The Register

It's not all about speed Vodafone is the mobile network with the best ping rate, according to network performance sleuth Tutela.…

Bristol's Dr Asier Marzo on acoustic levitation Levitation and tractor beams are the stuff of science fiction legend. Think Marty McFly’s hoverboard from Steven Spielberg’s Back to the Future II in 1989, or any number of Star Trek episodes.…

Space Launch System pad lumbers towards completion NASA's monster rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), took another tentative step towards lift-off yesterday as engineers fitted the last big umbilical arm to its launch tower.…

Plus: who gets priority at unmarked junctions. We know you care about this The UK Autodrive consortium is working on self-parking car technology, it has declared – which puts it head-to-head with German car tech rivals.…

Some foreplay: Dark web, smut monopolies and moral outrage Remember last night when you went online to order pizza and stumbled across those two people humping each others' brains out?…

Big drone, big money, big problems The British Army's massively overdue Watchkeeper drone project has failed to gain a critical air safety certificate – yet the Ministry of Defence still insists it is "a satisfactory use of public resources".…

Oh wait, yes they do The UK data protection watchdog’s well-advertised raid of Cambridge Analytica’s offices is no closer to happening, as the High Court has adjourned the warrant application until tomorrow.…

Like a bat out of parallel... Startup type WekaIO has apparently walked all over IBM's Spectrum Scale parallel file system with a doubled SPEC SFS2014 benchmark score for its Matrix software running on Supermicro servers.…

After we leave the EU we could cover that in a week with change to spare ... allegedly Britain will spend £345m ($486m) upgrading its F-35B fighter jets to the most recent, combat-ready, version of the aircraft’s operating system.…

Science. Because save the planet 'n' beer 'n' stuff In news to delight eco-friendly hipsters the world over, boffins at the University of California, Berkeley, have come up with a way of creating hoppy craft beer without recourse to, er, hops.…

Because when state attacks blow back, the taxpayers who paid to have them developed pay again Black Hat Asia The USA, China and Russia are doing all that they can to avoid development of a treaty that would make it hard for them to conduct cyber-war, but an effort led by the governments of The Netherlands, France and Singapore, together with Microsoft and The Internet Society, is using diplomacy to find another way to stop state-sponsored online warfare.…

Yeah, it's an El Reg listicle. What of it? Poll At some point next month, just in time for Spring, Microsoft will start to emit the Windows 10 Spring Creators Update to everyone's PC.…

The device, the app and the cloud, and your development lifecycle isn’t fit enough to catch up Black Hat Asia Wearable devices – and anything that relies on an app to help with configuration – has at least three attack surfaces and your existing secure development lifecycle probably isn’t going to cope with the complexity that creates.…

Things get surreal in suite 7088 GDC The Ataribox has been renamed the AtariVCS, and it is finally here!…

Talk about telling your code to go screw itself A pair of computer scientists have created a neural network that can self-replicate.…

Auto autos prevented from being blinded by the elements – using the power of statistics MIT brainiacs have come up with some new fangled technology that could help self-driving cars cope with misty mornings.…

ID on a blockchain? Maybe. ID on Bitcoin? Forget it Too many cryptocurrency people are trying to force-fit blockchain technology into identity solutions, when ID needs its own solutions.…

Care for some extra bandwidth? Just turn the knob One thing that's always been promised in telco-land, but rarely delivered, is genuine automation between carrier networks. At the end of last week, Verizon and Colt claimed to crack it with an inter-carrier software-defined-networking (SDN) demo.…

Plus news from F5, Palo Alto and Dell EMC in your networking news capsule ROUNDUP This week's networking news roundup isn't only “what happened at the Open Compute Project summit?” – there's also news from F5, Palo Alto Networks, and Dell EMC.…

Netflix lures bounty-hunters, Dropbox offers vulnerabiliy research safe harbour If you listen carefully, you'll hear the sound of a very small ship coming in: Netflix has joined Bugcrowd, offering bounties of up to US$15,000 for vulnerabilities.…

Proactive fault-finding? Yup. Security alliance? Yup. CX checks? Yup. And an eloquent little licence change, too VMware’s given its end-user computing portfolio a few tweaks, the most interesting of which might just be a licencing change.…

SESTA passes – but could do more harm than good The US Senate has passed the Stop Enabling Sex Trafficking Act (SESTA) with a 97-2 vote.…

The sound of stable door shutting years too late Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, has broken his silence about his data gathering and advertising firm's unforeseen role in data gathering and advertising.…

Our intrepid reporter tries to track down mystery tech GDC After months – no, years – of Magic Leap promising to revolutionize the gaming world with its augmented reality technology, this week the company finally launched… sort of.…

AI hardware plans up for grabs Facebook has revealed its updated GPU-powered server design known as Big Basin v2 as part of the Open Compute Project.…

Silicon Valley boffins bag Nobel Prize of computer science The two engineers who further developed and popularized the concept of RISC microprocessors have won the 2017 ACM Turing Award.…

Shortage of tech talent has government pondering end to age, gender restrictions A US government commission has asked the public for its thoughts on possible changes to the military's selective service rules to allow the conscription of technical talent, including those with computer-oriented skills, regardless of sex or age.…

No-name brand software to help push Leonardo toolkit German ERP giant SAP has launched an Application Edition of its Predictive Analytics software – part of its Leonardo toolkit.…

Big Blue claims POWER9 kit with beastly GPUs gives Google Cloud a thrashing Analysis IBM boasts that machine learning is not just quicker on its POWER servers than on TensorFlow in the Google Cloud, it's 46 times quicker.…

Fine for gaming, not so much for modeling, it is claimed Nvidia’s flagship Titan V graphics cards may have hardware gremlins causing them to spit out different answers to repeated complex calculations under certain conditions, according to computer scientists.…

Fast and slow high-cap disk lines coming In 2020 Seagate will introduce its first multi-actuator disk drives using Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) tech with 20TB capacities.…

Project hopes to bring dev skills to developing nation A Filipino developer is hoping his handmade Ruby port will help bring coding skills to some of the Philippines's poorest communities.…

Not the only possible theory, say infosec types A British surgeon whose instructions over the internet helped to guide operations in war-torn Aleppo fears his PC was hacked in order to target a makeshift hospital that was subsequently bombed.…

Users will stop trusting you, warns researcher Many high profile UK sites still use Symantec certificates just days before Google will begin the process of dropping support for them with the next and upcoming releases of its Chrome browser.…

Faster GPUs, more FLOPS HPE has updated its Apollo 6500 deep learning server with a threefold performance boost over its precursor by stuffing it with eight Tesla V100 GPUs, which speak to each other via Nvidia's NVlink 2.0 interconnect protocol.…

System may be full of waterworlds, boffins find New research published in Nature Astronomy has poured, er, cold water on hopes that it may be possible to detect life on Earth-sized planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system.…

It's not. ♫ It's beginning to sound a lot like Brexit ♪ In the latest report slamming preparations for the UK’s departure from the European Union next year, and the subsequent transition period, Britain's Commons Home Affairs Committee has said it has “serious concerns” about the future of data flows.…

Kumoscale software presents fabric access NVMe flash drives virtually Surprise, surprise – flash chip and SSD manufacturer Toshiba has announced NVMe fabric-access flash array software. What's its game?…

There's plenty of fish in... Oh European Space Agency (ESA) scientists plan to use satellite shortwave infrared (SWIR) sensing to detect plastic litter concentrations in the oceans.…

Array types, riders and runners It may be a surprise to some, but a tech consultancy has said that the existing all-flash array market is in no danger of losing market share to NMVe over Fabrics (NVMeoF) types – saying they're not competing in the same areas. It also said mainstream storage array suppliers would soon be snapping up the NVMeoF startups for their technology.…

Myth, legend and the lucky escape of Bennerley Geek's Guide to Britain The pell-mell expansion of Britain's railways in the 19th century has bequeathed some impressive feats of engineering. Great stone viaducts like those at Calstock in Cornwall and Harringworth near Melton Mowbray get the glory, but for my money it's the iron bridges that are the real marvels.…

Blockchain voting outfit ran its own count, but only as an observer Blockchain enthusiasts may be a little deflated today, after the nation of Sierra Leone took to Twitter to debunk claims it had conducted “the world’s first blockchain election.”…

DNS-Over-HTTPS set for week of performance tests Last year, an IETF working group mulled whether HTTPS is a suitable mechanism to protect Internet users' domain name requests, to protect them from prying eyes. Now Mozilla have decided to lend a hand by testing the current DNS-Over-HTTPS (yes, the acronym is DOH) implementation.…

The meter-long telescope expected to launch in 2028 The European Space Agency is launching a mission to find out how planets form and how life emerges in space, it announced on Tuesday.…

Russian judge upholds 2016 FSB order, company will appeal Secure messaging service Telegram says it will appeal a Russian Supreme Court order to hand over encryption keys to the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation – the FSB.…

Chrome OS 66 to protect older Intel units, still working on ARM Older Chromebook owners should keep an eye open for Chrome OS updates, because Google has announced they'll get Meltdown protection soon.…

Prepare for 'deep customer experiences throughout a personalized 1:1 journey’ Salesforce has decided to buy API-farmer MuleSoft for a cool US$6.5bn – about a billion bucks above the latter company’s market capitalisation.…

Facebook isn't having a very good time either For the fourth straight day, Cambridge Analytica is scrambling in the wake of damning media reports.…

Free Wi-Fi will be lousy without a Social Network™ login, which in this of all weeks is just dumb Facebook may be up to its armpits in alligators, but that hasn't stopped Australia's Gold Coast Council from chumming up with the ad-farm to offer free Wi-Fi to visitors at the upcoming Commonwealth Games.…

Just give it a few weeks notice next time, not 24 hours AMD has finally weighed in with its opinion of the security flaws in its Epyc, Ryzen, Ryzen Pro, and Ryzen Mobile chips, identified in a rather over-the-top fashion by CTS-Labs a week ago.…