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Uncle Sam scraps rules 17 years on from when the world ended, oh wait... The US Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has announced rule changes that – among other things – will finally end the requirement that agency IT departments report their Y2K compliance, only almost two decades after the event.…

Nano Server to go containers-only, Server Core pushed for all other workloads Poll Windows Server and System Center will soon receive twice-yearly updates and come in two “channels”, one for the latest stuff and another less-frequently-updated channel.…

IT biz bags US govt cash to tinker with lab experiment HPE will use a research grant awarded today by the US Department of Energy to develop blueprints for a Machine-based exascale supercomputer.…

Spies do spying, part 78: Cherry Blossom malware gobbles up data flowing through routers Hundreds of commercial Wi-Fi routers are, or were, easily hackable by the CIA, according to classified files published today by WikiLeaks.…

One click, or two? How about no clicks, German court tells search company A German court has given Google a hearty slap over its grudging response to "right to be forgotten" laws, telling it that not linking to information means exactly that: not linking to information.…

And no fees for unshackling mobes, either – all from December this year Canada has ruled that cellphone networks may no longer charge fees for carrier-unlocking handsets nor sell new phones locked to their network.…

Arab Spring meant ka-ching for merchants of death A year-long investigation has uncovered evidence that British armaments conglomerate BAE Systems has been selling internet surveillance equipment to Middle Eastern regimes with questionable human rights records.…

Ha! Ha! Another! chance! to! use! these! exclamations! Verizon says it will have to write off $500m for severance and integration costs on its acquisition of Yahoo!…

Toxic trash taxi biz accused of obtaining files to smear sex assault victim Adding to its litany of disasters, Uber, CEO Travis Kalanick, and former executives Emil Michael and Eric Alexander were sued on Thursday for privacy violations and defamation by the unnamed woman raped in 2014 by an Uber driver in India.…

Sie werden diese Nachrichten entschlüsseln! Germany has joined an increasing number of countries looking to introduce anti-encryption laws.…

Carrot dangled for 2021 mega-machines The US government has dangled $258m in funding in front of six American tech giants to encourage the development of exascale supercomputer systems.…

Lovely chaps at Kaspersky have developed decryption tool Security researchers have developed a free decryption tool for victims of the ‪Jaff‬ ransomware, meaning they can regain access to files without paying crooks.…

Firm starting to win big orders to its replication to the cloud product Data replicator WANdisco has won a US$2mn contract with a "major American multinational retail corporation," claimed to be "one of the world’s largest retailers".…

Firm peddling security solutions says poor breach reporting will 'make you look like a fool' European banks could face fines totalling €4.7bn in the three years after General Data Protection Regulation comes into force, according to a report from data security solutions firm AllClear ID.…

Reformed monopoly wants to 'get much closer' to partners The new, reformed UK network backbone Openreach wants to "get much closer" to its communications providers and hopes to make a business case for a "very sizeable" full-fibre footprint together, says chief exec Clive Selley.…

Let's just say cloud security on the up - Gartner Growth cloud-based security services will remain strong, with the market reaching $5.9bn in 2017, up 21 per cent from 2016, analyst house Gartner predicts.…

Resulting IT systems crash airline chaos lasted 3 days The massive IT systems failure caused by a power surge at British Airways' primary data centre will cost the airline £80m.…

Enjoying a free version of the biz collab software? Maybe not for much longer... Slack is attracting interest from potential suitors including Amazon that are reportedly eyeing up the white collar messaging and collaboration software slinger.…

600 Johnny Cabs in the Land of the Rising Sun A Japanese robotics firm hopes to launch self-driving taxis in Tokyo for the 2020 Olympics.…

Confused? Let us explain the tale of love and hate Analysis Western Digital Corporation continues its strange make love and war approach to getting a slice of Toshiba's Memory Business action by opening a new legal attack on its joint venture partner.…

Which bit is the half-million pounds of other people's money? ZX Spectrum reboot firm Retro Computers Ltd has filed unaudited accounts at Companies House – and they offer few clues as to where the £513,000 of crowdfunded cash for its Vega+ product has gone.…

Lenders already know whether to approve before you apply A new study has warned that third-party trackers litter banking websites and the privacy-invading tech is being used to rate surfers' creditworthiness.…

Whatever the problem was, it’s fixed, says airport A fault in the baggage systems at Heathrow Terminals 3 and 5 this morning left passengers forced to travel without their belongings.…

As bad as Mirai was, it could have been much worse A wormable vulnerability involving an estimated one million digital video recorders (DVR) is at risk of creating a Mirai-style botnet, security researchers warn.…

IBM BigInsights users migrating to Hadoop-flinger’s HDP IBM has slipped a ring on Hortonworks' finger – offering the Hadoop distributor access to a potentially lucrative market.…

And what about Brexit, huh? From today people will be able to spend more time gazing at their phones while on hols rather than looking at the sights as roaming charges in EU countries are abolished.…

Mobile natives are getting restless Comment Ericsson and Nokia are united on one thing, and that is Europe's failure to take a lead on 5G, a view which is supported by operators too.…

'The biggest challenge is to not misrepresent the data' Advocates of data visualisation using virtual or augmented reality argue that both let your brain do what it does best. Namely, pick out and memorise patterns by walking through the data using 3D and assisted by colour, movement, sound and even touch to represent extra dimensions.…

Sensible stuff from Wi-Fi Alliance guides AP placement, channel usage and more Interoperability and certification outfit the Wi-Fi Alliance has taken on quite a challenge: getting the home-building industry to do WiFi right.…

Code hardwired to reach perfect 999,990 score Analysis Back in a bygone era – September last year – Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told a developer conference: "We are not pursuing AI to beat humans at games."…

Euro Court of Justice decides infamous search engine does infringe copyright ANalysis Europe's highest court has ruled that notorious torrent search engine The Pirate Bay infringes copyright, opening the door for ISPs across the continent to be obliged to block access to it.…

Patent bid for special sauce in kids' tat that blinds rip-off equipment Disney's Imagineers have dreamed up a scheme to fight counterfeiting with a form of stealth technology.…

Adds S3 compatibility but Docker drops out for now FreeNAS releases version 11 so let's put the unpleasantness of failed V.10 behind us Version 11 of FreeNAS has emerged, hopefully without the bugs that saw the open source project release version 10 and then downgrade it to a mere “tech preview” a month later.…

Given training data was real human chatter, this says more about us than anything else Let's be honest, despite last year's burst of hype, chatbots haven’t progressed beyond asking and answering simple questions. Still, researchers aren't letting go of their dream of a perfect digital assistant.…

Put the management interface behind the firewall, pronto Stop us if you've heard this one: an emergency access feature offered by RSA for SecurID token customers isn't completely secure.…

And that means useful stuff could be left out of customer premises equipment Smaller ISPs are dealing themselves out of discussions about the inevitable transition to IPv6, a Spanish consultant warns, and could find their future defined by large telcos.…

Box and Google co-incidentally reveal new low-download backup apps on the same day Google and Box have each revealed new cloud backup products.…

Microsoft's NetBIOS naming is vulnerable: use DNS instead Sysadmins should already have purged WINS from their Microsoft Windows Server environments – but if they haven't, there's a new reason to take it for one last walk out behind the shed.…

James Lee says Microsoft's A-V software still has remote code execution holes In spite of a flurry of patches designed to fix Windows Defender, at least one security researcher reckons there's still work to be done.…

Mobe maker demands millions after SoFIA processors sparked thousands of complaints Intel is being sued by a Brazilian phone maker that claims Chipzilla's smartphone Atom processors caused handsets to explode.…

Cops pad up to Thai operation A massive click-fraud farm has been raided in Thailand by police and army troops, who seized nearly half a million SIM cards and hundreds of iPhones used to promote products online.…

Oh yes, you will hand over those documents Analysis A California judge is not taking any nonsense in the ongoing self-driving tech theft case between Uber and Google-owned Waymo.…

What do we have to do to make you love us, er, autonomous vehicles, ponder senators Lamenting the 35,000 people in the US who died in motor vehicle crashes in 2015, Senator John Thune (R-SD), chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, on Wednesday held a hearing in Washington, DC, on the need to win public support for automated cars and to rethink regulation.…

DeltaCharlie malware aimed at American biz, we're told The Norks are coming and it won't be fun, according to a new bulletin from the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT).…

Antivirus didn't pick up software nasty, say UCL IT peeps University College London is tonight tackling a serious ransomware outbreak that has scrambled academics' files.…

New facility in █████████ to open up next year Amazon Web Services says it will launch a second dedicated cloud compute facility for the US government early next year.…

Hang on, what's going on here? President Donald Trump has nominated former FCC commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel to rejoin the US federal telecom regulator, filling a seat made empty by... herself.…

That's a lot of porn The router market might be in the doldrums, but that hasn't stopped Nokia spending big on drive silicon to drive its latest operator-scale router iron.…

Hey, insurance firms! We've got smart car data to flog you! IBM's partnership with German carmaker BMW has resulted in a contract to supply cloud-based data management services.…

Watchdog sinks gums into Dixons Carphone subsidiary Currys PC World was today placed on the naughty step by toothless watchdog the Advertising Standards Authority over the way it misleadingly promoted savings to push laptops sales.…