The Register

Microsoft software-defined data centre coming, NVMe-oF kit, play Mist for me and more Microsoft has said it'll be bringing "software-defined" capabilities to Windows Server in 2019.…

Revenues, clients up in Q2 2018 Software support biz Rimini Street said it planned an "aggressive" investment in sales and marketing as it posted a 20 per cent boost in both revenues and client numbers.…

Misses Wall Street numbers by circa $1m Extreme Networks’ share price almost halved after its Q4 financials hit the wires on Wednesday, in spite of the US network infrastrucutre kit-maker reporting a double-digit bounce in turnover. It serves as a timely reminder that tech companies miss Wall Street forecasts at their peril.…

Says modular approach will bring new business to market The NHS plans to offer £450,000 to a firm that can replace the outdated contractural framework used to supply IT systems and services to GP practices with a new, modular IT framework.…

Service Provider gros fromage and marketer leave biz A former Brocade marketer turned Cisco veep is leaving the networking kinpin, along with another veep who ran the service provider division.…

Staff opened phishing email Updated Holiday camp and British institution Butlin's has admitted 34,000 visitor records have been compromised.…

Leaked roadmap emerges, still full of holes +Comment Intel has ceremonially "shipped" its first Optane DIMM to Google, despite no Xeon CPU support.…

Reps probe Rex's wrecking ball job on crucial Cyber Issues office US House Democrats are asking Republicans to subpoena the State Department over its decision to shut down a key government cybersecurity office.…

Head of education letter littered with mistakes, blames 'IT printers' for bad spelling Devon County Council has pointed the finger of blame at a "new IT printing system" for a letter littered with spelling mistakes that informed a father he was being fined for taking his son out of school in term time.…

Pre-Brexit bargain to be used as UK hub Munich-headquartered integrator CANCOM has confirmed to the German stock exchange that it is buying British enterprise tech supplier OCSL for £29m in cash and shares.…

Maybe the audience needed the teleprompter? Comment When Samsung's veep of artificial intelligence strategy, the enigmatic Ji Soo Yi, demonstrated Bixby 2.0 at the chaebol's Galaxy event yesterday, he had to prompt the audience for applause. "You can clap," he urged the attendees after stunned silence met another new feature.…

Last year Hutchins, now Linton targeted Black Hat/DEF CON At midnight on Thursday Matt Linton, a senior Google engineer who was one of the key players in sorting out the Spectre security hole mess, went to his hotel room in Caesars Palace and found his room key no longer worked.…

Status-checking tool isn't fit for purpose, and then there's Brexit The UK's taxman, HMRC, is under pressure to rethink "short-sighted" plans to extend IR35 tax reforms to the private sector and scrap its "unfit" assessment tool as a consultation on the matter closes today.…

Strange things indeed happen in Californian courts A former VMware veep who claimed tens of millions of dollars from the virtualization company over whistleblower victimisation has lost his legal attempt (PDF) to throw out a $1.5m arbitration award made in his favour.…

Planes, ships, military equipment at risk says IOActive's Santamarta Black Hat Four years ago, IOActive security researcher Ruben Santamarta came to Black Hat USA to warn about insecurities in aircraft satellite-communication (SATCOM) systems. Now he’s back with more doom and gloom.…

In server rooms, neat doesn't trump functionality On-Call Welcome again to On-Call, El Reg's weekly column that offers readers the chance to vent about their co-workers' ineptitude.…

Why we hardly have to sniff the packet to know you play tennis with an IoT racket You don't need to sniff clear-text Internet of Things traffic to comprehensively compromise a gadget-fan's home privacy: mere traffic profiles will do the job nicely, a group of researchers has found.…

You-hoo, Pythonistas and Rsters Julia, the open-source programming language with a taste for science, turned 1.0 on Thursday, six years after its public debut in 2012. The occasion was presented on YouTube, live from JuliaCon 2018 in London.…

Fun and frolics at the 2018 Pwnie Awards Black Hat The whizz kids who uncovered the Spectre and Meltdown data-leaking flaws in modern processors have scooped two Pwnie Awards – often referred to as the information security industry’s Oscars.…

Use this to match profiles to names of people at an organization. Nothing could possibly go wrong here Finding people's social media profiles can be a slow and manual business – so why not get facial recognition to help?…

Remote management a double-edged sword, IT admins warned at hacking conference Black Hat Data centers are vital in this cloudy world – yet little-understood management chips potentially give hackers easy access to their servers in ways sysadmins may not have imagined.…

Miller, Valasek discuss today and tomorrow's robo-ride defenses Black Hat Car hacking wizards Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek have turned their attention to autonomous vehicles – and reckon the security is surprisingly good.…

Why are we eternal pessimists? And why's that such a bad thing, eh? Eh? Eh? Is your morning coffee half empty? Do you feel it's always darkest before it goes pitch black?…

Join the Mobile Infantry and save the Galaxy. Service guarantees citizenship. Would you like to know more? Mike Pence, the Vice President of the United States, on Thursday formally announced that his administration hopes to bankroll, no, not universal healthcare for all Americans. Not better support for armed forces veterans. Not improved public education.…

Tech needs to mature a little more, perhaps Black Hat Those gadgets and apps used by small shops and traders to turn their smartphones and tablets into handheld sales terminals? Quite possibly insecure, you'll no doubt be shocked to discover.…

DNS leak flaws are outside of bug-bounty scope Kaspersky's Android VPN app whispered the names of websites its 1,000,000-plus users visited along with their public IP addresses to the world's DNS servers, it is claimed.…

You listening, Cressida Dick? Analysis America's largest manufacturer of body cameras – and the biggest supplier to police forces across the United States – says today's facial recognition technology is not safe for making serious decisions.…

Decision to join Google-y Internet-of-Things-ish Thread Group intrigues Analysis Apple may have finally concluded that its attempt to force people to use only its technology to control their smart-home automation equipment is doomed to failure.…

Thousands of mobes allegedly slurped, fenced via phishing, etc A dozen people have been indicted in America for allegedly fencing more than $1m in smartphones and other kit obtained via hacking and fraud.…

Even worse: contains Bixby – you've been warned Pics Samsung is allegedly mulling ending its Galaxy Note line, now that almost every smartphone on the planet is larger than the original Note – which was so absurdly large at launch it was dubbed the first “phablet."…

That's rough, bet they were well teed off – crooks want Bitcoin The Professional Golfers' Association of America (PGA) was hit by ransomware just before one of the sport's biggest pro events, which teed off on Thursday.…

Plenty of work for the Z14 plumbers Down Under IBM has scored itself a AU$481m ($357m, £277m) mainframe contract with the Australian Department of Human Services. The revelation that half of a larger mega-deal rests solely on mainframes sheds more light on what's holding up Big Blue's financial position.…

Chipzilla has a few flash drives for the data centre as well Intel has launched two QLC (4bits/cell) SSDs – one for consumers and one for data centre use.…

Mind you, they're doing all right on basic B2B phone lines Virgin Media's operating income slid 17 per cent over the past year despite the Brit telco growing its Q2 2018 revenues to £1.275bn, creating interesting conditions for its newly acquired chief operating officer.…

Invitation to lunch, workshops and talks Promo Cybersecurity software firm Sophos is inviting IT professionals to "See the Future" at The Brewery, near the Barbican in London, on Tuesday 9 October.…

He'll help AWS to 'transform' international governments Exclusive The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport has today confirmed the resignation of Liam Maxwell, though the UK government’s top tech advisor will work his notice period and not leave until October.…

Waiter, there's a bug in my Pie Android P may have been the smoothest and most public beta the world’s dominant phone OS has yet enjoyed, but it isn't without its issues.…

NAND that... is how you get skin in the flash game Seagate has announced Nytro 1000 and 5020 SSDs based on OEM'd Toshiba/Western Digital flash chips.…

Marketing biz sold info to political campaign via Experian Updated Data-brokering biz Lifecycle Marketing (Mother & Baby) has been fined £140,000 by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) for illegally collating and flogging personal information of more than a million people.…

Nostalgia warp now almost complete Of all the intellectual property rights on which our future prosperity depends, perhaps trademarks are the most undervalued. The deep emotional power of a brand endures, long after its parent has expired.…

Countdown to ancient IE a telltale sign of malice A honeypot project operated by Japanese comms company NTT has turned up a bunch of new approaches to malware obfuscation.…

Uncomfortable to hold, crap buttons – oh dear Review The ZX Spectrum Vega+ is running open-source Spectrum emulator software FUSE, The Register has confirmed while carrying out a hands-on review of the handheld console.…

Legal eagles drill into the issue with El Reg What are the implications under GDPR of a previous owner retaining access to data and control of a connected car after it is sold on?…

Save now with Serverless Computing early bird tickets Events Whether you’re looking at tweaking your infrastructure or contemplating a wholescale transformation, Serverless is likely to figure in your planning.…

You could put words in people's mouths, claim researchers Researchers have uncovered security shortcomings in WhatsApp that create a means for hackers to intercept and manipulate messages sent in both private and group conversations.…

NVMe rules the interconnect roost Flash Memory Summit At the Flash Memory Summit this week in Santa Clara, California, Toshiba claimed it's possible to get NVMe-over-Fabrics access speed on bog-standard Ethernet, Attala flashed its shared flash cache, the crowd oo'd and ah'd at PCI gen 4.0, and the industry meditated on enhanced 3D NAND layer counts and disk drive cannibalisation.…

Easyleads chief failed to pay fine – now he can't run a UK biz A company boss whose business was fined £260,000 for making 16.7 million automated marketing calls has been banned from holding directorships for six years.…

How does it work? Nobody really knows what goes on in the black box Black Hat Here's perhaps a novel use of a neural network: proof-of-concept malware that uses AI to decide whether or not to attack a victim.…

Panel spills beans on beans spilled Black Hat Next time you leave things to the last minute, remember this well.…

Press record, make some noise into your mic, press play, voila – all in your browser Vid AI can now beatbox for you for hours on end using your voice, if you're into that kind of thing.…