The Register

Grazing FB is ruining your life, admits social network after probing its army of addicts Facebook has just publicaly slapped itself upside the head, admitting that its very existence is often detrimental to the wellbeing of its users.…

AGs pressure America's top court to make Redmond hand over overseas messages Microsoft should not be able to “shield evidence” held on Irish servers from US prosecutors, a group of 35 US state attorneys general has argued.…

Whoosh... gust of wind - sorry chaps, I'm out Engineers and programmers working on a robot bee project could soon have the faux insects behaving more like real bees, according to engineers and roboticists at Cornell and Harvard.…

In search of cold, hard facts, scientists prep 470-mile adventure A NASA team is heading on a trip arcing around the South Pole to check that their new satellite's measurements from space are just as good as their own back on terra firma.…

Some 4% of properties trundle below 10Mpbs Just over a million premises in Blighty, or 4 per cent of properties, cannot get speeds of 10Mpbs, according to a comprehensive report by regulator Ofcom.…

Yo, NSA maths chaps, can you hear me? – Black Hat man Security researchers regularly set out to find implementation problems in cryptographic algorithms, but not enough effort is going towards the search for mathematical backdoors, two cryptography professors have argued.…

New hinge design looks back not forward The handful of fans anticipating a Microsoft "Surface Phone" should brace themselves for disappointment.…

ACM Sir Stuart Peach is right – but only to a point The head of the British Armed Forces, Air Chief Marshal Sir Stuart Peach, has warned that Russia could cut off the UK by severing undersea communications cables.…

Campaigners say body 'will be pushed to block' large number The British Board of Film Classification will be responsible for regulating age checks for UK users of online porn websites, if the government gets its way.…

Thank you for your support BlackBerry has announced "continuing support" for the legacy BB10 OS phones it once made – but won't be updating its first Android phone, the Priv, regularly any more.…

Intended to boost former state monopoly's 'ailing TV service' BT and Sky have set aside their long-running feud and signed a deal to sell their channels on each other's platforms.…

Claims unfair dismissal, sex discrimination, withholding bonuses Intel Corp's former Europe, Middle East, Africa, and Russia (EMEAR) sales director, who lost her job a year ago, is making an employment tribunal claim against the company which includes a series of accusations including sexual discrimination.…

... and companies need to share their info nicely The UK needs high-quality, standardised and more open data to improve its national infrastructure – and companies need to get used to sharing, a report has said.…

Under-glass fingerprint sensors are HERE Apple is said to have made a virtue out of a necessity with its iPhone X – creating the notorious "Notch" to house a sophisticated facial-recognition system, Face ID.…

Huawei ... who, who, who, who? I really wanna know Analysis Huawei has made a move towards storage class memory that suggests it believes infrastructure driven by the tech is not only possible but inevitable.…

Latest container wrangling bits should drop on Friday Assuming a handful of lingering issues can be resolved, the open-source Kubernetes project will introduce version 1.9 on Friday.…

Dentist’s office disapproved of perceived personalisation On Call Welcome again to On-Call, The Reg’s Friday column celebrating readers’ stories of being asked to fix the unfeasible.…

Kepler-90 has the same number of planets as our Sun Our Solar System is no longer the largest-known planetary system in the Milky Way – after scientists confirmed the existence of an eighth planet, Kepler-90i, around a Sun-like star on Thursday.…

Splendid isolation for VMs, and a hand for ARM servers The Xen Project has released version 4.10 of its hypervisor.…

Woman's nightmare revealed in discrimination lawsuit An ex-Microsoft worker has accused the US software giant of bungling her internal complaint that a fellow employee raped her while she slept.…

Serverless functions running on a set-top box could be a thing before long CableLabs, the organisation that figures out to help pay TV operators sweat their networks, has launched OpenStack installers for its software-defined networking and network function virtualization efforts.…

Lot of invoices to customers, still a small slice of database giant's biz Oracle topped analyst expectations and continued its push into the cloud computing space with another strong quarter.…

Shut your whining, it's going to be great Analysis The FCC voted 3-2 Thursday morning to get rid of net neutrality rules.…

It says so right here, in this paper Scientists have solved a 60-year mystery by figuring out the source of harmful and highly energetic electrons whizzing around in Earth’s inner radiation belt.…

Court makes quick work of techie's long-shot appeal In a not particularly surprising decision, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, USA, this week ruled that Michael Thomas, in his former role as IT operations manager for web hosting biz ClickMotive, was not authorized to trash company files and infrastructure as he claimed.…

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.…