The Register

Plus: Waymo? Way no! Levandowski swerves doc demand in trade secrets trial Taxi app turned lawsuit magnet Uber last week was sued by Donna Giacomaro, a resident of Levittown, New York, for text message harassment, in violation of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) and New York state law.…

Licensing dispute explodes into all-out patent war with Apple Qualcomm is upping the stakes in its legal war against Apple by accusing the Cupertino idiot-tax operation of infringing six patents.…

Tweet a GIF about that, Donald Chinese boffins say they have smashed yet another world fusion record using their EAST contraption – aka the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak.…

White House warns corpos after President's Twitter fight The very public war of words – and GIFs – between the President of the United States and CNN could pose a threat to the $85bn merger between AT&T and Time Warner.…

* And everyone else, too, of course Let's Encrypt plans to begin offering free wildcard certificates in January 2018, a move likely to make web security easier and a bit less costly for many organizations.…

Total Inability To Support Users' Purchases – and the second time in four months A number of banking app startups were forced to shut down their services Thursday after their payment processor fell over for the second time in four months.…

Templated stories sourced from gov databases to push web ads. Welcome to your dystopia Google has today awarded €706,000 ($800,000) to the UK’s Press Association to develop robot reporters that can crank out 30,000 articles a month for local newspapers and bloggers.…

And Intel sighs with relief Virus-fighting tech renegade John McAfee has settled his lawsuit in the US with Intel over his own name.…

Why employ people to flog software when you can just force feed people's computers with code anyway? Microsoft today announced it is dumping 3,000 workers.…

Self-driving project could be a smart move by Redmond Yesterday, China's search engine giant Baidu named Microsoft as a partner on its new open-source autonomous driving platform, Apollo. Technology analysts say the partnership is a smart call by Redmond.…

It's not like you can go to the police, eh? Dark web marketplace AlphaBay has dropped offline, sparking frenzied speculation that its admins may have disappeared for good after pocketing a swag bag of digital currency. The outage may be down to a simple security update, if assurances offered through Reddit are true.…

200GbitE and 400GbitE ASIC-powered switches Just as we're getting used to 40Gbps, Ethernet networking kit-flinger Mellanox makes it 10 times faster with a Spectrum-2 ASIC running at up to 400Gbps.…

Reckitt Benckiser revenues wrecked by comp-wiping nasty The owner of the Dettol brand and Durex condoms could be left millions out of pocket after falling victim to the NotPetya ransomware last week.…

SpectraLogic's LTO-8 pre-purchase programme and 190TB+ cartridge forecast Library vendor SpectraLogic is preparing for upcoming 12TB LTO-8 format tape drives with a pre-purchase programme and a 190-plus TB cartridge on the way.…

They 'can't make people redundant properly despite having loads of practice' Computer Sciences Corp and HP Enterprise Services were old hands at making redundancies, so you'd expect the newly formed entity DXC Technology would also be well versed. Yet some former staff have been left in employment limbo due to a payroll cock-up.…

Geminga! Yet another of astronomy's classic pranks... A new study suggests a dangerous, young neutron star could be attracting planet-forming matter around it as it swims through space.…

Stretch your non-Artificial Intelligence at MCubed The agenda for MCubed is complete, with almost 40 of the smartest brains in machine learning and AI due in London in October to not just talk about the technology, but to show how to use it in real world organisations.…

Saying heck no to rules, man Analysis Tegile has announced the first mainstream multi-tiered flash array in the storage industry. What does it do and how does it do it?…

Most recent public document is from 1955 The campaign group Privacy International has filed a lawsuit to try to force authorities to release the latest details of the Five Eyes surveillance agreement.…

Eight? Really? Analysis Data centre infrastructure management console seller Aptare claims to have 8 or 9 exabytes of storage under management – a larger total than any storage company on the planet.…

I shoulda patched what now? The ransomware problems reported by The Reg over the past few weeks are enough to make you, er, wanna cry. Yet all that's happened is that known issues with Windows machines – desktop and server – have now come to everyone's attention and the bandwidth out of Microsoft's Windows Update servers has likely increased a bit relative to the previous few weeks.…

No word on what caused the feed to go silent Updated Londoners are straightening their bowed necks, lowering their sunglasses and blinking into the strong sunlight as they attempt to "look" to see if their buses are coming.…

A smartphone should be as fixable as a refrigerator The European Parliament has recommended better consumer product protection, asking that durable products be durable and repairable by independent workshops.…

King Battistelli gets latest reform efforts approved, but his days are numbered The European Patent Office has formally advertised for a new president, marking a cut-off date for its controversial president Benoit Battistelli.…

Society has yet to – and perhaps never will – come to terms with creepy kid love dolls Sex robots may reduce sex crimes, or make them more common. According to "Our Sexual Future With Robots," a report published Wednesday by the Foundation for Responsible Robotics, it could go either way.…

Can science crack the cosmos's inexplicable yet bountiful ion? We think it can Scientists are getting closer to piecing together the chemical reactions that form trihydrogen, one of the most abundant yet mysterious ions floating around in space.…

Default and leaky creds, remote code execution and more In Cisco's weekly security update list, there are three critical bugs affecting its Elastic Services Controller and Ultra Services Framework.…

Turbo-charged solar runaways escape home galaxies, scream through our cosmic backwater Rare hypervelocity stars tearing through the Milky Way galaxy are runaway suns that have escaped neighbouring galaxies, according to research presented at this year’s National Astronomy Meeting in Hull, England.…

BACKRONYM also fixed, so pull the patch The Perl 5 database interface maintainers have issued an important patch for DBD—MySQL: in some configurations it wasn't enforcing encryption.…

Microsoft's decided only NTFS devices are allowed Microsoft has tried to DoS its forum servers, by changing its OneDrive consumer policy to only support cloud backups of NTFS-formatted drives without warning users first.…

Humans still the weakest link South Korean cyber-cops are probing a hacking attack on Bithumb, one of the world's biggest Bitcoin exchanges.…

Boggs sees future prospects go down the pan Another member of the Crackas With Attitude hacking group has been sent down – after breaking into the email accounts of more than 10 US government officials, including the then-director of the CIA.…

Mayor's plan could lead the way for other cities The city of Vancouver, Canada, is pushing a set of reforms to hit back against a housing shortage it blames in part on Airbnb and Expedia.…

Would be the first M-line server processor since 2015's M7 Oracle engineers are seemingly working on a new SPARC processor: the M8.…

Say 'have you tried turning it off and turning it back on?' again. I DARE YOU In a speech at the National Press Club yesterday, Australian Taxation Office commissioner Chris Jordan apologised for the organisation’s repeated IT outages, while the ATO’s online portals hit the canvas again.…

It's not a bug, it's a feature To obtain root privileges on a Linux distribution that utilizes systemd for initialization, start with an invalid user name in the systemd.unit file.…

What's the solution? Analysis Simmering anger over Silicon Valley sexism has exploded, with a slew of women going public with allegations of unwanted sexual advances at the top of the tech industry.…

Users slam attempt to infuse app with social media magic Microsoft last month declared that it had rebuilt its Skype app "from the ground up." Those who use the app have been busy tearing it down.…

Robo-ride car tech will use Drive PX 2 hardware, plus other bits from the conference China's top web portal Baidu kicked off its inaugural developer conference in Beijing today with a flurry of news bits and bytes.…

Lad cuffed after worldwide manhunt leads cops to parents' home in Stockport, UK A British teenager is accused of flogging and supporting malware used to launch distributed denial-of-service attacks against top multinationals.…

원숭이도 나무에서 떨어진다. Samsung is again delayed the Bixby voice assistant in the US because its English not so good with skills.…

Nope, that is fake news, says memory chip maker: 'There was a minor event' Micron Technology has trashed analysts' claims that a malfunction forced the closure of one of its two fabs.…

Vendors upping tags while consumers want better products PCs should become more expensive this year but consumers will continue to buy them, Gartner has read in the tea leaves.…

Also: Docs might be Snapchatting your scans to colleagues DeepMind doesn’t fully understand the complexity of the problems it is trying to address and needs to think through the broader implications of its work, a panel in the UK has said.…

NAO hear this: Wares of ransom, feel the wrath come... audit UK Parliamentary spending watchdogs at the National Audit Office have launched an inquiry into the impact of the recent WannaCrypt ransomware attack on the NHS.…

Paula Long startup fails to reach escape velocity on its own Exclusive Ninety-two million dollars and a pivot or two later, virtualised data guardian DataGravity has been acquired, The Register can reveal.…

Wants to pump fibre to 50 cities by 2020 Small Brit broadband provider CityFibre has splashed £29m on connectivity service Entanet and is seeking to raise £185m in additional funds.…

And staff on chopping block unhappy with internal comms Virgin Media has admitted it "fell short" in delivering broadband speeds ahead of a BBC Watchdog report due to air tonight which found customers in some areas receive 3 per cent of the 200Mbps speed they were originally sold.…

No Bull... no flops... or should that be the other way round? The Atomic Weapons Establishment, which provides warheads for the UK's nuclear weapons, is going to use a Bull supercomputer to simulate Trident nuclear warhead explosions.…

Plus: More Valley douchebaggery, NotPetya, death of backups, and more