The Register

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.…

'That's insane' says judge (and everyone else) amid FoI battle New York cops claim they can't tell anyone how much cash they have seized from people under civil asset forfeiture laws – because their IBM DB2 database is knackered.…

Now you see it, now you don't Support for Storage Spaces Direct, Microsoft's version of VSAN, has been stripped from the latest build of Windows Server 2016, version 1709, which was released on Tuesday.…

Norwegian project exposes worrying lack of security Tests on smartwatches for children by security firm Mnemonic and the Norwegian Consumer Council have revealed them to be riddled with flaws.…

A masterclass in mind-boggling 'always-on availability' spiel Vantara, Hitachi's new Internet of Things + analytics business, has sped up its operational and disaster recovery chops, claiming to elevate IT with always-on data availability.…

Endurance test for the mobe brand that refuses to die BlackBerry Mobile, which is TCL for all intents and purposes, is making its enterprise slab available in the UK.…

Legendary lake lark comes true, sort of The legendary sword has been pulled from the stone – but the owner wants it back and a crowdfunding campaign has been set up to replace the blade.…

Part of the opening of the network Openreach has today offered its communication providers an alternative to the Ofcom-proposed Dark Fibre Access (DFA) product, which a court ruling slapped down three months ago.…

It's just not a security vulnerability, says Redmond Features of the Intel MPX designed to prevent memory errors and attacks might be abused to launch assaults on Windows systems, security researchers claim.…

Just missing an ombudsman, checks on companies, info on how to use it... Mere quibbles The first annual review of the Privacy Shield agreement that governs transatlantic data flows has come back with a solid, unsurprising mark of "adequate".…

MD reportedly wants look-in on fab agreements Bain Japan's MD reportedly wants to get on the Toshiba Memory Business board, to invest in it and get an agreement with WDC about continuing the joint venture to make flash chips.…

Mathematical model solves the crash blame question, apparently Intel-owned Mobileye says it has cooked up a safety framework for fully autonomous, human-independent, driverless cars – and desperately wants people to notice this before the "inevitable fall" of public interest in driverless tech.…

Advert looked too much like a BT contract, says watchdog Fibre ISP Hyperoptic has been slammed by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) for releasing an advert that looked like an official contract from BT.…

Cortana is broken, intrusive, but still a must-have upgrade Hands On Just over two years after the introduction of both Windows 10 and the "Windows as a service" concept, Microsoft has released the Fall Creators Update. We took it for a spin.…

Your social media's been scraped as the Investigatory Powers Act flaps in the wind Concerns have been raised that neither of the bodies tasked with overseeing the UK's spy agencies were aware that data they collected was shared with industry.…

Seeing that the Pixelbook costs $999, don't hold your breath The year of Linux desktop was a running joke. The concept of Linux being ready for the mainstream with users confidently running it on their desktops, sadly, never happened.…

Only joking. You are all very clever Hello, wrong number At the heart of machine learning are patterns, and patterns are all about counting, so it's important to make sure we are counting the correct items in the correct way. Combinatorics is the branch of mathematics concerned with counting things; more specifically, all the wonderful ways you can count, arrange and manipulate finite (limited in size) sets of things. Having a grasp of basic combinatorics is vital because it underlies many wide and varied real-world situations.…

Estimate of full impact 'out of date and flawed' says committee HMRC, Amazon and eBay have not done enough to crack down on overseas sellers evading VAT in the UK, a “dismal” failure that has hit British businesses hard, the Committee of Public Accounts has said today.…

From heading one cyber-attack victim to another Dido Harding, the woman at the helm during TalkTalk's 2015 mega breach, was yesterday grilled about her move to chair NHS Improvement, the body responsible for overseeing the UK's health service and also famously clobbered by a huge cyber attack.…

Plod say crims now too hard to find and catch online Europol has asked cellphone networks and other internet providers to stop using Carrier Grade Network Address Translation (CGNAT) – because it’s making life too difficult for cops trying to track cyber-villains across the web.…

Windows Server version 1709 is now yours for the downloading Microsoft's vision of six-monthly Windows Server updates is now a reality.…

Take a mass spectroscope and synthesise some 'very tiny disks are coming' hype Monomer-manipulating researchers writing in Nature Communications this month say they have read multi-byte sequences using mass spectroscopy and bit-storing monomers.…

SoC gets hot enough to fry a very, very, small egg. And heat sinks aren't much help Microsoft, of all people, has offered a recipe for cooling the Raspberry Pi 3.…

Brrrt! Brrrt! Brrrt! Big Red's bug gun targets 252 bugs, and you for not patching fast enough Hundreds of products, more than 250 vulnerabilities … yes, it's Oracle's quarterly critical patch update day!…

Your personal data was probably already in crims' hands The United States Internal Revenue Service has said that citizens affected by the Equifax breach need not panic, because it probably didn't reveal anything that hasn't already been stolen and the agency has tooled up to deal with fraudulent tax claims.…

Nice try, Big Blue, but it's now 22 straight quarters of revenue decline IBM topped analyst expectations in its third quarter of the year, but still couldn't shake a run of falling revenue that now stands at 5 and a half years long.…

Greg Kroah-Hartman issues 'enforcement statement' after chap wins 'a few million Euros' with questionable claims Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman and several other senior Linux figures have published a “Linux Kernel Community Enforcement Statement” to be included in future Linux documentation, in order to ensure contributions to the kernel don't fall foul of copyright claims that have already seen a single developer win "at least a few million Euros.”…

Flatiron School accused of operating without license, cocking up grad claims Analysis New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman last week agreed to settle charges that New York City-based code bootcamp Flatiron School operated without a license and failed to adequately disclose information about the employment outcomes of graduates.…

I’ll have a garlic bread, a Supreme and a side of privacy breach by slack partners Domino's Pizza's Australian outpost has blamed a partner for a security breach, after angry customers went online complaining about finding themselves on spam lists.…

Block all the things! No, wait, not the XSS security alerts Top ad-blocking plugin uBlock Origin has come under fire for being a little too eager in its quest to murder nasty stuff on the internet: it prevents browsers from sounding the alarm on hacking attacks.…

Cyber kangaroo isn't loose in minister Teehan's top paddock INTERVIEW As Vulture South reported Monday, Australia's government hopes to have consumer Internet of Things products given security “star ratings” of some kind, so consumers know what they're buying.…

Forget KRACK, good ol' Office malware has biz workers in its sights again Updated Malware exploiting Microsoft Word's DDE features to infect computers has been lobbed at US government-backed mortgage biz Freddie Mac.…

America hasn't gone full-blown crazy, yet The head of America's telly watchdog, the FCC, said he cannot follow up on Donald Trump's threat to revoke the broadcast licenses of TV networks that run unflattering news coverage of the US president.…

It's Andy Rubin v Tony Fadell Android phone maker Essential, which needs stronger sales, also needs a legal defense.…

'Overboard' proposal shot down by Corley Updated The district judge overseeing Waymo's trade-secret legal battle with Uber has denied a request by Waymo to get all of Uber's self-driving car source code.…

Throw your storage vanities on the bonfire Analysis Security software supplier Symantec is moving 105 Norton data centre applications to Microsoft's Azure cloud.…

Where it doesn't rain – indoors It's barely six months since the industry agreed on a standard (5G NR) for exploiting millimetre wave spectrum, and now Qualcomm's silicon has achieved a 5G connection in the extreme high-frequency millimetre wave (MMW or mmWave) portion of the spectrum, between the super high frequency and the far infrared bands.…

Thingstream reckons USSD is talking thingies' future Another Internet of Things upstart has nudged its way into the limelight – and Thingstream reckons its "MVNO for IoT" connectivity offering will compete against established players Sigfox and LoRaWAN.…

Surprise! Using our assumptions, our all-flash array costs less than theirs Kaminario has claimed its all-flash storage arrays have a lower three or five-year cost of ownership than competing products.…

CEO dispatched to secure extra finance. If that fails, administration awaits Misco Group Ltd is holding eleventh-hour talks to secure additional funding to turn around the business and stave off the threat of administrative receivership, multiple sources have told The Reg.…

Rubrik has new competition in the space Commvault is launching a HyperScale all-in-one appliance providing a scale-out platform for its data protection and management services, taking on competing offerings from the likes of Rubrik and Cohesity.…

Dealing with backlog could cost 'in the zone of a million' NHS leaders have admitted that the biggest ever loss of patient documents is worse than initially thought, as another 162,000 undelivered documents have been discovered.…

New European Patent Office chairman gets it in the ohr The issue of falling patent quality at the European Patent Office (EPO) has again reared its head, this time thanks to German intellectual property lawyers.…

Totally, like, an expression of 'humanity and commitment' and stuff Logowatch Throwing caution to the wind, the IT outsourcing and services giant Capgemini is celebrating its 50th anniversary with a daring visit to the Strategy Boutique.…

Tell us what you've stopped doing too... Events If you want to tell a few hundred of your peers just what you've been doing with DevOps, Containers, Agile and Continuous Delivery, you've got till midnight this Friday to respond to the Continuous Lifecycle London call for papers.…

Amazon takes a swipe at hosting provider market Amazon Web Services is trying to lure more Windows developers by rolling out Windows private servers via its Lightsail service.…

Pricier but slimmer Mates Huawei’s “phablet” line, the Mate series, has languished in relative obscurity, but that’s set to change. The three new Mate 10 models unveiled yesterday are set to push the business-focused niche to the forefront of the Chinese giant’s portfolio.…

Airsoft player cleared but case raises many questions A man was prosecuted for posting a picture of himself on Facebook posing with airsoft equipment.…