The Register

She may not look like much, but she's got it where it counts, kid Durham University has built itself a secondhand supercomputer from recycled parts and beefed up its contribution to DiRAC (distributed research utilising advanced computing), the integrated facility for theoretical modelling and HPC-based research in particle physics, astronomy and cosmology.…

It actually works – and could foster faster, cheaper science Boffins have built what could be one of the world's smallest working detectors of elusive neutrino particles.…

Ban lifted in UK, France and Ireland as an 'experiment' Google has agreed to let Play Store customers court cruel mistress Lady Luck.…

Win for Big Blue in court showdown over final salaries The Court of Appeal in London, England, has upheld IBM's appeal over the closure of its defined benefit schemes, which guaranteed retired employees a predefined portion of their final salary.…

Come, swim with the sharks Despite predictions of its demise, we've been happily using email in business since it first became widespread more than two decades ago. In many ways it's defined the way we compose, reply or send digital messages. A number of technologies have consolidated and extended it to something that became called "collaboration".…

VMware's event has become the conference of today's refresh cycle, not tomorrow's VMworld 2017 is nearly upon us. The primary event in Las Vegas taking place August 27-31 will be followed by VMware Europe from September 11-14 in Barcelona.…

Soz, SMEs, you can't submit your monthly returns online The taxman's Digital Forms Service, intended to allow small businesses to submit returns online, has been down for maintenance since the beginning of the week, leaving SMEs to return to pen and paper.…

New features? Sorry. Just new colours, because modern monitors give CLIs the blues Microsoft's making over the Windows Console, the tool that throws up a command line interface and which has hung around in Windows long after DOS was sent to the attic and told not to show itself in polite company.…

Replaced everything to no avail, before small talk about the view sorted things out On-Call Salutations dear readers, and congratulations on reaching the last working day of the week, on which The Register runs On-Call, our reader-contributed tales of gigs that get you giggling.…

Finally, Zuck's lot get neural-network-powered translation Facebook’s language translation is now finally powered by several large neural networks.…

Turn your bon mots to meh for the sake of privacy To publish online and remain anonymous, boffins from Bulgaria and Qatar advise being mediocre. And if you can't manage that on your own, they have a technique to make your prose less scintillating.…

Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69 could be two rocks for the price of one The New Horizons probe's next destination, Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69, looks a bit like a duck.…

Michelle Carter banned from profiting from her story in any medium, ever The sad case of the teenager who committed suicide after being urged to do so in text messages has resulted with a 15-month jail sentence for the woman who sent the messages.…

Plan is to put different functions into VMs to improve security, reduce bill of materials The Automotive Grade Linux has revealed it's going shopping for a hypervisor so that in-car computers can handle lots of different jobs.…

Tech's rich aunts and uncles beg the President not to ditch Entrepreneur Rule A gang of venture capital firms and startup funds has asked the Trump administration to save an immigration rule that allows foreign startup founders to come to the US in order to build their companies.…

Malware used to take down Linux Foundation and make millions A Russian man has been imprisoned for 46 months after admitting to using the Ebury malware to create a massive botnet for fun and profit.…

I'm a bloody idiot, says programmer after failing to turn on two-factor authentication The chap behind Chrome Web Developer, a popular third-party extension that was briefly hijacked to inject ads into browsers, today confirmed he was the victim of a phishing attack.…

Comms watchdog back up to full strength America's broadband watchdog, the FCC, is finally back to its full complement of five commissioners following the confirmations of Brendan Carr and Jessica Rosenworcel by the US Senate.…

IETF draft hopes to balance netizens' needs and corporate interests in future standards The Internet Engineering Task Force is being asked to formally adopt its informal philosophy that when it comes to new standards and protocols, end users' needs must come first.…

Shock as Brit cuffed in Vegas – now he's accused of developing account-draining nasty Marcus Hutchins, the British malware researcher who killed off the WannaCry ransomware outbreak, was arrested in Las Vegas on Wednesday on suspicion of being a malware writer himself.…

Our customer contract doesn't violate GPLv2, biz insists in defamation lawsuit Updated In late June, noted open-source programmer Bruce Perens warned that using Grsecurity's Linux kernel security could invite legal trouble.…

Oh Danny boy, the typos, the typos are galling A bug in code that generates medical reports could force patients in Ireland to repeat their hospital and clinic scans.…

Chap who stopped malware spread cuffed in Vegas Updated Marcus Hutchins, the unassuming Brit who found and activated the kill switch in the WannaCry ransomware, has been arrested by the FBI in America.…

Star-crossed lovers secretly kicking each other to death Toshiba and Western Digital Corp negotiating makes for bizarre viewing. Billions of dollars are at stake, goodwill is laughably absent and one of the world's best flash production partnerships could be headed down the toilet.…

Virtualises structured data for copies and cloud migration Analysis Database copy virtualiser Delphix has relaunched itself as a Dynamic Data Platform supplier of personal virtualised data environments, covering on-premises and public cloud environments and masking out sensitive data.…

450k folk want a Model 3 – and record revenues won't hurt Tesla has posted its largest ever loss in its latest quarterly financial results, continuing its trend of burning ever greater quantities of cash.…

Subscription licensing, yay! 'Inertia' displacing legacy deployments, boo! Data visualisation firm Tableau has reported a 7 per cent growth in revenue, with execs waxing lyrical about the company’s move to a subscription licensing model.…

Let your children run wild and free 3D Robotics, the American drone company, has thrown open the codebase for its Solo software, in a move interpreted by some as its latest acknowledgement of Chinese rival DJI's dominance.…

The Donald missed out on cameo in crap film franchise to run for White House – reports Donald Trump was reportedly in talks to play the president in the third incarnation of cult sci-fi disaster film Sharknado – until he welched on the deal to run for the real thing.…

'Deferred revenues' up sharply at the Data Communications Company The Capita-owned monopoly that runs Britain's smart meter infrastructure made an operating profit of £390,000 last year – but paid no tax and is owed £42m by the wider smart meter industry.…

Cash thought to have 'gone through a mixer' More than $140,000 (£105,000) in Bitcoin has been paid out by victims of the global WannaCrypt ransomware outbreak from May.…

Opt-in at your own risk Some Office 365 customers can't use Office, thanks to a login portal redesign.…

No decision yet on challenging Ofcom's spectrum cap Mobile operator Three posted a drop in operating income of 15 per cent to £197m in its first-half results, due to costs associated with network and IT infrastructure investment.…

That's gotta sting, huh, HPE? Rubrik is a winner and HPE a loser in Gartner's latest beauty contest for data centre backup and recovery suppliers.…

IM app QQ 'adjusting' bots that revealed unpatriotic sentiments Two chatbots have reportedly been removed from Chinese messaging app QQ after issuing distinctly unpatriotic answers.…

... and shrinking cells. So, how about a double string-stacked 64-layer 3D with cheese? Backgrounder The flash foundry folk took on 3D NAND because it provided an escape hatch from the NAND scaling trap of ever-decreasing cell sizes eventually to non-functioning flash.…

First reading to be squeezed into short September term The UK's new legislation on data protection is to get its first airing in Parliament next month, the government has said.…

Folk neglecting work, chores, family to catch up on Thrones Online streaming has freed consumers from the tyranny of gawping at the crap telly other family members insist on watching, with one-third regularly sitting together in the same room to watch different programmes – according to a major report by Ofcom.…

Reports solid Q1 and makes spats with Google and Mozilla someone else's problem Symantec sold its Website Security and related PKI solutions to DigiCert, effectively making its spat with Mozilla and Google someone else's problem.…

Boffins crack ultimate riddle of stinging agent formation We’re all familiar with the burning, eye-watering sensation felt when chopping onions, and now we know exactly why.…

Q2 numbers beat the street, but the transition to SaaS-y cash flows will be tricky When Citrix suddenly appointed a new CEO in early July, the company promised incoming leader David J Henshall would soon detail “a series of strategic initiatives” to improve the company's performance.…

And not by the cops – but by pushy company reps If you thought American or British copyright fights were petty, consider the case of Canadian Adam Lackman – who had a bailiff, lawyers, and computer experts burst into his home, seize his gear, and grill him for hours.…

It's got an end-of-life date, though: next Tuesday An e-mail has gone out from IBM about its Bluemix cloud: after next Tuesday, the SoftLayer APIs will no longer accept connections encrypted with the ancient TLS 1.0.…

If you said yes, you may be in luck: NASA needs a Planetary Protection Officer Here’s a job title you can dazzle people with at boring dinner parties: Planetary Protection Officer.…

Gravity waves reveal our star rotates four times faster on the inside than the outside Our Sun's core is rotating four times faster than its surface.…

Now you can shave a few milliseconds from real-time apps and, er, batch processing Microsoft has spun up families of virtual machines packed with GPUs and beefy compute muscle for Azure UK customers.…

200 million more to come online in 2017 as 30 million ditch the landline The world has more mobile phone subscriptions than people, according to the International Telecommunications Union's Facts and Figures for 2017.…

Proposals shake up visas, rules for families seeking a better life Having decided to move on from healthcare, the Trump administration has backed proposed legislation that would markedly overhaul America's immigration process.…

Only the smile remained Pretty much the last bits of Brocade have been sold, with the news that Mavenir Systems has slurped the networking company's virtual Evolved Packet Core (vEPC) product range, intellectual property, and development lab.…

Judge goes easy on bloke on web brothel rap, citing work with LGBTQ community A US judge has sentenced the owner of male escort marketplace Rentboy.com to six months behind bars.…