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Plus: Guess how much it costs.... oh, go on - have a guess! Review Samsung's giant rival for 50 years, LG, has gone toe-to-toe with the bigger chaebol throughout the smartphone era. Three years ago, LG was firing all cylinders. Its 2014 flagship had introduced the first QHD+ panel; and its successor offered great design (custom leatherbacks) while retaining the removable battery Samsung discarded as it tried to emulate the clean glass lines of the iPhone.…

Consortium possibly looking to flex Arm muscle, too Analysis The European Union's consortium to develop European microprocessors for future supercomputers has taken a few more steps towards its goal of delivering a locally made exascale chip by 2025.…

Changes to add ‘more of the skills that you actually need to be successful’ Microsoft has admitted that the certifications it created for Azure admins aren’t very good.…

Alternative proposed to sending server names in cleartext Over the weekend, at the IETF Hackathon in Montreal, Canada, software engineers from Apple, Cloudflare, Fastly and Mozilla made some progress toward closing a privacy gap affecting network communications.…

Adobe-spawn feels 'more tangible and credible' for government crusties The UK’s Government Digital Service (GDS) has revealed it’s working on a tool that will export its web pages as PDFs.…

‘USENET was a pretty clear warning’ of things to come, says new draft IETF standard A new Internet Engineering Task Force draft proposes to apologise for social media.…

Singaporeans boffins offer Spectre-protector as Fortinet ponders Android inoculation Black hats haven't yet found a way to mass-exploit the Spectre vulnerability – but mitigations are already arriving.…

Malaysia plant faces axe in 2019 while biz powers up more flash drive assembly lines Western Digital will close its hard disk drive factory in Petaling Jaya, near the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur, blaming lack of demand for the gear.…

Switchzilla's kit is programmable now, so anything Bezos does it army of developers can replicate As we reported yesterday, the idea that Amazon might make its own switches into some kind of a captive gateway between on-premises data centres and the AWS cloud sent shivers through investors in traditional networking vendors – and none so much as Cisco.…

The bits on land don't expect to get salty, and that's 1,100 Internet pieces of internet infrastructure in the US alone University of Wisconsin-Madison boffins have warned submarine cable owners that their landing stations and onshore cables are at risk from rising sea levels.…

The tech’s almost grown up so they’ll be sleeping in separate rooms under one roof Intel and Micron Technology will dissolve the partnership that gave the world 3D XPoint storage-class memory.…

And that’s one reason why The Register has been denied access to the final document The final report into the two major failures of HPE 3Par storage area networks at the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) would likely lead to “further negative publicity” for the vendor – which is one reason the ATO has decided not to release the document.…

The same day Bezos becomes the richest man in the world Amazon's 36-hour "Prime Day" marketing jamboree has kicked off with more than a few hiccups.…

And tech industry doesn't get off lightly in civil rights probe The world's most powerful governments are today accused of bankrolling surveillance kit and training for smaller and dubious nations – and the tech industry stands to benefit.…

And noone wants to fix it Login passwords for tens of thousands of Dahua digital video recorder devices have been cached by ZoomEye, an IoT search engine, and published on the web so that even the dumbest hacker could crack unpatched kit.…

Bloke extradited to New York to face charges of serving as drug cyber-mart's tech support US prosecutors have extradited an Irish man to America, where he will face charges of allegedly overseeing the infamous Silk Road drugs e-souk.…

Not enough for a proper atomic weapon but the right stuff for a dirty bomb Analysis While staying at a Marriott hotel in San Antonio, Texas, US government staffers left nuclear material, recovered from a non-profit research lab, in a rented SUV overnight.…

Eggheads reveal designs for causing navigation mischief for folks unsure of surroundings Researchers have developed kit that masquerades as GPS satellites to deceive nearby GPS receivers and thus potentially trick drivers into heading off in the wrong direction.…

Quarterly revenues and bookings up a fifth – again Data protecting deduper to disk Exagrid notched up yet another quarter of over 20 per cent revenue growth for its 2018 second quarter.…

Fancy that! APT28 fingered for Italian job Researchers have claimed the infamous APT28 Kremlin-linked hacking group was behind a new cyber-espionage campaign they believe was targeted at the Italian military.…

It does cloud, it does AI, it does analytics - how many more boxes d'ya wanna tick? Salesforce has slurped up Israeli cloudy artificial intelligence biz Datorama for a reported $800m.…

Plus peers told not to hand excess power to big biz Three major internet service providers have said they would back a regulator to oversee rules for web giants – but warned lawmakers not to forget smaller firms or the bigger picture.…

Cloud strategy pays off for investors. Hardware fanboys, not so much It’s Monday and Microsoft’s Partners are already winging their way to Las Vegas for Inspire. That means it must be time for a news round-up.…

Tell us your views on responsibilities, skills and tools in the modern delivery process Study In the early years of software development, you would often design it, build it, and only then think about how to secure it.…

Everyone seems to know the score... backups, benchmarks and more Quite a few things happened in the land of storage this past week. When it came to hardware, there were a raft of substitutions in the second half, and we also saw the appearance of a new benchmark that hopes to punt real-world workloads past the goalie. There was also, of course, an attempt to win back precious possession of, er, Tintri. Clear away the beer cans and get ready to rack up some wins with a week in the world of mad flash and spinning rust.…

Teardown drills into new design Apple has applied a prophylactic to its butterfly MacBook Pro keyboard, teardown specialist iFixit discovered after taking apart a model from the refreshed line.…

Dungeon generator also excellent at training agents in procrastination How do you train AI agents in language and understanding? Easy – drop them into a Zork-alike dungeon and let then find their own way out.…

Civil liberties group visits Washington for four-day data and privacy talks The US is under increasing pressure over Privacy Shield as an EU lawyers' association backed MEPs’ calls for a suspension of the deal.…

And definitely not copper, argues Cityfibre Most Brits think ads for “fibre” broadband ought to mean “fibre to the premises” and not “fibre to the cabinet”, according to a survey sponsored by a FTTP company.…

Microsoft's apology for Windows 8 is maturing nicely Sunday is a big day in Vulture Central. No, not the football. Sunday is three years to the day when Microsoft’s apology for the Windows 8 generation was released to computer makers.…

Dive deep with our quartet of workshops If you want to put machine learning to work in your organisation, you should really consider securing a place at one of the four all-day workshops we’re running as part of MCubed before our early bird ticket offer expires in two weeks time.…

A decade of technical promise and open-source fall-outs Ten years ago this month, when Lehman Brothers was still just about in business and the term NoSQL wasn't even widely known, let alone an irritant, Facebook engineers open-sourced a distributed database system named Cassandra.…

Third language added to security scanner GitHub's added Python to the list of programming languages it can auto-scan for known vulnerabilities.…

Trouble started with a boiling battery and got worse when a ladder fell over Who, me? Welcome once more to “Who, me?”, in which we help Reg readers to unburden themselves by telling anonymised stories of big, bad, mistakes.…

Chipzilla wants to stick its nose into yet more sections of semiconductor design cycles Intel has acquired fabless designer eASIC, a specialist in the structured ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit) business.…

Analytical email, modern web dev tools and more, for both of you who still care IBM’s effort to make its Notes/Domino platform relevant for the future kicks up a gear this week, as the company prepares a second beta of a new version 10.…

AWS increasingly accepts hybrid cloud is a thing, but would it really get into support? Rumours emerged late last week that AWS plans to make and sell white box switches for you to use on-premises.…

Some qode qleanup, some tweaks and also an arbitrary numbering thing The QEMU machine emulator and virtualizer has decided the time is right to give the world version 3.0 and seems also to have acted on a vow to qlean up its qode.…

US commerce dept. counts escrow cash, warns it's always watching, Congress still split Chinese telco kit-maker ZTE is back in business in the USA after doing everything asked of it by the nation’s authorities.…

Plus BIND bugs, billion-Euro Nokia deal, and push-to-talk gets LTE-rrific Roundup Juniper Networks has issued its semi-regular bug-dump, with sixteen advisories arriving late last week. There's a Spectre/Meltdown patch in there, but you need to go looking: it's in the Junos Space management platform, along with various other items.…

Also, make sure you update your Juniper kit quickly Roundup This week, when we weren't watching the football and sobbing uncontrollably, we saw security headaches at NPM and Ticketmaster, and a priest in hot water with cybercrime charges.…

A wonderful week in machine learning Roundup Hello, here are some quick AI announcements from this week. A researcher reminds us to be wary of the hype around Montezuma's Revenge, there are some new framework updates from Google and Microsoft, and a new Google Brain office in Amsterdam.…

A network's only as strong as its weakest link or worker Hackers can potentially obtain access to Microsoft Office 365 emails and calendars even if multi-factor-authentication is in place, we were warned this week.…

Same being used against ordinary US citizens? Analysis Back in 2013, Canadian John Darrel Krokos got 11.5 years in a US jail for leading a massive cocaine smuggling ring. Two years later, his colleague Zaid Wakil was given a 20-year sentence.…

Extortionists snatch weak passwords to shame victims Scumbags are trying to extort money from netizens by threatening to leak to friends and family videos of their marks watching X-rated videos.…

Redmond also insists ICE is not using its AI to snare immigrants, split families at the border Microsoft has urged US Congress to regulate the American government's use of facial-recognition technology provided by, er, Microsoft and others.…

Oh, and vaccines.news? Yep, anti-vaxxers. The same guys In what may be the perfect combination of everything wrong with 2018, the operator of the .news dot-word has sold a batch of premium .news domains to a purveyor of what can be best described as conspiratorial content for cretins.…

Single-socket job wakes up and smells the Coffee Lake Intel has done a bit of Xeon processor range in-filling, and brought its single-socket Kaby-Lake-based entry-level E3 workstation family up to date.…

We can’t have Matt Hancock calling a hospital and hearing: baa-ruhr-reee-uh-reeee-uh-reee The NHS has been told to stop clinging onto the past, after it was revealed trusts have more than 8,000 fax machines still in use.…