The Register

Launch comes a week after Nest does the same The smart home battleground has moved to security systems, with smart doorbell biz Ring announcing this week a new product just days before Nest dove into the same market.…

FSB buddies pinky-swore to let ArcSight know of any flaws discovered Hewlett Packard Enterprise handed over the source code for its ArcSight security platform to Russian investigators in exchange for being allowed to sell kit in the former Soviet Union.…

We can't throw money at nerds if they can't get here, wail Silicon Valley's sugar daddies A group of technology venture capitalists are suing the US government for, effectively, preventing them from investing in startups due to immigration red tape.…

Long-delayed update adds support for modern web tech OpenWorld Java EE 8 arrived last month rather later than expected – but it landed in time for Oracle OpenWorld and JavaOne, which are taking place this week in San Francisco, California.…

Linux, Android, IoT, you name it, they'll need updates if you use this open-source tool Google security engineers have spotted not one, not two, but seven serious flaws in Dnsmasq, a fairly widely used DNS forwarder and DHCP server.…

New report digs into economic damage caused by over-zealous governments A new report estimates the cost to African countries routinely pulling the plug on their citizens' internet access is around $1m a day.…

Class-action sueball alleges discrimination OpenWorld Oracle is being sued by some of its former women staffers who claim they were deliberately and unfairly paid less than their male colleagues.…

But analysts say good luck convincing newcomers In an attempt to entice new blood to those dinosaur systems of record known as mainframes, Detroit software firm Compuware has moved its development environment to the cloud.…

Perhaps this will calm the American military? Chinese drone-maker DJI has re-announced its "local data mode" for phone-home UAVs, around six weeks after first promising to introduce it following the US Army banning use of its products.…

It's the same for fruit flies Jeffrey Hall, Michael Rosbach and Michael Young have won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for "their discoveries of molecular mechanisms controlling the circadian rhythm".…

Injunction application nixed by Northern Irish High Court A sex offender with 74 convictions who changed his name to escape his past has been refused permission to sue Google by a judge in Northern Ireland.…

Orange you glad that growers beat showers? Things are getting real for outdoor pumpkin growers ahead of a European championship that starts in less than a week: a German team yesterday won the national heats with a near-800kg orange beast.…

But sources say critique is 'politically expedient' Head of Ofcom Sharon White has come out swinging against providers' legal challenges to its spectrum auction proposals – accusing them of derailing Britain’s “golden opportunity” to take a lead in 5G.…

What now? Readers and pundits like to compare Apple products to Veblen goods: the pricier they are, the stronger the demand. An iPhone is a status symbol and an aspirational good; it shows the world you have taste and money. When Apple tried a cut-price iPhone, it flopped.…

The bonbon of backup, cola bottle of containers, foam teeth of flash Storage roundup You're getting plenty of hardware sugar (NVMe) and remote software spice (the public cloud), with lots of tasty goodies in between in this week's storage roundup.…

Back up now, but packet loss ongoing Problems at Linode's data centre in Germany have led to connectivity issues with its cloud services over the weekend, and we understand the vendor is currently trying to solve a packet loss problem.…

It could be you* The UK National Lottery has apologised for a website outage that left money in their pockets of punters unable to play games on Saturday evening.…

Kill or capture, and get £50k for trying The Ministry of Justice is offering up to £50,000 for bright ideas to stop drones and mobile phones from getting into prisons.…

File under management bullsh$t, for now* As soon as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's book Hit Refresh was introduced as a "masterpiece" of how to scale up the "growth mindset" by the on-stage interviewer, it quickly became apparent this wasn't going to be a Paxman-esque grilling.…

Buy now! Buy now! Buy now! Or commit to the firm for a decade Life is about to get a lot more expensive for some customers of Fasthosts with domain renewal price hikes as high as 160 per cent coming into effect late next month – unless of course they buy early.…

Security, compatibility, control... we enter another world of pain I have a confession: I've fallen out of love with Bring Your Own Device.…

Larry Ellison is keen on ‘Anything we can possibly do to reduce human intervention’ OPENWORLD 2017 Oracle has kicked off its annual OpenWorld conference with a pledge to automate in the company's “autonomous” database, plus plenty of snark directed at Amazon Web Services.…

US financial watchdog drags four into court A US SanDisk manager and his family have been accused of insider trading after profiting from the biz's acquisition of Fusion-io.…

Cloudflare Workers offered to customize content Bit caching biz Cloudflare on Friday teased website publishers with the prospect of being able to run JavaScript at the edge of its content delivery network, a capability that promises performance, security, and reliability improvements.…

It could hint at the possibilities of life on other planets early on in their development Scientists claim to have found the oldest evidence of life on Earth – contained in Canadian rocks 3.95 billion years ago, when our planet had no oxygen and was being pelted by asteroids.…

Sorenson dinged after cockup blocked emergency calls A US telco will cough up $3m after a web domain screwup caused it to drop potentially emergency and other essential video calls from deaf and hearing-impaired people.…

By 2024. Possibly. SpaceX isn't very good at deadlines Elon Musk thinks he can get humans onto Mars within the next seven years. On Friday, he told the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Adelaide, Australia, how he intends to do it.…

Senate draft law finds careful balance, opens doors to mass production A law proposed in the US Senate would pave the way for hundreds of thousands of autonomous vehicles on America's streets in the next few years.…

Boffins bash stale Stack Overflow fixes and lazy developers Relying on search engines to find answers to coding problems has become so common that two years ago it was suggested computer programming be renamed "googling Stack Overflow," in reference to the oft-visited coding community website.…

Iceball K2 is already active despite being far from the Sun The Hubble Space Telescope has snapped a picture of the farthest-away inbound comet, at a whopping 1.5 billion miles from Earth.…

Cutting-edge tattoo checks your blood sugar, still disappoints your mother Researchers at Harvard and MIT have developed a subdermal ink capable of monitoring vitals such as hydration and blood sugar.…

But Ajit Pai still expected to clear US Senate hurdle next week For a man who repeatedly criticized his predecessor at the Federal Communications Commission for dragging the US watchdog in a bi-partisan direction, in his eight months as FCC chairman Ajit Pai has done more than anyone to infect it with Washington politics.…

Advises US citizens to avoid Castroland The US State Department on Friday announced that it is pulling all non-essential staff and their families out of its embassy in Cuba following reports of a secret weapon being deployed against employees there.…

Oh, and there's no such thing as a 'gun tree' Gumtree has taken ownership of the Guntree web domain after dot-UK registry Nominet ruled that the classified ads webite for guns and ammunition was similar enough to Gumtree to constitute an “abusive registration”.…

Good Q2 news for Cisco, NetApp and a few others. Yep, just them IDC's latest Worldwide Quarterly Converged Systems Tracker shows a flight to the top vendors, away from HPE, Hitachi and the Others' category, with the hyperconverged sector being the only growth area.…

'Technology still has a long way to go' Karma no longer seems to be the main factor in improving gender diversity at Microsoft, with CEO Microsoft Satya Nadella saying the compensation of the senior team is now anchored to making progress on the issue.…

Fully up to date for OS and apps, but there's a hidden hack threat Pre-boot software on Macs is often outdated, leaving Apple fans at a greater risk of malware attack as a result, according to new research.…

You'll still have your own room A disturbance was noted in the reselling channel today when the parent of Bytes UK slurped rival Microsoft licensing solution partner Phoenix Software for £35.9m.…

You've heard of wardriving – say hello to screwdriving Security researchers have figured out how to locate and exploit smart adult toys.…

Network failure forces punters' websites offline The domain name server "OpenSRS" crashed and burned during the dead of night following a network failure, taking down scores of customers' portals with it. Normal service has yet to resume.…

Golly Tosh, so much flash biz dosh Analysis The Bain consortium buying Toshiba's flash memory business includes Toshiba itself and is setting up "Pangea" to hold its bought assets. Yes, named for a super-continent that split apart 175 million years ago – not a good augury.…

Big brains, big questions There’s just over a week left till we open the doors at MCubed, our machine learning, AI and analytics extravaganza, and if you want to sure of getting in, act now as tickets are getting scarce.…

Pot legalisation prep under way in maple syrup land Canada is preparing to remove drunk canoeing as an impaired driving offence, ahead of its plans to legalize marijuana.…

F-f-f-f-forty per cent... Former EDS employees at DXC Technologies that look set to lose the final salary pension plan will need to funnel 40 per cent of monthly earnings into the replacement scheme to maintain their current retirement pot.…

There may be trouble ahead – but you can help If you want to sleep rough to raise money to tackle youth homelessness, you’ve got till midnight today (29/9/2017) to register for Byte Night.…

Let a multi-limbed Meccano monster touch me? I'm crushed Something for the Weekend, Sir? The future is a six-handed massage.…

The good, the bad and the weird from this week Roundup As ever, it has been a busy week on the security front with good news, some very bad reports, corporate failings all round and troubling signs ahead for those worried about government intrusion in the online world.…

All-night vigil discovered the dirty deeds behind constant re-boots On-Call If it's Friday - and absent some weird time/space slippage we're pretty sure that's the case – that means it is time for another instalment of On-Call, The Register's Friday column in which readers recount their stories of the ups and downs of doing tech support.…

And is this the beginning of the end for System Center? Ignite What’s new for Azure at Microsoft Ignite? The key point is not so much the list of new features, but the direction the company is taking with its cloud platform, which is to make it pervasive even for customers working mainly on premises.…

'Unable to process planning applications and land searches' A ransomware assault late last month is continuing to affect the operations of Copeland Borough Council in the northwest of England.…