The Register

BT, TalkTalk engineer a no-show? ... £25 for you Purveyors of crap broadband services could have to shell out £142m in compensation, under an automatic redress scheme due to be brought in by regulator Ofcom.…

It's like Windows at 20. But slurpier Part One It was an anniversary that prompted much reflection. The Platform had completely triumphed and was now ubiquitous, relied on by people all over the world. You could find the Platform in almost every conceivable kind of device, from cars to TVs. Although Apple had once been the pioneer, it now had to settle for life in the Platform's shadow: as a high-margin boutique, catering to a wealthy minority. The Platform was what everyone else used.…

Schismogenesis? Isn’t that a posh word for Flame War? Register Lecture You know that geeks tend to atomise into warring camps, exchanging flames, tweets and worse. But did you know that real live academics have studied this phenomena?…

My blue jean contents are disruptive Something for the Weekend, Sir? Facebook wants to look at my nuts.…

Where's the money coming from to fund these sueballs, angry folk ask watchdog Disgruntled customers of ZX Spectrum Vega+ firm Retro Computers Ltd have complained to the Solicitors’ Regulation Authority (SRA), alleging ringfenced company funds are being diverted into its legal battles.…

Let's see how that works out The British government has once again told departments to break their addiction to big contracts, specifying that deals with suppliers should be no longer than a paltry seven years.…

Saturday launch will hoist super-manoeuvrable CubeSats that find each other in space Orbital ATK will on Saturday launch a Cygnus spacecraft on a supply mission to the International Space Station, with one of its payloads being a pair of CubeSats that NASA hopes can demonstrate 200 megabits per second downloads, from space, and how small satellites can be operated in harness to build networks or complex machines.…

If the Desktop Metal can pull this off, a revolution is coming Comment A new machine will print metal parts at a tenth of the cost of today's manufacturing systems, potentially launching a revolution in small part production, its creators claim.…

Try Redmond's upgrade treadmill in Tech Preview to see if you can hack the pace Microsoft's released the first semi-annual version of System Centre.…

It had an error code on it and was on a monitor, which made it an IT problem On-Call Welcome again to On-Call, in which The Register christens each new Friday with a reader-contributed tale of being asked to fix the unthinkable.…

Can expelliarmus get your kid to put down their phone? You'll need to know soon If you're not keen on augmented reality, Harry Potter, kids whose lives seem to be lived through mobile devices, or all of the above: brace yourself.…

Pre-tax profit dipped a few percentage points, though Brit satellite biz Inmarsat has doubled its statutory profits and grown its revenues, thanks mainly to its in-flight Wi-Fi offerings.…

Non-binding 'memorandum of understanding' inked with four smartphone builders Qualcomm says it has struck a deal, of sorts, with four major smartphone vendors in China that could possibly be worth $12bn.…

Cryptocurrency mining is another story, though Nvidia's fortunes continue to rise, with the graphics card slinger reporting record revenue of $2.64bn, as well as rising profit, in its third quarter of the year.…

Ubuntu – all of it – running Eclipse on a phone, and a DeX dock VIDEO Samsung's shown a little more of its plans to run fully-fledged Linux desktops on its 8-series Galaxy smartmobes.…

Don't laugh: Goose Bay strip is where an A380 landed after its engine blew up in September Canadian airport Goose Bay has closed due to a “sticky runway”.…

We can explain, insists multibillion-dollar social network Poll Amid days of intense debate over about its controversial plan to block revenge porn on its social network, Facebook sought to calm fears about the program.…

Litigious security biz upset at blanket PC ban Security software slinger Enigma has lost a key legal battle against antivirus maker Malwarebytes, which blocks and deletes Enigma's products from PCs.…

And tries to explain 'class action lawsuit' forum censorship Logitech is now offering to replace free of charge the connected home hubs it will automatically brick early next year.…

Available now via everyone's favorite publisher, WikiLeaks – Отличная работа, Джулиан! WikiLeaks has shoved online more internal classified stuff nicked from the CIA – this time what's said to be the source code for spyware used by Uncle Sam to infect and snoop on targets' computers and devices.…

Too early to talk gun control, not too early to bork iPhone security While US President Donald Trump thinks it's too early to discuss gun control in the wake of Sunday's Texas church massacre – America's latest mass shooting – his Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein is just fine exploiting the murder-suicide of 26 people to push for backdoors.…

Gee, thanks Concerned that browser cookies fall short when it comes to tracking mobile devices and their owners on the internet, computer-science boffins believe they can recognize phone-toters using only their keystrokes and accelerometer data.…

Sour krauts after Amazon digital assistant throws wild midnight party – for itself We all assume that intelligent devices will either serve our every need, or try to kill us, but what if they just want to party?…

Open-source offering faster, shorter bottlenecks Citing the social network's need for speed, Facebook senior software engineer Jonathan Keljo says the company's developer tools group has revisited how its Buck open-source build tool compiles Java code and made it faster still.…

1 becomes 2: Director, storage blades must move apart... in order to grow Analysis Panasas has separated out its Director blades in its latest ActiveStor iteration and put them in an ActiveStor Director 100 controller component product line to scale performance and capacity separately.…

Handing over immigrants' info 'violates confidentiality' A civil rights group has launched a legal challenge in the UK against a deal that asks the NHS to share patient data for immigration enforcement.…

Co-founder Eliot Horowitz chats to El Reg about a decade in the NoSQL space Document database-flinger MongoDB has long positioned itself as the dev's best friend, but after ten years it is now fluffing itself up for the enterprise.…

SC family goes flash, Unity gets dedupe +Comment Dell EMC has retrofitted flash to its SC array, added deduplication to its Unity array and devised a loyalty programme to keep its mid-range array customers onboard.…

Easier than riding a bike, apparently A British inventor has set a new world record for fastest speed in a body-controlled, jet engine-powered suit.…

University leaks personal data for 2nd time in 5 months For the second time in five months, The University of East Anglia has been involved in a personal data breach.…

UK West and South regions suffering from capacity issues Multiple Microsoft customers have for the past nineteen hours been unable to provision new virtual machines in Azure's UK West and UK South regions.…

Confidential helpline considered for distressed and lonely churchmen The annual general meeting of Ireland’s Catholic Priests has been told to ease up on attacking their seniors, amidst increasing concerns over the future of the Church in the country.…

Plus outsells regular iPhone for the first time Some ominous news if you like your phones small and unobtrusive. Apple’s “Plus” model has outsold its regular iPhone sibling for the first time. Canalys estimates Apple shipped 5.4 million iPhone 8 units in Q3, but 6.3 million units of the larger iPhone 8 Plus.…

One day, one news release and some coverage... NASA has smacked down reports that it is working with Uber on a flying car, or software for that flying car, or indeed, software for any firm after several announcements from the ride-hailing biz yesterday had the tech press aflame with excitement.…

Coinhive API increasingly pops up in top 3 million websites A total of 2,531 of the top 3 million websites (1 in 1,000) are running the Coinhive miner, according to new stats from analytics firm Red Volcano.…

Fear not, robots, it was a squishy meatsack to blame A self-driving bus has been involved in a collision, barely two hours after being introduced into public service for the first time.…

Project up to eight years with broadband minnow Vodafone has inked a deal for a full-fibre network built by CityFibre, which could connect up to 5 million premises over the next eight years.…

Department eXits Contracts: Biz falls prey to in-sourcing move Exclusive The Department for Work & Pensions has not renewed a pair of contracts it held with Frankenfirm DXC Technologies – a loss the outsourcing business was lamenting in its latest financial results.…

Thanks, initial testing seems unduly problematic Updated Power outages have brought some OVH data servers to their knees, and unspecified issues have broken optical cable routing in Europe for POP.…

Big Blue's mighty machine needs Nutanix software nuggets .NEXT In the hyperconverged infrastructure appliance space, x86 rules. This might appear to exclude IBM, having sold its x86 servers to Lenvo, but you'd be surprised.…

Pushed out by newly acquired Black Duck Black Duck has launched a product that provides automatic detection of known open source vulnerabilities for containers.…

Clive Selley admits BT could have done more to build a fibre network Interview "Look, if you can't get decent broadband, it is a real pisser," said Openreach boss Clive Selley in response to a Devon village's decision to burn an effigy of one of its vans on bonfire night.…

Cloud Foundry project aims to make containers manageable Announcing its updated and renamed Kubernetes and BOSH (Kubo) project as Container Runtime (CFCR) last month, Cloud Foundry said the project would give users greater "choice".…

The SDN industry – ahem – admires Google and will learn from this, to your benefit Google last week announced that it has started using version 2.1 of its Andromeda software-defined networking stack.…

In with 'international and modern' typeface 'Plex', seeya later boring old Helvetica Neue IBM's decided the time is right for a new corporate font.…

Because everything has firmware and it survives reboots. PLUS: Redmond details HPE-killing cloud servers Microsoft's revealed its working with Intel on a “cryptographic microcontroller” to secure its cloud servers and the many firmware-using components within.…

Users see white noise, attackers see whatever they just stole from you It's the kind of thinking you expect from someone who lives in a volcano lair: exfiltrating data from remote screen pixel values.…

Bitdefender integration with Windows Defender APT in preview; Lookout, Ziften soon Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection first landed as a public preview in September, and now it's general availability, Redmond has announced a bunch of partners to give it cross-platform support: Bitdefender for Linux and macOS, Lookout for iOS and Android, and Ziften for macOS and Linux).…

Wannabe terror teen found guilty, faces sentencing A British teenager who tried to order a car bomb on the dark web and get it delivered to his address has been found guilty this week.…

Creator of OS on the chip calls out Chipzilla for keeping his work secret Positive Technologies, which in September said it has a way to attack the Intel Management Engine, has dropped more details on how its exploit works.…