The Register

The bit number explosion gets bigger still In the flash numbers game Western Digital's 3D, 64-layer NAND is being armed with 4bits/cell (quad-level cell, QLC) and bit-cost scaling (BiCS3) technology.…

Copyright-agnostic streaming boxes fail UK safety standards Pirate TV boxes might not be safe, IP champions FACT and Westminster Council have announced.…

Wellcome Trust wants boffins to share Moneybags research funder the Wellcome Trust has changed its policy on the sharing and management of research outputs to include original software, reagents and cell lines.…

Redmond abashed by your unexpected love Brushes bristled when Microsoft placed Paint on a list of deprecated features for the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update. Now Redmond is promising fans that Paint won't be splashed into the abyss – just moved elsewhere.…

The newbies, the comeback kids and the maturing players Opinion Which suppliers will be the major storage players in the next 10 years on the same scale as Dell, HPE, IBM and NetApp are today? And how will they fit into the storage landscape?…

Mozilla runs counter to Valley narrative Open Source Insider Just in case you didn't believe Firefox was on a trajectory that should have it crash and burn into extinction in the next couple of years, former chief technology officer Andreas Gal has usage stats that confirm it. To use Gal's words: "Firefox market share is falling off a cliff." The same could be said of Firefox itself.…

On 20,000 changes a day, its public task and beautiful, beautiful maps Interview The UK’s mapping agency has brought in Vodafone’s director of business intelligence Caroline Bellamy to help define and drive its data offering.…

Google and Facebook both have fact-check site on their fake-news-fighting teams Fact-checking web site Snopes.com says it is “in danger of shuttering” due to a commercial dispute that has starved it of revenue.…

With three different forms of Chinese spoken across one mega-city, smartphone translation is essential The electronics markets of Shenzhen are bewildering. These football-field-sized buildings seemingly sell almost anything, any bit of electronics – chip, component, connector – if you know where to look among the myriad stores in the ten-storey towers.…

We can’t bring ‘em home, but we should be able to figure out what they’re made of The soon-to-die Cassini probe has captured tiny fragments of Saturn’s rings. Cassini’s was launched in 1997, made it to Saturn in 2004 and has been there ever since. But the probe is running out of fuel and will be crashed into the gas giant in September 2017, in order to avoid possible contamination of potentially-life-bearing moons.…

Cloud dev biz tries rainmaking, stirs up storm of complaints Kite, a San Francisco-based development tools startup, has managed to alienate developers by quietly altering open-source projects for its benefit.…

Protests sparked after web security hole reported The arrest of a Hungarian bloke after he discovered a massive flaw in the website of Budapest's transport authority – and reported it – has sparked a wave of protests.…

Tech boss denies any wrongdoing Symbolic IO CEO and founder Brian Ignomirello was arrested last week on outstanding warrants and for allegedly violating a restraining order, it is reported.…

If you skipped the fix, fair enough - it landed before the vulnerability report Popular wireless networking hardware vendor Ubiquiti patched a couple of serious vulnerabilities back in March and April – without telling the people who reported the bugs.…

Another day, another cloudy data leak, as admins fail to get one setting right G Suite business users: go and check your configuration, and make sure you're not publishing enterprise information to the whole world.…

Meanwhile, 'Other Bets' group hemorrhages less than before Google parent company Alphabet says that its revenues in the past three months have grown by 21 per cent – while the European Commission's $2.7bn fine took a big bite out of its net income.…

Big-bang software rollout goes bitterly bad, where have we heard that before? Australian ERP software vendor TechnologyOne has escalated a long-running row with Brisbane City Council, threatening to sling an AU$50 million sueball at the city.…

Everyone else did the 'Houston, we have a problem' headline An online fundraising campaign is asking for $250,000 to cover the costs of preserving and maintaining a historic control room used for NASA's Apollo missions.…

And that’s months after patches released and warning emails sent – sort it out! If you're running the caching service Memcached, and particularly if you're exposing it to the public internet for some reason, please make sure you've patched it. Tens of thousands of vulnerable systems haven't.…

Busting up telcos is on LOSER party's agenda. SAD! Democrats in US Congress oppose AT&T's acquisition of Time-Warner and any other proposed big-time telco gobbles.…

On-the-spot checks by cops to ensure creepy mass surveillance tool is installed The Chinese government is requiring citizens in Xinjiang province to install spyware on their mobile phones and is enforcing the policy with police spot-checks, according to several online reports.…

A server where there isn't any trouble. Do you suppose there is such a server, Toto? Hackers have lifted not only the social security numbers and personal information of half a million jobseekers in Kansas – but also records on more than five million people from nine other US states.…

Amazon's unhelpful assistant also sleeps through its wakeup word on HTC mobe Hands-on No wonder Silicon Valley is excited about the Amazon Echo.…

Meanwhile Huawei gets green light, despite failure to verify source code UK spy agency GCHQ’s cyber security arm, CESG, was left without PGP encryption for more than four months, according to a government report.…

Tells German court it was unintentional An as yet unnamed 29-year-old pleaded guilty on Friday to charges relating to the hijacking of more than 1.25 million Deutsche Telekom routers, according to reports in the German press.…

50 have supposedly signed up for this An American company is offering its hapless employees microchip implants as a substitute employee ID card.…

Good for you, kid Microsoft will upgrade its HoloLens gizmo with a mysterious chip to handle machine-learning on the space-age goggles.…

Leaks point to pricey behemoth Samsung’s Note 8, due to be unveiled in a month, will burst through the $1,000 (c. £920) price point, and may well become the first mass market phone in that price bracket in the UK. It’s also likely to be a monster, with a 6.3 inch diagonal display.…

Users forced to sightsee, look up from their phones Virgin Mobile customers enjoying their summer hols have been perturbed to discover their data roaming isn't working on the continent.…

Where industry leads, government follows with gusto New British drone owners will have to register their craft with the state and pass a mandatory safety test, according to a government announcement sneaked out over the weekend.…

Sellers using AlphaBay vendor 'trust' ratings on new dodgy agoras Analysis A US Federal Bureau of Investigation veteran has spoken out on the international police ops that led to the takedown of dark web drug souks AlphaBay and Hansa, giving an insider's look at the process.…

And will write down €420m due to removeable SIM's 'prospects' Security software-maker Gemalto has once again issued a trading update, warning its second quarter revenue will fall 9 per cent to €742m (£663m) compared with the same period in 2016.…

No mutant lizards. Possible spilled fuel found inside reactor container PICS TEPCO, the operator of Japan's stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant, has revealed photos of the facility's flooded interior.…

Using CPUs, GPUs, FGPAs and ASICS to make sense of AI The Raspberry Pi is one of the most exciting developments in hobbyist computing today. Across the world, people are using it to automate beer making, open up the world of robotics and revolutionise STEM education in a world overrun by film students. These are all laudable pursuits. Meanwhile, what is Microsoft doing with it? Creating squirrel-hunting water robots.…

Nice solar tracking, shame about the Flatpaks Review Fedora 26, released recently, is a welcome update on the already very nice 25.…

Scheduled maintenance overran, says bank Nationwide customers have been unable to see payments on their online banking systems since this morning, in the latest in a string of digital glitches at the bank.…

Availability is not take-up. Must do better. See us after class A report by MP Grant Shapps into the state of broadband in Blighty has been criticised for doing more harm than good, as the research appears to conflate superfast broadband (24 Mbps) with 10Mbps broadband – the Universal Service Obligation goal.…

Imagine a world without high-performance servers The move to containerisation has been built on a simple formula: containers mean Docker and container management means Kubernetes. Let's disregard the first part of that formula and concentrate on the second half – the rise of Kubernetes as the container management software of choice, running on servers.…

Imagine a world without high-performance servers The move to containerisation has been built on a simple formula: containers mean Docker and container management means Kubernetes. Let's disregard the first part of that formula and concentrate on the second half – the rise of Kubernetes as the container management software of choice, running on servers.…

Components just aren't made any more and Fairphone can't afford more batteries Fairphone, the effort to build a smartphone that “puts social values first” by using exploitation-free factories, conflict-free minerals and being gentle to the planet by being easy to repair, has ended support for its first phone.…

You can take my free, naff, graphics app from my cold, dead, mouse hand ... Satya Nadella had us all fooled but good with his kinder, gentler, people-empowering Microsoft act. But now we can see the company's reverted to type by threatening to kill venerable graphics app Paint after the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update.…

PlusServer sold after eight months, Cloud Servers service snuffed after 16 GoDaddy is killing its clouds.…

Plagiarists nearly spoiled his PhD party, so he's becoming a micro-brewer A Swedish researcher has discovered a new way to optimise FPGA performance, with as much as a five-fold boost on offer.…

Plausibly Redmond-related domains were used to phish Bit-by-bit, Microsoft is hitting back at an international domain-squatting/drive-by-hacking operation by taking over the domains involved.…

You live on a steaming dunghill of complexity, vendors want to keep you there and your CIO's way out is early retirement Kill something, find a leader, stop thinking about apps and start thinking about products, get seriously good at agile development and realise there is no finish line.…

Repeat after me: _ is allowed in domain names A few Penguinistas spent a weekend working out why they can't get through to Netflix from their Linux machines, because when they tried, their DNS lookups failed.…

Repeat after me: _ is allowed in domain names A few Penguinistas spent a weekend working out why they can't get through to Netflix from their Linux machines, because when they tried, their DNS lookups failed.…

26 security fixes for 55 packages. You know what to do! Debian Linux has hit version 9.1.…

Another day, another botched government contract In a slowly-unfolding scandal in Sweden, it's emerged that the country's transport agency bungled an outsourcing deal with IBM, putting both individuals and national security at risk.…

County had hoped to protect land from gamer stampede Milwaukee County's rules to keep its parks from being overrun by augmented reality gamers have been suspended by a judge over concerns that they violate the First Amendment.…