The Register

'Within the next decade we'll either have it or we won't,' prof tells The Reg A new type of memory that could make computers and smartphones far more energy-efficient, if it ever reaches production, has been developed at the UK's University of Lancaster.…

40 million British pounds goes to one brave supplier of replacement Surrey County Council is shopping around for a new £40m ERP platform as the existing SAP system has been running on in-house servers for so long it is in danger of falling over.…

El Reg visits Westcott and the Isle of Wight in search of more of Britain's forgotten rocket centres Geek's Guide to Britain It is difficult to trump the long-defunct Blue Streak missile development and test facility at RAF Spadeadam for a sense of historical ennui and lost opportunity. The sheer number and scale of the remains, their dilapidated nature and isolated location make it a place unique, depressing and awe-inspiring in equal measure.…

Behold the Frankenworkstation Who, Me? As the weekend recedes, be glad you didn't find yourself in need of a fresh change of clothes like the contributor of today's entry into the Who, Me? hall of shame.…

Hey, if it's good enough for AutoCAD... Code corner Like us, you may have heard a lot recent about WebAssembly. Today, freelance software engineer Ben James walks us through its creation, its current state, and the role it will play in the future of cross-platform development.…

Derided app framework ready for broader acceptance Analysis About 150 developers gathered at the headquarters of Slack on Friday to learn about Electron.js, the open-source, cross-platform desktop app framework upon which the IRC-for-hipsters client is built.…

Also, the most detailed brain map yet took 12 years, $40m to build Roundup Hello, welcome to this week's AI roundup of news that's beyond what we've already covered, and it's mostly all about facial recognition.…

Also, Cisco, Citrix emit patches, US army advises using Signal Roundup Here comes a summary of this week's computer security news beyond what we've already covered.…

DNS overseer accepts 35,000-signature petition... and then runs away It was only going to be one rogue member, then it wasn’t happening at all, and then the entire board of DNS overseer ICANN emerged from the organization’s headquarters into Los Angeles, blinking in the bright sun, to accept a 35,000-signature petition from those opposed the sale of the .org registry.…

Virtualization giant hit with massive tech blueprint verdict VMware is set to find itself a little lighter in the wallet after losing a nearly quarter-billion dollar patent-infringement case.…

DirecTV's Spaceway-1 to head off into the void before its batteries detonate AT&T’s satellite telly service DirecTV will push one of its birds beyond its geostationary orbit – before it has a chance to explode into a million pieces.…

Unpopular opinion: Adverts are a bit more distinct with this new style, but OK, internet, you win Updated Google is under fire this week for rolling out a new design for its desktop web search results in which advertisements and normal links look almost the same.…

Pretty much the most exciting thing to come out of Fast Ring Build 19551 Microsoft ended the week with a fresh build of Windows 10 and, slightly worryingly, the killing of a Progressive Web App (PWA) project "due to some technical limitations."…

Can you hear the cloudy cash registers ringing? Atlassian, continued its march into megabucks territory with a 37 per cent year-on-year rise in revenues for the quarter as subscriptions led the way.…

Develop on Windows, deploy to Linux: an increasingly common pattern Microsoft's second preview of Visual Studio 2019 16.5, freshly flung out this week, has better Linux support for C++ developers and also includes a new designer for Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).…

Change your passwords, ye scurvy-free non-landlubbers The Royal Yachting Association (RYA) has told members that "an unauthorised party" may have pilfered a database containing personal information from 2015.…

Punters can still run old and new gear on same network, for now Sonos has said it will continue to support legacy products in an apparent reversal of a statement made earlier this week.…

Here's what Met top brass told the press this morning In depth London's Metropolitan Police is to start routinely deploying facial-recognition tech across the English capital despite legal and public opinion challenges, the force declared this morning.…

'Its life doesn't have to end!' More than 10 years on from its campaign to persuade users to dump Windows 7 for a non-proprietary alternative, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has kicked off a petition to urge Microsoft to open-source the recently snuffed software.…

From Screw you, Brits... to Up yours, Delors... Perhaps predictably, Apple has hit out against the European Parliament's renewed calls for a common charging standard. Its battle call? "It'll stifle our profits innovation."…

Courtesy of Species360 (not a move by Microsoft into the zoology space) Is your team flinging poo at visitors to your business? There's a cloud for that – as long as those doing the flinging are literal monkeys.…

TUPE or not TUPE? That is the question. Unison calls on lawyers ahead of 30 June D-Day IBMers who provide tech services to ScottishPower have voted "overwhelmingly" for industrial action in a consultative ballot over deepening uncertainty surrounding their jobs.…

And what about my buttocks, eh? Something for the Weekend, Sir? It's that hum in the office. It's getting to me.…

Hadoop slinger's big bet joins list of rivals doing the same thing When Hadoop distributor Cloudera marked a year since it signed off its merger with rival Hortonworks with the appointment of a new CEO, it was hardly a glowing endorsement of the strategy so far.…

Polishing balls for mates is no way to make a living On Call Welcome to an On Call with a difference. Today The Register retells a story familiar to all too many readers: "You know about computers, right?"…

Some engineers are just better than others... at being noticed The idea that some software developers matter more to coding projects than others is controversial, particularly among open source projects were community cohesion and participation can suffer if contributors are not treated fairly.…

'These models should not go into clinical practice at all,' academic tells El Reg A surprising number of peer-reviewed premature-birth-predicting machine-learning systems are nowhere near as accurate as first thought, according to a new study.…

Now 29-year-old faces years in the clink after long battle to bring him to justice A 29-year-old Russian scumbag has admitted masterminding the Cardplanet underworld marketplace as well as a second forum for elite fraudsters.…

What do we want?! $100. When do we want it? As soon as we finish this shift Protesters rallying outside court in Vancouver, Canada, this week in support of embattled Huawei finance chief Meng Wanzhou turned out to be paid actors – who said they thought they were extras for a film or music video.…

'Closed source' blueprints available for all to gawp at – and potentially exploit Source code, internal user names and passwords, and private keys, for the website and online account systems of Canadian telecoms giant Rogers have been found sitting on the open internet.…

Just don't mention the FPGAs Intel on Thursday reported $20.2bn revenue for the fourth quarter of 2019, a gain of eight per cent year-on-year, and $72bn for the full-year, a two per cent increase.…

This is Windstream, going dark... US ISP Windstream says a video game update is to blame for an outage affecting its business VOIP service earlier this week.…

Both the hero we need and the hero we deserve News has reached Vulture Central of a US resident's attempt to have his beer registered as an emotional support animal in the hope of bringing the amber nectar onboard public transport.…

The dirty dozen... well, almost Updated Xerox is done playing mister nice guy – the company has named a slate of directors it wants to shoehorn onto HP's board to spearhead its £33bn hostile takeover bid.…

MP claims HPE vs Autonomy High Court trial has cost £40m to date Ex-Cabinet minister David Davis has called for former Autonomy exec Mike Lynch's potential US extradition to be halted – at least until judgment in the lengthy UK civil case brought against him by HPE.…

Only up for five hours, but that's plenty of time for the wrong person to spot it Updated An Amazon Web Services engineer published exchanges with customers and "system credentials including passwords, AWS key pairs, and private keys" to a public GitHub repository by accident.…

Don't want to incriminate yourself? Tough luck, you terrorist The Government Reviewer of Terrorism Laws has declared that safeguards protecting Britons from police workers demanding passwords for their devices must be watered down.…

New SDK shows both potential and challenge of the new Surface devices Microsoft has released a preview SDK for its forthcoming Android Surface Duo device, and has confirmed a Developer Day on February 11th when the SDK for the Windows dual-screen Surface Neo will be previewed.…

Bye-bye Kohsuke Kawaguchi Kohsuke "Father of Jenkins" Kawaguchi is taking a step back from the DevOps tooling he created as he ventures into startup territory.…

Yep, the Verizon that sold subscribers' location data Verizon has slung out a new, privacy-focused search engine in an effort to win over customers who prefer not to have their browsing habits tracked by ad-slingers and the like.…

Shades of Saturn V as Artemis I inches closer to launch Engineers have lowered NASA's monster SLS core stage into the B-2 Test Stand at the agency's Stennis Space Center.…

Weren't you going to use it for 'continuous improvement'? Pub and hotel company Fuller’s has decided to ditch its Infor ERP system and search for a simplified accounts package a year after selling its brewing division to Japanese beverage biz Asahi for £250m.…

Open-source distributed system teaches bots to find their way without a map, just cam, GPS, compass A reinforcement-learning algorithm was open-sourced this week by Facebook that can train AI bots to navigate simulations, with each droid armed with just a camera, GPS, and a compass – and no map.…

So give him a call FFS Like the unfortunate soul who finds himself being loaded onto a cart of plague victims in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a bloke from Forfar in Scotland has had to declare himself "still alive" after finding his name on a headstone in a local graveyard.…

Innovation freedom may not be so free if US Supreme Court rules Google ripped off Oracle's Java APIs Column Later this spring, the US Supreme Court will hear Google v Oracle. This is the final appeal of a decade-long case in which Oracle claims Google stole the Java application program interface (API) structure that defines how programs interact with Java's own libraries. That Google reproduced the API in Android is not in doubt; until Oracle kicked up a stink, it was also not in doubt that APIs could not be copyrighted.…

Well, AWS hopes you will because they're doing AI/ML/etc for it New tech-driven Six Nations stats will "show you which teams are really clinical" at making line breaks inside the opposition's 22, England rugby legend Will Carling has told The Register.…

Macron suspends cyber levy plan after The Donald has a quiet word French President Emmanuel Macron has confirmed his country will suspend its plan to slap a digital tax on tech giants after threats from US president Donald Trump to impose trade tariffs.…

Handy FireEye tool roots out indicators of compromise Citrix and FireEye have released a new security tool to help admins find out if their servers have been hacked via the high-profile CVE-2019-19781 flaw that was disclosed in December but only patched on Monday.…

Space prang rose temperatures, melted glaciers, influenced climate, next thing we know: we're sharing AI-filtered selfies on Insta Pic Scientists studying minerals in the Yarrabubba crater in Western Australia have confirmed the giant pit was formed when an asteroid struck Earth 2.229 billion years ago, making it the oldest impact site yet found on our planet.…

We say take off and nuke the entire codebase from orbit. It's the only way to be sure To mark the arrival of the Chromium-based Microsoft Edge browser, Microsoft software engineer Eric Lawrence, who helped shift Edge to its Google-driven open source foundation, issued a plea to Windows users to let go of Internet Explorer.…