The Register

Competitors are raising prices. Who knows, it could work TalkTalk has spotted an opportunity to win back customers following its mega data breach in October 2015 with a flash sale broadband promotion.…

Dr Jesper Sorensen takes aim at forum posters The UK parenting website Mumsnet has been ordered by a court to give up the identities of two users who criticised a plastic surgeon, along with the contents of their private messages.…

Bring your own key to the encryption kingdom Businesses would be more likely to use store data in a public cloud environment if they were allowed to "manage and control their own encryption keys", a new study has found.…

Could be costly for Zuck. But who really cooks the Spam? Facebook has failed to dismiss moves to file a class action lawsuit over its practice of sending "unsolicited" text messages when your friend has a birthday.…

Tech visionary pushed parallel IO processing to the end Obit Datacore co-founder and chairman Ziya Aral has passed away, aged just 64.…

Tie me up, tie me down Demand for cyber security skills in the UK means that salaries for full time IT security jobs are increasing faster than contractor rates, according to a new survey.…

Will shed up to 160 lb kg jobs, say sources Fitbit is to cut some 80 to 160 jobs as the “smart” wearable novelty wears off. According to a scoop by The Information, cuts will affect between 5 per cent and 10 per cent of employees, and are part of a reorganisation designed to take $200m costs out of the business.…

What are you doing with machine learning? And how are you doing it? 2017 looks like being the year of AI. Or at least that’s what a friendly computer keeps telling us.…

Parliament receives petition to prevent President's state visit More than a million Britons have signed an online petition begging the government to prevent American President Donald Trump from making a state visit to the United Kingdom.…

Two failed attempts to sell company revealed in Chapter 11 filings One "VM Bidco" has been revealed as the successful bidder for Violin Memory at its auction. Violin's Chapter 11 bankruptcy filings have now revealed two failed attempts, spaced a year apart, to sell the firm.…

HD TV in 1945? Nearly BBC TV, famed for such nation-capturing programmes as Playschool and Great British Bake Off, celebrated its 80th birthday last November. It did so in the same week that watching the country's then most popular TV programme, The Crown, required neither the BBC nor a TV set. Just a Netflix account and a connected mobe.…

You gotta buy American, right? Right? Opinion Results from Ericsson this week will have all of us pundits reaching for just how the Swedish telecoms giant is going to survive the continual onslaught from China’s Huawei. How long will it be before it needs to be acquired and why Cisco needs to be the acquirer.…

'People do tend to have a negative perception of Hull' Feature Most people are aware of Hull's status as the UK City of Culture this year - along with it being serial holder of the Crappiest Town in Britain. But few also know about the city's unique telecoms history.…

Yes it is. You at the back, stop sniggering! Ronald Rubens, Europe North veep at telecommunications biz Avaya, is busy doing some serious damage limitation, after the US Avaya parent company filed for bankruptcy protection earlier this week.…

Guests gain XSSive privileges in IBM's Hadoopery IBM has patched twin cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities in its Hadoop-probing InfoSphere BigInsights platform.…

Big freighter order keeps the Jumbo Jet aloft and it was the internet wot won it Boeing's iconic 747 looks safe for a few years yet, thanks in part to the internet.…

Incompatible Timesharing System now compatible with modern machines Among the more interesting denizens of GitHub are the many projects devoted to rediscovering and preserving the history of computing – such as a system called the Incompatible Timesharing System for the legendary Digital PDP-10.…

Larry Ellison did promise Oracle's cloud would be faster and cheaper Oracle has changed the way it charges users to run its software in Amazon Web Services, effectively doubling the cost along the way.…

Alphabet subsidiary decided hardware emulator that's plagued Zen had to go Google's revealed how it hardened the open source KVM hypervisor to run in its cloud and removing the QEMU hardware emulation tool looks to be a big part of its efforts.…

Firm that leaked 13M records shames firm that leaked 400k More than 400,000 phone call recordings that include names, addresses, phone numbers and credit card information have been leaked online by Florida marketing company VICI Marketing following suspected security blunders.…

Don't try this at home. And if you do, please RTFM about ventilation About that “3D laser printer killed Berkeley couple” story? It's more likely to have been a laser cutter.…

HPE's all-but quoting Rick Astley as Cisco finds another way to nobble Arista imports HPE has gone the full Rick Astley with Arista, telling its sales team and partners customers it will never give it up, let it down, run around or desert it.…

Traditional owners still have to put up the Facebook founder as a neighbour Mark Zuckerberg has abandoned the lawsuit he hoped would let him buy Hawaiian real estate without having any actual Hawaiians as neighbours.…

Huge ransomware. The best ransomware. Ransomware fixed with a wipe-and-restore Criminals infected 70 percent of storage devices tied to closed-circuit TVs in Washington DC eight days before the inauguration of President Donald Trump.…

'Small and calm release candidate' suddenly gets 'a bit distressing' as rc8 looms Progress on Linux 4.10 has to date been steady. So steady, in fact, that it's not been worth reporting.…

SoftNAS spans on-prem and Azure with virtual NAS, and there's news to come in April Microsoft's cooking up something to do with virtual storage appliances spanning on-premises storage and Azure and will reveal all in April.…

Cross-site scripting, cross-site request forgery shuttered WordPress has fixed three flaws in its content management system, shuttering cross-site scripting and SQL injection bugs three weeks after its last update.…

One political hack is worth one Director of National Intelligence and one Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. No, really In case the first week of the White House of President Donald Trump hadn't scared you enough, alt.right news service Breitbart executive chair and now Senior Counselor to the President Steve Bannon has managed to insert himself into the United States' National Security Council.…

All you need is the right tools, says Citrix Promo Although flexible working offers significant cost benefits for companies and enhances satisfaction for those employees who are allowed to work at the place and time of their choosing, a recent survey of 1,024 office workers across Australia found that despite the demand, flexible working is being held back by a culture of “presenteeism”.…

Cisco's collaborationware is a mess: that WebEx bug also hit Firefox and IE Cisco has turned up a packet fragmentation issue in its TelePresence Multipoint Control Unit software that opens up a denial-of-service and remote code execution vulnerability.…

Anti-corruption body finds project was more corrupt, for longer, than anyone thought The corruption watchdog in the Australian State of Victoria has concluded that the state's failed "Ultranet" project was made vastly more expensive by official, rampant and long-standing corruption.…

Songstress reaches settlement with 'secondary reality television personality' It was a battle of the Kylies: in one corner legendary actress and singer Kylie Minogue; in the other, a girl that occasionally appears on a reality TV show.…

Not the first time we've come across this, say cops A randy van man faces three points or a driver education course after he and a female passenger were nabbed in flagrante while whizzing down the A3 at Guildford in Surrey, England, yesterday.…

Researchers spot bad behavior abounding in mobe apps A worrying number of VPN apps for Android mobile devices are rife with malware, spying, and code injection, say researchers.…

It's a grim week of remembrance for America's rocketeers Pics and video On Friday, NASA unveiled a new memorial for Command Pilot Virgil "Gus" Grissom, Senior Pilot Edward White II, and Pilot Roger Chaffee, who perished when fire broke out in their Apollo 1 capsule.…

If true, we hope he got the file on avoiding truck trailers Tesla has sued a former employee who left to set up a rival business, claiming he tried a not-so cunning plan to steal company secrets and lure away key staff.…

Hardware dump will help pay costs from failed energy venture Toshiba says it will sell off its memory semiconductor business as it looks to recuperate from the write-off of losses to its nuclear power business.…

Yes, we're being sarcastic. We're always sarcastic The FBI has released documents detailing its inconclusive investigation into threats made by online gamers against several women that started in 2014, particularly media critic Anita Sarkeesian and game developer Brianna Wu.…

IT admins left with dead boxes blocking all traffic Updated A firmware update pushed to Barracuda firewalls has knocked out boxes in large firms and crippled networks, we're told.…

Draft executive order foresees new legal powers US President Donald Trump will order a 60-day report on the state of the nation's cybersecurity, complete with recommendations on whether new legal powers are required.…

Tech workers not able to keep up with new systems, we're told New York state officials say they are having to hire outside consultants to work on their systems because the state's own IT personnel lack the skills to manage newer technology.…

You don't want a taskbar? Fine, we'll take it out. OK, we'll put it back again Microsoft is said to be developing a cross-platform shell to bring the desktop Windows antiques to non-PC devices of different shapes and sizes.…

We have to get very, very tough on cyber and cyber warfare… and backups? Cockrell Hill, Texas has a population of just over 4,000 souls and a police force that managed to lose eight years of evidence when a departmental server was compromised by ransomware.…

Yeah... thanks for that, sniffs Ministry of Defence Military kit costs are going to skyrocket, according to the National Audit Office, which claims the Ministry of Defence now needs to slash an extra £5.8bn from its budget over the next 10 years.…

Still better than most of the press releases we receive An Italian couple have been nicked by counter-terror cops for, some, er, smearing letters they had sent to public figures.…

Cutting out the middle man Google has launched its own root certificate authority.…

The Cyber Cold War, everyone Prague has become the centre of cyber cold war intrigue with both Russia and the US seeking the extradition of a Russian hacker.…

Distillery needs a pagoda like a whole in the roof Devonians are up in arms after plans for a whisky, or possibly whiskey, distillery on Dartmoor were derided as “too Scottish”. Or possibly too Japanese.. Or maybe even too Irish.*…

Wall St downgrades stock – because buyers prefer last year's model The phrase "Peak Apple" has been used many times, only for the fruity firm to bounce back. Cupertino has amassed a vast fortune by ignoring the carping experts. However, the latest bout of iPhone fatigue might be more than a passing bout of flu. It's prompted one Wall Street watcher to downgrade Apple stock.…

How's that sacking 12,000 people thing going, Bri? Intel's profits dipped slightly in the last quarter of 2016, with income for the entire year down by 9 per cent.…