The Register

That's nice and all, but, er, a brain it ain't, no matter what the marketing suggests DeepMind researchers have developed a neural network loosely modeled on mammalian brains to craft an artificially intelligent program capable of navigating through mazes.…

What you need is a switched 'Spline', says Cisco-irritator Arista Networks has decided the campus network is the next place it wants to irritate Cisco.…

It's the anchovy pasta of Linux administration, it seems Red Hat Summit Senior Red Hat techies this week urged Red Hat Enterprise Linux sysadmins to give Systemd a chance if they haven't already taken the software to heart.…

More desktops. More boards. More ‘init freedom’ and a long-ish roadmap Devuan Linux, the Debian fork that offers “init freedom” has announced the first release candidate for its second version.…

China’s going to be super duper happy – not US sanctions against Chinese mobe maker ZTE have forced the company to go into zombie mode as it can’t get the electronic components it needs from American suppliers.…

FSF firebrand rails against purged abort() docs 'satire' Late last month, open-source contributor Raymond Nicholson proposed a change to the manual for glibc, the GNU implementation of the C programming language's standard library, to remove "the abortion joke," which accompanied the explanation of libc's abort() function.…

General Motors CTO chats to El Reg about robo-ride timings After several years of hype about autonomous vehicles – cars that can truly independently drive themselves – the big question has become: when will people other than beta testers get in them?…

First releases will be touch and go. If your hardware can handle it Google IO On Tuesday, Google told developers at its IO conference in Silicon Valley that Linux applications and command lines are coming to Chrome OS, showed off a few demos – and then shut up about it and published an information-light blog post. So, we decided to dig a little during the event today.…

Offers 15TB SSDs and AI-driven operations tools to weary admins Hitachi Vantara has updated its VSP all-flash and hybrid storage arrays and their SVOS operating system, and provided AI-based operations tools to make operating them easier.…

Too little, too late? Qualcomm is shipping samples of its third-generation wearable chip – the first to be built from the "ground up," it claims.…

Mac Notification Center sometimes clones supposedly transient notes Encrypted chat app Signal's disappearing messages may not actually vanish on Apple Macs, thanks to the way the encrypted messaging software interacts with the macOS Notification Center.…

Govt says non-clinical info will only be extracted in, er, loosely defined circumstances The UK government has partially backed down from ordering the NHS to hand over patients' personal details to the Home Office so it can track down illegal immigrants.…

♫ We're so bored with your USP ♫ Smartmobe shipments were down almost 7 per cent year-on-year in Europe during calendar Q1, according to Canalys, as phone fatigue hit mature markets hard.…

Plus: Russia's space head honcho launched out of his job NASA chief Jim Bridenstine has strangely compared previous attempts to return to the Moon to an old Peanuts cartoon.…

Scrolling Twitter more important than phoning home or anywhere else Web browsing ranks as the most important phone use activity, above making calls, a chunky survey by Ofcom has found.…

Swipe right to like then tap, tap, tap away Hands On Early developer builds traditionally require donning a hazmat suit, but as Android enters its middle age, Google wants everyone to come in, wearing Bermuda shorts, and kick the tyres like tourists.…

On-premises boost paired with public cloud blanket extension NetApp has announced a real biggie for storage wonks: support for Fibre Channel-based NVMe-over-Fabrics (FC-NVMe) access to all-flash ONTAP arrays using Brocade gear.…

UK watchdog to assess whether it breaches data protection rules The database London cops use to rank people's likelihood of gang-related violence is racially biased, a campaign group has said.…

♬ And motherdoctors act like they forgot about Dre ♬ A long-running trademark dispute between rapper Dr Dre and Dr Drai, gynaecologist and author of 20 Things You May Not Know About A Vagina, has been dismissed by the the US trademark office.…

Stopped at a service station? Tough – your self-driving car's just been bricked AEV Bill The British government expects that most future software updates to driverless cars will be pushed into the vehicles over-the-air without any user involvement.…

Meanwhile, corporate daddy Liberty Global flogs European assets to Vodafone for €18.4bn Virgin Media reported another quarter of low growth for its troubled £3bn fibre programme Project Lightning, adding just 111,000 premises in the first three months of 2018 – the lowest for the last four quarters.…

It's enough to make you pinky swear T-Mobile owner Deutsche Telekom is making legal threats against a small British business – on the grounds that the German company has an exclusive trademark on a shade of the colour magenta.…

Pull that Raspberry Pi out of the drawer and fire up the soldering iron A near perfect emulation of the 1541 floppy drive has been released, and you need only a Raspberry Pi and a soldering iron to rock the 1980s once again.…

Memory business deal could be sunk + Comment A delay in antitrust approval by Chinese regulators has stalled Toshiba's sale of its TMS flash business for $18bn to a Bain-led consortium - and analysts have said this might be best for the business.…

Remember when the US DoJ almost broke up Microsoft? No? The images from Mark Zuckerberg's recent appearances before two US Congressional hearings (here and here) tell a story about the drama of such occasions.…

US corp asked for extra time to file expert witness statements Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s civil lawsuit against former Autonomy chief exec Mike Lynch has been pushed back to next year, The Register has learned.…

Common Platform Programme at 'greatest risk' – as previously revealed by El Reg Ambitions to slash court staff by 5,000 and chop physical cases held by 2.4 million per year via digitisation are at "serious risk" of not being delivered on time, according to the National Audit Office.…

Visual Studio previews a world without 32-bit emulation Qualcomm and Microsoft will finally let developers start building native 64-bit Windows applications for Snapdragon-based PCs.…

And what's on Krzanich's mind? Data. Your data. Petabytes of data Comment Intel declined to comment on industry whisperings that Qualcomm is mulling ending its Arm-powered server processor efforts.…

Grab those patches while Chipzilla updates its manuals Linux, Windows, macOS, FreeBSD, and some implementations of Xen have a design flaw that could allow attackers to, at best, crash Intel and AMD-powered computers.…

Annual gabfest's big news is brand refresh and non-disruptive disruption LOGOWATCH ServiceNow’s ramped up its efforts to excite buyers and users beyond the IT department, with a new logo and a pledge to deliver consumer-style experiences in the workplace to change the very nature of the mucky business of exchanging your labour for currency.…

Will that bacteria just make you a bit ill? Or do hospitals need to roll out their spare beds? A team of researchers have developed machine-learning software that can predict how dangerous a particular strain of Salmonella will be, according to a paper published in PLOS Genetics on Tuesday.…

You talkin' to me? Google IO Alphabet's self-driving car outfit Waymo has announced it will start an autonomous taxi service in Phoenix, Arizona, USA, later this year.…

2nm chips! Custom silicon in days! Software-as-chips! Chipzilla's funding it all Moore's Law ain't dead yet, but Intel needs startups to keep it alive.…

Intel needs more time and it could be Q3 before all the patches for OSes and VMs land The new bunch of Spectre-like flaws revealed last week won't be patched for at least 12 days.…

Researchers infected devices and totted up all the 'leccy and bandwidth they used Berkeley boffins reckon the Dyn-based Internet of Things attack that took down Brian Krebs' Website in 2016 cost device owners over $US320,000.…

Plus a new limit of $10,000 on cash payments for anything - and cheaper craft beer! Australia’s government has tabled its proposed budget for financial year 2018/19 and as usual there’s lots of technology-related spending to contemplate.…

Scores of bugs, from Edge and Office to kernel code to Adobe Flash, need fixing ASAP Patch Tuesday Microsoft and Adobe have patched a bunch of security bugs in their products that can be exploited by hackers to commandeer vulnerable computers, siphon people's personal information, and so on.…

What happens when cabs go aerial next to an airport? They'll figure it out together NASA and Uber have signed an agreement to ensure safe development of flying taxis in urban environments.…

Look but don't touch... nor look too closely, either Google IO The latest iteration of Google’s custom-designed number-crunching chip, version three of its Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), will dramatically cut the time needed to train machine learning systems, the Chocolate Factory has claimed.…

Also reveals plans to replace Atomic Host with CoreOS Linux Red Hat Summit Red Hat has revealed a plan to to work with CPU-makers so that its wares can take advantage of in-silicon security features such as secure enclaves.…

Plus: Linux apps on Chrome OS start to emerge Google IO Google today opened its annual I/O developer bash with details of how it’s going to lob machine-learning software at everything you do online and offline, and it truly means everything.…

So happy for you, Microsoft, \r\n Windows Notepad users, rejoice! Microsoft's text editing app, which has been shipping with Windows since version 1.0 in 1985, has finally been taught how to handle line endings in text files created on Linux, Unix, Mac OS, and macOS devices.…

So happy for you, Microsoft, \r\n Windows Notepad users, rejoice! Microsoft's text editing app, which has been shipping with Windows since version 1.0 in 1985, has finally been taught how to handle line endings in text files created on Linux, Unix, Mac OS, and macOS devices.…

As JavaScript is popped into Excel spreadsheets Build During the second day of its Build developer conference in Seattle, Washington, on Tuesday, Microsoft shined the spotlight on Microsoft 365, its year-old swirl of software and services made by whipping Office 365, Windows 10, and Enterprise Mobility and Security (EMS) into a single confection – a suite.…

Embrace, extend, errr, what was the other one again? Red Hat Summit Red Hat and Microsoft today tore the wraps off a jointly managed public OpenShift service running on Azure.…

This may not be the vendor you're looking for – explain yourself to get your funding A grenade in the form of an updated authorisation bill has been lobbed at the Pentagon's attempt to shift to commercial cloud.…

Plus: New tools for programming with your buddies Build Microsoft has used its Build developer shindig in Seattle to rip the wrapping off IntelliCode, an AI-assisted development for Visual Studio.…

Power outages, automation, rollback... and more Analysis Back in the days of the mainframe, technology risk looked a lot different. You paid a lot of money for a big box in the corner, using software often written by the same supplier. If it went wrong, a nice techie came along and fixed it. Business moved slowly enough that the world didn’t come crashing down if you couldn’t process data for a few days.…

SideSync? Blend? We’ve heard of it Build Losing the smartphone war means Microsoft is taking PC-phone integration seriously again – including the never-quite-solved problem of getting desktops and mobiles to work nicely together.…