The Register

Forget WD – bigger stake in joint flash fab would make more sense Reuters is all over the Toshiba memory division 20 per cent stake sale, reporting incoming bids up to $3.6bn.…

Don't be afraid. It's just that year-late digital strategy Cabinet Office minister Ben Gummer has today unveiled the government’s long-delayed digital strategy, calling it "the most ambitious programme of change of any government anywhere in the world”.…

American general wants rid of his Harriers tout suite The head of US Marine Corps aviation wants to buy more F-35Bs per year than the UK will receive in the next five.…

Like GNU running in Windows – outrageous. And pointless Once the second biggest enemy of Linux (SCO Group takes top honours), Microsoft is positively giddy about not just supporting Linux but actually building tools that run Linux in Windows and about putting previously Windows-only software on Linux.…

Four paws bad! Time to break the emotional attachment Microsoft, Amazon, Google, others all telling us to move server loads to the cloud. Most of us with on-premise servers haven't designed things in a cloud friendly way and - call us old sentimentalists - have heaped time, love and workloads on our tin.…

Inspur and Diablo smash those datasets Analysis Chinese server vendor Inspur has cut Spark workload runtimes in half by bulking out DRAM with Diablo Technologies' Memory1 technology.…

Now your soaps can come on holiday, too European Union citizens will soon be able to carry their streaming video subscriptions across borders, without virtual private networks but not necessarily for free.…

Whatever, you're just a sore loser, Fitbit fires back The bitter battle between Fitbit and Jawbone has picked up again, with Jawbone claiming in its latest court filing that its rival is under criminal investigation.…

If $1,000 a month is cheap, sure Patent trolls are a growing problem, and Microsoft thinks that it has the solution – an affordable-ish protection scheme for Azure customers.…

Plaintext passwords. In 2017 UK magazine publisher Future's FileSilo website has been raided by hackers, who have made off with, among other information, unencrypted user account passwords.…

Boffins challenged to make H.265 compression look flabby The International Telecommunications Union wants researchers to get busy on new video compression codecs, setting an ambitious target to double their squeezing compression power by 2020.…

Turn off F5's 'Session Tickets' or patch the bug to survive 'Ticketbleed' There's a new branded bug in town, but thankfully it only hurts kit made by F5 Networks.…

Carl Bass is not planning to spend time with family - he's not sure they want him around Carl Bass says quitting will mean people stop laughing at his jokes as we noted in passing yesterday, Autodesk's Carl Bass has stepped aside as CEO.…

Space Launch System and Orion undamaged, all personnel accounted for Video A tornado has totalled some priceless NASA artefacts.…

But signup for higher speed tiers is flat-lining Australia's National Broadband Network is closing in on a million active fibre-to-the-premises users and topped AU$400 million for the first half of its 2017 financial year.…

No, seriously. This thing floats over your office and flashes when code pipelines go bad Application performance monitoring outfit Dynatrace is getting into the flying saucer business.…

Not just marketing – Software and Systems must work from city hubs, too Exclusive IBM is forcing more than just its US marketing staff to move to a handful of regional hubs. The crackdown on remote workers and smaller offices also hits engineers and other staffers in America and Europe.…

Homeland Sec boss says he wants 'enhanced' digital vetting The new boss of the US Department of Homeland Security plans to dig deeper into the lives of some of those wishing to enter the Land of the Free – even going as far as demanding web passwords and banking records.…

US prosecutors list dossiers and code allegedly swiped Former Booz Allen Hamilton contractor Harold Thomas Martin III allegedly stole secret and top-secret software and documents from American intelligence agencies for up to 20 years. That's according to a federal grand jury indictment revealed today.…

ACLU urges end to behavioral screening of travelers From 2007 through 2015, the US Transportation Security Administration (TSA) spent $1.5 billion trying to identify potentially dangerous travelers by observing their behavior through an ongoing program called SPOT.…

Hypocrisy is the new normal More tech companies have added their names to the legal brief against President Trump's immigration ban, but some big names – including Amazon, Google and Microsoft – are facing accusations of rampant hypocrisy for funding his inauguration.…

Recycling center processing exploding batts itself explodes. How poetic The factory tasked with producing and later recycling the batteries for the self-detonating Samsung Note 7 has itself fallen victim to a fire.…

Need a 2/47 NAS disk? Mmm, maybe the MN series is just right Toshiba has a new desktop and low-end NAS disk drive, the MN series.…

*cough* Yahoo! *cough* What? No, I have a terrible cold US-based industrial computer supplier Logic Supply has reset user passwords following a suspected security breach.…

2.0 hits the Last Chance Saloon today Analysis After multiple delays, Google is finally launching Android Wear 2 today, nine months after revealing it to world+dog. This is Google's last chance to give Wear a purpose, in a market that's been savage to so many wearables. Otherwise, it's back to the drawing board.…

What could possibly go wrong with this madcap scheme? Petty criminals in Britain will soon be found guilty and sentenced by computers, under new government plans.…

New hyperconverged pair Cisco has announced two all-flash HyperFlex systems with an up to sixfold performance improvement.…

Crackdown reaches Manchester, Wales and Liverpool UK copyright cops made their biggest sweep yet in the crackdown on preloaded Kodi TV streaming kit.…

Three-week hearing expected, and yes, it is about the NSA's mass surveillance activities The future of the relationship between the European Union and President Trump's United States is being decided in a Dublin court hearing which is expected to continue for the next three weeks.…

From Isilon to Scality to OpenIO and ARM-powered nano-nodes Case study Paris-based Dailymotion is the world's second largest video sharing website after YouTube and its three-stage storage history has transitioned from a reliable scale-out filer, to a maturing object storage startup, to an even smaller firm in pursuit of scale and performance.…

Now all we need is some international standards, and a use case... Ofcom has identified the spectrum bands in the UK for the much-hyped use of 5G, ahead of the yet-to-be-determined international standards for 5G.…

Faster access to more data with gen-6 refresh Kaminario has more than doubled array capacity and speed with the sixth generation of its K2 all-flash array, mainly by using higher capacity SSDs and faster controller processors. It's also improved compression and its storage assurance program.…

And MPs said workers were being treated without dignity or respect… Exclusive Sports Direct has left its 30,000-strong workforce in the dark over a data breach in the autumn when a hacker accessed internal systems containing staffers' personal information.…

Flaw let users add malicious code to their profile pages Security researchers have discovered a significant security vulnerability in Steam, Valve's digital distribution platform for PC gaming.…

This power browser has turned seriously useful Some time late last year, without most of us really noticing, the Vivaldi browser became genuinely, startingly useful.…

Barclays Bank and KBC presented with fraudulent contracts Four men have been found guilty of conning Barclays Bank and Belgian banking group KBC out of £160m in a superfast broadband scam.…

APT tactics deployed by mystery cybercrooks unveiled Cybercriminals have hit scores of enterprises in 40 countries using hidden malware.…

Don't forget, they'll also have to spend a lot to relocate

Machine learning IP snapped up in $100m deal Sophos has announced a deal to acquire the core technologies of anti-malware protection outfit Invincea for $100m plus up to $20m, dependent on first-year revenues.…

€20m is srs bsnss so we will keep talking about it Comment Data was a hot topic last year and it's already big in 2017: Microsoft continues to resist the US government's attempts to get hold of data held in its Irish data centres. But just as it seems to be making progress, the government has won a favourable first instance ruling against Google forcing it to disclose data held outside the USA. This looks set to end up in the US Supreme Court.…

Piracy reaching 'epidemic' proportions, as streaming goes plug and play Pay TV and other copyright industries are pinning their hopes that new prosecutions of “Kodi USB stick” sellers will thwart what they call an “epidemic” of streaming piracy.…

We called; your digital crayons answered Pics Last week we challenged our commentards to redesign The Register's masthead in the style of David Hockney, after the artist scrawled over The Sun's logo in Paintbrush.…

Sorry – t'cloud for accents? Microsoft has build a cloud service for applications so that software can attempt to understand specialist vocabularies and cope with dialects and accents.…

Concorde 216 rolls into its very own hangar at Aerospace Bristol museum VID The last Concorde to take to the skies, G-BOAF (216), has come to a stop for the final time in the soon-to-open Aerospace Bristol museum.…

You catch more crooks with honey than vinegar Feature The hackers breached the transport operator's systems and before they knew it had sent a passenger train hurtling into a wall. And the only reason you didn't read about it in the papers was that the systems were an entirely fictitious network created in 2015 to test just how far snoopers or crims would go in attacking vulnerable transport systems.…

Nexus owners are sweet. The rest of us have to hope we don't get bricked by baddies Android's revealed 58 patches, but good luck getting your paws on them: as ever, owners of Nexus devices may already have the February update but OEM customers have to wait.…

Marketing told to sit 'shoulder to shoulder' or else Exclusive IBM is cracking down on remote workers, ordering unlucky employees to either come into one of six main offices and work "shoulder to shoulder" – or leave for good.…

Cross-platform dev is for low-rent chumps, unless it's our cross-platform dev Apple, which once dismissed cross-platform development for forcing developers to use lowest-common-denominator technology, has proposed a cross-platform JavaScript API for 3D graphics rendered in browsers called WebGPU.…

Astroboffins have searched for magnetic neighbor for 50 years Fifty years after pulsars were discovered, scientists in the UK and South Africa have spotted the first white dwarf that mimics the emissions of a neutron star.…

It was either shallow cuts now or no cash for new product investments says CEO Rackspace has revealed plans to trim six per cent of its workforce in the United States, and plenty of people elsewhere.…