The Register

Transtelecom can reach 256 North Korean hosts North Korea's very limited Internet has, for the second time in its brief history, obtained a redundant connection to the outside world.…

Larry E wants diverse log file formats tamed, so you can ask security questions in natural language OpenWorld 2017 Oracle’s founder and chief technology officer Larry Ellison put on his best salesman act Tuesday during his second keynote at the tech giant's OpenWorld gabfest – this time playing up the impact high-profile IT security breaches have had on organisations and increasing concerns over state hackers.…

Someone failed to order the patch. If it was you, c'mere, have a hug. And a new identity Recently-and-forcibly-retired Equifax CEO Rick Smith has laid the blame for his credit-check biz's IT security breach on a single member of the company's security team.…

It's an international tug-of-war: Russia also wants to extradite Peter Levashov The 36-year-old Russian accused of herding pump-and-dump spambots will be tried in America, following a decision of a Spanish court.…

Gadgets that need Flash now have another alternative OS Version 10.4 of FreeBSD has landed, with the headline feature being support for eMMC.…

'Pairing colours, type and imagery' is the new creativity, apparently LOGOWATCH LogoWatch's formative computing experiences included using multiple fonts – nearly always Kawasaki and Chicago – sometimes with different shadings, in Aldus PageMaker on early Macs' nine-inch screens.…

At last, the leadership America desperately needs If you've never heard of Stonecrest, Georgia, you're not alone: the town on the outer fringes of Atlanta only voted itself into existence a couple of years ago. But it's now put itself on the map by offering to rename 345 acres of land “Amazon” in a bid to land Amazon.com's new headquarters.…

Wee small hours civil defence wake-in-fright text arrives on Vodafone mobes A time-zone mixup has resulted in about half of all New Zealanders being woken by civil defence and emergency management authorities sending a test text message overnight.…

We meant it, nothing matters any more. Nothing at all White House cybersecurity coordinator Rob Joyce has won the backing of Equifax's ex-CEO for a plan to stop using social security numbers as personal identifiers in the US.…

Cloud Firestore aspires to scale better Google's twin fetish manifested itself in its Firebase platform-as-a-service offering on Tuesday through the introduction of a second realtime NoSQL database.…

El Reg takes another spin on Redmond's VR headset support in Fall Creators release With the release of the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update just two weeks away, Microsoft showcased on Tuesday more of the virtual-reality headset support that will be bundled with the software upgrade.…

They're just trolling us at this point Shortly after we all learned of a massive security breach at Equifax in which the personal information of 143 million 145.5 million Americans and sundry Brits and Canadians was plundered by hackers, the US Internal Revenue Service awarded Equifax a no-bid contract – to provide identity verification services for the tax authority.…

Drivers' licenses pics shared with States? You ain't seen nothing yet: the private sector might get your mugshot, too Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull has hinted that the expansion of the nation's facial recognition databases could include private sector access.…

Every user pwned, how's that $4bn looking now, Verizon? With Equifax testifying in US Congress today about its own massive security failings, someone at Yahoo! presumably thought now would be a good time to bury bad news – but some things are too large to hide.…

Unless of course your site is so dull that a little hacker defacement will cheer it up The plugin gurus at WordFence have this week found three critical security holes in third-party WordPress extensions that are being actively exploited by hackers to take over websites.…

For perhaps the first time ever, a JavaOne keynote was actually useful Analysis In the wake of a safe harbor disclaimer insisting Oracle could not be held to anything said during its JavaOne conference keynote on Monday, Georges Saab, veep of software development for the Java platform, talked his way through a Java victory lap.…

Engineering the Microsoft way Microsoft has explained how a cascading series of cockups left some of its Northern European Azure customers without access to services for nearly seven hours.…

Krzanich pays tribute to former Chipzilla supremo Former Intel CEO Paul Otellini died on Monday aged 66, the chip maker confirmed this morning.…

NFS as a service on-ramp to Azure NetApp is making NFS available as a service in Microsoft's Azure Cloud, enaabling on-premises NFS-using applications to move into Azure.…

Zürich bloke's neighbours send nasty letter over whiskey flag A man was reportedly asked if he was an Islamic State sympathiser after his neighbours mistook a Jack Daniel's flag for the black-and-white terrorist insignia.…

Oh, that's shingles. As you were WDC has released an Ultrastar 14TB disk drive with host application software managing its shingled writing scheme.…

What went down last week in Florida? Tens of thousands of tourists flocked to Florida's theme park town of Orlando last week, but they weren't there to see Mickey; they were there to imbibe the new wares at Microsoft's Ignite, which focuses on cloud computing and IT administration.…

$95m to satiate its appetite for gutbusting growth Analysis Moshe Yanai's Infinidat has gained $95m in third-round funding and wants us to know that it's not a debt-fuelled Silicon Valley extravaganza of a startup like others that have crashed and burned or gone through bought-at-a-discount acquisitions.…

Dude. Woah. The 2017 Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to three researchers crucial to the first detection of ripples in the fabric of space-time – gravitational waves.…

Dublin Judge asks European Court to look at data flows all over again Privacy activist and student Max Schrems has hailed an Irish Court decision today to refer cross-Atlantic data flows back to the European Court of Justice - all over again.…

ATSB wraps up, nine months after 'suspending' search Australian air authorities have published their final report into the MH370 mystery, concluding that they’re no wiser about what happened or why than when the Malaysian Airlines flight vanished three years ago.…

Yet another product cull raises questions about Microsoft's commitment to... anything, really Comment Ever since Satya Nadella took the helm at Microsoft in 2014, his PR people have been grooming him to be an Inspiration Thought Leader, preaching Transformation to the TED Talk classes. This took another step with the global launch of his book Hit Refresh, a "masterpiece" of how to scale up the "growth mindset”. [must-read]…

It must have been divine intervention Ubuntu's wiki page this morning temporarily played host to a bit of info from religious group Computers4Christians, whose aim is to propagate the use of its operating system to spread the word of the Lord.…

Developers hoping move will reinvigorate the community It's been a few weeks since it was announced that Oracle would move Java EE to the Eclipse Foundation and we're already starting to see indications of how it's shaping up.…

Goes native with Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM, Oracle Data-as-a-service firm Actifio has bumped its virtual data pipeline, Sky Platform, to v8.0, extending its coverage to a crowd of public clouds.…

125k refuseniks to have their say after all Parliament has rescheduled its debate on the BBC TV Tax, after it was quietly canned thanks to the snap general election earlier this year.…

Techies! Will you please stop patronising and sneering! ;_; UK Home Secretary Amber Rudd has once again demonstrated she does not know how encryption works, this time by explicitly admitting it to delegates at a Tory party fringe conference where she also hit out at "patronising" techies that "sneered" at politicians.…

OpenIO talks us through how it's applying its software to SSDs Interview Will object storage using SSDs with embedded servers become a realistic storage/processing technology?…

Management, devs, ops, Bob too... just be freakin' reasonable Don't be like Bob. You remember Bob, right? Tasked with building the company's cloud. Sinking in a quicksand of managerial buzzword bingo and ever-changing requirements, burdened by a lack of resources. Bob was under pressure, which produced tension at home, and Bob quit the job resulting in the company's cloud project floundering.…

The keyboard's cosmetic in this 'retro-games-baked-onto ROM' with HDMI and USB caper The Commodore 64 is coming back, in a form that owes a debt to both Nintendo's shrunken Mini SNES and thee Vega+ Sinclair ZX Spectrum reboot.…

Reality will have to do unless you can leap-frog quantum computing That “we live in a simulation" trope being advanced by Elon Musk and some folk on the fringes of science? Fuggeddaboutit, because it's impossible to build a simulator that would reproduce what humans already know about quantum systems.…

Cosmic carbon crashes, plus grains galore, set the chemical world cranking Life began on Earth only a few hundred million years after the planet’s surface was cool enough for pools of liquid water to form, according to a new study published today.…

Big Red has all this year's big buzzwords covered OPENWORLD 2017 Oracle has launched an enterprise-grade blockchain cloud service, as part of a flurry of announcements at its annual OpenWorld conference in San Francisco.…

Google wants Android devices to survive four OS upgrades, even if LTS releases make Linus a bit grumpy Long-term-support (LTS) editions of the Linux Kernel will henceforth be supported for six years, up from the current two.…

KompriseCloud can now shunt data between different cloud storage operators Data management software vendor Komprise has added extra cold cloud tiers to its data lifecycle manager, which moves data to slower access storage tiers without affecting its accessibility.…

We thought this stuff would turn up where there's already life. Turns out it's everywhere Scientists have announced today that a stable organohalogen, a class of compounds normally produced by organisms on Earth, has been detected for the first time in space.…

Newly-freed security vendor thinks it can drag users into cloudy security analytics SonicWall has updated its product range with an eye on ransomware and mesh networking.…

Ghost-of-Zune music subscription service retired, users shunted to Spotify Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's new book says the company has its groove back, yet the company has also decided to kill off the Zune-zombie nby sending music subscription service "Groove" to its doom.…

AU$297 million a year bought co-operation as much as services, says ANAO Australia's National Audit Office (ANAO) says Telstra isn't delivering value for money under contracts it won to deliver subsidised telecommunications services in remote areas under the nation's universal service obligation (ISO) program.…

There's a nasty bug in media file handling – deja vu, right? Another month, another round of Android patches – although October's batch is pleasantly small compared to other recent releases.…

Hurd flames first after his 2016 predictions were live-trashed OpenWorld 2017 Oracle Co-CEO Mark Hurd appears not to have shrugged off past criticism of his predictions for the state of cloud computing in the year 2025, a staple of his recent appearances at Big Red's OpenWorld gabfest.…

Ex-CEO says company stayed silent about hack to stop crims piling on with more attacks Equifax was just as much of a trash-fire as it looked: the company saw the Apache Struts 2 vulnerability warning, failed to patch its systems, and held back a public announcement for weeks for fear of “copycat” attacks.…

Australian mine train capable of hauling 236 carriages and 29,500 tonnes goes 100km without anyone aboard Paraburdoo is a tiny town in Australia's north west famous for being hot, dry, remote … and the site of a rich iron ore mine operated by Rio Tinto, which has just run the first fully autonomous mine train to the town.…

Monday's events cancelled after music festival attack NetApp's Insight conference has been delayed a day after its venue, the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, was used by a terrorist to shoot and kill at least 59 people and hurt more than 527.…

Broadcast TV gets a big bear hug in upgraded operating system and gizmo line Roku today responded to Apple with a new range of streaming boxes and an updated operating system that tightly integrates broadcast TV.…