The Register

No crying at the back As "trendy" as ransomware is at the moment, it's a sobering thought when you remind yourself that in this case you're literally having to deal with some miscreant holding your data to ransom.…

Hardware rolling out, new software promised GitHub has tried to reassure users that it is targeting zero downtime with the help of new data centres and infrastructure software – some being open-sourced.…

$21k lucky dip for exploits Shadow Brokers, the group that leaked stolen NSA hacking tools including the vulnerability that proved key to the WannaCrypt outbreak, has launched a new exploit subscription service.…

These are not the sex droids you’re looking for... If you’ve ever wondered what the development of AI and robotics might mean for your sex life, you should have been with us last month for our Register Lecture on Sex, AI, Robots and You.…

Be a love and check if we're a data processor. It should be on the internet somewhere UK businesses are risking damaging fines by ignoring the implications of upcoming data protection rules, according to a new survey.…

Options - you have some ISPs in the US have regained to power to snoop on your internet browsing and sell the results to the highest bidder. Congress has passed news rules under President Donald Trump rolling back earlier restrictions on internet service providers - Verizon, AT&T, Comcast and so on - from selling or otherwise sharing your web browsing history with other companies.…

TV ads banned, but targeted Facebook videos have free rein Britons vote for a new government on June 8 and, until recently, election campaigns have been tightly controlled affairs with limits on how much parties can spend per constituency, the requirement to submit detailed accounts and no political advertising on television.…

No travel or catering for internal meetings, as for external meetings... get the memo? Execs at DXC Technology have imposed a series of penny-pinching measures on staff just two months after the tech outsourcing corpse started trading, and amid a redundancy programme.…

Not a good fit. Apparently IBM has tried to erase the photograph of the Big Blue chopper that CEO, president and chairman Ginny Rometty used to fly to the UK R&D labs recently, because it didn’t fit with the corporate austerity message.…

No more standing on sidelines as ODMs hoover up service provider punters Analysis Dell EMC’s Server business unit is receiving help from Dell’s Client Solutions Group as it aims to take on the original design manufacturers (ODMs) in the Far East, company insiders have told The Reg.…

Well, they need to find that $1.6bn cost saving somewhere, can't be all job cuts DXC Technology is planning to shutter a bunch of sites as part of its mega savings plan, multiple company insiders have told El Reg.…

Short of £180,000? These guys will sort you out Star Wars New Hope @ 40 Two years ago, the helmet of an Empire Strikes Back stormtrooper fetched $120,000 (£92,736) at US auction.…

Oracle Labs plays with an Optane simulator and finds cacheing gets rather tricky Oracle Labs has found that applications will need a bit of work before they can really take advantage of storage-class RAM like Intel's Optane.…

Eric Raymond says it's time 'hallowed artifacts of hacker folklore' were hackable again The classics never die – or so we hope. One classic, Colossal Cave Adventure, is getting a new lease of life on GitHub.…

Says broken bits were never outsourced offshore, offers SFA explanation for lack of backup The catastrophic systems failure that grounded British Airways flights for a day appears to have been caused by networking hardware failing to cope with a power surge and messaging systems failing as a result.…

Sending data home to Putin, puffs president Poroshenko Already under sanctions by the Ukrainian government, Russian search giant Yandex has been raided by the country's security services.…

Taxation Office reveals investigation timeline, defends itself for causing pay delays Australia's taxation commissioner Chris Jordan has given contractors impacted by the alleged fraud at Plutus Payroll hope they may yet receive compulsory superannuation payments.…

HPE settles after findings of badly fitted cables, bugs on disks and backup tools on SAN Oz taxation commissioner Chris Jordan has revealed that the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) has reached a commercial settlement with HPE over the two outages to its online services caused by 3PAR storage arrays.…

C*ck-up not conspiracy – Redmond says 'OCSP stapling' has come undone Microsoft's Azure Portal has become hostile to some clients, especially the Firefox browser.…

'Inner authentication' has bad karma, allows strangers to log in without credentials Sysadmins with FreeRADIUS in their boxen need to run in an upgrade, because there's a bug in its TTLS and PEAP implementations.…

Redmond's out-of-band advisory landed after the bugs were fixed Microsoft has broken out of its usual cycle to patch more Malware Protection Engine bugs notified privately Google Project Zero.…

'Smart' home IoT devices reveal dumb amounts of what they're up to every time they go online Princeton boffins reckon the Internet of woefully insecure things yields sensitive information about connected homes with nothing more than a bit of network traffic analysis.…

Has $150 million diversity program, server farms galore, needs 500 hours to sift data After failing in April to shut down reporting of its lawsuit with the United States Department of Labor, Google's told the US court looking into alleged pay discrimination it would be too expensive to find out whether women are underpaid at the advertising behemoth.…

Taking a look at a new common set of AV rules Analysis The European Parliament has approved a draft law that geo-blocking, the act of offering an online content service in one European Union (EU) country and that country alone, will be scrapped in the first half of next year.…

Some folk have Photoshop and too much time on their hands The WannaCrypt ransomware is yet another reminder, if any were needed, that the networks and machines on which society is now so reliant are laughably insecure.…

And none of those in China show anything while they wait for government paperwork Netcraft's monthly survey of web-facing computers has turned up an oddity: a new web server called “Beaver” that's used by exactly one web site outside China.…

Network time lords decide we don't need IP address swaps The Internet Engineering Task Force has taken another small step in protecting everybody's privacy – this time, in making the Network Time Protocol a bit less spaffy.…

Cortex-A75, A55, and Mali-G72 coming next year Chip designer ARM on Monday plans to announce its first set of processors based on its DynamIQ microprocessor architecture, in conjunction with a revised GPU chip.…

The 1990s called: they want their filepath hack back Until Microsoft patches this problem, use Chrome: a slip in file-path handling allows attacker to crash Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 with a file call.…

If payroll operator accused of AU$165m scam didn't pay, neither will contractors The Australian Taxation Office has issued guidance to clients of Plutus Payroll, the company accused of AU$165m scam, and says they “will not be penalised” if the company hasn't paid the right amount of tax on their behalf.…

ClearPass Policy Manager needs upgrade In case you missed it: there's a bunch of bad bugs in HPE's Aruba ClearPass Policy Manager.…

Two coding-for-kids orgs already overlapped, now plan joint acceleration The Raspberry Pi Foundation and the CoderDojo Foundation have merged in order to combine forces and accelerate both organisation's mission to teach kids how to code.…

Upside: it could be all over by September Both Cisco and Arista have claimed victory in the latest instalment of their intellectual property lawsuit.…

'Real, sophisticated, threat' may mean ban on flights to and from USA says Homeland Security head John Kelly United States Homeland Security Secretary Gen. John Kelly says he's considering a ban on laptops in airline cabins from flights that leave all nations, not just Europe and the Middle East as is currently the case.…

All flights from Gatwick and Heathrow cancelled British Airways CEO Alex Cruz has said the root cause of today's London flight-grounding IT systems ambi-cockup is "a power supply issue" and that the airline has "no evidence of any cyberattack".…

*Insert canna do it captain joke here* British Airways CEO Alex Cruz has said the the root cause of today's London flight-grounding IT systems ambi-cockup is "a power supply issue" and that the airline has "no evidence of any cyberattack".…

You may have to wait a decade or more to join him aloft In a few years, Alphabet president and Google cofounder Sergey Brin is expected to have an airship at his disposal for humanitarian missions and ferrying friends, not necessarily in that order.…

Nothing new in speech but then that wasn't the point British prime minister Theresa May used Facebook, Google and social media companies as a vote-winning punch bag on Friday, slamming them for not doing enough to limit extremist content online.…

Is it a Tango? Is it a 360-camera? Or is it a let-down? Android creator Andy Rubin has been running in stealth mode with his forthcoming smartphone startup Essential, but has now released a teaser picture of his new handset.…

Fast food chain cops to POS malware breach Fast-food chain Chipotle says hackers infected its point of sale terminals to gain access to card data from stores in 47 states and Washington, DC.…

Even AI researcher jobs at risk by the year 2105 Hundreds of AI researchers have taken a glimpse into their crystal balls to try to determine when machines will finally exceed human capabilities.…

Hackers target The Donald's businesses The FBI and CIA are investigating an attempted hack on the Trump Organization.…

Japanese investors rush in after cryptocurrency was made legal Over the past couple of weeks, the price of Bitcoin has gone up 50 per cent, spiking at over $2,700 per unit on Thursday. Demand has been so great that popular exchange Coinbase has been unable to keep up.…

Patent case wraps up as sides agree on final tally Former smartphone king BlackBerry has today finalized its settlement with Qualcomm in their long-running battle over royalty payments.…

Google, Facebook et al take on Section 702, Apple quiet More than 30 big internet companies including Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft have sent a letter to the chair of the House Judiciary Committee asking for specific reforms to the law used for carrying out mass surveillance.…

Buy your bread n' butter from the Bezos Bunch Amazon has once again expanded its reach in all things commerce, this time with its own take on the grocery store.…

Keelhauling through the week's movers and shakers Behind every great enterprise and technology news website lies storage, humming away in the background heeded by no one. But the industry never stands still and every week El Reg is inundated with news – some significant, some less so. However, we're not solely a storage 'zine and we need somewhere to stack the shorter bits that wouldn't necessarily make a standalone story but we know you storageheads out there would appreciate. So pull up a pew, pour yourself a mug o' joe, and read on to find out about Bristol Uni's new supercomputer, Intel's SSD wins, Diablo Tech's Memory1 benchmarks, and much more.…

'You are without a doubt the worst pirate I’ve ever heard of' The supposed "Pirates hack" was only ever a hoax, according to Disney chief exec Bob Iger.…

Hoping to stock up for a barbecue? Tough The sun is shining and the prospect of barbecue and beer over the bank holiday is almost in grabbing distance. But customers who ordered their groceries online with Sainsbury's today may be in for a disappointment.…

Revenues increase as it faces dismemberment +Comment Say goodbye to Brocade as an independent company. It has just published its last quarterly results before being gobbled up and dismembered by Broadcom.…