The Register

Simple rules for organisers, courtesy of Citrix Promo Marketers rely on webinars as one of the most important elements in helping savvy technology decision-makers to evaluate their next purchase.…

Splashed big bucks for a fancy display? Let's hope you have a big office too LG's space-age monitors are suffering from an engineering flaw that causes the screen to become unusable when placed too close to a Wi-Fi hotspot.…

Follows briefings heavy on blame, light on Russia US President Donald Trump unexpectedly cancelled the signing of a new executive order on cybersecurity Tuesday, following a day of briefings by the White House on its contents.…

Turnbull's Transformers' left hand no longer speaking to right hand The Australian government's Digital Transformation Agency says one of its signal projects, GovShare, is just fine – but nobody's told the developers that are quietly shovelling dirt onto its coffin.…

Microsoft exploring 'less is more' for its operating system Microsoft's latest Windows Insider build, released on Friday for participants in the software preview program, contains a reference to a new Windows SKU called Cloud.…

Phew! US ISPs finally free to roll out broadband, right? The new head of the US Federal Communications Commission has promised to cut back on red tape and free up Big Cable – which has been suffering under record profits for too long.…

For pity’s sake, stop reusing passwords Usenix Enigma 2017 The life of the security IT professional would be a lot easier if people were capable of remembering enough passwords so that they didn't need to reuse them.…

Cisco research paints a grim picture of corporate defences More than a third of organisations that experienced a breach last year reported substantial customer, opportunity and revenue loss.…

Furious clicktivists wear out keyboards in online virtue-signalling battle Proving that democracy is just fine in the internet era, a petition demanding that Donald Trump should be invited to make a state visit to the UK has passed 100,000 signatures – passing the threshold to be "considered" for a Parliamentary debate.…

This is an entirely sensible view of the near future. Cough “What if you need to update 50 million hairdryers and something goes wrong? How can you roll it back?” Thus spake Maarten Ectors, Canonical’s Internet of Things veep, who painted a picture of an IoT future where your fridge will be taken away from you unless you constantly use it as a smart app store.…

Big Tech gets ready to defend Low Pay. Again Analysis President Trump's immigration reforms are set to open a divide between Silicon Valley bosses and their technology workers – much as Brexit did. Unlike many of Trump's policies, this one will find favour with Congress and strike a chord with American technology and engineering graduates, who have seen wages stagnate as Big Tech exploited the H-1B visa program.…

Cloud-managed Wi-Fi access for 'DNA' (acronym, not ludicrous business metaphor) Datto is getting in a right mesh. The backup service vendor is buying Open Mesh to improve its managed service provider offering.…

Accenture blamed for system swamp The NHS reply-all email fail last year involved 500 million emails being sent across the health service's network in just 75 minutes.…

Securobods file data hostage report A security firm has floated the theory that malware authors are using German firms as a testing ground for their wares prior to wider distribution.…

Adds 5,000 connections, but still has a long way to go before taking on BT Wannabe BT challenger CityFibre is expecting to swing into profit for the full-year 2016, having added more than 5,000 fibre-to-the-premises connections last year.…

Where could the tech end up? Sysadmin Blog HPE recently purchased SimpliVity for $650m. Some folks, like me, think this was a heck of a bargain for HPE. Others – most notably SimpliVity's competitors – think SimpliVity wasn't worth all that much anyways.…

ExaGrid CEO Bill Andrews on backup's major players Interview After our relatively crude attempt to segment the backup market, ExaGrid CEO Bill Andrews got in touch wanting to talk about their way of divvying up the market. What he described seemed a neat enough way of doing it, and far better than our three-group attempt.…

Switching suppliers could save people of UK £327m a year Millions of Brits would rather pay through the nose for services via their existing broadband provider than switch suppliers and risk a prolonged period without access to the web, a poll has found.…

More VMware, more containers, more switches Big Switch Networks has peeled back the veil over its Big Cloud Fabric 4.0, revealing broader VMware support, multi-container networking, and scale-up to 128 leaf switches.…

Will deliver an NVMe over Fabrics FlexPod system in a rack all ready to go Interview El Reg has asked a large number of storage array vendors about their views of NVMe solid state drives and NVMe over Fabrics access to such drives. The combination promises to effectively kill array network access latency issues and make array access equivalent to reading and writing data from a locally attached flash drive.…

Yet more rewriting of rules, as majority of patent attorneys say it's time to resign The president of the European Patent Office has embarked on yet another effort to undermine his organization's staff union.…

What’s the frequency, Kenneth? Usenix Enigma 2017 Hacking sensors isn’t as big an area of research as hacking operating systems and firmware, but the results of simple physical hacks can be far-reaching.…

No, says Tintri, it isn’t nonsense. (Psst, want to see a demo?) When we rather fancifully wrote a column about storage system management by chatbot, and added the idea of an Alexa-type, speech-recognizing front end, we thought we’d left the back of our envelope far, far behind. Turns out we hadn’t.…

Give them problems to solve, not solutions to bodge in, says Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson believes companies should let their software developers off leash.…

Actually, we do want to alarm you. At least enough to take your printers off the internet Take your printers off the Internet: a bunch of researchers from a German university have found a cross-site printing bug in the ancient PostScript language.…

More warnings for users, downgrading insecure APIs Usenix Enigma 2017 Google and Firefox have been key drivers in the quest to get more people using HTTPS online, and starting later this week the hammer is coming down.…

Most of the kit at 2016 plugfest worked just fine and should be backwards-compatible There's already product a-plenty on the market, but it still matters that the Google-led 25G Ethernet consortium has formalised the release of its technical specification.…

AirWatch's Android app and Agent need an update, stat VMware's AirWatch enterprise mobility management service has two flaws that means the software needs ran update ASAP.…

One was fixed before anyone realised it was a security issue, so be careful when applying OpenSSL's released patches for a trio of denial-of-service bugs.…

Hardware hack steals serial numbers from legitimate users Video Apple has closed its iCloud activation lock check in a possible move to neuter a bypass method that allowed stolen devices to be reactivated at the expense of legitimate devices.…

Amid the AI hype is a real chance to spot more anomalous behaviour, faster The information security industry's rush to adopt machine learning will help businesses burn US$96 billion on big data, intelligence, and analytics by 2021, says research house ABI .…

Give 'p's a chance... no? Linux encryption app Cryptkeeper has a bug that causes it to use a single-letter universal decryption password: 'p'.…

Kennedy pad needs more prep, Elon's next flight will be to ISS SpaceX's spectacular explosion last September is still producing fallout, with the company deciding its EchoStar launch will have to wait, while it prepares its new launchpad.…

Programming blunders allow miscreants to snatch home gateways' admin passwords Researchers are warning of a serious security hole that can be exploited to hijack potentially hundreds of thousands of Netgear routers.…

When the elderly can't access services or communicate, we all lose My dad seems to have a propensity for breaking the all of the kit we’ve given him to allow us to have a trans-oceanic video chat pretty much any time either of us wants. Apple’s Facetime came along just around the time I moved to Australia. Skype wasn’t far behind. Between these two we’ve been able to keep our relationship going strong, even at a 13,000 km remove. The tyranny of distance has been just a little less tyrannical as a result.…

American ISP giants' stooges urge watchdog to tear down safeguards on customer data Full of confidence in Ajit Pai – the new boss at the FCC, America's communications watchdog – groups representing US telcos are seeking a repeal of the regulator's privacy rules.…

What else do you expect from a glorified hotel manager? US President Donald Trump has emitted another executive order: this latest one is aimed at reducing the number of government regulations.…

As cloud era sweeps in, Redmond faces up to fresh competition Analysis Amazon's cloud service AWS has replaced Oracle and VMware as Microsoft's chief rivals, the Windows giant's CEO Satya Nadella has said.…

Open protocol published for all app, web devs to implement Usenix Enigma 2017 Facebook has published a specification for providing secure and reliable account recovery in websites and applications.…

Could this get any weirder or more silly? Apparently confirming that the United States of America has become its own strange reality TV show where brash billionaires and pantomime villains make decisions and everyone else has to clean up after them, Elon Musk has announced he will resolve the immigration crisis that has enveloped the Trump Administration over the past few days.…

And a good job too, seeing as blocks can be dodged by setting DNS to 8.8.8.8 Australia's government will conduct a “future review” into Section 115a of the nation's Copyright Act, the amendment introduced in 2015 that requires internet service providers to block websites.…

Software exploits presidential tantrums aimed at big biz US President Donald Trump's tweets about Boeing, General Motors, and Toyota have affected the companies' stock price – and creative agency T3 believes that consequence will be repeated.…

If at first you succeed, try, try again, think extortionists A top Austrian hotel coughed up thousands in ransom to cybercrooks, who hacked its computer system and locked guests out of their rooms until the money was paid.…

Feeling pretty Blu-ray DVD and Blu-ray income has collapsed faster than Sony expected, obliging the company to take a $976m (Y112bn) impairment on its movie business. Sony’s movie and TV boss stepped down earlier this month.…

NAND revenues top $800m/quarter with XPOint forecast to be a 2018 revenue driver Intel made $816m from flash memory products in the final 2016 quarter and sees XPoint contributing 10 per cent of revenues in 2018.…

Masaya Nakamura famous for popularising the iconic 80s arcade game The father of the world's most iconic arcade game Pac-Man, Masaya Nakamura, has died at the age of 91.…

Apparently survived YouTube shooting The tech world's equivalent of Jarndyce and Jarndyce rolled back into a New York Court last week, with a judge refusing to grant John McAfee an injunction blocking Intel from transferring trademark rights to the name McAfee to a proposed cyber-security spin-off.…

Hammy eating pups alive French farmers’ embrace of modern farming is turning the already endangered local hamster population into black-tongued baby eating pyschos, scientists have found.…

We are all 'Removable Aliens' now Analysis President Trump’s Executive Order (Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States) has caused controversy over its temporary ban on all Muslims entering the USA from certain countries. It has consequences for data protection.…

Does Clickbait cause blindness? Yes it does Zeitgeist-hungry MPs at the UK Parliament will conduct an inquiry into “Fake News”.…