The Register

Designed hardware for Xerox Alto, co-invented Ethernet and did formative work at Microsoft Computer Science has lost a titan: Charles P. “Chuck” Thacker died on Monday, June 12th, aged 74.…

Tape drive due to shut down in 2018 as 1.4 kbps link becomes too skinny Voyager 1 has just ticked off another milestone: on Tuesday it reached 138 astronomical units from Earth, or about 20,600,000,000km from the planet on which you're (presumably!) reading this story.…

Premature recognition of sales in Australia and New Zealand drags down whole company FujiXerox has apologised for what it calls “improper accounting” that saw its Australian and New Zealand operations book sales earlier than was usual, resulting in inflated sales figures.…

DevOps darling has assembled a 'stack' and hopes it and US$186k price stack up Atlassian's decided the time is right for it to do a “stack” for enterprises keen to get their DevOps efforts in order.…

Project Electrolysis means Firefox spawns four processes and shares them between tabs Mozilla has released version 54 of its Firefox browser and in so doing delivered long-promised sandboxing technology.…

Voicemail hacking? Discovered in 2015, and still not fixed.

As big T sells its copper to nbn™, it needs fewer copper techs to fix it Telstra will shed 1,400 or more jobs to make up for revenue gaps looming as the National Broadband Network rollout continues.…

Edward Snowden's preferred-for-privacy OS gets a decent upgrade The developers of privacy-protecting Linux distribution Tails have decided to get closer to Debian with the project's 3.0 release.…

Fix for App Engine memory allocation mess will be applied to just one data centre Google's cloud thought it was out of memory for a couple of hours last week.…

The regeneration process continues to baffle boffins A flatworm sent to the International Space Station has sprouted two heads, an anomaly that never happens in the wild, according to a paper published in the journal Regeneration.…

Glacial thaw brings a bit more openness to hermit kingdom Apple, by necessity, fatigue, goodwill or accident, is becoming slightly more open in how it allows developers to interact with its software.…

🎶 Where the streets have no hostname 🎶 Time to put to bed once and for all the image of the hip young hacker pounding out code to cutting-edge techno music. It turns out that today's devs prefer to work to most of the same tunes your mom plays while driving to the store.…

People who put crap on your laptop love bands who put crap on your iPhone Time to put to bed once and for all the image of the hip young hacker pounding out code to cutting-edge techno music; it turns out that today's devs prefer to work to most of the same tunes your mom plays while driving to the store.…

New algorithm keeps humans firmly in the loop during training Researchers from OpenAI and DeepMind are hoping to make artificial intelligence safer using a new algorithm that learns from human feedback.…

Bugs used by stolen tools fixed among 96 software holes Microsoft today addressed 96 CVE-listed vulnerabilities in its products – plus issued more emergency patches for unsupported versions of Windows menaced by leaked NSA exploits.…

Bill Shorten says there are things 'we do not know enough about to deal with properly' Australia's opposition leader Bill Shorten has suggested that governmental action to deny use of encryption to terrorists should extend to Bitcoin.…

Turns out Apple execs were testing new file system on you It's a recurring pain experienced by all iPhone owners: the huge and very slow software updates that require you to plug your phone in and forget about it for 30 minutes.…

What do you need news for, anyway? 'It shouldn't be a problem' – NTRA official Egypt has embarked on a new wave of online censorship, blocking news websites and killing off VPN services in order to limit its citizens' access to information.…

Taxi app upstart told to ditch values that excused abusive behavior – while its bro-in-chief takes time off Updated with bonus sexism Uber CEO Travis Kalanick is taking a leave of absence while the company he co-founded tries to remake itself in a more humane image.…

US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada mull leaning hard for access to your info Officials from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand will discuss next month plans to force tech companies to break encryption on their products.…

CEO Meg Whitman tells staff she's signed pact with Faust Exclusive Hewlett Packard Enterprise has hatched a radical plan to overhaul processes, investments, people and overheads in a project that is “likely to determine” its “relevance in the years ahead.”…

Chief exec says Yaho-o-oo! as biz becomes Oath Marissa Mayer has officially resigned from Yahoo!, as Verizon's $4.8bn (£3.77bn) gobble of the company closed today.…

Also demo'ing end-to-end NVMe over fabrics to Cisco UCS servers Pure Storage is launching a mega-slew of software, with some new hardware, as well as a demo-ing an end-to-end NVMe over fabrics Flash Stack at its annual Pure Accelerate conference in San Francisco.…

Replacing soon-to-be 'museum exhibit' with fleet of robo delivery vans Waymo, the one-time driverless car division of Google, has ditched its original self-driving car, the Firefly, in favour of a fleet of hundreds of robot vans.…

Don't worry long-suffering BA customers, Capita will take care of you Two brands that people love to hate today stand poised to forge an alliance: British Airways plans to outsource call centre management to Capita, sending 1,000 employees into the belly of the beast.…

Virident? Violin?! Where is Tintri? HPE?! IBM??!!! Registrar Daily's Global Enterprise Flash Storage Market 2017 report looks at 15 vendors – of which five no longer exist and two are small-to-insignificant – and totally neglects to mention others.…

Cybercrooks rake it in with Fake-News-as-a-Service Fake news has come to be associated with political intrigue but the same propaganda techniques are also abused by cybercriminals, according to a study by Trend Micro.…

Peeking at the pylons, mes braves? A French drone company reckons it has flown a power line inspection drone remotely for 50km (30 miles) – and controlled the aircraft over a public 3G network.…

Now talks to Nutanix AHV, Microsoft Hyper-V and Oracle RMAN Secondary data storage protection and management supplier Rubrik just added a host of extensions to its product to broaden its appeal to Microsoft, Nutanix and Oracle users.…

But what does the department of odds and sods actually do these days? Analysis Damian Green’s appointment as Cabinet Office minister this week makes him the fourth MP to hold the role over the last seven years. He takes the helm from former Cabinet Office minister Ben Gummer, who was ousted as an MP in the general election last week.…

Bigly ambitious bill would archive the President's social media dealings A US congressman has written up a bill that calls for the President's social media activity to be archived alongside other official communications.…

People like the idea of privacy but not the effort, research finds Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University have found that people say they want privacy but make choices suggesting the opposite, and can be easily manipulated through interface design, reassuring statements, and pizza.…

Anti-terror crackdown, evil tech biz to blame yadda yadda, we're told Theresa May and Emmanuel Macron are planning to issue multi-million pound fines to technology companies that don’t act fast enough to remove material that governments and police forces disapprove of.…

Thomas Cook most impacted with 12 delays A technical "glitch" at Manchester Airport has left hundreds of passengers stranded for hours this morning.…

'If it was unstable and uncertain this time last week, it’s gone up a notch' The outcome of the general election has created greater uncertainty over the impact of Brexit on the telecommunications sector, BT chief exec Gavin Patterson has said.…

Constitutional Court slams brakes on UPC – but why? Europe's effort to create a single patent system has been thrown into confusion following a decision by Germany's constitutional court to halt legislation ratifying it.…

Warms IBM Watson for patient data probe Oracle's cloud has been judged too risky, too expensive and not up to scratch by Specsavers, which is aiming to complete an AWS and Azure combo next year.…

Swing when you're winning In the aftermath of almost every recent election, two types of story get written based on the outcome. One is how the polls "got it wrong", how the forecast – surprise! – failed to match the actual result. The other, usually written by someone with at least basic statistical skills, explains why the polls mostly didn't "get it wrong."…

The dangers, and how to guard against them Broadcast - 11am BST If you haven't had any of your key systems or services brought down by a DDoS attack, you can probably consider yourself lucky.…

IBM and Cisco give their VersaStacks multi-cloud capabilities and a VDI special Hybrid hyperconvergence is the new blue: first NetApp launched its hyperconverged appliances by emphasising their hybrid credentials and now IBM and IBM and Cisco have given their shared hyperconverged VersaStacks the hybrid cloud treatment.…

The internet made information flow on the cheap, but making it anti-fragile will cost plenty I spent the first half of my career coding and while I don't miss the day-in-day-out grind of coding, but do still enjoy the computer-as-infinite-toy. So from time to time I try to spend a few days with my head in the machine, playing, exploring and learning.…

Version 4.0's not out the door but connection wonks have decided to fast track version 5.0 The Peripheral Component Interconnect Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG) has revealed a roadmap for PCI 5.0 to debut in 2019 at 128GB/s. And that's before it finalises PC 4.0 at half that speed.…

Toothless Tiger Moths at Arizona base grounded A quarter of the world's F-35s have been temporarily grounded after starving their pilots of oxygen.…

There can be only one and that'll be LinkedIn's SlideShare Microsoft's decided that Docs.com has to die in December.…

IDC's network tracker finds 100 Gbps and software-defined kit surging, at Cisco's expense Analyst firm IDC reckons the world's Ethernet switch market laid on 3.3 per cent growth year-on-year for the first quarter of 2017, up to US$5.66 billion.…

Cloud can now ID 'hundreds of thousands' of athletes, pollies, actors, struggles with oiled butt At last - a cloud service that will get the unwashed masses excited about cloud: Amazon Web Services has added celebrity-spotting-as-a-service to its cloud.…

And if you don't like it, off to the Ombudsman you go Australia's Department of Communications wants to make it easier for carriers to build radio towers – and with everything on the table from heritage building access to objection procedures, there's likely to be a Battle Royale on the way.…

Change your default user name or Linux.MulDrop.14 will send your Pi down the crypto-mines Anti-virus vendor Dr. Web has found something nasty: malware named “Linux.MulDrop.14” that turns the Raspberry Pi into a cryptocurrency mining machine.…

Alleges Chinese company paid for Sharp's name, then made it a discount brand Sharp wants its name back from Hisense, which is allowed to use Sharp's name in the US but stands accused of making brand-power-erasing knock-off tellies.…

Minerals found in Mars rocks strengthen case for past life-friendly conditions The Martian rock samples dug up by NASA's Curiosity robotic rover show that there is a wide diversity of minerals, allowing scientists to piece together the planet's past.…