The Register

No, this story didn’t come through a wormhole in time. Q2 2018 was the best since 2012 Sales of personal computers rose in 2018’s second quarter, making it the best time to be in the PC business since 2012.…

‘Benevolent dictator for life’ tired of the hate, leaves behind no successor or governance Guido van Rossum – who created the Python programming language in 1989, was jokingly styled as its “benevolent dictator for life”, and ushered it to global ubiquity – has stepped down, and won’t appoint a successor.…

We’re the lawyers your mom warned you about The NFL, the home of America's favorite form of recreational brain trauma, will find itself a bit less wealthy, after it settled a lawsuit brought by a streaming video software developer.…

Annoying flaws found, patched in Fabric Services, NX-OS, StarOS, VOIP kit Cisco has advised net admins using switches that run its Fabric Services on FXOS, or NX-OS software, to update their boxes following the discovery of a critical security flaw.…

Time for rodents to retrain as PHP programmers Machine learning algorithms can help scientists predict chemical toxicity to a similar degree of accuracy as animal testing, according to a paper published this week in Toxicological Sciences.…

Site Isolation keeps pages fully separate on Windows, Mac, Linux, Chrome OS Google is touting the benefits of a recently rolled out browser security feature called Site Isolation.…

Plan is killed at the last minute after outrage all round America's comms watchdog – the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) – stooped to a new low on Thursday when it made last-second changes to a new complaints procedure just minutes after it denied the changes were necessary.…

Total Inability to Support Usual Purchases Updated Register readers, and quite a few other people, have been left with dead credit cards after Mastercard's payment system took a dive on Thursday.…

Tokens killed after eslint-scope utility compromised Updated An unfortunate chain reaction was averted today after miscreants tampered with a widely used JavaScript programming tool to steal other developers' NPM login tokens.…

Learn the tenets of the AWS Well-Architected Framework’s Cost Optimization pillar Promo The Amazon Web Services (AWS) Well-Architected Framework is designed to assist organizations in building secure, resilient, performant and efficient infrastructure able to optimally support their applications.…

And if you could shift Windows and SQL Server 2008 to the cloud that would be fine Microsoft is continuing to extend the tentacles of Azure into the enterprise with a new Data Box Disk, WAN and Firewall functionality and a speed bump for its SQL data warehouse. Oh, and asks would people please stop using the 2008 editions of Windows Server and SQL Server?…

Didn't we have one of those already? Yes, but this empowers ideation! Microsoft has made its Whiteboard Windows 10 app generally available in a move that Redmond hopes will see an end to dried-out marker pens and inky fingers.…

Redmond broadsides Slack with unlimited message history and more storage On the eve of its 2018 partner conference, Inspire, Microsoft has launched a freebie version of its Slack-alike collaboration platform, Teams.…

Minnow takes on pretty much every other primary storage supplier Storage startup Datera has spread its primary storage wings and added containerisation and object support.…

Look at our information protection laws and well-resourced watchdog The UK government has insisted it's in the European Union's best interests to grant it a souped-up agreement on the protection and sharing of personal data post-Brexit and wants to start talks now.…

They say it is 'quiet(er)'. Well, quite... Apple gave part of its MacBook Pro line of laptops a speed bump today. But all you'll want to know really is whether the machine can still be paralysed by a crumb, or a speck of dust.…

It's an Office runtime, for students Microsoft has avoided cannibalising its boutique, premium Surface line by making one that's a lot less boutique and premium – at around half the price.…

Plus: Hackers take crack at cloud, phones come pre-pwned, malware's going multi-plat The number of organisations affected by cryptomining malware in the first half of 2018 ramped up to 42 per cent, compared to 20.5 per cent in the second half of 2017, according to a new report from Check Point.…

Loan notes to build war chest – yet firm denies it's eyeing up a fresh buyout Palo Alto Networks is trying to raise $1.5bn in cash for "potential acquisitions" and "strategic transactions", the company said today – though it claims not to have any buyout targets in mind just yet.…

Dual citizenship with AWS The Snowflake cloud data warehouse now has dual cloud passports, and will run in both AWS and Azure public clouds.…

A cool £160m on the table for software and services UK-based box shifting titan Softcat, is cock-a-hoop after bagging a lucrative contract worth up to £160m to fling software at the Scottish public sector.…

Dark web does roaring trade in Remote Desktop Protocol hacks Dark web shops are selling access to computers on corporate networks for less than the cost of a short cab ride.…

Former JPMorgan man wants to procure 'true enterprise cloud' Controversial plans to award a massive Pentagon cloud project to a single supplier are said to be on hold as the department's newly minted CIO reviews the programme.…

Outsourcer awarded £109m contract to do primary school test admin for next six years Won't somebody think of the children? Capita – perhaps the UK's least favourite outsourcing badass – is to oversee the admin, processing and support for all primary school national curriculum assessment (NCA) tests in England.…

Execs admit some traders might miss the boat in a no-deal Brexit HMRC execs have set out a series of risks to the development of its new customs IT system, including ensuring that supplier IBM delivers on time and a possible £70m shortfall in funding this year alone.…

But Insiders will skip no more. Not for a while at least Microsoft's army of Windows Insiders got a treat last night in the form of a fresh build of Redmond's other OS. You know, the one that isn't based on Linux.…

Save big on your MCubed ticket now, then hit the beach happy If you’re heading to the beach this summer, make sure you grab an early bird ticket for MCubed now - they might not be around when you get back.…

225 million jotters can't be wrong Evernote can quietly celebrate its 10th anniversary this summer, and remarkably, the software company behind it remains independent.…

It may have shielded life from harmful rays of radiation billions of years ago Mars was once covered in hundreds of giant dunes as big as the US Capitol Building billions of years ago, according to new research.…

The plan looks like gentle cloud-herding with cheap, hybrid-cloud-friendly licences Microsoft’s revealed a new way to buy Windows Server and SQL Server – a subscription offer tied to Azure.…

Complete with a REST API for automated amusement VMware’s quietly slipped out a Tech Preview of an update to Workstation, its desktop hypervisor for Windows and Linux.…

It gets worse, say researchers The Ticketmaster breach was not a one-off, but part of a massive digital credit card-skimming campaign.…

Your software pal who makes call centres less stabby Salesforce has unleashed an upgrade to its Einstein AI that equips it to handle customer service chores.…

Congress sends Apple and Alphabet a 'please explain', perhaps because Oracle asked Oracle’s busy backgrounding about Android privacy last year appears to have helped draw US lawmakers' attention to Google and Apple.…

Bad actor was inside social network for months without being detected Nostalgia aggregator Timehop has revised its advice about the data breach it reported earlier this week.…

$19bn to meld chipmaker and software museum into mission-critical amalgam CA Technologies, long a byword for making acquisitions, has been acquired by Broadcom.…

Engineer facing trade secrets theft rap for allegedly trying to defect with tech A former Apple engineer has been hit with federal trade secrets theft charges after trying to lift Cupertino's car tech on behalf of Alibaba.…

But are enterprises willing to pay for this suite smoothie? It's an issue every sysadmin faces: how do you maintain a decent level of network security when everyone and their dog wants to use the latest messaging app or collaboration tool?…

Bug bounty platform reports that vuln hunters are making bank Vuln hunters brought home the bacon last year, according to figures released today by bug bounty platform HackerOne.…

Whistleblower alleges fake biz names used to sneak in 'n' slurp A whistleblowing employee of a Huawei subsidiary is suing the biz for $100m over claims the Chinese networking kit maker infiltrated meetings at Facebook HQ in the US – and stole rivals' trade secrets before sending them to China.…

Cloudy device management suite hoping to come to a kiosk near you Microsoft’s Intune device and PC management suite has scored support for Android enterprise purpose-built device management, meaning admins can lock down biz devices before users get their sticky fingers near them.…

Integration a year behind schedule – IT system switch and culture clash blamed The integration of HPE Software into Micro Focus is running a year behind schedule due to a clash of sales cultures and setting up new IT systems. But at least the rate of falling revenues has slowed.…

Still only 12 months' porridge The UK government has rowed back on proposals that would allow it to suck up communications data for investigations of crimes that could see someone put away for just six months – but not by much.…

'Inaccessible' servers, crap transparency, Twitter caught doing decent thing and more Analysis Cambridge Analytica had data ferreted away on disconnected servers, Twitter actually kicked the firm's ads off its platform, and Facebook still has a lot of questions to answer.…

'Inaccessible' servers, crap transparency, Twitter caught doing decent thing and more Analysis Cambridge Analytica had data ferreted away on disconnected servers, Twitter actually kicked the firm's ads off its platform, and Facebook still has a lot of questions to answer.…

Wow, so servicemen forget to change their default logins too Sensitive US Air Force documents have leaked onto the dark web as part of an attempted sale of drone manuals.…

Shareholder proxy vote revolt fails to rap chief exec over share price plunge BT chief exec Gavin Patterson has sailed through the annual shareholders’ meeting with his pay untouched, in spite of a late move to curb his £1.3m bonus.…

QLC will take SSD capacity to another level Samsung has added another regiment to its fast disk destruction army, announcing 90+ layer 3D-NAND chip manufacturing, with 1Tbit and QLC (4-level cell) chips coming.…

Or, if you will, an arthritic stagger around the park Azure Dev Spaces is one of those technologies that looks great in demonstrations, but can end up being infuriating when introduced to real life.…

UK techie's tests reveal half-dozen daily fails, infrastructure bods vow to look into it An irritated techie from Nottinghamshire, in the East Midlands of England, has hit out at Openreach after what he claimed was a year-long series of daily micro-outages that make it "often impossible" to work from home.…