The Register

Sour krauts after Amazon digital assistant throws wild midnight party – for itself We all assume that intelligent devices will either serve our every need, or try to kill us, but what if they just want to party?…

Open-source offering faster, shorter bottlenecks Citing the social network's need for speed, Facebook senior software engineer Jonathan Keljo says the company's developer tools group has revisited how its Buck open-source build tool compiles Java code and made it faster still.…

1 becomes 2: Director, storage blades must move apart... in order to grow Analysis Panasas has separated out its Director blades in its latest ActiveStor iteration and put them in an ActiveStor Director 100 controller component product line to scale performance and capacity separately.…

Handing over immigrants' info 'violates confidentiality' A civil rights group has launched a legal challenge in the UK against a deal that asks the NHS to share patient data for immigration enforcement.…

Co-founder Eliot Horowitz chats to El Reg about a decade in the NoSQL space Document database-flinger MongoDB has long positioned itself as the dev's best friend, but after ten years it is now fluffing itself up for the enterprise.…

SC family goes flash, Unity gets dedupe +Comment Dell EMC has retrofitted flash to its SC array, added deduplication to its Unity array and devised a loyalty programme to keep its mid-range array customers onboard.…

Easier than riding a bike, apparently A British inventor has set a new world record for fastest speed in a body-controlled, jet engine-powered suit.…

University leaks personal data for 2nd time in 5 months For the second time in five months, The University of East Anglia has been involved in a personal data breach.…

UK West and South regions suffering from capacity issues Multiple Microsoft customers have for the past nineteen hours been unable to provision new virtual machines in Azure's UK West and UK South regions.…

Confidential helpline considered for distressed and lonely churchmen The annual general meeting of Ireland’s Catholic Priests has been told to ease up on attacking their seniors, amidst increasing concerns over the future of the Church in the country.…

Plus outsells regular iPhone for the first time Some ominous news if you like your phones small and unobtrusive. Apple’s “Plus” model has outsold its regular iPhone sibling for the first time. Canalys estimates Apple shipped 5.4 million iPhone 8 units in Q3, but 6.3 million units of the larger iPhone 8 Plus.…

One day, one news release and some coverage... NASA has smacked down reports that it is working with Uber on a flying car, or software for that flying car, or indeed, software for any firm after several announcements from the ride-hailing biz yesterday had the tech press aflame with excitement.…

Coinhive API increasingly pops up in top 3 million websites A total of 2,531 of the top 3 million websites (1 in 1,000) are running the Coinhive miner, according to new stats from analytics firm Red Volcano.…

Fear not, robots, it was a squishy meatsack to blame A self-driving bus has been involved in a collision, barely two hours after being introduced into public service for the first time.…

Project up to eight years with broadband minnow Vodafone has inked a deal for a full-fibre network built by CityFibre, which could connect up to 5 million premises over the next eight years.…

Department eXits Contracts: Biz falls prey to in-sourcing move Exclusive The Department for Work & Pensions has not renewed a pair of contracts it held with Frankenfirm DXC Technologies – a loss the outsourcing business was lamenting in its latest financial results.…

Thanks, initial testing seems unduly problematic Updated Power outages have brought some OVH data servers to their knees, and unspecified issues have broken optical cable routing in Europe for POP.…

Big Blue's mighty machine needs Nutanix software nuggets .NEXT In the hyperconverged infrastructure appliance space, x86 rules. This might appear to exclude IBM, having sold its x86 servers to Lenvo, but you'd be surprised.…

Pushed out by newly acquired Black Duck Black Duck has launched a product that provides automatic detection of known open source vulnerabilities for containers.…

Clive Selley admits BT could have done more to build a fibre network Interview "Look, if you can't get decent broadband, it is a real pisser," said Openreach boss Clive Selley in response to a Devon village's decision to burn an effigy of one of its vans on bonfire night.…

Cloud Foundry project aims to make containers manageable Announcing its updated and renamed Kubernetes and BOSH (Kubo) project as Container Runtime (CFCR) last month, Cloud Foundry said the project would give users greater "choice".…

The SDN industry – ahem – admires Google and will learn from this, to your benefit Google last week announced that it has started using version 2.1 of its Andromeda software-defined networking stack.…

In with 'international and modern' typeface 'Plex', seeya later boring old Helvetica Neue IBM's decided the time is right for a new corporate font.…

Because everything has firmware and it survives reboots. PLUS: Redmond details HPE-killing cloud servers Microsoft's revealed its working with Intel on a “cryptographic microcontroller” to secure its cloud servers and the many firmware-using components within.…

Users see white noise, attackers see whatever they just stole from you It's the kind of thinking you expect from someone who lives in a volcano lair: exfiltrating data from remote screen pixel values.…

Bitdefender integration with Windows Defender APT in preview; Lookout, Ziften soon Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection first landed as a public preview in September, and now it's general availability, Redmond has announced a bunch of partners to give it cross-platform support: Bitdefender for Linux and macOS, Lookout for iOS and Android, and Ziften for macOS and Linux).…

Wannabe terror teen found guilty, faces sentencing A British teenager who tried to order a car bomb on the dark web and get it delivered to his address has been found guilty this week.…

Creator of OS on the chip calls out Chipzilla for keeping his work secret Positive Technologies, which in September said it has a way to attack the Intel Management Engine, has dropped more details on how its exploit works.…

Shor, we need a new sig scheme An international group of quantum boffins reckons Bitcoin could be broken by the year 2027.…

If nothing goes wrong with biggest rocket ever, which is only a little over budget Vid NASA has reconfirmed it hopes to stage the first flight of its Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft in December 2019, but also conceded such a big build could run late.…

That's a busted flush of a headline Intel will be making its own discrete graphics cards, and it has hired away the head of AMD's GPU unit to lead the effort.…

We've fro-Xen page to preserve evidence of NVMe servers and Xen's stay of execution Amazon Web Services has quietly edited its FAQ in which it revealed it has created a new KVM-based hypervisor and will use it instead of Xen for future instances.…

Boffins baffled by slow burn supernova that glows and dims Astrophysicists have discovered one of the weirdest stars yet in the universe: one that refuses to die, exploding as a supernova multiple times over fifty years.…

Joins Equifax and Verizon execs to explain pitiful security Poor Marissa Mayer. After selling off Yahoo! and floating away on her golden parachute, she must have been looking for a nice rest. But US Congress wanted her to explain how every single user account on the portal got hacked.…

Joins Equifax and Verizon execs to explain pitiful security Poor Marissa Meyer. After selling off Yahoo! and floating away on her golden parachute, she must have been looking for a nice rest. But Congress wanted her to explain how every single user account on the portal got hacked.…

Shut up and take my money! Nose-diving social media company Snap Inc. says it has secured a significant investment from Chinese tech powerhouse Tencent.…

Thought the Snowden leaks would make things better? Joke's on you A draft law protecting one of the US government's spying programs has passed through the initial markup stage in the Congress, providing one more opportunity to witness the "up is down" world in which American politics currently resides.…

Ad-slinger promises to crack down on ads (that it didn't sling) Chrome will begin blocking some redirect links in an effort to crack down on particularly annoying web ads.…

Cryptocurrency hits all-time high, then bounces back down Bitcoin's contentious upgrade plan, known as SegWit2x, has been called off, sending the cryptocurrency price past $7,800 – an all-time high – and then down several hundred dollars as profit taking set it.…

Microsoft, Google keen to use CPUs and push Intel Outside Putting aside its legal battles for a few hours, Qualcomm today said is it shipping the Centriq 2400 – its ARM-based server-grade processor, and the world's first 10nm data-center CPU.…

Techies safe, but you may have to endure a robot co-worker So, robots are coming to take your jobs after all* but techies shouldn't be scared, not in the slightest.…

Plus: Trying to make storage 'cool' in Antartica Data-protector Commvault made several announcements at its annual customer shindig – including a GPDR "package", endpoint data protection as a service, a partnership with the Google Cloud Platform and a bit of Antarctic Expedition do-goodery.…

Whose land is it anyway? HM Land Registry made its databases of property owned by domestic and foreign businesses free to access yesterday.…

On the path to becoming an enterprise hybrid cloud provider and gateway .NEXT Nutanix has a one click, one OS, any cloud concept with new services to virtualise compute and object storage across multiple clouds – both on-premises and public ones.…

Slight glitch in Industrial Revolution 4.0 Troubled Tesla Inc. has quietly acquired Perbix, which designs robot production lines. Perbix was already a Tesla contractor.…

Can we skip the orange of outage, please? We've peeled the storage news fruit, cut off the rough edges, discarded the excess verbiage bits and blended them into a smoothie. Grab a napkin and tuck in, because a lot has happened over the past week.…

Pre-emptive perv to defang revenge pr0nz peddlers Facebook has begun conducting a pilot where it solicits intimate photographs of women – and it will soon offer the service in the United Kingdom. Anxious exes who fear their former partner is set on revenge porn will be urged to upload photographs of themselves nude.…

Data analytics platform sunset in December, but enterprise version spared IBM has announced the retirement of the basic plan for its data analytics software platform, BigInsights for Hadoop.…

Built-in obsolescence, meet kill switch One more reason to avoid The Cloud – as if you didn't have enough already.…

Three's a crowd, and a 'major competitor', says watchdog Carphone Warehouse was given a particularly withering stare by the Advertising Standards Agency in a ruling handed down today concerning one of its radio adverts.…