The Register

Oldies will retain mobility and independence when Teslas can self-drive them to work or be sent out to do the shopping My uncle Amadeo turns 79 this week and bought himself a luxe Model S Tesla as a present.…

Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has told a press conference ahead of a ministerial meeting tomorrow Brussels time that “cyber” is a “military domain” – and that a cyber-attack on one member can trigger NATO's Article 5.…

Tiny body moves similar to Jupiter – but travels in the opposite direction Asteroid 2015 BZ – also known as Bee-Zed – is the only asteroid in our solar system with a confirmed retrograde orbit lasting 12 years; the same orbital period as Jupiter.…

Attackers can dive out of the cloud to pwn admin passwords Microsoft is warning sysadmins to check their Azure Active Directory Connect configurations and implement a patch against a credential-handling vulnerability.…

End of an epoch, but dead trees live on O'Reilly Media, the preeminent publisher of tech titles for non-dummies, is exiting print distribution.…

Drivers' 'not-a-union' takes on 'not-a-taxi' company Scandal-ridden, leaderless not-a-taxi dudebro poster-child Uber is under investigation in Australia about whether its “independent contractor” drivers are actually employees.…

Outsourcing the unicorn hunt This week's five-eyes meeting has issued its communique, promising to get the tech sector to solve the problems of online terrorism and encrypted communications.…

PS, Alpine users, you need to get patching, too – for other reasons Systemd, the Linux world's favorite init monolith, can be potentially crashed or hijacked by malicious DNS servers. Patches are available to address the security flaw, and should be installed ASAP if you're affected.…

Toxic upstart accused of inaction amid assault claims Uber is accused of ignoring warning signs about an attempted murderer who signed up as a driver and then allegedly attacked a passenger before raping another.…

Peeps flying into US face 'enhanced screening' Folks flying into America must endure extra security checks if they want to bring their laptops into airplane cabins. In a press conference on Wednesday, US Homeland Security boss John Kelly announced the introduction of:…

Sit down Kitt, be humble The head of US trade watchdog the FTC has pushed for companies to loosen their ties over self-driving cars.…

Senior execs hired and flagging retail business canned Sanjay Mehrotra, Micron’s new CEO, is setting a whirlwind pace to make changes at the relatively staid old chipper.…

Also, update your Kaspersky Anti-Virus File Server – before you get hacked Several employees of Russian security vendor Kaspersky Lab got an unpleasant surprise on Tuesday night when FBI agents popped round to their residences for a chat.…

TNT Express systems blown up by, er, yeah, you get the idea FedEx has suspended trading of its shares on the New York stock exchange after admitting that its subsidiary TNT Express has been hit by "an information system virus."…

It seems that everything's gone wrong since Canada came along Canada's Supreme Court says America's Hat has authority over Google results worldwide – at least in cases when someone's copyright has been stomped on.…

Tosh talks 4-level cell tech, too Just as we are getting used to 64‑layer 3D NAND chips, along come the warring flash joint-venture couple Toshiba and Western Digital. The pair say their JV has produced a 96‑layer prototype die, with Toshiba also introducing four-level cell tech.…

Malicious chats mostly came from India, say police Four Britons have been arrested on suspicion of helping organise fraudulent telephone support scam calls that caused “hundreds of millions of pounds” of losses worldwide.…

Managed cloud biz’s next move? Machine learning, obviously Managed cloud provider Rackspace has announced it is using Splunk to power its decision analytics engine - and plans to use the software provider’s machine learning tool next.…

VDI and HCIA software supplier Atlantis Computing is in middle of "delicate ongoing negotiations" seeking funding from investors.…

Integrated IT infrastructure is a good place to start Sysadmin blog The private clouds are coming. A few of them are already in place, lurking in the shadows, but in 2017 the Infrastructure Endgame Machines (IEMs) land and everyone starts being able to buy cloud-in-a-can. With private clouds moving along the hype cycle towards Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) solutions, the race to rebrand the concept for marketing purposes begins. Behold: the enterprise cloud!…

You could say the flash JV partners' relationship is at rock bottom Toshiba is suing WDC in a Tokyo court for ¥120bn ($1bn, £830m), alleging unfair competition.…

Catches up with https everywhere memo UK-based hosting and domains provider firm 123-reg has fixed an issue that meant access to some customers' databases ran over an unsecured link, creating a privacy risk in the process.…

Junior appointment more telling than non-expert status Comment The appointment of digital minister Caroline Nokes yesterday was met with some sniggering when it was revealed she was formerly the chief executive of the National Pony Society.…

You can buy it at consumer electronics e-shop. We're not joking Intel has hatched a new SSD, a 64-layer one, available in a lovely coincidence at etailer Newegg for $179.99.…

Airplane mode: Yes or no?

Ultimate Britishness experience – wet, grey skies and a huge wait just to be disappointed The AWS Summit in London has opened – and queues of several hundred people are already building around the venue as rumours of an IT failure on the ticket desks swirl.…

Record £500m full-year figure for borg Dixons Carphone reported a bumper year, with profits up 10 per cent to £501m for its preliminary results 2016/17.…

Never fear – they're moving to, er, Windows 8.1 instead Thousands of Metropolitan Police computers are still running Windows XP more than a year after the force promised to upgrade them, mayor Sadiq Khan has admitted in response to a Greater London Assembly question.…

Matching DNA and personality types Ubuntu's Unity interface is gone, which means there's one less desktop to choose from in Linux-land. And while dozens remain to choose from, Unity was one of the most polished out there. Many will miss its detail and design.…

Plus BT evaluates startups. Good luck, network kit giants Comment Hard on the heels of Orange's Telecom Track, which will support network infrastructure startups in association with Facebook's Telecom Infra Project (TIP), BT is evaluating startups for a similar scheme.…

Sugar's 'Hint' scraping service populates sales profiles by scraping 70 data sources Facebook's hit two billion users. Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to his creation on Wednesday to share the news.…

Redmond owned it, Google invaded. Your options Analysis Microsoft for decades not only defined personal productivity and team collaboration using Office, Outlook and Exchange – it kept the competition at arm’s length.…

VMworld content catalog lists live AWS services, Cross Cloud and OpenStack 4.0 The content catalog for VMworld 2017 has appeared and as usual offers a few hints about announcements at the show and the company's future plans.…

But the transport authority says that invalidates the card Killjoys at the public transport authority in the Australian State of New South Wales are warning users of stored-value-for-public-transport "Opal Card" that turning them into implants invalidates the card.…

'How would you rate your ride?' A police officer in Fayette County, Atlanta, has nabbed a murder suspect by appropriating the Lyft vehicle he figured the perp hoped to use as a getaway car.…

Australian airline QANTAS is partly offline, other carriers may be in trouble too The Amadeus airline booking platform is suffering another outage, so far mostly seen in a follow-on TITSUP (Total Inability To Support Usual Performance) hitting Australian airline Qantas.…

Four weeks, paid, to deal with family health crises Microsoft has decided that family caregivers deserve support, so it's decided to take its paid leave program global.…

This isn't ransomware – it's merry chaos Analysis It is now increasingly clear that the global outbreak of a file-scrambling software nasty targeting Microsoft Windows PCs was designed not to line the pockets of criminals, but spread merry mayhem.…

Upcoming early-access product details revealed Analysis Picture this. A little press conference with Primary Data at its headquarters in Milpitas, California, right in the armpit of Silicon Valley. CEO Lance Smith is briskly burbling away about his company, but us hacks are somewhat distracted.…

Settle down: This looks like a SNAFU, not Trump teasing techies All Daniel Stenberg wanted to do was endure about fifteen hours of air travel from Sweden so he could spend a fun week talking code at Mozilla's all-hands meeting in San Francisco. But the Moz developer and maker of the Curl data transfer tool was denied boarding in Stockholm, en route to London and then The City By The Bay.…

What could FE stand for? Fried Ears? Fearful Explosions? Flaming Emissions? Samsung's Galaxy Note 7 is about to make its comeback.…

Never a M or L when you want one, right? Astronomers looking for black holes have been baffled by the same question for decades: we've found large and small holes, but where are all the medium-sized black holes?…

Oi, tie your kangaroo down, sport ... Mad Max 2: The Roo'd Warrior ... etc etc Kangaroos continue to be the bane of self-driving cars in Australia, as automakers say they still can't figure out how to accurately detect the presence of the pouched marsupials.…

Five year march to One Login To Rule Us All still not over The Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) has rubber-stamped the government's MyGov portal, in spite of cost-overruns and a lack of performance metrics.…

Murgio gets off easy in money laundering case A kingpin of the ill-fated Coin.mx Bitcoin exchange was today handed a 66-month prison sentence for conspiracy, fraud, and money laundering.…

Tell it to the jury, judge rules Qualcomm will have to face trial against America's trade watchdog over alleged price gouging on its chip designs.…

IBM and Cisco gear? So you're saying two wrongs can make a right? IBM has found a new route for its channel into enterprise data-intensive workloads, courtesy of its Cisco VersaStack deal.…

Vid game biz failed to carry out pen-testing A small UK company that suffered a cyber attack has been fined £60,000 by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).…

What's the future of cash? Analysis Today marks the 50th anniversary of the Automated Teller Machine (ATM), the first of which was installed outside Barclays Bank, Enfield Town in north London.…

Petya or cattle? Updated A huge ‪ransomware‬ outbreak has hit major banks, utilities and telcos in Ukraine as well as victims in other countries.…