The Register

Verify needs to be addressed, Pope is Catholic, etc In what might seem like an exercise stating the blindingly obvious, a report by policy wonks at think tank The Institute for Government has found that gov tech transformation is "happening too slowly" and the online identity platform Verify needs some urgently intervention.…

Let’s leave the polyamorists out of this for now Reg Lectures If the recent election’s clash of centre right and a bit left leaves you cold, perhaps the prospect of libertarians versus transhumanists might make you sit up and take notice.…

Want a more secure PC? Try Windows 10 S, says CRO Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at Finnish security company F-Secure, spoke to The Reg at the launch of Sense, a consumer firewall device that aims to "secure your connected things".…

Students show all at Frankfurt HPC showdown HPC Blog The tension is rising at the ISC17 Student Cluster Competition being held this week in Frankfurt, Germany. Eleven university teams are vying for the coveted Ultimate Champion award, the Highest LINPACK award, and the Fan Favourite Prize.…

SNAFU or something more sinister going on? The Conservative Party’s 2017 manifesto was briefly deleted from its website this morning – on the same day that political Britain downs tools for the State Opening of Parliament.…

Challenging dodgy generalisations on IT spending Study One of the silliest concepts peddled by large industry analyst firms is "The CIO agenda". Listen to some of them and you would get the impression that everyone running an IT department woke up one morning and decided the priority would now be Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, grid computing, SOA, cloud, analytics, mobile, IoT, software development, DevOps, or one of the other "critical imperatives" that have been foisted on us over the years.…

WDC: Hang on ... WHAAAA.... Toshiba has reportedly picked a home-grown Japanese state-backed fund to buy its memory business, and has frozen out flash foundry joint-venture partner WDC.…

Learning lessons the hard way so you don't have to Yes, cloud might be the future but what truths lie hidden beneath this rock of certainty? You've heard the hype, pros and cons, but there's plenty the average cloud user may not have considered in the clamour to get up there. Our company recently heeded the cloud's call, and this is what we discovered.…

Strong and stable release from conservative distro Review The Debian Project has released Debian 9 after two years and, as you might expect for a work that's taken so long, it's quite an overhaul.…

Users say they can't access Child Maintenance Service Users trying to get through to the Child Maintenance Service have been unable to do so for the past two days because of problems with BT.…

'ThinkSystem' spans servers, storage and switches. HCI and Azure Stack are 'ThinkAgile' Lenovo reckons its data centre range has never had a refresh quite like it: 25 new products, a couple of new brands and a new CPU to play with as well.…

Bill Gates' cistern system uses your personal recharger Boffins in Bristol have the perfect solution to the two most common late-night problems: finding somewhere to urinate and keeping your phone charged.…

Investors insisted, board concurred, curtain fell, but bro-in-chief will remain on the board Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has resigned, according to The New York Times.…

'Stream' video vault and share-o-matic debuts in Office 365, as does a dictation bot for Office Microsoft's launched “Stream”, a cloud service perhaps best understood as a private YouTube, with extras.…

Guess which was which. Hint: Firefox now crushes trackers on Android Mozilla's announced that its “Firefox Focus” ad-busting browser has made it to Android.…

The world may need only one company where old software goes to die BMC and CA are considering a consensual acqui-merger, reports Bloomberg.…

Pushing to have 18 Qualcomm patents invalidated Apple is expanding its legal war with Qualcomm to include an attempt at having the chip designer's patents thrown out.…

Researchers explore 3D imaging using drones Video Drones can perform three-dimensional imaging of objects through walls using Wi-Fi, a team of researchers demonstrated for the first time.…

App Engine and Datastore coming real soon now, no word on when other services will land Google Cloud Platform's Sydney region is now open for business … but missing lots of services the company's cloud offers elsewhere.…

Redmond readies the ground for Kaspersky's EU antitrust suit Windows 10 does disable some third-party security software, Microsoft has admitted, but because of compatibility – not competitive – issues.…

Dr Katie Mack explains the SkyHopper cubesat project to El Reg A couple of years after it was first conceived, a Melbourne University-led infrared astronomy cubesat proposal called SkyHopper is gathering momentum.…

Magnanimous gesture that won't cost the bros anything Uber is looking to mend fences with its drivers by adding the option for riders to tip.…

Report shows driver took a hands-off approach to driving American crash investigators have thrown open their files on a fatal motorway collision between a Tesla Model S and a truck, confirming Tesla’s earlier statement that its autopilot failed to notice the truck blocking the car’s path.…

Somewhere in there is the germ of a good idea Monday afternoon saw the first meeting of the "American Technology Council" at the White House, during which most of the country's top tech CEOs gathered around to talk about what could be done to modernize the US government's abysmal IT systems.…

Fraudsters love America's easy-to-hack card slurpers Hacking attacks against sales terminals have risen by nearly a third last year, and the US is still leading the way in being insecure.…

Registry operator points finger at US embassy staffer The operator of Costa Rica's .cr internet registry has formally complained that it is being harassed by the US government over The Pirate Bay domain on its system.…

And a quick look at the chips' encrypted RAM tech Updated Here it is: the official lineup of AMD's Epyc processors, which will go toe to toe with Intel's Xeons that utterly dominate the data center world.…

Switchzilla wants to make 'intuitive' switches that charge you by the month Cisco is once again making a push to tie its networking hardware deeper into the compute space, this time with "intuitive" boxes that are better able to analyze and control network traffic.…

Global Skype outages spill over onto a second day Microsoft thought it had fixed global outages for Skype that began yesterday, but so far, no such luck. Skype is still going through ups and downs.…

♪ I'm gonna wait... til the midnight hour, when there's no one else around A UK hacker who stole £100,000 from his bank after spotting a loophole in its systems has been jailed for 16 months.…

Redmond to support fledgling firms at Station F initiative Today, Microsoft announced that it'll be throwing its resources behind fledgling AI devs at a soon-to-launch startup space in Paris called Station F.…

Document database company has Google’s Firebase in its sights MongoDB’s latest offering, Stitch, is aiming to appeal to developers that don’t have the time - or the inclination - to write boilerplate code.…

Education provider has 'ambitious growth plans' IT training company QA has been bought out by Europe's largest private equity firm, CVC Capital Partners.…

Outgoing Garry Quinn hands reins to Intermap's Todd Oseth FalconStor CEO Gary Quinn has resigned with Todd Oseth coming in to run this somewhat sickly storage software firm.…

Shoppers across UK forced to leave the house An unspecified UK-wide technical glitch related to the food picking and packaging process left thousands of Tesco online grocery punters without their deliveries today, the retailer has told us.…

It's just the future of democracy at stake, no biggie The use of algorithms and bots to spread political propaganda is "one of the most powerful tools against democracy", top academics have warned.…

A flight to nowhere, complete with streaming Netflix Pics How do you tell the world you’re building smart(er) aircraft tech? If you’re Honeywell, you put a bunch of journalists in the front of your converted testbed airliner and take them for a flight 20,000 feet over eastern England, that’s how.…

UK prisoner escort scandal? They paid that money back! Business Process Outsourcing behemoth Serco is part of the NewPathways consortium that will sketch out, erect and run the largest prison in Australia under a mega-contract dished out today.…

Has anyone told Qualcomm, Intel and the gang? Comment The smartphone chip market it dominates is nevertheless an increasingly challenging one for Qualcomm. Slowing growth, litigation and rising Chinese competition are among its problems, but also the trend for the largest, richest handset makers to design their own chips.…

Designing for the future Broadcast Massively scalable server, storage and cloud orchestration architectures can provide an organisation with a plethora of options when it comes to building new IT systems and services. But they can also add to the age old headache as IT and business decision-makers look to deliver on their business goals.…

Some times it really is, though Open Source Insider I recently received an email from an old shared hosting provider. The host wanted to "upgrade" my account to a new server. I had long since stopped using the account for all but one client site that ran a legacy version of Django. I built it ages ago, but it was done. It worked fine and the client was still happy with it. No big deal, I thought, they'll move it to a new server and it'll keep on running.…

They kept that quiet: Software for AHV app data protection Comtrade Software’s HYCU is an app-aware data protection product tailored for Nutanix’s Acropolis hypervisor (AHV) with fast deployment, backup and recovery.…

Verily joins Novartis and the European Investment Fund Venture capital group Medicxi has announced a $300m late-stage life sciences fund that is backed by Novartis, the European Investment Fund (EIF) and Verily Life Sciences, the healthcare division of Google's holding company Alphabet.…

China packs a one-two punch at the top, UK Met office scores 11th place, Australia 111th A GPU injection to the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre's Piz Daint supercomputer has seen it hit 19,590 TFLOPS and in the process bump the “Titan” machine at the USA's Oak Ridge National Laboratory off the podium for just the third time in the history of the TOP500 list of the world's mightiest supercomputers.…

Managers told to hit budgets, even if customers bleed IBM's efforts to crimp the cost of its contact workforce are continuing, The Register has learned.…

What is this: Storage insecurity day? Asking cos Acronis has the same problem The CERT Coordination Centre at Carnegie Mellon University has just popped two items onto storage admins to-do lists.…

Unlocked racks. No 2FA. No access control lists. No wonder Snowden got away with it Second-rate opsec remained pervasive at the United States' National Security Agency, according to an August 2016 review now released under Freedom of Information laws.…

Fancy a cheap cloud Xeon, guv'nor? Bargain price, but just these few Cloud computing prices come down regularly, but IBM's just offered a price cut of a sort The Register hasn't seen before – a temporary discount on bare metal servers running just one CPU family.…

Talked scum down from $4.4m after they waltzed through unpatched legacy mess A South Korean web hosting company is forking out just over US$1 million to ransomware scum after suffering more than eight days of nightmare.…

4.12 might emerge next week, 4.14 dubbed next LTS release Linux lords Linus Torvalds and Greg Kroah-Hartman have clarified Linux's short term future.…