The Register

Plus: Those neural network stock photos... Roundup Here's a quick roundup of all the important announcements in AI this week.…

Not to forget, moans about bad AI photos. AI roundup Here's a quick roundup of all the important announcements in AI this week.…

Reg vulture gets its claws on Reolink's Argus 2 Review One of the interesting side effects of being asked to test smart-home technology is that you get grumpier about it.…

And the internet says... Redmond, keep your forking hands off our favorite website Poll Microsoft has held talks with GitHub with a mind to potentially buy the popular source-code warehouse, folks closely familiar with the discussions have claimed.…

Also, the SEC takes aim at another shady ICO Roundup While we were busy chasing SpamCannibals, jailing Yahoo hackers, and blaming North Korea for everything else, there was some interesting security news going on.…

Machine-learning conference organizers warn someone is trying to get boffins into bed A cheeky website is pretending to take attendee registrations and hotel bookings for folks heading to the upcoming Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference in Montreal, Canada, at the end of this year.…

Machine-learning conference organizers warn miscreants are trying to get boffins into bed A dodgy website is providing fake registrations and hotel deals for the upcoming Neural Information Processing Systems conference happening in Montreal at the end of this year.…

Second worst stingray in history (RIP Steve Irwin) Someone may have spied on smartphones in or near the White House using a fake cellphone tower – and miscreants are said to have abused SS7 weaknesses to swipe US citizens' private information, it emerged this week.…

Second worst stingray in history (RIP Steve Irwin) The US government has confirmed someone spied on smartphones in America's capital using a fake cellphone tower – and miscreants abused SS7 weaknesses to swipe citizens' personal information from a major wireless carrier.…

Which bright spark should we blame after this illuminating revelation of current affairs? Philips' Hue smart-home lighting has had an embarrassing outage with its API going offline for four hours on Thursday, preventing customers from accessing the system remotely.…

Banishment comes after bias investigation that found nothing Facebook's controversial Trending section has fallen out of fashion and will be removed next week, along with products and third-party partner integrations that rely on the Trends API.…

'Hardware failure' blamed for ruining revelries Updated Businesses and punters in Europe are in for a long and frustrating night – after Visa's payment services in the region went TITSUP: a Total Inability To Support Usual Purchases.…

Infamous IoT menace lives on in its hellspawn Cybercrooks are using the infamous Mirai IoT botnet as a framework to quickly add in new exploits and functionalities, it has emerged.…

Debt collectors to be unleashed if product doesn't arrive Indiegogo has given flailing Retro Computers Ltd a fortnight stay of execution on its threat to call in debt collectors after the ZX Spectrum reboot biz failed to deliver a product by the end-of-May deadline.…

Plus: SIM-swapping scam costs customer thousands TSB customers have reported receiving letters from the British bank containing other people's details in the embattled firm's latest cock-up.…

US Department of Defense insistent on single vendor The Pentagon has pushed back its controversial single vendor cloud contract deal, saying it doesn't want to "rush toward failure".…

Machines join the march against identity fraud There’s a conundrum called know your customer (KYC), the process of verifying the identity of a company’s clients. A decade ago, KYC was a mild inconvenience that could be tackled using some familiar procedures.…

Cops comb area to net wannabe keepers Bee thieves have created a buzz in Sweden after two million Apis mellifera were stolen – in what appears to be among the largest stings of its kind in Europe.…

ALIS logistics software woes continue at US-UK training unit Delayed upgrades to F-35 fighter jets along with bespoke logistics software that displays spare part lead times in years are keeping some aircraft grounded, according to a report from the US air force station where the core of Britain's future F-35 operators are being trained.…

Watch out for those white-box-flingers, though, Mike Top dog Dell barked loudest in IDC's latest server quarterly tracker, overtaking HPE in both revenue and units, while white boxes made a strong showing on hyperscalers' shopping list.…

Spoiler alert: he didn't Facebook has been accused of violating users' human rights and failing to create adequate risk management structures in a heated exchange with stockholders yesterday.…

Japanese conglomerate balances book after nuclear power plant shutdown Toshiba has finally offloaded its chip unit for $18bn (£13.5bn) to US private equity house Bain Capital weeks after getting the green light from Chinese regulators.…

Once the agenda goes up, so does the price We're close to confirming the lineup for Serverless Computing London, our three-day exploration of all things sans server, cloud native and more, which means you don't have long to grab a super bargain blind bird ticket.…

Trashy ideas return to whence they came Something for the Weekend, Sir? I am looking for a fit man.…

iomart-owned outfit TITSUP* as trencher slices through critical cable HostingUK and its big brother, iomart, are still struggling to restore online services more than 12 hours after a bit barn blackout.…

Interpretability in machine learning is a minefield Neural networks – the algorithms that many people think of when they hear the words machine learning – aren't very good at explaining what they do. They are black boxes.…

Tech support chap wondered why client seemingly had a blank cheque for the stuff! Turns out they did … mostly On-Call On-come again to On-Call, The Register’s Friday column in which readers share tales of tech support oddities.…

New orbit will skim just 30 miles above Death Star lookalike The Dawn spacecraft orbiting dwarf planet Ceres will soon make its final course change as NASA boffins set it up for a closest-ever flyby yet to get a warts-and-all look.…

Regional director takes giant to court in discrimination row A former Oracle regional sales director has sued the American database goliath, claiming he had been fired unlawfully after 13 years of employment for seeking medical treatment under US Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA).…

‘Self-innovation is the only way for us to climb the world's technological peaks’ Chinese president Xi Jinping has given a major speech on the country’s science and technology agenda, and signalled that China will innovate for itself rather than source technology from the rest of the world.…

Q1 2019 beats expectations, full-year guidance raised VMware’s mainstream server virtualization users haven’t felt a lot of love in recent years The company’s focussed on the cloud, containers and software best suited to very large enterprises.…

‘Power event’ blamed, hit subset of kit in US-EAST-1 Updated Parts of Amazon Web Services' US-East-1 region have experienced about half an hour of downtime, but some customers' instances and data can't be restored because the hardware running them appears to have experienced complete failure.…

Neural network comedy – literally, no laughing matter Researchers in Japan have tried to build an artificially intelligent system to make people laugh – but, surprise, surprise, the jokes it told were terrible.…

Watchdog says fellas made billions of automated calls Amid a broad federal effort to be seen looking busy in the battle against robocalls, the US Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit against two men and their respective companies for alleged involvement with billions of unlawful automated pitches.…

Furious netizens locked out of their business profiles all day Facebook is mysteriously and inexplicably locking people out of their Pages – the social network's profiles for businesses and organizations.…

I think I'm a clone now Video DeepMind has taught artificially intelligent programs to play classic Atari computer games by making them watch YouTube videos.…

Supply firm owner slipped boodles in envelopes to bag millions in contracts The owner of an IT supplier has admitted bunging a US city's tech boss cash bribes to bag lucrative service contracts worth millions of dollars.…

Pluto's not just a cold distant ball – it may have been geologically active early on Dunes of methane ice grains have been discovered on Pluto after scientists studied snaps taken by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft. That's according to a paper published in the journal Science today.…

Apps, 32 or 64-bit, will continue to run just fine as design biz looks to ditch baggage Arm's latest top-end processor core design – the Cortex-A76 unveiled today – is its first CPU to only run kernel-level code that is 64-bit, according to its inventors.…

America('s lawsuits) First Chinese phone maker ZTE will have to face a patent infringement lawsuit in the US, despite its handsets being effectively barred from sale in America.…

GDPR hell to continue for unprepared DNS overseer Global domain name system overlord ICANN’s latest attempt to deal with compliance with European data protection law has been dealt a blow after a German court rejected its request to force a registrar to keep gathering people’s information.…

One (un)lucky guy shoved two workloads Scale-out storage firm Quantum has announced that CEO Patrick Dennis is stepping down to focus on family matters. CFO Fuad Ahmad has also left.…

A mere month after Sushovan Hussein was found guilty of fraud in the US The UK's Financial Reporting Council has announced that it will investigate "the conduct of Sushovan Hussein", a month after a US court found the former Autonomy chief financial officer guilty of fraud.…

Bad luck if you want to book an appointment online The latest version of the UK National Health Service's Patient Access app and website, used to book appointments and to order repeat prescriptions, has been down for many users over the past 24 hours.…

None of them got a sausage roll, though Food snobs have been tricked into saying they like Greggs after the British high-street pasty biz went undercover at a London festival.…

Nvidia-powered quadcopter 'sees' and follows road vehicles An American camera drone startup has come up with an eye-opening new feature for its products: automatic car following.…

We read Mary Meeker so you don't have to American venture capitalist Mary Meeker's annual "bible" of internet and macroeconomic trends has been a fixture since the dotcom heyday, and as you would expect from a tech VC, it emphasises the good news. But it's not such good news if you're a high street retailer, rely on desktop users, or make smartphones.…

Noooooo, my stickers! Telegram backer and self-proclaimed "global entrepreneur" Pavel Durov has blamed a lack of updates to his app on Apple "not siding with us" in the ongoing furore in Russia over the crypto-chat platform.…

All you need is access to 40Mbps and extreme masochistic tendencies Football fans will be able to watch England's World Cup disappointments in full 4K resolution and high dynamic range colour glory, thanks to a trial on the BBC's iPlayer.…