The Register

Prenda Law's John Steele done for fraud after courts ordered repayments of extorted funds One of the architects of the notorious Prenda Law copyright-porn scam, John Steele, has admitted that he and Paul Hansmeier made US$6 million out of the operation.…

Five years? What's the matter? Can't afford Prime? Video Blue Origin, the orbital delivery service funded by Amazon supremo Jeff Bezos, has taken its first satellite launch booking. We're told the sat will be put into orbit in 2021 or 2022 – basically, once Bezos has finished building the rocket to do the job.…

New browser also crumbs cookies and finds new ways to speed web apps The Mozilla Foundation has has given the world the fifty-second version of the Firefox browser, complete with some significant changes.…

Unless you want your backups to be in 'Someone Else's Cloud' Western Digital is preparing patches for its My Cloud storage devices because they can be easily hijacked from across the internet or network.…

Bad code or backdoor? Whichever it was, patch it now Chinese security camera/DVR company Dahua is pushing firmware patches after accusations by a security researcher that a swathe of its products carried a back door.…

'Will we do this the easy way, or will we do it the hard way?' Spiral Toys, makers of the insecure Bluetooth-connected stuffed animals dubbed CloudPets, is being grilled for information by a US Senator.…

Bad requirements make bad systems, episode 1,001 When Australia's Department of Human services decided to create its now-notorious “robo-debt” system, it did so without consulting one of its major data sources, the Australian Tax Office.…

Convicted fraudster says he was given personal details in records requests Prison authorities in Ohio, US, mistakenly provided the social security numbers of thousands of inmates to a man convicted of identity theft.…

Saving the furniture to burn later Bankruptcy-beset Avaya is cashing out of its networking business for just $100m, with Extreme Networks the buyer.…

Nest adds two-factor auth – where's the rest of 'em? Smart home poster child Nest has stolen a march on the rest of the smart-home industry by adding two-factor authentication to its systems.…

Wall Street greed meets Silicon Valley delusion – and they all get rich First, we'll look at some quick facts at Snap – the Los Angeles-based developer of Snapchat that debuted on the stock market on Thursday, March 2.…

Kalanick vows to bring in a grownup to knock sense into toxic, sexist upstart Following a string of damaging revelations about its atrocious corporate culture, Uber is seeking fresh help to clean up its act.…

Cloudy software giant marries Einstein to tech behemoth's Watson Analysis A partnership between IBM and Salesforce involving the namesakes of two of the most influential people in the worlds of business and science. It must have sounded like genius in the PR brainstorming session.…

Upstart got tired of grinding out sales against deepening yearly losses Analysis In buying Nimble Storage for $1.2bn, HPE has signaled that it needs a complementary all‑flash array architecture to its 3PAR StoreServ arrays.…

You could also have uncertain costs and lose handy powered, fibred FTTN cabinets nbn™, the organisation that builds and operates Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN), appear to be escalating its efforts to rebut those who call for it to abandon its fibre to the network build.…

وای نه. ما واقعا به دنبال به جلو به که روتر Chinese giant ZTE has been fined $900m by the US government for skirting trade blocks by selling comms hardware to Iran.…

Nothing to fear, citizens. Keep consuming. Keep smiling WikiLeaks has dumped online what appears to be a trove of CIA documents outlining the American murder-snoops' ability to spy on people.…

MongoDB Atlas to lift interest, maybe? MongoDB has announced a free tier for its DBaaS offering Atlas, as it continues to sound out the incumbents' customers who might be looking to save a bit of money.…

HyperFlex 2x virtual advantage hyped Cisco's HyperFlex hyperconverged products can support more than twice the number of VMs than other HCI systems while maintaining high performance, according to tests by ESG [PDF].…

Nice chunk of change FireEye is close to paying $10.3m to settle a class-action lawsuit alleging that the security firm misled investors about the effectiveness of its security technology.…

Probably won't be built in Blighty, sadly Jaguar Land Rover is to resurrect the venerable old Defender – and it may be built abroad, according to media reports.…

Web hosting services supplier vanishes Web hosting services at Fast.co.uk are out of action in what would appear to be the final nail in the supplier's coffin.…

Flash array maker to give infrastructure biz a shot in the arm Not content with buying SimpliVity, HPE has signed a "definitive" agreement to gobble Nimble Storage for $1.2bn.…

We don't know what's caused it, but it's probably a cyberwar with aliens living among us Some unknowable terror has struck at the heart of the 21st century's communications infrastructure, as complaints mount regarding the global unavailability of Microsoft services, including email and authentication.…

If you've got 40 Bitcoin burning a hole in your pocket... Cybercriminals are attempting to flog a supposedly undetectable Mac malware strain on the dark web for 40BTC ($50,000) a pop.…

Want that promotion? Better improve your performance in the sack A healthy sex life at home is apparently linked to better performance at work, according to a study by Oregon State University.…

Einstein hopes to make artificial alleged intelligence accessible Salesforce's Spring 17 release has arrived with Einstein inside, software that its creators hope will live up to its rather clever namesake.…

PR 101: How not to head off an embarrassing investigation + Comment Facebook reported BBC journalists to the police after the reporters accidentally emailed them images of child sexual abuse, the social network's PR has alleged.…

BBC probe reveals scale of the scam Hundreds of staff were hired by scammers in Indian call centres to defraud TalkTalk customers, according to a BBC report revealing the extent of the scam.…

Flash supply shortages drove up prices and profits Samsung was top of the charts as NAND prices rose in the fourth 2016 quarter due to supply shortages, with suppliers’ profits peaking according to TrendForce.…

Not EVIL, not FIRST, but yes... it's your data and they're using it According to a story doing the rounds, psychometric big data pushed Britain into Brexit and Trump on to America. The winning sides adopted a method developed at the University of Cambridge to psychometrically profile people by using publicly available data including Facebook "likes". They used these to create devastatingly effective digital advertising and targeted millions of voters' psychological traits.…

Investors not happy, nominate seven independent directors Quantum's board has caved in to activist investor VIEX and agreed to reconstitute itself with new independent directors.…

'Income will be an important part to us surviving' Two northern councils have teamed up to sell technology and services commercially.…

Small firm claims calf birth safety boost with M2M monitor Internet of Things devices mounted on cows’ tails are responsible for 150,000 safe births of calves, if the developer and Vodafone are to be believed.…

Plans to chuck more cash once it's merged up with OneWeb Comment Softbank has arrived as the unlikely white knight to save Luxembourg-based internet-satellite provider Intelsat from running out of cash. It has injected debt funding and proposed a merger through its LEO satellite firm OneWeb. Now bondholders for Intelsat must give the deal the go-ahead.…

And this time VersaStack's all about hybrid and/or cloud with software-defined storage IBM and Cisco are having another crack at converged infrastructure, by releasing a few new configurations for their joint VersaStack rigs.…

The world's big three PC vendors tell us what they expect you will buy this year Yes, PC sales are now moribund. But someone's going to buy about 280 million of them this year. Lenovo, HP Inc and Dell look like being the ones to sell them to businesses, because all have rosy outlooks for PC sales despite the long sales slide across the industry. The Register therefore asked the three companies, universally rated as the top three vendors by volume. what they've got in store for you this year.…

State of Kerala turns on WiFi network, promises to fund 1,500 startups and grow 175k IT jobs The Indian State of Kerala, home to 34 million people, has declared its citizens have a right to internet access.…

Dutch minister, International Labor Office signal they've had enough with EPO dysfunction Time is running out for European Patent Office president Benoit Battistelli.…

Software Guard Extensions are supposed to hide data. But the 'Prime+Probe attack' fixes that A researcher who in January helped highlight possible flaws in Intel's Software Guard Extensions' input-output protection is back, this time with malware running inside a protected SGX enclave.…

'Cloud Container Builder' offers 120 minutes of container creation, for any platform Google's found another way to wrap developers more closely into its warm embrace: a cloudy software build environment it reckons should be free for most users.…

It's time for you lot to figure out what's going on up there on TRAPPIST's Earth-like planets Astronomers and the astro-curious but software-savvy will be hovering over a download link waiting for midday Tuesday (US Eastern Time), when Kepler data for the TRAPPIST-1 system is published.…

Spammers hoard contact details on millions of netizens, we can non-exclusively reveal The “1.4 billion identity leak” that was hyped up before the weekend involved, no, not a database ransacking at Facebook, YouTube, or anything that important.…

Data-destroying code moves on from Middle East, now rampaging through Europe Researchers following up on last November's re-emergent Shamoon malware attacks have found something even nastier.…

Attention web scribes: Six nasty flaws found in publishing tool Internet scribblers who use WordPress must update their installation of the publishing tool following the disclosure and patching of six security holes.…

Sucked in by tech world's vacuum for $614m Investors in the cloudy app security biz Veracode are going to be celebrating after CA Technologies agreed to buy it up for $614m in cash.…

You snooze, you lose Video A computer security outfit claims to have plugged an information leak in Windows that was publicly revealed by Google before Microsoft had a patch ready. Could this third-party patching become a trend?…

iVote's proxy issues certs – and decrypts data – in America The Western Australian government is pushing back against concerns about the security of its implementation of the iVote electoral system.…

Electronics retailer once again sees liquidation looming The company that arose from RadioShack's 2015 bankruptcy saga could soon itself be filing for bankruptcy.…

Cable giant nine-figures lighter after ripping off voice-call tech Sprint has been awarded $139.8m in damages after a jury found that Time Warner Cable infringed on five of its patents related to voice-over-IP calling systems.…