The Register

But what's a 'true data fabric'? Analysis Data archiver StrongBox has moved into the data management space with StrongLink.…

Ken 'e' logins Update Users of Microsoft's Office365 cloud productivity suite struggled to log in today.…

Ideal steward would be mediator, soothsayer, guide Two of the UK’s leading academic societies have recommended setting up a data stewardship body to take a “helicopter view” of the whole data governance landscape.…

One of 30 Brit branches to be shut due to 'shift to online' Exclusive Virgin Media has named the 30 branches scheduled to shut as part of plans to slash up to 250 jobs – including the closure of its flagship Oxford Street store in London in August.…

Product shortage plus high demand equals price rise driven profits rise Memory and flash chip-maker Micron had a massive third quarter as demand growth-driven revenues led to price rise-driven profits.…

Not that easy, is it? Apple, Samsung most locked-down of all kit Out of 17 IT brands, Apple, Samsung and Microsoft have taken the crown for devices that are the hardest to repair or upgrade – and their displays are the fiddliest bits of all.…

High Court allows group to challenge mass state surveillance The High Court has given Liberty permission to challenge parts of the UK's Investigatory Powers Act.…

None of today's P45 recipients will be directors, say sources Virgin Media is closing 30 shops and cutting 250 jobs, including a number of head office people, as a result of botching its £3bn Project Lightning superfast broadband plan.…

Classic or encapsulated? You choose Sysadmin blog Next year will see the 20th anniversary of IEEE 802.1Q, the standard that defines the tagged VLAN for Ethernet networks. Despite it being two decades since modern VLANs started being used in anger a significant number of systems administrators remain afraid of them. Unfortunately, the time is upon us where VLANs are becoming a necessity even in small businesses.…

Follows €2.4bn mega fine The European Commission is seeking a company to police Google’s algorithm in a tender worth €10m, following its record antitrust fine against the advertising business of €2.4bn (£2.1bn).…

This app could have grave consequences etc Something for the Weekend, Sir? I will be annoying when I am dead. In fact, I plan to be much more of an irritant after passing away than I am at the moment as the once-dicky ticker continues to clock up the artery miles.…

750,000 smart cards, millions of PCs A quiet revolution has been rumbling in Leeds. It may not seem revolutionary: a gathering of software developers is scarcely going to get people taking to the barricades in these uncertain times, but the results of this particular meetup could shape access to NHS PCs in the coming years.…

Battle beyond terrible packaging Sysadmin blog VMware's VRealize suite for management and orchestration recently received its bi-annual refresh for hybrid-cloud wranglers.…

The atmosphere was positively electric back when polyester pants were popular ON-CALL Hello Friday! And hello, therefore, to On-Call, The Register's regular column in which readers explain how they were sent out into user-land to do odd things and returned triumphant, frustrated or smugly satisfied.…

Russia 'won't rule out' retaliation Russia has hinted at retaliation if the US adopts a Senate committee recommendation to ban Kaspersky from American military contracts.…

Eggheads demand panic button to control wacky brain-machine interfaces in the future Who is responsible if a robot controlled by a human brain drops, say, a baby?…

Tune into space boffins' 24-hour telethon celebration Space scientists and enthusiasts are today celebrating International Asteroid Day – with events in 190 countries and a 24-hour telethon with boffins from NASA, ESA, and JAXA plus assorted celebrities.…

Passwords were salted, so there's some comfort A staffer of social music streaming site 8Tracks is having a really bad day: a bit of GitHub carelessness has leaked 18 million user accounts.…

Security service calls NotPetya an 'act of cyberterrorism' The Ukraine, hardest hit by this week's “NotPetya” ransomware/havoc-ware, has called for help from Europol, the FBI, and England's National Crime Agency to investigate who was behind it.…

Software update adds traction control to protect rover's wheels After 18 months of testing, NASA's pushed a patch to the Mars Curiosity Rover – to extend its wheels' life, and eliminate over-exuberant climbs causing “wheelies”.…

Nine SNMP MIBs vulnerable Cisco's been caught out by the venerable Simple Network Management Protocol, turning up nine bugs in IOS and IOS XE that appear in all SNMP versions.…

Another day, another botched government contract Australia's derailed outsourcing of its National Cancer Registry is the latest project red-flagged by the Australian National Audit Office.…

No phone tracking without asking for permission that you probably already granted The US state of Illinois is about to pass a law that makes it illegal to track a phone's location without the owner's consent.…

Also starts mysterious VIP service for $130,000 The Shadow Brokers is once again trying to sell yet more stolen NSA cyber-weapons, raising the asking price in the process. And the gang has threatened to out one of the US spy agency's ex-operatives that it claims hacked Chinese targets.…

Stable for up to 10x the distance from Earth to Moon A team of physicists claims to have created the world's sharpest laser, with a line width frequency of only 10 millihertz – opening up the possibility of improving the accuracy of optical clocks and radioastronomy experiments.…

Hang on, there's a tech angle in here somewhere... IoT, right? Fad-crazed parents have something new to worry about, as reports suggest that fidget spinners can pose a fire risk.…

Brendan Carr will be a reliable vote against net neutrality as an FCC commissioner President Donald Trump has nominated Brendan Carr, the FCC's general counsel, to fill the last remaining Republican commissioner slot at America's telco watchdog.…

Thanks, WackyLeaks The latest cache of classified intelligence documents dumped online by WikiLeaks includes files describing malware CIA apparently uses to track PCs via Wi‑Fi.…

Safe to assume the money will keep getting better Some security-conscious organizations award hackers up to $900,000 a year, according to what's touted as the biggest bug bounty industry report to date.…

Halt and catch fire! Oops, all-flash storage array startup Tintri intended to go public today – during what has turned out to be the busiest week for IPOs in over a year – but abruptly halted its IPO intention late yesterday.…

More than one BEEEEELLION mobe sales to celebrate? Screw that twisted logic A decade ago to the day, the Jesus Mobe went on sale in the US: bereft of 3G connectivity, the iPhone had a relatively crappy two megapixel camera and 4GB of storage, not to mention a hefty price of $499. It was destined to be a failure.…

European Aviation Network connectivity project continues Inmarsat has successfully launched its latest satellite, which will form part of the grandiosely named European Aviation Network for putting faster Wi-Fi aboard airliners.…

Total Inability To Support Users' Packets Rackspace was hit by a major worldwide outage this morning, which appeared to last for nearly three hours.…

You should probably reset your password, says GDS Users of the UK government’s data dashboard have been asked to change their passwords after their information was made public.…

Getting IT out of everyone's way Sysadmin blog Organizations look at the cloud as an option because it was impossible to get their data centers to operate at the same efficiency. Now if you flip it over and get the data centers to behave the same way as the cloud, how would that change things?…

Getting IT out of everyone's way Sysadmin blog Organizations look at the cloud as an option because it was impossible to get their data centers to operate at the same efficiency. Now if you flip it over and get the data centers to behave the same way as the cloud, how would that change things?…

Ordinary decent cybercriminal... or? A Twitter user purporting to speak for the cybercrime group behind the original Petya ransomware has claimed they want to help "repair" the damage caused by this week's attack.…

Audit giant failed to spot frauds The UK's Financial Reporting Council (FRC) is to investigate PwC's audits of BT, following an accountancy scandal at the telecom firm's Italian unit.…

Defence ministry announces full inquiry A French general stands accused of using military fast jets for weekend commutes to his country pile in Provence on the country’s sunny south coast.…

Thinking ahead to save on artificial intelligence Events You’ve got a month to grab early bird tickets for MCubed London, our three-day exploration of all things Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and Predictive Analytical this October, and save £100s in the process.…

Blow to Rupe as deal will be subject to further investigation The proposed £11.7bn takeover of Sky by Rupert Murdoch's 21st Century Fox has been referred to the Competition and Markets Authority regulator today.…

Data centre control plane platform play by mad hyperconverger Nutanix is making a play to be a data centre control plane platform with a hybrid cloud game plan, buttressed by buddying up with the Google Cloud Platform.…

Worse than York, which is 'frankly embarrassing' The capital has "sub-standard" broadband and 4G speeds, causing it to lag behind smaller UK cities such as York, Coventry and Edinburgh - according to a report (PDF) today by the London Assembly.…

Kinetica CEO dreams of being the database Apple of the enterprise's eye Kinetica, the in-memory GPU-accelerated database, has pulled in $50m in its first major venture capital financing round.…

Hey Tosh, you're so frivolous and without merit Western Digital has hit back at Toshiba, its flash memory joint venture partner, which this week sued it in Japan for $1bn damages, alleging unfair competition and theft of trade secrets.…

Plus systemic underspending in IT. Imagine that A lack of accountability and investment in cyber-security has been blamed for the recent WannaCrypt virus that hobbled multiple hospital NHS IT systems last month, a report by The Chartered Institute for IT concludes.…

High-income countries told to help those that can’t afford to collect data The World Health Organisation has issued what it says is the first international framework for ethical public health data collection and use.…

If they’re a 'DevOps Expert', they probably aren’t Comment We’re almost halfway through this year, and how’s progress on those Digital Transformation Initiative slides doing? Maybe you need a quick jump in improvement to buy some time for August vacations, and then ensure you can get enough actual change and a few successful projects in place by the holidays.…

Jez 'Argonaut' San puts on his poker face for El Reg grilling One of the brains behind classic Nintendo game Star Fox is launching a blockchain-based online gambling service that could leave regulators stumped – and says he has raised $200,000 from the public to launch it.…

Separate compute and storage environments inside Analysis I have come to the conclusion that NetApp's new HCI system is more converged than hyperconverged: in essence the boxes just add compute nodes and networking to SolidFire (storage) nodes.…