The Register

University claims the Bezos Bunch nicked its ideas for language processing Amazon is the target of a patent complaint from a US university that claims the Alexa assistant ripped off its technology for processing voice commands.…

Dell teases high and low-end hyperconverged kit at .NEXT Nutanix .NEXT attendees were this week furnished with details about a heavy duty server and skinny ROBO box – two new Nutanix-based hyperconverged systems from Dell.…

Cheltenham biz awarded $30m in damages against Emerson Facebook's open data centre initiative used stolen British know-how, a Californian jury ruled yesterday.…

Just as the $50m returned from Big Red court battles lifts profits Oracle third-party support slinger Rimini Street has added Salesforce to its portfolio, which isn't going to ease any tension that still exists with Larry Ellison's lot following a protracted court battle.…

Public Accounts Committee recommends department chains its wallet shut Britain's Ministry of Defence's spending plans for the next decade "lack cost control" and contain a £20bn black hole, according to the House of Commons' influential Public Accounts Committee (PAC).…

Researcher finds security hotspots on some rail networks Vulnerabilities on the Wi-Fi networks of a number of rail operators could expose customers' credit card information, according to infosec biz Pen Test Partners this week.…

Storwize catches up with rivals, adds cube of ML sugar to block storage too IBM is again playing catch up with rivals by adding a heavy sprinkling of dedupe dust to its near two-year old Storwize arrays and other products.…

Falcon 9 launch countdown stops at the last minute The launch of SpaceX’s updated Falcon 9, with Bangladesh’s first satellite perched on top, was halted at the 58 second mark.…

Is line-of-sight gear good enough for this kind of work? Southend Airport has trialled an anti-drone system – though its air traffic control boss cheerfully admitted the airport doesn’t have any “outstanding issues with ‘rogue’ drone operations”.…

Stop. Err, wait a minute, Mr Postman A man is facing charges of theft and fraud after the mail of parcel delivery service UPS was redirected to his home address.…

Top Brit judge thinks we'll warm to our Panopticon overlords A senior British judge has highlighted the benefits of legislation that obliges people to carry their mobile phone at all times.…

We've got 39 questions and Zuck has answered none Facebook has told MPs on the the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) Committee that it will have to finish the homework it's been set over the weekend.…

Life insurance and pensions biz admits they're working on it Some customers of life insurance, pensions and asset management biz Aegon have been unable to log into their accounts following an IT upgrade over the bank holiday weekend.…

Help us, help you, help us Thank you for reading El Reg. We hope you like what you see. And whether you do or you don't, now's your chance to pipe your thoughts directly into our brains.…

Devs are lapping up Lambda, and this has already redefined the future of computing "Serverless" didn't get a single mention in Amazon's quarterly earnings call. Neither did its poster child, AWS Lambda. Apparently it's not the sort of thing investors want to hear about, even if the developers that keep dumping cash into Amazon's pockets do.…

If you find our user interfaces unintuitive, that's YOUR problem, chum Something for the Weekend, Sir? “I want you to kill Barbra Streisand.”…

Freshly passed law means intent is no longer important The ban on shining lasers at cars and aeroplanes has been strengthened with a five-year prison sentence now available for those who train their laser pointers on ships, aircraft or air traffic control towers.…

Or refuse to put them in promoted playlists R&B artist R. Kelly can no longer be found on playlists curated by streaming music giant Spotify after it introduced a new New Hate Content and Hateful Conduct Public Policy.…

Where there’s smoke, there’s wet paper On-Call Welcome once again to On-Call, The Register’s continuing column recounting readers’ tech support traumas.…

It's not a security problem, but full-year results will likely be late Symantec’s shares have slumped after the company revealed it “has commenced an internal investigation in connection with concerns raised by a former employee.”…

Blockchain comes to the cable biz, acquisitions, Red Hat Summit and more Roundup What happened in networking this week? Well, for starters, Nokia acquired analytics company SpaceTime Insight, and will roll its capabilities into its Internet of Things business.…

Blog post shamed video vault, has since been ‘reposted as intended Cisco has edited a blog post in which it said YouTube is an unsuitable place for its ads to appear.…

Won't say why, will say it's not sure it can fix the problem without your help UPDATE Telstra has advised users of its cloud who run self-managed resources that their “internet facing servers are potentially vulnerable to malware or other malicious activity.”…

There's still not enough GPUs to go round however Nvidia continued to report strong numbers in its first quarterly results this year, despite failing to supply graphics cards to vendors on time due to a shortage of chips.…

Class action seeks a Zuck-ton of money for privacy invasion Facebook can add a class action lawsuit to the list of legal woes it faces over data misuse revelations.…

Telstra bins own-brand phones, seeks alternative supplier Australia’s largest and dominant telco, Telstra, has stopped selling the ZTE devices it sold under its own brand.…

The Secure Data Act has returned and is lookin' for love US lawmakers from both major political parties came together on Thursday to reintroduce a bill that, if passed, would prohibit the US government from forcing tech product makers to undermine the security of their wares.…

Getting beaten by Deep Blue seems to have had an effect Garry Kasparov, a former Soviet world chess champion and one of the greatest players of all time, has changed his tune about AI since he was beaten by IBM’s Deep Blue.…

Florida Man gets one hell of a phone bill for nuisance calls The FCC has upheld a $120m fine levied against a man accused of making 96 million illegal robocalls.…

Human CEO outlines safety policy for other humans Analysis It's hard to know at what point in Amnon Shashua's presentation on autonomous cars that I started fearing for my life. But it began in earnest when others started asking questions and he started answering them.…

Judge's ruling won't be much help to this bloke going through the courts, though A US Court of Appeals has upheld a ruling that American border agents cannot randomly order deep searches of travelers' electronic devices.…

Judge's ruling won't be much help to this bloke going through the courts, though A US Court of Appeals has upheld a ruling that American border agents cannot randomly order deep searches of travelers' electronic devices.…

If by 'smart' you mean one who 'gets good grades' Students who get good grades have better passwords than their less academically successful peers, though this finding should be considered alongside several caveats.…

If by 'smart' you mean one who 'gets good grades' Students who get good grades have better passwords than their less academically successful peers, though this finding should be considered alongside several caveats.…

Sub-literate, inept, and mostly right-on Pics US Congress has released more than 3,000 Facebook ads purchased by a pro-Kremlin, so-called troll factory the Internet Research Agency.…

Sub-literate, inept, and um... mostly right-on. US Congress has released the full cache of over 3,000 Facebook ads purchased by a pro-Kremlin group, the Internet Research Agency.…

600p and Pro 6000p devices beset by 'incompatibility issues' The Windows 10 April 2018 Update is not proving to be the smoothest of installations for PCs containing certain Intel SSDs.…

Canadian cops put animal road trips on ice after owners 'forget' to mention their plan Canadian law enforcement is bearing down on a pair of zoo owners whose wild trip to the local Dairy Queen wasn't quite the Kodiak moment they'd hoped for.…

Showing Google and Samsung how it's done Nimble-footed Garmin has nipped ahead of industry's lumbering giants and expanded its own mobile payments offering in the UK to include "challenger bank" Starling.…

Not just public cloud services for public cloud servicer Low-cost Irish airline Ryanair is shuttering the "vast majority" of its data centres and moving the infrastructure to AWS.…

Possibly Gemalto and Telit, judging by this The biggest shipper of Internet of Things cellular modules last year wasn’t one of the usual suspects such as Gemalto or Telit. It was Chinese-headquartered biz Simcom.…

New addition to Copernicus, Sentinel-3B, is alive and well and taking pictures The newly launched Sentinel-3B satellite has snapped its first shots of home, delighting boffins back on Earth.…

Don't worry, regulation still, er, WEEKS away Android developers are scrambling to change their apps after 11th hour privacy instructions from Google left them waiting on an SDK which still isn't ready.…

SDN-based security, automated database cloning and multi-cloud spending control Nutanix has moved into SaaS-based compliance, Acropolis SDN-based security and PaaS-based automated database operations with its new Beam, Flow and Era products.…

Planning process prattle stalled project for years Apple has torn up a blueprint to build a €850m (£742m) data centre in Ireland, blaming delays in the planning process that have stalled the project for almost three years.…

Battery optimisation and some love for Assistant in dev preview Google has made some minor tweaks to the wearable OS it insists is doing just great.…

Punxsutawney Phil, where will Brexit leave UK space? As the imagined strains of Sonny and Cher’s hit "I Got You, Babe"* died down, the UK Parliament’s Exiting the European Union Committee spent a chunk of yesterday morning asking the UK space industry the same old questions.…

.NET Core 3.0 will be a soothing balm, claims veep Julia Liuson Build "We're going to reinvigorate Windows desktop development," claimed Julia Liuson, Microsoft's corporate VP responsible for developer tools and programming languages.…

Alas poor Velostrata! You knew those AWS and Azure workloads well Israeli multi-vendor cloud migration startup Velostrata might not be so agnostic about which data centres it shifts workloads to after agreeing to be gobbled by Google for an undisclosed financial sum.…

Still making it rain for MS Growth in spending on cloud by certain sectors of the UK government looks to be coming to a juddering halt, according to information provided under Freedom of Information (FoI) and open data.…