The Register

Boffins from the University of Washington embed connectivity in (mostly) plastic trinkets In an effort to make objects more chatty, boffins at the University of Washington have developed a way to create 3D-printed plastic baubles that can communicate over Wi-Fi with other devices, without batteries or electronics.…

Pezy CEO accused of $3.8m subsidy theft The CEO of Pezy Computing, known for developing one of the world's fastest supercomputers, has been arrested on suspicion of fraud.…

Awkward timing considering its Time-Warner marriage request AT&T has been hit with a particularly badly-timed antitrust lawsuit accusing it of price gouging.…

Sparse is more Researchers at OpenAI have launched a library of tools that can help researchers build faster, more efficient neural networks that take up less memory on GPUs.…

‘Significant concerns’ over transatlantic data flow deal European data protection agencies have told authorities to address their “significant concerns” about Privacy Shield, or risk having the deal tested in court.…

A percentage reduction AND no future tax on foreign profits? Too kind, Uncle Sam! While Apple may have to fork out €13bn (£11.4bn) to the Irish government in back taxes, on the other side of the Pond it could gain $47.2bn (£35.2bn) in tax breaks.…

Security researchers lift lid on snafu at Black Hat Europe On Wednesday, in a presentation at Black Hat Europe, Positive Technologies security researchers Mark Ermolov and Maxim Goryachy plan to explain the firmware flaws they found in Intel Management Engine 11, along with a warning that vendor patches for the vulnerability may not be enough.…

Spending watchdog says buck stops with Home Office The government is not doing enough to prevent Brits being defrauded by £10bn per year, according to a spending watchdog report.…

Cyber no longer domain of techies, says ex-diplomat Black Hat Cyber threats have evolved from been a solely technical issues to core issues of government policy, according to a senior US lawyer and former cyber diplomat.…

Zuck Off, says UK Health Minister Comment "Won't somebody think of the children!" Hur hur.…

Ding dong merrily you're high Nothing says Christmas like a wreath. Except of course a reefer wreath. But why stop at Jesus and Mary, when you can add a full ounce of Mary Jane, dressed with eucalyptus, wheat and rosemary that stoners can use to decorate their knockers this festivus.…

Subscribe, or record nothing after a year, customers told Home security company Y-Cam has enraged its users after pulling its free lifetime cloud storage for its cameras.…

And it doesn't matter if you call the engine a 'range extender' or not BMW claims that its electric i3 car has “zero emissions” and is a “really clean car [that] helps to give back to the environment”. Ad regulators have ordered it never to say that again – pointing to the Beemer’s petrol-fuelled auxiliary engine.…

Could it be eyeing up more public sector deals? Public sector outsourcing favourite Capita has appointed House of Lords backbencher Lucy Neville-Rolfe as independent non-executive director.…

No surprises, just a well made modern mobe Review HMD's efforts to put the Nokia brand over what we call the "Shenzhen generics" formula haven't exactly set the world on fire yet. But in all honesty, you'll struggle to find anything better for £399, the revised price of the Nokia 8.…

Big Red (tor)mentors, ‘Design Realization Garage’ and yachting lake (obvs) As Facebook is being slapped down for trying to get ‘em young with its under-13s messenger service, Oracle has gone one step further towards life-time lock-in: by opening a high school on its campus.…

Involves big hitter Android Studio, APKTool and more Security researchers have found several flaws in the developer tools and environments used by Android programmers.…

Privacy International: Companies need to be explicit, not rely on fine print Car rental companies should offer customers explicit information on what happens to data that has been sucked up by connected cars, a civil rights group has said.…

It can create or destroy. Yes, we're still talking about IT infrastructure... Terraform is taking over as one of the critical new technologies for managing composable infrastructure both in and out of the cloud. Where does it fit in a world with Docker, Kubernetes, Puppet and other tools that all seem to be important elements in this space?…

Show me the money: No longer data guardians, Gartner says Chief data officers are increasingly asked to help monetise the data companies hold, rather than purely managing and protecting that data, according to Gartner.…

Merry Christmas! Workers at the Sopra Steria-run government shared services centre received an early Christmas present this week: the opportunity to apply for voluntary redundancy.…

The firewall might not work. It can corrupt data. Why haven't you downloaded it yet? Microsoft's released something odd: a new tech preview of Windows Server's semi-annual release channel with no new features but a few known issues with the potential to mess things up.…

Schools left without Wi-Fi! How will the kids learn? A Google slip-up left educators scratching their heads after schools' Chromebooks developed mass wireless network SSID amnesia.…

'Your search is trash and you stopped paying ' vs. 'we had a deal you can't walk away from' The Mozilla Foundation and Yahoo! have flung sueballs at each other, after the former ended its deal to have the latter provide search results in the Firefox browser amid claims it hadn't been paid.…

Message client vendors have had 25 years to get RFC 1342 right Penetration tester Sabri Haddouche has reintroduced the world to email source spoofing, bypassing spam filters and protections like Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC), thereby posing a risk to anyone running a vulnerable and unpatched mail client.…

Biased models mean bad decisions for women and some races. Google boffins think they've improved things a bit Google's taken a small step towards addressing the persistent problem of bias in artificial intelligence, setting its boffins to work on equal-opportunity smile detection.…

Android Studio, Eclipse, and IntelliJ IDEA stabbed in the back by an XML parser Developers using the Android Studio, Eclipse, and IntelliJ IDEA have been advised to update their IDEs against serious and easily-exploitable vulnerabilities.…

'Kata Containers' blends every-container-gets-a-kernel tech from Intel and hyper.sh The OpenStack Foundation has made good on its promise to start helping complementary projects by adopting every-container-gets-its-own-kernel projects run by Intel and hyper.sh.…

Imagine a netbook with a SIM card. Bingo Pics Qualcomm, Microsoft, Asus, HP Inc and Lenovo today talked up their upcoming Arm-compatible, Snapdragon-powered three-in-one Windows 10 PCs.…

But people will still play a role in crafting code Boffins at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory speculate that by 2040 advances in AI disciplines like machine learning and natural language processing will shift most software code creation from people to machines.…

Boffins experiment with machine-learning-edited promos to lure ppl to its flicks Researchers at Netflix are experimenting with creating software-edited trailers personalized for individual subscribers to get more peeps to watch its films, according to a well-placed source familiar with the matter.…

'Every time we launch a new platform we got through processes learning how to do it well' nbn™ chairman Ziggy Switkowski last night told a Senate Estimates hearing that problems with the hybrid fibre-coax (HFC) network it bought from Telstra first emerged in July.…

You won't sell our stuff? We won't let you watch our vids Google is trying to stop Amazon Echo Show devices from streaming YouTube videos – and from January, it will block Amazon’s Fire TVs from accessing the vid service, too.…

I'm so surprised, says no one in Silicon Valley The co-founder of tube-traveling startup Hyperloop One and a key Uber investor has left the company effective immediately following allegations of sexual assault.…

Ai.type leaves wealth of personal info open to all Another week, another open database left online, but this latest case has shown not only sloppy security but also how much data you’re giving up with some apps.…

Snapdragon Win 10 PCs declaration of war on Intel Analysis Qualcomm conquered the high-end smartphone world with its top-end Arm-compatible Snapdragon chips powering more than 120 smart mobes models globally.…

Pai calls net neutrality opponents 'desperate' With just a week to go before the head of the FCC will put his plan for a repeal of current net neutrality rules up for a vote, Ajit Pai has come under another barrage of criticism, this time with a focus on consumer protection.…

Judge says social networks not to blame for cop killings A US Judge says social networks cannot be held accountable for the murderous actions of their users.…

Surprise findings EE’s dominance as the best-performing UK mobile network has one or two surprising short comings in the No.1’s performance. Real-world data suggests Vodafone has the best network for 4G packet loss and EE the worst.…

Wants to lead a 'Phull-er' life VMware’s UK boss has insisted it was his decision to quit Virtzilla to pursue pastures new and spend more time with his young family.…

Says VirtualWisdom makes it wiser about apps Virtual Instruments has said it is getting more application-centric with its v5.4 release of VirtualWisdom, its infrastructure performance monitoring and analytics platform, which builds on its Xangati acquisition.…

It's 2017: Is the splinternet nearer than ever? Analysis Barclays has stopped offering free Kaspersky Lab products to new users in a move that shows, like Best Buy, commercial firms can be swayed by governmental stances on dealing with the Russian software firm.…

Campaign Storage shuts doors Hierarchical Storage Management and HPC archiving firm Campaign Storage has closed down.…

A power browser for the hobbyists The power user’s browser Vivaldi has come to the Raspberry Pi and other Linux Arm boards.…

Don't pop the champagne yet: Microsoft's still using Intel in same series AMD's return to the server market has won it a place in a top tier cloud: the company today revealed that it has won Microsoft's business for the next generation of Azure's L-series instances.…

And I’ll stay up 500 weeks, and I’ll stay up 3,000 days The near two decade-old story that refuses to lie down aroused interest again at the weekend: folk from Ringaskiddy in rural Ireland complained once more that a nearby Viagra plant was still giving local men and, um, dogs a chubby.…

It'd be more expensive than just buying Bs. Why do this? The United Kingdom is edging ever closer to buying F-35As, instead of the B model needed to fly from the Navy’s new aircraft carriers, as a senior officer once again refused to rule out a future F-35A purchase.…

Claimant: We've beaten Uber twice, prepared to do it again Uber’s request to leapfrog the Court of Appeals and go straight to the UK Supreme Court in its bid to appeal a decision on workers’ rights, has been knocked back.…

Slimline Android Go slurps from the bottom billions Just because you earn a dollar a day shouldn’t mean you're lost to the behavioural advertising industry.…

Civil rights group Liberty has plans on that Comment From the day the UK government unveiled its Investigatory Powers Act two years ago, Liberty warned it that the authoritarian surveillance powers the proposed legislation contained were unlawful.…