The Register

System reports, snapshots, improved app store, backups Linux Mint 18.3 – aka "Sylvia" – is here to remind users that, hey, sometimes Linux can work a little bit more like Apple, Google and Microsoft software. (Just kidding, don't kill us.)…

Keep your money, says chap (tho Chinese drone firm did patch 'em right quick) Updated Chinese drone-maker DJI’s bug bounty programme has been struck with fresh controversy after a security researcher claimed he was offered just $500 for reporting, among others, the years-old Heartbleed vulnerability.…

Handy wristjob Google has quietly brought improvements to its wearable OS that users have been asking for three years. And without much fanfare.…

E-Fan X slated to generate lift and 'leccy by 2020 British aero engine maker Rolls-Royce will team up with Airbus and Siemens to develop hybrid electric-powered flying machines, it has been announced today.…

Mischievous herd serves 4-day sentence Eight donkeys were released from an Indian jail yesterday after the law proved itself to be, well, an ass, and imprisoned them for eating the prison officers' plants.…

Virtzilla's new cloudy release cadence gets an airing VMware has added new services, and new features, to its bare metal service running in Amazon Web Services.…

Which pie *doesn't* Japanese corp have a finger in? Software-defined storage biz Nexenta has picked up another $20m in funding.…

Jonathan Taplin against the tech giants If the tech industry wants another wave of innovation to match the PC or the internet, Google and Facebook must be broken up, journalist and film producer Jonathan Taplin told an audience at University College London's Faculty of Law this week.…

NoSQL biz touts 'engagement database' to firms with cash to burn on 'digital transformation' Couchbase is going after businesses tracking customer interactions and investing in "digital transformation" amid speculation of an IPO.…

C'mon... there has to be some aggregation aggravation Interview How does Hewlett Packard Enterprise view hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) now that it has bought and is digesting SimpliVity?…

Open the chuffing pod bay doors yourself, Dave Stob has obtained access to the unpublished journals of a young British programmer who found herself assigned to the elite team that built the HAL 9000 computer during the 1990s.…

Ernst & Young: Mmm... maybe if you had some 'objectives' The UK government’s network of "Catapult" innovation and technology agencies – which fall under its under the R&D spending umbrella – show poor governance and dubious value for money, a report by Ernst and Young has concluded.…

No we aren't talking about helicopters. UK heads, offshoring.... Exclusive With the wider ambition to base eight in 10 services personnel to lower-cost wage locations, IBM has commenced the latest job-cutting process in the UK and Ireland.…

And finally sir, a wafer-thin mint... it is but wafer-thin Tasty storage dishes for your Thanksgiving table include starter from Hazelcast, entree from HPE, a side from Qubole and dessert from Rubrik. Place your napkins in your lap and start dining.…

Unexpected consequences - or drawing the line at non-linear relationships Hello, wrong number You may never have heard of the NPS but if you have ever answered a question such as: "How likely are you to recommend our company/product/service to your friends and colleagues?" you have entered the Net Promoter Score zone.…

You've only got a few billion years, little buddy Astronomers have long known the nearby galaxy, the Small Magellanic Cloud, was being monstered by the Milky Way and the Large Magellanic Cloud. But new imaging captured by the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) has made it clear that the little star-factory has only a handful of billion years left.…

Think Face/Off, in software, plus some digital touchup Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Informatics have defeated facial recognition on big social media platforms – by removing faces from photos and replacing them with automatically-painted replicas.…

Hundreds of apps put snoops to work, and then there's 'supersonic tone tracking' In case you're wondering, yes, there's a good chance at least some of your Android apps have tracked you rather more than you expect.…

We gave up privacy for convenience, and 2018's the time to win both of them back On a walk across the show floor at January's Consumer Electronics Show, a friend working in technology for nearly thirty years expressed unease at where it all seemed to be headed.…

PowerDNS admins, feel free to fix these DNSSEC bugs before something nasty happens Open source DNS software vendor PowerDNS has advised users to patch its "Authoritative" and "Recursor" products, to squish five bugs disclosed today.…

We promise not to make any sour kraut gags Facebook has caved to political pressure and announced a new office in Germany to scrub abusive posts from its social network.…

Animal-piloted cyborgs is just what 2017 needs right now Amputatee monkeys have been trained to control robotic arms with their minds using an advanced brain-machine interface, a group of researchers have claimed.…

Ahem ahem, have you... have you tried turning off and on again? Call it a bug, call it a spellcheck quirk, or call it a wonderful bit of wishful thinking; iPhone owners are all about the IT department these days.…

What's Redmond got to hide? Or clear with lawyers? Microsoft's delayed its big reveal of how it plans to run VMware on Azure by a fortnight, and won't say why.…

Fake pizza, fake comments, fake arguments aren't helping either side Analysis Just because it was inevitable doesn't make it bearable.…

Tech consultants waged six-year hacking campaign, American prosecutors claim Three Chinese nationals went on a six-year hacking spree against American targets, siphoning financial reports and tech blueprints, US prosecutors allege.…

Web giant's R&D boffins to tease privacy-protecting tech in NIPS show-and-tell Video Google researchers claim to have developed an "electronic screen protector" that can alert you when nosy parkers are looking over your shoulder at your phone.…

Lawmakers wonder if biz known for regulatory contempt flouted rules Five US senators on Monday asked ersatz taxi biz and lawsuit magnet Uber to provide more details about how it allowed hackers in 2016 to pilfer personal information for 57 million customers and drivers.…

Apple's facial-recog tech 'not secure enough for business' claim researchers Video Security researchers have once again claimed a simple mask to hoodwink Apple's Face ID authentication system that graces the tech giant's $1,000 iPhone X.…

Buttered beverage second-nastiest thing on upstart's site The Silicon Valley-backed nutrition upstart specializing in butter-infused coffee says evil code injected into its website was covertly gulping customers' payment card details for months.…

Once you're in... How times change. When the Cloud Industry Forum first started surveying cloud take-up, about seven years ago, most businesses still weren’t using any cloud services. Its latest survey, published this spring, revealed that nearly 90 per cent of organisations are using cloud, each one deploying three cloud-based services.…

Strangers' snaps glimpsed, deleted with code you wouldn't touch with a ten-foot poll A security researcher found a way to delete any picture on Facebook, irrespective of whether it's public or private, by cunning use of polls.…

City's attempt to foster competition shafted after taking pole position An American city's efforts to make it easier for Google and upstart ISPs to compete against cable giants has been unceremoniously unplugged.…

Cure period now available in other license flavors Facebook, Google, IBM, and Red Hat on Monday will give free-software license violators two months to mend their ways before going nuclear.…

Thoma Bravo bags network security biz for $1.6bn cash Private equity biz Thoma Bravo is buying slow-growth Barracuda Networks for $1.6bn in cash.…

Come on in, the water's... err... cloudy Businesses want cloud-style IT, HPE declared as it pushed out GreenLake on-premises everything-as-a-service models – an evolution of its Flex Capacity pay-per-use infrastructure.…

Summer tests show mobile signal on all trains is possible Transport for London promises to have 4G mobile coverage on the London Underground during 2019 following successful tests this summer.…

User conference opens with call for clarity on indirect access Brit SAP users have little interest in adopting the German enterprise resource planning giant's self-branded "digital innovation system", Leonardo, citing licensing concerns as a barrier, according to a survey.…

Revisiting a feel-good hit of the summer Long-Term Test It's become a bit of cliché that in recent years low-cost Chinese phones have been "disrupting" a market that belonged to high-margin, high-cost flagship makers like Samsung and Sony. But what happens when a Chinese phone vendor "disrupts" itself?…

Streamed direct from the Amazon storage fishbowl, natch Amazon announced a preview for its new AR, VR and 3D app editing and hosting service, Sumerian, today. It is hoping new augmented and virtual reality web developers will pick its new cloud-based platform over Unity3D and Unreal Engine.…

One-time head-shedding biz will build foundations for robot air traffic controllers Troubled integrator biz Logicalis has scooped itself a contract to supply the UK's main air traffic control firm with key IT infrastructure equipment and services.…

Shada serial completed with animation and voiceovers The fourth and finest Doctor, Tom Baker, has reprised the role to finish a Who serial scuppered in 1979 by strike action at the BBC.…

Wedding, schmedding, here's the REAL news of the day As Prince Harry and actress Meghan Markle announce their engagement today, equally thrilling news is also breaking across Britain: new laws forcing drone operators to register.…

£20m vaccine for NHS cybersecurity The UK's National Health Service will pay white hat hackers up to £20m to protect its IT systems, it announced today.…

Private equity investor of fallen reseller launches online auction Whichever fool once proclaimed money can’t buy one class clearly wasn’t privy to the inventory of now defunct tech reseller Misco Group that was recently put up for sale by private equity backer Hilco Capital.…

Switch flicked on latest voluntary redundancy scheme. Staff out by 31 Dec DXC Technologies is spreading some festive cheer by dangling voluntary redundancy (VR) terms in front of customer support teams, according to a confidential document seen by The Register.…

Here's one I made earlier – now, over to you If there's a poster child for machine learning, it's neural networks. We gave a practical introduction to the topic here, but this time I'll take a different approach and explain the background to how neural networks, er, work.…

Playing augmented reality while driving in the real world cost billions, say boffins Pokémon GO killed at least two people and spiked rates of car accidents and injuries, according to a study of the game's impact on just one United States city.…

Cunning plan: anger rusted-on users who've been with you before social networks existed Administrators of Yahoo! Groups have complained that the service has become unstable and unreliable.…