The Register

Street-beating protector and archiver basks in analyst love After three quarters of losses, Commvault made a $3.2m profit in its final fiscal 2017 quarter, just enough to tip the full year into profit.…

Proposals by watchdog call for further crackdown on misleadings ads Broadband providers may have to ensure at least half of customers can receive advertised top line speeds, under a proposed crackdown on consumers being misled.…

Please, please come back So desperate is the UK government to attract IT contractors in the wake of controversial changes to IR35 legislation, it is advertising roles as explicitly outside the tweaks. In capital letters.…

Clients: We need more compute. Redmond: 'Go to Canada' Exclusive Microsoft's public cloud business is experiencing growing pains – fresh deployments are being held up by insufficient rack space in the UK data centres that host Azure.…

Won't someone think of the children? They're bloody lightweights! New figures on British drinking habits from the Office of National Statistics show teetotalism continues to rise, with our prudent youth leading the way in moderate alcohol consumption.…

Meet the artist who helped shape Watchmen, Batman and, yes, the drokkin' LAW himself Say the words "Judge" and "Dredd" and one name should rather forcefully present itself.…

HPE ProLiant and Cisco UCS-C for now, with more to come and an opex spending plan too Nutanix has decided the time is right to sell more software, inking deals that will see its hyperconverged software-defined-everything stack sold with servers by HPE and Cisco.…

High-end CPUs prone to randomly running near thermal limit Owners of Intel's new i7-7700 processors say the chips have been randomly revving up to extremely high temperatures, and Chipzilla won't give the issue so much as a second look.…

Space agency has US$55k in prizes to those who can accelerate old code NASA wants scientific computer experts to take a look at one of its oldest software suites in the hope they can speed it up.…

We're gonna make 'em an offer they can't refuse After Tuesday's big launch of Windows 10 S, it emerged the software will force people to use Edge and Bing. How can that be?…

Tiny impacts don't smash sats, but the energy they produce might break electronics Space scientists have long known that impacts too small to pierce a craft's skin can still damage the electronics inside, by creating electromagnetic pulses. Why those pulses happen, however, is still not well understood.…

President Jeff Cotten named interim CEO, mere months after company went private Rackspace CEO Taylor Rhodes has decided to leave the company he's led since late 2014.…

If you're going to steal secret silicon designs, it's a bit of a giveaway to hang around the office making copies An engineer from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has been arrested trying to leave the country for a new job in China.…

Sigh ... people just leave it on without blocking the port world+dog knows it uses. So patch it or close it, people A 60 byte payload sent to a UDP socket to the rpcbind service can crash its host by filling up the target's memory.…

It's 2017, and UPnP is still a critical attack vector Universal Plug-and-Play remains a gift-that-keeps-on-giving for infosec researchers, with Cisco announcing a critical vulnerability in the software that plagues its CVR100W wireless VPN router.…

TITSUP: Total Inability To Support Usual Prattle Updated It's not you, it's WhatsApp. The Facebook-owned messenger app used by more than a billion people worldwide abruptly stopped working today.…

No 5th Amendment protections against unlock demands A Florida state court has ruled that suspected crims can be forced to hand over their smartphone passcodes to cops and other investigators.…

Piles and piles of crazy and that's not even mentioning the shooting shutdown It promised to be an eye-opening battle royale between tech giants. So let's check in with Uber and Waymo, the ride-hailing app maker and the Google self-driving car spinoff, which are duking it out in court.…

IT titan sheds 100 or so staff after gobbling storage biz We are hearing that Nimble staff, no longer needed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise following its acquisition of the storage biz, are being laid off – up to a hundred of them.…

Rogue app grabs contacts, peeks at inbox, spams everyone Updated If you get an email today sharing a Google Docs file with you, don't click it – you may accidentally hand over your Gmail inbox and your contacts to a mystery attacker.…

O2 in Germany confirms online thefts from sour krauts Experts have been warning for years about security blunders in the Signaling System 7 protocol – the magic glue used by cellphone networks to communicate with each other.…

Server silicon head unplugs after 30+ years at Chipzilla Intel said that longtime executive Diane Bryant will be stepping down from her role as head of the data center group.…

OK, OK, we'll hire 3,000 people to police our site, sighs CEO Stung by global criticism over murder videos on his sprawling web empire, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has promised to swell the ranks of his moderator army.…

Interest-free bicycle bundled with £100k+ salary The Mayor of London is hiring a chief digital officer for the capital, advertised at a cool £107,000.…

Flash fabber fabricates NVMe over fabrics flash array +Comment Micron is building SolidScale, an all-flash, scale-out, NVMe over Fabrics access array using Excelero software aimed at low latency and high-throughput data access needs.…

Researchers had full control and were able to make unauthorised withdrawals A firm that supplies security software for cash machines has updated its technology after researchers uncovered a number of serious shortcomings.…

Turning a flying robot petrol station into a sort of maritime NSA The US Navy has tested a software package that will allow aircraft carriers running it to use its planned drone air-to-air tankers for communications relay and surveillance duties.…

Surface Laptop – like seeing a Tesla advertised on late-night teleshopping Analysis Microsoft had two strategic problems to address yesterday. Over several years, the PC has been taking its long, sad journey into becoming a niche. But more recently, Google has leapt into the US education market, going from zero to over 50 per cent in three years.…

Only the sausage-fingered among us need fear Hackers are abusing the trademarked names of five of the UK's top high street banks.…

Credentials reset and reissued to head off toll fraud concerns Over the weekend FreePBX and PBXact users were warned of a security breach that spilled SIP credentials, potentially opening the door for fraudsters to make phone calls at the expense of small businesses that rely on the technology.…

Breaches down from last year, though US healthcare breach incidents have dropped off in the year to date after hitting an all-time high in 2016.…

Two weeks left to join our Westminster party… There are just 14 days to go until 40 of the top brains in DevOps, Continuous Delivery, Containers and Agile come together at Continuous Lifecycle London, and there’s still time for you to grab a ticket.…

Sued sales agent then admits he bought and redirected them Former Retro Computers Ltd sales agent Nick Cooper has admitted he is the man who bought two of the company’s domain names and pointed them at sites critical of the company. He is currently being sued by it over an unrelated matter.…

On-prem product sales canned for Cloud Architects Oracle is restructuring sales to make more money from cloud, with industry chat claiming layoffs are expected after the end of this month.…

Big data, big funding? Datos IO has extended its on-premises and public cloud data protection to relational databases and Hadoop distributions.…

The centre cannot hold... Despite attempts to force government departments to work together, the "age old tension" between Whitehall and the Cabinet Office continues - according to an annual report by the Public Accounts Committee.…

Plus: You call yourself an engineer?

Amazon pushes Alexa into host of devices as teeming throng of AIs fills room Analysis Voice-activated speakers and digital assistants may just seem like the modern, more annoying version of the old Microsoft paperclip, continually offering help and reminders where they are not needed. But while Apple Siri, Microsoft Cortana, Google Home/Now and Amazon Echo/Alexa may have a long way to go, we will look back on them as the advance guard in a crucial battle – to define and control the next generation of the mobile and web experience, on the long route to the Tactile Internet.…

Sun, sea and solutions on the Pacific island for the Best of Big Bluers The so-called Best of IBM will descend on Hawaii this week as a pat on the back for “delivering signature client experiences and results”. No, really. But it won’t all be sun, sea and slides - gang-briefings on “solutions” will feature heavily too.…

Boss man sees unprecedented 'opportunity to double down' Analysis Cloud data management startup Rubrik has confirmed speculation about new funding with a massive $180m round, but has $61m from the last round in the bank. What gives?…

Who'd be a contractor when a payroll company 'suspends' payments with no explanation? Your correspondent's inbox has never seen anything quite like this: I've received more than 50 personal emails from tech contractors affected by the “suspension” of payments by Plutus Payroll, an Australian outfit that pays tech contractors.…

The University of Tennessee's royalty collection arm wants its pound of flesh The University of Tennessee Research Foundation (UTRF) and Saint Matthew Research (SMR) on Tuesday filed lawsuits against Microsoft and Oracle alleging the infringement of database patents.…

Just last year Verizon said it was investing for the long haul, now it will share with IBM In February 2016 Verizon told The Register it “remains committed to delivering a range of cloud services for enterprise and government customers and is making significant investments in its cloud platform in 2016."…

Surface team roped in for not-for-students laptop Analysis Tuesday’s launch of Windows 10 S, a cut-down version of the operating system designed for the education market, has raised some interesting questions about Microsoft’s ongoing efforts to hit Google and Apple where it hurts.…

Take Google's advice and get out of CA infrastructure' Mozilla has weighed in to the ongoing Symantec-Google certificate spat, telling Symantec it should follow the Alphabet subsidiary's advice on how to restore trust in its certificates.…

Leaked developer certificate revoked, protection updated Apple has moved to thwart a malware attack that used a legitimate – probably hijacked – developer certificate, by revoking the cert.…

Big Red wants One Profile To Rule Them All so marketers know what to sell you Your LinkedIn profile just got a little bit more useful … for marketers, because Oracle has done a deal with Microsoft's social network.…

Legislation coming to beef up Aadhaar card privacy, security If you're enthused about governments operating large-scale online identity projects, here's a cautionary tale: the Indian government's eight-year-old Aadhaar payment card project has leaked a stunning 130 million records.…

Learn how to add value to digital business at Gartner's IT Infrastructure, Operations & Data Center Summit Promo Infrastructure and operations teams are copping criticism from two sources these days: developers want on-premises IT to behave and scale like a public cloud; line of business people expect all software to deliver an any-device, 50-more-users-NOW SaaS experience.…

We're asking because that's what CenturyLink's former data centres are called now How would you pronounce 'Cyxtera'?…