The Register

Your weekly dose of networking Coming off a long string of losses, Ericsson probably hoped to turn in some good news, but at its latest financial results, the company announced the sacking of 50 people in response to a corruption scandal.…

Plus: 7nm LLP, QLC, stacked RDIMMS and brainy drives Among a blizzard of news from Samsung's Tech Data, El Reg has spotted smaller processor nodes, FPGAs added to SSDs, stacked and cubed memory, quad-level cell flash and object-storing SSDs on the way.…

All working now says biz. No, no, no, no, say customers, it is NOT! An unspecified and “unexpected load” on its infrastructure broke the Smart Living Home app for a day, an apologetic Yale Security UK confirmed to customers yesterday - however the smell of failure still lingers today.…

Chipzilla has to go it alone or turn to a partner Micron has announced its intent to buy out Intel's interest in Intel Micron Flash Technologies (IMFT), the pair's flash and 3D XPoint foundry joint venture.…

Zuck and Clegg in Silicon Valley – no, it's not the latest Netflix satire Facebook has hired former British deputy PM Nick Clegg to head up its global affairs – a move that reportedly involved boss Mark Zuckerberg spending months “wooing” the Lib Dem has-been.…

Former Primary Data boss talks to El Reg about Hammerspace +Comment Newcomer on the storage software-as-a-service scene Hammerspace announced the general availability of its eponymous SaaS application this week. This software has been engineered using technology from Primary Data – yes, that Primary Data – applied to hybrid IT and cloud environments, providing a SaaS cloud-control plane.…

Spending watchdog slams transparency and record-keeping on major projects The UK's spending watchdog has said it isn't possible to tell whether the biggest and most risky government projects are doing what they're supposed to because of poor records and incomplete reporting.…

Sightings of Asian stink bug in French capital spike Oh, c'est mal, les punaises diaboliques sont arrivés à Paris! But before you pack the holy water if sojourning in the French capital this winter, you should know a clothes peg might be more suitable.…

Spies' fave data mining biz could go public as early as late 2019 – reports CIA-backed data-mining business Palantir is reportedly in talks with banks to take the company public for a blockbuster sum, and could move as early as next year.…

Case closed month after Apple coughs $14.3bn in 'illegal State Aid' The European Commission has decided to withdraw court action against Ireland over the delayed recovery of €14.3bn worth of back taxes that were ruled as illegal state aid, it has confirmed.…

JAXA and ESA in a tree, going to visit Mercury BepiColombo, the first mission to Mercury for the European Space Agency (ESA), is due to lift off tomorrow morning at 0145 UTC on an Ariane 5 rocket.…

Continuous Lifecycle London ‘19: Call for papers closes tonight Events If you want to tell hundreds of your peers how you've used DevOps, containers, continuous delivery or agile to improve your software operations, be quick - the call for papers for Continuous Lifecycle London closes tonight.…

Both parties accuse each other of IP theft CNEX Labs co-founder and CTO Yiren Ronnie Huang have accused Huawei and its subsidiary Futurewei of engaging in industrial espionage to steal CNEX's SSD intellectual property.…

'Do not disturb' mode isn't for you, it's for the rest of us Something for the Weekend, Sir? Hold down the Shift key as you drag the vertical divider horizontally, and you find that you can adjust the column width in your table without changing the……

Was your anti-surveillance letter sinkholed? Write a blog about it Seemingly annoyed at being ignored, an anonymous person claiming to be an Amazon employee has repeated demands for the online behemoth to stop selling its Rekognition product to American police agencies.…

Techie called in after computer always starts the day with a go-slow On-Call Welcome once more to On Call, The Register’s regular foray into the freaky world of tech support.…

Never-closed browsers and persistent session tickets make tracking a doddle Analysis Transport Layer Security underpins much of the modern internet. It is the foundation of secure connections to HTTPS websites, for one thing. However, it can harbor a sting in its tail for those concerned about staying anonymous online.…

Quadcopter slinger rudely palms folk off to .apk download Drone manufacturer DJI is under fire because the "Get it on Google Play" button on its website for its smartphone app does anything but that.…

Turns out getting diet advice from popular internet images is a bad idea Plus-sized pea-brained progenies, sorry, impressionable youths pile on the pounds because they're using internet memes as a handbook for living life.…

Targeted ads, coming to a galaxy nowhere near you Google Cloud has teamed up with NASA’s Frontier Development Lab to search for extraterrestrial life using simulations and machine-learning technology.…

Also: AWS talks how to avoid TLS state machine slips Network box maker F5 says it has shipped load balancers that are vulnerable to the libssh authentication-bypass bug – meaning anyone who can reach the devices over the network or internet can potentially dive in simply by asking nicely.…

Internet piracy crackdown looms over Google and search engines, file-sharing sites in proposed legislation Australia's federal government hopes to expand the piracy-blocking regime it introduced in 2015 to include injunctions against search engines, include file drop-sites in bans, and catch so-called “alternative pathways” to pirated content that emerge after a primary site has been blocked.…

Five quadrillion solar masses – and you'll need a Farcaster to get there An international team of astronomers have stumbled upon the largest and oldest galaxy supercluster found to date, measuring more than four quadrillion solar masses.…

El Reg vulture gets his claws into Canonical's latest OS Ubuntu 18.10 is about to make its scheduled appearance: Cosmic Cuttlefish will take centre stage from previous incumbent, Bionic Beaver.…

Firmware update fingered for draining power as folks sleep Samsung Gear smartwatch owners are complaining the batteries in their strap-on gizmos are mysteriously and rapidly draining overnight – and it's only just started happening.…

He tells investigators: 'I was hacked!' Microsoft's former director of sports marketing has been indicted on five counts of wire fraud, based on allegations that he created fake invoices to defraud the software giant and sold its property as his own.…

Thrown in the small house rather than the big house An Equifax executive – who knew the biz had been hacked before it was made public and banked over $75,000 in stock trades using this inside knowledge – has avoided jail.…

German ERP giant's revenues up, operating profits down A successful quarter for SAP's cloud business has been tempered by a 6 per cent drop in profits and a dip in its share price.…

Star analyst uses 2020 vision to predict macOS move Apple will abandon Intel processor chips for its Macs in favour of homegrown Arm-based chips, according to a securities analyst. Formerly at KGI, Ming-Chi Kuo of KeyBanc Capital Markets, has a strong record of reliable Apple predictions.…

Learn to love the browser instead Microsoft loves Linux. Unless you are a Linux user who happens to want to use Teams. In that case, you probably aren’t feeling the love quite so much.…

What do you get for 50 per cent more layers? Not a lot Western Digital has a 96-layer NAND chip for smartphones and has spoken of higher embedded storage capacity while seemingly delivering exactly the same capacity as before.…

National Programme for IT Mark 2? Given the track record of project failures in NHS IT, some might say that Matt Hancock - former Minister for Fun who now runs the Department of Health - is marching with ill-founded confidence towards what he describes as a “tech revolution”.…

Promises 'truly game changing consumer product'... Please, not the Clippy mobe The phone startup founded by Andy Rubin – creator of WebTV, the Sidekick and Android – has reportedly laid off 30 per cent of its staff. Essential is still in the game, but only just.…

Irish eyes won't be smiling that much – operations and taxes are staying in Blighty As the wailing and gnashing of teeth over what will become of the UK space industry in a post-Brexit world continues, British firms are sidestepping the flapping of politicians and making their own plans.…

Talks to cover oversight, enforcement, US surveillance The deal governing transatlantic data flows – branded not fit for purpose by privacy watchdogs – enters its second annual review today.…

Army short of 5,000 grunts, MPs warned The UK Ministry of Defence could terminate Capita's disastrous military IT contract following confirmation that the Recruiting Partnering Project (RPP) was 90 per cent below recruiting targets for calendar Q1.…

Or at least uninstall some of the bits you really don't want Microsoft has announced that its customers will finally be able to remove more of the cruft that arrives with a Windows 10 installation. In 2019.…

Aww, ain't that sweet Earlier this week, Arm drew Intel into its warm embrace when Chipzilla joined its Pelion IoT platform. The Softbank-owned design house has said it's now preparing to release a Linux-based OS, taking advantage of the Intel-backed Yocto Project tools.…

Oh, and the £1.1bn Airwave extension hasn't yet been triggered The fine minds behind Britain's bungled Emergency Services Network comms system have admitted that its projected £200m savings might not kick in until 2020.…

(It's good news, really) Good news, Cisco admins: there are no bugs rated “critical” in this week's batch of security patches – but there are seven that copped a “high” rating, and four of those are remotely exploitable.…

Eclipse Foundation seeks to replace the Java Community Process for Jakarta EE The Eclipse Foundation, saddled with oversight of Java EE last year after Oracle washed its hands of the thankless business of community governance, wants to revise the process by which enterprise Java – rechristened Jakarta EE when Oracle declined to grant use of its Java trademark – gets improved.…

Man-made satellite to eliminate need for street lamps Video A Chinese businessman has announced plans to light Chengdu at night by launching an artificial "moon" to direct the out-of-sight Sun's rays down onto the city's streets.…

Chocolate Factory opens lid, just a little, on secure boot and crypto phone coprocessor People in the Googleplex need to talk to each other more: the Chocolate Factory has launched a third product with “Titan” in its name, and it's only related to one of the other two bits of kit.…

'No evidence' vulnerability was abused, though, we're told Tumblr today reveal it has fixed a security bug in its website that quietly revealed private details of some of its bloggers.…

Code-hosting biz tries out a more automated delivery process Analysis At its annual developer conference on Tuesday, GitHub unveiled a way to automate software deployment workflows called Actions. It sounds rather underwhelming, given all the different automation tools available, but the executives discussing it brimmed with Apple-level enthusiasm. Sam Lambert, head of platform for GitHub, called it "truly remarkable."…

Leaky AWS S3 bucket fingered by infosec bods Now, now, America. Don't go overboard. Again.…

Grubby Grubbs' grifting days are gone A programmer who wrote and sold software that backdoored PCs so they could be remotely controlled has been jailed for 30 months – and forced to give up his stash of 114 Bitcoins.…

So. Much. Glue. Torx twirlers iFixit celebrated the release of Microsoft's Surface Pro 6 by ripping the thing apart only to find that its still pretty much unrepairable.…

They don't *seem* so different if you check digits (though your real world results may vary) Micron's consumer SSD brand Crucial has pushed out an NVMe minicard flash drive that looks almost identical to Intel's 600p.…

Cloud comms upstart touts more authentic engagement through artificial intelligence At its Signal show in San Francisco, California, today, cloud comms biz Twilio intends to debut a chatbot platform called Autopilot for creating chatty software agents suitable for integration with a variety of services, including interactive voice response (IVR) systems, SMS, chat, Alexa, Slack, and Google Assistant.…