The Register

Support biz files court petition to recover additional $32m Oracle botherer Rimini Street has filed a court petition to recover another $32m from Big Red in the long-running copyright case.…

Italy and Austria first in line for new service Sky has signaled the end of the satellite dish with plans to make all its channels and content available online.…

VCs chuck money at data warehouse startup Data Warehouser in the cloud Snowflake has just raised $263.5m, eight months after raising $105m, making it a startup monster.…

It's not a knock-out: Fbook's privacy status will be tested in Austrian court Max Schrems can sue Facebook in Vienna as an individual, but can’t bring a class action suit, in a ruling from the Court of Justice of the European Union without a knock-out blow for either side.…

RIP, dragon lady who told us our true names Beloved dragon-tale spinning author Ursula K Le Guin has died. The novelist, probably best known for the thoughtful 1972 "anarcho-utopian" tale The Dispossessed, spent a lifetime exploring themes around revolutionary societies, individualism, anarchism and, of course, dragons. She was 88.…

Blueprints touted to ASIC, SoC makers to take on GPUs Patent troll Semiconductor licensing giant Rambus announced this week a physical layer design for accessing GDDR6 – aka double data rate type six synchronous graphics random-access memory.…

Please don't be like the admin who failed to update PSC first At a client site recently, we had to investigate why the upgrade from VMware vSphere 6.0 to 6.5 had gone wrong in that the normally rock-solid environment was a bit ill – to say the least.…

4,000 servers, 45,000 PCs and 2,500 apps all rebuilt, while other staff went manual It's long been known that shipping giant Maersk suffered very badly from 2017's NotPetya attack.…

Steve Yegge torches Chocolate Factory on his way out Seven years ago, Google software engineer Steve Yegge, having failed to understand the risk that a private social media rant might become public, lambasted Google for its failure to understand software platforms, with Google+ serving as his whipping boy.…

The plan is to throw the cloud at data collection and analysis, to produce alerts that matter Google’s parent company Alphabet has launched a security company named Chronicle.…

Diagnostic Data Viewer gives users a peek into what Redmond gathers from your PC Microsoft is laying its cards out on the table. The software giant has produced a tool that's claimed to show users how much personal information its Windows 10 operating system collects and sends back to Redmond for diagnostics.…

Dodgy punters blacklisted on National Ugly Mugs database A study into the effect of the internet on professional sex workers has shown the online world keeps them safer, happier in their job, and more able to weed out creepy customers.…

Fixed in 7.58.0 If you use libcurl, the command line tool and library for transferring data with URLs, get ready to patch. The tool has a pair of problems, one of which is an authentication leak.…

Because crooks salivate when you punch a PIN into a smartmobe at a market stall The advent of mobile point-of-sale (MPOS) systems has been a boon for consumers and retailers of modest means, but the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council's security wonks worried that they can't adhere to the strict hardware standards that merchants' credit card merchant terminals.…

And still secret, so we can't say if Silicon Valley's fair use booster survived The Trans-Pacific Partnership has been successfully been defibrillated by eleven nations that decided they could still do a deal even though United States president Donald Trump pulled his nation out of the trade pact.…

Pact of silence questioned Four Republican members of the US House of Representatives sent letters on Wednesday to the leaders of Amazon, AMD, Apple, ARM, Google, Intel and Microsoft seeking answers about how the embargo on the Meltdown and Spectre bugs was handled.…

And faces of ex-partners, bosses, children, you name it The faces of celebrities, politicians, children, or pretty much anyone, can be pasted over faces of porn stars in X-rated movies using freely available machine-learning software.…

Subscriber database plundered by miscreants once again Executives at Bell Canada have been left with faces redder than their nation's flag – after their subscriber database was hacked for the second time in eight months.…

Support plug will now be pulled in June Fitbit says it will formally end support for Pebble hardware this summer.…

Big Internet dominates US political pressure splurging For the first time, an internet company has become the largest lobbyist in Washington DC.…

Easy with those exclusives and unfortunate facts, hacks Take it easy with those hard-hitting exclusives and investigations, said the Pope this week, lumping inconvenient quality journalism with fake news and clickbait.…

Bye bye Mister Biker Guy, drove my Chevy to the lefty but the Chevy was awry (allegedly) A motorcyclist is suing General Motors in the US after he was knocked off his motorbike by one of the automaker's self-driving cars.…

Yes, you read that right Vid It is possible for a policy issue to jump the shark?…

No connection... between the blackouts A data centre glitch has left doctors in Wales unable to access their patients’ details – while a similar outage in Manchester, England, has placed severe strain on hospitals’ accident and emergency departments.…

No connection... between the blackouts A data centre glitch in the Welsh NHS has left doctors unable to access their patients’ details while a similar outage in Manchester has placed severe strain on hospitals’ accident and emergency departments.…

Yay! Oh, wait. Aww... Commvault has reported record quarterly revenues but took a dramatic GAAP thrashing due to US tax law changes.…

That's only 2% of Blighty's health service PCs NHS Digital has yet to explain why it has taken months to roll out Microsoft's Enterprise Threat Detection Service (ETDS) to only about two per cent of the UK health service's targeted installed base.…

Dem to be granted access to Twitter profile ‘in an emergency’ Red faces over Hawaii’s false nuke alert got even redder this week, as the governor admitted he knew it was a mistake – but couldn’t alert citizens because he didn't know his Twitter password.…

Forgot your tax return, mon ami? Pas de problem! France has reportedly passed a law to allow hapless citizens the right to make admin screwups in their dealings with the state – and not have those mistakes held against them.…

While Facebook boasts tools to help users 'manage their data' The European Union's incoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has still not registered with more than half of small companies and a third of medium-sized firms, according to a UK government survey.…

Polishes off hyperconverged and software-defined support Big Switch Networks has updated its Big Cloud Fabric to support hyperconverged (HCI) and software-defined storage (SDS) products so they don't need to use shonky old proprietary networking hardware.…

Immigrants, and those who employ them, had better be legit Following President Donald Trump's demands for a crackdown on H-1B visas, there has been a radical shift in how US immigration officials handle applications for the program.…

Call for Papers Open Now Events Situation Publishing and Heise Medien are launching Serverless Computing London 2018, a three day conference that will bring together together experts and practitioners in one of the tech world’s hottest new areas.…

My humps, my humps, my humps, my lovely camel humps Twelve cheating camels have been disqualified from a Saudi beauty pageant for having Botox injections to enhance their pouts.…

$30m prize will go unclaimed after repeated extensions Google has pulled its financial backing from the Lunar X wheeze to get a privately funded spacecraft to the Moon after finally conceding that none of the five entrants were likely to make it there.…

Halifax man didn’t pay HMRC but forked out on 2 houses and a wedding The cash-splashing director of a nuisance call biz has been struck off for 12 years after breaking telemarketing rules and trading while insolvent.…

Can't cram crazy TBs in so new 860s bring speed and longevity Samsung's new 860 Pro and Evo SSDs have virtually the same capacity and performance as the 850 line, but with much higher endurance.…

Found to have paid billions to Apple to prevent it buying from rivals Updated The European Commission today slapped a €997m (£872m) fine on Qualcomm for abusing its dominant market position - finding it paid billions to Apple to exclusively use its chips.…

A 'great' deal - as long as you stay with their crummy broadband TalkTalk has started offering customers the option of moving onto O2 when their contracts expire, as part of the beleaguered firm's plans to ditch mobile.…

UK government beancounters aren't happy with the MoJ The Ministry of Justice's system of monitoring criminals with electronic tags has been blasted as a "catastrophic waste of public money" in a damning report by the National Audit Office.…

Machine-learning news and code to pore over Roundup Welcome to El Reg's January roundup of AI-related news beyond all the wonderful and terrible things we've covered separately. Drop us a line if you have any machine-learning news or gossip to share.…

Brit boss off after two years behind the controls The UK president of Canadian outsourcing biz CGI, Steve Thorn, has stepped down to "to pursue different career opportunities" after 25 years with the firm.…

Inhabitable with alien lifeforms, mind you. Grab a phaser A team of scientists have identified two out of the seven planets in the Trappist-1 system as the most likely to be habitable, according to a new study.…

‘LF Networking Fund' is like the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, but for SDN The Linux Foundation has decided the time is right for one administrative structure to cover all of its networking efforts, so has created the “LF Networking Fund ” to oversee them all.…

Google bans forced redirects used by Zirconium to infect Macs, PCs with nasties The largest malvertising campaign in 2017 involved 28 fake ad agencies, which were used to generate about one billion ad views across 62 per cent of ad-supported websites, according to publishing security biz Confiant.…

All he has to do is make Tesla the third-most valuable company and vastly increase revenue “Vertically integrated sustainable energy" company Tesla – more on that description later – has revealed a new compensation plan for CEO and founder Elon Musk that will see him work for nothing but could see him earn US$55 billion over the next decade.…

Done in by the weaponisation of optimisation, and now 2017 may be as good as it ever got

Could be the end of the road for Opportunity, too It's highly likely that Mars is going to suffer one of its periodical planet-wide dust storms this year – and NASA is concerned the event could disrupt its operations on the Red Planet.…

Grids were not built to handle big EVs populations all plugging in at once At today's adoption levels, electric vehicles' impact on overall household energy consumption is negligible, but grid planners probably need to look to the future sooner rather than later.…

Replacement robot hand didn't work, so they turned it off, and yes, turned it back on again Apart from a slightly irritating software bug, it seems NASA's first spacewalk for 2018 went smoothly.…