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Plus machine systems can trounce humans at Quake III flag captures Roundup Let's get right to it: here's your latest roundup of recent machine-learning related news beyond what we've already reported.…

Heaven forfend, someone had to use their actual TV speakers Owners of Bose kit are filling support forums with moans that a recent firmware update has introduced a deeply irritating crackling noise to "the world's best performing soundbar".…

Plus a punched card reader and some extra manuals Big congratulations to Adam Bradley and Chris Blackburn, who have raised enough cash to get their rescued IBM 360s back from Nuremberg.…

Hey – watch where you're pointing that code! Who, Me? A fresh week means a fresh story to add to The Register's regular hall of shame where hapless techies tell tales of in-the-field slip-ups: welcome to Who, Me?…

Another week of security mishaps is in the books Roundup Here's a quick summary of news in the world of information security beyond everything we've already covered.…

Unlucky netizens struggle to connect to web giant suffering from 'network congestion' Google is right now recovering from a multi-hour outage that knocked several of its internet services offline for unlucky netizens on Sunday.…

Server hoster apologizes, undoes system slaying after washing away AI org Nicolas Beauvais, the CTO of a two-person AI startup called Raisup, raised a ruckus on Twitter on Friday to revive his company and it worked.…

What a radical idea Maine is about to become the latest US state to – and get this – mandate that ISPs obtain subscribers' permission before selling their data to advertisers.…

Popular admin tool shifts to .Net Core 3.0 amid talk of future features Microsoft on Thursday released a preview version of PowerShell 7, its command-line shell and scripting language for administrators. The software was once was limited to Windows but opened up to Linux (including arm64) and macOS three years ago.…

Nothing to see here, pervs – it is all in your mind Attempts by the US Air Force to keep up with its Navy pilot rivals in the fine art of contrail cock drawing is nothing of the sort, according to service flacks.…

Mad dash stalled growth and screwed revenue targets Subscriptions is the nirvana that tech vendors are trying to journey towards since investors love predictability. For hyperconverged bigwig Nutanix, it has proved to be something of a challenge but for all the wrong reasons.…

Deadline for offers is June 14 MapR Technologies, once a shining star of the emerging big data analytics set with a valuation of more than $1 billion, has two weeks to find an investor. Failure to do will see the software developer shutter its HQ and terminate 122 staff, including founder and CEO John Schroeder.…

Hot in that waistcoat, innit, Gareth Southgate? RotM The Football Association - which governs competitive football in England - has fallen prey to the rise of the player analytics machines, having thrown its lot in with Google's public cloud and associated tools.…

Let's not talk about the $48bn debt pile Sagging server market demand, protracted chip shortages and the US’ tariff shenanigans with China are among the things Dell Tech is watching with interest after lowering fiscal ’20 revenue targets.…

Plus market's slow to swallow gear, especially storage. Hmmf. At least Huawei 'ban' won't hurt too much Storage and semiconductor maker Marvell Technology Group played down the impact of the effective ban on selling chips to Huawei as it filed losses of $21m for the quarter ended 4 May.…

Show us what you knew and when, shareholders demand A court in Delaware has backed investors who want to see internal emails and other documents relating to how Facebook handed data on 50 million users to Cambridge Analytica.…

Case being heard in US, but disties in Middle East, Europe warn delays will go on till at least August Exclusive A courtroom showdown over a patent infringement allegation that Fujifilm brought against Sony is crippling supply of LTO-8 tape media stateside and further afield, and a resolution doesn't appear to be imminent.…

Sorry, wrong Eton – the power distribution specialist says rent out battery capacity to the grid Power distribution specialist Eaton has kicked off a pilot project in Ireland that uses data centre UPS systems to help power the grid in periods of peak demand, to avoid grid-level outages.…

Now they're withdrawing co-operation too Following disquiet over the IEEE's decision to block Huawei-linked researchers from doing various academic tasks, a Chinese computer research body has reportedly severed ties with the IEEE in retaliation.…

If you've bought a Foxes shirt lately, check your statements Leicester City Football Club has quietly told people who bought stuff from its website that their financial details have been stolen by hackers – and those details include credit card numbers and CVVs.…

Stock prices take predictable battering Minicab disruptor Uber burned a billion dollars in the quarter ended 31 March 2019, its first since going public.…

Impressive indie is an emergent gameplay goldmine The RPG Greetings, traveller, and welcome to The Register Plays Games, henceforth known as The RPG, a column that will run on the last Friday of each month. All genres, AAA studios, indie devs, just out or decades old – nothing is off-limits, but it'll likely have to be something fun and hopefully even new to you.…

One for the money, two for the blow Something for the Weekend, Sir? "Thirty years ago people couldn't imagine online porn."…

Hyperscalers now leasing 81 per cent of new colo space in FLAP markets Cloud slingers are leasing larger chunks of third-party colocation facilities as they can’t build their own data centres fast enough in locations they need, and nowhere is this trend more pronounced than Europe.…

Repeat after me, better software costs less... Interview ThoughtWorks chief scientist Martin Fowler has written about the curious inverse relationship between quality and cost in the field of software development.…

Top tip for when no one knows which rack you need to look at On Call As the week draws to a close and we bite our collective knuckles at all the things that went a bit wrong, take solace in another tale about those brave souls charged with fixing stuff when it all goes squiffy: On Call.…

Sadly no HD video back in 1900 but restoration has worked wonders Video The first ever film of a solar eclipse, created in 1900 and once thought lost forever, has been found and restored by the British Film Institute and the UK's Royal Astronomical Society.…

Are you tired of being lonely? Do you want to find REAL love? Catfishing, the act of pretending to be someone you're not to deceive people over the internet, can be caught early on by machine learning systems to prevent fake online romance scams.…

Chrome extension creators and Drive app makers face pending API and policy limitations Google on Thursday announced plans to tighten its requirements for developers of Chrome extensions and apps that utilize the Drive API as part of a previously announced re-evaluation of third-party access to Google user data.…

Ad giant's site slurping tech complicates web security model, could give more power to search engines and social networks, Firefox maker warns Mozilla has published a series of objections to web packaging, a content distribution scheme proposed by engineers at Google that the Firefox maker considers harmful to the web in its current form.…

No policy to stop use of dodgy foreign network providers. You'd hope common sense would prevail, but... US government workers may be placing America's national security at risk as there is no official policy banning them from running their smartphones' personal and official internet traffic through untrustworthy foreign-hosted VPN services.…

Those stellar financial results last week. Yes ignore them Lenovo is eliminating 500 staff worldwide, including some in its US headquarters at Research Triangle Park in Morrisville, North Carolina.…

Oversupply blues set to continue into the second too Oversupply is a pain in the collective rear for flash suppliers – a price crash caused market revenues to slump by almost a fifth to $10.792bn in calendar Q1 compared to the prior quarter.…

Which then deleted all evidence – except this article Pics Today marked the launch of Britain's first 5G network – and also, as the BBC joyously informed us, the first telly broadcast made over 5G. But guess which company made the antenna that the Beeb used to beam its tech correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones into your bedroom this morning?…

EMEA shipments for calendar Q1 up 16.7% on last year. As for the rest of the market.... There is a flicker of positivity in the world of Apple hardware – iPads are flying off retailers' shelves again.…

Because those 80,000 codices are getting a bit oldy-moldy now The Holy See has upgraded the data centre used to preserve the extensive collection of historic documents held in the Vatican Apostolic Library.…

Auto-detects structured data... some of the time Amazon Web Services has announced the general availability of Textract, a service for converting scanned documents to text.…

Brit spies' idea would backdoor WhatsApp et al without breaking the crypto Bruce Schneier, Richard Stallman and a host of western tech companies including Microsoft and WhatsApp are pushing back hard against GCHQ proposals that to add a "ghost user" to encrypted messaging services.…

TITSUP* at Wynyard, Doxford bit barns leave finance clients with some free time – sources The dust is settling at DXC Technology following an outage at its Wynyard colocation site in England yesterday that hosts services for a bunch of FTSE 50 financial services clients, insiders have told us.…

US to smother the planet with liberty, whether we like it or not Logowatch Whether it's Puff Daddy to P Diddy, Sci Fi to Syfy or French fries to freedom fries, the US is the undisputed king of dubious rebranding exercises.…

High Street help with those Blue Screens of Death Microsoft will open its first bricks and mortar store in the UK on 11 July, located in London's Oxford Circus – just a short walk from Apple's shiny Regent Street boutique.…

This will be the PCIe 5.0, this will be the PCIe 5.0 PCI-SIG, the industry consortium that oversees the Peripheral Component Interconnect Express specification, rolled out PCIe 5.0 on Wednesday, promising speedier data transfers between connected computer components.…

Nanshou malware hijacked more than 50,000 MS-SQL boxes with rootkits More than 50,000 servers around the world have been infected with malware that installs crypto-coin-mining scripts and advanced rootkits, it is claimed.…

Folks reported non-functioning volume control in February, still no firmware fix in sight If you are fed up with shouting at a so-called smart assistant to make yourself heard, you must be one of the many Google Home customers who have lived with a less-than-stellar digital butler lately.…

Your repo's dependencies need updating to close a hole? We're way ahead of you, pal GitHub can now automagically offer security patches for projects' third-party dependencies.…

First gas giant spotted in the so-called 'Neptunian Desert' Astrophysicists have discovered a rogue exoplanet that has managed to cling onto its atmosphere despite lying fatally close to its parent star, defying all expectations.…

Class-action lawsuit accuses Cupertino of flogging personal info to marketroids Apple has been hit with a class-action complaint in the US accusing the iGiant of playing fast and loose with the privacy of its customers.…

'We hacked the results to reach one of the most difficult places: The top of the world’s largest search engine' Updated The North Face tried to sneakily replace images on Wikipedia pages with shots of models wearing the outdoor-clothing biz's clobber in an attempt to skyrocket to the top of Google Images.…

Secure comms biz says it simply follows the law – plus, there's always Tor Updated ProtonMail, a provider of encrypted email, has denied claims that it voluntarily provides real-time surveillance to authorities.…

OEMs toes the line for that sweet, sweet marketing moolah This week at Computex in Taiwan, Chipzilla finally shared the specific details about Project Athena – its valiant attempt to tell PC makers how to do their job.…