The Register

King Battistelli is at it again The central staff committee of the European Patent Office has sent a letter to the organization's board warning it of proposed changes that would further undermine their rights.…

Emptoris procurement product is being taken behind the shed just five years after acquisition IBM and SAP last week shared a stage and delivered the ShinyHappy™ news that the two are throwing their respective Watson and Leonardo artificial intelligences at “cognitive procurement solutions that redefine the source-to-settle process.”…

Astronaut reproduction could be possible one day, boffins reckon Japanese scientists say reproducing in space could be possible one day, after preserved mouse spermatozoa kept on the International Space Station resulted in healthy offspring.…

Are you ready for an idea from the playground to challenge your organisation? OPINION Fidget spinners may be the biggest thing since the yo-yo, but they can’t hold a candle to the latest fad to sweep the business world: hackathons.…

Customers fleeing your e-store before buying? Your data centre should know how to respond AppDynamics is considering the wonderful world of policy-driven infrastructure automation, so that your data centre can respond when your applications deliver a less-than-stellar customer experience.…

Proposes baseline security spec, plus stickers to prove thing-makers have complied European network and infosec agency ENISA has taken a look at Internet of Things security, and doesn't much like what it sees.…

Cron job aborted after crims scoop ₽50m and share it to 6,000 bank accounts The Russian Interior Ministry has announced the arrest of 20 people following raids related to a malware campaign dubbed “Cron” which had been emptying victims' bank accounts.…

Is it comets? Or aliens? Astronomers want your help to figure out this cosmic riddle Astronomers worldwide are scrambling a worldwide effort to capture as many images of the famous “Tabby's Star” (also known as Boyajian's Star), which has abruptly entered a dimming phase.…

PayPal says Pandora can't make cash without cashing in on its fame LOGOWATCH LEGAL PayPal has filed a lawsuit against streaming music service Pandora, alleging that the latter's stylised single “P” logo is so similar to the payment company's “PP” logo that it's designed to get punters confusing the two.…

Presence of encrypted keys in source code runs afoul of rules Last week, Amazon Web Services banned rclone, an open source cloud storage client application, from accessing Amazon Drive, inconveniencing hundreds or possibly thousands of people using the software.…

Bezos fumes as US bureaucracy holds his drone fleet back JD.com, China's largest online retailer, has announced it is beginning trials of a new delivery drone capable of carrying a ton of cargo to rural Chinese customers.…

Define irony: For-profit school wants unpaid bill forgiven The estate of bankrupt US trade school ITT Technical Institutes is today asking a court to stop Microsoft from erasing its cloud data.…

US lawmakers try to clear up FTC control over data collection The US Representatives who just weeks ago repealed privacy rules for ISPs now want to enact a new set of restrictions.…

But boffins say better tools are needed to nab scofflaws Researchers analyzing the emissions defeat devices found in automobiles made by the Volkswagen Group and Chrysler Fiat Automobiles have developed a way to test software for misbehavior, but they caution that lack of visibility into programming code could pose a challenge for regulators.…

Lawsuit reveals ominous warnings from former government special agent "If you're considering sharing confidential information to a reporter – or to anyone externally – for the love of all that's Googley, please reconsider! Not only could it cost you your job, but it also betrays the values that makes us a community."…

'Orphan memory' could unlock more secrets hidden in our universe A team of physicists has proposed a new idea about gravitational waves that will allow other researchers to find more exotic objects in space.…

One down, at least seven more to go Computer-controlled locks are some of the more popular Internet of Things devices making it into the home, and in the first settlement of its kind, the New York Attorney General has reached an agreement with a manufacturer to make them more secure against hackers.…

Things are about to get very quiet in Eastern Texas The US Supreme Court has issued a ruling that could block patent-holding firms from seeking out friendly courts to hear their infringement claims.…

Justice coming for Prenda Law Notorious copyright troll and scammer John Steele of Prenda Law has been disbarred by the Illinois Supreme Court.…

Updated IDC SSD forecast sees 44 per cent capacity CAGR 2016-2021 The general solid state drive price premium over disk should decline from 6.6x now to 2.2x in 2021, according to new IDC numbers.…

He just smiled and gave me... er, a copy of the Ts and Cs Vegemite is trying to hijack Australian airline Qantas's public competition to name its new airliners.…

More details emerge at HPC powwow in Switzerland HPC Blog IBM gave the audience a deeper dive into the OpenCAPI initiative and hardware at the recently concluded HPC Advisory Council annual meeting in Lugano, Switzerland.…

Why can't you be like a cheerful HHGTTG dolphin overlord? Miscreants have created a strain of malware that targets the same vulnerability as the infamous WannaCrypt worm.…

Too risky, too spammy, too smutty, say devs Developers of the popular Kodi plug-in Navi-X have pulled the plug on further development, citing the "current legal climate" around its work.…

Thanks WannaCrypt... Hey, about our new security budget. Oh, you've cut it Salaries for chief information security officers (CISOs) at leading European firms have hit €1m (£850,000) as the threat of data breaches grows, City AM reports.…

Share price slump sees a certain door opening early Ford has reportedly invited its CEO to leave following a slump in share prices which some media reports pin on the US auto maker’s shift from focusing on cars to tech.…

Not enough agencies tightening their belts, say auditors US government agencies are falling behind on their plans to consolidate data center facilities to cut IT costs.…

AI, robotics fund definitely won't trigger the singularity *twitch* The world's biggest tech fund backed by Japan's SoftBank Group has raised $93bn (£71bn) which it intends to plough into AI and robotics.…

Internet of Things arrives at British telco Exclusive British telco O2 is the first to publicly confirm that it will be trialling 3GPP-compliant Internet of Things connectivity tech in the UK later this year.…

4 fighters in the ring... but Western Dig could still jump in +Comment There are four bidders for Toshiba’s Memory Business and WDC isn’t one of them.…

What's allowed and what isn't A large quantity of Facebook's advice for its English-language content moderators* has been obtained and published by The Guardian newspaper, giving insight into how it handles material on the site.…

How we will save the NHS from cyber-ransom ¡Bong! Even over Skype, the weeping of the National Health Service's Chief Transformation Officer could be heard even over the sound of the breaking waves here on Seven Mile Beach, Grand Cayman.…

Bipul Sinha and the Indian ex-pat tech CEO's club Profile How did Bipul Sinha, a man with neither entrepreneurial nor operation executive-level tech business experience, become the CEO of a startup?…

Online store will try to make developer tools work better for businesses Social code repository GitHub is making it easier for developers to fetch data and spend money.…

And it's under £500... Review Towards the end of his long career as an expert summariser on Test Match Special, Fred Trueman would declare: "I just don't know what's going on out there," and light his pipe.…

Dr Panda's recent Swiss presentation free to view HPC Blog Dr DK Panda is a world-recognised expert on parallel programming and networking. He's a Distinguished Scholar at The Ohio State University and his research group has developed the MVAPICH2 (high performance MPI and MIP+PGAS) libraries for InfiniBand, iWARP, and RoCE with support for GPUs, Xeon Phi, and virtualization.…

Beyond cars, toasters and American Gods Comment After six years as a formal project, OpenStack has survived numerous raids and famines and now finds itself in a not-too-weird space of being boring, on-premises infrastructure. That is, “boring” in the good way of focusing on what users want and fixing existing problems, only chasing shiny objects – cough, PaaS, cough, containers, cough, orchestration – as much as needed.…

Nokia Bell Labs' Dr Laurent Schmalen explains how networks can find a new gear Interview A technology that first hit the mass market in 1990s-era modems running over voice networks will soon be boosting submarine fibre speeds around the world.…

Capacity droughts hit just before conference paper deadlines, say researchers Top cloud providers struggled to provide enough GPUs on-demand last week, AI experts complained to The Register.…

Airport chaos as check-in counters revert to archaic manual processes Updated International airline passengers in Australia, New Zealand and other nations have been told that problems processing passports at airports today were caused by a telecoms failure in the United Kingdom.…

DoJ isn't naming names but this was probably an attempt to lift IBM's GPFS A Chinese national accused of stealing source code to a clustered file system and other intellectual property from an officially-unnamed American company has entered a guilty plea.…

All hail Peggy Whitson, hands-on sysadmin – IN SPAAACE An external comms box on the International Space Station has failed, leading NASA to schedule its first unscheduled spacewalk since 2015.…

Microsoft plants a flag before Google, AWS and IBM Microsoft has announced that it will offer Microsoft Azure, Office 365 and Dynamics 365 from data centres in the South African cities Cape Town and Johannesburg next year.…

Some like it bot... but Jilly Cooper, this machine-learning software is not NSFW Forget about intelligent machines solving grand problems in healthcare and science – here’s an AI that can write awful gay porn.…

Firefox 55 to get all up in your face if a web page needs Adobe's hell-spawn Developers of the Mozilla's Firefox Web Browser have indicated that version 55, due in August 2017, will be openly hostile to Adobe's Flash plugin.…

It's more than half of the Tokyo Stock Exchange, but just who's doing what is hard to say Japan has decided it's high time it got a grip on just who is conducting high-frequency algorithmic trading on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.…

Cloud SQL backups being 'forced' instead of automated for 60 hours or more POLL Google's got a problem with its Cloud SQL service – about seven per cent of instances using the service's first-generation code aren't backing up properly.…

Purple Palace pays researcher US$778 bounty per byte How would you like US$778 per byte for your exploit?…

Yeah, that'll be secure for sure Netgear NightHawk R7000 users who ran last week's firmware upgrade need to check their settings, because the company added a remote data collection feature to the units.…

We can't make this stuff up: Triple Crown race 'Preakness Stakes' goes to cloudy outsider A horse called 'Cloud Computing' has just beaten rival 'Classic Empire' to the Preakness Stakes, the second leg of the three races comprising the "Triple Crown"…