The Register

Bureaucracy embraces removing communications for millions of people The Indian government has responded to fierce criticism of its increasing use of internet shutdowns by codifying rules for when the extreme measure is allowed.…

APU disaster rears its head again with class action payout Advanced Micro Devices has agreed to pay out $29.5m to settle a class action lawsuit its shareholders filed after the disastrous Llano chip rollout.…

Dara Khosrowshahi to take over troubled cab-hailing company Following a selection process as chaotic and flawed as its own corporate culture, Uber has finally selected a new CEO: current Expedia boss Dara Khosrowshahi.…

The Play Store is looking buggier than ever A coalition of tech firms has taken down the WireX botnet, a malware network run predominantly off Android phones running subverted apps.…

Sharing network hopes to hit hoaxers where it hurts After last year's disabling of users' ability to block ads, Facebook plans to reject ads from those who promote fake news.…

Carriers say they're holding up – more flooding is likely With Houston in the midst of severe flooding from Hurricane Harvey, telcos say they are so far maintaining service and will help with emergency efforts by waiving service costs.…

Bonkers buy-up by bungling billionairess The New York Police Department will scrap 36,000 smartphones, thanks to a monumental purchasing cock-up by a billionaire's daughter.…

If you can get it running and figure out the keyboard, it's impressive Hands-on When my kids were very little, they'd do something a tiny bit naughty and I'd wiggle my index finger as if to threaten a tickle for their naughtiness. They'd then make a great show of running away shrieking. And now I've discovered that finger has another power, namely making a premium laptop look bad.…

Part two of our look into storage world's transition from 2D Analysis Part one of my attempt to understand the transition from 2D to 3D NAND started out by trying to understand how 2D NAND is made, so that its development towards 3D NAND can be understood.…

Dave, I can't put my finger on it, but I sense something strange – like me becoming malware If you don't know what your AI model is doing, how do you know it's not evil?…

Platforms must register identities before users can post China's Internet administration has issued an edict that any platform that allows users to post comments must register their real-world identities first.…

Infect me once, shame on you. Infect me twice… One of the UK National Health Service boards hit by WannaCrypt earlier this year has again been infected by malware.…

Permanently mute those annoying autoplay videos? We're listening Chrome's developers are testing a permanent mute for Websites that insist on running autoplay videos the instant they load.…

Project maintainer Paolo Bonzini details open source hypervisor's future directions The Kernel-based Virtual Machine is making waves. Better known as “KVM”, the open source hypervisor runs Google's cloud and Cisco's using it as the hypervisor for its network function virtualization efforts. It is widely used by OpenStack users while Nutanix uses it to power the Acropolis code it hopes will see its users ditch VMware.…

Another big BGP blunder Last Friday, someone in Google fat-thumbed a border gateway protocol (GGP) advertisement and sent Japanese Internet traffic into a black hole.…

NASA's investigations into the watery moons may hold secrets to life in the Solar System NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope will be focused on Europa and Enceladus, the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, in efforts to uncover the secrets of how life began in the Solar System.…

Klobuchar wants answers over the fast-tracked Whole Foods gobble A ranking member of the Senate's Antitrust Subcommittee wants a top US regulator to explain why it was so quick to approve Amazon's purchase of high-end grocery chain Whole Foods.…

We have the technology, we just don't use it Ad blocking may prompt fearful publishers to seek help from consultancies, but it isn't actually interfering with the delivery of ads on mobile devices.…

Residents flee as weather services upgrade storm to Category Three As Hurricane Harvey bears down on the Texas coast, American satellites have provided vital monitoring data to give Texans the best information about the incoming terror tempest.…

Court rules chip designer has right to view letters behind royalties abuse claim America's trade watchdog has been ordered to provide copies of the letters that led to its antitrust probe into California chip designer Qualcomm.…

Section 702 saves lives, claims spying agency, while continuing to dodge critical question The NSA has begun what is likely to be a determined PR campaign to retain mass spying laws as they head toward expiration at the end of the year.…

Gizmo whisperers reveal their secrets Eavesdropping appliances like Amazon Echo and software assistants like Google Now can be attacked using mangled words that get interpreted as commands, but humans hear as nonsense.…

James Liang gets 40 months on the cooler and $200,000 fine The engineer responsible for designing the software that enabled Volkswagen diesel cars to cheat on US emissions tests has been sentenced to 40 months in prison and fined $200,000.…

Peter Dinklage takes Switchzilla's coin Tech firms hiring famous folks to push their products are depressingly common – who can forget Lady Gaga promoting cables for Monster at CES? Now Cisco is going to hook onto the popularity of Game of Thrones to push its new grand plan.…

Court will oversee use of data as web biz plans appeal A US judge has ordered that all user details of a Trump protest website be handed over to the US Department of Justice following several weeks of argument over the demand.…

Researchers kicked off network for slurping hidden services en masse A university research project in Brazil has had its Tor relay node banned after it was caught harvesting the .onion addresses of visitors.…

Brit, German, French markets buoyed by upgrade demands Computacenter is paying £100m in dividends to shareholders after reporting a double-digit rise in profits on the back of a sales spike that was in part boosted by Windows 10 implementations.…

Plus Xeon SPification for their hyperconverged systems There's some new wine in Hitachi's Unified Compute Platform of converged and hyperconverged server bottles – specifically VMware Cloud Foundation software added to its converged rack-scale (RS) product and Xeon SP processors to its hyperconverged systems.…

Locking down servers and cloud with this itty-bitty chip Google has unveiled more details about how security built into its custom silicon chips underpins the integrity of its servers and cloud-based services.…

Practical workshop sessions added to Minds Mastering Machines line-up Events We've added two new workshops to the Minds Mastering Machines roster, October 9-11:…

Quiet Finnish firm starts rolling, like a pebble in the night Nokia is naming its upcoming consumer drones brand Ovni, according to reports.…

'Free speech' demo faces faeces counter-protest A shit storm awaits a bunch of far-right protestors when they convene in San Francisco this weekend – locals are storing up their doggy do-do and plan to distribute it in the area the protestors are holding the rally.…

Staff say they’re in the (Big) Red after sales teams push customers into the fluffy stuff Boardroom high-fives at Oracle over bumper cloud sales haven’t spread across the entire business, with staff lower down the food chain telling The Register that their bonuses have tanked.…

Travelling far and wide in the UK? Feed yourself out of your own pocket, says telco Tight-fisted Vodafone rejects expenses claims for food and snacks for hard-worked people pulling 12-hour days, hacked-off sources have told The Register.…

Scott Dietzen chairman now, Charles Giancarlo takes reins As Pure Storage boasted strong second-quarter sales yesterday, the company also revealed that CEO Scott Dietzen would be stepping down to become chairman of the board.…

Court sentences Lee Jae-yong to five years in prison for bribery Samsung vice-chairman Lee Jae-yong has been sentenced to five years in the clink for corruption after a six-month trial.…

UK.gov pours £8.1m into fresh series of trials The Transport Research Laboratory will be starting trials of semi-autonomous "platooning" technology, using lorries on UK roads.…

Sure, theoretically it offers a lot of protection, but get it wrong... Security researchers have endorsed industry guru Scott Helme's vote of no confidence in a next-generation web crypto technology.…

Part 1: Start with the flat 2D planar stuff Backgrounder The world of flash is moving to 3D NAND, chips with 36, 48, 72 or 64 layers of flash cells, and 96-layer chips being prototyped. How has it developed from 2D NAND?…

Surfaces, iPad Pro and their ilk will do okay, bad news for all other form factors Analyst firm IDC has issued a forecast for PC sales from 2016 to 2021, and the news is bad: shipments slipping from 2016's 435.1 million units to 398.3 million in 2021, for five-year compound annual growth rate of -1.7 per cent.…

When data disappeared, everyone knew exactly where to point the finger On-Call Things went pear-shaped when data disappeared as a result of the glorious leader's incompetence. Hey, hey, it's Friday! Which means weekend frolics aren't far away once you get through this edition of On-Call, The Register's weekly reader-contributed tales of workplace woe.…

Riak devs giddy over gambling biz's vow to set code free Bankrupt bit bin biz Basho Technologies, which developed the Riak distributed NoSQL database, has reached an agreement to sell its remaining assets to Bet365, an online gambling site based in Gibraltar.…

Info exchange plan continues Tories' 'we'll have our cake and eat it too' theme The UK government has said it wants an early agreement on a post-Brexit data-sharing deal with the European Union, as well as a continued seat at the table for Blighty's data protection watchdog.…

vSphere sales forecast changed from long-term-decline to long-term-flat VMware's delivered the market-beating second quarter it foreshadowed last week, hauling in US$1.90 billion of cash and GAAP net income of $334 million, both ahead of forecasts.…

Tablet beat Pythagoras by a millennium, may explain how the ancients built pyramids Those of you who can remember trigonometry can feel free to forget it, because ancient Babylonian mathematicians had a better way of doing it – using base 60!…

Facebook and Google also have reason to be worried India's Supreme Court has ruled that the nation's constitution gives its citizens a right to privacy, a decision that clouds the future of the country's Aadhaar biometric identification scheme.…

Also hints at crypto and update tech to make it handy for updating Linux on IoT devices SUSE has decided to let the world it has no plans to step away from the btrfs filesystem and plans to make it even better.…

Fingers pointed at Yu Pingan & unnamed conspirators in PRC A Chinese fella has been accused by the FBI of being a key team member in the hacking crew that took down the US Office of Personnel Management (OPM).…