The Register

Joss sticks lit at the Open Infrastructure Summit OpenStack executive director Jonathan Bryce took to the stage of the open source outfit's shindig in Denver, Colorado this week with a message of collaboration, openness and... clowns.…

£500k social network scotched less than two weeks after launch Who, Me? Are you hoping to make it through the week without a major balls-up? El Reg's fingers are crossed for you – but remember, not everyone is that lucky.…

Quick-fire summary of the past few days of news Roundup Welcome back, Brits, from your three-day Bank Holiday week. Allow us to catch you up on recent infosec comings and goings.…

Meet South America's Stoned Henge Pic Humans have been tripping off hallucinogens for at least a millennium, according to a crew of archaeologists who discovered a 1,000-year-old pouch of mind-bending drugs in a Bolivian cave.…

Browser-based access to hosted code environments. Plus: .NET 5 and GitHub-Azure Active Directory sync Build At its Build conference in Seattle on Monday Microsoft highlighted a handful of enhancements to its developer portfolio, including a preview of a pending browser-based development environment called Visual Studio Online (VSO).…

IntelliCode kinda available, online text editor to suggest sentence rewrites Build Microsoft today announced various AI-related tools during its annual Build developer conference in Seattle.…

Sanders blasts John Deere in John Deere-buying country A person's "right to repair" their own equipment may well become a US election issue, with presidential candidate Bernie Sanders making it a main talking point during his tour of Iowa.…

The cutthroat world of children's food in the spotlight After a year-long investigation, a top California exec has been arrested by the FBI for allegedly hacking into a competitor's website and stealing their customer data in an effort to ruin their business.…

Also: A new Windows Terminal is here and on GitHub Build The biggest news of Microsoft's annual developer get-together, Build, this year was the arrival of the Linux kernel as part of Windows Subsystem for Linux 2. Oh, and a new tab-happy Windows Terminal? It's in GitHub.…

Mozillans scramble over the weekend to undo damage On Friday, Mozilla detected a great disturbance in its Firefox browser, as if millions of voices had cried out on social media in annoyance.…

Woeful 1809 market share, Google warns testers off Edge, and we fire up Visual Studio once again Roundup Today, Microsoft's annual developer shindig Build kicks off in Seattle, USA. Ahead of that event, the gang still found time to tinker with Windows, fiddle with API packaging, and celebrate Solitaire.…

Which model is real? The top one? The one on the bottom left? Or the one on the middle? Roundup Hello, your regular AI roundup. We have a video of Mark Zuckerberg making a bad joke at F8, a neural network that generates fake whole human bodies, with their clothes on, and more. Enjoy.…

Find the expert or product you need in Frankfurt Promo The ISC High Performance conference is back, taking place this year in Frankfurt, Germany, from 16 to 20 June, and bringing together thousands of users and exhibitors with a shared interest in the latest high performance computing (HPC), big data, and cloud technologies.…

'I am the passenger / And I ride and I ride / I ride through the city's backsides' A man in Taiwan swallowed one of his wireless Apple AirPods while he slept but succeeded in retrieving the wayward earpiece – and found it still worked after its dark passage through the human body.…

Model X? More like Model XXX A blue-movie actress skyrocketed to internet fame overnight this week as a video of her having sex inside a Tesla Model X on Autopilot mode went viral on Pornhub.…

But for some, new additions to game are distinctly not OK It's official: you can now "dox" Scrabble players.…

Lets the President’s Cup Cybersecurity Competition begin! And may the odds be ever in your favor "A year after the White House eliminated the position of cybersecurity coordinator, President Donald Trump called for everyone else to do the opposite and push cybersecurity coordination through worker training and recruitment."…

US government lawyers reckon chief financial officer 'is an especially dangerous criminal' Prosecutors in the Autonomy trial in San Francisco are not holding back from demonizing a senior Autonomy executive…

Sudden flurry of forum posts leaves a few clues Programmers say they've been hit by ransomware that seemingly wipes their Git repositories' commits and replaces them with a ransom note demanding Bitcoin.…

But we've added networking features, OK? Bare metal cloud provider Packet, which specialises in services aimed at devs, has deployed infrastructure in Phoenix and Pittsburgh. This brings its total number of data center locations to 20 - up from just four in the beginning of 2017.…

Seagate's spinners stopping spinning more often, though Updated Cloud backup bods Backblaze this week cracked open another spreadsheet and fed it some log files, spitting out a bunch of fresh drive availability stats that show a mild uptick in Seagate drive failures.…

In Russia the internet regulates you Russia's internet iron curtain has been formally signed into law by President Putin. The nation's internet service providers have until 1 November to ensure they comply.…

Yes, yes, yes, we've told the ICO we are doing so, says HMRC Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, aka the tax collector, has agreed to delete five million voice recordings it used to create biometric IDs.…

As ways to build credibility go, it didn't help Autonomy Trial A witness for HPE who turned up at the Autonomy trial claiming to have been the British firm’s chief architect was forced to look at his own Linkedin page and admit that he was no such thing.…

Dyspeptic hyperscalers belch: We couldn't eat another bite for now, thanks Switch-making Cisco nemesis Arista Networks has reported a bottom line expansion in calendar Q1 financials, amid demand from hyperscale data centre operators, including Facebook - which recently unveiled a block switch developed in collaboration with Arista.…

One of two dark net marketplaces taken down by coppers as they cuff 3 in Germany, 2 in LA Three people have been arrested in Germany in connection with a dark net souk for drugs, dodgy documents and stolen data called the Wall Street Market.…

More entertaining than Myers-Briggs, about as useful as a bag of… sticks Poll Do you spend more time chatting at the watercooler than at your work desk? You’re probably a curious collaborator. Do you take pleasure in pointing out other people’s mistakes? You might just be a diplomat.…

Lawyer David Drummond and bean counter Ruth Porat get to sleep on beds of cash Google's parent company Alphabet shovelled $47.2m into chief legal officer David Drummond and chief financial officer Ruth Porat's pockets in 2018, amid another bumper year of litigation - and a sharp decline in ad revenue growth- for the Mountain View crew.…

No wonder it gave up its non-profit status The latest tax return forms filed by neural-network boffinry center OpenAI this year shows just how expensive it is to run an independent AI research institute without the financial backing of giant tech orgs.…

Learn the skills you need to fend off cybercriminals Promo The internet is full of hacking tools and bad guys only too eager to use them. To help organisations keep their precious data out of the criminals’ hands, IT security training specialist SANS Institute is planning an event in Amsterdam from 20-25 May, 2019, for cybersecurity professionals to develop hands-on skills to defend against determined and increasingly ingenious attackers.…

RIP: Chewbacca actor Peter Mayhew Obit Peter Mayhew, the actor best known for playing Chewbacca in the Star Wars films, has died aged 74.…

You've read through the terms and conditions, yes? Something for the Weekend, Sir? I arise with thoughts of robots having sex.…

Users can’t log in, start firing up the old Excel Updated Software management and automation service ConnectWise has gone for a liedown this morning for many users in the UK in what seems to be an EU-wide issue.…

Parched Itokawa was hiding watery tricks up its sleeve A pair of astronomers have managed to find water in an asteroid sample mined from the rocky remnant Itokawa, a type of asteroid previously thought to be bone dry.…

Creepycams are fine. Public just needs to trust us... I mean them, I mean private firms Opposition MPs have debated whether automated facial recognition technology should be used at all in the UK, after a pressure group mounted legal challenges against police use of face-scanning equipment.…

Investigation reveals shelves creaking under the weight of printed-out missives On Call All hail On Call, the beacon of light at the end of the long week's tunnel. Here, readers share their tech support triumphs and woes, from the infuriating to the fascinating, for your reading pleasure.…

Aluminium manufacturer accused of running 19-year supply quality scam Scientists at NASA have accused one of their metal suppliers of lying about the strength of its aluminium in a 19-year scam that caused $700m in satellites, rockets, and other parts to go up in smoke.…

Cognitive Services to assist fleshbags with tedious decision-making duties Build Ahead of next week's Build, Microsoft's annual developer shindig, the US tech giant is continuing its efforts to show it knows how to play nicely with others – as it preps a slew of updates to its Azure Cognitive Services.…

More consumer-friendly legislation killed by Golden State's politics Analysis A Californian law that would give people the right to fix their own electronic devices has been pulled by its author less than two months after it was first proposed.…

Technical term for today's three-hour outage is TITSUP: Total Inability To Support Users' Packets For at least the past hour or two, Microsoft's Azure cloud has been up and down globally due to a DNS configuration mishap.…

Got $3,500 to spare? No? How about $99 a month instead? Microsoft has unveiled a slew of technologies aimed getting its wares on the Edge, with a titchy SQL database and the developer edition of its Mixed Reality headset, HoloLens 2.…

Maybe it should be called World Password Shaming Day this year because, apparently, you suck If there's anything worse than having to constantly come up with and enter passwords, it's the idiotic way in which we all do it.…

Burning through the Amazon billions with rockets Jeff Bezos' rocket outfit, Blue Origin, was cock-a-hoop today as its New Shepard booster lofted a record 38 payloads to the edge of space, bringing the company closer to the day when it will strap actual humans into the thing.…

Calling all the ASIC snitches... A Mellanox shareholder is attempting to scupper Nvidia's efforts to buy the chipmaker for $6.9bn.…

Colo giant racks up the dollar bills by renting space to big 'n bulky cloud slingers The dark Satantic mills of the internet belched out more cash than they ever have for chunky data centre landlord Equinix in its calendar Q1.…

Help us form a more practical view Reader study Early responses to our latest survey tell us that a lot of readers are fed up with all of the sensationalist marketing and news coverage around AI.…

Alex Holmes, deputy director of cyber security at DCMS, joins Liam Maxwell at cloud giant Exclusive Amazon Web Services has hired Alex Holmes, the deputy director of cyber security at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport - another senior British IT government figure to move to the cloud biz.…

Good afternoon, is this Amazon? I believe the yarn we ordered has dissolved into some sort of powder Australian police say an elderly duo called them after unwittingly taking in what cops described as a 20kg (44lb) shipment of methamphetamine from the delivery person.…

Case will be heard over May and June Julian Asssange unsurprisingly told a judge today that he did not “wish to surrender myself” to a US extradition request.…

Blind bird ticket offer ending soon We’re thrilled to announce that Facebook’s Sebastian Riedel will be delivering a keynote at Minds Mastering Machines (MCubed), our three day delve into artificial intelligence, machine learning and advanced analytics this autumn.…