The Register

What's big, red and has 308 patches, 30 of them critical? Oracle's quarterly patch dump Oracle's emitted its quarterly patch dump. As usual it's a whopper, with 308 security fixes to consider.…

Penguinistas knock, Redmond lowers the Drawbridge Microsoft's long, gentle embrace of Linux continues with the first release candidate of SQL Server 2017.…

When a problem comes along, you must whip it. Without having to get off your chair Rapid7 is the latest vendor to jump on the orchestration and automation bandwagon, announcing it's buying upstart outfit Komand to plump out its range.…

Yeah, that ENRON: the one that went down in flames for enormous financial naughtiness The ongoing spat between VMware and Nutanix has flared again, with the latter company's CEO Dheeeraj Pandey hitting Twitter to smack down Lee Caswell, Virtzilla's veep for Products, Storage and Availability.…

Draft blends asymmetric public/private key encryption and one-time pad analogs In case someone manages to make a general purpose quantum computer one day, a group of IETF authors have put forward a proposal to harden Internet key exchange.…

Authentication system

Cable giant shares its thoughts on costs, freedom Analysis Comcast has barreled into the fight over net neutrality by arguing that the current rules impose "onerous" regulations and "substantial costs that undermine investment."…

Blokes allegedly lifted, cracked export-restricted rocketry design app to tout it in Iran Two Iranian nationals have been charged with hacking a US defense technology maker to steal and sell its rocketry simulation software.…

App verification signage aims to give phishing the finger Stung by phishing attacks aimed at G Suite users earlier this year, Google has armored its cloud with extra security layers.…

One step back – but several steps forward possible in battle against NSL gagging orders Gagging orders in the FBI's National Security Letters are all above board and constitutional, a California court has ruled.…

Those that can, do. Those that can't, return in enterprise form Google Glass, the Chocolate Factory's shotgun wedding between technology and fashion, debuted to great fanfare on skydivers at Google IO 2012, launched with timidity in May, 2014 and collapsed under the weight of ridicule and naive expectations in January, 2015.…

Death of Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo reveals new powers China has expanded its censorship tools to strip out images from chat messages in transit through its networks.…

CEO Mollenkopf opens door for settlement in licensing battle The CEO of Qualcomm says he hopes to settle his company's licensing dispute with Apple out of court.…

$7m pilfered from investors, white hats on the trail More than $7m was stolen by hackers on Monday from folks investing in a cryptocurrency startup.…

He told El Reg to build an ark conveniently summing it all up Another storage news flood has been washing over us. In between the waves we caught our breath and penned this catch-up.…

Digital borders, digital tax and raft of MoJ projects singled out One-quarter of the UK government’s major IT programmes worth a total lifetime cost of £8bn are at high risk of failure, according to a Register analysis of the major project watchdog's annual report of 143 government programmes worth over £455bn.…

Something to do with categories, not feline antidepressants Russia's tech behemoth Yandex has open-sourced its first machine learning library, CatBoost.…

Roboat firms and pals pile in More roboats and autonomous flying machines will be tested around the Solent after a consortium of companies was handed £1.5m to set up a drone test range.…

Vape at work? Hey, why not? Comment The government has said that the persecution of the users of e-cigarette technology should stop. The Department of Health today outlined a Five Year Tobacco Control plan for England with the goal that the proportion of the population who smoke tobacco products should fall to 12 per cent by 2022, down from 15.5 per cent today.…

Duals CPUs, triples capacity Entry-level and mid-market KVM-hypervisor-based Scale Computing has upped its HCIA game with dual CPU systems and a tripled disk capacity product.…

Are you affected? You know who to tell... Irritated customers of data centre operators Global Switch are complaining about repeated power outages at the firm’s London Docklands data centre.…

Vows crackdown on sexist commercials next year Ads depicting manchildren incapable of carrying out basic household tasks, and women in the role of Stepford Wives clearing up their mess, are to be banned in a crackdown by the Advertising Standards Authority.…

Two weeks left to grab MCubed early bird tickets Events Early bird tickets for MCubed disappear in under two weeks, so you should act now if you want to get up to speed on how to use machine learning and AI in real business, and save hundreds into the bargain.…

Is that clear? Rickety rectangle house Gartner has promoted Pure Storage to the top of the all-flash array pack in its latest Solid-State Array (SSA) Magic Quadrant, and yanked Kaminario into the leaders' quadrant for the first time.…

But then again they would say that, wouldn't they? Analysis A study aiming to raise the profile of cyber insurance claims that cloud outages and ransomware outbreaks on the WannaCry scale could cost companies $81.7bn – more than natural disasters like 2012's Hurricane Sandy. That's an awful lot of money, but wait – before you fish out the wallet – how did the authors arrive at these numbers?…

The All Grown-up Android gets sent back to school So Remix OS won’t be “eating the world” after all. Parent company Jide, founded by ex-Googlers, is repositioning itself as an enterprise vendor, and says its Android-for-PCs (which also runs on cheap ARM hardware) will no longer be sold to consumers any more.…

To succeed, operators need fibre, NFV, legacy kit and radio Analysis When an executive from Nokia, of all companies, said 5G was as much about fibre as wireless, it was clear this was going to be different from previous mobile standards generations. 5G will not be driven by mobile broadband speeds as 4G was.…

'No prospect of a clean break' on data protection laws – but UK may lose its influence The UK is risking a security and trade "cliff edge" if it doesn't secure an arrangement that allows data transfer with the European Union to continue after Brexit, a report has said.…

Good luck, Anyone-but-AWS club. You'll need it Kubernetes may be the hawtest thing in container orchestration, but Redmonk analyst James Governor has a different label for it: the "Anyone but Amazon" club. It's an interesting name for a club that includes, ironically, Amazon, but as AWS continues its march to enterprise IT domination, Kubernetes increasingly looks like a rallying cry for erstwhile enemies to combine against a common foe.…

Regulator given compo demands for tens of millions A former GSM gateway operator is threatening to reactivate a £20m legal claim against Ofcom after the regulator's past policies killed his company, according to documents seen by The Register.…

Friendly near-monopoly wants to work with industry, honest Openreach has launched a consultation seeking input from industry to create "full fibre" broadband in Blighty - part of its new cuddly, collaborative approach post legal separation from BT.…

So says Gartner, which reckons marketers have brainwashed themselves and us with AI hype Many enterprise software vendors “are focused on the goal of simply building and marketing an AI-based product rather than identifying use cases and the business value to customers.”…

So says Gartner, which reckons marketers have brainwashed themselves and us with AI hype Many enterprise software vendors “are focused on the goal of simply building and marketing an AI-based product rather than identifying use cases and the business value to customers.”…

Modeling biz owner alleges harassment, retaliation in tech's latest embarrassing lawsuit Microsoft and Jonathan Plumb, program manager at Microsoft Studios, have been sued by Jennifer Kelly, founder of Seattle modeling agency Genesis Industries.…

Add 'rent-a-cop' to the 'jobs safe from AI' list … for now A security robot tasked with patrolling an office building in Washington DC has instead driven itself into a water feature.…

He's got a box called Sentinel to do the job, but in April he said it was 'vulnerable' Having tilted at the US presidency without success, John McAfee has picked his last next big windmill: Google.…

Sure, Goddard boffins could just analyse the signals, but why not listen to them too? NASA boffins in charge of the agency's Van Allen Belt mission have recorded audio-frequency noise made by energetic electrons emitting what's known as “whistler waves”.…

S3 bucket was set to authenticate all AWS users, not just Dow Jones users Dow Jones has emulated Verizon by saving various internal databases (including Wall Street Journal subscribers) in the cloud without properly securing it.…

SAP teaching factory equipment to pre-analyse for tiny-but-costly faults, call cloud for help Artificial intelligence, the internet of things and edge computing are 2017's inescapable buzzwords, cloud probably has that role for the entire decade. So imagine The Register's surprise when we learned all three are working together in a product you can put to work today.…

114 servers, 3,192 Xeon cores and another million-plus from GPUs, for petaflop performance Dell has won the gig to build a Australia's newest supercomputer.…

Meanwhile, Musk's comments crash carmaker's stock On Saturday evening, a Tesla Model S skidded off the road in central Minnesota, in America's Midwest, and ended up on its roof in a marsh.…

Bug fixes shipped for all supported versions The folks over at FreeRADIUS took a look at Guido Vranken's work with OpenSSL, liked what they saw, asked him to fuzz the famous login/security server ... and then didn't like what they saw.…

Meanwhile the TSA found 78 guns at US airports last week, 32 with a round chambered The United States' ban on laptops being carried into airliner cabins is all-but-over, after the nation's Transport Security Administration reduced its list of dodgy airports to just one and signalled that destination awaits inspection before also disappearing from its list.…

Families urged to brush up on opsec, check for privacy leaks, patch security flaws, if possible The FBI issued a warning Monday advising parents to carefully check internet-connected toys for possible privacy and security concerns.…

Mayak bird so bright it may outshine Venus, Jupiter Skywatchers are going to see a new light in the heavens this week after the successful launch of the Russian satellite Mayak this past weekend.…

'Brandis.io' secures messages with APIs and 445 lines of JavaScript, so good luck with crypto-cracking laws! +Comment An Australian computer scientist working in Thailand has offered his contribution to Australia's cryptography debate by creating a public-key crypto demonstrator in less than a day, using public APIs and JavaScript.…

Anti-patent-lawsuit restrictions land tools on banned list The Apache Foundation has declared that none of its new software projects can include Facebook's booby-trapped BSD-licensed code.…

Lengthy filing by Internet Association highlights value of today's rules The world's largest internet companies lambasted the FCC in a formal filing today, telling America's telecom regulator to kill its plans to ditch net neutrality rules.…

Elon Musk again demands govt intervention to halt crazed computers Analysis Elon Musk – the CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, and Neuralink, not to mention co-chairman of OpenAI and founder of The Boring Company – is once again warning that artificial intelligence threatens humanity.…

Is there nowhere corps won't try and sell you stuff? HTC, which needs all the love it can get these days, has enraged its customers by bunging adverts into the onscreen keyboard on its phones.…