The Register

You may want to resist current plans to discharge a base on the surface Vid Strong solar eruptions may be blasting the Martian moon Phobos with an avalanche of electrically charged particles, charging parts of it to hundreds of volts, and hampering attempts to land on and study the alien landscape.…

Company also plans 'consolidation' of product lines, locations and languages HPE has quit the business of providing custom servers to big cloud operators.…

No-find-no-fee search to cover area recommended by new analyses of likely landing spot Malaysia has struck a deal with US Company Ocean Infinity to resume the search for missing airliner MH370.…

Mind the gap The US is starting to fall well behind China in terms of the speed at which organizations are alerted to reported security vulnerabilities, according to a study out this week by threat intel biz Recorded Future.…

With fewer meteors, lower radiation and better weather, this is a nice place for a colony Japan's lunar orbiter has found a long, deep tunnel under the Moon's surface.…

Hang on? Isn't Big Blue betting the company on a clever cloud? Yup. It is. Sigh Back in September, IBM was left red-faced when its global load balancer and reverse DNS services fell over for 21 hours.…

Clashing threads put in their place by RacerD In Facebook's advertising business, a race condition might be construed as an ethnic descriptor used to prevent purchased ads from being displayed to a particular racial group.…

Cruz missile targets iPhone head honcho for pulling software from shelves at Middle KIngdom's behest A pair of senior US Senators are calling out Apple CEO Tim Cook for what they call "enabling the Chinese government's censorship and surveillance of the internet."…

Some may even glimpse the ring Attention, inhabitants of the northern hemisphere of our fragile home world. You're about to get one of the best peeks at Uranus in years – because the strange alien planet will reach opposition with the Sun and be at the closest point in its orbit to Earth.…

Election security is national security, says senator as US law shakeup proposed Facebook and Google, along with other online publishers, may soon be required in the US to disclose funding for paid political ads.…

Judge rules in battle over seizure of overseas Gmail files Google and the US government are quarreling over just how much money the Chocolate Factory must pay in daily fines while it appeals against a search warrant for email held overseas.…

Town has an API, but no cars Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs venture has chosen Toronto as its urban laboratory – one in which humans may ultimately be optional.…

Expert's protip: 'Hope is not an investment strategy' If you threw money at the blockchain startup Tezos during its $232m initial coin offering fundraising round in July, here's something you can learn for future investments.…

Tribe has sovereign immunity to legal challenges A Native American tribe in New York is going after Microsoft and Amazon for infringing its patents.…

Q3 profits and revenues up but execs grilled over cloudy future Enterprise giant SAP has reported an increase in both revenues and operating profits for the latest quarter – but execs were forced to explain a slowdown in cloud bookings.…

Macs, iOS cheaper in long run – that means trouble Comment While Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella trots the world plugging his book on “transformation”, some of the biggest enterprises in the world are “transforming” themselves ... away from Microsoft.…

US and China in the firing line Lenovo is laying off a little more than 1,000 employees with the majority of heads set to roll in the US and China.…

Another extraordinary performance from the 'tech company' Comment Performance art company Magic Leap has astonished and wowed critics with its latest outing: a $500m funding round.…

Also slags off BT, backs Ofcom, keeps mum on Liberty tie-up "Basically the message is Vodafone is back," says UK chief executive Nick Jeffrey, a message he's so eager to convey at a breakfast briefing hosted by the company that it almost sounds as if the lady doth protest too much.…

On-premises Microsoft cloud gets 14G servers for more oomph Dell is updating its AzureStack offering with the latest 14th generation PowerEdge servers.…

Reg Lecture reveals what it is, where to find it Events If you've ever wondered who really controls today's upside-down, digital-soaked world, you should really join us next month when we consider "The Secrets of Power in the Digital Age".…

Industry age bias a source of constant worry Almost half of tech workers in the US, like Hollywood stars, live in constant fear that age will end their careers, according to a new poll.…

Only to be mysteriously restored hours later The YouTube account of the researcher behind the KRACK WPA2 Wi-Fi vulnerability was restored early on Thursday hours after it was shut down for violating "community guidelines".…

Positioning it as 'World Series' of yachting Oracle CTO Larry Ellison is reportedly launching his own world boat racing title – just months after his team was spanked at this year’s America’s Cup.…

Qumulo, HGST, StorageCraft move in, crack open craft beers In Gartner's perennial game of musical chairs, otherwise known as its annual magic quadrant exercise, the latest object storage square ushers three in and one out.…

Administrator blames credit insurance cuts, online rivals for collapse Misco UK has laid off 300 staff, as expected, after ceasing to trade and appointing administrative receiver FRP Advisory to pick through the ashes of the loss-making business.…

New law defines who pays if your auto auto prangs itself Tinkering with your future driverless car's software and failing to install safety-critical updates will invalidate your insurance, under a newly proposed British law.…

Also, the US negotiates fighter jet purchase contracts on our behalf Britain’s F-35B fighter jets currently cost around $123m each – and British officials are quite content that the only engine overhaul facility for the stealth aircraft’s engines is located in Turkey.…

Trading due to begin on NASDAQ today MongoDB hopes to rake in as much as $220.8m when it finally goes public – a move expected later today.…

Open Xchange boss maps out IMAP scheme Interview There's never been a better opportunity for the world to start untangling itself from the giant Silicon Valley data harvesters than now. Last week, we revealed a plan to embed open-source chat into three quarters of the world's IMAP servers.…

And stop hiring floorspace in San Fran, London for Pete's sake In a recent IDG survey, the number of execs worried about a skills gap in IT grew from 49 per cent in 2016 to 60 per cent this year. Other surveys shore up this finding as well: a Cloud Foundry Foundation survey from late 2016 had 64 per cent of respondents worried about getting the skilled staff needed.…

Yeah or maybe not Canalys Channels Forum Tech resellers who are on occasion – and perhaps cruelly – compared to sheepskin jacket-wearing secondhand car dealers, might just be getting into game after all, if a veteran channel analyst is to be believed.…

Flash forward Sponsored Sales of purpose-built storage appliances are falling, markedly, according to IDC, revenue and capacity falling respectively by 16.2 per cent and 14.9 per cent in the analyst’s latest quarterly tracker in September.…

Ten mice and a million cores are going to prove it "Brains are massively parallel. We each have just under 100 billion neurons inside our heads, all running at the same time. And they are hugely connected, with 10 synapses connecting the neurons together. The way forward in computing is parallelism. There is no other option."…

For now, consider the new Surface Book 2 with mere 17-hour life and Intels inside Microsoft says testing of Qualcomm-powered laptops running Windows 10 is well advanced and suggest it will be possible to use the devices for multiple days without charging their batteries.…

We've got something much more ethical anyway, say devs Malwarebytes has had enough of Coin Hive's alt-currency-generating browser-side code, and is now automatically blocking it.…

In Citrix's world, you'd do this to leave vSphere. In the real world? This is silo-saving Citrix has endorsed a third-party product that lets you manage its Xen Server virtualization stack with VMware's vCenter Server.…

You scratch my PKCS, and I'll scratch yours The European Commission has proposed that member states help each other break into encrypted devices by sharing expertise around the bloc.…

Israel's Spacecom still loves Elon enough to also pay for future launch Spacecom and SpaceX have settled their differences over a burned satellite. The Israeli company has once again signed Elon Musk's company for launch services.…

You've been warned The Carnegie-Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute has nominated transport systems, machine learning, and smart robots as needing better cyber-security risk and threat analysis.…

Minister doesn't mention scandals at current operator, says it's time to modernise Australia will conduct a review of how the nation's .au top level domain is managed.…

Plan avoids the need for new fibre to connect a squillion small cells +COMMENT Cisco and CableLabs have put their heads together in the hope they can convince mobile network operators that with a bit of unicorn-dust, DOCSIS networks can support the LTE small-cell rollout.…

Xen pins seven bugs to the card, all with guests doing nasty things to hosts The Xen Project has posted advisories and patches for seven bugs, most of which let guests run denial-of-service (DoS) attacks on hosts.…

Even penguintastic desktops when lodged in DeX dock Samsung has announced it will soon become possible to run actual proper Linux on its Note8, Galaxy S8 and S8+ smartphones – and even Linux desktops.…

Leader Xi Jinping also wants to crimp 'erroneous viewpoints' with more net censorship Chinese leader Xi Jinping has outlined the nation's technological ambitions in his opening address to the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC).…

Redmond wags its finger A few weeks ago, Google paid Microsoft $7,500 after Redmond's security gurus found, exploited and reported a vulnerability in the Chrome browser – a flaw that would allow malicious webpages to run malware on PCs.…

Redmond now able to host projects like ████████ and █████████████ in █████ and ███████████ Microsoft's Azure cloud has been approved to host classified-level applications for the US government.…

How'd you like them Big Apples? US telco caught up in kickback scam Verizon will have to reach between its couch cushions for $17.7m to shoo away allegations it overcharged New York schools for phone lines and broadband.…

Self-play code excites machine-learning world Analysis DeepMind published a paper today describing AlphaGo Zero – a leaner and meaner version of AlphaGo, the artificially intelligent program that crushed professional Go players.…

Firefox, IE, Chrome makers: One manual to rule them all A few years ago, programmer and writer Bernard Meisler argued that coders write bad software because they're bad writers.…