The Register

Japanese biz triggers worldwide semiconductor patent war Nikon has declared global legal war on rivals it says are ripping off crucial optical technology it developed to print microchips.…

This is nuts Security researchers have uncovered a critical security hole in SquirrelMail, the open-source webmail project.…

Not sorry we did it – just sorry you're pissed off Jojo Hedaya, the CEO of email summarizer Unroll.me, has apologized to his users for not telling them clearly enough that they are the product, not his website.…

I haven't quit, insists founder Dave +Comment NetApp says its SolidFire chief Dave Wright is on hiatus – and his role upon his return will not involve running the storage organization he founded.…

Man alleges elaborate scam is slapping money out of online souk's pockets A campaigner has gone public with his concerns over an alleged scam on eBay.…

Criminal Courts Review Commission confirms investigators in 27 cases The UK's Criminal Courts Review Commission has confirmed that it has appointed a firm of forensic accountants to assist its investigation into whether sub-postmasters were wrongfully prosecuted due to issues affecting the Post Office's Horizon IT system.…

Only six years overdue Office 365 administrators have a reason to be happy: Microsoft has finally joined the party on group-based Office 365 licence management, saving time from manual maintenance, or the reliance on scripts and third-party systems.…

They'll be on the motorways as well Driverless cars using UK-made software will be tested on public roads and even motorways between London and Oxford.…

Ground-based backup of in-flight drone-recorded data Fly Drive is not about car rental any more, not in our version of disk world at any rate. It's a Seagate disk drive for DJI drones and comes just three months after Seagate and drone-maker DJI announced a partnership to develop storage for drone-recorded images and videos.…

Greyball snoopware even 'geofenced' Cupertino Uber hid its fingerprinting of iPhone users from Apple – techniques that would have had any other app thrown out of Apple's store. Uber retained the information even after the Uber app had been deleted and the phone had been wiped. Uber CEO Travis Kalanick got a personal reprimand from Apple CEO Tim Cook, but the app stayed put, and Uber continues to use fingerprinting worldwide.…

♪ Straight outta Cisco, crazy app framework called Metron, open-sourced so data's not crept on ♪ The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has announced Metron, a cybersecurity applications framework for centralised monitoring and analysis of network traffic, as its newest top-level project.…

Cold, hard cash and cred up for grabs HPC Blog This year's edition of the Asian Student Cluster Competition (ASC) is the largest competition of its kind in the world, with 20 teams of university undergrads battling each other, themselves, and the world’s fastest supercomputer, Sunway TaihuLight, to win the Asian Cluster Crown*.…

Faces off with Facebook Surround 360 kit Analysis The Nokia as we traditionally know it is no more, and the reborn company of today is pinning a core part of its future business strategy on emerging virtual reality (VR) technologies.…

A startup paradise? After Britain voted to leave the EU in June 2016, there was a flurry of articles about how London's tech startups, shocked by the prospect of Brexit, could soon decamp to cheap, fun Berlin.…

Hello? Innovation? You in there, buddy? Comment The researchers at the Transportation Research Institute at the University of Michigan (UMTRI) sent me what may be the saddest opinion poll in the world. It asks the public: "Would you like a Flying Car?"…

Peter Levashov indicted over Kelihos as Russian carder Roman Seleznev cops 27 years Last week ended badly for Russian hackers.…

Java's days are numbered – but it's a very large number In early April, Stanford University began piloting a new version of its introductory computer science course, CS 106A. The variant, CS 106J, is taught in JavaScript rather than Java.…

Laptops lead EMEA sales revival, but Brexit-blown Blighty misses out Sales of personal computers - boring old-school desktop and laptops – are up across Europe.…

CTO Val Bercovici has bailed too SolidFire CEO Dave Wright has left NetApp, less than eighteen months after the storage company he founded was acquired by the big blue staple.…

Another weekly roundup of everything happening, from cloud to tape Storage news, like data growth, is unrelenting.…

Hoaxer kept thumb drive of swatting calls An 18-year-old dual citizen of the US and Israel has been charged with making a string of online and phone threats against schools and Jewish community centers.…

They'll all look and behave the same, but you won't get one console to rule them all Huawei's going to build a global cloud based on its cut of OpenStack, but it's going to be a patchwork quilt of clouds it builds and runs by itself and clouds it builds but which its telco mates run.…

Linus Torvalds reckons 'It's not like another week of letting this release mature will really hurt' The Register hasn't needed to spend much time covering Linux 4.11 because hiccups haven't happened and Linux daddy Linus Torvalds' comments have been sparse and measured, other than a slightly terse lesson on how to Pull properly.…

'Second half of 2017' becomes 'Q4 2017' and there's only 245 shopping days until Christmas Qualcomm's plan to kick Intel in the soft underbelly that is the PC market has been delayed.…

In pleasing irony, Redditors tag their snark and make themselves ideal test subjects Over here at El Reg, we think that chatbots are, like, the best thing ever.…

Time to look back on those halcyon days of bad ideas, mindlessly hyped If you work in Silicon Valley, you might want to look away now. Because one day your work may well feature in the Museum of Failure.…

Unix greybeards issue release candidate and proclaim init freedom Devuan, the effort to build a systemd-free version of Debian, has released Devuan Jessie 1.0.0, a release candidate felt to be just about the finished article.…

FireEye fingers Middle Kingdom infiltration teams Well-connected security biz FireEye is claiming Chinese hackers are trying to break into South Korea's military to halt the deployment of an anti-ballistic weapons system in the country.…

New rules wil lower requirements to build wireless cells America's favorite watchdog the FCC has suggested a set of new rules for installing hardware for 5G wireless broadband networks.…

When this thing gets up to 88 miles per hour, you're going to see some serious sh*t A dentist in Alaska has been accused of performing a tooth extraction while riding a hoverboard.…

Slitheen tool smuggles browsers into cyber-Tardis Computer boffins in Canada are working on anti-censorship software called Slitheen that disguises disallowed web content as government-sanctioned pablum. They intend for it to be used in countries where network connections get scrutinized for forbidden thought.…

And ahead of mystery launch event in May The base tech specs for Microsoft's Windows 10 Cloud laptops have leaked out ahead of a rumored launch next month, giving you an idea of their target market. Clue: Google-powered Chromebooks in education.…

Important legal ruling divides North America Canada's comms watchdog has come out strongly in favor of net neutrality – despite efforts by one of the Trump Administration's key telecoms advisors to tip the scales in the other direction.…

Cloud object storage pricing tumbling downhill +Comment Research house 451 says the cloud price struggle has moved away from virtual machines (VMs) to object storage, and fingers IBM for initiating the round of price cutting.…

Another EMC acquisition let go Dell has sold its in-cloud backup SW biz Spanning to private equity house Insight Venture Partners, ending just four years of ownership.…

Pop-up requested permission to share data with nearby devices even when app not in use LinkedIn irked privacy advocates by dropping a Bluetooth-enabled "Tinder for marketers" feature into its mobile app on Thursday.…

Azure Stream Analytics to connect your fridge to the cloud for chilled machinations Microsoft's commitment to Azure has tickled it to the market's movement towards edge analytics provoked by the wave of IoT devices, and has launched a new analytics service so the twain shall never part.…

What data did marketing agency subcontractor have access to? Following The Register's report on the Metropolitan Police breaching its own data protection statement by handing the addresses of tens of thousands of London firearms owners to a marketing agency, the British Association for Shooting and Conservation (BASC) has written to the force demanding the decision be investigated.…

2016 figures show only 35 of 1,752 applications were turned down in part or full The US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) has published its annual report, revealing that less than 2 per cent of surveillance applications made under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) were declined in 2016.…

Are teenage dreams so hard to beat? Teenage hackers get mixed up in cybercrime mostly to gain bragging rights over peers rather than to get rich, according to a new study.…

Change yours if you're worried, but operator insists issue is limited to earlier models Vodafone says that anxious customers of its home femtocell box are safe, despite experiencing continuing brownouts. Although Vodafone is replacing the Alcatel-made units on request, it has declined to carry out a full recall.…

Do you know where your advertisements are going? Big Red does Oracle's acquisition of digital advertising tracking business Moat has been valued at over $850m, according to reports.…

The tech-fulled radicals redesigning society Reg Lecture Politics and society is about to get stranger and we're not even talking about what's going on in Westminster.…

Pursuing extra financial firepower to see off rivals Western Digital Corporation (WDC) is aiming to bulk up its bid for Toshiba's memory biz with state-backed funding support.…

Going native Anyone looking to deploy cloud in any meaningful way will struggle to find skilled practitioners. It's a situation faced by so many enterprises, no matter what cloud system is being deployed.…

Election nixes online court plans – for now The controversial "conviction by computer" Parliamentary Bill has been scrapped ahead of June's general election, according to reports.…

GNOME all the way, baby Review The arrival of Ubuntu 17.04 this month was completely overshadowed by Mark Shuttleworth's decision to abandon the Unity desktop for a stock GNOME Shell interface.…

Six months later and you've lost 70 per cent of the RRP iPhones maintain their resale value much better than Androids. That much you probably already know – but which are the worst droids to resell?…

There's a steering wheel in my pants. It's driving me nuts Something for the Weekend, Sir? Stop squeezing my knob. No seriously, I've had enough.…