The Register

AWS RDS instances get virty to cut cloudy storage costs Delphix is integrating Amazon's Relational Database Service (RDS) into its database virtualizing platform.…

Oh good, because nothing ever goes wrong with online banking Taxpayer-owned Royal Bank of Scotland Group is shutting 259 branches and slashing 680 jobs, blaming the shift to customers banking online.…

Tackles former state monopoly's 'significant market power' Ofcom wants to slap new measures on BT to prevent it from undercutting rivals investing in super and ultrafast broadband.…

More sensible users would like regulation or permission first More than 20 per cent of Britons don't mind letting websites hijack their CPUs to mine cryptocurrency, a slightly stale survey has found.…

'Disabling the ME will reduce future vulnerabilities' In a slap to Intel, custom Linux computer seller System76 has said it will be disabling the Intel Management Engine in its laptops.…

Christopher Egan takes US prosecutors' deal A former Autonomy exec has entered into a deferred agreement with US prosecutors over charges that he and others deceived investors about the company's ill-fated $11bn (£9bn) acquisition by Hewlett-Packard.…

Adastral Park bundle on sale for a cool 10 Bitcoin BT research campus Adastral Park can finally buy up its domain names – just 17 years after giving a chap the sack for registering them.…

Premium model doubles capacity, ups IOPS 55 per cent Toshiba has doubled the capacity of its M.2 form factor XG5 flash drive to 2TB with an XG5-P (premium) model.…

Android v iPhone rated for crashes and crapitude Ten times as many Android users experience performance issues than iPhone users, although twice as many iPhone users report signal issues.…

UK insurance bods find new bit barn bouncer Exclusive Atos is lined up to replace DXC Technologies as the sole supplier of data centre hosting services to insurance giant Aviva when the existing deal times out in some 19 months.…

Backup sucks Hyperconverged system startup Datrium has spun out a DVX cloud instance for AWS.…

SpeechMatics bests world+dog at adding new language. How did it do it? Interview SpeechMatics, the company founded by British neural network pioneer Tony Robinson, has made major advance in speech recognition.…

Chap kept his work PDA in one, slacked off, played golf, lost job, appealed, failed to get job back An Australian electrician has failed in an effort to regain his job after a judge ruled he hid a work-issued GPS-equipped PDA in a foil snack food bag to avoid being tracked.…

Y'know, back when this would have been useful. Naw, just kidding. This is neat AI can now solve some of the hardest Sudoku puzzles to a high degree of accuracy, according to new research that teaches machines to logically reason.…

El Reg dives into global DNS split threat Analysis Russia is intending to set up its "own internet" according to a number of Russian news sources citing a document signed by President Vladimir Putin earlier this month.…

At same office, chap asked for help fixing keyboard. Spoiler: he had two of 'em On-Call Why hello there, dear readers, and welcome once again to On-Call, The Register's Friday folly in which we recount readers' tales of being asked to undo the messes that users leave behind.…

Receiver comes to the Store, to pipe apps and desktops into Windows-lite for Schools Citrix has released a version of its Receiver app for Windows 10 S, and in so doing made Microsoft's lightweight cut of Windows for schools a bit more interesting.…

Widely used biz tech risks bill bomb, says maker of less popular stuff County and district councils in the UK – Blighty's municipal governments – risk software bills they can't afford if they use Oracle databases, competing vendor TmaxSoft argues. That turns out to be almost all of them.…

Details are thin, but it looks like disks could help process data out on the edge Analysis Western Digital has grandly announced its will use the open-source RISC-V processor architecture in all future products and "intends to lead the industry transition toward open, purpose-built compute architectures to meet the increasingly diverse application needs of a data-centric world."…

Software dev tool relaunched with Amazon branding – plus other stuff AWS re:Invent Amid its torrent of product announcements tied to its re:Invent conference, Amazon Web Services on Thursday introduced AWS Cloud9, a browser-based code editor with AWS integration.…

iPhones and Apple Watch have pinched plenty, even stuff from webOS, apparently The dispute between Apple and Qualcomm has deepened, with the latter company firing off three new lawsuits claiming infringement of its patents.…

Lift and shift to the cloud is harder than you think, and that makes vSphere sticky VMware's again exceeded expectations, with its third quarter results revealing revenue of US$1.98bn, $20m more than expected, and earnings per share seven cents ahead at $1.34.…

More punishment on the menu for Roman Seleznev A Russian hacker already facing a lengthy prison stay in the US has been sent down for another 14 years for heading up an "organized cybercrime ring" that racked up $59m in damages across America.…

Wearing a couple of bullet-proof vests increases your chances of escaping unscathed Supported Well, there’s a surprise. The National Audit Office’s report into the WannaCry ransomware and its effect on the NHS came out in late October. It points the blame at – wait for it – the NHS. Despite warnings, trusts had not prepared themselves with the basic patches necessary to avoid what ended up being an unsophisticated attack.…

Browser will block third-party software from mucking around with pages next year By mid-2018 Google Chrome will no longer allow outside applications – cough, cough, antivirus packages – to run code within the browser on Windows.…

Broker claims 'partial victory' after caving to IRS demand Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase will be turning over information on 14,000 of its users to the IRS – Uncle Sam's tax collectors – thanks to an order from a US court.…

Like HyperCard, but without the cards. Or hype Microsoft isn't short of good ideas – but getting good ideas into Microsoft products, which then stay alive for a long time, is another thing.…

Cops to be stripped of powers to OK access to comms data in tweaks to Snooper's Charter Police forces will no longer be able to grant themselves access to surveillance data if new government proposals to the Snooper's Charter are accepted.…

Accused Brit hacker will have to wait to hear his fate London's High Court has reserved judgment on the extradition of accused hacker Lauri Love after hearing this morning that his appeal should be granted because conditions in the US prisons he may be sent to are "unconscionable".…

Whew, networking is hard Updated LinkedIn's country subdomain SSL certificate has expired – apparently as of about noon GMT today.…

To the power of 14G Analysis Dell is increasing the performance of its hyperconverged product lines by adding 14G PowerEdge servers amid triple-digit VxRail revenue growth. Is this just a short-term spurt or something deeper?…

Brit prosecutors have a confiscation order and say 'more to follow' "If criminals believe they can hide their ill-gotten assets online they are very much mistaken."…

Justice commissioner slams biz for 'irresponsible' behaviour The European Union’s group of data protection watchdogs has launched a taskforce into the Uber data breach that affected 57 million users worldwide.…

Microsoft extends end-of-life till January 8. Why? Uh, Microsoft For reasons unknown, Microsoft has decided at the last minute not to pull the plug on the old Azure Active Directory portal just yet.…

Consumer rights group says firm owes 5.4 million Brit users after 'massive abuse of trust' Consumer rights advocates have launched a class action lawsuit against Google, claiming the biz took millions of iPhone users' personal information illegally.…

M1 SCO car reg plate bidding reaches four figures The old saying "a fool and his money are soon parted" clearly doesn't spring to mind as bidding starts to simmer on the Misco car registration plate that went under the hammer last week.…

Everything's lovely, industry is being less obnoxious Interview When I last interviewed Eyeo comms chief Ben Williams a year ago, the smell of gun smoke and scorched flesh hung in the air. Our piece was headlined: Adblock overlord to Zuckerberg: Lay down your weapons and surrender.…

Higher mobile prices benefit big brands People are spending a little more on their phones, squeezing local and niche phone manufacturers.…

AR and VR vie for attention Microsoft’s recent release of the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, with virtual and augmented reality built in, is a big moment. Microsoft was one-half of the duo with Intel – nicknamed Wintel - that during the 1990s made business computing a mass movement. Windows headsets paired with x86 PCs also promises this mass-market for augmented reality. Only this time, the field is substantially different.…

The road from hell is paved with dead gas stations The Register Lecture It’s the end of the road for the internal combustion engine, right? Volvo will only make electric and hybrid vehicles after 2019 while Britain, France, Germany and others have pledged to stop the sale of and petrol vehicles during the next 20 years.…

New spec hits 48Gbps and can carry 8K HDR videos The HDMI forum has released the HDMI 2.1 spec, and promised it can deliver 48Gbps if you buy new cables that support the jump from HDMI 2.0s 18Gbps.…

Or how to stop worrying about infrastructure and love lock-in DevOps, a combination of development and operations, may have to be rethought because ops is on the outs.…

Sooner or later, dependency hell creates a problem for everyone Dabblers with prominent artificial intelligence tools have been warned and/or reminded to check their dependencies because some have open vulnerabilities.…

Anything smaller than 5.5 inches just won't satisfy, especially in China Analyst outfit IDC has predicted the smartphone era will soon end, with 2019 to see the dawn of the phablet age.…

Each packed with 50-plus qubits, it's a stepping stone to next-gen computing. Possibly Two teams of researchers have created the world's largest publicly known quantum simulators – a type of quantum computer – each containing more than 50 qubits to model complex interactions between matter that cannot be performed with a conventional supercomputer.…

Baidu's Deep Speech with TensorFlow under the covers Mozilla has revealed an open speech dataset and a TensorFlow-based transcription engine.…

Elvis had Graceland. Will Microsoft have Gatesland? Poll Apple built a spaceship, Amazon's tendered for a town and now Microsoft's announced a “multi-year campus refresh project” that will see it splash US$150m to renovate 6.7 million square feet of its offices, add eight new buildings and lay a cricket pitch.…

Note the 'currently' because something just made the Gin Palace's shares pop 20 per cent Nokia Networks has denied a rumour that it's planning to make an offer for Juniper Networks.…

Web alt-coin nasties run even after you leave the page Miscreants have found a way to continue running cryptocurrency-crafting JavaScript on Windows PCs even after netizens browse away from the webpage hosting the code.…

As expected – just like the Oracle bashing AWS re:Invent On Wednesday in Las Vegas, USA, at Amazon Web Services' sixth annual re:Invent dog-and-pony show, CEO Andy Jassy fulfilled industry expectations and introduced a managed Kubernetes service – Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS).…