The Register

Universal file sharing is hard because Services and CDNs scramble HTTP. Enter 'Upspin' Wouldn't it be nice if there was a universal and consistent way to give names to files stored on the Internet, so they were easy to find? A universal resource locator, if you like?…

Can build clouds, can't schedule email announcing stablization release The OpenStack Foundation has announced Ocata, its fifteenth edition. And then tried to un-announce it again.…

NoSQL server, but a big unhappy Yes to the question of security worries Aerospike NoSQL server DBAs, make sure you've rolled out version 3.11.1.1, because the vulnerabilities it fixes have been made public.…

*aaS-es are, however, fattening faster than any other segment of the market For all the hype about cloud it's a bit of a revenue wimp: the abacus-shufflers of IDC have just told the world that it will account for about five per cent of the world's tech spend in 2017.…

Don't get rung out about planting bugs in ladder logic: they should be easy to spot One of the world's oldest programming styles, the ladder logic that runs on industrial programmable logic controllers, remains dangerously vulnerable to attack, according to boffins from Singapore and India.…

Microsoft roadmap lays out second big update for 2017 Microsoft has confirmed it is planning a second major update for Windows 10, which is to be piloted this year, and is seriously considering releasing it before 2018.…

Nothing like a post-holiday IT cockup US Department of Homeland Security staff returning to work on Tuesday after the Presidents' Day holiday have apparently had a tough time getting computer systems to function.…

Private Docker Swarm keys leak into public containers IBM left private keys to the Docker host environment in its Data Science Experience service inside freely available containers.…

AWS, GCE price war looming? Google will this week start offering Nvidia Tesla K80 GPU-equipped virtual machines for its Compute Engine and Cloud Machine Learning hosted services.…

Boffins demand rule rewrite to restore glorified moon's dignity The ongoing argument over whether Pluto is an actual planet or just a dwarf on the outskirts of the Solar System has heated up again – with a new proposal to reapply planetary status to the distant iceball.…

Civil liberty groups, security experts, law profs, lawmakers slam looming US policy Over 50 human rights and civil liberties groups, nearly 100 law professors and security experts, and lawmakers have launched a campaign against digital searches at the US border.…

Starting with literally piles of crap (no, not the code) Interview In the months ahead, Idaho National Laboratory aims to open-source software for analyzing the quality of cow manure.…

One device for the next billion, Jide hopes Jide, the company founded by three ex-Googlers, has shown how a phone can act as a Continuum-style hub. When plugged into an external monitor, the Android device – with the new and as-yet unreleased cut of Jide's Remix OS – allows the user to work with "desktop-friendly" versions of the apps that are already installed on the phone.…

Push for majority stake sale in memory business Toshiba is looking to raise almost $9bn (‎¥1 trillion) by selling off a majority stake in its memory chip business, according to Reuters, and so repair its finances, which have been devastated by cost overruns in its US nuclear power business.…

Backup data streams and now snapshots flash between firms After announcing an initial backup integration between Pure's all-flash array and Cohesity's converged secondary storage a year ago, the two have now gone further with snapshot-level integration.…

Attacks of great concern to Russian financial institutions Cybercrime group RTM is deploying complex malware based in the Delphi programming language to target Remote Banking Systems (RBS), a type of business software used to make bulk financial transfers.…

$4.48bn... cheap! (apols to Alfred E Neuman) Yahoo! will be gobbled by Verizon for $4.48bn, $350m cheaper than the initial deal, apparently due to the damage done to the company's value by widely reported successful cyber-attacks.…

There's an app that maps public toilets – how could it not be core infrastructure? The chief executive of the Civil Service, John Manzoni, says the UK needs to begin to consider the "collection and storage of data as part of [our] core national infrastructure".…

Take your pick of our six workshops Reg Events We’ve added the final session to our workshop lineup for Continuous Lifecycle London, giving you six options for diving deep into the technologies and tools driving cutting edge software development and deployment.…

A fabulous start to the year! Everyone's favourite cuddly outsourcing corp Capita is writing off a cool £50m worth of assets related to certain deals with customers after a "comprehensive review across its major contracts" base.…

Plus emergency response vehicles for ESN backup EE has revealed plans to launch balloon and drone "air masts" to connect remote parts of the UK in the wake of disasters such as major flooding, in its yet-to-be-patented technology unveiled today.…

Remote-control app hijacked for use as snooping tool – again Cybercrooks have once again begun slinging malware that subverts elements of the legitimate TeamViewer remote control app to snoop on victims.…

And they've already got an integrated modem to show for it Japanese-owned chipmaker ARM has bought Swedish firm Mistbase and Brit biz NextG-Com – staking its flag firmly on the NB-IoT narrowband communications standard.…

Article 29 has 'concerns' about Microsoft's data slurp The EU’s top privacy body has been probing Windows 10, but isn’t satisfied, even after Microsoft agreed to tweak the consent settings.…

Well... if machines're gonna learn learn learn learn learn... Backgrounder Do we need a new processor architecture? Graphcore says that machine learning computation is different from existing computational types, and will be broad enough in its usage for – as well as accelerated significantly by – a dedicated processor architecture.…

Hans Rosling is gone, but dashboards and graphs are dangerous to knowledge So, farewell then Hans Rosling, educator and "Jedi master of data visualisation". For in a world increasingly addicted to alternative facts, you pioneered software – Gapminder – and a viewer-friendly approach with bubble charts that allowed you to communicate simple important messages about the world through the medium of the Ted Talk.…

Why chase balloons for hundreds of miles when you can drop the payload outside? NASA will soon be testing high-altitude parachute systems that let astroboffins land valuable scientific research payloads from altitudes of 60,000 feet.…

Just over $180m in revenue, it turns out... and gross profit of $138m!? Oh, net loss though... App integration software business Mulesoft is set to make its initial public offering after revealing its financials.…

Cupertino files defence against back tax claim, claiming errors and overreach Stop terraforming taxation, says Cupertino, and let us get on with it Apple has filed its defence against the European Commission's claim it owes €13bn in back taxes in Ireland.…

Space. The Final Frontier (for copyright). These are the free images and videos of the ESA The European Space Agency has flung the data doors open: from today, it's adopted an open access policy for its trove of images and videos.…

CEO Travis Kalanick uses alternative diversity facts to prove Uber's goodness Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has appointed Eric Holder, once United States attorney-general under Barack Obama and now a partner of law firm Covington & Burling, to conduct a review of the “specific issues relating to the work place environment raised by Susan Fowler, as well as diversity and inclusion at Uber more broadly.”…

El Reg surveys fun stuff that's popped up on GitHub and beyond Git, Bad, Ugly It's a slow day, the boss is absent enduring the travails of analysts with lunches to offer, so Vulture South found itself wandering around the odd corners of GitHub.…

Developers want the new shiny, users forget integration and then along come the vendors ... Your attempt at putting Hadoop or Spark to work probably won't work, and you'll be partly to blame for thinking they are magic.…

The plan is to build a database of 'stuff we don't want bombed' Last month, Australia's federal government established a Critical Infrastructure Centre. Now it's decided to ask what the centre should protect.…

This gets interesting when you find your way into a mail server, says dev who found it Stop us if you've heard this one: Java and Python have a bug you can exploit to cross firewalls. Since neither are yet patched, it might be a good day to nag your developers for a bit.…

Senate committee told SA Power 'sat on' a problem for a while while SA sweltered Yet another reason that isn't wind farms has emerged for recent blackouts in the Australian State of South Australia: dodgy software.…

You're going to need a whole lot of Intel Inside to make this work The price and precise performance of Intel's Optane storage-class memory still remain officially obscure, but the company has confirmed the PC version of the product will run only on 7th-generation Core i7, i5 and i3 CPUS nestled into certain motherboards.…

Uni of Washington says the age of Big Data makes statistical literacy essential How could El Reg ignore this? – two University of Washington professors have assembled a course to teach students to identify bullshit.…

Kimble's running out of road The businessman otherwise known as Kim Schmitz, aka "Kimble", aka "Kim Dotcom", has lost his High Court appeal in New Zealand to be extradited to the USA.…

Do they use 'the language of hacking', including referring to themselves as a 'hacker'? Hot on the heels of Liverpool being awarded the European Capital of Culture for 2008 comes a charity programme, run by YouthFed, titled Hackers to Heroes.…

Shrinking before hyperconverged/converged Analysis Current thinking among vendors with hyper-converged and converged infrastructure offerings is that physical SANs are in decline and their market is shrinking. Chad Sakac, Converged Platforms Division president at Dell EMC, is the latest high-profile prognosticator to push this view.…

'Indirect' licence court victory – but at what cost? SAP has scored what threatens to be a pyrrhic victory in court against one of its own customers.…

Haven't named and shamed car-makers though Insecure car-controlling Android apps create a heightened car theft risk, security researchers at Kaspersky Lab warn.…

Kate Sutton talks to El Reg about search and maps Interview “The thing that snookered us came eight years after the event,” Kate Sutton of Streetmap told The Register late last week, following the High Court’s ruling that Google’s manipulation of search results did not destroy her business despite that being exactly what happened.…

HCIA startup denied the full makeover for now Analysis HPE has closed its SimpliVity acquisition and publicised software porting and migration plans but hasn't said anything about SimpliVity hardware moving to a ProLiant server base.…

Valuation Office Agency needs to revaluate its revaluation Rivals BT and Virgin Media have joined hands to collective moan that a forthcoming hike to business rates will result in tripling of their collective tax bill to £1.3bn over the next five years.…

Company didn't confirm whether majority to go to AWS or work, er, warehouse Amazon has announced its intention to increase its UK workforce to over 24,000 this year.…

UK.gov tells search engines to demote dodgy websites or face legislation UK government-hosted talks spanning two Parliaments have culminated in Google and Bing at last agreeing to tweak their search results in response to copyright-holders' concerns, thereby heading off threatened legislation on their conduct.…

You’ll dance with Beyonce in your living room, vows co-founder Analysis 8i, a New Zealand based company, last week landed a large B funding round that reads like a who’s who in the Virtual reality world. Its aim is to bring holograms to the masses. This doesn’t actually mean what it says, but it’s still pretty cool.…

Open source with a difference, from Redmond Analysis Much has changed at Microsoft since Steve Ballmer described Linux as "a cancer" in reaction to the open-source flag-flyer's threat to Redmond's money-spinning Windows business.…