The Register

Come with us now 'on a journey away from PSN' The Cabinet Office wants government departments to buy public cloud rather than services from the Public Services Network (PSN).…

Not so, er, fab for storage tech, innit? Storage Blockhead Say hello to Wilbur Ross, "King of Bankruptcy" and the likely next US Secretary of State for Commerce – the man charged with implementing President Trump's promise to bring home the jobs stolen by cheap labour countries using free trade policies.…

Preview of next flagship delayed as embers of Note 7 debacle still burn MWC 2017 The great and the good attending next month’s Mobile World Congress won’t be getting a sneak peak at Samsung latest premier Galaxy S8 smartphone after all, a company exec has confirmed.…

Firms fighting off rocket docket suit as a matter of principle Cloud host Rackspace and storage vendor NetApp are fighting a patent holder who's targeted some of tech's biggest names in the notorious Eastern District of Texas.…

Ummm, good luck with that! The government is to throw an extra £4.7bn at R&D for smart energy technologies, robotics and artificial intelligence, and 5G in its Industrial Strategy to be published later today.…

Unite: IT giant's bosses gave us a bigger package, would be rude not to have a butcher's Unite has suspended all industrial action in its dispute with Fujitsu over planned cuts to job, pay and pensions in the UK.…

SNAFU reported via bug bounty program Beads of sweat must have surely run down the face of one hacker who, while trying to score a bug bounty, inadvertently infiltrated an "internal US Department of Defence website that requires special credentials to access."…

Little love for Crown Hosting from Whitehall depts Analysis Only in IT is “legacy” a pejorative term, where it is used to condemn ageing systems and forgotten workarounds.…

What does it take to get people patching? Not Reg readers, obviously. Other, silly people Some 200,000 systems are still susceptible to Heartbleed more than two years and 9 months after the huge vulnerability was disclosed.…

Another shot at spook-proofing email It's taken longer than first expected, but the first fruits of Lavabit founder Ladar Levison's Dark Mail Technical Alliance have landed with the relaunch of the encrypted mail service he closed in 2013.…

Code named for Prince of Darkness offers commissions for spreading evil Satan is infecting computers, encrypting files and demanding ransoms.…

Because that worked so well for Firefox OS, and Ubuntu Touch, and Sailfish, and Tizen … The Free Software Foundation has published a new High Priority Projects list, the document it uses to highlight “a relatively small number of projects of great strategic importance to the goal of freedom for all computer users.”…

Claims phablet was phine, but bad manufacturing short-circuited battery quality Samsung has blamed two un-named battery-makers for setting fire to its reputation by sending Galaxy Note 7 phablets up in flames, but has also admitted it may have pushed those suppliers too hard.…

You had one job ... and it wasn't letting test certs escape into the wild and then revoking them Symantec has confirmed that it's revoked another bunch of wrongly-issued certificates.…

Chief Mozillan calls for grass roots movement akin to 1960s' environmental awakenings Mozilla has issued a prototype of its first internet health report in a bid to make humans give security and privacy the same level of attention they devote to climate change.…

Gin Palace plugs Junos DoS bugs Juniper Networks pushed out patches for its Junos operating system over the weekend.…

We can either build more submarine cables or more efficient submarine cables Today's international optical systems carry impressive quantities of data, but as 'net traffic continues to grow they'll likely run out of capacity.…

Cracks limit of 32-bit table size without realising it. Back to the books, guys? Learn-to-code site Code.org is apologising to its students after being caught by a database table maxing out, and dropping progress for an unknown number of participants.…

Asteroid 391257 is now Asteroid Will Wheaton Actor Asteroid 391257, who rose to prominence for playing annoyingly precocious teen Starfleet member Wesley Crusher in Star Trek: The Next Generation, now has an asteroid named after him.…

Snapdragon biz's bad week just got worse Following the lead of the FTC, Apple has filed suit against Qualcomm alleging it was charging excessive patent royalty fees for cellphone technology.…

IDG into the hands of the Middle Kingdom – except its HPC bit Two Chinese investors are buying the owner of PCWorld magazine and the IDC market research outfit – International Data Group (IDG) – but IDC’s high-performance computing research businesses are not included in the sale.…

Computer researchers uncover yuuuge dormant army Computer boffins Juan Echeverria and Shi Zhou at University College London have chanced across a dormant Twitter botnet made up of more than 350,000 accounts with a fondness for quoting Star Wars novels.…

Self-driving ride take on a whole new meaning The future of self-driving cars is already with us – although maybe not in the way we had hoped.…

New spymaster Pompeo ponders massive metadata collection, death for Snowden While Washington is busy with the inauguration of President Trump, not all political business has stopped. The incoming administration is hoping to get its new CIA boss appointed today, but the Senate is having none of it.…

We're gonna have the best 404s! The greatest 404s! With Donald Trump taking over the presidency Friday morning, a different type of transition has also taken place: a digital transition.…

Security gurus condemn sensational reporting of encryption backdoor-that-wasn't Computer security experts and cryptographers have accused The Guardian of overblowing what was reported to be a backdoor in WhatsApp's encryption.…

Only a local hacker in a facility would be able to run an attack General Electric (GE) has pushed out an update to its industrial control systems following the discovery of vulnerabilities that create a way for hackers to steal SCADA system passwords.…

Benign neglect, managed decline, whatever Analysis <IBM's fourth quarter and full year 2016 results showed the now traditional storage hardware revenue decline, while all-flash array and software-defined storage revenues grew double digits.…

We've got four more years, people Passwords used by Donald Trump's incoming cybersecurity advisor Rudy Giuliani and 13 other top staffers have been leaked in mass hacks, according to a Channel 4 investigation.…

Incoming FlashSystem A9000 with 3D TLC makes it obsolete IBM is not going to develop a fourth-generation XIV storage array because an upcoming FlashSystem A9000R using 3D flash can be sold for the same cost as disk.…

As for that fabled IPO? May happen 'when market is right' French Internet of Things connectivity folk Sigfox are still hoping for a 2018 IPO – but it is not an "end in itself", a company rep told The Register.…

Move 'unjustified', says analyst BT is to hike its broadband and TV prices in an inflation-busting increase that will come into force this April.…

Big Blue talks 'silver threads' IBM Watson has taken heat from Wall Street for not adding to Big Blue's revenue as the company reported a 19th successive quarter of decline.…

'Deeply concerned' about possibility of sharing citizen info with companies A House of Lords committee has slammed the "inappropriate" and "untrammelled" powers laid out in the Digital Economy Bill to share citizen data across the public sector.…

Largest fab in the Middle Kingdom to be surrounded by huge 'international city' China’s flash-fancying Tsinghua Unigroup is going to build a $30bn-plus flash fab.…

Here's what's in Build 15014 Microsoft has removed the much-anticipated "People Experience" from current beta builds of Windows 10, and will release it later this year instead of this spring.…

Data protection SW biz buys filer hardware startup Analysis Backup SW biz StorageCraft has bought Exablox, a startup making scale-out deduping filer arrays using underlying object storage software.…

Internet of Things: Make ordering johnnies great again Amazon Web Services is so desperate to shift its AWS Internet of Things Buttons that it is offering free AWS credits, tech support and even design services to anyone who buys them – and has relaunched its "enterprise program" to boot.…

It's so important they held a 'three-week consultation'... over the Christmas hols At the current rate Julian Assange is more likely to see the light of day than the government's digital strategy – with a second Parliamentary committee having criticised its long-overdue publication.…

AT&T's streaming service only behind HBO's despite user complaints AT&T's freshly hatched DirecTV Now OTT streaming service is forecast by most industry analysts to hit around 1 million subscribers after one year, following its launch at the end of November, but here at Faultline Online Reporter we believe the service has the potential to take off on a much bigger scale – providing it can overcome some initial obstacles.…

US nuclear power plant fiasco prompts fears of writedown Reuters is reporting that Toshiba has started its chip business minority stake sale process.…

Where's pocket Bjarne Stroustrup when you need him? STOB Peter Wayner, a tech columnist, claims to have identified the seven most vexing problems in programming. According to his subheadings, these are: multithreading, closures, "too big data", np-completeness, security, encryption and identity management.…

I am guilty of too much clouded thinking Something for the Weekend, Sir? My neighbours are staring at my hole and shaking their heads disapprovingly. They were a little surprised to receive my invitation to view my orifice, and it may not be as big as theirs, but I needed their advice on how to fill it.…

Necrus botnet wakes up and starts fresh malware-cano Cisco is warning of possible return of a massive ransomware spam campaign after researchers noticed traces of traffic from the hitherto dormant Necrus botnet.…

EU antitrust bod nods in approval as another market opens up Apple and Amazon have agreed to end the exclusivity deal that gave Audible sole access to the iBooks store.…

Oh, bless Analysis Secondary storage silo converging startup Cohesity has added entry-level hardware as it reaches 80+ customers and 100+ US resellers.…

Board member claims he was sacked for slamming Trump and Brexit A sacked board member of UK telco regulator Ofcom is suing the British government for refusing to give him a £75,000 ($92,500) payoff.…

'More realistic picture' we're told Crime stats for England and Wales have shown a huge year-on-year increase. Don't panic, though: it's due to the inclusion of fraud and computer misuse offences for the first time.…

Saintly clients fled investment firm after workers revealed hellish smut mountain ON-CALL Welcome again to On-Call, which returns for 2017 with more tales of your fellow readers' experiences of horrible jobs at horrible times.…

Breaking news, literally Facebook apparently blocked Russia Today – the Kremlin-bankrolled broadcaster now known as RT – from posting anything other than text messages on the social network.…