The Register

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.…

Consumers to be able to access paid-for services when abroad Planned new EU laws aimed at making online content more accessible to those that subscribe to it are closer to being finalised after a deal struck on the new rules earlier this month was endorsed by representatives of national governments across the EU.…

Virtzilla debuts disaster-recovery-as-a-service on dedicated hardware Disaster-recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) is an obvious service to run in the cloud, as the business of operating secondary sites is costly and complex.…

University spends $62m on AI trial, gets the usual trials that come with failure A University of Texas audit report last week tipped a bucket on the conduct of a high-profile “Watson to cure cancer” project.…

The first owner might still have access. And the second. And so on Cars are smart enough to remember an owner, but not smart enough to forget one – and that's a problem if a smart car is sold second-hand.…

2,500 suits to be flung off bench to preach ERP on cloud Deloitte, Amazon Web Services and SAP have cooked up a cloudy consulting confection.…

Complete with faster disk reads, support for more CPUs and the usual grab bag of goodness Linus Torvalds has given us all version 4.10 of the Linux kernel.…

Tip for entrepreneurs: World could soon need automated cloud-sueball-flinger Those of you contemplating a cloud startup have two options: get acquired by one of five companies or build an automatic sueball flinger.…

Uber CEO orders investigation into tribulations of engineer Susan Fowler UPDATED Colour us surprised: a silicon valley darling famous for belligerent market entries, raising middle fingers at regulators and having a relaxed attitude to tax has been accused of also completing a bingo-card of bad management that includes sexism, arse ass-covering, empire-building and malicious management.…

Mess in Windows graphics library can give bad hombres access to memory Google's Project Zero has again revealed a Windows bug before Microsoft fixed it.…

Falls on Akamai's league table can't be automatically pinned on the multi-technology mix Like the sun rising, the release of a new Akamai State of the Internet report inevitably leads to opinion columns bemoaning Australia's slide on global league tables for broadband speed, most attributing it to the much-hated “multi-technology model” NBN.…

And then sticks the landing for good measure after pausing a day for hydraulic glitch Elon Musk's rocket trucking business, SpaceX, is rolling on the celestial highway again after successfully launching a Dragon capsule atop a Falcon 9 rocket, then landing the rocket's first stage back on terra firma.…

Miscreant used stolen email accounts to cram crap into inboxes A marketer who used stolen email accounts to trouser more than a million dollars by spamming people has been sent down for four years.…

Science lab stuck on 53-day orbit, unable to catch a closer glimpse of alien gas world NASA's Juno probe will not venture any closer to Jupiter, and will stay in its current 53-day orbit for the remainder of its mission. That's due to faulty helium valves in the propulsion system, space boffins announced today.…

34-month sentence and he has to pay his old bosses back A sacked system administrator has been jailed after hacking the control systems of his ex-employer – and causing over a million dollars in damage.…

And it's suing Nokia for patent infringement on wireless comms Long-ago phone-builder BlackBerry has been sued by hundreds of employees who say they were tricked into quitting their jobs.…

The Galaxy S3 is real but is its security FAKE NEWS? Fifteen members of US Congress have asked the House Oversight Committee to investigate whether President Trump is putting national security at risk by using an insecure phone and holding sensitive meetings in public.…

Set aside rational thought, it's Apple click-click story time With the exciting news that Apple is going to hold a conference in June where it will announce new products – only the 15th time it has done so since 2003 – we felt it was time to write down some wild speculation because, like lemmings, you will click on it and we make money when you do.…

Or switch it off, bin it, bury it, whatever's necessary Germany's Federal Network Agency, or Bundesnetzagentur, has banned Genesis Toys' Cayla doll as an illegal surveillance device.…

More evidence that security = happy customers Account holders in the US are more likely to switch banks in the aftermath of fraud, according to a new study.…

Report: It's not going to save money or anything. Plus we'll still need paper It was hard to hear UK health secretary Jeremy Hunt’s recent backtracking over his plans for a paperless NHS by 2018, without wondering to what extent digital health documents have contributed to global forest depletion over the last decades.…

Rushed proposal opens rift in internet giants' club Exclusive London Internet Exchange (LINX) – Europe's largest provider of internet interconnect services – faces a growing backlash among members over changes to its rules that would gag directors applying secret government orders to monitor traffic, under Britain's new Investigatory Powers Act.…

Come and use DocumentDB, we've fired up Photoshop Microsoft is attempting to capitalise on a recent spate of ransom attacks on unsecured MongoDB instances by encouraging developers to switch to working with its own Azure-based DocumentDB system.…

Getting those pesky ponies into that there corral, yessiree Not every story is NetApp making a hyperconverged product, or Oracle possibly canning tape products. Here's a roundup of several pieces of news that are nevertheless significant.…

'Unlikely Hamas is responsible' – researchers Hackers are continuing to target Israeli Defence Force (IDF) personnel with Android spyware but doubts have emerged that Hamas is behind the cyber-spying operation.…

You loved it, they killed it: Now bring it back Nokia didn’t once just dominate the world’s handset market, it defined it.…

Crews have to land and move tactical info around via USB sticks. No, really Britain's latest military helicopter fleet has still not had a tactical data link capability fitted, two years after the aircraft entered service.…

But they'll be hard-pressed to catch Dell and Nutanix Analysis The hyperconverged infrastructure appliance (HCIA) market has become hypercompetitive as the two-horse race between Dell and Nutanix has been blown open with HPE/SimpliVity, NetApp and Cisco chasing them.…

Competition Markets Authority lays smackdown on random hikes and service tweaks Amazon, Apple and Microsoft have committed to providing cloud storage users with fairer contracts after a crackdown by the Competition Markets Authority (CMA).…

Big Red keeps schtum over the status of StreamLine El Reg was tipped off that Oracle's StorageTek (StreamLine) tape library product range was going to be end-of-lifed.…

It wants to see me stripped Something for the Weekend, Sir? “Strip it off!” commands a disembodied voice. “We want to see what you’ve got!”…

... as in all complex systems Since it announced a crackdown on outstanding debt in June last year, Centrelink has sent debt recovery letters to thousands of Australian welfare recipients. Early reports indicated that around 20 per cent were issued in error, although the true number may be substantially higher.…

Contractors and staff may be left out of pocket Contractors and employees at recruitment firm Coal Intelligent Technology may be left out of pocket after the company ceased trading yesterday.…

This bit goes here, this bit goes there and - huh! - why aren't the lights blinking? On-Call Welcome to another Friday (!) and therefore to another edition of On-Call, The Register's column in which we let readers vent about jobs gone bad.…

King Battistelli tries to reconstitute Appeals Committee – staff union refuses The president of the European Patent Office, Benoit Battistelli, is ignoring yet another formal rebuke of his policies by disregarding two decisions by the International Labour Organization.…

Vivid images of machine learning graph processing Pics Brit chip startup Graphcore has produced sexy images of its graph processing.…

Bloke cuffed, charged after customer's subscription axed An IT contractor is facing criminal charges after turning off the Microsoft Office 365 service of a customer he said owed him money.…

Retail mega-giant accused in lawsuit of being lying IPA-holes US big-box chain Walmart is being sued by an Ohio bloke who claims the retailer's line of "craft beers" is an egregious lie.…

They'll stick notes to fridges in the aftermath of nuclear war? Fun Fact: Dead cockroaches stay magnetized far longer than their live brethren, according to real actual science.…

PCs are going great, but enterprise and mobile divisions are in turnaround mode Expect Lenovo server and storage sales people to knock on your door, soon and often, because the company's identified the lack of its own direct sales force as the reason for poor performance in its Data Center Group for the third quarter of its 2016/17 financial year.…

There's lots of things out there and Big Red wants to dig 'em out of silos and cloud 'em up Oracle's revealed another way it thinks it can address the internet of things market, by teaching its exisiting business apps to talk things' language.…

In theory this should mean ISPs offer faster plans for fewer dollars nbn™, the company building and operating Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN), has announced changes to the network capacity charge (CVC) it charges internet service providers.…

Explosive news that, for once, doesn't involve a self-detonating battery Samsung Group vice chairman Lee Jae-yong has been arrested, accused of bribery, embezzlement, and perjury, and taken to jail near Seoul in South Korea.…

Rookie's bill targets visa applicants, may never happen A newbie congressman has floated his first ever US law bill – one that demands visitors to America hand over URLs to their social network accounts.…

We took one for the team and deciphered it for you Comment Whatever Mark Zuckerberg's taking, we want some, too.…

'Rare issue under a set of circumstances that have never previously been encountered' HPE has blamed a problem with solid state disks for its dual and very disruptive outages at the Australian Taxation Office (ATO).…

Cali upstart peddles 4U HyperStore 4000 box Cloudian is now touting a fat HyperStore 4000 alongside its HyperStore 1500 appliance. Both boxes are compatible with Amazon's AWS S3 APIs.…

Medieval terror bastards not great at hacking says ex-top NSA lawyer RSA USA There’s no need to panic about the threat of a major online terrorist attack, since ISIS and their allies are all talk and no trousers. That's according to the former head of the US National Counterterrorism Center.…

Will things ever be the same again? Google is once again pulling resources out of its Fiber network venture – this time it's employees.…

Bill reintroduced to crack down on location snooping US Congressional lawmakers on Wednesday reintroduced legislation to establish rules limiting how American government agencies can obtain a person's whereabouts.…