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The path to all-IP calls is not smooth. Just ask EE EE has improved the reliability of its voice calls after a bumpy transition to an all-IP mobile network, according to network sleuth RootMetrics.…

Long-lived robot throws 5,000 sol party. Beancounters not invited As MER-B, better known as the Opportunity rover, passes the 5,000 sol mark on Mars and approaches the 15th anniversary of its launch (thankfully without the desolate rendition of "Happy Birthday" played by its plutonium-powered successor, Curiosity) it appears the knives are out at NASA.…

Shaping up for transformation Over the last few months people have stopped saying “digitalization” or “digital transformation” and abbreviating it “DX.” The industry is full of abbreviations and ephemeral jargon, and the most irritating part of this latest addition, for those of us in receiving end of the phrase “DX”, is they don’t know what “DX” means.…

Lo-tech brainwave 'won't solve everything', says biz In the face of increasing public pressure to address election fraud, Facebook has come up with a novel way to check who's buying advertising on its site – snail mail.…

Is there anything you don't already know? There's rarely such a thing as a "genuine" phone leak in our experience – glimpses of unreleased models are carefully choreographed by professionals months in advance.…

Web still looking pretty toxic You read it here first: the much-feared Chrome adblockalypse is likely be a soaking wet squib – with many kinds of digital irritant permitted.…

As PM lacks specifics on UK’s desired ‘adequacy-plus’ deal British government ministers have been told not to peddle the idea that trade agreements are incompatible with continued compliance with European data protection laws.…

Cars detect when it is on a test routine – reports American investigators are looking into car company Daimler's use of engine management software that is alleged to help its vehicles pass emissions tests, according to reports.…

Ice to meet you, storage fans. This was your week In this week's roundup we hitch a brief ride on a sledge to the South Pole, and watch the movements in frozen flash, hot HCI, supercooled software and more.…

Flatulence takes the wind out of budget Dutch airline's wings An elderly man's flatulence forced his flight to make an emergency stop after a fight broke out over his barrage of bottom burps.…

We're supposed to sift through this without a tool? Comment Ah, the good old days of server benchmarks, when CPU variations were few and clock rates ruled the roost. Now we have four different Xeon SP CPU families, one with two model lines, and each family has its own set of CPUs with differing core counts, threads and clock rates.…

Spring menu includes Deception, Spitfires and Existential Risk… Spring is on the horizon, the sap is rising and if you’re anything like us, your brain is emerging from its winter hibernation and looking for sustenance.…

Digi Sec decrees: Thou shalt put a mast on your spire to boost connectivity The governent is looking towards the heavens in its bid to redeem rural broadband speeds, having exhausted all other options.…

Which makes lots of sysadmins' fave tracing tool cool for Linux Oracle appears to have open-sourced DTrace, the system instrumentation tool that Sun Microsystems created in the early 2000s and which has been beloved of many-a-sysadmin ever since.…

Daaahlink! Cloud was so 2017. This year is about multicloud Juniper Networks has taken the tube labelled 'multicloud' out of the paint-box and applied a liberal coat to the latest updates to its switching products.…

Salesperson-suddenly-turned-coder learned social skills can be more important than technical skills Who, Me? Welcome to the fifth edition of Who, Me? It's a new Register weekly column in which readers confess to times their skills fell just a little - or a lot - short of what was required to stop things going pear-shaped.…

Over the weekend it said no Windows customisation, no Hyper-V. That's gone now Microsoft has altered a document that listed Windows 10's "Limitations of apps and experiences on ARM".…

And then along came a good old flesh and blood human! Chalk up another one for good old humans: Google's admitted that an automation failure was the root cause of a 93-minute outage of its Compute Engine in the us-central1 and europe-west3 zones of its cloud on January 18th, 2018.…

Borg attack repelled, Microsoft and cloud are now Prime Directive (and cash source) Customer certification delays resulting from its ongoing patent lawsuit brought by Cisco have delayed some of its revenue, but upstart Arista Networks still turned in a tidy result for Q4 2017 and for the full year.…

City Union Bank now reckons it has ‘adequate enhanced security’ A year after the SWIFT international bank transfer system enhanced its security, another breach has emerged: an Indian bank has confirmed that criminals gained access to its systems and made transfers totalling US$1.8 million.…

PayID operator says it's a feature that sends money to the right person. It's a bug that harvests data, say others Updated The brand-new app implementing Australia’s New Payment Platform (NPP) system has a user enumeration flaw, but the organisation responsible for it considers it to be a feature.…

Writes to residents to announce on-site inspection nbn™, the company building and operating Australia's national broadband network (NBN), has advised households connected to its hybrid fibre-coax network to expect a visit between March 7th 2018 and July 27th 2018.…

It's the week in security Roundup Here's a summary of this week's security news beyond what we've already reported.…

Why machines aren't really superhuman at all Roundup Hello! Here's a brief roundup of some interesting news from the AI world from the past two weeks, beyond what we've already reported.…

When the lawyer thinks you're cruel, that's Damore. When you're thrown on the street with a cloud at your feet... Google was well within its rights when it dumped controversial bro-grammer James Damore in mid-2017.…

Chipzilla says class-action lawsuit tally stands at 32 Intel says it is facing 32 separate class-action lawsuits following the revelations it shipped millions of processors with security design flaws dubbed Meltdown and Spectre.…

Intimate photos somehow ended up on some other guy's mobe, lawsuit claims A bloke is suing Verizon Wireless in the US because, he claims, personal pictures from his Verizon phone, including intimate snaps of his fiancée, turned up on the phone of another subscriber – who happened to know her.…

Governor Phil Scott signs executive order as battle lines are drawn Vermont has become the fifth US state to adopt net neutrality regulations, joining Montana, New Jersey, Hawaii, and New York.…

First Amendment bad, Second Amendment good? The governor of the US state of Kentucky, Matt Bevin, has blamed violent video games for the Florida high-school shooting that left 17 people dead this week.…

Alarm raised over APFS sparse disk images tossing documents into the void Apple's recently revised file system, APFS, may lose data under specific circumstances, a maker of macOS backup software is warning.…

Ruskies stole citizen IDs to spread discord – indictment Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor investigating foreign agents tampering with the 2016 US presidential election, has criminally charged 13 Russian nationals with conspiring against the United States.…

Second privacy ruling to go against Zuck and co in a week Facebook has been told to stop tracking Belgian citizens' online habits, and to delete all the data it holds on them, or it could be fined up to €100m.…

Cheapo merger terms wouldn't get past regulator, it says Fresh from telling us all how its “highly qualified” board would see off a hostile takeover from Broadcom, chip biz Qualcomm is now getting around the table with its buyout-happy rival.…

Security services facing 'curtailed' EU info sharing if UK doesn't agree terms Security experts have warned that Brexit could lead to data flows between the UK and European Union being "substantially curtailed".…

Incident reported to local cops and Federal Aviation Authority A helicopter has crashed after reportedly manoeuvring hard to avoid a "DJI Phantom quadcopter," in what could be the first confirmed aircraft accident involving a drone.…

Complainants hoped to squeeze more from HP Hedge funds wanting a court-ordered higher share price from HP when it acquired Aruba have been dealt a blow costing them $17.3m.…

And have some cyber goodness too – just don't mention the Belgacom hack Great Britain, which is buying the US-made F-35 fighter jet, is urging European neighbour Belgium not to buy the US-made F-35 fighter jet.…

Look guys, everyone's doing it Mobile customers face a mid-contract price rise, with all four operators confirming they will hike fees by 4 per cent, 1 per cent above inflation.…

Switch antitrust case rumbles on A US court has agreed to dismiss most of Cisco's IP defences in its long-running antitrust dispute with rival Arista Networks; the latter had previously described them as "breathtakingly broad, unprecedented and insane".…

Sort out your safety policies... oh, and share all your travel info with us Private-hire cab firms that want to operate in the capital will have to demonstrate how they protect riders' safety and data – and may still only get short-term licences, Transport for London has said.…

And publishers – have you thought of trying something new? Analysis Google's own ad-blocking initiative was introduced yesterday via its Chrome browser.…

Apple suggests wiping your ROD and oiling your ring Something for the Weekend, Sir? My wife has a hairy tongue.…

How DevOps could be about to collide with machine learning DevOps is finally getting somewhere. This year the term is ten years old and like most ten-year olds, DevOps is starting to show signs of puberty and cognitive maturity. According to analyst Forrester, this is being reflected in industry. In 2017, a Forrester survey found that over 50 per cent of organisations were to implement DevOps in some form or another, enough for the analyst to claim that 2018 is going to be the year of enterprise DevOps.…

Where enterprise servers go, hyperconverged systems follow Analysis If hyperconverged systems are basically enhanced servers then HCI vendors with no server hardware or channel partnerships for their software are doomed.…

Project Honolulu gets a second Tech Preview Microsoft has offered Windows admins a second look at Project Honolulu, its web-based System Center successor.…

It's therefore safe to assume the notch is not going away any time soon The Apple rumour mill has buzzed with speculation that less-than-completely-astounding sales of Cupertino's latest iPhone, the X, mean it might not be long for this world.…

Un-hinged user needed some basic education On-Call Welcome again to On-Call, in which The Register tries to liven up Fridays with reader-contributed stories of tech support traumas.…

Everything we knew was a lie The Andromeda galaxy is actually roughly the same size as the Milky Way, and may not engulf our galaxy when it is expected to collide in about four billion years time, according to new research.…

'Cognitive solutioning' kicks in when you ask Big Blue to solve tricky problems Exclusive IBM is not just telling the world it needs "cognitive" computing: the company has bet the future of its own services business on Watson-branded services.…

If whatever you ask IBM to do isn't easy, 'cognitive solutioning' will sort you out Exclusive IBM is not just telling the world it needs "cognitive" computing: the company has bet the future of its own services business on Watson-branded services.…