The Register

Well, if you pronounce it 'Vee' and not 'Five'... Anyway, instruction set to be touted under undisclosed license AI biz Wave Computing on Monday told the world it intends to open source the latest MIPS instruction set architecture (ISA) in the hope that fosters the development of more RISC-based custom chips.…

Animated tear-jerker awaits man who illegally shot bucks An outlaw hunter will spend not only the next year or so behind bars, but also must face regular screenings of the Disney film Bambi.…

Highlight: Ellison goes bananas over AWS Aurora noise Red Hat and Oracle both on Monday reported their latest financial figures. Let's take a look at how they fared.…

Just slightly better than coal in your stocking Roundup We are now firmly into the holiday season, the Christmas parties are kicking off, and folks are swapping their Excel files for eggnog, or something cliched like that.…

May your days be merry and bright, and may you all go patch your SQLite Google and other software developers have patched the SQLite component of their code after it was discovered it could be potentially exploited to inject malware into vulnerable systems.…

Money in form of loans and grants – but will it work or be wasted? Analysis The US government has added another $600m to the pot of money that is supposed to expand broadband internet access to rural areas of America. But it remains far from clear how effective the program will be.…

Kiwibot snack shuttle snuffed by thermal runaway A Kiwibot delivery robot unexpectedly self-immolated last week at the University of California, Berkeley, due a defective battery, the company said over the weekend, attributing the incident to human error.…

Fresh Senate dossiers detail influence campaign, flag tech titans' obstructionism Instagram may have been the most effective social media network for Russian spies in their effort to sway America's 2016 presidential election toward Donald Trump.…

Third of market to evaporate by 2021. Only nearline, spycam drives to swell In brief Number-crunchers at IDC and Wells Fargo are predicting that global disk drive sales will crash from 424.7 million units in 2016 to an estimated 284.7 million in 2021. Ouch.…

A preview of next year's .NET Framework also emitted The hardworking elves toiling in the corridors of Redmond loaded up Santa's sled with two more developer treats in the form of Python updates for Visual Studio Code and a fresh preview of the venerable .NET Framework.…

One-time Intel boffin Obit Friends of Timothy May have confirmed that the former Intel engineer and co-founder of the Cypherpunks mailing list died of natural causes at his home in California on Friday. He was 67. Bitcoin and blockchain, WikiLeaks, P2P software and information markets all owe a debt to the list.…

Crouching monkey, hidden leader of the free world A pair of boffins are in hot water after the image of president Donald Trump made an unexpected cameo in a paper on how to gather animal DNA from their poop at scale.…

But US firm must get specific on which trade secrets it claims were nicked – judge SAP has failed to have a copyright infringement and antitrust lawsuit lodged against it by Teradata thrown out.…

UK space specialist's holding company ups sticks for €11.2m Chippenham-based space systems specialist SCISYS has announced that it will trouser €11.2m as part of a contract to keep the Galileo project running.…

Great. Big Brother Watch claims tech had 100% fail rate since May London cops have been slammed for using unmarked vans to test controversial and inaccurate automated facial recognition technology on Christmas shoppers.…

Office nerd saves day with Dungeons & Dragons die When two candidates running for director of Byron-Bethany Irrigation District in California found themselves locked in a bizarre tie earlier this month, the authority sought to resolve the stalemate in a swift and decisive manner – by reaching for a D20.…

Yuletide cheer for Wing Commander Andy Green and the team In news that will bring festive cheer to fans of plucky Brit engineering efforts, the Bloodhound 1,000mph car project has been lobbed a lifeline by Yorkshire-based entrepreneur Ian Warhurst.…

It's not just about quality Research results Whether it's systems-level platforms and tools or full-blown business applications, you want the software your organisation depends on to run reliably and predictably. Our recent Reg survey, however, confirmed what most probably knew from experience, or could guess from press headlines – that software-related failures are far from uncommon.…

'Please stop... you're doing something to the radios' Who, me? Welcome all, to the merry world of Who, Me?, our weekly trip down memory lane for techies who want to get something off their chest.…

Plus: Listen to some new classical piano generated by an algorithm Roundup welcome to the last AI round up of the year; thank you for reading.…

Plus, Talos critical of flawed message apps It was pretty hectic security week, between the Sharpshooter malware attack, a massive Patch Tuesday, and yet another Facebook privacy fail.…

Complaint argues false pixels, notch, and measurements don't fit with ad claims Two iPhone owners sued Apple on Friday claiming that company misrepresents the screen resolution and screen size of its recent model iPhones.…

Scare tactic efforts may be the work of a single group Yesterday's 'bomb scare' spam campaign may have been a follow-up to another infamous email extortion effort.…

Says it will give people $100,000 to ditch their smartphone. It won't It's your lucky day: sugary soft drink maker Vitamin Water has said it will give you $100,000 if you are able to give up your smartphone for a year.…

Utter asshats pull seven-figure heist on Save the Children Foundation A group of criminal asswipes have managed to steal $1m from the Save the Children Foundation.…

Computers are getting better at generating pictures of humans. This will go down well. AI systems can now create images of humans that are so lifelike they look like photographs, except the people in them don’t really exist.…

Don't be daft, of course they haven't, we're still in Crazytown USA Analysis One year ago today, the FCC passed a controversial measure that undermined its own rules, passed just two years earlier, over net neutrality.…

Data gathering biz still having trouble keeping data secure Facebook on Friday apologized for a bug that may have exposed exposed private photos to third-party apps for the 12 day period from September 13 to September 25, 2018.…

Long-standing cloud enemies to do battle in the courts AWS has intervened in Oracle's lawsuit against the Pentagon's plans to award a $10bn cloud contract to a single vendor.…

But built-in email and mobile clients still works in progress Only months after reaching the 2.0 milestone, the independent Chromium-based browser Vivaldi has added a bunch of useful features.…

Looking for work? Spammers could well be looking for you Tinder for job-seekers ZipRecruiter has copped to a data breach after the names and email addresses of job-seekers were flung to the wind in a permissions screw-up.…

Orphaned cross-platform code students, your new home is Microsoft Learn Cross-platform dev darling Xamarin is to shutter its online University in favour of Microsoft Learn as its absorption into the Windows giant continues.…

IBM and Hitachi fail to surf crest of spending wave as rivals seize the day IDC's Q3 storage tracker numbers show a tier of the tech industry growing by almost a fifth versus the same period a year ago, though not all of the big players are keeping pace. Looking at you IBM and Hitachi.…

All the better to sell you stuff Smart speakers will listen for your farts, yawns and sneezes and analyse it to sell you stuff, a British AI company hopes.…

No one knows if recruitment system will be usable once contract ends in 2022 The British Army has missed its recruitment targets by between 21 and 45 per cent each year since 2013 because of a botched project with Capita, according to a damning report released today.…

You know, they've paid for the phone a few times over now... UK regulator Ofcom wants ISPs and networks to tell customers when their contract is up and inform them of better deals. The consultation (PDF) was launched today alongside a review of broadband prices.…

The Windows Christmas Jumper Day Update is here! Those whacky guys on the Windows team have taken time out from slapping plasters all over Microsoft's flagship OS to slip a special Christmas gift under the tree of the faithful.…

5G is like 3G, except this time they mean it Analysis 5G is a technical and economical miracle that you cannot help but admire. Soon our streets will be drenched in high-speed connectivity as all kinds of far-out radio boffinry get commercialised, productised, and deployed for something useful. Many billions of pounds of other people's money will be spent here. But the mobile networks are haunted by an awkward economic reality: for all the 5G razzle-dazzle, most punters just won't pay more for it.…

It's time has come Promo Technical work on the first spec for Non-Volatile Memory express (NVMe) began in 2009 with a first version released two years later. A decade on, NVMEe’s time has come.…

But y'know, maybe we will terminate positions post-merger if there's a business case Cloudera founder Mike Olson has asked staffers to turn down recruiters' advances ahead of the firm's merger with Hortonworks – despite acknowledging there could be layoffs.…

Surprise, surprise, the execs want someone SaaSy Mimecast headed up a crew of the usual suspects – which included Proofpoint and Microsoft – in the leaders' square of the latest Gartner magic quadrant that ranks enterprise information archivers.…

The user in this On Call would prefer we didn't tell... On Call How many sleeps 'till Christmas? We don't care, because here at El Reg, we count in On Calls, and we can tell you there are plenty to come, so fret not.…

Generate made-up currency in exchange for a different made-up currency Gamer hardware specialist Razer is asking customers to turn their graphics cards into cryptocurrency miners in exchange for rewards points.…

Cab hailing app accuses rival of predatory prices and fake bookings An early entrant to the cab-hailing app market, Sidecar, has sued Uber claiming the cab giant used predatory pricing and fake bookings to put its rival out of business.…

Extortion scheme gets national attention but not much in the way of funds Police departments around the US say they've been apprised of emailed bomb threats seeking payment in cryptocurrency or else explosions will ensue.…

*Okay so it will be here for another billion years or so but it's shrinking faster than normal Somewhere in the Cancer constellation lies a mini-Neptune sized planet that is disappearing at rate faster than ever seen before, according to research published in Astronomy & Astrophysics on Thursday.…

Congresscritters now have one less excuse for getting pwned The US Federal Election Commission has officially voted to allow members of Congress to use their campaign funds on cybersecurity protection.…

Wheeled robo-containers called Serve headed first to LA Delivery biz Postmates on Tuesday showed off a wheeled robotic box named Serve that should soon start showing up in cities around the US, carrying goods for customers.…

Ingenious device, or fake bomb from 1980s cop movie? Police in London have put away a fraudster who was using a bizarre homemade device to con people out of the contents of their bank accounts.…

Well, in one respect anyway Microsoft may have taken the decision to ditch the Edge's browser engine for Google's Chromium too soon.…