The Register

EXIF through a gift shop full of personal data In what looks like an Apple oversight, a developer has discovered that apps can access image metadata and therefore a pretty good history of iThing users' location.…

Eric Pulier alleged to have bribed execs at Australia's Commonwealth Bank to inflate earn-out payments The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Department of Justice (DoJ) have charged ServiceMesh founder Eric Pulier with attempting to defraud technology services giant of US$98 million.…

Latest lodging for Alexa has clock radio aspirations Amazon expanded its line of Echo cloud commerce intercoms on Wednesday with the introduction of Echo Spot, a spherical hodgepodge of screen, mics and speaker for communing with the company's Alexa software and demanding doorstep deliveries.…

Just 5,000 handsets have been shifted since release – pundits Android co-inventor Andy Rubin's much-hyped Essential Phone has thus far been a flop with consumers in its first weeks on the market, it is estimated.…

In Moxie we trust Encrypted call and messaging app Signal gets a lot of love in the security community. Now its developers have decided to toughen it up even more to avoid the possibility of it being turned against its users.…

How about we define the thing we're supposedly deciding on, queries Rosenworcel FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel made her presence felt at her first meeting in a year at the US communications regulator on Wednesday – when she cited an infamous Supreme Court decision over pornography to slam a report claiming there was sufficient competition in the American mobile market.…

Hirsute French hipster 'found with $500,000 in BTC' A French national and suspected online drug dealer has been collared by US government agents – after he flew to America for the World Beard and Mustache Championships.…

Battle to block Bezos from gTLD slams into big biz Analysis In an effort to block Amazon from getting the top-level domain .amazon, Brazil may have put governments on a crash course with the private sector over control of the web.…

Here's the keys to ride Vespa into the sunset Oath, the Verizon-owned parent of Yahoo!, has forsworn control of Yahoo!'s search code, known as Vespa, and turned it into an open-source project.…

Here's some code and Curl commands to get you on the path of milliblogging Twitter's plan to limit public trials of 280-character tweets has been foiled by web devs, who discovered the feature could be enabled by twits on the client-side.…

Total Inability To Support Unusual Projects Exclusive A crippling data center power failure knackered SourceForge's equipment yesterday and earlier today, knocking the site offline.…

Bridging the chasm Research There are many reasons why someone might not be using an All-Flash Array. It might be that you can’t get the budget, say, or that you think it has been over-hyped. Maybe you are sceptical about whether your application set would benefit from it, or if it would fit into your operations seamlessly.…

Mehrotra hints beyond 64-layer tech could land next year Massive revenues from DRAM and flash have made Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra a happy chief. Third-quarter revenues were good but they have just been eclipsed.…

Google and Amazon clash over YouTube on the Echo Show Google's low-intensity rivalry with Amazon has just escalated. Amazon's Echo Show speaker has been barred from playing YouTube videos.…

Adding S3 gateways to Mr Blobby's storage in the Microsoft cloud Both Caringo and Scality are adding S3 gateways between their object storage and Microsoft's Azure Blob storage.…

'Some providers still not doing enough,' says regulator Update BT and TalkTalk are the providers most moaned about, according to UK comms regulator Ofcom's quarterly whinge data between April and June – a result that will surprise no one.…

Put a Red Hat on your virtual machines and steal away Maxta has found a neat way to differentiate itself from the hyperconverged system pack; it can run vSphere and Red Hat Virtualization VMs simultaneously and convert between them.…

National Cyber Crime Unit spills on pre-2015 megahack convo Prior to its disastrous 2015 mega hack, UK ISP TalkTalk had told British spies at GCHQ that should an attack occur, its main focus would be to restore "online sports streaming", according to the head of operations at the country's National Cyber Crime Unit.…

Delisted storage firm now trading stock on OTCQB Struggling storage software company Falconstor has been delisted from the Nasdaq Stock Market and its shares are now trading on the OTC Market Group's OTCQB marketplace.…

Blue-sky thinking... no, you shut up... EasyJet has given its blessing to a mildly bonkers plan to replace airliners with electrically propelled aircraft on short-haul flights.…

65-yr-old woman being held in London The Metropolitan Police has announced the arrest of a government contractor after a tip-off.…

Hundreds earmarked for the chop Cisco is saying farewell to 310 more staff from its corporate HQ in California, according to a filing with the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) system.…

Yeah. We can do that. No problem. Regulators are warming to Google's preferred remedy to the European Commission's vertical search competition investigation, according to a briefing given to Bloomberg.…

Microsoft's general manager talks to Reg about cross-platform SQL Server Ignite “It’s a big milestone for us as a company,” general manager Rohan Kumar told us, referring to the release of SQL Server on Linux, “the biggest server product from Microsoft”, announced here at the Ignite event in Orlando.…

Gas-free drive war with WDC and Seagate ramps up again Toshiba has reached the 10TB disk drive capacity level without the help of helium, providing OEMs with an alternative to Seagate and WDC.…

Or a little historical insight for those not going OpenWorld When reports emerged early in September that Oracle was shedding hundreds of workers, it might have been dismissed as just the latest in a series of such moves. What caught the attention of industry watchers was where the axe was falling. Sources indicated those being laid off included many of the engineers responsible for its SPARC processors and Solaris operating system.…

AWS is way in front, Azure a solid second, server-makers in trouble Google is the world's number four infrastructure-as-a-service vendor, according to analyst outfit Gartner's first ever attempt at calculating market share in the field.…

In-cabin gear gets NAND assist for driver help and infotainment Samsung has 128GB and 64GB eUFS flash cards for automotive use.…

Broadcom sampling chipset that should let navigation apps tell you which lane to drive in Broadcom is now sampling silicon it says will make smartphones' SatNav systems accurate to a centimeter in 2018.…

Dot-cat referendum webpages censored amid brazen internet crackdown As a controversial referendum on the independence of Catalonia draws near, the Spanish government has expanded efforts to shut it down, even blocking access to some websites.…

Project Zero reveal you really shouldn't skip the upgrade to iOS 11 iThing owners, do not skip iOS 11: it plugs a dead-easy-to-exploit drive-by WiFi bug.…

Chap inhaled tiny toy traffic cone 40 years ago and he's been spluttering ever since The British Medical Journal has revealed a mistaken diagnosis of cancer was caused by Playmobil.…

Vacuum-maker to spend £2bn on 'radical battery electric vehicle' due on the road in 2020 Vacuum-cleaner maker Dyson has announced its intention to build a “battery electric vehicle.”…

Also says it's not the best way to save money for most people Google's decided to join AWS in the per-second billing club, point out that it's actually had this constant cloudy ka-ching thing under control since 2013 and offer advice that recommends not using its new billing scheme as your number one cost-cutting tactic.…

Code Citrix sold becomes multi-hypervisor hybrid cloud wrangler full of bursty goodness Accelerite has finally revealed what it's done with Citrix's CloudPlatform, which it acquired in January 2016.…

Full region coming in 2019. Keeping it cold should be fun! Amazon Web Services has announced it will open bit barns in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).…

Mirrors price relief offered to consumer market Updated nbn™, the company building Australia's National Broadband Networ (NBN), has adjusted its wholesale prices so that retailers offering business plans get the same price relief as previously offered for the consumer market.…

Big Red issues out-of-band patch for Apache and a few other urgent issues Oracle has stepped outside its usual quarterly security fix cycle to address the latest Apache Struts 2 vulnerability.…

Ad giant has an 'Identity Vision' and now sees it more clearly Google's acquired cloudy single-sign-on outfit Bitium for the usual undisclosed sum.…

Clinton calls hypocrisy but somewhat misses the point The US House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has sent a letter [PDF] to White House lawyers demanding details of how many of its staffers have been using private email for government business.…

President Trump can now trigger nuclear Armageddon in half the time Twitter is preparing to double its 140-character limit on tweets to 280 characters.…

Feared patent bomb defused, for the time being Facebook on Tuesday freed its React JavaScript library and its GraphQL query language from its unloved license scheme.…

Landmark build promises to be faster, slimmer, better at multi-threading Mozilla has pushed its much-hyped "Firefox Quantum" browser build into public beta.…

Dead or alive, preferably dead, you're coming with me In its ongoing quest to trap and kill Android malware, Google has, as usual, turned to machine learning – and is reporting some success.…

Could 'significantly impair cross-border transfers of information' The United States government is attempting to limit extraordinary online censorship efforts by China, complaining to the World Trade Organization that such measures will damage global trade.…

Aviation chums want personal flying device that can be flown by 'anyone, anywhere' Boeing and its pals today offered a whopping $2m (£1.49m) in prizes to anyone who can design and build a working “personal flying device."…

Yes, that's Gartner’s security consultancy of the year Monday’s news that multinational consultancy Deloitte had been hacked was dismissed by the firm as a small incident.…

Group demands compensation after scandal after scandal burns '$18bn' in investment Uber's wild ride-sharing past has returned to haunt the biz in the form of yet another lawsuit in the US.…

Next release promises nice offline features, Matlock before bedtime Microsoft has shed light on next year's preview of Office 2019, talking up the new productivity suite as a boon for those who may prefer to work outside of the cloud.…

Dedupe and hot-swap drives with monitored telemetry and predictive analytics X-IO has moved on from its ISE sealed array of disk drives to a 60-slot, hot-swap deduping all-flash array with monitored telemetry and predictive analytics.…