The Register

And don't forget to negotiate when vendors are most desperate for cash Pricing and licensing "are central to all data and analytics initiatives" and vendors are using organisations' enthusiasm for the field to coin it at your expense. But controlling costs is more than possible, Gartner principal analyst Etisham Zaidi said yesterday at the firm's Asia-Pacific Data and Analytics Summit in Sydney.…

Bum note: you could Rickroll an artist live on stage Guitar amp manufacturer Fender's recently-introduced Mustang GT 100 guitar amplifier can made to play whatever audio an attacker fancies, security researchers have discovered.…

When too many cloudy ports are barely enough Microsoft has rewritten the operation of its Source Network Address Translation (SNAT) protocol in a bid to improve Azure's load balancing performance.…

Heart Of Gold meets Piece Of Crap Musician Neil Young has spent years railing against the poor quality of digital audio.…

We wouldn't say 'barely', says Coinhive Few sites are bothering to use the opt-in version ofCoinhive, the controversial ride-along JavaScript crypto-mining package that requires end-users' consent to run.…

If you think that's silly, try these $550 Chanel 'data centre sunglasses' Fashion house Dolce and Gabbana has replaced human models with drones.…

Trials virty radio with Nokia, Chipzilla Verizon's enthusiasm for 5G and virtualization has spawned a virtual radio access network trial in the USA.…

You put off buying any while figuring out the cloud, but now you're ready to spend Financial Services colossus Morgan Stanley reckons on-premises hardware vendors are about to have their best sales season for a decade.…

Both make it harder to connect you to your connections The Australian government has fingered the next threat in the country's cryptography vs. policing debate: the IPv6 protocol.…

Stanford uni fumes at Palo Alto soil contamination cleanup bill Stanford University is suing the descendants of Hewlett-Packard and Agilent for allegedly contaminating a property in Palo Alto, California, with toxic chemicals.…

Fella sent down for 33 months after touting spyware, anti-piracy tool to scumbags A bloke has been jailed for nearly three years for developing and selling malware that allowed miscreants to snoop on and remote-control victims' Windows PCs.…

Georgia does not want to hear about your bug reports A proposed anti-hacking law in the US state of Georgia is raising all kinds of alarms – because it could chill security research, and criminalize anyone who breaks a website or ISP's T&Cs.…

FTC can smack down telcos – and eyes up $100m fine from AT&T for limited 'unlimited' plan A US federal appeals court has prevented the country from falling into a telecoms black hole – by asserting that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) does have the authority to fine phone giant AT&T for misleading subscribers.…

If there's a better event for IT Pros in Australia, Vulture South can't find 'em PROMO Each year VMware's User Groups stage day-long conferences in Sydney and Melbourne and the dates have just been set for this year's gigs: March 20th in the harbour city and March 22nd in Melbourne.…

Watchdog commish continues ringing alarm bell over Sinclair coziness Analysis Ajit Pai, chairman of America's telecoms regulator, the FCC, is under renewed scrutiny for making a string of decisions that benefited Sinclair, a major US broadcaster.…

OpenAI emits more simulation environments for toolkit Gym OpenAI today updated Gym – its system for training intelligent software – so that developers can teach physical robots to hold pens, pick up and move objects, and so on.…

You can't escape The Circle If you chose the Apple ecosystem because you don't, for whatever reason, trust Google – bad news. Apple has confirmed for the first time that it now uses Google servers to store chunks of people's iCloud data.…

Social code site will let vendors peek at online store analytics Community code site GitHub on Monday plans to illuminate its Marketplace, not with lights but with data.…

Yet more consolidation in networking world London-based fibre and cloud networks business Interoute has been acquired by US networking business GTT for $2.3bn (£1.65bn).…

Just get a room already Qualcomm has urged chip-slinger Broadcom to return to the negotiating table with a better deal than the $117bn on offer.…

No cool first-person-view flying unless you plan the flight like a real pilot The EU Aviation Safety Agency has formally opined that drone hobbyists should be banned from carrying out beyond visual-line-of-sight flights.…

Plus: Holey headsets Batman, I can hear a car coming MWC18 Sony launched the Xperia XZ2 and XZ2 compact at an early morning press event as Mobile World Congress opened in Barcelona.…

Airbus, OneWeb partner up to bring airborne roaming to the masses MWC18 Folk soon need not look up from their screens when boarding aircraft and wandering the aisles thanks to an alliance formed by OneWeb and Airbus to bring 5G roaming to the skies.…

So much for the shift to streaming... for now UK comms infrastructure provider Arqiva has reported a bump in operating profits of 6.1 per cent to £158.7m for its half-year results – mainly thanks to a "cost-control" and "operating efficiency" programme.…

Treat us like the OTT providers, beg operators MWC18 5G could, er, bring an end to populism, said Vittorio Colao, Vodafone’s chief executive during his keynote address at this year’s Mobile World Congress.…

Zombie apocalypse targets feature phone slab-shunners MWC18 Dead phone platforms are coming back to life at MWC in 2018 – like a zombie feature phone apocalypse.…

Can you play the slide that was in The Matrix? MWC18 Nokia tribute act HMD has revived another of the band's classics – the slider phone made famous by The Matrix.…

Just days left to snap up early bird tickets for Continuous Lifecycle London If you’re smart enough to want to buff up your DevOps, Continuous Integration and Container knowledge, you’ll also be smart enough to want to do that as cheaply as possible.…

Bernd Heinrichs talks tech and cars with El Reg BCW18 Take risks, be first, launch something as the minimum viable product when it's 80 per cent ready – such is the philosophy of the head of Bosch's new Connected Mobility Services division, Bernd Heinrichs.…

It's your week in storage, kids It's been an eventful week in storage land, with contract wins, possible IPOs, biz unit sales and the inevitable poring over financial results. Let's have a look at the people, the product and the numbers...…

12 new data centres is too little, too late Comment If Larry Ellison earned a dollar for every cloud-hyped phrase he made, Oracle's market share in cloud infrastructure wouldn't be the miserly 0.3 per cent – by Gartner's calculations – that it is today.…

'Agile Ceremonies', Slack instead of email, but still some red tape to cut through Exclusive IBM has told its Services workers to get agile – as in the development practice, not as in yoga – by the end of the year.…

MIT researchers want web devs and sites to protect you. Good luck with that, chaps A group of boffins working at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory believe that “private” browsing modes aren't private, so have given developers a framework to fix it.…

We've given away our privacy for the wrong rewards If you saw someone being assaulted, you'd probably whip out your phone and dial for help.…

That's not a bug, that's the Queen's English Who, me? Welcome to the sixth instalment of "Who, me?", The Register's confessional for IT pros who managed to break stuff before it became the kind of user-generated mess story we run in On-Call.…

Database of possible configurations offers costs and performance possibilities Hyperconverged hopeful HyperGrid has pivoted again and now offers a service that assesses the properties of 100 million possible cloud configurations so you can send a workload to whichever one will suit it best.…

Flawed analogue-to-digital converter can turn a whole bunch of 1s into a cosmic joke Users of sixteen of the world's most prestigious optical telescopes - including the Hubble Space Telescope - are revisiting old data in case an analogue-to-digital converter design has polluted the instruments' measurements.…

'Open vRAN' snugglefest includes India's Tech Mahindra and Reliance Jio Cisco has used Mobile World Congress 2018 to tout a group of vendors working on open tech for the mobile radio access network.…

Fibre to the pole, then Facebook's well-behaved wireless brings signal to the great unwired Facebook hopes to get parts of its Terragraph wireless comms platform standardised by the IEEE, and has recruited Nokia to help.…

Don't even think about applying without revealing exactly what you'll do at work, where you'll work, who you'll really work for The United States Department of Homeland Security's Citizenship and Immigration Services has released new and strict rules for H-1B visas, the permit used by many-a-tech-company to bring skilled workers to the USA from abroad.…

Critical patch lands for that, UCS Domain Manager flaw, dirty dozen lesser messes fixed Cisco's Elastic Services Controller's release 3.0.0 software has a critical vulnerability: it accepts an empty admin password.…

Critical patch lands for that, UCS Domain Manager flaw, dirty dozen lesser messes fixed Cisco's Elastic Services Controller's release 3.0.0 software has a critical vulnerability: it accepts an empty admin password.…

Emoji-selfies are the headline grabber, improved desktop experience might be the market-maker MWC Samsung has formally launched its next-generation Galaxy 9 flagship smartphones just ahead of 2018's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.…

NRA calls it 'a shameful display of political and civic cowardice' and some users agree Symantec has ended a promotion that saw if offer discounts on Norton-branded products to members of the US National Rifle Association (NRA).…

This one's more than a Cupertino clone Hands On Huawei won't unveil its new P20 flagship phone until the end of March, so it used MWC to showcase an envy-inducing laptop, the Matebook X.…

E: Syntax error at line 42 in journobot/article.py Roundup Welcome, friends. Here's your human-generated, totally not computer written, summary of this week's AI news, beyond what we've already covered. In short: Elon Musk steps down from OpenAI's board, Uber is looking to train new coders in machine learning, and there's a new AI conference.…

A busy and bonkers week in security Roundup Happy weekend, everyone. Here's a roundup of computer security news beyond everything we've already reported this week.…

Liability for artificial intelligence won't be easy Analysis On September 26, 1983, Stanislav Petrov, an officer in the Soviet Union's Air Defense Forces, heard an alarm and saw that the warning system he'd been assigned to monitor showed the US had launched five nuclear missiles.…

Playpen pervert fails to convince appeals court Analysis US judges have shut down an appeal from a convicted pedophile who claimed the FBI hacking of his computer was an illegal and unreasonable search.…

Decorum isn't even visible in the rear-view mirror at this point Ajit Pai – chairman of America's broadband watchdog, the FCC – is the proud new owner of a handmade Kentucky long gun from the US National Rifle Association (NRA) – thanks to his brave stance in favor of lining the pockets of billion-dollar telcos.…