The Register

Applied Materials quartet accused of trying to pull a Fairchild Four former Applied Materials employees have been charged with stealing the company's chipmaking technology to use as the basis for their own startup.…

Boffins working to put everyone in glass houses Seeing through walls, a capability available to law enforcement and military authorities for several years, could become a bit more predictable in the future thanks to a technique developed by researchers at Duke University.…

Files brief to make sure US ‘correctly understands’ EU data protection law The European Commission has stepped into the ongoing battle between Microsoft and the US government to make sure European laws are “correctly understood”.…

Black Hat crowd encouraged to be paranoid Delegates to Black Hat Europe have been encouraged to turn conventional security thinking on its head by practicing security through distrusting.…

President punts issue to Administrative Council Despite having conclusively won two tribunals and been publicly supported by the International Labour Organization (ILO) demanding his immediate reinstatement, on Thursday patent judge Patrick Corcoran was refused entry to the European Patent Office's (EPO) headquarters.…

Stop appreciating the irony and go install the patch now Microsoft has posted an out-of-band security update to address a remote code execution flaw in its Malware Protection Engine.…

There's no traffic on that road because it's ON FIRE! As wildfires continue to rage around Los Angeles, the local police have asked drivers to be somewhat skeptical about navigation apps.…

Another week, another Mac patch to install Apple has released a security update to address nearly two dozen vulnerabilities in macOS High Sierra.…

But… aren't you… supposed…aaargh… Pai! One of the US government's top regulators has warned that her department is in no position to take on the mantle of protecting the open internet if its sister organization, the FCC, votes on repealing net neutrality regulations later this month.…

Outages throw a wrench into profit taking The price of Bitcoin (BTC) continued to soar on Thursday, creating chaos among those trying to buy and sell the cryptocurrency currency due to service trouble at several exchanges.…

That's not how bug bounties work, Travis A 20-year-old Florida man who lives with his mom was the "security researcher" that Uber paid off last year not to reveal a massive hack of its systems.…

We'll soon be Xeon the numbers... IBM has launched its first POWER9 server, the dual-socket AC922, saying it is designed for compute-intensive AI work, speeding frameworks like Chainer, TensorFlow and Caffe.…

Up to 40 calls a day, three hours wasted IT buyers are pestered by between nine and 40 unsolicited sales calls from resellers each and every day, collectively wasting hours of their life that they’ll never get back.…

Infrastructure, acquisitions and retrenchments Supported It has been an interesting year in the world of hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) with acquisitions and retrenchments and with new products released.…

At least one part of the 'Year of the Navy' went to plan Britain’s biggest ever aircraft carrier, HMS Queen Elizabeth, has been formally commissioned into the Royal Navy, with Her Majesty attending the ceremony in person.…

Something went bump in the night... over and over It takes all sorts to make a world and some on the fringes of life often turn up on daytime TV. And so El Reg was fascinated by the story of Amethyst Realm, who dumped a human in the, er, physical realm to become a ghostbuster banger.…

Object storage filer front end to ease the load for primary filers Cloudian says you can store unstructured data files on its HyperStore object storage, through a HyperFile NAS Controller, and not burden primary data filers with the stuff, saving lots of lovely money and getting loads of scalability.…

Be safe out there, mmkay, says CAA The Civil Aviation Authority reckons a million and a half consumer drones will be sold over Christmas – and the aviation regulator hopes new dronies will read and obey the law of the skies.…

Mulls further regulation next year The European Commission has urged the likes of Google, Facebook and Twitter to do more to remove extremist content - or face further regulation.…

Not so bad, is it? Real world performance gleaned from thousands of British mobiles sheds light on how LTE in the boondocks performs outside major urban areas. And it may not be as bad as you think.…

For the love of cloud, don't click on anything Google seems powerless to stop its Google Drive file sharing service being exploited by a spammer who has linked other users to their stash of pirated movies, among other dubious files, users have complained.…

Ben Rudall challenged over move to Snowflake Hadoop-slinger Hortonworks has sought a court order against former enterprise sales manager Ben Rudall that would permit it take forensic images of his personal phone and his cloud storage account.…

Parroting Cayla... if she were a bit more sweary The same researchers whose hack on the My Friend Cayla doll prompted regulatory action have followed up with a hack on a talking toy robot bird.…

Free at last, free at last, thank Ginny Rommety... IBM is seeking volunteers in Technology Support Services (TSS) to throw themselves down the redundancy chute by the end of the year.…

And give thanks unto the GSMA Logowatch Progress on deploying the NB-IoT connectivity tech may have stalled but the GSM Association doesn’t want you worrying your little head about that. Instead, take a look at the shiny new logo they’ve come up with for NB-IoT!…

Innovation deep freeze ends with private equity ownership Analysis Public cloud backupper Spanning says it has a new release of innovation energy now that Dell has shopped it to private equity.…

Why you should check the load type and other tips Sometimes fast just isn’t fast enough and in the fast moving world of NoSQL databases, what was considered blindingly fast yesterday can be seen as slow today. For instance, Cassandra has always been thought of as a fast solution for ingesting data into a database cluster, but today upcoming systems such as Aerospike and Scylla are wiping the floor with Cassandra in benchmarks.…

Nick Wilson working six month notice Just months after Nick Wilson landed in the UK hot seat at Frankenfirm DXC Technologies - the merger between CSC and HPE’s outsourcing division - he has quit, multiple sources have told The Reg.…

ICO in discussions with govt, has set out its concerns The UK’s data protection watchdog has raised concerns with the government over new clauses slipped into the Data Protection Bill at the last minute, which critics say could undermine the law.…

Emerges without much dust, ready for fourteenth Earth year of ops - rather longer than planned 90-day mission! It has been the week of long-lived space hardware: first came the news of Voyager 1's thrusters working after 37 years without use and now NASA's cautiously suggested that the Opportunity rover on Mars will be fit to roll into its 14th year of red planet operations.…

Na Zdorovie to the hard-working devs at Russia's Arusoft Russian software vendor Arusoft claims it delayed a product release because its developers were drunk.…

Hyper-volatility means transaction fees can hit $20 – if they go through before the price of Bitcoin changes Online games-mart Steam has stopped accepting Bitcoin payments.…

vRealize brings workload definition and movement across your bit barn or public cloud VMware's added management wares to its hybrid cloud bundle, Cloud Foundation.…

Oliver Schmidt lied his way up the greasy pole, Judge rules Former Volkswagen executive Oliver Schmidt has been sentenced to 84 months in a United States federal prison for his role in the “dieselgate” software scandal that saw vehicles deliver test results that indicated their emissions met US standards when in fact they were smoke-belching jalopies.…

Services for lands of slow connections and rotten roads now set global agendas Google's efforts to find its “next billion” users has been revealed to also be an effort to build services for the first billion.…

Specs, features summarized Qualcomm's flagship Snapdragon 845 system-on-chip will include an isolated security core for handling sensitive personal information, among other new features.…

A sampling KubeCon and CloudNativeCon-oriented tidbits With the advent of KubCon and CloudNativeCon in Austin, Texas, on Wednesday, assorted enterprise vendors have chosen this week to flog their latest devops-oriented wares, before the impending holiday torpor leaves IT folks too distracted, weary or inebriated to care.…

Attempt to harden network failed, badly, so the call's gone out to Cisco for help European web hosting outfit OVH has reported its second major outage and Total Inability To Support Usual Performance in a month and admitted the new outage was caused by its attempts to fix the cause of the last one.…

President Benoit Battistelli dealt brutal blow by International Labor Organization The European Patent Office (EPO) has been commanded to immediately reinstate a judge it suspended two years ago and pay him tens of thousands of euros in compensation and damages.…

Mining outfit says its entire wallet gone, estimated $62m Cryptocurrency mining market NiceHash says it has fallen victim to a hacking attack that may have resulted in the loss of its entire Bitcoin wallet.…

If you're not fit to drive, you're not fit to fly in the Garden State The State of New Jersey is considering a law to criminalize flying drones while drunk or stoned.…

Boffins from the University of Washington embed connectivity in (mostly) plastic trinkets In an effort to make objects more chatty, boffins at the University of Washington have developed a way to create 3D-printed plastic baubles that can communicate over Wi-Fi with other devices, without batteries or electronics.…

Pezy CEO accused of $3.8m subsidy theft The CEO of Pezy Computing, known for developing one of the world's fastest supercomputers, has been arrested on suspicion of fraud.…

Awkward timing considering its Time-Warner marriage request AT&T has been hit with a particularly badly-timed antitrust lawsuit accusing it of price gouging.…

Sparse is more Researchers at OpenAI have launched a library of tools that can help researchers build faster, more efficient neural networks that take up less memory on GPUs.…

‘Significant concerns’ over transatlantic data flow deal European data protection agencies have told authorities to address their “significant concerns” about Privacy Shield, or risk having the deal tested in court.…

A percentage reduction AND no future tax on foreign profits? Too kind, Uncle Sam! While Apple may have to fork out €13bn (£11.4bn) to the Irish government in back taxes, on the other side of the Pond it could gain $47.2bn (£35.2bn) in tax breaks.…

Security researchers lift lid on snafu at Black Hat Europe On Wednesday, in a presentation at Black Hat Europe, Positive Technologies security researchers Mark Ermolov and Maxim Goryachy plan to explain the firmware flaws they found in Intel Management Engine 11, along with a warning that vendor patches for the vulnerability may not be enough.…

Spending watchdog says buck stops with Home Office The government is not doing enough to prevent Brits being defrauded by £10bn per year, according to a spending watchdog report.…

Cyber no longer domain of techies, says ex-diplomat Black Hat Cyber threats have evolved from been a solely technical issues to core issues of government policy, according to a senior US lawyer and former cyber diplomat.…