The user you really dont want to mess with is a vigilant loyalty points herder Who, me? Why hello there Monday! And hello, therefore, to a new instalment of Who, me?, The Register s column in which readers confess to their c*ckups.

If you can't get to a POP yourself, this plan's for you Google has formally launched its Partner Interconnect product, priced for customers too small to afford 10 Gbps interconnect links.

Management faces the ghoulish and grisly truth Storage array supplier Tintri really is circling the drain as it issues preliminary first fiscal 2019 quarter results and issues dire warnings, really dire warnings, about its prospects.

We smell a cloudy challenge to Citrix and VMware and maybe Microsoft and Google AWS looks to be up to something in the end-user computing market.

Version 4.18 rc1 also swats Spectre, cuddles Chromebooks Linux has literally lost its Lustre the filesystem favoured by HPC types has vanished in the first release candidate of version 4.18 of the Linux kernel.

Meanwhile there's 15 other $10m-plus IT projects wobbling down Canberra way The Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (ACIC) has unplugged a biometric identification project.

Yikes! And the fix is to delete and rebuild the VM. Google gave some of its cloud customers a rotten weekend by breaking a bunch of virtual machines.

Juniper's new routers emerge, Google QUIC-ens gets load balancing for HTTPS Roundup Be nimble, be QUIC: Google's added secured load balancing support to its QUIC protocol.

Including bad news for IBM Watson Health Roundup Welcome to this week's AI news bites, picking up the bits besides everything else we've written abou t.

Rapporteur David Kaye not impressed with Article 13 The campaign against a key aspect of new European copyright legislation has picked up a significant backer: the United Nations' freedom of expression expert.

'You want a war? Well done, you've got one' replies China The Trump administration is moving forward with its plans to implement tariffs on Chinese goods coming into America. On Friday, it published a list of products totaling $34bn that will be subjected to a 25 per cent charge to importers, and another $16bn worth of goods that could be added to the list.

Tapplock: Once, twice, three times a screw-up It's never easy to crack into a market with a innovative new product but makers of the "world's first smart fingerprint padlock" have made one critical error: they forgot about the existence of screwdrivers.

Staffers accused of swiping trade secrets face criminal charges Six former and current Fitbit staffers have been accused of stealing trade secrets from rival gizmo-slinger Jawbone.

Crowdfunder asks to be reimbursed on behalf of backers Crowdfunding platform Indiegogo has revealed to The Register that it has set its lawyers on flailing ZX Spectrum reboot firm Retro Computers Ltd.

Review panel: We don't think AI firm has a hidden agenda, but Alphabet-owned AI company DeepMind Health needs to clarify its relationship with Google and explain how it plans to turn a profit, the firm's independent review panel has said.

The land of the cuckoo clock brings you more endearingly cuckoo rules A Swiss police force has decreed that up to an hour of car-horn beeping during the football World Cup will be officially tolerated by the famously pernickety nation.

Drop for Big Red shares as biz prepares to announce Q4 financial results Oracle stock has been downgraded by JP Morgan based on its CIO survey that didn't paint a rosy picture for Big Red's cloud services business.

UK users waiting for emails to download ponder early start to weekend Office 365 is suffering a stuttering start to the weekend with UK users complaining this morning that the service has slowed to a crawl or stopped altogether.

Public consultation for skeletal law inches closer The long-awaited Drones Bill will be out for public consultation "this summer" - though sources tell The Register that it has been stripped down in order to guarantee a smooth passage through Parliament.

Quobyte, Pure Storage and Caringo all helping out Quobyte, FlashBlade and Caringo will all flower at JASMIN, the UK's environmental science supercomputer site, it has emerged.

The dilithium crystals cannae take it, Captain Here's a surprise. William Shatner wants cryptocurrency miners to use a solar energy company he represents.

Who needs DAS with RDMA? Analysis NVMe-over Fabrics arrays are performing as fast as servers fitted with the same storage media Optane or Z-SSD drives for example. Because NVMe-oF uses RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) then the network latency involved in accessing external storage arrays effectively goes away.

UK's National Audit Office slams delays, overestimation of Verify, attitude to claimants The UK government's embattled Universal Credit programme hasn't delivered value for money and has caused some claimants hardship but is now so embedded there is no alternative but to plough on, the National Audit Office has said.

What open-sourcery is this? Interview Open source had a moral purpose when it was fighting "The Borg", Microsoft, in the 1990s, but then it fell from view. You could say it has found its mojo again, only this time it is about loosening the grip of companies built on ever more intrusive personal data processing: Google and Facebook. One of the biggest but most promising challenges is creating an Android free of Google's data-slurping .

Just has to lose GDPR rulings in other courts first Domain name system overseer ICANN will spend millions of dollars arguing its GDPR case to the European Court of Justice rather than resolve its own internal disagreements.

Citizen sysadmin saved the day after kids got lost without lasers On-Call Welcome again to On-Call, in which The Register brings you readers tales of tech support traumas.

Google pours simple coding tools to deepen dev pool After a year and a half of gestation in its Early Adopter program, Google's low-code application development environment App Maker has been delivered into the hands of its corporate customers.

Hint: health outspends finance outfits two to one, but all vertical IT is heading cloudy. Fast Healthcare providers are the top users of public clouds, says analyst firm IDC.

Claims its the least complaint-generating Windows ever Microsofts decided that Windows 10 version 1803, aka the April Update, is now fit for consumption by business users or indeed anyone or anything capable of running Windows 10.

According ot the American Medical Association at least The American Medical Association does not believe that using AI is essential in healthcare and will benefit all patients, according to a new report.

Wants to move into the application business Cisco has opened up its network automation and analytics software, DNA Center, to all-comers.

A bigger splash from big freaking box of a server, with up to 32 CPUs in a rack Huawei has unveiled a more powerful version of its top-end KunLun server at CeBIT, amongst a raft of other big iron-ish hardware and software announcements.

Fake videos generated by AI models can be detected In the last year or so convincing fake videos known as DeepFakes the product of deep learning-driven facial image manipulation have been condemned as a threat to democracy , or what's left of it.

Code good for passing the salt, but it won't win you the lottery A team of scientists at Universitt Bonn in Germany has developed not-at-all-creepy software able to predict the future. A few minutes of it, at least.

What, you didn't do this already? The Bank of England is expecting financial institutions to be a bit less rubbish when IT goes wrong, it said today.

What, you didn't do this already? The Bank of England is expecting financial institutions to be a bit less rubbish when IT goes wrong, it said today.

Microsoft: Plz park your containers in our cloud K thx Container fans, rejoice! Microsoft's Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is now generally available, having been in preview since October.

Troubled surveillance craft has taken a shine to terra firma A British Army Watchkeeper drone has crashed near Aberporth, taking the number of crashes involving the unmanned aircraft to five.

73-year-old taken in by counter-terror cops report A former Rolls-Royce engineer has reportedly been arrested on suspicion of breaching the Official Secrets Act by allegedly handing British F-35 engine secrets to China.

Ron Coughlin will no longer doorstep fanbois outside Apple stores HP Inc exec Ron Coughlin is quitting the dog-eats-dog world of peddling PCs and heading into the more cuddly-sounding - but no doubt competitive - one of speciality pet retailing.