The Register

Streamed direct from the Amazon storage fishbowl, natch Amazon announced a preview for its new AR, VR and 3D app editing and hosting service, Sumerian, today. It is hoping new augmented and virtual reality web developers will pick its new cloud-based platform over Unity3D and Unreal Engine.…

One-time head-shedding biz will build foundations for robot air traffic controllers Troubled integrator biz Logicalis has scooped itself a contract to supply the UK's main air traffic control firm with key IT infrastructure equipment and services.…

Shada serial completed with animation and voiceovers The fourth and finest Doctor, Tom Baker, has reprised the role to finish a Who serial scuppered in 1979 by strike action at the BBC.…

Wedding, schmedding, here's the REAL news of the day As Prince Harry and actress Meghan Markle announce their engagement today, equally thrilling news is also breaking across Britain: new laws forcing drone operators to register.…

£20m vaccine for NHS cybersecurity The UK's National Health Service will pay white hat hackers up to £20m to protect its IT systems, it announced today.…

Private equity investor of fallen reseller launches online auction Whichever fool once proclaimed money can’t buy one class clearly wasn’t privy to the inventory of now defunct tech reseller Misco Group that was recently put up for sale by private equity backer Hilco Capital.…

Switch flicked on latest voluntary redundancy scheme. Staff out by 31 Dec DXC Technologies is spreading some festive cheer by dangling voluntary redundancy (VR) terms in front of customer support teams, according to a confidential document seen by The Register.…

Here's one I made earlier – now, over to you If there's a poster child for machine learning, it's neural networks. We gave a practical introduction to the topic here, but this time I'll take a different approach and explain the background to how neural networks, er, work.…

Playing augmented reality while driving in the real world cost billions, say boffins Pokémon GO killed at least two people and spiked rates of car accidents and injuries, according to a study of the game's impact on just one United States city.…

Cunning plan: anger rusted-on users who've been with you before social networks existed Administrators of Yahoo! Groups have complained that the service has become unstable and unreliable.…

It'll be a doddle because we invented it, claims state-owned organ Xinhua China has claimed it invented IPv6, according to state-controlled newswire Xinhua.…

Uber gets a big slab of combined company, Russia and region get UberEATS The Federal Antimonopoly Service of the Russian Federation has given its approval to the combination of Uber's services with those of local Google analog Yandex.…

Qubits are old hat: this uses 'qudits' - a photon with more than two simultaneous states Researchers have packed extra information onto single photons to speed up quantum key distribution (QKD) systems.…

Billions spent on networks not fit for purpose, cabling may be to blame +Comment nbn™, the company building and operating Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN), has announced that it will remediate parts of its hybrid fibre-coax and pause new rollouts…

Phew! Nothing but emails and hashed passwords leaked The world's self-described “most awesome” collection of images, Imgur, has confessed to leaking 1.7 million user records in 2014.…

$20k up front to get in the queue, $200k to buy a 'Founder's edition' Tesla's revealed more details about its forthcoming “Semi” electric truck, including a starting price of US$150,000.…

Patch imminent, for now please turn off e-mail attachment chunking Sysadmins who tend Exim servers have been advised to kick off their working weeks with the joy of patching.…

What swamp? Donald Trump's former policy chief Steve Bannon wanted to limit the power of Silicon Valley's plutocrats, but US trade negotiations have just thrown a protective arm around them.…

In other news, shares in mirror manufacturers have soared British miltech boffinry outfit Qinetiq has opened a testing centre named the Dragonworks for the building and tweaking of giant laser cannon.…

Judges reject Privacy International's case against Investigatory Powers Tribunal The UK's Court of Appeal has ruled that the body that oversees the nation's intelligence agencies cannot be held subject to a judicial review under active laws.…

Why do we mention thrashing in the 'best schools'? Read on Proposals to reform and rewrite Britain's aged Official Secrets Acts have been postponed for at least a year, the government's Law Commission has confirmed to The Register.…

Why won't you let us create value for shareholders? Analysis InfiniBand/Ethernet tech supplier Mellanox is being targeted by an activist investor pissy that it rejected overtures from Marvell.…

New finch species developed in just two generations New research has documented a species of finch evolving on the Galápagos island of Daphne Major, 1,000km off the west coast of Ecuador, in just two generations.…

Get fined £45,000 anyway The Information Commissioner's Office has fined Hamilton Digital Solutions £45,000 for sending spam text messages, it announced today, despite its protestations that a third party had been responsible.…

But will it make a difference? Analysis BT has long been accused of jealously guarding its infrastructure. But forcing it to open up its network to competitors and break its market dominance has been an aim of Ofcom for some time.…

Networking subsidiary insists everything is Just Fine "No change to Aruba" was veep Morten Illum's public verdict on the news that Meg Whitman was stepping down from the top spot at Aruba's parent company, Hewlett Packard Enterprise.…

Infosec staffing needs a shot in the arm Plugging the infosec skills gap with expensive consultants or by trying to hire already skilled people won't fix recruitment headaches, Thom Langford, CISO at Publicis Groupe, insisted at the #IRISSCERT conference in Dublin this week.…

The 1970s called, it wants its dancers back When it comes to women in tech, it's fair to say the sector has a bit of an image problem.…

Samsung inks deal to give crews up to 250k handsets The British emergency services are to be equipped with 4G phones thanks to a new handheld device contract with Samsung worth up to £210m.…

UK.gov told to sever ties with 'grubby, unethical' company The massive Uber data breach will be discussed by the European Union's data protection authorities next week.…

We never learn from incidents, says Europol security adviser The world has never been so dependent on computers, networks and software so ensuring the security and availability of those systems is critical.…

Budget confirmed its creation, but where does it fit in? Amid myriad bodies offering advice, opinions and rulings on the use of data springing up all over the shop, the government used the Budget to announce plans to create yet another.…

Launched a million business plans, sank Lotus... Thirty is a ripe old age, maybe older than a good chunk of Register readers. Even for those of you for whom Excel is a spring chicken, how many applications or even operating systems are you still using of a similar age outside the Office suite?…

Feel the full weight of Jerusalem, base cur! Something for the Weekend, Sir? A little worse for wear after the first Christmas party of the season, I stagger up the driveway to be met at my own front door by... a Kindle.…

Open source dream officially dies in Bavarian city The city of Munich will spend €49.3m (£43.9m/ $58.4m) going all-in on Windows after local politicos agreed to call time on the failing 15-year open source project.…

Fixing for the sake of security alone means 'all your work was just masturbation' Linus Torvalds has offered a lengthy explanation of his thoughts on security, in which he explained a calmer and more detailed version of his expletive-laden thoughts on the topic earlier this week.…

Yes, hearing: vibrating glass turns mirror into 'superdirective speaker' Fujitsu Ten, the Japanese giant's automotive outfit, has developed technology that turns sheets of glass into speakers and thinks it could be used to help drivers talk on the phone without disturbing passengers.…

It was more of a RAM-page, actually, and it crashed a mainframe On-Call Welcome again to On-Call, The Register's Friday column in which we share readers' tech support morality tales.…

Microsoft's power pack can't deliver the juice fast enough to keep up Microsoft's acknowledged an embarrassing issue with its SurfaceBook 2 laptop – its battery can drain even while plugged into its power pack.…

Do you really want to go there? And does Mozilla, which hasn't figured out how to do this and preserve security, privacy Mozilla developer Nihanth Subramanya has revealed the organisation's Firefox browser will soon warn users if they visit sites that have experienced data breaches that led to user credential leaks.…

Who is Microsoft's mystery partner? We think it's a hyperconverged player VMware has responded to Microsoft's plan to run its stack in Azure, by saying customers who choose that option will have to forego support.…

Oak Ridge Top 500-leading system's innards Analysis IBM offered HPC fans at SC17 a gawk at the server tray for the upcoming Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Tennessee.…

Boffins say health issues were not related to genetic wizardry New research suggests the arthritis plaguing Dolly the sheep – the first mammal cloned from an adult somatic cell – was normal for her age.…

For once it's not an engine breakdown A Type 45 destroyer has been recalled to Britain with propeller problems, leaving the Royal Navy's traditional "east of Suez" deployment without proper warship cover.…

An unlikely trio? Not according to Mikko Hypponen Questions about cyber influence continue to cloud last year's US presidential elections and recently similar allegations have been levelled against the Brexit vote.…

'Free science'/pirate site operator 'working on solving DNS issue' Several domains of the controversial academic paper filesharing site Sci-Hub have been made inactive following a court order earlier this month.…

And Mountain View obliged Links to pages slating a telco slapped with multiple fines from UK regulators have been wiped from Google's search results after a claimant asked the search giant to chuck them down a sinkhole.…

How will you tell the difference? #F_AI_L The BBC has confirmed that Radio 4's Today programme will conduct an interview with a politician via an AI bot "modelled on Mishal Husain".…

125,000 people tried – and failed Britons simply don't understand that "public sector broadcasting" is a "good for all society", a Labour MP lamented during a Westminster Hall debate on TV licensing.…