The Register

Concern as to whether new administration will abide by Obama's promises The US administration has been keeping schtum regarding President Trump's plans to adhere to promises made by Obama's government on how EU citizens' data would be protected from the NSA's mass-surveillance activities.…

Fielding most IOs from memory blasts 'em out of the park Infinidat has run performance tests against Pure and EMC all-flash arrays and surpassed them with its array.…

La la la nothing to patch here la la la An independent security researcher claims to have uncovered a security flaw in Microsoft Edge.…

Yes, the pesky creatures that break your code are often worth listening to Users are those strange creatures who break the computer you put on their desks, and for whom software that has worked perfectly in the test lab suddenly decides to crash.…

Not cool, man VMware's recent decision to block third-party virtual switches on its platform could put a serious crimp in, among others, Cisco's plans for Software-Defined Networking (SDN).…

It's all about how you spend that sweet R&D dollar Steve Jobs once said that "innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have" – it's all about how you spend it.…

£40k or more for initial contracts up for grabs The Ministry of Defence is looking for drone startups to throw their hats into the ring for a Just-Eat-for-bullets ‘bot competition.…

It's too warm to store booze. Renting it out is risky. Slowing things down can do the job On-premises data centres are expensive to build and operate, which is one reason public cloud is so attractive … albeit not so attractive that organisations will immediately evacuate on-premises data centres.…

Amazon VP takes Big Red's co-CEO to task over server boast Amazon's AWS infrastructure boss has slapped down Oracle co-CEO Mark Hurd after the latter boasted that Big Red needs fewer data centers because its systems are, apparently, twice as good.…

Not-so-bright API means web pages can use a W3C idea to pop your phone or laptop Security researcher Lukasz Olejnik says it is possible to slurp sensitive data with the ambient light sensors installed in many smartphones and laptops.…

Oh no, don't let data slurpers know we love Coldplay A chap in Chicago is suing headphone maker Bose after discovering how much personal information its app was phoning home to base – this slurped data includes songs listened to, for how long, and when.…

NASA moving to 'Perseverance Valley' where we can see Martian erosion in action The thirteen year-old Opportunity rover is moving on from the region of Mars it's been exploring since 2014.…

Let us level with you... Medical robots should be split into different categories of autonomy, just as driverless cars are, a group of academics proposed today in Science Robotics.…

Olympic Council of Asia will award gold medals for fragging in 2022, helped by Alibaba Gold medals will be awarded to players of computer games at the 2022 Asian Games.…

Because internet things should probably talk on secure virtual networks, not punter-grade WiFi Riverbed has acquired Xirrus for an undisclosed sum and will now try to build a software-defined WAN that stretches all the way to Wi-Fi access points.…

Billionaire dreamer to see your thoughts 'by 2019' F8 2017 Facebook sees such promise in virtual reality that it has taken to celebrating products and services that don't exist outside laboratory settings, like brain interfaces, augmented reality glasses, and "hearing" through one's skin.…

Patent royalty check dings profits but nothing Snapdragon biz can't handle Qualcomm is blaming a $974m pile of cash it had to fork out to BlackBerry for huge drops in revenues in its second quarter.…

Four-year study will bung patient records in the cloud Alphabet’s healthcare arm, and Google stablemate, Verily Life Sciences has today announced Project Baseline: a study that will glean massive amounts of healthcare records by monitoring thousands of patients over four years.…

Yet more evidence that nbn™ just won't change its mind and build fibre-to-the-premises Yet more evidence, as if we needed it, that nbn™ has little interest in more FTTP nbn™, the organisation building and operating Australia's national broadband network (NBN), has won membership of CableLabs, the global R&D body that develops technologies and standards that help cable operators deploy new services on existing hybrid fibre coax (HFC) networks.…

Except we're not, of course, because that would be illegal A new factsheet by the NSA and FBI has laid bare ludicrous contradictions in how US intelligence agencies choose to interpret a law designed to prevent spying on American citizens, but which they use to achieve exactly that end.…

Massive malware infection slurps customers' privates In February, Intercontinental Hotels Group alerted customers that some of its US locations had been infected with credit-card-stealing malware. Now it has admitted the cyber-outbreak is much worse than first thought.…

Redmond-powered mobes don't deserve latest sign-in tool Microsoft has introduced a new authentication method for logging into its online accounts: rather than remember and type in a complex password, use an app on your smartphone to confirm it's really you logging in and not some miscreant.…

That whole conversation-as-a-UI thing was just a big misunderstanding F8 2017 Facebook all but admitted the failure of chatbots last month – with the announcement that developers building Messenger bot can hide text input boxes and offer menu-driven conversations instead.…

Water, check. Low radiation, check. Possible to get to... oh wait, darn Scientists have spotted a planet slightly larger than Earth orbiting a distant star that looks to be the best contender yet for hosting life as we know it.…

Nasuni, Panzura and Avere all set for accelerated growth Helping organisations send and access stored data in the public cloud is good business for gateway supplier Nasuni, which is expanding its corporate waistline. As are competitors Avere and Panzura.…

Python slithers in next to R Microsoft is due to announce what it's calling "the first RDBMS with built-in AI". In other words, a community technology preview of SQL Server 2017 with additional support for R and – for the first time – Python.…

A beautiful David-Goliath tale EMC will probably have to change the name of its Unity array, now that a court has found in favour of Nexsan's use of the trademark.…

Who gave marketing agency access to super-sensitive address database? London gun owners are asking questions of the Metropolitan Police after the force seemingly handed the addresses of 30,000 firearm and shotgun owners to a direct mail marketing agency for a commercial firm's advertising campaign.…

Reverses 22 quarters of hardware decline Analysis Despite falling server sales, IBM has reversed 22 quarters of decline in storage hardware revenue, offset by a leap in flash storage array sales. It's also, we think, number 3 in overall storage sales.…

Phishing, ransomware remain most pressing concerns Phishing and ransomware remain the most pressing security threats for UK business, according to a government-backed survey out Wednesday.…

No cash, slow answers, firm still blames man who quit a year ago Suppliers of Retro Computers Ltd are calling for the company to pay the royalties they claim it owes for bundling their games with its ZX Spectrum Vega console.…

Cast-iron storage policies World backup came and went – did you notice? It seems the only thing we've learned is that everyone wants Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) of 0. Unfortunately, aggressive RPO targets are hard. They affect the design of real world environments, and are sometimes not possible.…

Consumer workhorse has the speed and capacity to thrill ya Toshiba has a new 8TB NAS disk drive with its fastest data transfer rate.…

Hacker whizz and Veracode co-founder Chris Wysopal joins the crew this week to talk secure software

Story no longer published.…

22-year-old to appear before magistrates at month's end Detectives from Operation Falcon, the Metropolitan Police's cybercrime unit, have charged a footballer with two fraud-related offences.…

Do we really want Chrome hegemony? Open Source Insider Write, as I have, about Firefox and you receive the usual slew of critics who demand to know why Firefox matters? Who cares if Firefox continues to exist? This is often accompanied by "Chrome is better! Chrome is all we need!"…

'Perceptual ad blocker' cannot be defeated, researchers claim Researchers from Princeton and Stanford University have developed an ad blocker that they claim could end the ad blocking "arms race" for good.…

Hold fire on the euthanasia Several things change when you decide to move from an in-house technology setup to a hybrid infrastructure. And if part of the move involves relocating services and applications from the on-premise installation into the cloud, one of those changes is that some equipment suddenly becomes underemployed.…

Developer says he's found a way to stop Windows' new CPU check, which means updates flow again A developer using the handle “Zeffy” claims to have found a way around Microsoft's ban on updates for old versions of Windows on shiny new CPUs.…

Despite evidence and previous offense, Abhishek Gattani unlikely to face serious charges The CEO of a Silicon Valley startup captured on video beating his wife and threatening to kill her is, due to an offered plea deal, likely to spend less than 30 days behind bars to avoid being deported.…

Appliance vendor Hotpoint's UK service site is serving malware when you seek repairs If your Hotpoint cooker or washer's on the blink, don't arrange a repair by visiting company's site: Netcraft says the appliance vendor's foisting nastyware onto visitors.…

Research shows how web mapping service can be abused Computer scientists at the University of California, San Diego, and Google, are clamping down on fake businesses trying to scam victims through Google Maps.…

Hooray for humans! We can pick out images too obscure for Google's AI Google's Cloud Vision API is easily blinded by the addition of a little noise to the images it analyses, say a trio of researchers from the Network Security Lab at the University of Washington, Seattle.…

Need some code to alter pics and whack some stickers and be worth billions? F8 2017 Facebook has open sourced Caffe2, the toolbox of deep-learning software its own developers use to train AI models and build apps.…

Early June looks like being hypervisor happy time The Xen Project's wheeled out the first release candidate of Xen 4.9 and reckons it will be ready to launch in the first week of June 2017.…

Backup biz notches up another 4,000-new-customer quarter Has Veeam's record-breaking growth halted? Er, in a word, no.…

PwC report into what went wrong and why has been received. And hidden, for now The Australian Taxation Office says its planned Easter outage to replace its infamously wobbly HPE storage area network went well.…

Mega load of updates lands for tons of Big Red gear Oracle today emitted a huge batch of 299 security fixes for its software – including a patch for a vulnerability exploited by a leaked NSA tool that can hijack Solaris systems.…

Mega patch load lands for April Oracle today emitted a huge batch of 299 security patches for its software – including a fix for a vulnerability exploited by a leaked NSA tool that can hijack Solaris systems.…