The Register

Santa's sack helps out in Cupertino Christmas sales helped Apple steal top spot in global phone shipments from Samsung, but Gartner, who compiled the numbers, are confident that the chaebol will wrestle it back.…

Crypto panel lets loose at conference RSA USA Every year, the RSA Conference in San Francisco brings out the best and the brightest for its crypto panel, and the view from the floor was simple. Ignore the fads and hyped technology, and concentrate on the basics: good, clean, secure programming.…

And hackers didn't have much luck either with other flaws in the mobe OS RSA USA Despite shrill wailings by computer security experts over vulnerabilities in Android, Google claims very, very few of people have ever suffered at the hands of its bugs.…

At data, EE leads, Voda fails Real-world mobile network performance monitor RootMetrics reckons the reliability of the UK’s mobile networks improved eight per cent in the last six months of 2016.…

Citizen science project to find galactic bursts using selfie-taking pocket radio receivers Friends, take out your mobiles in the name of science! Astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics are trying to look for fast radio bursts in the Milky Way galaxy with “low-cost radio receivers.” And by that, they mean, your smartphones.…

If you think bad guys could abuse the Smart Install protocol, just turn it off Cisco's taken umbrage at accusations that its Smart Install (SMI) protocol is vulnerable to abuse.…

Roses are red. 'Global strategic alliance' is … eeeww. We've written a more fun headline for you even though V-Day is over IBM and ServiceNow have signed a “multi-year, strategic partnership” to blend their respective SaaS-y bits in the service of automated everything.…

Big Red 'categorically denies' former worker's claims it re-writes commission rules and puts sales people in 'debt' Updated A new lawsuit filed by a former Oracle employee alleges the software giant “has systematically stiffed its sales force of earned commission wages for many years, by scrapping contractual compensation plans when they yield commission earnings that are higher than Oracle would prefer to pay and retroactively imposing inferior – i.e. less remunerative – numeric terms.”…

It's all cloudy, innit? Riverbed is hoping to push more large-scale Software-Defined WAN (SD-WAN) deployments with a data centre version of its SteelConnect, plus integration of the system into its SteelHead appliances under the new moniker "SteelHead SD".…

Pay the ransom, or restore from backup. Choose wisely! Let's start with the “calm down” part of the article: yes, LogicLocker is ransomware designed for programmable logic controllers, but no, the cyber-geddon isn't upon us.…

Security experts skeptical of encrypted messenger's claims Rumors that President Donald Trump's aides are using an encrypted messaging app called Confide has landed the software firmly in the spotlight – and under the security microscope.…

Ye canna' hand a man a grander (Cloud) Spanner Google's close to plugging a long-standing gap in its public cloud, with its Cloud Spanner distributed relational database hitting public beta.…

Rickety array still at work: In tax-speak 'Commissioned new SAN' doesn't mean it's live yet The Australia Taxation Office's HPE SAN failed twice, in different ways, when causing its infamous December and February outages that brought down online tax services on which citizens and accountants rely.…

May have to sell even more of its chip business to cover costs The chairman of Toshiba has resigned following the release of figures showing a projected $6.3bn loss from the company's nuclear business – a loss that may continue to grow and threaten its other businesses.…

Amster-damn, that's a hell of a vulnerability to make browser bug exploitation easier Researchers in Europe have developed a way to exploit a common computer processor feature to bypass a crucial security defense provided by modern operating systems.…

Big Red's IaaS and PaaS land in Oz, as an entree to SPARC cloud and AWS-killer plans Oracle has flicked the switch on everything-as-a-service in Australia.…

macOS gets patch for critical flaw in music app Apple says a newly patched hole in its GarageBand music tool could allow for remote code execution on the Mac.…

Private biz needs to push back against government pressure, says Microsoft prez RSA USA In 1949, the world’s nations came together to sign the Geneva Conventions, according respect in times of war to civilians, soldiers incapable of fighting, and prisoners of war. Now we need to go back and do the same for civilians caught up in online conflict, according to Microsoft.…

Open source has won, but victory may be fleeting OSLS The Open Source Leadership Summit began on Tuesday amid roads closed by a landslide: held in The Resort at Squaw Creek near Lake Tahoe, California, it was not easily accessible to attendees traveling Highway 80 from the San Francisco Bay Area.…

Oh yeah, and its technology still doesn't exist either Cementing its reputation as a slow-motion corporate car-crash, made-up technology specialist Magic Leap has been sued for sex discrimination by the woman it hired to tackle sex discrimination.…

Is the dining room the right place for 10 kWH of battery chemistry anyhow? Standards Australia is considering a change to building standards that might require storage batteries such as the Tesla PowerWall to be installed out-of-doors.…

Is there something in the water in San Francisco? RSA USA Representative Michael McCaul (R-TX), head of the US House Committee on Homeland Security, seemed a tad off-message today at the RSA USA security conference.…

Adobe and Nvidia on the other hand... IT admins hoping to get out of the office early for Valentine's Day have received some potentially welcome or heartbreaking news from Microsoft, depending on how they're set up.…

Extreme measures called for in an extreme geography Why is Fujitsu touting all-flash XtremIO storage arrays in Japan when it has its own Eternus all-flash array product line?…

Never mind the cock-ups Outgoing Met police commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe claims to be leaving the service on track to be the "best digital police" force with the arrival of long-awaited smart devices this summer.…

Covers AWS, Azure, Google clouds and more CostStorage.com is a free public cloud cost calculator covering the Amazon, Azure, Google, IBM, BackBlaze and Oracle clouds and their US regions.…

Cloud Platform becomes Virtual Edition for ROBO use Cohesity has added two more products to its Data Platform set, a software-only virtual edition and a hyper-converged node.…

'One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness... oh sh*t, it's come off' Boffins at Kings College London are looking for gents in committed relationships who don't mind slipping a variety of rings over their old fellas to measure the relationship between satisfaction and depth of penetration during sexual intercourse.…

CTO gets all loved up about customers on Valentine's Day DigitalOcean on Tuesday plans to begin offering load balancers to help its customers distribute online traffic across their infrastructure, at a cost of $20 per month.…

HMD cranks up the nostalgia ahead of comeback HMD, the custodian of the Nokia brand, is cranking up the nostalgia ahead of its return at MWC at the end of the month. Pre-publicity material is about heritage - although how much the new models have to do with the Nokia DNA is open to question.…

DDoSing over 100Gbps up 140%. Mirai worst but Spike peaks at 517Gbps DDoS attacks more than doubled in the last quarter of 2016 compared to the same period the year before.…

Show off your intelligence by answering the M call for papers Reg Events Machine learning, AI and robotics are escaping from the lab, and popping up businesses, and we want to know how you’re putting them to work.…

Roses are nice, but SSDs from Chipzilla (if these specs are true) are DRAM-NAND gap-filler Leaked Intel Optane SSD specs show much higher endurance and lower latency than NAND SSDs and good, but not great, IO performance.…

See this, Cisco? Amazon has opened a new front in its battle for enterprise applications against Microsoft, Google and Cisco.…

At least wait until there's a pipeline from schools, he says American techies who discovered their Silicon Valley bosses were suppressing their wages illegally now have to suffer fresh insult to injury.…

Don't break my car... my achy brake-y car.. or is that do? Popular car parts website PartsGateway.co.uk is dangerously insecure, a veteran UK security consultant warns.…

Taxmen to press on with own ID authenticating service... as we reported Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC) has confirmed that it's ditching the Cabinet Office's new online ID system, and will be pushing forwards with its own replacement for Government Gateway.…

Soz, currency fluctuation Spare a thought for those taking the Cisco CCNA assessments, who are facing a 32 per cent hike in fees this month without warning.…

5G, New Radio - how much of the hype should we really believe... One of the toughest jobs in this industry is analyzing out the latest Cisco Visual Networking Index. First you have to get your head around all those numbers which are impossible to visualise, like exabytes. And then you start to see questions in the logic, and wonder if perhaps Cisco has gone too far off in one direction or another.…

Wonder material, not wonder market Graphene, the material with many extraordinary properties, has swallowed around £120m in UK government funds, but development and commercialisation is proving tortuously slow and increasingly dogged with disappointment.…

Summary: You're (mostly) screwed without preparation Getting into America can be tricky at the moment if you have the wrong skin color or the wrong surname.…

Software-defined networking? Time for an open relationship Sysadmin Blog VMware has recently announced its financial results for 2016, and for a company that's not just satured but that leads the VM market, it had a very good year.…

Tries - and fails - to have court suppress review of its Falcon product SaaS-y endpoint protection outfit CrowdStrike has failed in an attempt to prevent publication of a review detailing its software's qualities.…

Humanity's bulls*** is too much for software Analysis The viral spread of fake news and “alternative facts” has rocked Western politics. Oxford Dictionaries chose “post-truth” as its word of 2016, and when a society is scolded by a dictionary wielding a hyphenated word, you know you've collectively screwed up.…

Blue, soon, close enough At Oracle, the future is cloud. If a product is not in the cloud, it's toast. It's that simple. The command has come down from on high to Oraclers. Be in the cloud or be finding a new job.…

A solution! You can now invite your equally sad mates It's a question that has long concerned us all: when you're at home watching TV on your VR headset, how do you avoid that sense that if someone looked in the window, you might appear to be the saddest individual on the planet?…

'Cliff edge' drop for UK cybersecurity industry The UK's aging cybersecurity workforce is approaching a "retirement cliff edge," according to a new survey.…

Big Red admits to a lost half-decade in silicon, promises melding with software real soon Oracle's popped out a short explanation for the sketchy SPARC/Solaris roadmap it slipped out in January.…

Bug-hunting mission's final landing site candidates are thought to have seen water flow NASA has decided its Mars 2020 mission will land a rover in one of three places, all of which are thought to have once seen liquid water flowing.…

Azure hits the high notes in High Performance Linpack tests, SoftLayer strangles itself The best clouds are genuinely competitive with do-it-yourself high performance computing – and Microsoft's top-tier Azure is the best of the lot.…