)…

Anger rises over ten-figure sale of registry Analysis The price tag for one of the internet’s largest and most important domain-name registries has finally been revealed: $1.135bn.…

Because eight billion euros just ain’t enough The European Commission has confirmed it is carrying out yet another investigation into whether Google has abused its market position, this time digging into the search giant’s data collection around local search and ads.…

Photosynthesis alone ain't going to cut it as an explanation The chemical reaction that produced the outburst of oxygen on Earth was sparked by volcanoes belching carbon dioxide after a major tectonic plate shifted about 2.5 billion years ago, according to the latest research.…

Online tracking report explores persistent privacy problems As the sacred shopping season gets underway, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has issued a report detailing the privacy cost of surveillance-based commerce.…

Don't call it a comeback, I've been here for years Imagination will today launch the tenth generation of its PowerVR family, with GPU cores aimed at rendering 3D graphics and other imagery for all sorts of stuff, from phones and cars to PCs and servers.…

Feds tell senator that age-filter toy a possible security risk Netizens who fire up FaceApp for fun may be unknowingly putting national security at risk, according to the FBI.…

DeepComposer is certainly no maestro re:Invent Amazon is releasing DeepComposer, a software package to help machine learning enthusiasts automatically generate jingles using a mini keyboard.…

TrueDialog, Mixcloud, Magento Marketplace expose accounts Thanksgiving is an ideal time to either hack (IT admins need holidays too) or to drop news of hacks (because no one's reading much news) so here's your roundup of the weekend's shenanigans.…

Rent-a-server biz readies week-long fanboi rally re:Invent In advance of its Las Vegas-based re:Invent confab this week, Amazon Web Services announced a handful of additions to a product menu that at last count included more than 165 distinctive ways to be billed.…

Aw man, I was still downl...err.. great work everyone! Europol says its latest piracy takedown netted three arrests and more than 30,000 website takedowns.…

Modem biz sale was made 'at a multi-billion dollar loss,' complains Chipzilla Apple's acquisition of the bulk of Intel's smartphone business, valued at $1bn, was completed today against the backdrop of of a complaint from Chipzilla that the deal was done "at a multi-billion dollar loss".…

There's more than enough crap up there already Roundup As ISS astronauts get cracking with the next AMS spacewalk, take a moment to look back at the week in rockets. Arianespace celebrated its 250th launch, Russia and India fired off some of their own, and Rocket Lab spared us all more space junk.…

Hey contractor techies, the politicians really want your vote The UK's would-be chancellor of the exchequer has promised to review the extension of IR35 to the private sector – if the Conservative Party wins the General Election on 12 December.…

Video link request from September finally granted Julian Assange will be interviewed via video link by a judge investigating claims that a Spanish company orchestrated a spying operation against him while he resided in the Ecuadorian embassy.…

More than half won't pull suitcase from the attic for at least two years As the UK and Ireland SAP User Group conference opened in Birmingham today, customers of the enterprise software monolith gave their verdict on the cloud-and-AI platform S/4HANA.…

Mike Lynch currently in the UK facing HPE civil case The United States Embassy in London has filed a request to extradite ex-Autonomy boss Mike Lynch to face charges of wire fraud.…

Got a problem with $2.6bn deal? The CMA wants to hear from you The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is considering whether Google's takeover of Looker Data Sciences is likely to have a negative impact on the market.…

Plus: New Surface SDKs, Outlook as web app, Azure updates and more Roundup It may be 2004 within the bowels of Redmond, but the eyes of Windows 7 users are nervously fixed on 2020 as the end of support nears.…

Yes, we'll definitely use this for spreadsheets and charts and not video games, nope, no way The Register got its talons on Lenovo's monster monitor, the 43.4-inch ThinkVision P44W-10 curved display. Was it worth the desk space?…

Nudity, inebriation and a desire to see a band live on stage. The Christmas countdown has begun! Who, Me? Crack open the advent calendar, chow down on some stale chocolate and join us in celebrating the prospering of cheats with a Who, Me? featuring a reader very much on the naughty list.…

Arm yourself with the latest cybersecurity know-how Promo As more and more organisations move to new technologies, data thieves constantly try to find ingenious new ways of penetrating even the most well-protected systems.…

A better operating system thanks to Rust's combination of safety and performance? The Redox OS, written in Rust and currently under development, is only "a few months of work away" from self-hosting, meaning that the Rustc compiler would run on Redox itself, according to its creator Jeremy Soller.…

Competent corporate workhorse with a funky finish and a price tag to match Nippy, fixable but oh-so-scuffable. Lenovo's premium X1 Carbon ThinkPad has had an update, but is it any good?…

NatWest, RBS, FirstDirect and Ulster all on the fritz Updated UK banks Royal Bank of Scotland, FirstDirect and NatWest are all struggling to keep their websites up today, which is nice considering it's pay day.…