The Register

It's sing-along-a-Stob time Stob It's that time of year, in the northern hemisphere, when IT specialists reluctantly abandon their rugged, outdoor lifestyle, and gather around Mama's upright piano to sing some favourite old songs... with updated, satirical lyrics. Like these.…

RPC over TLS: You know it makes sense An Internet Engineering Task Force group has turned its attention to how Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) travel over the internet, and decided a bit of (easy) encryption is in order.…

HPC pusher bats eyelids at OEM flingers after biggest product refresh in a while HPC supplier Panasas has introduced a faster file system and non-proprietary hardware design in its biggest product refresh for a decade or more.…

Carmaker's unpredictable 'super cruise control' tech blamed for ton of close calls Tesla CEO Elon Musk asked the Tesla owners among his millions of Twitter followers last week what aspect of their electric cars they'd most like to see improved or fixed.…

Well, if anyone knows if he fudged it, it would be him The inventor of two patents that covers Ethernet switching products has been given permission to question the validity of his own invention.…

Another pair awaiting trial over slaying of Andrew Finch One of three people charged over the December 2017 “swatting” death of 28-year-old Andrew Finch in the US has pleaded guilty.…

Sub cable biz raises hand, 'fesses up to causing BGP hijack drama Monday's prolonged Google cloud and websites outage was triggered by a botched network update by a West Africa telco, it is claimed.…

Look, we're tired of doing these headlines too, but for there's patching to do Microsoft and Adobe have delivered the November edition of Patch Tuesday with another sizable bundle of security fixes to install as soon as you're able to.…

Xilinx Alveo cards added to platform list Liqid has added FPGAs to the list of compute resources its customers can use to compose workload-specific computing systems.…

Bio-boffins bet beastly bad bits bash bronchi Analysis Scientists are calling for more research into the effect, negative or otherwise, of 3D printers on indoor air quality.…

Hackers are lethal weapons, as in diplomatic... oh forget it The Russian government has denied having anything to do with hacking the US Democratic party in 2016, although in a court filing this week stressed that even if it did break into the DNC's servers, it is immune from prosecution.…

Wow, what a novel concept: 'Extensive internal validation' Is the Windows October 2018 update here again? Did it ever exist previously? Are we all in a feverish dream where the latest version, build 1809, is stable and fit for purpose, and Patch Tuesday was totally uneventful? Our finger hovers over the "no" button, but we live in hope of someone one day fitted a "yes" key.…

Brit user group presses for info and tools amid licensing fudge SAP has used its annual British user shindig to big up reforms to internal structures and licensing – but customers wary over indirect access won't be won over easily.…

Steady as she goes with 5G Vodafone's new group CEO has vowed to keep shareholders happy by continuing to pay out dividends in his first earnings conference, despite reporting a €7.8bn loss and falling revenue.…

2001: A Space Odyssey's villain raised bar for killer robot trope Canadian actor Douglas Rain has died at the age of 90.…

Data Protection Act isn't our only legal weapon, beams ICO +Comment A UK car industry worker who abused his customer database access to send data to telephone scammers has been sentenced to six months in prison.…

Rival AWS fluffs US govt cloud, pops up in Italy Playing catch-up with AWS and Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud has pulled the EU dust covers off its cloud onboarding appliance.…

Optimised Office 365 performance also on cards Cisco has claimed to be "bringing intent-based networking into every domain", the latest being branch offices which need software-defined WAN capabilities and security.…

On yer bike, CJEU tells Dutch dairy dealer The EU's highest court has rejected an attempt to use copyright law to protect the distinct taste of a food product.…

Relief is coming next year, CEO promises Remote Aussies getting their broadband from nbn™'s SkyMuster satellites have been promised a bit of bandwidth relief, with the company deciding to bundle some 'net traffic for free.…

When an offer looks too good to be true, it always is Chinese phone maker Xiaomi is in damage-control mode after an online promotion coinciding with its big UK launch somewhat backfired.…

Another way ISS 'nauts can send stuff home Roundup This week Rocket Labs launched six satellites into the nether, the British team on ESA's ExoMars mission had a think about where to land their rover on the red planet in 2021, and Japan helped successfully scrap a load of space crap.…

Let's lift our eyes from the balance sheet and take a look around... Arriving at a recent conference organised by one of the government's many regulatory bodies, I received my obligatory lanyard – and something else, credit-card-shaped, emblazoned with the branding for event. "What's this?" I asked.…

MariaDB boss says IPO is part of his 3-year plan Interview Michael Howard, Berkley grad and alumnus of Oracle and EMC, took the helm at open-source biz MariaDB almost three years ago. Reflecting on how things have changed, he reckons the biggest shift is in how both investors and enterprise have embrace open-source. Now, he has an IPO on his mind.…

Big names missing from 'Paris Call for Trust and Security in Cyberspace' America has aligned with China and Russia to scupper a France-led initiative to improve the internet's security. However, French president Emmanuel Macron has promised to battle on.…

Chrome Web Summit finds web apps still struggling next to shiny native counterparts If insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, Google's Chrome team might be a candidate for involuntary commitment.…

Clue's in the headline. And more importantly: Will anyone but Cupertino care? It looks as though Apple's iThings may get 5G connectivity in 2020 – after Intel promised production of its 5G modem will start in the second half of 2019, and ship in the first half of the following year.…

BGP attack committed 'grand theft internet' People's connections in the US to Google – including its cloud, YouTube, and other websites – were suddenly rerouted through Russia and into China in a textbook Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) hijacking attack.…

Arm gets a look-in with first petascale machine, China slips into third IBM can now officially boast it has built the world's two most powerful publicly known supercomputers.…

State-sponsored attack looks to infiltrate nuclear Air Force The Pakistan Air Force is the apparent target of a complex new state-sponsored attack campaign.…

While announcing new pilot project with antisocial network French president Emmanuel Macron has insisted that new laws are needed to limit and protect online content and the internet itself.…

Editorial oversight contemplated by article 13 creates too much financial risk YouTube, a company "completely sustained by pirated content" according to Google executives prior to its 2006 acquisition, is warning that a proposed revision of Europe's copyright directive could spell the end of online video sharing as we know it.…

4G version of Microsoft's budget fondleslab road-ready Microsoft has confirmed that a 4G version of its budget fondleslab, the Surface Go, will ship this month.…

Plus: Warehouse security, Alexa for all, and more Roundup Aside from the hoo-ha around Windows 10 licences suddenly being downgraded amid an Insider build update, last week brought Row-Level Security to Azure warehouses, Alexa's tanks rolled onto Cortana's lawn and Microsoft prepared to drop support for old versions of Xcode.…

Gartner's magical square: NetApp, HPE still winning, Infinidat joins leader's box NetApp has replaced HPE as the leading vendor in Gartner's general purpose drive array magic quadrant as Infinidat makes its first appearance in the top dog square.…

AWS boss claims consumer division has switched off Oracle data warehouse Amazon’s consumer business has switched off its Oracle data warehouse and will be almost Big Red-free by Christmas – at least according to AWS boss Andy Jassy.…

Initial 'suspicious activity' was full-scale data theft, it tells local lawmakers Fresh from belatedly admitting that 9.4 million passengers’ personal data was stolen by hackers, Hong Kong airline Cathay Pacific has now admitted that it was under attack for three solid months before it took half a year to tell anyone.…

MoD insists there will always be a human at the wheel The UK's Ministry of Defence is "actively" trying to create fully autonomous killer drones, according to a report (PDF) by a campaign group.…

Dying OS abandoned by carers Comment Although Microsoft officially supports Windows 10 Mobile, each update breaks new things – and it has reached comical proportions. Or tragic, if you're still using it.…

Faces off with Intel's Optane, says product bod Western Digital has been using software to turn SSDs into virtual memory so applications are accelerated without having to deploy DRAM or be constrained by memory capacity.…

As UK and Ireland user survey suggests awareness of 4-year-old S/4HANA finally on the up German giant SAP has slurped up "experience management" biz Qualtrics for a cool €8bn cash after reportedly persuading the firm not to IPO.…

CLL19 blind bird ticket offer expires soon Do you want to tap into the most up to date knowledge on DevOps, Containers, Agile and Continuous Delivery, and do it in the most cost-effective way you can. Well it sounds like what you really need is a blind bird ticket for Continuous Lifecycle London 2019.…

Critics warn it's complex and off-putting for international firms Critics have complained that the UK government's proposed digital services tax is complex, confusing and off-putting for international business.…

Damn, your expectations for fiscal '18 were that low? Dell Corporation's UK wing has reported a net profit of £22.77m on a turnover of £1.556bn, according to Profit and Loss accounts (PDF) for fiscal '18 filed with Companies House.…

Scrap the HiCrap and UI, and we'd have a winner Review When, four years ago, I predicted Huawei was coming to eat Apple and Samsung's lunch, derision swiftly followed. Either it couldn't, or it would take a very long time. For years, Japanese and Korean cars were nasty little tin cans, jokes on wheels, remember?…

Probably the best database recovery in the world Who, Me? The days are drawing in and the mornings are getting darker – so why not take a dose of Who, Me? to help lighten up your day.…

But don't expect one in your mobile phone any time soon British boffins have developed a self-contained and tamper-proof compass that doesn't rely on GPS signals to provide a highly accurate measure of where it is in the world.…

The week's other news in machine learning Roundup Hello, here is a very quick roundup of this week's AI goodies you may have missed.…

Loads of bonus infosec news for your weekend Roundup This week we had broken promises in China, broken keys in Steam, and broken ..err, everything in Apache Struts.…

So there is fife on Mars? Video Scientists in England have documented the five thousandth sunrise spied by NASA’s Opportunity rover in the form of interpretive dance music.…