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Tech distie veteran Graeme Watt set for April Fool's Day start Ever wondered how much the CEO at a big box shifting reseller gets paid? Wonder no more, for Softcat has revealed its new head honcho Graeme Watt will be on a cool £450,000 yearly base salary.…

OpenStack to power first version of scalable clouds, Azure and VMware to follow Rackspace says it will be teaming up with HPE to build a private cloud service that bills customers based on usage.…

Pie love thee, Lord Jesus Nothing quite says Christmas like greasy, calorific overindulgence, and this year budget sausage roll shop Greggs is ready to get you in the mood with its "treat-filled" limited-edition advent calendar.…

You keep using that word, dox. It means more than you think it means... Amazon's audio surveillance personal assistant device, Alexa, has acquired an external battery pack called Dox.…

Scottish vessel gets a refit by team that restored Cutty Sark A Playmobil pirate ship has been launched off the west coast of Africa after stowing away on a full-size Norwegian vessel.…

GraphCore blimey AI chip startup Graphcore has announced today a $50m deal with venture capital firm Sequoia Capital.…

It's all about AR... and iPhone has the X factor This month's release by Apple of the iPhone X with FaceID begins the first wave of consumer products designed from the ground up for continuous awareness of space, place and face - crowning a half a century of research in augmented reality destined to fuse our rising sea of data onto the real world.…

Offering cloud-to-cloud backup and data intelligence +Comment Druva has nabbed a new Druva Cloud Platform (DCP) service gig for protecting, governing and looking into data in Amazon Web Services' Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Simple Storage Service (S3), Elastic Block Store (EBS), and the Relational Database Service (RDS).…

Never go full Windows Munich city council's administrative and personnel committee has decided to move any remaining Linux systems to Windows 10 in 2020.…

Chair says he needs to kill copper network, maybe build 5G backhaul too Openreach chair Mike McTighe says the carrier has concluded its consultation on how to deliver fibre-to-the-premises connections across Britain by the year 2025 and will deliver its plan to do so “before Christmas”.…

Scale-out on-premises filer can burst processing to Amazon Scale-out file start up Qumulo has revealed all-flash filer nodes.…

It's an exercise in learning to cluster, and could soon scale to 10,000 nodes The Los Alamos National Laboratory will this week reveal its latest "High-performance computer" - a cluster of 750 Raspberry Pis.…

Companion app recorded audio you while you - ahem - played, but it never left your phone Sex-toy maker Lovsense has told its customers to stop moaning about one of its products, which recorded audio of users as they – ahem – played, and stored it on their Android phones.…

Also does MIPS, PowerPC, Sparc, and AARCH64 Hacking ARM processors just became a little easier after a researcher who operates under the name Azeria Labs put together virtual machines that emulate common hardware.…

'Dream Chaser' is signed up for ISS re-supply six missions Sierra Nevada Corporation's “Dream Chaser” automated spaceplane has successfully flown and landed.…

Like Uber but for leaking personal data: a million customer records left on unsecured Hadoop Boston-based ride-hailing hopeful Fasten has coughed to a million-customer data breach that happened because someone left a database lying around unsecured.…

Hardened Android vendor found third parties eating its lunch The folk in charge of the hardened Android distribution CopperheadOS have run into problems with licence violations. Over the weekend, they temporarily disabled over-the-air updates for Nexus devices, and pulled some downloads from their website.…

Which is nice as it's the next long-term release and gets Linux into the GPU game Linus Torvalds has given the world version 4.14 of the Linux Kernel.…

It's your weekly security news bytes Roundup Phew, we made it to the weekend. Let's take a look at everything that went down in IT security beyond what we've already covered this week.…

Your weekend dose of machine-learning updates Roundup It's been an interesting fortnight, sorry, two weeks in AI. In addition to what we've already reported, we have news about HPE developing what looks like a neural network accelerator chip, TensorFlow updates, Google's effort to teach software to make software, and other bits and pieces.…

And we have evidence to prove it, says biz stiffed out of $1m A crypto-currency collector who was locked out of his $1m Ethereum multi-signature wallet this week by a catastrophic bug in Parity's software has claimed the blunder was not an accident – it was "deliberate and fraudulent."…

Machine-learning tech tries to figure out when your servers are about to fail Interview Park Place Technologies for the past two years has been working with IT services biz BMC to develop a way to augment its data center service business with machine learning.…

Speaking of white scenes, Apple's diversity is still grim Apple's $1,000 iPhone X may have trouble operating in the winter weather.…

If you run a website with user accounts, take a look at this research, ta Google has teamed up with computer scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, to find out how exactly hijackers take over its users' accounts.…

Mr Smith goes to Switzerland Microsoft president Brad Smith appeared before the UN in Geneva to talk about the growing problem of nation-state cyber attacks on Thursday.…

Tape, DXi and SOS all trend down as SW-defined cloud-native star rises It's blood on the boardroom table at Quantum as an activist investor joins the board, the CEO leaves, the scale-out storage revenue rescue strategy fails, revenues turn down, and hopes turn to a software-defined, cloud-native future.…

Q3 sales up, global footprint enlarged post NASDAQ listing Oracle and SAP support firm Rimini Street has reported an increase in revenues in its first quarterly results since being listed on the NASDAQ.…

High-performance servers get data-pumping storage arrays +Comment HPE and DataDirect Networks are partnering to integrate DDN storage and burst buffer products with HPE's Apollo servers and its DMF workflow manager.…

By a multinational... But, er, RULE BRITANNIA! The UK Space Agency has made a deal with Thales Alenia Space to assemble and test a carbon-measuring satellite, the British government announced yesterday.…

This programme is not fully supported, please contact your national administration Computing based education has improved in the UK since 2012 but there's still more to be done, according to the Royal Society…

The cost of THAT breach revealed... profits crash Equifax's latest financials lay bare the costly fallout from the embarrassing security breach that exposed 143 million customers' privates in the US and 15.2 million in the UK.…

Sorry isn't enough, Sean The billionaire and former Facebook president Sean Parker now says he regrets helping turn the social network into a global phenomenon. The site grew by "exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology" with its greed for attention and the careful reward system it created to keep users addicted.…

Offers advice on getting better Optane benchmark boosts The 750GB version of Intel's Optane P4800X product is becoming available this month, doubling the current 375GB capacity.…

Watchdog finds outsourcer's oversight severely lacking Capita's investment business has been forced to pay up to £66m to investors by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) over its handling of the collapsed Connaught Income Fund.…

Unless you're lucky and there's already a WebExtensions equivalent Open Source Insider Mozilla plans on November 14 to start rolling out Firefox 57, a massive update that just might send many of its users scurrying for the LTS release.…

Calling all precogs! Comment The Home Secretary believes artificial intelligence will soon be used to stop people posting on the internet pre-emptively with a kind of Minority Report-style "precrime" unit.…

Vault 8 release says spooks used disguise to siphon off data The CIA wrote code to impersonate Kaspersky Labs in order to more easily siphon off sensitive data from hack targets, according to leaked intel released by Wikileaks on Thursday.…

Tribunal upholds minimum wage, paid rest break luxury for minions Taxi firm Uber has today lost its appeal against a ruling that its drivers should be classed as workers rather than self-employed.…

BT, TalkTalk engineer a no-show? ... £25 for you Purveyors of crap broadband services could have to shell out £142m in compensation, under an automatic redress scheme due to be brought in by regulator Ofcom.…

It's like Windows at 20. But slurpier Part One It was an anniversary that prompted much reflection. The Platform had completely triumphed and was now ubiquitous, relied on by people all over the world. You could find the Platform in almost every conceivable kind of device, from cars to TVs. Although Apple had once been the pioneer, it now had to settle for life in the Platform's shadow: as a high-margin boutique, catering to a wealthy minority. The Platform was what everyone else used.…

Schismogenesis? Isn’t that a posh word for Flame War? Register Lecture You know that geeks tend to atomise into warring camps, exchanging flames, tweets and worse. But did you know that real live academics have studied this phenomena?…

My blue jean contents are disruptive Something for the Weekend, Sir? Facebook wants to look at my nuts.…

Where's the money coming from to fund these sueballs, angry folk ask watchdog Disgruntled customers of ZX Spectrum Vega+ firm Retro Computers Ltd have complained to the Solicitors’ Regulation Authority (SRA), alleging ringfenced company funds are being diverted into its legal battles.…

Let's see how that works out The British government has once again told departments to break their addiction to big contracts, specifying that deals with suppliers should be no longer than a paltry seven years.…

Saturday launch will hoist super-manoeuvrable CubeSats that find each other in space Orbital ATK will on Saturday launch a Cygnus spacecraft on a supply mission to the International Space Station, with one of its payloads being a pair of CubeSats that NASA hopes can demonstrate 200 megabits per second downloads, from space, and how small satellites can be operated in harness to build networks or complex machines.…

If the Desktop Metal can pull this off, a revolution is coming Comment A new machine will print metal parts at a tenth of the cost of today's manufacturing systems, potentially launching a revolution in small part production, its creators claim.…

Try Redmond's upgrade treadmill in Tech Preview to see if you can hack the pace Microsoft's released the first semi-annual version of System Centre.…

It had an error code on it and was on a monitor, which made it an IT problem On-Call Welcome again to On-Call, in which The Register christens each new Friday with a reader-contributed tale of being asked to fix the unthinkable.…

Can expelliarmus get your kid to put down their phone? You'll need to know soon If you're not keen on augmented reality, Harry Potter, kids whose lives seem to be lived through mobile devices, or all of the above: brace yourself.…

Pre-tax profit dipped a few percentage points, though Brit satellite biz Inmarsat has doubled its statutory profits and grown its revenues, thanks mainly to its in-flight Wi-Fi offerings.…