The Register

Except we're not, of course, because that would be illegal A new factsheet by the NSA and FBI has laid bare ludicrous contradictions in how US intelligence agencies choose to interpret a law designed to prevent spying on American citizens, but which they use to achieve exactly that end.…

Massive malware infection slurps customers' privates In February, Intercontinental Hotels Group alerted customers that some of its US locations had been infected with credit-card-stealing malware. Now it has admitted the cyber-outbreak is much worse than first thought.…

Redmond-powered mobes don't deserve latest sign-in tool Microsoft has introduced a new authentication method for logging into its online accounts: rather than remember and type in a complex password, use an app on your smartphone to confirm it's really you logging in and not some miscreant.…

That whole conversation-as-a-UI thing was just a big misunderstanding F8 2017 Facebook all but admitted the failure of chatbots last month – with the announcement that developers building Messenger bot can hide text input boxes and offer menu-driven conversations instead.…

Water, check. Low radiation, check. Possible to get to... oh wait, darn Scientists have spotted a planet slightly larger than Earth orbiting a distant star that looks to be the best contender yet for hosting life as we know it.…

Nasuni, Panzura and Avere all set for accelerated growth Helping organisations send and access stored data in the public cloud is good business for gateway supplier Nasuni, which is expanding its corporate waistline. As are competitors Avere and Panzura.…

Python slithers in next to R Microsoft is due to announce what it's calling "the first RDBMS with built-in AI". In other words, a community technology preview of SQL Server 2017 with additional support for R and – for the first time – Python.…

A beautiful David-Goliath tale EMC will probably have to change the name of its Unity array, now that a court has found in favour of Nexsan's use of the trademark.…

Who gave marketing agency access to super-sensitive address database? London gun owners are asking questions of the Metropolitan Police after the force seemingly handed the addresses of 30,000 firearm and shotgun owners to a direct mail marketing agency for a commercial firm's advertising campaign.…

Reverses 22 quarters of hardware decline Analysis Despite falling server sales, IBM has reversed 22 quarters of decline in storage hardware revenue, offset by a leap in flash storage array sales. It's also, we think, number 3 in overall storage sales.…

Phishing, ransomware remain most pressing concerns Phishing and ransomware remain the most pressing security threats for UK business, according to a government-backed survey out Wednesday.…

No cash, slow answers, firm still blames man who quit a year ago Suppliers of Retro Computers Ltd are calling for the company to pay the royalties they claim it owes for bundling their games with its ZX Spectrum Vega console.…

Cast-iron storage policies World backup came and went – did you notice? It seems the only thing we've learned is that everyone wants Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) of 0. Unfortunately, aggressive RPO targets are hard. They affect the design of real world environments, and are sometimes not possible.…

Consumer workhorse has the speed and capacity to thrill ya Toshiba has a new 8TB NAS disk drive with its fastest data transfer rate.…

Hacker whizz and Veracode co-founder Chris Wysopal joins the crew this week to talk secure software

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22-year-old to appear before magistrates at month's end Detectives from Operation Falcon, the Metropolitan Police's cybercrime unit, have charged a footballer with two fraud-related offences.…

Do we really want Chrome hegemony? Open Source Insider Write, as I have, about Firefox and you receive the usual slew of critics who demand to know why Firefox matters? Who cares if Firefox continues to exist? This is often accompanied by "Chrome is better! Chrome is all we need!"…

'Perceptual ad blocker' cannot be defeated, researchers claim Researchers from Princeton and Stanford University have developed an ad blocker that they claim could end the ad blocking "arms race" for good.…

Hold fire on the euthanasia Several things change when you decide to move from an in-house technology setup to a hybrid infrastructure. And if part of the move involves relocating services and applications from the on-premise installation into the cloud, one of those changes is that some equipment suddenly becomes underemployed.…

Developer says he's found a way to stop Windows' new CPU check, which means updates flow again A developer using the handle “Zeffy” claims to have found a way around Microsoft's ban on updates for old versions of Windows on shiny new CPUs.…

Despite evidence and previous offense, Abhishek Gattani unlikely to face serious charges The CEO of a Silicon Valley startup captured on video beating his wife and threatening to kill her is, due to an offered plea deal, likely to spend less than 30 days behind bars to avoid being deported.…

Appliance vendor Hotpoint's UK service site is serving malware when you seek repairs If your Hotpoint cooker or washer's on the blink, don't arrange a repair by visiting company's site: Netcraft says the appliance vendor's foisting nastyware onto visitors.…

Research shows how web mapping service can be abused Computer scientists at the University of California, San Diego, and Google, are clamping down on fake businesses trying to scam victims through Google Maps.…

Hooray for humans! We can pick out images too obscure for Google's AI Google's Cloud Vision API is easily blinded by the addition of a little noise to the images it analyses, say a trio of researchers from the Network Security Lab at the University of Washington, Seattle.…

Need some code to alter pics and whack some stickers and be worth billions? F8 2017 Facebook has open sourced Caffe2, the toolbox of deep-learning software its own developers use to train AI models and build apps.…

Early June looks like being hypervisor happy time The Xen Project's wheeled out the first release candidate of Xen 4.9 and reckons it will be ready to launch in the first week of June 2017.…

Backup biz notches up another 4,000-new-customer quarter Has Veeam's record-breaking growth halted? Er, in a word, no.…

PwC report into what went wrong and why has been received. And hidden, for now The Australian Taxation Office says its planned Easter outage to replace its infamously wobbly HPE storage area network went well.…

Mega load of updates lands for tons of Big Red gear Oracle today emitted a huge batch of 299 security fixes for its software – including a patch for a vulnerability exploited by a leaked NSA tool that can hijack Solaris systems.…

Mega patch load lands for April Oracle today emitted a huge batch of 299 security patches for its software – including a fix for a vulnerability exploited by a leaked NSA tool that can hijack Solaris systems.…

Sigh IBM says it is right on track for the coming fiscal year: everything is going to plan and its sales are falling just as expected. Hurrah for Big Blue!…

Between killing an OpenStack research team and killing IDF, we see a pattern here Intel's decided to stop offering its own version of the Lustre file system – the code beloved of high-performance computing types because it's handy for managing exabyte-scale storage spanning colossal Linux clusters.…

File request under: 'Trash can' Civil and digital rights groups are leading a campaign to stop the US Department of Homeland Security's demanding access to foreigners' social media accounts when entering America.…

Buy American, hire American, unlike me, grins US president President Trump today signed an executive order that may lead to an overhaul of the H-1B visa system used by US technology giants to draft in cheap foreigner workers.…

Facebook boss reckons he'll heal society's ills with pix F8 2017 Amid the fallout over the killing of an elderly man broadcast via Facebook Live on Sunday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared, "Our next focus is building community."…

So far, the highest bid is $27bn, it is claimed Three new characters are starring in Toshiba's saga to sell off its memory business: they are Foxconn, Apple, and a fund backed by Japan's government.…

Voice version won't even ship until spring It's not entirely clear why Samsung hyped up its new digital assistant earlier this year.…

Windows giant devours Office mastermind and his biz, Intentional Software Microsoft has acquired Intentional Software on undisclosed terms.…

Brouhaha over shoddy website and payments sparks lawsuit Yahoo! has been hit with a lawsuit alleging its web-hosting service has been shutting down customers' websites for months while still charging them.…

Turn off the heating, it's gonna get −180C in here Microsoft and Rambus have announced "an expanded collaboration" to develop prototype systems that can optimise memory performance at cryogenic temperatures.…

Just don't mention the memory business malarky Demonstrating the strength of Toshiba's NAND chips and SSD business, Dell's PowerEdge 13G servers will use Toshiba HK4 SSDs to make them faster and add encryption options.…

It's actually pretty nerdy but in a good way Docker will today release LinuxKit, an open-source toolbox for building fine-tuned Linux-based operating systems that run in containers.…

Nifty dashboard shows the bitcoin rolling in Cybercrooks have begun retailing a new easy-to-use ransomware strain that promises profit with only one successful infection.…

Silicon Valley wants foreigners, POTUS preparing to say no Applications for H-1B visas, the most common route for skilled technologists seeking lawful work in America, have decreased for the first time in years.…

New builds from Nightly to Beta Mozilla is killing the channel it introduced for developers to test experimental new features in Firefox and keep pace with Chrome.…

Brit scientist warns of increased hazards from new constellations Broadband satellites could lead to an explosion in the volume of space junk, a British scientist has said.…

But are they just better at sniffing out breaches? Larger businesses in the UK are far more likely to be victims of attacks than smaller ones, according to a survey by the British Chamber of Commerce.…

Not yet anyway Microsoft has scotched reports that it has "abandoned" Windows Mobile.…

Bid to nix post-Brexit 'uncertainty and instability' Prime Minister Theresa May has called a snap general election to be held on 8 June.…