The Register

Yet another belated entry into the interactive snooping speaker world WWDC Apple has joined Amazon, Google, and Microsoft in the race to plant microphones in people's homes.…

Will they live up to the promise, though? HPE today announced its generation-10 ProLiant servers – claiming they have better security and more persistent memory and manageability – while, like Dell, saying nothing much about the coming Skylake server CPUs from Intel.…

Uni gives kids a lesson they'll never forget after spreading stupidity on Facebook At least ten students due to start at Harvard this fall have had their admission offers torn up – after they swapped offensive piffle online.…

Armed robbery case goes to America's highest court After years of contradictory appeals court decisions, the US Supreme Court will finally hear a case about how private your cell phone location should be.…

Info safeguards to ramp up spending, say beancounters The rush to comply with Europe's upcoming General Data Protection Regulation will balloon the continent's IT security budgets to $11.5bn in 2018, analyst group Canalys reckons.…

You can't make the internet more and less safe at the same time The UK's Prime Minister has been taken to task for trying to make the internet "both more and less safe" at the same time – and failing to publicly acknowledge the dichotomy.…

Where's my self-driving plane? Nowhere, it's a feasibility study* It's the fear of anyone who watches Snakes on a Plane and books a flight – what if your plane crashes? Now take a deep breath and imagine that you're travelling on a plane or rocketship with no pilot. A new NASA research project hopes to find ways to certify unmanned autonomous aircraft systems for safety.…

Unable to raise orders following database merge few weeks ago The merger between Dell and EMC has caused havoc for partners attempting to raise invoices with the borg, as its "new combined customer base" is having problems issuing purchase order numbers.…

Emo Oil targets overheated marketeers and frigid FM specialists alike If you're worried that your fellow office workers' productivity is being compromised because they're boiling over with "frustration", Northern Ireland's Emo Oil is promising to relieve their plight with its selection of oils and lubricants.…

'NetApp HCI' takes all of its best bits and wraps them around compute and vCenter NetApp has finally revealed its long-promised hyperconverged appliance. Named “NetApp HCI”, the product pours almost everything the company does into a 2U box, along with four unnamed servers, a cloud-style pay-as-you-go pricing plan and a vCenter plugin so you can manage it without having to learn new tools.…

Meanwhile, Tosh shoves WDC's stake back, mutters 'keep it' Apple, Amazon and Foxconn are preparing to "chip in" for ailing Toshiba's NAND flash memory chip-making division, according to reports.…

Um. Who put production credentials in onboarding doc? "How screwed am I?" a new starter asked Reddit after claiming they'd been marched out of their job by their employer's CTO after "destroying" the production DB – and had been told "legal" would soon get stuck in.…

Defence Science and Tech Lab accused of 'discriminatory' rules A data scientist claims the UK's Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) diddled him out of a £12,000 research competition prize because he is Russian – despite assurances he'd be able to claim the money.…

It's not the velociraptor you can see that kills you One of the key principles of designing any high availability system is to make sure only vital apps or functions use it and everything else doesn't – sometimes referred to as KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid).…

The hidden problems of criticality bloat One of the key principles of designing any high availability system is to make sure only vital apps or functions use it and everything else doesn't – sometimes referred to as KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid).…

How difficult can it possibly be? Very, apparently Delays in updating software and operating systems are putting organisations at greater risk of attacks, according to research by Duo Security.…

Forget 'value or biz justification' says UK GTS chief IBM UK and Ireland has told the Global Technology Services team that all travel to customer sites must be approved by divisional general manager Tosca Colangeli irrespective of "value or business justification".…

€120m for the bin... Opinion A group of European governing institutions has approved a programme to invest €120m (£105m, $134.7m) in public Wi-Fi hotspots in over 6,000 municipalities in all European Union member states by 2020.…

Survey of ~6,000 contributors also finds widespread harassment, gender imbalance The open source community is nasty in many ways, according to a survey of over 6,000 contributors to open source projects.…

'Maxx Interactive Desktop' lets you relive the workstation wars and maybe do serious work Those of you yearning for the experience of running a 1990s-vintage graphics workstation are about to have a good day: a developer named Eric Masson has resurrected the IRIX Interactive Desktop that shipped on Silicon Graphics Workstations and now offers it as a Linux desktop alternative.…

Strontium release dogged by normal boring clouds that blocked boffins' view NASA's attempts to make red and green clouds have been thwarted by Mother Nature.…

Cloudy backup, now with data de-dupe, Windows System State restore and free egress Microsoft keeps getting closer and closer to being a decent backup vendor.…

Internet offers terrorist hatemongers 'safe space to breed' says PM British prime minister Theresa May's statement in response to the terror attacks that saw seven people murdered in London on Saturday night has again called for internet companies to make life harder for those who would discuss hateful and violent ideologies.…

Admits costs set to rise and that it faces entrenched deep-pocketed competition Virtualized storage upstart Tintri has filed for its initial public offering.…

Details scant on insurance, mileage costs, and depreciation As Amazon tests drone-drops for online orders, Walmart wants sales associates to double as delivery drivers.…

There's no way this could go horribly, violently wrong... right? Amazon has been given a patent on a system to deliver packages from the sky via on-board parachutes.…

ISS crew Thomas Pesquet and Oleg Novitski come home The crew of the International Space Station is down to three after ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Novitski landed rather uncomfortably in the wilds of Kazakhstan.…

FCC boss ready to kill off protections for phone calls FCC boss Ajit Pai has put forward a new set of changes to the rules it will use to govern US telcos, potentially reducing privacy protections and local government rights in the process.…

Foe of same-sex unions seeks to wed machine The Utah Attorney General's Office says marrying a laptop is not a constitutionally protected right, particularly if it's less than fifteen years old.…

It's easier to mine than uraninite ore, too Scientists have discovered bizarre evidence in the US state of Wyoming – that bacteria hidden deep within the Earth's crust secrete uranium.…

Smartphone king already losing its only hope for a base With its much-hyped Bixby Voice assistant still learning basic English, Samsung has to deal with a mass defection of its user base.…

Apple and Google have eaten its lunch Sage, pusher of the thrilling product that is accountancy software, has flogged its North American Payments business to private equity outfit GTCR for $260m (£202m).…

Finding a partner – what to check for You may have noticed that information security is something of a big deal these days. You’ll also not have missed that the attackers’ capabilities are far ahead of those of us trying to defend our systems against them.…

'Tier-one' customer cools off Hewlett Packard Enterprise's joint venture with Foxconn to build lower cost servers to order for the world's biggest service providers is under threat because of its over reliance on shrinking sales to its one major customer, reportedly Microsoft.…

Potentially by a panicking contractor, if reports are to be believed Analysis An IT bod from a data centre consultancy has been fingered as the person responsible for killing wannabe budget airline British Airways' Boadicea House data centre – and an explanation has emerged as to what killed the DC.…

Do not install build 16212 “A small portion” of Windows mobile users hoping the unexpected cool new update would start the month off the right way got burned yesterday. Microsoft “accidentally” released a development build of Windows 10 that can transform your phone into jelly if you try to install it.…

Do not install build 16212 “A small portion” of Windows mobile users hoping the unexpected cool new update would start the month off the right way got burned yesterday. Microsoft “accidentally” released a development build of Windows 10 that can transform your phone into jelly if you try to install it.…

Carrion parenting A pair of gay Dutch vultures in a long-term relationship have become parents.…

We're talking 'bout blockage, blockage... Eyeo, Eyeo away Publishers will get a six-month headsup before Google kills intrusive advertising on Chrome, sources close to the ad giant have reportedly said.…

Just kidding, they'll have smart 'Snap' spectacles... Memory monetisation has arrived in the UK today with the launch of Snap Spectacles.…

Remember to cut down on those travel expenses, folks... Here is the short video that IBM didn’t want the world see - it shows CEO, president and chairman Ginni Rometty mounting a Big Blue chopper following a trip to the Hursley R&D labs in the UK.…

Researchers finger digital marketing agency Rafotech A strain of Chinese browser-hijacking malware dubbed Fireball has infected 250 million computers.…

When you wanna be lit af, like manual scripting It's strange when you're no longer the new kid on the block. First, you're the hippest of the hip, the one that everyone envies and then, suddenly, you're looking that little bit older, and generally less interesting.…

Pay me $500 in Bitcoin or... oh look, everyone's dead Something for the Weekend, Sir? Nothing could hurry Cool Dave. Tall and taciturn, he would make his way around school between classes at his own pace. When he talked, he not so much spoke as delivered a quiet soliloquy in a thoughtful and deliberate manner.…

Four workers to each pensioner just doesn't add up The ratio of people in the workforce to those in retirement will fall from 8:1 to 4:1 by 2050 if retirement ages do not change, and the global economy will not be able to bear the burden, the World Economic Forum (WEF) has said…

The NTFS diet sorted things out in more ways than one ON-CALL Friday's here again and so, therefore, is On-Call, our weekly dip into absurd tech support tales contributed by readers.…

Combined might of Microsoft, Musk and other tech titans couldn't persuade Prez to stay in climate pact United States President Donald Trump's decision to walk away from the Paris climate change agreement has been met by a chorus of disgruntlement from the technology industry.…

Chemical analysis of Gale Crater finds Martian lakes were a lot like ours Mars' Gale Crater was once home to a body of water “that offered favorable conditions for microbial life” thanks to stratification that meant different parts of the lake offered different conditions.…

The market's growing fast, but only the cheap stuff with no strings attached is selling Virtual reality headsets are moving at a rate of 2.3 million a quarter, but cheap and simple devices dominate the market.…

2018 Camry's infotainment system will run Automotive Grade Linux The Linux Foundation's Automotive Grade Linux project is celebrating its first big-name user, after Toyota said it will employ the OS in the 2018 Camry model it will sell in the United States.…