The Register

Or maybe takes a cue from the White House's leak crackdown The European Patent Office (EPO) is seeking new powers that it would allow it to search the bags and electronic devices of its staff and office visitors.…

Storage news saved for the end of the week TGI (Thank God It’s) Friday and so time to retrieve back burner storage news received in the week and bring it to the fore;…

Also handed four months' chokey, suspended for 12 The Royal Air Force officer who sent his Airbus Voyager into an accidental dive from 33,000 feet, injuring passengers and crew, has been dismissed and given a suspended prison sentence.…

Regulation in effect from this week, 180 days to comply Major financial firms operating in New York need to comply with tougher cybersecurity rules that came into effect this week.…

Hipster hangout devs praised, vuln never exploited Slack quickly squashed a potential account hijack bug hours after it was reported.…

Flt Lt Andrew Townshed pleaded guilty to letting Nikon wedge Airbus' control stick A Royal Air Force pilot has been cleared of perjury – but will be sentenced at court martial today after admitting he allowed his digital camera to jam his military airliner’s controls, sending it into a 4,000ft plummet.…

Theresa May appoints former International Criminal Court judge The Prime Minister has today appointed Lord Justice Fulford as the first Investigatory Powers Commissioner, who will be the chief overseer of the UK's new surveillance laws.…

TechLive demo has raised a lot of questions Interview The TechLive session revealed Symbolic IO's IRIS i1 box, and its tech continues to raise lots of questions. How do the components work? Why have certain design choices been made? How does the IRIS system compare to other servers?…

Intends to determine correct employment status HMRC has unveiled its tax calculator for contractors to determine whether they should cough up more cash in its freelancer tax clampdown next month.…

More market share than HPE, IBM and NetApp combined The latest IDC Storage Tracker says top dog Dell Technologies has more external storage revenue share than HPE, IBM and NetApp combined.…

Thumb-twitchers will just have to go for a walk this weekend. Or read a book Gamers desperate to play on their new Nintendo Switches these weekend may have to wait a bit longer, with many reporting their preorders have been delayed.…

Embattled app's owners to appeal verdict Taxi app Uber has lost its legal challenge to Transport for London’s requirement that its drivers must pass English language tests, according to reports.…

Whitehall can't even convince UK it's not watching everything we do UK surveillance laws could be an obstacle to the creation of a US-Europe Privacy Shield-style arrangement post-Brexit.…

€80 a go. The anti-bacterial soap is free Is your significant other staying a little longer at Mobile World Congress than you expected? You may want to ask them about the robo sex house recently installed nearby the mobile extravaganza venue in Barcelona.…

CTO alludes to Brexit as a factor in sluggish UK sales MWC Weak customer spending on networking gear will pick up once organisations start splashing cash on next gen tech like 5G, with Brexit also playing a part in sluggish sales, Colin Kincaid, CTO at Cisco's Service Provider Business has said.…

Tell us, what’s the picture? Survey We’re running a survey to find out just what kind of impact flash drives and their arrays have had on your business. We’d like to know your experiences with them be they good bad or plain right ugly.…

It's the internet of sh*tty things, says Intel's Raj Samani MWC Greater accountability is needed in the rush to connect absolutely everything to the net – including toilet roll holders and pregnancy tests – Europol's CyberCrime Centre advisor and Intel Security CTO Raj Samani has said.…

If you ‘ain’t coding Java EE, it’s telling you what to deliver A while back I answered my door bell - it was the pizza. After transacting for the hot pie, the older delivery man with a Just Like Dear Old Dad mustache asked: "Are you a programmer?" pointing to the OpenStack logo on my hoodie sleeve. "Yes," I said, "well, I used to be." He asked me what programming language he should learn and quickly added "JavaScript?"…

Pause, play, rewind, break… buy another pair Something for the Weekend, Sir? Up and down, I’m up the wall, I’m up the bloody tree. Yup, this week finds me back on the trail in an unnecessary hunt for inessential portable kit I probably won’t use.…

Fine words, yes, but you're no better protected Comment Microsoft’s president and chief legal officer, Brad Smith, recently announced a new deal called the Microsoft Azure IP Advantage Program. It is touted as “the industry’s most comprehensive protection against intellectual property (IP) risks”.…

Data loss caused by the team's frag-happy habits didn't help their cause On-Call Welcome again to On-Call, our weekly review of readers' tales of jobs gone awry.…

Straight out of the Red Hat playbook: Take your VM images and pay for support Docker has extended its product line by adding two E's, for Enterprise Edition, a version of its container software tuned to the demands of businesses.…

Blighty's machine learning and robotics strategy lags behind other countries, say experts AI is at the forefront of the UK government’s digital strategy, and believed to be crucial to the nation's future post-Brexit.…

Poultry peddler pleads Page's peeps: Precision, please A restaurant owner feared for her business's future this week after it was mistakenly listed as closed down on Google Maps – and the ad giant wouldn't correct the error.…

Batt inventor John is back – and says his latest design charges fast, holds more energy A team led by John Goodenough, the man who played a key role in creating the lithium-ion battery, thinks it has cracked a replacement.…

Tech Preview 3 lands, with offline mode and promises of Blockchain services to come Microsoft's revealed Technical Preview 3 of Azure Stack, its forthcoming on-premises Azure-in-a-box effort, adding some new features, promising a continuous stream of other additions before final release and hinting at the pricing scheme.…

Uni bods hit bell where it hertz Vibrations emitted by Britain’s most famous bell have been mapped for the first time by engineers from the University of Leicester.…

The only data you want on your wrist describes your pulse Sales of wearables did okay in the Christmas quarter, but sales of apps for wearables are in the doldrums.…

Sales superheroes promoted into management and suddenly next quarter looks tricky Nutanix posted excellent quarterly revenue results – but its outlook for next quarter is so comparatively low that its shares took a hammering.…

If you like retro tech, dictator chic and paying far too much for stuff, this is for you! Hot on the heels of the resurrected Nokia 3310 comes news of Russian outfit “Caviar” creating a Vladimir-Putin-Themed mod for the retro handset.…

Just imagine what you could do with twenty-one million dollars Secondary storage consolidating software startup Hedvig has gained $21.5m in a VC‑round of funding, with HPE putting in some of the cash.…

Ex-Sun bloke earns promotion at virty database biz A reliable source tells us that Delphix, the database copy virtualizer, has promoted engineering VP Eric Schrock into its chief technology officer role, finally replacing the somewhat long-ago departed Adam Leventhal.…

Top-level VCDX now costs $3,995 and vAdmins aren't impressed VMware's bumped up the price of its certification exams, with the price of the MBA-grade VCDX certification more than tripling.…

No immediate danger, but Microsoft wants you to deprecate old certs When Google revealed last week that it had destroyed the SHA-1 algorithm, it hammered another nail into the venerable algo's coffin.…

Lawsuit claims streaming giant hushed up viewer growth drop that sparked stock plummet Netflix is facing a class-action lawsuit from one of its investors, who claims executives withheld bad news from shareholders – and cost them billions of dollars in losses.…

NSA: It's hard to tell. Now could you reauthorize our authority to keep doing it? If there is one piece of information that would fatally undermine the NSA's argument that it doesn't abuse Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), it would be the number of American citizens whose personal information it has "incidentally" hoovered up.…

And no, you can't use Stackoverflow and Google Analysis Amid the Trump administration's tough talk on immigration and executive orders calling for border barriers and immigration bans, recent anecdotes describing a more confrontational entry process among travelers arriving in the US appear to confirm expectations set by the President's rhetoric.…

Tough year for big box shifters as shipments, revenues, hopes, dreams fail Analysis HPE, IBM and Lenovo each lost their market-share footing in the server box shifting world at the end of 2016, according to Gartner and IDC. Server sales revenues also dropped in the final three months of the year.…

Army baffled as Shadow goes invisible Vid The US Army is investigating how one of its drones took an unplanned 623-mile excursion and ended up stuck in a tree two states away.…

Blueprints and staff shifted to different projects after EMC spent '$1bn' on tech +Comment A year after first shipping the DSSD D5 array, Dell Technologies is axing the standalone product.…

Basically, Team Bezos pulled a GitLab Amazon has provided the postmortem for Tuesday's AWS S3 meltdown, shedding light on what caused one of its largest cloud facilities to bring a chunk of the web down.…

Regulator publishes draft guidance, opens consultation The UK Information Commissioner's Office has published draft guidance for data controllers on what it's actually going to mean for users to consent to their data being collected and shared under the European Union's looming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).…

IT-business misalignment woes When IT teams and their colleagues within the business get along, life is good for everyone.…

Incumbent Oracle: 'We'll aggressively compete too. It's what we do' Software biz SAP is eyeing up BT's business following its acquisition of the firm's existing customer EE for £12.5bn last year, with the former state monopoly having already set aside £550m for integration costs.…

When Machines Won’t Learn Facebook has revamped its Messenger bot platform that allows businesses to engage with the app's massive audience – and the story is a lesson for anyone looking for practical applications of the AI and machine learning hype.…

We're talking revenues. Positive cash flow ... haha. Maybe later As Pure’s quarterly results show revenue growth continuing, CEO Scott Dietzen is leading the company out on a highwire towards the billion dollars/year revenue goal, with the FlashBlade sales ramp essential to them not falling off.…

VoIP kitmakers probed IoT devices from a Chinese vendor contain a hidden backdoor that the vendor is refusing to fix, according to security researchers.…

Bet both of those cloud customers are angry now Oracle DBAs who weren't so eager to trial 12cR2 in the cloud can now check it out on their own premises.…

Did we say tears...sorry, meant cheers. Profits crash to blame Capita chief Andy Parker is stepping off the executive merry-go-round after the little loved outsourcing company today reported financial results that showed a crash in profits - the worst in its corporate history.…