The Register

Up to 40 calls a day, three hours wasted IT buyers are pestered by between nine and 40 unsolicited sales calls from resellers each and every day, collectively wasting hours of their life that they’ll never get back.…

Infrastructure, acquisitions and retrenchments Supported It has been an interesting year in the world of hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) with acquisitions and retrenchments and with new products released.…

At least one part of the 'Year of the Navy' went to plan Britain’s biggest ever aircraft carrier, HMS Queen Elizabeth, has been formally commissioned into the Royal Navy, with Her Majesty attending the ceremony in person.…

Something went bump in the night... over and over It takes all sorts to make a world and some on the fringes of life often turn up on daytime TV. And so El Reg was fascinated by the story of Amethyst Realm, who dumped a human in the, er, physical realm to become a ghostbuster banger.…

Object storage filer front end to ease the load for primary filers Cloudian says you can store unstructured data files on its HyperStore object storage, through a HyperFile NAS Controller, and not burden primary data filers with the stuff, saving lots of lovely money and getting loads of scalability.…

Be safe out there, mmkay, says CAA The Civil Aviation Authority reckons a million and a half consumer drones will be sold over Christmas – and the aviation regulator hopes new dronies will read and obey the law of the skies.…

Mulls further regulation next year The European Commission has urged the likes of Google, Facebook and Twitter to do more to remove extremist content - or face further regulation.…

Not so bad, is it? Real world performance gleaned from thousands of British mobiles sheds light on how LTE in the boondocks performs outside major urban areas. And it may not be as bad as you think.…

For the love of cloud, don't click on anything Google seems powerless to stop its Google Drive file sharing service being exploited by a spammer who has linked other users to their stash of pirated movies, among other dubious files, users have complained.…

Ben Rudall challenged over move to Snowflake Hadoop-slinger Hortonworks has sought a court order against former enterprise sales manager Ben Rudall that would permit it take forensic images of his personal phone and his cloud storage account.…

Parroting Cayla... if she were a bit more sweary The same researchers whose hack on the My Friend Cayla doll prompted regulatory action have followed up with a hack on a talking toy robot bird.…

Free at last, free at last, thank Ginny Rommety... IBM is seeking volunteers in Technology Support Services (TSS) to throw themselves down the redundancy chute by the end of the year.…

And give thanks unto the GSMA Logowatch Progress on deploying the NB-IoT connectivity tech may have stalled but the GSM Association doesn’t want you worrying your little head about that. Instead, take a look at the shiny new logo they’ve come up with for NB-IoT!…

Innovation deep freeze ends with private equity ownership Analysis Public cloud backupper Spanning says it has a new release of innovation energy now that Dell has shopped it to private equity.…

Why you should check the load type and other tips Sometimes fast just isn’t fast enough and in the fast moving world of NoSQL databases, what was considered blindingly fast yesterday can be seen as slow today. For instance, Cassandra has always been thought of as a fast solution for ingesting data into a database cluster, but today upcoming systems such as Aerospike and Scylla are wiping the floor with Cassandra in benchmarks.…

Nick Wilson working six month notice Just months after Nick Wilson landed in the UK hot seat at Frankenfirm DXC Technologies - the merger between CSC and HPE’s outsourcing division - he has quit, multiple sources have told The Reg.…

ICO in discussions with govt, has set out its concerns The UK’s data protection watchdog has raised concerns with the government over new clauses slipped into the Data Protection Bill at the last minute, which critics say could undermine the law.…

Emerges without much dust, ready for fourteenth Earth year of ops - rather longer than planned 90-day mission! It has been the week of long-lived space hardware: first came the news of Voyager 1's thrusters working after 37 years without use and now NASA's cautiously suggested that the Opportunity rover on Mars will be fit to roll into its 14th year of red planet operations.…

Na Zdorovie to the hard-working devs at Russia's Arusoft Russian software vendor Arusoft claims it delayed a product release because its developers were drunk.…

Hyper-volatility means transaction fees can hit $20 – if they go through before the price of Bitcoin changes Online games-mart Steam has stopped accepting Bitcoin payments.…

vRealize brings workload definition and movement across your bit barn or public cloud VMware's added management wares to its hybrid cloud bundle, Cloud Foundation.…

Oliver Schmidt lied his way up the greasy pole, Judge rules Former Volkswagen executive Oliver Schmidt has been sentenced to 84 months in a United States federal prison for his role in the “dieselgate” software scandal that saw vehicles deliver test results that indicated their emissions met US standards when in fact they were smoke-belching jalopies.…

Services for lands of slow connections and rotten roads now set global agendas Google's efforts to find its “next billion” users has been revealed to also be an effort to build services for the first billion.…

Specs, features summarized Qualcomm's flagship Snapdragon 845 system-on-chip will include an isolated security core for handling sensitive personal information, among other new features.…

A sampling KubeCon and CloudNativeCon-oriented tidbits With the advent of KubCon and CloudNativeCon in Austin, Texas, on Wednesday, assorted enterprise vendors have chosen this week to flog their latest devops-oriented wares, before the impending holiday torpor leaves IT folks too distracted, weary or inebriated to care.…

Attempt to harden network failed, badly, so the call's gone out to Cisco for help European web hosting outfit OVH has reported its second major outage and Total Inability To Support Usual Performance in a month and admitted the new outage was caused by its attempts to fix the cause of the last one.…

President Benoit Battistelli dealt brutal blow by International Labor Organization The European Patent Office (EPO) has been commanded to immediately reinstate a judge it suspended two years ago and pay him tens of thousands of euros in compensation and damages.…

Mining outfit says its entire wallet gone, estimated $62m Cryptocurrency mining market NiceHash says it has fallen victim to a hacking attack that may have resulted in the loss of its entire Bitcoin wallet.…

If you're not fit to drive, you're not fit to fly in the Garden State The State of New Jersey is considering a law to criminalize flying drones while drunk or stoned.…

Boffins from the University of Washington embed connectivity in (mostly) plastic trinkets In an effort to make objects more chatty, boffins at the University of Washington have developed a way to create 3D-printed plastic baubles that can communicate over Wi-Fi with other devices, without batteries or electronics.…

Pezy CEO accused of $3.8m subsidy theft The CEO of Pezy Computing, known for developing one of the world's fastest supercomputers, has been arrested on suspicion of fraud.…

Awkward timing considering its Time-Warner marriage request AT&T has been hit with a particularly badly-timed antitrust lawsuit accusing it of price gouging.…

Sparse is more Researchers at OpenAI have launched a library of tools that can help researchers build faster, more efficient neural networks that take up less memory on GPUs.…

‘Significant concerns’ over transatlantic data flow deal European data protection agencies have told authorities to address their “significant concerns” about Privacy Shield, or risk having the deal tested in court.…

A percentage reduction AND no future tax on foreign profits? Too kind, Uncle Sam! While Apple may have to fork out €13bn (£11.4bn) to the Irish government in back taxes, on the other side of the Pond it could gain $47.2bn (£35.2bn) in tax breaks.…

Security researchers lift lid on snafu at Black Hat Europe On Wednesday, in a presentation at Black Hat Europe, Positive Technologies security researchers Mark Ermolov and Maxim Goryachy plan to explain the firmware flaws they found in Intel Management Engine 11, along with a warning that vendor patches for the vulnerability may not be enough.…

Spending watchdog says buck stops with Home Office The government is not doing enough to prevent Brits being defrauded by £10bn per year, according to a spending watchdog report.…

Cyber no longer domain of techies, says ex-diplomat Black Hat Cyber threats have evolved from been a solely technical issues to core issues of government policy, according to a senior US lawyer and former cyber diplomat.…

Zuck Off, says UK Health Minister Comment "Won't somebody think of the children!" Hur hur.…

Ding dong merrily you're high Nothing says Christmas like a wreath. Except of course a reefer wreath. But why stop at Jesus and Mary, when you can add a full ounce of Mary Jane, dressed with eucalyptus, wheat and rosemary that stoners can use to decorate their knockers this festivus.…

Subscribe, or record nothing after a year, customers told Home security company Y-Cam has enraged its users after pulling its free lifetime cloud storage for its cameras.…

And it doesn't matter if you call the engine a 'range extender' or not BMW claims that its electric i3 car has “zero emissions” and is a “really clean car [that] helps to give back to the environment”. Ad regulators have ordered it never to say that again – pointing to the Beemer’s petrol-fuelled auxiliary engine.…

Could it be eyeing up more public sector deals? Public sector outsourcing favourite Capita has appointed House of Lords backbencher Lucy Neville-Rolfe as independent non-executive director.…

No surprises, just a well made modern mobe Review HMD's efforts to put the Nokia brand over what we call the "Shenzhen generics" formula haven't exactly set the world on fire yet. But in all honesty, you'll struggle to find anything better for £399, the revised price of the Nokia 8.…

Big Red (tor)mentors, ‘Design Realization Garage’ and yachting lake (obvs) As Facebook is being slapped down for trying to get ‘em young with its under-13s messenger service, Oracle has gone one step further towards life-time lock-in: by opening a high school on its campus.…

Involves big hitter Android Studio, APKTool and more Security researchers have found several flaws in the developer tools and environments used by Android programmers.…

Privacy International: Companies need to be explicit, not rely on fine print Car rental companies should offer customers explicit information on what happens to data that has been sucked up by connected cars, a civil rights group has said.…

It can create or destroy. Yes, we're still talking about IT infrastructure... Terraform is taking over as one of the critical new technologies for managing composable infrastructure both in and out of the cloud. Where does it fit in a world with Docker, Kubernetes, Puppet and other tools that all seem to be important elements in this space?…

Show me the money: No longer data guardians, Gartner says Chief data officers are increasingly asked to help monetise the data companies hold, rather than purely managing and protecting that data, according to Gartner.…

Merry Christmas! Workers at the Sopra Steria-run government shared services centre received an early Christmas present this week: the opportunity to apply for voluntary redundancy.…