The Register

Ideological unity drives 'spirit of sharing' in crimeware market Cybercriminals in the Arab states are some of the most co-operative in the world, according to a new report by Trend Micro.…

RansomBlock tech stops unauthorised access and changes to data The RDX is a neat niche removable disk storage product that can now tell ransomware to get lost.…

Mimecast promises fast mail search and (of course) GDPR-friendly tools Email archiver Mimecast has promised a subscription drug to cut through GDPR pain.…

Microsoft suspects 'code change' behind slow calls Microsoft has said it suspects a code change has caused "performance issues" for its cloud-based code repository and dev collaboration platform, Visual Studio Team Services.…

And London advertising firm spanked for similar campaign A Bradford-based bank has been fined by the UK's data privacy watchdog for sending illegal marketing texts and emails.…

Mules open forged accounts, crooks clear them out from foreign ATMs Hybrid cyber attacks on banks in former Soviet states has already resulted in estimated losses of $100m.…

By the end of 2018, says Realm, Kotlin will overtake Java for Android apps Java on Android is dying, and before long will be dominated by Kotlin, or so says a selective slice of developer data.…

All hexagons and no pentagons makes Jack a very dull... A petition has been launched to update the UK Traffic Signs Regulations to include a geometrically correct football.…

EE phone home EE customers have been hit with a nationwide outage, with many unable to make calls this morning.…

Never knowingly undersold Everyone's favourite outsourcer Capita has appointed Jonathan Lewis as its new CEO, after former grande fromage Andy Parker left last month, due to a series of profit warnings.…

They’re taking our processor cycles Cryptojacking is well on its way to becoming a new menace to internet hygiene.…

It's an Android with a few frills and BBM. Fine First Fondle BlackBerry's new "Motion" handset is a solid Android with some nice touches that, if it lives up to its battery life promises, will be a solid contender for mid-to-premium handset buyers.…

Central bank deputy governor calls them 'dubious' Russia has announced a ban on the websites of cryptocurrency exchanges.…

Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to nerds raging on Twitter Europe's second largest cinema, Cineworld, is struggling to meet demand for Star Wars: The Last Jedi.…

Redundancies down to falling demand, says chief exec BAE Systems has confirmed it is to slash 2,000 jobs across its military, maritime and intelligence services operations.…

Kubernetes grunt-powered community storage software Multi-app enterprise storage startup CloudByte has announced v0.4 of OpenEBS, hyperconverged block storage for stateful applications on the Kubernetes platform.…

Because 3D printers are sooo 2006 Beware, 3D printers. Self-assembling bacteria are coming for your jobs. Specially designed bacteria can organise themselves to make a three-dimensional pressure sensor, new research shows.…

Tell us what you’re doing - or not doing - with DevOps, Containers, Agile The call for papers for Continuous Lifecycle 2018 closes in a couple of weeks, meaning you’ve still got the chance to tell your peers, and us, exactly how software development and delivery should work.…

Motion to dismiss case of 6.4m leaked kids' accounts looks likely to succeed VTech, the toy company pierced by attackers in late 2015, is hoping an Illinois court will toss out the resulting class action against it.…

Google and Facebook can't – or won't – anticipate misuses of data that shouldn't exist We’re leaking location data everywhere, and it's time to fix it by design.…

Redmond's AI assistant can now scan your messages and make your more eloquent If you're really, really awkward in Skype text conversations, or you just want someone to think you're paying attention without all that pesky human interaction, you can now get help from Cortana.…

That's the price for continuing to cook Apple's cores Taiwanese chip heavyweight TSMC has announced the location for its future 3 nm chip-making factory in late September and has now put a figure on how much that's going to cost: a cool $US20 billion.…

In 2015 the two were at each other's throats over a blog post. We think we can say who won! Splunk has announced the acquisition of a rival company named Rocana with which it once fought a bitter blog-fuelled legal battle.…

'Millions' of Pr0rnHüb visitors offered fake browser updates Security bods have closed off a malvertising campaign targeting an ad network spread through an ad network that targeted smut site P0rnHub.…

The Social Network™ indulges in disaster pr0n in the week it has new VR kit landing Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has visited Puerto Rico in virtual reality.…

Part 1: find out who owns what. Part 2: get them to take security seriously ... or else Sysadmin-in-chief of Australia's telecommunications industry, Attorney-General George Brandis, has released plans to anoint himself in a similar role in other critical infrastructure sectors, starting with an ownership register.…

Japan's NICT looks to data centres of the future If you've always wanted to pump more than 50 Tbps down a data centre fibre, good news: it can be done. The bad news is that right now, it needs a fair whack of boffinry and equipment.…

Professor Mark Bishop on the dangers of deep stupidity Minds Mastering Machines Mark Bishop, a professor of cognitive computing and a researcher at the Tungsten Centre for Intelligent Data Analytics (TCIDA) at Goldsmiths, University of London, celebrated the successes of deep learning during a lecture at the Minds Mastering Machines conference on Monday, but stressed the limits of modern AI.…

Belfiore's done it again "Without the end points you aren't going to have the impact in the world and people's lives so you have to think about this next generation of computing as mobile-first, cloud-first," said Microsoft's CEO three years ago.…

Which means higher capacity, according to L2 Drive Stealthy storage startup L2 Drive's technology could enable higher-capacity disk drives.…

Stealth launch in Gulf, no sign when to expect it in US/EU Enterprise-focussed phones are vanishingly rare, and that's unlikely to change after BlackBerry Mobile gave its newest model the stealthiest launch possible.…

Director Jeremy Fleming sets out priorities for intel agency Keeping the UK safe from cyber attacks is now as important as fighting terrorism, the new GCHQ boss has said.…

Warton braced for job cuts BAE Systems, maker of military machinery, is to slash more than 1,000 jobs, according to reports, with most roles affected at its Warton plant in Lancashire – the main factory that builds the Eurofighter Typhoon.…

By the end of 2018, says Realm, Kotlin will overtake Java for Android apps Java on Android is dying, and before long will be dominated by Kotlin, or so says a selective slice of developer data.…

Some might have to wait a bit longer... Updated Certain Royal Mail customers have not been able to pin down the location of their packages today.…

Devs seduced by the dark arts of data collection and product placement VB2017 Poor disclosure and intrusive advertising are becoming a bête noire for gamers who increasingly find themselves getting fragged by promos.…

Fivemiletown, Northern Ireland, ambles at a stately 1.2Mbps Superfast internet speeds are within reach of nearly 94 per cent of the country, according to figures compiled by Thinkbroadband.…

Hilary Mason on Cloudera acquisition, AI hype and getting enterprises to experiment Businesses' aversion to risk means they miss out on the potential rewards of machine-learning projects – but some still have impractical ideas about what artificial intelligence can really offer them.…

Hearings without complainant still A-OK though IPA The UK government is planning a number of “significant” changes to the rules governing spy oversight body the Investigatory Powers Tribunal.…

Why Redmond's CEO offloaded the business in an instant Steve Ballmer as Microsoft chief executive bought Finnish former smartphone giant Nokia in 2013. Satya Nadella, who took over from Ballmer in 2014, sold what Ballmer had bought just two years later.…

Getting serious before things get serious for self-driving vehicles Last year, a dark historical landmark was reached. Joshua Brown became the first confirmed person to die in a crash where the car was, at least in part, driving itself. On a Florida highway, his Tesla Model S ploughed underneath a white truck trailer that was straddling the road, devastating the top half of the car.…

Veep Pence calls for Luna to become stepping stone for farther missions, constant US presence in low-Earth orbit The United States' National Space Council Policy has met for the first time in 25 years and issued a new “Policy for Future American Leadership in Space”.…

Data capture tool that shares browser history will land in ~1% of browsers POLL Mozilla has decided to experiment on its German users by opting-in around one per cent of them to a search recommendations service that slurps their browsing histories.…

Project Loon gets its chance to beam relief broadband Alphabet's Project Loon broadband balloons will be allowed to attempt broadband services in Puerto Rico, as the unincorporated United States territory continues to recover from hurricane damage.…

Version 10 improves replication, simplifies partitioning With the release of PostgreSQL 10, the open source database's developers are farewelling the deprecated MD5 in their authentication mechanism.…

Bought in 2013, disposed of in 2017 due to misalignment with 'long-term focus' Four years after acquiring Composite Software and rebranding it as Cisco Data Virtualization, Switchzilla will sell the unit to Tibco.…

Get a piece of the Register' weekend storage pizza Thick crust, thin crust, who cares, it's storage pizza time, cooked in The Register's own wood-fired oven, with lots of bark and bite.…

If you fancy whipping up a bondage loop under a BSDM licence this is the language you've been gagging for Developers: bored with bracketing? Got a dose of “escaping ennui”? Why not write bad erotica instead?…

Larry's revolution is incremental change that DBAs need not fear OPENWORLD WRAP Oracle’s annual OpenWorld conference is over. The streets of San Francisco are free of the hordes of execs, devs and analysts, and everyone has gone home to mull over what they've learned.…

PureVPN assisted investigation of man charged over 16-month harassment campaign Virtual private network provider PureVPN helped the FBI track down an Internet stalker, by combing its logs to reveal his IP address.…