The Register

To the death? Not necessarily, but the gloves are off As the world's boffins prepare to carve up the airwaves again next year, the mobile industry has stepped up the lobbying war over spectrum, fearing a crushing 5G disappointment.…

QA? We've heard of it It isn't just Microsoft that has QA issues – so does Apple. The Cupertino giant withdrew a watchOS update that bricked the Apple Watch 4 last week, and has now rushed out a replacement containing things that don't work yet which Apple probably didn't want you to see.…

Though you get what you pay for, mostly Brit consumers get a broadband bargain, but pay for it with poorer performance than other European countries.…

This is all about 'digital', gonna be so digital you could cut yourself on our services In a lurch towards “digitising” ops as part of the “transformation” scheme launched months ago, Lloyds Banking Group (LBG) today said it is creating 2,000 roles to beef up its “leading-edge digital banking” services.…

Fireworks night has been and gone. Microsoft stayed home The leaves on the trees are turning golden, a chill is in the air, and while the Windows 10 October 2018 Update remains locked in the fireworks tin, there seems to be movement for its sibling, Windows Server 2019.…

De-crewed? More like de-orbit if the ISS had to wait for Orion It was another busy week in space as Russia notched up a second Soyuz success, China conducted its 32nd launch of the year and NASA awaited the arrival of its first service module for Orion.…

Oh, and some exam boards might need to offer paper-based tests due to schools' crap IT kit Students starting GCSE computer science in 2020 may be assessed by exams only, amid concerns about schools' IT kit, burdens on teachers and malpractice in non-exam tests.…

Tax efficient biz makes 1.73 pre-tax profit % on £1.508bn local sales in fiscal '18 Salesforce's European limb last year coughed £5m in tax to the UK government - the business is registered in Blighty - as it made a 1.73 pre-tax profit percentage on a turnover of £1.51bn.…

Finds orgs sent marketing emails promoting each other without consent The Information Commissioner’s Office plans to slap fines totalling £135,000 on Leave.EU and Brexiteer Arron Banks’ insurance biz Eldon for “serious” breaches of direct marketing laws.…

Network admins really need to mind their MANRS Oracle has backed claims that China Telecom Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) announcements regularly take internet traffic on an unwanted tour of the Middle Kingdom.…

What's that coming over the hill? Is it ProcDump, a Linux ProcDump? Roundup Microsoft is looking to 2019 and tinkering with Skype as the Windows 10 October 2018 update continues its lonely wanderings.…

Antacid, anyone? Analysis Hyperscale customers went on a disk drive buying strike late in Seagate's first quarter of fiscal '19, ended September 28.…

There is no ghost in the machine Comment For the last few years the media has been awash with hyperbole about artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technologies. It could be said that never, in the field of computer science, have so many ridiculous things been said by so many people in possession of so little relevant expertise. For anyone engaged in cutting-edge hardware in the 1980s, this is puzzling.…

Most of the bang of the XS for not so much of the bucks Review Back in 2007, Apple convinced the world a phone that could barely last a day was OK. In 2018 it has set out to persuade the public that a phone costing £749 is somehow a bargain.…

The wheels of steel are turnin' and traffic lights are burnin'... A lot of vendors have looked to NVMe amongst the other cloud, software and hyperconverged tidbits in storage roundup this week, but let's start with some updates.…

Have you tried innovating your enterprise synergy today? Today marks the opening of VMware's VMworld Europe 2018 event in Barcelona, Spain. The Dell-owned virtualization giant has a bunch of announcements to kick off its shindig.…

It works for now because the forgeries are quite easy to spot The rise of AI systems that can generate fake images and videos has spurred researchers in the US to develop a technique to sniff out these cyber-shams, also known as deepfakes.…

Kernel release candidate adds support for two Chinese CPU families... will these be the final new CPU archs? The new, improved, and chilled-out Linus Torvalds emitted the first release candidate for Linux kernel 4.20 over the weekend.…

Hundreds gone from Switchzilla's Customers Experience division Exclusive Cisco has confirmed to The Register that it has launched a round of layoffs, slashing its Customer EXperience team, after some affected staff got in touch with us.…

Switchzilla's Customer Experience division experiences brunt of HR's 'limited restructuring' Exclusive Cisco has confirmed to The Register it launched a round of layoffs on Monday, effectively slashing its Customer Experience (CX) team, after insiders alerted us to the cuts.…

Beam would light up planets, lead furious ETs back to Earth Space agencies and private citizens spend millions of dollars and countless hours hunting for signs of extraterrestrial life. Yet, there may be an easier way to find intelligent civilizations, according to a pair of researchers from MIT in the US.…

No spittin', no cussin', either, Cali judge rules America's trade watchdog's case against network device maker D-Link will go ahead next January – after a district judge rebuked the two sides for wasting money drawing up and filing demands for summary judgments.…

Caucasian employees allege pattern of unfair treatment at Indian IT consultancy giant India-based IT outsourcing biz Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) will finally face trial over claims that the company discriminated against workers at US facilities who were not from South Asia.…

And Apple fixes Watch-killing security patch of its own Google today pushed out the November edition of its monthly Android security updates, giving carriers and device makers a fresh set of patches to install. Fingers cross the patches are rolled out to you ASAP.…

Why can't we all go back to being nice to each other, like in the Usenet and IRC days, er, wait... Comment The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is warning about the death of the web again, and urging people to come together to make the internet all nice and lovely.…

Security experts frantically facepalming at stupid design Fundamental flaws in the encryption system used by popular solid-state drives (SSDs) can be exploited by miscreants to easily decrypt data, once they've got their hands on the equipment.…

Enough with the abusive ads, says ad-dependent biz After the failure of last year's abusive web ad clampdown, Google will next month cut off revenue for websites that flout its rules against malicious adverts.…

Enough with the abusive ads, says ad-dependent biz After the failure of last year's abusive web ad clampdown, Google will next month cut off revenue for websites that flout its rules against malicious adverts.…

Even America's top court is bored of 'open internet' legal shenanigans The US Supreme Court has refused to hear a challenge to the net neutrality rules that were introduced in 2015, and which have since been rescinded.…

Home of McAfee and SonicWall slurps app security testing biz from Broadcom Thomas Bravo – private equity owner of McAfee and Barracuda Networks – has slurped cloudy application security testing biz Veracode Software, a division of Broadcom, for $950m in cash.…

Home of McAfee and SonicWall slurps app security testing biz from Broadcom Thoma Bravo – private equity owner of McAfee and Barracuda Networks – has slurped cloudy application security testing biz Veracode Software, a division of Broadcom, for $950m in cash.…

Whether you Periphery Under Cell or Core Over Periphery, it all means smaller chips SK Hynix has finished work on a 512 Gbit, 96-layer, 3D NAND chip with 1Tbit, and 3bits/cell (TLC) and 4bits/cell (QLC) coming later.…

Eleven areas will require people to prove identity in advance or on the day The government is to expand its controversial voter ID trials in next year’s local elections.…

Is Emmental? Probably a bit One Swiss chap hopes to get his rock and rollright by playing music to cheese to see if that makes it taste better.…

3.5 million fewer units shipped worldwide on Q3 Fewer and fewer people want to fondle a new slab these days with just 36.4 million units shipped worldwide during Q3.…

Don't want to consent? Law would allow firms to charge for access to products, services Company bosses could be thrown in jail for up to 20 years if they aren't straight with US regulators about privacy violations under a law drafted by senator Ron Wyden.…

Son of Gemini Planet Computers, creator of the Gemini PDA, has pulled the covers off its next-generation device – the Cosmo Communicator.…

Quantum boffinry, SS7 acquisition, Arista results Roundup Nokia this week announced an SDN-based open optical transport management suite of products for optical transport management, WaveSuite.…

Do you have a service, Heart, or is that web blackout all there is today? Webs will wobble and frequently fall down, but it is the way that cloud or hosting providers manage this that sets them apart. On this Monday morning, Heart Internet isn't distinguishing itself from the great and good in a positive way.…

Raise your security expertise to a new level Promo Information security training specialist SANS promises that its fourth European Security Awareness Summit will be its biggest yet.…

Everyone loves a manic pixel dream swirl Deep learning has become the go-to "AI" technique for image recognition and classification. It has reached a stage where a programmer doesn't even have to create their own models, thanks to a large number available off the shelf, pre-trained and ready for download.…

Jason Zander on cloud native, Red Hat, and figuring out open source Interview A curious feature of Microsoft's cloud platform is that it has two fundamentally different platforms for microservices. One is based on the homegrown Service Fabric, while the other is orchestrated by the Google-originated Kubernetes, available on Azure through the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Both are open source.…

Fire! Fire! Oh, er, maybe not... Who, Me? Welcome to the latest instalment of Who, Me?, our weekly confessional column in which Reg readers share their tales of historic face-palms.…

You broke it, you pay for it, one way or another Comment Trust the hybrid cloud, service providers tell us – they are, apparently, the experts. But when outages occur, and when data or virtual instances are lost or become unavailable, the impact is profound.…

The AP does not stand for 'AMD P**-off' In brief Intel will today talk up two new Xeon processor family members: Cascade Lake Advanced Performance (AP), and the E-2100.…

RCL chief David Levy is member of ACE2018 committee David Levy, one of the players in the Sinclair ZX Spectrum Vega+ scandal in the UK, has reappeared in the news – in connection with a gaming and design tech conference that invited notorious alt-right firebrand Steve Bannon to be its keynote speaker.…

Make sure you're spending your hard-earned cash on the 'right' IT security Comment One of the unpleasant developments of the last decade has been the speed with which IT security threats, once aimed mainly at large enterprises, have spread to SMBs – small and medium businesses.…

OpenAI builds curious bots and Nvidia's on the lookout for fresh ML talent Roundup Hello, here’s this week's dose of AI news. Google has promised to throw more money at AI research that benefits society, OpenAI developed a new technique to get bots to be more curious, and Nvidia has launched its own AI Research Residency Program.…

Plus, SystemD gets system de-bugged, again Roundup This week there were Hacked Home Hubs, buggered BBC Bits, and PortSmash privilege punch-ups.…

Here's our Top Ten pick of the best of Brits Poll This week the Bank of England said it was going to put a famous boffin on a new polymer £50 note, and has decided to ask the public who it should be.…