The Register

Lithuanian cuffed and charged Evaldas Rimasauskas, a 48-year-old Lithuanian man, has been charged with defrauding two major US-based internet companies for more than $100m through whaling attacks.…

With commercial success, npm can afford to be magnanimous npm Inc, the company behind the Node.js package manager and command-line utility known by the same three letters, on Wednesday plans to make its developer collaboration tool known as Orgs free for open source projects.…

'Turkish crime family' says Bitcoin's also OK Hackers who claim to have gained access to over 300 million iCloud and Apple email accounts are threatening to wipe user data unless Apple pays a ransom.…

Reg lecture explores what turning on a machine really means If you've wondered how AI and robotics are going to interact with and affect human sexuality – indeed humans full stop – you should really join us on 19 April for our next Register Lecture.…

That's cold, IBM Word reaches us of Project Baccarat*, IBM’s latest redundancy programme for staffers in the Infrastructure Services Delivery division.…

Radio frequency testing probes for foreign bodies Rapid7 has upgraded its popular Metasploit pen-testing tool to help IT security teams and consultants probe for IoT-related weaknesses in corporate environments.…

Operation Top Hat report surfaces from the archives Pics The Ministry of Defence sent an expedition to Rockall in 1971 to blast the top off the Atlantic islet, a newly released report has revealed.…

Staff association warns that systems 'increasingly' being used for personal reasons Coppers in England and Wales are "persistently" committing data breaches, according to the Police Federation's head of misconduct.…

PINs hopes on some good news next year Gemalto warned on Wednesday that its first-quarter revenues will be between 7 to 9 per cent lower compared to the same period of 2016.…

Developer data meets operations data for – hey presto! – DevOps dashboards Operations people are often quite fond of Splunk, because it gives them bucketloads of useful data about the performance of the kit they tend. Developers are often quite fond of New Relic, because it gives them bucketloads of useful data about the performance of the code they tend, and its impact on the user experience.…

Looks 'forward to the next spectrum auction'. Yep, sounds about right Three UK's mobile users are ripping through well over 6GB of data a month, prompting questions on whether the increase is sustainable.…

Plus, Lego tape, the decline of Uber, Brexit for dummies and more!

You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave Broadband provider Plusnet has been slapped with a £880,000 fine from Ofcom for continuing to bill former customers.…

Half of system support engineers put at risk in one authority London councils with Capita contracts have sought assurances from the outsourcing business that they will not be affected by its plans to offshore jobs to India.…

Too many ppl, amirite? Poor old Brit govt ... A security researcher has welcomed the UK's launch of a vulnerability co-ordination pilot while cautioning that a strategy for handling Freedom of Information requests needs to be developed.…

Don't be bitten by the differences Hybrid IT infrastructures are rapidly becoming the norm. Even if there isn’t a conscious decision to adopt a hybrid of on-premises/cloud networks and servers (for instance, on-premises servers replicating near-real-time to failover partners in the cloud), the adoption of cloud apps is making many setups hybrid by default, even if not by design.…

There's Reds under the Windows! And that's the way China's government wants it Microsoft's supremo for China has told state-owned China Daily that Redmond's ready roll out version of Windows 10 with extra security features demanded by China's government.…

Architect proudly displays work for EPO president, gets told to take it down Pics Very few people have seen the 10th floor of the European Patent Office's ISAR building in Munich since it's been renovated – and for good reason.…

Maybe we're stupid jerks: company reports record rider traffic in 2017 Throughout its recent sexism and scofflaw scandals, Uber hasn't denied that its culture has some invidious aspects.…

♪ Botnet knocked down, but it gets up again ♪ Aficionados of salacious smut sites in the UK and Canada are picking up some nasty software that infects systems by using corrupted pop-under adverts.…

Software-defined-networks from photons up to Layer 3 In January 2016, Juniper Networks swallowed BTI Systems with the aim of bringing software defined network approaches to the optical sphere. One of the fruits of that acquisition has now landed, with the company announcing its Open Cloud Interconnect.…

Plus: Rubber-ducky rock may split in half one day Pics Scientists have seen a landslide on a comet for the first time ever, it was announced on Tuesday.…

Boosted capacity of existing fibre by 2.5x. Coming soon: 32 Tbps per fibre Nokia has lit up a trans-Atlantic fibre for Facebook, in a field trial that showed off 200 Gbps and 250 Gbps wavelengths on a 5,500 km link.…

iPhone also now comes in charitable red and the iPhone SE doubles up on memory Apple's best products succeed because they solve non-obvious problems.…

libpurple is a 'binary blob of unknown provenance' says researcher A developer is warning Adium users to pick a different messaging app because of an exploitable vulnerability in its underlying libpurple version.…

Brace yourselves, netadmins, streamer's promising more and chunkier vids everywhere If your Linux-using mates suddenly disappear for a day or two, we can explain why: Netflix has just revealed it's fully and formally available on the OS.…

Also ties up with NetApp, Veritas, Red Hat, gets hot about hybrid everything IBM's decided to play the “our cloud storage is even cheaper than your cloud storage” game, but by a different set of rules.…

Undocumented feature allows installation of persistent malware “Don't create undocumented features” should be tattooed in the corner of every developer's eye: there's one in the Microsoft Application Verifier Provider that provides attack vectors on everything Windows since XP.…

Will Google's operating system be an "oh baby" or an "oh dear" moment for programmers? Google on Tuesday published a developer-oriented preview of Android O, which turns out to be a software sequel rather than softcore erotica.…

High cost of peninsula leads to 'de-location' offer A startup is offering workers a hefty sign-on bonus – if they move out of the San Francisco Bay Area.…

For better work-life balance, work more outside of work In contrast to the restrictions many companies place on their workers, GitHub believes it can loosen the reins through the release of its Balanced Employee Intellectual Property Agreement (BEIPA).…

Two critical bugs found in Chrome, Firefox add-ons Password vault LastPass is scrambling to patch critical security flaws that malicious websites can exploit to steal millions of victims' passphrases.…

Total Inability To Skype Ur Parents Updated Microsoft cloud services have dived offline, taking down Outlook, Hotmail, OneDrive, Skype, and Xbox Live.…

Hit list: Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia The UK has banned airline passengers on direct inbound flights from six countries in the Middle East and North Africa from taking a range of electronic devices into the cabin due to fears of a terrorist attack.…

IT LIVES! Cybercriminals behind the Necurs botnet have reactivated the zombie network and returned to their original business of using compromised machines as conduits for spam distribution.…

Now, how to do that in a stagnant market? The wonderfully named Marco Grieco Wang-Andresen, number two EMEA exec at Acer, is floating across to run rival PC maker Lenovo's ops in the same territory, El Reg can confirm.…

De Rojas to have 're-energised' regional business British software giant Sage has lost a “trail-blazing” executive brought in to help oversee the transition to cloud from on-prem after less than six months.…

So that's OK then, nothing to see here The UK Information Commissioner has cleared the Information Commissioner of an alleged failure to apply Freedom of Information laws correctly, following an investigation into itself.…

'Numerous reports' received Microsoft’s March Windows 10 Update has claimed a new victim: Windows dialogue boxes built using Telerik objects.…

Smartphone hardware school of hard knocks A popular Indiegogo venture to build a secondary e-ink display for the iPhone has shut down after raising over $1m – and donors will not get their money back.…

Don't just fling unsecured open source OSes at world+dog, father of the Internet begs Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the internet, has weighed in on Internet of Things security, warning that a Mirai botnet-style incident could happen again unless vendors start taking responsibility for their goods.…

Announces product integrations and new language for exchanging customer data Adobe and Microsoft have announced new product integrations along with the XDM (Experience Data Model) language for interchanging behavioural and marketing data between platforms.…

Advertisers, please help us build a better swamp Google has responded to a contagious YouTube advertising boycott which yesterday prompted a downgrade on Wall Street.…

Customers able to view account details of other users Mobile operator Three has admitted that some customers were able to view the mobile account details of other Three users via their accounts yesterday.…

Privacy impact assessments? Anyone? Bueller? Councils in the UK have work to do ahead of the EU's General Data Protection Regulations, according to the Information Commissioner's Office's department for good practice.…

Industry bods not keen on mandatory filtering Government proposals to force internet service providers into blocking content inappropriate for children with filters have been branded "disproportionate" by the industry's representative group.…

M call for papers due to close on March 31 There are just 10 days left until we close the call for papers for M, so if you want to tell the world how you’re putting artificial intelligence, machine learning and predictive analytics to work in business, we really want to hear from you.…

Don't decommission that MySQL server – yet The commercial release by Google of its Spanner database as a public beta last month came as both a pleasant surprise and a wake-up call: perhaps the end of NoSQL databases is in sight.…

Pocket powerhouse Review Huawei began to make significant inroads into the premium phone business in the West last year with its heavily promoted P9 models, and the Chinese giant has got this year’s shot at the market in early: ahead of Samsung and HTC.…

Doesn't say it's going to, just that it is preparing to do so... The Home Office has acknowledged that it is preparing to accept a landmark EU ruling from last year which restated that access to retained data must only be given in cases of serious crime, unlike the range of cases provided for under the new Investigatory Powers Act.…