The Register

'Increased error rates' is the new 'outage', according to Bezos' bit-barn bods Amazon Web Services is scrambling to recover from a cockup at its facility in Virginia, US, that is causing its S3 cloud storage to fail.…

Souless contraptions in the home or at work are a risk – not to humanity Common security flaws in mainstream robotic technologies leave them wide open to attack, infosec researched have warned.…

Big wins push sales to record high as expenses push losses to... record high It was a record-breaking year for finance and HR cloud purveyor Workday for all the right and the wrong reasons: sales reached a new high aided by Oracle’s disruptive buy of NetSuite, but losses soared too.…

Look how good I look underneath my Cloud HALO Object storage house Scality is offering a 100 per cent data availability guarantee. How so?…

The secure, self destructing mobe for heads of state... and big enterprises MWC There’s exclusive and then there’s exclusive. If you need to ask how much the DarkMatter Katim phone costs, you’re not a serious customer. The first handset to come from the UAE-based security company doesn’t have a price.…

Connected device expert on post-Borg IoT Interview Macario Namie, head of IoT strategy at Cisco Jasper, has been working in the connected device space "before it was known as IoT” and was with Jasper for nine years before it was acquired by the networking borg in 2016 for $1.4bn (£1.1bn).…

Indian subcontractor kept transcripts on insecure server A private health firm has been fined £200,000 after fertility patients’ confidential conversations leaked online.…

IronKey flash drive patent was at stake A jury has found that flash-flinger Imation must pay $11m damages to ioengine for patent infringement.…

Exec professes love for 'colocation hubs'... just 'not sure everyone else will' Exclusive IBM is clamping down on its remote workers in Britain, with the Global Technology Services team being centralised in one of a number of as yet unnamed “colocation hubs”.…

Exec professes love for 'colocation hubs'... just 'not sure everyone else will' Exclusive IBM is clamping down on its remote workers in Britain, with the big iron and storage teams being centralised in one of a number of as yet unnamed “colocation hubs”.…

Just two weeks to save £100s on DevOps/Containers extravaganza You’ve got less than two weeks to snag early bird tickets for Continuous Lifecycle London and save yourself a packet on three days of the best in DevOps, Containers, Continuous Delivery and Agile.…

Keep the devs happy, or Microsoft and Google will catch you Amazon Web Services became the 800-pound cloud gorilla by catering to developers. It expects to own the container crown with the exact same strategy, touting convenience and productivity gains to users of its EC2 Container Service (ECS). There are signs, however, that this fight won’t be as simple, and that a cross-cloud container option like Kubernetes could be the spoiler to Amazon’s steady march.…

Of 227 snooping local authorities, only a third cared how it might affect the public More than half of the UK’s local authorities have used body-worn cameras, with only a third of them having considered the privacy impact on the public, according to best practice.…

ARM bought a startup just like this one last week A few days after ARM bought a couple of Internet of Things startups focused on digital signal processing and integrated IoT chip offerings, a Hong Kong-US joint venture has wheeled out something that looks very similar.…

We only do the last few kms, CEO Bill Morrow tells Senate Estimates The chief executive officer of nbn™, the organisation building and operating Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN), has told Senate Estimates that retailers need to pay more attention to their networks in order to avoid disappointing customers.…

Which sounds great! Shame annual sales will be less in 2021 than they were in 2016 More bad news for the PC and tablet market: analyst IDC says the five-year sales slump is set to extend to a decade of decline.…

Moto puts Mods on speed MWC While recent modular phone experiments from Google and LG have crashed and burned, Motorola’s more sober effort is the one that’s paying off.…

Crypto shouldn't hold back cops, sniffs commission The technology industry has hit back at proposed plans by France and Germany to force EU member states to backdoor encryption for the police.…

Talking robots! My word, has science gone too far? MWC Years ago, Sony was one of the first of the old tier-one electronics giants to get fully behind Android. With its multimedia prowess, its amazing R&D pipeline and its refined design aesthetic, Sony should have ruled the roost. But it was outfought by its vulgar South Korean rival Samsung, for that's what the public wanted.…

What's it like – and how did it happen? MWC Bill Clinton was still US President when the last pocket computer that you could touch type on came out. Back then, almost everyone accessed the internet at home on a dialup modem, not broadband, and no phone yet sported a colour screen or a camera. It was a different era.…

Surface Book rival costs north of two grand, certainly ain't a cheap trick MWC Luxury brand Porsche Design has announced, at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, its first 2-in-1 computer: a Windows 10 device that will be available in April 2017 for €2,795 or £2,395.…

You always wanted an autonomous T-shirt cannon, right? Here you go Repo Roundup To kick off this week's Repo Roundup, in which we trawl online code repositories so you don't have to, Facebook's emitted a prophecy, and we don't mean Mark Zuckerberg's manifesto: it's a forecasting procedure for R and Python, designed to work with the kind of datasets Facebook slurps.…

What... is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow? MWC SanDisk has slapped a price sticker and availability date on its 256GB 3D NAND flash chip that'll be packaged into A1-class microSDXC cards, as well as USB sticks and other formats.…

Allowing unauthenticated OS re-install sure feels like a bug ... Cisco has reiterated that its Smart Install feature is not a bug and not a vulnerability, and to prove it's not, it's built a tool to help sysadmins block it.…

App scrapes content into devices for later viewing, even offline, advances Moz mission to make web accessible Mozilla has acquired Read It Later, Inc. the developer of a web clipping app called “Pocket”.…

Current chief Frank Slootman steps aside in sudden but orderly transition ServiceNow has a new CEO: John Donahoe, formerly CEO of eBay and of Bain & Company, was appointed on Monday after the current holder of the positions, Frank Slootman, decided the time was right to make the transition.…

Voice messages and account info slurped, held to ransom Two million voice recordings of kids and their families were exposed online and repeatedly held to ransom – because the maker of microphone-fitted, internet-connected stuffed toys used an insecure MongoDB installation.…

Get patching – fix available now Bored hacker looking for fun? We couldn't possibly suggest you attack the latest vulnerability in ESET's antivirus software, because it's too basic to offer any challenge at all.…

'Doxing' of Centrelink complainant hurts open government say privacy experts The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner is investigating whether it's acceptable for an Australian government department to release personal data when seeking to correct the public record when clients recount their interactions with government agencies.…

Axed workers vow to spend last day kicking up a fuss in the street Dozens of IT workers slated to be laid off from their jobs at the University of California, San Francisco are planning a protest this week.…

Configurable switch on software spotted in latest Insider build A feature in the Windows Insider Preview Build 15042 allows administrators to block the installation of any Win32 application that is not fetched from Microsoft's software marketplace.…

Oral arguments critical of North Carolina law that blocks criminal perverts from social media The US Supreme Court looks set to kill off a North Carolina law that prevents sex offenders from accessing social media sites, for being unconstitutional.…

2018? No. And we're assuming they'll be back in one piece Two unnamed and presumably very well-heeled people have booked a flight around the Moon using unproven hardware from SpaceX.…

Eugene Kaspersky looks forward to a new darker dawn Apple's Mac operating system may be the safer choice – but only because cybercriminals can't get their hands on people who know how to exploit it.…

TLS 1.3 takes down Chromebooks, PCs Updated The availability of Transport Layer Security protocol version 1.3 was supposed to make network encryption faster and more secure.…

Go to your brother, kill him with your gun. Leave him dying at his wedding, dying in the sun After more than 20 years of service, the US Air Force fly boys have today announced that the MQ-1 Predator drone is going to be phased out within a year.…

Redmond tosses $1.2m to settle suit over leaky receipts Microsoft will cough up $1.2m to settle a class-action lawsuit after its retail stores leaked a little too much information about shoppers' payment cards.…

Retro computing fans mod ancient Texas Instruments machines Feature The retro computing and gaming scene is seeing no shortage of interest these days. Old fans and curious millennials are flocking to take nostalgia trips on the popular consoles of the 1980s.…

ACAS conciliation service talks worked well, then Unionised staff at Fujitsu are downing tools for 24 hours from midnight in protest over cuts to jobs, pay and pensions. It appears the conciliation service ACAS failed to find a common ground that suited all parties.…

Enforcement officers bully their way to catching 28 offenders per week for £15,000 bonus Capita, to whom the BBC has outsourced its licence fee shakedown efforts, has been found to be targeting vulnerable people as part of an aggressive bonus scheme for its collectors.…

Also foresees terrifying 10bn-strong robot army. Hey ho MWC Japanese mega-corp Softbank expects its processor-designer subsidiary ARM to fire out a trillion chips for the Internet of Things over the next two decades, its CEO told Mobile World Congress.…

Also foresees terrifying 10bn-strong robot army. Hey ho MWC Japanese firm Softbank expects its subsidiary ARM to fire out a trillion chips for the Internet of Things over the next two decades, its CEO told Mobile World Congress.…

Hybrid pipes and services for Amazon-sippers Nimble Storage claims Azure and AWS clouds aren't ideal for enterprise transaction apps but says it can fix that by wrapping them inside Nimble Cloud Volumes for a $0.10/GB/month starting price.…

Part of trend by operators desperate to reinvent themselves MWC Frenchie telco Orange is reinventing itself as a bank next month, with plans to offset lacklustre revenue by branching out into the rest of Europe and possibly the UK.…

Plus, an extra 50 'exceptional' folk can get a Tech Nation passport The UK government is considering a five-year post-Brexit visa scheme that would allow more foreign employees – including those in the tech sector – to work in the UK, according to reports.…

Yep, half a million The NHS has been accused of covering up a large data loss involving the loss or mislaying of more than half a million pieces of confidential information.…

Smothers back panel in LEDs ... now do we stand out? MWC Alcatel, a brand of Hong Kong-based TCL Communication, has announced the A5 LED at Mobile World Congress, which it claims is "the world’s first interactive LED-covered smartphone."…

Parents today can't deal with bullying, sex, eating-disorders and the sort, because cyber The government has today announced a “major new drive on internet safety” for which it will enlist the world's largest technology companies in order to make the UK the “safest place in the world for young people to go online.”…

Psion, was a lion, in iron (Reg readers called it) Exclusive The original Psion designers have returned to put the classic British pocket computer in a modern body.…

Trio of Atomic edge boxen to sharpen the Things' bite Dell has developed the Edge Gateway 3000 Series of boxes so IoT customers can do some data analysis at the edge of their IoT network, to make real-time local decisions about the operations of IoT-monitored machinery and reduce bandwidth needs for data transfer to a central site.…