The Register

Startup now valued at $3.5bn Cloud data warehouser Snowflake has raised nearly half a billion dollars in its latest tranche, taking total funding to $923m.…

UK operators this summer look much like they did last year Monitoring biz OpenSignal has found no major gains in mobile broadband performance since spring in its latest quarterly UK survey [PDF] as network operators focus their investments more carefully ahead of the upcoming 5G spectrum auction.…

Pixel Slate: Nero for a Day Comment Common sense says you can't make a Veblen good out of a dumb computer terminal – but that isn't going to stop Google trying.…

DNS infrastructures still vulnerable to attacks The majority (72 per cent) of FTSE 100 firms are vulnerable to DNS attacks, nearly two years after the major Dyn outage.…

Take your foot off the accelerator, admins told VMware has warned users about an "important" denial-of-service vuln in ESXi, Workstation and Fusion that hinges on a problem with 3D rendering.…

Delay 'in the overall best interest' of Firefox users Mozilla has postponed its plans to distrust all legacy digital certificates from Symantec, spreading dismay in security circles.…

'Nauts safe, but the ISS may have to be abandoned The post-Space Shuttle era of reliability spearheaded by Russian space agency Roskosmos came to an abrupt end this morning as the booster carrying the Soyuz MS-10 spacecraft to the International Space Station failed a few minutes after launch.…

Middle Kingdom is a rising threat once again – research Infosec pros might have already noticed some familiar IP address ranges in their system logs – China has returned to the cyber-attack arena.…

Getting practical with machine learning and AI There are many ways machines can learn, but for humans nothing beats getting together with like-minded souls who’ve trodden a similar path.…

Fondleslabs continue to be borked by flaky firmware Unhappy Surface Pro 4 owners continue to fill Microsoft's support forums with complaints over an update that is leaving the touchscreen untouchable.…

Runs SPEC SFS 2014 software builds 25% faster than E8 Optane system Enterprise HPC storage vendor DDN has run the SPEC SFS 2014 benchmark 25 per cent faster than an E8 NVMe storage system using Intel Optane 3D XPoint drives.…

The spikey satellite is not for the faint hearted Exploring Jupiter’s moon, Europa, will be a treacherous task after scientists discovered its surface is covered in sharp icy daggers towering at almost 15 metres tall.…

The spikey satellite is not for the faint hearted, it appears Exploring Jupiter’s moon Europa will be a treacherous task, it seems: scientists reckon its surface is covered in sharp towering icy daggers.…

Oh, and there are 21 other vulns to patch It's time for Juniper Networks' semi-regular bugfest, with 22 fixes announced today, two of which carry a “critical” rating and should be applied immediately.…

The tech that is, not this made-up mystery Backgrounder IT infrastructure has become more complex as virtualization and private clouds have added more cream and sponge to the technology layer cake within businesses.…

The bad news: PC sales went down a little, says IDC It's time for the quarterly PC market predictions from analyst houses Gartner and IDC and, as usual, they disagree on the state of the trade.…

MikroTik. Stupid name. Stupid bugs. Get those fixes If you haven't installed a batch of patches for bugs in your MikroTik routers – and two thirds of owners apparently haven't – then stiffen the sinews and summon up the blood: you really need to update your firmware.…

Xu can play at this espionage game, Feds allege US prosecutors have unsealed charges against a collared Chinese national, accusing him of stealing trade secrets from American aerospace companies.…

Deal or no deal – what's in the bot? Artificially intelligent bots are notoriously bad at communicating with, well, anything. Conversations with the code, whether it's between themselves or with people, often go awry, and veer off topic. Grammar goes out the window, and sentences become nonsensical.…

Open-source suite defies doomsayers with millions of downloads Analysis Last year Brett Porter, then chairman of the Apache Software Foundation, contemplated whether a proposed official blog post on the state of Apache OpenOffice (AOO) might discourage people from downloading the software due to lack of activity in the project.…

Hack to thaw account freezes reported, fixed, hopefully never exploited Experian's website exposed to world-plus-dog the PINs needed to unlock frozen accounts, allowing crooks to potentially apply for loans and credit cards as their victims.…

Likely state hackers make do with 'living off the land' and going after tardy Office patchers A newly discovered spy gang is eschewing boutique attack tools to instead use publicly available exploits against unpatched systems.…

But Oracle shot first IBM has officially griped to a top US government watchdog about JEDI – the Pentagon's proposed 10-year $10bn single-vendor IT system for America’s Green Machine.…

350-year monkish mystery could be down to a merger Astrophysicists have finally solved a mystery lasting almost 350 years to uncover the first documented merger between a white and brown dwarf star.…

Finally, Jeff Bezos can sleep easy on his cash pillow Canalys Channels Forum 2018 The billions of dollars in ad revenue that Amazon is turning over each quarter will bankroll the capital expenditure of new data centre builds at AWS for years to come, sustaining the business model.…

Membership of WD's OpenFlex club has its perks Western Digital has invested in all-flash array supplier Kaminario, which supports WD's composable systems technology.…

That 60,000 patents in your pocket or are you just pleased to see us? Who would have thought it? Not content with signing with LOT Network, Microsoft has taken the next step in patent cuddling and joined the Open Innovation Network.…

That 60,000 patents in your pocket or are you just pleased to see us? Who would have thought it? Not content with signing with LOT Network, Microsoft has taken the next step in patent cuddling and joined the Open Invention Network.…

Hopes to lure new cloud-sniffers with location lockdown feature Google Cloud Next At the Google Cloud Next conference in London today the adtech company's enterprise tech arm declared that business clients would soon enjoy location restriction policies and other new tools of control freakery on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).…

Microsoft tweaks firmware for kiosks and users that love the power cord In news that will make Surface Pro 3 owners twitch involuntarily, Microsoft is fiddling with Surface battery settings yet again.…

Comparing Middle Kingdom's hacker forums to Russia's? Apples and pears Underground hacker forums in China and Russia are as different as each country's regular shopping bazaars, according to research from Recorded Future.…

RIP Verify. Finally It's official: the UK state's expensive-but-comatose digital identity system Verify has been taken off life support.…

Choosing your platform is just the first step If you're considering moving to a serverless architecture you might think the first step is easy, but the real challenges come with ensuring enterprise-grade discipline once you move into production.…

Choosing your platform is just the first step Event If you're considering moving to a serverless architecture you might think the first step is easy, but the real challenges come with ensuring enterprise-grade discipline once you move into production.…

UK information commish is investigating Employee benefits firm Sodexo has suffered a data breach exposing personal info believed to include names, email addresses and home addresses after its UK Engage unit’s internal IT systems were hit by malware.…

If it's not one DRAM thing, it's another As Intel battles to get on top of CPU shortages that have plagued its business in recent times, the world's largest computer makers are hunkering down for six months of tight supply.…

And Brussels sprout... Give it a chai, says Sainsbury's It's common knowledge that the British are a nation of tea drinkers but – yikes – Sainsbury's launch of pigs in blankets and Brussels sprout-flavoured teas ahead of the Christmas mania are a little beyond the pale brown water.…

Two Redmond wranglers sitting in a tree... Switzerland-based flinger of Microsoft licences SoftwareONE has announced plans to snap up IT services provider Comparex in a deal that will create a licensing giant.…

Sysdig's container runtime security project gets solid foundation Falco, Sysdig's open source project for monitoring container runtimes, is slated to join the Cloud Native Computing Foundation on Wednesday, becoming the first runtime security tool to be added to the Cloud Native Sandbox project, a home for early stage projects.…

Internet Engineering Task Force doc examines how to better protect authentication tokens Google and Microsoft engineers have pooled their efforts to propose a protection against what are known as "replay attacks".…

IT shifts from a back office to core of operations, says survey Half of senior IT bods across Europe agree that their departments are struggling to cope with new tech while keeping core gear running, according a recent survey.…

Sick burn, bro: attacker only managed to torch a window-sill Russian media is reporting that someone has tried to torch the notorious St Petersberg “troll factory,” linked with trolling Western social media sites, sparking a police investigation.…

Let's try that one again, says Redmond, after last week's operating system build misread timestamps The world now knows why last week's Microsoft Windows 10 upgrade deleted unlucky users' files: the software treated the default user directory as ripe for destruction, because it thought the files were elsewhere. The upgrade has since been pulled.…

Signs up NetApp as a reseller Commvault started its GO user conference in Nashville, TN, by telling attendees it had signed up NetApp as a reseller, made its main backup and recovery product available as a service, introduced bigger and smaller backup appliances, and said it has a complete new system management product coming, with AI helping it continuously improve.…

And how might this be done? Backgrounder Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) is a popular way to deal with complex server, SAN storage, and virtualization requirements with integrated, scale-out nodes that converge server compute, storage, and hypervisor technology in all-in-one clusterable elements.…

GAO report finds more holes than a Swiss cheese, and very little hope for improvement If you were worried about the state of US military security systems you might not want to read the latest audit. with such frequency, there was no reason to suspect an attack.…

Xiongmai's cloud portal opens sneaky backdoor into servers Yet another IoT device vendor has been found to be exposing their products to attackers with basic security lapses.…

Remember the days when you didn't have to charge your phone several times a day? AI can help developers design mobile phone apps that drain less battery, according to new research.…

Remember the days when you didn't have to charge your phone several times a day? Artificial intelligence can help developers design mobile phone apps that drain less battery, according to new research.…

Memory corruption flaw present in Android, iOS builds. Aaand it's been fixed WhatsApp has patched a vulnerability it its smartphone code that could have been exploited by miscreants to crash victims' chat app simply by placing a call.…