The Register

If we change the definition of 'time crystal', so scratch that Doctor Who screenplay, okay? A new quantum state of matter has been experimentally observed for the first time, according to two papers published in Nature.…

The PaaS plot is thickening with big data, AI and the cross-application workflow creation SAP probably isn't high on the list of companies you'd contemplate as a host of a virtual machine in the cloud, but the company's just doubled down on a service that offers just that.…

'Richard's iPhone' could be anybody's, but it's easy to find out which Richard's it is If you must give your devices names, please don't leak them on the Internet.…

Recently-dimmed South Australia plans grid-scale batteries and gas, gas, gas Sorry, Elon Musk: if you want to ship 100MW or so of battery so Atlassian's founder Mike Cannon-Brookes can save the Australian State of South Australia, you'll have to go through the boring process of a public tender.…

Now that we can spot things the size of a fridge 380,000km away, dodging debris or asteroids should be easier In 2009, a lunar orbiter launched by India went quiet and never heard from again. Fast-forward eight years and NASA say it's spotted it using an Earth-based radar.…

Which is why lucky Nexus owners have had two OS updates in a week Last week's Android security update broke Android's Pay for some Nexus 6 users, so it was pulled and re-posted.…

Canuck tax and stats outages revealed as patch pauses Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) says its online services were taken offline over the weekend so it could patch the Apache Struts 2 vulnerability.…

Windows giant approached, Google, Apple next, we hope Last week, WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange said he would hand over the CIA hacking tools that fell into his lap to various technology companies before making the exploits public. We're told he has at least reached out to one tech corp.…

Windows giant approached, Google, Apple next, we hope Last week, WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange said he would hand over the CIA hacking tools that fell into his lap to various technology companies before making the exploits public. We're told he has at least reached out to one tech corp.…

'High risk' gTLDs pondered by money-loving DNS overseer For five years, more than a dozen companies have been waiting to hear whether they will be able to run the generic top-level domains .corp, .home and .mail. And this month they finally got their answer: we're still thinking about it.…

Greater transparency about snooping, tracking needed In light of the contrast between widely observed personal security routines such as locking the door at night and more carefree behavior online, Mozilla decided to interrogate its community to find out what people think about security, encryption, and privacy.…

Ex-employee turned whistleblower is $10m richer CA Inc will cough up $45m to end allegations it overcharged American taxpayers while offering discounts to companies.…

DataSphere's claims – make believe or real? Analysis Primary Data has updated its storage silo-converging DataSphere product, and says it’s ready for mainstream enterprise use, not just test and dev. The new release can save millions of dollars, handle billions of files and accelerate Isilon and NetApp filers.…

Mining social media accounts is our job, Uncle Sam Facebook and its snap-sharing app Instagram have updated their terms and conditions to bar developers from scanning profiles for surveillance purposes.…

Sensor maker gets a massive payday as Chipzilla gobbles up more non-x86 tech Intel will buy autonomous car-sensor company Mobileye for a whopping $15 billion – more than a third over what the company is worth.…

Firm's boss says customer data was not exposed The IoT has thrown up a fresh set of vulnerabilities, this time in a telepresence robot from Double Robotics.…

She won't lead Altaba, she may pop up at the US telco, she will pocket $23m, though Marissa Mayer won't lead the remains of her beleaguered Yahoo! once telco giant Verizon gobbles up its core assets, it was announced Monday.…

Windows as an adspam service? Microsoft's Department of Annoying The Users has been quiet since the end of the GWX scheme.…

'National security' apparently an issue +Comment Potential buyers of Toshiba’s memory business sale could be restricted by Japanese government national security concerns.…

Code red on code-fix rates Patching rates went down in 2016 despite an increase in availability of security patches, according to a new study out today.…

Nimble-enriched HPE nears NetApp in all-flash frog jump +Comment It is only one quarter, but IDC’s latest enterprise storage numbers show IBM’s flash array revenues have overtaken those of Pure Storage, putting that IPO’d company in fifth place in the market.…

See, we do want to stay in Blighty really Vodafone is to hire 2,100 more staffers in what appears to be a growing trend by telcos to improve customer service by bringing call centre roles back to Blighty.…

But it was the weekend... Events We’ve extended our early bird ticket offer for Continuous Lifecycle London, giving you till the end of this week to save big time on our three day spectacular spanning the best in DevOps, Containers, Agile and Continuous Delivery.…

Radiation dose-measuring firm took months to let Welsh trust know The personal information of thousands of medical staff in Wales were stolen following a breach of an IT contractor's server.…

Deal worth £1.3bn over seven years, says union Lloyds Banking Group is to offshore nearly 2,000 IT jobs as part of its shift to IBM, according to the Lloyds Trade Union.…

Yup, it's the Internet of Dildos again A US teledildonics company – if you’re wondering whether that means what it looks like it means, yes it does – has settled a privacy infringement lawsuit for $3.75m.…

'We need to be careful here' Exclusive The Home Office is warning staff and contractors not to tweet or retweet negative posts about Donald Trump, in an email about its social media guidance seen by The Register.…

'We don't need to raise more money for… ever' Cloudera will make its initial public offering this year, reports suggest, bringing on board Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America to début at a targeted at $4.1bn.…

Sixty-eight DSSDers getting permanently laid off in May The state of California's Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) system shows that 68 DSSD staff are being laid off.…

Weekend's over, here's some info to impress colleagues It's a brand new week. We know you're all dying to get back to work. Here's a load of enterprise storage info to kickstart your Monday.…

We're coming to America Analysis In the end, after a year waiting for the service, BritFlix has become BritBox, an OTT service which the BBC promised a while back, as a follow-on to its failed global iPlayer initiative. This will have been stimulated by the relatively new relationship between AMC Networks and BBC Worldwide – effectively AMC said (to OTT): "Come on in, the water's fine".…

It was supposed to be a 40,000-ton US supply ship on the day, though The Ministry of Defence has spent around £200m rebuilding a jetty at HM Naval Base Portsmouth ready for the arrival of HMS Queen Elizabeth later this year. El Reg got invited to watch an American supply ship test it out.…

Might not be everyone's best option, but at least we're not going to Brussels Analysis When Ofcom announced it had finally reached a settlement with BT over the future of Openreach on Friday, you could practically hear the collective sigh of relief.…

Efforts to engage women with STEM are useless if 'Bro culture' means they face years of harassment and frustration Over the last few years we’ve watched parents, educators and mentors everywhere working hard to get women into science, technology engineering and maths careers. Those efforts are succeeding: the number of women going studying engineering at the tertiary level has begun to arc upward. This is a good thing.…

Real-time video search for weapons looking possible Artificial intelligence has the potential to take over mundane, boring tasks such as driving, scheduling meetings and transcribing speech. Now there's another job that can be added to the list: detecting handguns in videos.…

Visa paperwork is due April 1, but Sean Spicer says visa needs 'comprehensive look' United States president Donald Trump appears to have gone slow on his campaign pledge to reform H-1B visas, the category of working visa that tech firms often use to bring skilled workers to America.…

Boffins demo withholding attack that could work on one ASIC and make an Evil Genius™ rich Bitcoin's reward mechanism is based on publishing a solution to the block chain. What if an Evil Genius™ reversed this, and rewarded miners for withholding their solutions?…

Microsoft's also advancing code cleanup tool DevSkim Repo Roundup Welcome again to Repo Roundup, in which The Reg trawls online code repositories to let you know about the fun, the useful or the inexplicable.…

Tax office tight-lipped about what it's just patched Canada's taxman has restored online services it took down over the weekend to respond to unspecified vulnerabilities.…

Linux 4.11 rc 2 is out, but not until after a little terse instruction on how to contribute Linux kernel developers have again given Linus Torvalds cause for complaint.…

CommVault and Veeam both sign up in a week, which Cisco says is a total co-incidence Cisco's pals are excited that The Borg has signed them up for new data protection bundles.…

Submission on extending metadata access proposes making lawyers aware of costs before they subpoena Telstra has put a new wrinkle on Australia's simmering data retention debate by suggesting that it charges for access to retained telecommunications sought by civil litigants.…

Handsets leave the factory clean, then get dragged through the mud before they reach you Smartphones from Samsung, LG, Xiaomi, ZTE, Oppo, Vivo, Asus and Lenovo have been spotted sporting malware they apparently carried when they were shipped.…

Five-year plan proposes to explain why you're seeing that ad and the fake news it leads to Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, has penned a 28th-birthday letter for his creation in which he identifies three trends he thinks are harming the web, and explains how the Web Foundation that he heads will seek to implement his ideas.…

Document hoarding 'must be deterred for the sake of intelligence community' Mohan Nirala, 52, a former employee of the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, received a prison sentence of 12 months and a day on Friday for storing national defense information in violation of the law.…

Industrial bot builders, installers, maintainers blamed for horrific accident The family of a repair technician killed in an auto parts factory accident is suing five robotics companies they say are responsible.…

If you're using an 8-character password, you may just as well not bother Jeff Atwood, founder of the popular coding site Stack Overflow, has published an extended and entertaining rant about the lamentable state of password policy among developers.…

DHS report shows the limits of bonkers budget-busting plan The US Department of Homeland Security used software to scan social media accounts of people visiting America, but it didn't work properly.…

Light touch regulation philosophy runs up against political reality Analysis The ideological goal of "light touch regulation" as proposed by the new head of the US FCC has hit a barrier: cybersecurity.…

Give us your genes or pay 50% more for company healthcare Amid the attention on the new US administration's healthcare plan, a law has been proposed that would force employees to hand over their genetic information if they want company health insurance.…