The Register

'Nervousness from customers is understandable' UK comms and networking integrator Maintel has blamed trading partner Avaya’s bankruptcy filing in the US for slowing customer demand on this side of the pond.…

Any point turning up? Not now Apple apparently deploys resources comparable to the security apparatus of a repressive Cold War Balkan state to try to prevent leaks. To very little effect. And with magnificent irony, it seems to have itself to blame for the biggest leak of all.…

Clamshell QWERTY has a few unique tricks World Exclusive Last week Gemini, the venture that re-invents the Psion 5 design for the 21st century, took delivery of pre-production units. Planet Computing invited us to see how the project is progressing.…

This is not foil-bagged street food... It's a knife-fork-and-plater +Comment Good morning, storage fans. Last week we were buzz-bombed with a barrage of storage updates, but we kept quite a few aside to wrap up into something easily digestible. It's a bit more substantial than the blob-dropping treat you might grab at the food truck, though, so get a napkin, plate, and some cutlery, find a quiet room and spend 15 minutes ingesting this stuff.…

Where did you get Red Hat, where did you get that tile? For all of the breathless hype that containers and cloud native get, the strange-but-true story is that enterprises still need to run servers and for that vSphere is arguably the best possible option. VMware probably understands this in its inner sanctum but, well... Kubernetes envy.…

What councils spend it on is another matter The government has clawed back £645m from BT under its state-subsidised superfast broadband contracts tendered in 2012.…

We trawled through 32 Lords debating so you don't have to Fellow peers phone snubbed (or phubbed) Lord Sugar's speech in a debate last week, which included calls for an ID card system to be resurrected and plenty of hand-wringing about the Government Digital Service.…

Businesses to get 'File Stream', great unwashed get 'Backup and Sync' Google is killing its “Drive” sync 'n' share file locker in two ways.…

Fast book delivery is a first world problem, but cargo-carriers might just slow down the growth of cities At the end of 2013 (the world seemed much simpler back then) Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos gave a rare interview to CBS’ 60 Minutes program during which he revealed - with an almost Jobsian flourish - an autonomous deliver drone that would drop packages on customers' doorsteps 30 minutes after they pressed the ‘buy’ button.…

Borg starts appraising its exposure to Apache problem More than 42 Cisco products might inherit the Apache Struts bug that emerged last week.…

New Wave giant, journalist, essayist and Byte columnist now a mote in God's eye One of the giants of “New Wave” hard science fiction, Jerry Pournelle, has died aged 84.…

Chipzilla thinks fast short-range wireless is good for VR, where desks are always tidy Intel has issued “Product Change Notifications” for several WiGig products it used to make wireless laptop docks.…

An upload filter would break GitHub builds, warn FSFE, OpenForum Europe European digital rights groups and open science advocates are mobilising against proposed EU copyright changes they say would hamper information sharing.…

'Toast' micro-messages can burn just about every Android users Any unpatched Android phone running a version older than Oreo is going to need patching fairly soon, with researchers turning up a class of vulnerability that lets malware draw fake dialogs so users “okay” their own pwnage.…

Timeline explains that either Equifax didn't patch old bugs, or was zero-dayed The Apache Software Foundation has defended its development practices in the face of a report alleging its code was responsible for the Equifax data leak.…

Three different machines fail tests, must be binned before November election Virginia's State Board of Elections has decided its current generation of electronic voting machines is potentially vulnerable, and wants them replaced in time for the gubernatorial election due on November 7th, 2017.…

easyDNS, which bills itself as 'the free speech registrar' won't register white supremacists Yet another domain name registrar has declined to give white supremacist web site The Daily Stormer an easy way back onto the web.…

Fascinating detail on how people move around the system The people in charge of the London Underground transport have released a report [PDF] in their month-long tracking trial of Tube users – and the results are fascinating.…

It's a grower not a, er, yeah... Python, which ranks consistently as one of the most popular programming languages, is the fastest growing major programming language, according to coding community site Stack Overflow.…

That gives me a great idea, says Putin – payback Updated US big box retailer Best Buy has pulled from its shelves Kaspersky Lab's PC security software amid fears of Kremlin spies using the antivirus tool to snoop on Americans.…

Operating system release pushed back to next year Oracle's latest roadmap for its SPARC and Solaris platforms shows that at least one major milestone has been delayed.…

Not exactly a move designed to inspire confidence The team behind Scotiabank's Digital Banking Unit isn't impressing some customers, after forgetting to renew the security certificates for their own website.…

Could any 'detect the transits of the Solar System planets'? Scientists on Earth have found thousands of exoplanets – but which of those potential alien civilizations are in the best position to discover us?…

Nothing at all wrong with this China's version of Twitter, Sina Weibo, has warned its 340 million users they have until next Friday to verify their accounts using their real names.…

Friend boasted on social media about trading skillz A former financial analyst at Amazon.com pled guilty on Thursday to securities fraud for helping a former fraternity brother trade Amazon stock based on insider information.…

So stopping antivirus software from spotting malware is now a feature? A design flaw within the Windows kernel that could stop antivirus software from recognizing malware isn't going to be fixed, Microsoft has said.…

Class actions already piling up against identity theft brokers Less than 24 hours after credit monitors Equifax revealed it had lost the personal data of more than 130 million Americans, two class action suits have been filed.…

Tourists' passport details and credit card numbers exposed Mexican VAT refund site MoneyBack exposed sensitive customer information online as a result of a misconfigured database.…

Court suggests recent EU ruling on bulk data retention could put national security at risk The UK's Investigatory Powers Tribunal, which oversees the country's spy agencies, has said the European Court of Justice should rule on the legality of the government's mass-surveillance legislation.…

Beleaguered company says it's 'cooperating' with investigation The FBI is investigating allegations that Uber used its "Hell" program to track drivers from rival firm Lyft.…

'I see you're trying to land. Please reboot the flight control system to continue' Initial software development for the F-35 fighter jet is coming to an end, while future tweaks to the aircraft’s onboard systems will be rolled out like smartphone app updates, according to reports.…

But it's still behind the curve compared to Azure and AWS In a bid to attract large enterprise clientele shackled to Amazon's AWS and Microsoft's Azure, Google Cloud has announced a direct connection offering.…

Want gold, top brass? Make clouds float, hit $80 stock price Oracle’s top earners will only be able to earn more equity if the company delivers on its cloudy promises and pays out for stockholders, according to a revamped compensation plan.…

'You can have any colour you want, as long as it's ours' Sponsored You want to move from an on-premises Office suite to Office 365 in the cloud. It'll save you money in the short term and free you from providing local infrastructure. That's nice. But whoa – not so fast there. Securing cloud-based productivity systems like Office 365 takes a little forethought.…

A Wordpress site? Really? Credit reference agency Equifax has been criticised for its breach response in the wake of the disclosure on Thursday of a megahack that affected the data of up to 143 million people in the US alone.…

Judge mulls whether to dismiss suit after ITC ruling Arista Networks has called its long-running patent dispute with Cisco "breathtakingly broad, unprecedented and insane" in a hearing regarding an antitrust suit against Switchzilla.…

Motorolaesque panic buy? Not really Google is set to relieve HTC of its mobile phones unit, according to a report in Taiwan's Commercial Times, leaving the company to focus on its Vive VR helmet.…

8-char password limits? HTTP-YES HSBC has been faulted for redirecting business customers to a website that is not obviously secure.…

Someone's noticed Big Blue’s deal with Hortonworks Big data company Cloudera has acquired an artificial intelligence research firm in a bid to expand its machine learning offering and get customers to part with more of their cash.…

Bare-bones offerings from AmAzureGoog don't compute Huawei is delivering an enterprise storage service in its public cloud to which enterprises can transfer mission-critical apps from on-premises without changing their applications or processes at all.…

Every $1 of sales costs array supplier $1.50 +Comment Hybrid and all-flash array supplier Tintri is haemorrhaging cash – the latest quarterly results show every $1 of sales costs it $1.50. And its been getting worse. In the previous quarter $1 of sales cost it $1.01.…

JBOF ... or perhaps you'd prefer to look into a Barreleye Analysis Will NVMe over Fabrics nuke the storage array into a JBOF winter or will array technology extend itself into new combinations of compute controllers, media and network links? Huawei has both technology strands in development with a high density 1U JBOF and a 4U x 16-blade Barreleye system.…

If someone filmed it, it must be real Something for the Weekend, Sir? I'm on deadline for two concurrent articles and another client has asked me to rebuild their app with a new welcome screen by tomorrow morning, which is also when I shall be training a classroom of delegates how to use spectrophotometers to create custom-calibrated ICC profiles.…

Package management client hits 1.0 Facebook, known for telling tales about about users it doesn't have, has spun another sort of yarn.…

Desktop team cleans up mess created by developers, and doctors confused by disks On-Call Welcome agin to On-Call, The Register's weekly column in which we share readers' stories of being asked to achieve the improbable, by people who are impossible.…

Servers, switches, PCs all did well, but traditional arrays left a nasty balance sheet stain Weakness in traditional disk array sales held Dell Technologies back as it posted otherwise solid results for the second quarter of its FY 2018, the numbers for which were released a year on from the formal conclusion of its EMC acquisition.…

One language called Ansible to rule them all While tech luminaries fret about the world-killing potential of self-directed computers amid galas and globetrotting, the industry's worker bees see automation as salvation from soul-killing drudgery.…

South Park doing what it does best: making you laugh, uncomfortably Science fiction author John Scalzi once wrote that “In the role playing game known as The Real World, 'Straight White Male' is the lowest difficulty setting there is.”…

Did, did these bio-boffins just sass us? A team of scientists has proposed a new classification system that grades how advanced alien civilizations are by examining how an exoplanet uses energy.…

New collaboration tool is 'recommended upgrade' to HipChat, beats it on price Atlassian has decided HipChat is terminally un-hip and created a new product with which to take on Slack in the messaging-with-benefits market.…