The Register

Watchdog's clown, er, chairman debases policymaking in the United States Despite the clearly stated and serious concerns of a broad cross-section of industry and society, on Thursday morning a mocking, preening excuse of a regulatory chairman tore down US rules that ensured content over the internet was kept free from manipulation by companies that sell access to the global network.…

Doing AI or ML? Really? Tell us about it Events The call for papers for MCubed 2018 is open, and we really want to hear how you're putting machine learning, AI and robotics to work in real organisations.…

Firm considers sale and looks to slash expenses +Comment CEO Ken Klein is having to eat dust after Tintri's poor IPO saw sales staff leave. Third quarter results are dire, the fourth quarter looks even worse, and Tintri is considering selling itself.…

Machine learning algo can classify thousands in time puny human groks one Britain's map maker is demonstrating that machine learning isn't all hot air – but has discovered just how much donkey work is involved.…

Roaming hike of £5 a day means more to exit required Thousands of Vodafone customers have been given the green light by UK comms watchdog Ofcom to ditch their contracts, after the mobile phone provider hiked international roaming fees to £5 per day.…

MAVEN probe observations shed light on atmosphere loss Scientists are applying knowledge gained from studying Mars to calculate how the atmospheres of theoretical exoplanets would behave.…

Disney buys Fox empire for $66bn, news divs to be spun off Most of Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox empire is being flogged to Disney for $66bn, including large chunks of the film and telly businesses.…

In plain English, offshoring and automating jobs, of course Outsourcing giant Capita is broadening its "restructuring" programme (AKA offshoring and automating more jobs), while reporting that 2017 has been a "subdued" year for the biz in a trading update today.…

Lawyer tells patent hearing day-to-day operations suspended NVDIMMer Diablo Technologies has suspended day-to-day operations, according to its lawyer.…

Commish 'forced' to invoke statutory powers with 'difficult' organisations UKIP has appealed to the information tribunal after the Information Commissioner's Office ordered it to hand over details about its use of data analytics during the Brexit campaign.…

Tech's too 'fast moving' for framework, but not for slurping your face The Home Office has admitted the UK’s biometrics strategy won't be published until next year, as MPs slam an "unacceptable" delay of more than five years.…

Adventures in on-premises hyperscale rackland Analysis Composable infrastructure startup DriveScale believes composability is not primarily about hardware. Its CEO told us: "Hardware doesn’t drive software any more" and "SoCs are everywhere now", so "use the network as your backplane" because "100Gbit Ethernet is faster than PCIe 4 lane".…

You say you're not into us. Let's 'dialogue' over dinner Dutch security biz Gemalto has spurned outsourcing giant Atos' unsolicited offer of a €4.3bn (£3.79bn) buyout describing the proposal as "opportunistic".…

You guys OK with paper print-outs for the next eight months? EE Business Broadband customers will have to make do with old-fashioned paper print-outs for the next eight months because the firm's online portal is down.…

Walking in a storage wonderland – the top 10 news stories of the year Analysis It's been a crazy storage news year with a furious blitz of announcements and events, some of which stand out more than others.…

You won't believe this but it's a mess Despite having been repeatedly criticized for abusing his position amid the suspension of a patent judge, the president of the European Patent Office (EPO) is seemingly still using the organization's secretive nature to influence the affair.…

Yes, this really is called DOH, but this one's far from a face palm The Internet Engineering Task Force has taken the first steps towards a better way of protecting users' DNS queries and incidentally made a useful contribution to making neutrality part of the 'net's infrastructure instead of the plaything of ISPs.…

Cortana, Office, Bing, Azure get machine-learning boost Microsoft has bunged a load of AI-powered features into its software – from Azure and Office 365 to Bing and Cortana.…

$2 an hour? Jeez, thanks, Jeff People wanted for tedious work. Low wages, variable hours, location flexible. Career growth doubtful. Not much in the way of recognition or thanks.…

VMware-to-Azure was just the beginning Microsoft has revealed the Azure Migrate tool it announced as supporting lift and shift from on-prem vSphere to Azure will also become capable of doing the same for on-premises Hyper-V applications and applications in rival clouds. But the company’s stayed schtum about the identity of the mystery VMware partner that has helped it build its bare metal VMware service in Azure.…

Missing key info, take with a pinch of salt, YMMV If you've been curious about the potential performance of Google's TPU2 – its second-generation custom neural-network math acceleration chip – well, here's an early Christmas present.…

50 Mbps / 100 Mbps now bundle CVC capacity nbn™ has announced new wholesale bundles it hopes will overcome the despised peak-hour crush: a 50 Mbps access product with 2 Mbps of CVC traffic in the bundle; and a 100 Mbps access product with 2.5 Mbps of CVC.…

It's also accidentally written the syllabus for a 'Home IoT Network Engineer' course Internet of Things users need to become sysadmins, America's Federal Bureau of Investigation says.…

Good effort but the games were seemingly rigged Analysis DeepMind claimed this month its latest AI system – AlphaZero – mastered chess and Shogi as well as Go to "superhuman levels" within a handful of hours.…

Jha rule-breaker and pals confess IoT gadget hack crimes, now facing the slammer A former New Jersey college student has copped to helping create and run the massive Mirai DDoS botnet.…

Web giant accused in court of withholding money AdTrader, an online ad agency, has accused Google of reneging on promised ad payments, stealing clients, and fraud.…

Buh buh buh buh buh buh buh but her emails! And those texts! Analysis In two weeks, a US law authorizing one of Uncle Sam's crucial mass snooping programs will expire.…

Australian tentacle has mucked things up at bank and border security agency Bosses at IBM's Australian outpost have been forced to remind staff to do their best work during the pre-Christmas rush – that time of year when outsourced clients want a lot of stuff done in a hurry before much of the world shuts down to overeat.…

Why use a slow expensive risky currency when you can do real-time bank-to-bank transfers? The governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia has opined that cryptocurrencies are most useful “to those who want to make transactions in the black or illegal economy, rather than everyday transactions” and concluded that current enthusiasm for the instruments therefore “feels more like a speculative mania than it has to do with their use as an efficient and convenient form of electronic payment.”…

Save now, learn later EVENTS If embracing Continuous Delivery of DevOps is on your New Year’s resolution list, you can get a head start by wrapping up your Continuous Lifecycle London 2018 tickets now - and save a stack of cash into the bargain.…

Happy with this Utopian vision of the driverless future? Tell the Highways Agency A Highways Agency report suggests that cars of the future could report road potholes automatically, with fleets of auto autos being instructed to swerve around them without human intervention.…

echo "Bot herders will love"; cat /etc/passwd # AT&T's DirecTV wireless kit has an embarrassing vulnerability in its firmware that can be trivially exploited by miscreants and malware to install hidden backdoors on the home network equipment, according to a security researcher.…

Six years's porridge. Dridex not a laundry soap – it's a Trojan An employee of Barclays Bank who laundered thousands of pounds on behalf of Moldovan cybercriminals was yesterday sentenced to six years and four months behind bars in Blighty.…

Paltry 50,000 sold, according to camera app download stats Andy Rubin's ambitions to create a new consumer electronics ecosystem are floundering at base camp. Sales of Essential's phone, which forms a key part of the strategy, are tepid.…

Retro Computers Ltd director hits back: So? We binned him Ailing ZX Spectrum Vega firm Retro Computers Ltd appears to have lost one of its key people, amid a battle of words between the MD and a former contractor.…

Bad news for regular TITSUP* offenders, good news for consumer choice Banks will have to publish details of incidents that stop people using their payment services under new rules proposed by the UK's Financial Conduct Authority.…

Metaphor wrought in flesh An experiment by staff at ISP Andrews & Arnold has redefined the meaning of a fibre connection by showing that a piece of wet string can handle ADSL.…

But taxi biz can restart work in Sheffield The northern city of York has voted against renewing Uber's licence as the backlash against the ride-hailing firm's business practices continues.…

No replacement named for bossman who oversaw £3.5bn takeover by US giant Head honcho at comms biz Cable & Wireless John Reid is to step down in early 2018.…

Plans to extend slurping to why kids quit mainstream education Plans to expand the vast National Pupil Database to include information on why kids leave mainstream education have been slammed by privacy campaigners.…

Store closures on the way? Did someone mention Brexit? Dixons Carphone execs handed out their numbers to world+dog today, showing profits plummeting by more than half in the firm’s half-year results. The plunge was chalked up to UK customers skipping mobile upgrades - a move that could signal further closures across its stores.…

True meaning of the season is all about how you overindulge Boozing in the morning, blazing family rows in the afternoon, and passing out in front of the telly – trousers unbuttoned – by 5pm. All of these are annual traditions of Christmas but when it comes to dinner, what makes the perfect festive nosh?…

Smartens up software act with raft of improvements Cloud storage and gateway supplier Nasuni has released software making its Edge Appliances faster, safer, and easily integrated.…

GPU-makers aren't members of the TPC. Will they join? The Transaction Processing Performance Council has decided the world needs a benchmark for systems running artificial intelligence workloads.…

Google, Facebook and Microsoft routed through PutinGrad, for no good reason A Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing incident saw a bunch of high-profile Internet destinations mis-routed through Russia on Tuesday, US time.…

Automated account-creator used bad passwords to detect when sites go bad Researchers working on a technology to detect unannounced data breaches have found, to their dismay, that one per cent of the sites they monitored were hacked over the previous 18 months.…

Come for the free movies, stay to dig Monero for a stranger Security experts claim four extremely popular video-streaming websites have been secretly loaded with crypto-currency-crafting code.…

Remember that 747 with an open door and a telescope? It spotted a moon-esque blip NASA's hypothesised that MU69, the Kuiper Belt object that is the New Horizons probe's next destination, has a moon.…

Marvell claims it'll have the first chipsets for new 10G WiFi ready for products in H2 2018 Chip-maker Marvell has claimed it will be the first to offer WiFi chipsets that bring the 802.11ax standard to the world.…

Seeing as India has biometric national ID, this seems like a pretty sensible idea India's decided it needs a third computer emergency response team, to protect government digital services.…