The Register

And it might be winning them: Windows Insiders program has cracked the ten million mark Microsoft's revealed it doesn't just want Windows users, it wants Windows fans. As in queue-all-night, constantly-offer-unsolicited-feedback, faint-at-the-sight-of-pop-stars fans.…

Welsh corner of Mars makes the final list, along with once-wet Oxia Planum The European Space Agency has narrowed its candidate list of landing sites for the ExoMars rover to two choices.…

Run the classic Model III on Windows Antique Code Show If you get misty-eyed over the expression 20 IF N=1 GOTO 10 (or reach for the pen to correct me), there's another open source TRS-80 BASIC emulator available.…

Ebury infections for fun and profit, sentencing in August A Russian citizen behind “tens of thousands” of Ebury trojan infections has entered a guilty plea in the US and will face sentencing in August.…

Mobile base stations to be treated as computers in their own right The European Telecommunications Standards Institute has decided its Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) effort needed a bigger brief, so it's renamed it as Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC).…

Who needs a plastic bag and civic pride when two drones can do the job? Finding dog poo in public places and picking it up before it can besmirch a sole probably isn't high on the list of things humanity needs to get better at, but that hasn't stopped Dutch folk throwing two drones at the problem.…

A statistical model for cluelessness named after the president. Because why not? Let's give this points in the Academic Sense of Humour stakes for 2017: the wryly-named Data-mining Textual Responses to Uncover Misconception Patterns, or D.TRUMP, looks to automate the process of working out just how confused someone might be, from how they answer open-response questions.…

Three to do, pronto, unless you like guest-host escape mirth VMware's reported three bugs that probably deserve your urgent attention.…

Johnny Depp to play John McAfee in biopic depicting A-V man as Colonel Kurtz POLL Nobody's confirmed anything except Big Mac himself, but John McAfee reckons he's going to be played by Captain Jack Sparrow himself, Johnny Depp.…

Republican politico has something of an obsession with onanism Yet another American state has seen legislation introduced to include mandatory anti-pornography filters on any internet-capable device – or else.…

Rain is wet, sky is blue, Oracle is expensive, etc Uber has published its first ever diversity report today, revealing that the car-hailing biz is, unsurprisingly, dominated by white males like most major American technology companies.…

No NBN revenue top up for you, says regulator Australia's Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) is crowing today after the nation's Federal Court agreed with its ruling on how much dominant telco Telstra can charge for wholesale services on its fixed line networks.…

All your calls are belong to us Amazon Web Services on Tuesday introduced Amazon Connect, a hosted contact center service that allows any business to consign customers to voice jail with minimal effort.…

So much for the utopian techno future, according to this study Industrial robots are depressing wages and increasing unemployment, according to a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a private, non-profit, non-partisan research organization in America.…

Would you mind telling me what you're doing with my phone? US Customs and Homeland Security are being sued to get them to hand over the rules by which people have their electronic devices seized and searched at the border.…

'Who leaked the leak? Not us', claim feds, 'talk to them' The Australian Senate's Committee of Privileges decided yesterday that documents seized from former Senator Stephen Conroy and a staffer last year are covered by parliamentary privilege, and can't be used in any police investigation into who leaked them.…

Car firm says discrimination claims false, points to promotion Tesla is facing a lawsuit from an employee at its car factory who is making lurid claims about racial discrimination in the workplace.…

Find a good VPN So, the US House of Representatives has voted away internet privacy (in concert with the Senate), and the legislation will be heading to the White House for Trump's imprimatur. He's expected to sign quickly, so as internet users it's time to get really serious about privacy.…

No, it's not a gun, I swear... I just want to pay for my milk. Let me go! A “quantum gadget” prototype capable of sending quantum keys using polarized light could make contactless payments on mobile more secure if it can be squeezed into a smartphone.…

As House passes law, here's what you should do about it The US House of Representatives has just approved a "congressional disapproval" vote of privacy rules, which gives your ISP the right to sell your internet history to the highest bidder.…

Not exactly getting with the program Despite being the third-largest internet provider in the UK, Virgin Media is not exactly looking toward the future.…

IBM does help, too OpenStack drove a chunk of Red Hat’s largest deals during the fourth quarter, with cloud proving more lucrative than its trademark Linux business.…

Trend Micro CTO suffered fatal heart attack Colleagues and friends are mourning the sudden death of distinguished antivirus industry veteran Raimund Genes last Friday.…

You mean they still have some customers left? Long-suffering customers of troubled hosting provider 186k are unable to access the firm's hosting and email services in what appears to be a major outage.…

Due to investment in content, it reckons Mobile operator EE has confirmed it will be hiking the prices of new customer contracts on its broadband and TV packages.…

Big Red hires consultancies to eye up consultancy Exclusive Oracle has hired global specialists to explore the feasibility of buying multi-billion dollar consultancy Accenture, sources have told us.…

Flaw posed remote code execution risk Apple has resolved a certification validation vulnerability affecting both macOS and iOS users.…

'G4S has introduced further quality checks' Offenders may have been wrongly sent back to prison because of faulty electronic tags supplied by G4S, the government admitted today.…

Server, storage and networking wrap Orchestrating, deploying and managing thousands of servers, storage shelves and switches can provide a persistent PITA*. Server white box supremo Supermicro has a Rack Scale Design (RSD) fix for service providers, telecoms, and Fortune 500 companies dealing with this.…

Protip: Don't ask customers if they want to be contacted by email… by email The Information Commissioner's Office is baring its teeth as we rocket towards the EU's General Data Protection Regulation coming into effect.…

Differentiating between commercial partners, coevolution and clutter Opinion Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Four friends are sitting on a sofa, and one says to the others, “I’m hungry, I want to learn how to make pizza.”…

Judge Brennan fines Eircom after litany of screwups A judge has hit Irish telco Eircom with a €16,500 fine, after the former incumbent left a nursing home for retired nuns without phone service for weeks, then overcharged the sisters for the privilege.…

That's 86% up on 2015... and it's mostly identity theft Almost 1.4 billion data records were compromised worldwide during 2016, a whopping increase of 86 per cent compared to the year before.…

Adding better public cloud facilities to users' hybrid world Avere, the filer and public cloud storage accelerator supplier, has scored a $27m E-round of funding, with Google proper providing some of the funds.…

Corporate comms face-off Microsoft is rounding out its Skype for Business Cloud PBX.…

It's a connected land grab of things Mobile operator Three has announced a deal with Cisco Jasper, the switchzilla's newly acquired IoT arm.…

Beyond Big Data Promo On 27 April at 11am we're broadcasting live with a studio full of experts focused on the challenges of data-enabled workflow - that is the notion of integrating data into business workflows to improve performance and increase competitive advantage.…

Good news for those posted to Benbecula or Mount Pleasant? British military personnel will no longer face swingeing cancellation fees on broadband packages if they are posted abroad.…

He's both the sharpest tool AND two spanners short Stob Are you lolling dolefully? Then I'll continue. The TV show Mr. Robot deals with the life and adventures of Elliot Alderson, a twenty-something New York devop and cyber-vigilante. He and his circle of chums, seeking to inflict revenge on a mega-corporation for a hushed-up industrial accident, stumble towards bringing e-civilisation to a sticky end.…

What Mozilla's browser rewrite means to... Mozilla Open source insider Mozilla has been rolling out a major change to Firefox during the last year, the results of what the company calls its Electrolysis project. Electrolysis gives Firefox something Chrome has had for years now – multiple processes (in the best case scenario that's per tab). The change is a boon for speed – somewhere Firefox has been lagging lately – and it improves stability and security.…

Right-click to vMotion VMs between on-prem and AWS VMware's revealed some demos of its planned hybrid cloud service running inside Amazon Web Services.…

iOS 10.3 lands, complete with heavily encrypted Apple File System Apple today released iOS 10.3, watchOS 3.2 and tvOS 10.2 (14W265), the first two of all of which bring some pleasing extra functionality to iThings, But the main attraction in the new release is Apple File System, because it adds comprehensive encryption to the iPhone and Apple Watch.…

Computers wired into our minds. What could go wrong? Three years ago, Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, mused that artificial intelligence represented humanity's biggest existential threat.…

Queries indicate your intentions, so they're worth hiding From stock searches to map directions, any time a user queries a database, they tell the database owner something valuable.…

Simpler cluster config Amazon Web Services' 2016 acquisition of NICE Systems is bearing fruit, with AWS lifting the lid on the next iteration of a high performance computing service called EnginFrame.…

No runtime yet, but two developer repos have landed Last year, Microsoft offered up its first public beta of Azure Service Fabric for Linux. This month, it quietly took another step with the fabric by partly open-sourcing it.…

Don't criticise CEO Morrow for keeping the build moving Stop me if you've heard this one: nbn™, builder and operator of Australia's national broadband network (NBN), is being accused of polishing its rollout figures by fast-tracking areas that are easy to service.…

Wind-turbine-ware defaults didn't handle exceptional weather events Something good is going to come out of last year's “Black System” in the Australian State of South Australia: the global wind power industry has learned how to do better modelling for systems under attack from repeated failures.…

Flaming phablet stockpile to be refurbished, resold, rented and/or broken up for parts Samsung's revealed it will soon start selling the Galaxy Note 7 again.…

First step, smart bulbs and sensors Analysis Ikea has just announced the entry of smart home technology into the mainstream with a new range of lights that can be activated by motion or smartphone app.…