The Register

Reg man submits self to invasive sparkly-unicorn androgyny transformation PIC The Meitu selfie horrorshow app going viral through Western audiences is a privacy nightmare, researchers say.…

From the special forces to, um, HPE Profile SimpliVity CEO and cofounder Doron Kempel is a two-time storage startup winner. With HPE buying his firm for $650m, what will he do next?…

Decade-old capital structure needs a refresh for cloudier times Avaya has filed for bankruptcy under Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code, which allows organisations to re-organise their affairs in part by temporarily relieving them of obligations to creditors.…

New .gov domains will only ever offer HTTPS, says US CIO On United States president Barack Obama's last day in office, the U.S. Chief Information Officer and the Federal CIO Council have announced a new rule that will see all future .gov websites shrouded in impenetrable secret codes.…

Logo picked to represent internet roots just confuses the internet LOGOWATCH Mozilla, sorry Moz://a's new logo is causing problems because it doesn't work when typed into browsers' address bars.…

Krebs says he's fingered author of epic IoT web assault code The author of the massive distributed denial-of-service attack malware Mirai, which ropes infected routers and internet of things devices into remotely controlled armies, is a New Jersey man, according to journo Brian Krebs.…

Biz optimistic 2017 will see cloud and mobile help boost bottom line IBM is touting growth in its cloud and cognitive business units as the enterprise giant wraps up a year of double-digit revenue declines.…

FTC settlement bars taxi app maker from publishing fiction about potential riches Cab app Uber has agreed to pay $20m to settle charges that it exaggerated how much drivers using its software can earn and downplayed the cost of financing cars through the company.…

WikiLeaker folds hand in pledge poker If US investigators were hoping WikiLeaks boss Julian Assange would be deliver himself into their hands, then they are due for a disappointment.…

Code lets developers test applications without a hosting account Hardware infrastructure, once the foundation of computing giants like IBM, has become an abstract commodity thanks to cloud computing, virtualization, and containerization.…

The technical term for this, in the financial world, is: 'Boned' Around 33 per cent of the technology companies to enter the market in the last ten years are currently valued at a price lower than their IPO mark.…

Autopilot update cuts prangs by 40 per cent, we're told The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration investigation into a fatal Tesla crash last year has determined that the car manufacturer should face no further action and has improved safety considerably.…

No pressure, peeps: Techies are awaiting a fix from their Redmond coworkers A bug in Windows 10 is undermining Microsoft's efforts to roll out an IPv6-only network at its Seattle headquarters.…

Stateless Linux data center released into the wilds An alliance that dominated the PC industry is entering the world of fluffy white stuff and open source: Microsoft Azure is the first public cloud to include an Intel initiated and container-oriented Clear Linux OS.…

It's your own fault, Trump-friendly tycoon tells Davos Silicon Valley’s tech plutocrats have kept a relatively low profile at Davos, the WEF’s schmoozefest for corporate, government and NGO elites. But into the void stepped Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba.…

Time for REST... and it's only January Oracle’s first financial splash of 2017 has seen it snap up enterprise API specialist Apiary.…

Badge engineering to make open networking easier for newcomers Open networking operating system vendor Cumulus Networks is about to start selling hardware – but it's not going to start actually making the stuff.…

Don't learn about IoT, learn how to do IoT The early bird ticket offer for Building IoT London ends very soon, meaning you’ve got just hours to save a stack of cash on three days with the IoT world’s finest thinkers, doers and developers.…

Carbanak: It's not just a caramel-flavoured choc-trocity. It's also malware The Carbanak cyber criminal gang is abusing Google’s infrastructure as a conduit for botnet control.…

UK security firm's chairman steps down NCC Group’s chairman Paul Mitchell said he would be stepping down as he UK cyber security consultancy announced a drop in profits on Thursday.…

Fearless Flatley flouts inauguration boycott Fears that Donald Trump inauguration will be more winalot than Camelot have abated, with the news that renowned trad Irish hoofer Michael Flatley will parachute in his Lord of the Dance troupe to Friday’s virtually celeb-free inauguration.…

Anything Elon can do…? Korean boffins want to create the blueprint for a train capable of operating at 1,000km/h (621mph).…

Maybe it doesn't need friends? But it should worry about fragmenting Android further Google’s decision to keep premium Android features for itself attracted surprisingly little comment last year - but the dangers are heaving into view. By declaring war on its most important customers, Google risks losing a degree of control over Android, further fragmenting the platform.…

Whitehouse.gov down? A software engineer is calling on netizens opposed to Donald Trump to visit the Whitehouse.gov site and overload it with traffic tomorrow.…

Keep yr Digits for now, fam ... we're good Google is set to acquire Twitter's mobile app development platform, Fabric, and assimilate its team within its own development platform, Firebase.…

Peace, love and Docker or Kubernetes – you must choose Docker was arguably a dumb thing for you to do with your time last year. Developers loved it but enterprises weren’t so sure.…

Known oppressive regimes including Egypt, and er... the UK? Oh, the IP Act is law... ProtonMail, the privacy-focused email business, has launched a Tor hidden service to combat the censorship and surveillance of its users.…

AFA without tears Conventional wisdom says that for performance-sensitive applications, you want all-flash arrays (AFAs), while for less-critical applications and bulk storage, disk is better. How can you use them in conjunction with each other? What would a joint AFA/hybrid/disk environment look like?…

Why? 'Umm, er, cable insulation standards,' mutters MoD Britain’s naval service will receive new fleet support tanker RFA Tidespring more than 18 months late, following delays which left the vessel languishing in a South Korean shipyard.…

Turns out Mother Nature is a killer for power and people Video For decades now people have been claiming that the power grid could be taken down by terrorists. However, simple statistical analysis shows that the biggest danger isn't online hackers, but squirrels – aka rats with good PR.…

Stop us if you've heard this one before – billionaire fights to turf people out of private paradise Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg is suing dozens of families in Hawaii to force them to give up land they've owned for generations.…

Does that 'thing' really need to run Linux, given alternatives have smaller attack surfaces? The Mirai botnet? Just the “tip of the iceberg” is how security bods at this week's linux.conf.au see the Internet of Things.…

They'll go in mid-2018. Does that support the 'too insecure for business' message? In the same week that Microsoft's German tentacle declared Windows 7 a security horror that no business in its right mind would continue to use, the company's also announced it will axe some certification exams for the operating system.…

The 'LINE OF DEATH' between safe content and untrustworthy stuff is receding every year Google Chrome engineer Eric Lawrence has described the battle of browser barons against the 'line of death', an ever-diminishing demarcation between trusted content and the no-man's land where phishers dangle their poison.…

OSIRIS-REx completes initial big burn on the way to asteroid Bennu NASA's asteroid-exploration mission OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has taken the left turn at Albuquerque on its way to a near-Earth space rock called Bennu.…

Because MongoDB, Elasticsearch ransomware attacks are sooo last week Rinse-and-repeat ransomware attacks on data services left unsecured by dozy sysadmins are now hitting Hadoop instances.…

It woz El Reg wot done it - you picked this one last year LOGOWATCH When Mozilla floated new logo designs last August The Reg polled readers to ask which of the eight candidates you felt would best represent the open sourcerers.…

All you need is the right tools, says Citrix Promo Although flexible working offers significant cost benefits for companies and enhances satisfaction for 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.”…

Since patched, but a bad look for Adobe when it can't even get snoopware right Adobe's pushed out a fix for its already-controversial Chrome telemetry extension after Project Zero's Tavis Ormandy found an egregious bug.…

Dissenting FTC voice sees an Obamaesque assault on tech licensing Analysis America’s competition commissioners didn’t want to prosecute Google, which operates a monopoly in over a dozen markets, so why are they complaining about Qualcomm?…

When mobes and gadgets stop verifying app installations, you're gonna have a bad time To determine whether a mobile app is potentially harmful, Google listens for the sound of silence.…

Australia's Murchison radio telescope tells Reg how big astronomy 'destroys' big data Australia's precursor to the Square Kilometre Array has gone from sitting on the slipway to shedding champagne-bottle shards and sliding gracefully into action.…

Big Red threatened with government IT contract armageddon over pay gap Oracle could lose its lucrative US government IT contracts after the Department of Labor accused the tech giant of racial and gender discrimination.…

'Healthy' smoking puts American bloke in hospital NSFW pics A man claims his e-cigarette exploded mid-puff, blew out seven of his teeth, gave him second-degree facial burns, wrecked his bathroom, and put him in intensive care.…

M-I-S-S-I-sue-your-ass-you-creepy-spy Google is once again facing allegations that its cloud for education has been used to harvest and sell information on school kids.…

Sacked techie claims school retaliated over race complaint Shortly after the American College of Education (ACE) in Indiana fired IT administrator Triano Williams in April, 2016, it found that it no longer had any employees with admin access to the Google email service used by the school.…

Recreating old work to the tune of £500m per year Some Whitehall departments are saddled with more than 100 terabytes of legacy data, and are wasting time recreating old work at a cost of £500m per year, according to a Cabinet Office report.…

Sitting in a tree, K I S S I N G DDN has signed a deal for Inspur to sell tested and configured systems to worldwide HPC customers, using DDN storage alongside Inspur servers, networking, software and services.…

£3m granted for 'emerging architectures' supercomputing mashup A fellowship of four UK universities, along with HPC veteran Cray and the Met Office have been handed £3m to build a 10,000+ ARM core supercomputer.…

More secure than PC? Ha! Security researchers at Malwarebytes have discovered a Mac backdoor using antiquated code that targets biomedical research facilities.…