The Register

It's worse than we feared and the worst may yet be to come What a difference a year makes. This time last year, Twitter pooh-poohed any suggestion that Russian agents ran accounts on its platform for purposes of subverting the US election.…

Memcache was gone in 20 seconds and down for nearly two hours Google's again 'fessed up to cooking its own cloud.…

Jamie Hyneman wants a future in which gaming doesn't mean stumbling into furniture Former Mythbuster Jamie Hyneman is seeking US$50,000 to build a prototype pair of roller skates to wear in virtual reality.…

Silicon Valley bigwigs giggle to themselves, thumb their noses at Redmond Salesforce.com and Google have agreed on a partnership deal that will see the former's CRM service integrated directly into G Suite's productivity apps.…

TLS over HTTP? Yes please, says every sysadmin, netizen The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has just put out a new draft for a standard that would enable folks to effectively bypass surveillance equipment on their networks to maintain secure connections.…

Chocolate Factory tickled with featherweight €300k fine Seven years after Google raised hackles by collecting information about Wi-Fi access points with its Street View fleet, Spain's privacy regulator has fined the company €300,000.…

145 million year fossil reveals our rat-like relatives Researchers have discovered fossils of our oldest mammalian ancestors yet found – along the coastline of Dorset in southeast England.…

And waits for news on how OpenStack will govern its new outreach plans OPENSTACK SYDNEY Mirantis is contemplating a future as a provider of continuous integration (CI) tools and continuous-delivery-as-a-service.…

Pair to work on traffic optimisation and better batteries Google's quantum computer isn't much more than a science project at this stage, but Volkswagen's decided to hitch a ride anyway.…

The perfect is the enemy of the good, says think tank RAND Corporation Autonomous cars only need to be good enough to reduce the number of road deaths to be worth permitting: eliminating fatal accidents can wait until later.…

We're not happy with ourselves, you know Comment Google has responded in greater depth after it actively promoted fake news about Sunday's Texas murder-suicide gunman by... behaving like a spoilt kid.…

Gin palace lead architect James Kelly explains plan to make NFV reign Juniper Networks has enhanced its Contrail Cloud enhancements, in the hope it can put network function virtualization into the hands of more and smaller carrier.…

Here we go again FBI agents investigating the murder-suicide of 26 people in a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, on Sunday, have said they can't yet unlock the shooter's smartphone.…

Carrier says 'it is not possible to accurately determine what speed the NBN can deliver to a customer prior to connection' Telstra has all-but-blamed nbn™, the company building and operating Australia's national broadband network (NBN), for having to compensate customers who can't experience broadband speeds the carrier advertised.…

Spiegel's crew lost $2 on every buck they made. But we're definitely not in a bubble Shares in (former) social media darling Snap Inc. are understandably tanking today after the photo-spaffing service said it was losing more money and gaining fewer users than anticipated.…

Serious rethink needed on account policies History is "a series of lies agreed upon," as nineteenth century orator Wendell Phillips phrased an adage employed by Napoleon, among others.…

Update your firmware ASAP to avoid being hacked Google has released its November security update for Android, addressing a bag of security holes.…

Look out for that orange alert Updated After watching customer after customer screw up their AWS S3 security and accidentally make highly sensitive files publicly accessible on the internet, Amazon has responded.…

Super Cali goes – oh no, wait, this is Arizona Google stablemate Waymo has begun testing its self-driving cars on the mean streets of Phoenix, Arizona, without a single driver at the wheel.…

Move along. Nothing to see here. By the way, try this flash drive in your laptop, ta The Linux kernel USB subsystem has more holes than a donut shop. On Monday, Google security researcher Andrey Konovalov disclosed 14 Linux USB flaws found using syzkaller, a kernel fuzzing tool developed by another Google software engineer, Dmitry Vyukov.…

Punter 'accidentally' borks dozens of strangers' crypto-currency collections There's a lot of hair-pulling among Ethereum alt-coin hoarders today – after a programming blunder in Parity's wallet software let one person bin $280m of the digital currency belonging to scores of strangers, probably permanently.…

Apply these patches – and please don't demand a recall “Ask more of your phone,” is the Pixel 2's official marketing slogan. It's not a good sign when early adopters are asking Google for more support.…

Ex-military supersonic daredevil? Come hither... An American startup claiming to be building a modern-day Concorde is hiring a test pilot.…

All your data protection are belong to us +Comment Comtrade's HYCU product snuggled up to Nutanix as its most friendly data protection platform. The latest release sidles even closer with a great big Nutanix bearhug.…

Judges grill government on nuances of spying laws The UK's surveillance laws have been put under the spotlight today as the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) heard legal complaints against the government's spying powers.…

UK stats body tasked with finding cheaper data sources Mobile phone data could be used to gather information on people's workplaces for future censuses as the government tries to cut the cost of producing population statistics.…

Variants on zombie horde that took down Dyn still at large The Mirai botnet is alive and kicking more than a year after its involvement in a DDoS attack that left many of the world's biggest websites unreachable.…

Now that's a hard one Sketch With the TV landscape changing faster than some viewers change their socks, today's marathon grilling of BBC bosses at Westminster took on some urgency.…

DoSsing for fun and profit not just a 'nuisance', they warn Security researchers have said they've uncovered a new way for hackers to crash Brother printers.…

Multi-vendor, multi-tier data manager gets Quebec labour fund cash Quebecois' savings are being wagered on the success of a Montreal-based data management firm via a venture fund that aims to boost local biz.…

And what about uninsured UK.gov robocars? AEV Bill "Pointy-headed technocrats" behind autonomous vehicles tech are worried that a proposed new law won't protect the public from huge financial claims if a mass hack of a driverless car fleet occurs.…

Bookings up 50% in a quarter... though all of HCI is doing nicely Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) supplier Pivot3 saw better than 50 per cent sequential growth in its bookings from the second to third 2017 quarters. It said it had a record number of million-dollar orders in both the video surveillance and data centre areas.…

It also makes for great fertiliser A speculative new study suggests that nucleic acids, proteins and cell membranes – precursors to life Earth – first grew from a single kickstarting molecule named diamidophosphate.…

Qualcomm punts on NVMe-over-fabrics server SAN startup Under acquisitive siege by Broadcom, Qualcom has invested millions in NVMe-over-fabrics array startup Excelero.…

Cupertino denies avoidance Apple has continued to avoid the heavier taxes that some countries would like to exact by moving parts of its company to Jersey, the Paradise Papers have revealed.…

Deutsche Telekom's got a feeling about i.am+ voice assistant Omega Would-be entrepreneur and tech magpie will.i.am's startup, i.am+, has bagged $117m venture funding from Salesforce.…

'US is the worst for startups' The outgoing executive chairman of Cisco, John Chambers, has made no secret about his desire to invest in drones in his life after the Borg. But now he has also revealed his passion for cricket farming.…

Ahhh, it's a mistake. Not CEO Bezos' plan to get EVEN richer AWS has a reputation for ratcheting up prices as customers migrate more workloads to its sprawling rack empire, but a bunch of UK users endured a sphincter-tightening moment today when they checked their bill.…

Sorry the line is bad... what? BT is once again hiking prices, with punters facing an extra £30 on their annual broadband bill in the new year.…

Look, people use microwaves and cars, and they effectively operate as black boxes Opening up the processes that underpin algorithms may well magnify the risk of hacking, widen privacy concerns and stifle innovation, Google has told MPs.…

All's fair in war and cloud The cloud is a highly competitive arena, where cloud providers jostle for market share. We know of Microsoft's long haul against Amazon’s AWS, but of late Oracle has cranked up the noise against Jeff Bezos' market leader while trying to break past Google and IBM.…

Underdogs fail to see how that's a competition 'remedy' As the European Commission mulls Google's own remedy to its anti-competitive behaviour on the web, the former startup behind the original complaint has warned of possible consequences.…

Also, AI isn't really doing much for the economy Robot-assisted surgery costs more time and money than traditional methods, but isn't more effective, for certain types of operations.…

The XGIMI CC Aurora is, frankly, outstanding. But a little buggy Review Every now and again in the world of gadgets there is a confluence of technologies that make something new possible. A better take on a familiar task.…

We catch up with 'death watch' project after latest version bags 1.6m downloads Interview Apache OpenOffice 4.1.4 finally shipped on October 19, five months later than intended, but the software is still a bit buggy.…

Earth-based 'scope clocks one of this simulation's first wonders A large international team of astronomers has detected one of the oldest galaxies in the universe we've seen to date – born within a billion years after the Big Bang.…

This kind of security that should keep the likes of the NSA and pirates out, but doesn't Several large gaps have been found in the IEEE's P1735 cryptography standard that can be exploited to unlock or tamper with encrypted system-on-chip blueprints.…

Rights carrot dangled before Netflix, Amazon and HBO, apparently J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings could be on its way to the small screen.…

Out with Xen, in with 'core KVM technology' for new C5 instances and future VMs too AWS has revealed its created a new hypervisor based on KVM, not the Xen hypervisor on which it has relied for years.…

Deployed with Skylake-powered instances unleashed today, coming soon to more instances AWS has revealed its created a new version of the Xen hypervisor to make a new type of EC2 instance go faster.…