The Register

Why won't you let us create value for shareholders? Analysis InfiniBand/Ethernet tech supplier Mellanox is being targeted by an activist investor pissy that it rejected overtures from Marvell.…

New finch species developed in just two generations New research has documented a species of finch evolving on the Galápagos island of Daphne Major, 1,000km off the west coast of Ecuador, in just two generations.…

Get fined £45,000 anyway The Information Commissioner's Office has fined Hamilton Digital Solutions £45,000 for sending spam text messages, it announced today, despite its protestations that a third party had been responsible.…

But will it make a difference? Analysis BT has long been accused of jealously guarding its infrastructure. But forcing it to open up its network to competitors and break its market dominance has been an aim of Ofcom for some time.…

Networking subsidiary insists everything is Just Fine "No change to Aruba" was veep Morten Illum's public verdict on the news that Meg Whitman was stepping down from the top spot at Aruba's parent company, Hewlett Packard Enterprise.…

Infosec staffing needs a shot in the arm Plugging the infosec skills gap with expensive consultants or by trying to hire already skilled people won't fix recruitment headaches, Thom Langford, CISO at Publicis Groupe, insisted at the #IRISSCERT conference in Dublin this week.…

The 1970s called, it wants its dancers back When it comes to women in tech, it's fair to say the sector has a bit of an image problem.…

Samsung inks deal to give crews up to 250k handsets The British emergency services are to be equipped with 4G phones thanks to a new handheld device contract with Samsung worth up to £210m.…

UK.gov told to sever ties with 'grubby, unethical' company The massive Uber data breach will be discussed by the European Union's data protection authorities next week.…

We never learn from incidents, says Europol security adviser The world has never been so dependent on computers, networks and software so ensuring the security and availability of those systems is critical.…

Budget confirmed its creation, but where does it fit in? Amid myriad bodies offering advice, opinions and rulings on the use of data springing up all over the shop, the government used the Budget to announce plans to create yet another.…

Launched a million business plans, sank Lotus... Thirty is a ripe old age, maybe older than a good chunk of Register readers. Even for those of you for whom Excel is a spring chicken, how many applications or even operating systems are you still using of a similar age outside the Office suite?…

Feel the full weight of Jerusalem, base cur! Something for the Weekend, Sir? A little worse for wear after the first Christmas party of the season, I stagger up the driveway to be met at my own front door by... a Kindle.…

Open source dream officially dies in Bavarian city The city of Munich will spend €49.3m (£43.9m/ $58.4m) going all-in on Windows after local politicos agreed to call time on the failing 15-year open source project.…

Fixing for the sake of security alone means 'all your work was just masturbation' Linus Torvalds has offered a lengthy explanation of his thoughts on security, in which he explained a calmer and more detailed version of his expletive-laden thoughts on the topic earlier this week.…

Yes, hearing: vibrating glass turns mirror into 'superdirective speaker' Fujitsu Ten, the Japanese giant's automotive outfit, has developed technology that turns sheets of glass into speakers and thinks it could be used to help drivers talk on the phone without disturbing passengers.…

It was more of a RAM-page, actually, and it crashed a mainframe On-Call Welcome again to On-Call, The Register's Friday column in which we share readers' tech support morality tales.…

Microsoft's power pack can't deliver the juice fast enough to keep up Microsoft's acknowledged an embarrassing issue with its SurfaceBook 2 laptop – its battery can drain even while plugged into its power pack.…

Do you really want to go there? And does Mozilla, which hasn't figured out how to do this and preserve security, privacy Mozilla developer Nihanth Subramanya has revealed the organisation's Firefox browser will soon warn users if they visit sites that have experienced data breaches that led to user credential leaks.…

Who is Microsoft's mystery partner? We think it's a hyperconverged player VMware has responded to Microsoft's plan to run its stack in Azure, by saying customers who choose that option will have to forego support.…

Oak Ridge Top 500-leading system's innards Analysis IBM offered HPC fans at SC17 a gawk at the server tray for the upcoming Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Tennessee.…

Boffins say health issues were not related to genetic wizardry New research suggests the arthritis plaguing Dolly the sheep – the first mammal cloned from an adult somatic cell – was normal for her age.…

For once it's not an engine breakdown A Type 45 destroyer has been recalled to Britain with propeller problems, leaving the Royal Navy's traditional "east of Suez" deployment without proper warship cover.…

An unlikely trio? Not according to Mikko Hypponen Questions about cyber influence continue to cloud last year's US presidential elections and recently similar allegations have been levelled against the Brexit vote.…

'Free science'/pirate site operator 'working on solving DNS issue' Several domains of the controversial academic paper filesharing site Sci-Hub have been made inactive following a court order earlier this month.…

And Mountain View obliged Links to pages slating a telco slapped with multiple fines from UK regulators have been wiped from Google's search results after a claimant asked the search giant to chuck them down a sinkhole.…

How will you tell the difference? #F_AI_L The BBC has confirmed that Radio 4's Today programme will conduct an interview with a politician via an AI bot "modelled on Mishal Husain".…

125,000 people tried – and failed Britons simply don't understand that "public sector broadcasting" is a "good for all society", a Labour MP lamented during a Westminster Hall debate on TV licensing.…

'Hancock pinched all my ideas' jokes former digi minister Comment For all digital minister Matt Hancock's rhetoric about 'full-fibre' investment, Blighty's digital infrastructure still remains unchanged.…

Midget gem Apple hasn't forgotten its miraculous budget iPhone, the iPhone SE, after all. The ornate miniature looks set for an update next year, according to reports.…

Excel Exumai! Hey kids, fancy an all-inclusive break to the magical Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Florida? Well, you're in luck.…

Just one week left to save £££ Events You've got just one week left to snap up tickets for our two-day conference at Continuous Lifecycle London for just £500 plus VAT.…

If I hear 'up to' one more time... Broadband providers will only be able to advertise "average" download speeds if at least 50 per cent of customers are able to receive them at peak times, under new rules announced today by the advertising regulator.…

After 6 years of work, 35 people in StorOne say storage industry's wrong Analysis Israeli storage startup StorONE says it has re-invented the storage stack to set hardware free.…

Get your filthy, fallible hands out of filthy, fallible Github Scripting is now the first choice for clued-up administrators who want to get things done quickly and in an automated fashion. However, scripting does bring its own set of issues.…

Maybe very slightly damp sand, but new look at Martian gullies finds they look like dunes Scientists have revisited a 2015 sighting of water on the surface of Mars and revised the theory to suggest what we saw was sand, and probably not even damp sand at that.…

Boffins finds neutrinos sometimes collide with Earth instead of passing through Video Thanks to work at the IceCube instrument in Antarctica, we have learned that Earth has an appetite for high-energy neutrinos: they're more likely to be “swallowed” by the planet in collisions with matter than those at lower energies.…

And cross your fingers: 'TBD' is the scheduled date for hundreds of PC fixes The world's top PC-makers have started to ship fixes for the multiple flaws in Intel's CPUs, but plenty won't land until 2018.…

Big Linux distros have pushed their fixes, but let's not assume everything auto-patches, OK? It’s time to patch Samba again - or turn off SAMBA 1, which is never as easy as it sounds.…

Programming language makes some fuzzy big numbers Consider this an item for the watch-list, rather than a reason to hit the panic button: a math error in the Go language could potentially affect cryptographic libraries.…

This may explain why you've craved Vlad Putin's borscht recipe since mid-2016 Facebook has revealed it's started work on a tool that will let its members learn if they saw ads published by the “Internet Research Agency”, the outfit thought to have been behind mass buys of pro-Kremlin propaganda ads during the 2016 US presidential election.…

AWS explains itself to project Board, keeps its revelations off the record Fresh from the news that Amazon Web Services intends to replace its hypervisor, the Xen Project will tell the world it has a fine future in embedded applications.…

Verification, credibility and accuracy Sponsored Big data holds great promise: structured and unstructured data harvested, processes and analysed in near-real-time by organisations sifting for new opportunities or seeking to refine existing activities. Data is pouring in: from sensors, shoppers, IoT, social and more with companies investing in big-data projects, from data lakes and processing frameworks like Hadoop to analytics tools and Intel hardware.…

Just in time for Thanksgiving when no one will notice Ajit Pai, head of America's communications watchdog the FCC, has unveiled his "plan to repeal the Obama Administration's heavy-handed regulation of the Internet," referred to by critics as an anti-consumer giveaway to large communications companies.…

Off-shored statue offered a curious roll A Catholic School in Australia has been left red-faced after a newly commissioned statue of a revered saint appeared to be offering to share more than a few loaves and fishes with the little children.…

Hmmm. Looks familiar… Microsoft is experimenting with taking Search out of Cortana and making it more Mac-like in the newest Windows 10 build.…

We'd ask them what it means, but, uh... Apple researchers have released a paper about a "trainable deep architecture", setting out the fruity firm's plans to make autonomous vehicles better at detecting cyclists and pedestrians.…

Are you in control? Comment According to an old Chinese proverb: "When a wise man points at the Moon, an idiot looks at his finger." Google may have been hoping that you were examining a finger, not reading a Quartz story yesterday, which reveals how Android phones send location data to Google without you even knowing it.…

MP: Funny, you managed to contact customers when TfL put your licence on hold… Brit regulators, security agencies and MPs have slammed Uber for covering up the massive data breach of 57 million customer and driver records.…

Trebling comp sci teachers, digi tax evaders clampdown “The world is on the brink of a technological revolution,” UK chancellor Philip Hammond declared in Blighty's Autumn budget today. “We choose the future; we choose to run towards change, not away from it.”…