The Register

In the city or up the country? Promo The obvious difference between using a data centre in the city centre compared to the country is cost, but other factors such as proximity to fibre connections, accessibility, security and just plain convenience, might well lure you back to the centre. Let’s help you decide whether you’d prefer your infrastructure to be uptown, top ranking, or just on a farm.…

European providers team up A number of cloud infrastructure providers operating in Europe have signed up to a new data protection code of conduct.…

Former US sub-hunter boasts 1980s décor, serious sonar, workstations galore and so much printer ink Slideshow Chances are this story was brought to you by a submarine cable, the world-girdling network of optic fibres that just about make the internet possible.…

Avoid this wonderful malware on your network by black-holing connections A detailed analysis of the Shamoon malware – which is playing a huge role in the cyberwar between Saudi Arabia and Iran – has identified servers used to spread the software nasty.…

'We're learning every day'. But does 'test your backups' really need to be learned? When GitLab suffered its database deletion, outage and related failure of five backup tools, the company quickly offered The Register an interview. Which sounded like a good opportunity to learn just how a startup aiming for serious developers, and with US$25m of serious investors' cash in its keeping, could have failed to operate a proper data protection regime.…

Really, guys? Really? Videos AI may be more human-like than people think. DeepMind’s latest research shows that once resources dwindle, the selfish instinct kicks in and virtual AI agents turn against each other, becoming aggressive to get what they want.…

Should bugs that don't expose user data be left alone, saving time and effort? Poll The Xen Project is asking if it can disclose fewer bugs.…

If 'cute' means 'explosively re-writes plenty of our theories about how stars behave' In the kind of observational serendipity that astro-boffins live for: spotting the explosion of a supernova mere hours after the explosion's light started reaching Earth.…

Look, don't copy: 'this is not an open source license' Ephemeral messaging application Wickr has opened up the core crypto software of its Wickr Professional app so others can review it.…

Security working group has decided it wants to know what it needs to know The International Telecommunication Union has decided the time has come to consider whether Blockchain deserves its attention so it can be considered for future security standards.…

Big headaches in big iron, hyper-servers aren't taking off, but software biz all smiles Get out the pen, walk to the whiteboard, and draw lines heading downwards: Cisco's Q2 2017 results showed year-on-year falls in revenue and earnings, and a router business close to free-fall.…

Smart card support busted? Redmond says: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ For months now, the Windows 10 Anniversary Update has broken two-factor logins using certain smart cards – and Microsoft has refused to discuss it.…

Resistance is futile as probe demanded into environment agency staffers US House Republicans Lamar Smith (R-TX) and Darin LaHood (R-IL) have demanded a probe into staff at the US Environmental Protection Agency who are apparently using private encrypted communications.…

Exhausted with never-ending internet exhaustion You may have heard this before, but we are really, really running out of public IPv4 addresses.…

And tech groups are starting the fightback now Analysis While the entire US political machinery has been caught up with one Trump-based scandal after another over the past three weeks, larger underlying issues are starting to re-emerge. And top of the list is mass surveillance.…

Fat-fingered fumblers of Australia, untie! Your Office 365 errors are now recoverable Dell EMCs software-as-a-service backup outfit, “Spanning”, has expanded into Australia.…

A top life tip, there, from the Linux kernel chieftan OSLS Linus Torvalds believes the technology industry's celebration of innovation is smug, self-congratulatory, and self-serving.…

'When the internet crashes into the real world and people get killed' you'll be sorry RSA USA We all know the vast majority of Internet-of-Things devices haven’t anything more than a fig leaf for protection. Now the unlikeliest of folks are calling for rules to improve IoT security: libertarians.…

Ra, Ra Rasputin. SQL injection is his thing A Russian-speaking miscreant dubbed "Rasputin," who potentially hacked into the US Election Assistance Commission and sold access to its systems, has struck again, it is claimed.…

Can't get that bonus if the merger falls through, so meh, shave off 5% and let's go Verizon will savagely slash its acquisition offer for hacker-ransacked Yahoo! by, wait a minute, just 5.2 per cent, it is claimed.…

But customers welcome to taste IBM's own-brand Hadoop sauce... +Comment Cognitive Watsonian and mainframer IBM is making Hortonworks available for its Elastic Storage Server (ESS) and Spectrum Scale products.…

Consent wording not enough to prevent a spanking by the ICO A UK credit broker has been fined £120,000 for sending more than five million unlawful text messages.…

Doctor Blue says a little of what you like does you good IBM's i and AIX customer bases can buy a cheaper box; its latest Power S812 server comes with just one socket and a single or quad-core processor.…

Get to keep hardware home, gain machine learning anyway Microsoft has created and released a simulator for drone pilots to help them avoid destroying their toys while running machine learning experiments.…

Researchers could listen in on meetings and plant backdoors Security researchers have uncovered a flaw in conference phone systems from Mitel that create a means for hackers to listen in on board meetings.…

As promised, story about space poo US Air Force Colonel Thatcher Cardon, MD, has won a competition to develop a new diaper to cradle astronauts' soiled nethers for up to six days of spacefaring.…

iPhone backups can be slurped for Mother Russia, say researchers Kremlin-linked spies have been blamed for cooking up malware called Xagent, which targets victims running macOS to steal passwords, grab screenshots and exfiltrate iPhone backups stored on the Mac.…

Unfinished APIs in JDK and Java SE Experimental and unfinished Java APIs could soon appear in new versions of Java under a plan from Oracle.…

New Orleans firm partner takes charge Comment Nexsan, newly sold by Imation to private equity house Spear Point Capital Management, is now run by that firm's co-founder and managing partner, Ron Bienvenu.…

Intel shipping Kittson samples into Itanium-land There have been reports that Intel has already started shipping its latest, Kittson version, Itanium processor chip.…

More moaned about than rail and energy, says ombudsman Shoddy customer service is costing telcos £2.9bn per year, making the sector the second most moaned about, according to the Ombudsman Services.…

Dumping a mainframe – now that's another story

Broaderband fight Analysis Some are talking about 3.5 GHz as a 5G band, but Hutchison’s deal to acquire UK Broadband to bolster its 3UK arm is all about the good old fight for LTE spectrum.…

Unleash operation Thrash Chrome Opinion The Mozilla Foundation has recently announced that it will refocus its development efforts on Firefox. Again.…

Santa's sack helps out in Cupertino Christmas sales helped Apple steal top spot in global phone shipments from Samsung, but Gartner, who compiled the numbers, are confident that the chaebol will wrestle it back.…

Crypto panel lets loose at conference RSA USA Every year, the RSA Conference in San Francisco brings out the best and the brightest for its crypto panel, and the view from the floor was simple. Ignore the fads and hyped technology, and concentrate on the basics: good, clean, secure programming.…

And hackers didn't have much luck either with other flaws in the mobe OS RSA USA Despite shrill wailings by computer security experts over vulnerabilities in Android, Google claims very, very few of people have ever suffered at the hands of its bugs.…

At data, EE leads, Voda fails Real-world mobile network performance monitor RootMetrics reckons the reliability of the UK’s mobile networks improved eight per cent in the last six months of 2016.…

Citizen science project to find galactic bursts using selfie-taking pocket radio receivers Friends, take out your mobiles in the name of science! Astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics are trying to look for fast radio bursts in the Milky Way galaxy with “low-cost radio receivers.” And by that, they mean, your smartphones.…

If you think bad guys could abuse the Smart Install protocol, just turn it off Cisco's taken umbrage at accusations that its Smart Install (SMI) protocol is vulnerable to abuse.…

Roses are red. 'Global strategic alliance' is … eeeww. We've written a more fun headline for you even though V-Day is over IBM and ServiceNow have signed a “multi-year, strategic partnership” to blend their respective SaaS-y bits in the service of automated everything.…

Big Red 'categorically denies' former worker's claims it re-writes commission rules and puts sales people in 'debt' Updated A new lawsuit filed by a former Oracle employee alleges the software giant “has systematically stiffed its sales force of earned commission wages for many years, by scrapping contractual compensation plans when they yield commission earnings that are higher than Oracle would prefer to pay and retroactively imposing inferior – i.e. less remunerative – numeric terms.”…

It's all cloudy, innit? Riverbed is hoping to push more large-scale Software-Defined WAN (SD-WAN) deployments with a data centre version of its SteelConnect, plus integration of the system into its SteelHead appliances under the new moniker "SteelHead SD".…

Pay the ransom, or restore from backup. Choose wisely! Let's start with the “calm down” part of the article: yes, LogicLocker is ransomware designed for programmable logic controllers, but no, the cyber-geddon isn't upon us.…

Security experts skeptical of encrypted messenger's claims Rumors that President Donald Trump's aides are using an encrypted messaging app called Confide has landed the software firmly in the spotlight – and under the security microscope.…

Ye canna' hand a man a grander (Cloud) Spanner Google's close to plugging a long-standing gap in its public cloud, with its Cloud Spanner distributed relational database hitting public beta.…

Rickety array still at work: In tax-speak 'Commissioned new SAN' doesn't mean it's live yet The Australia Taxation Office's HPE SAN failed twice, in different ways, when causing its infamous December and February outages that brought down online tax services on which citizens and accountants rely.…

May have to sell even more of its chip business to cover costs The chairman of Toshiba has resigned following the release of figures showing a projected $6.3bn loss from the company's nuclear business – a loss that may continue to grow and threaten its other businesses.…

Amster-damn, that's a hell of a vulnerability to make browser bug exploitation easier Researchers in Europe have developed a way to exploit a common computer processor feature to bypass a crucial security defense provided by modern operating systems.…

Big Red's IaaS and PaaS land in Oz, as an entree to SPARC cloud and AWS-killer plans Oracle has flicked the switch on everything-as-a-service in Australia.…