The Register

Tactical victory for Battistelli and chair as org falls back on status quo A determined effort to take action against the president of the European Patent Office, Benoit Battistelli, has faltered again thanks to some strategic maneuvering by his defenders.…

Middle Kingdom's biggest property group - Wanda Dalian - buddies up with Big Blue IBM”s found a new way to get its cloud into China – a new deal with the Wanda Internet Technology Group.…

HipChat, Bamboo, and Crowd get fix Atlassian has joined the growing list of vendors to patch its products against the Apache Struts 2 vulnerability.…

But there's no sight of the RemoteApp replacement promised for early 2017 Citrix has taken the wraps off the “XenDesktop Essentials Service for Microsoft Azure”, a product that lets you run virtual Windows 10 desktops from Microsoft's cloud. But the XenApp Express product it and Microsoft said would replace Azure remoteapp remains hidden from view.…

The sky still isn't falling Following the February controversy over whether or not Google's SHA-1 collision broke Git, its community has taken the first small steps towards replacing the ancient hash function.…

Cisco shipped PSUs that like it low and slow, which is bad news for mountainous networks Cisco's let users of its ASR 920 Series Aggregation Services Routers know they've got a fear of heights.…

More than 300 Borg switches carry critical IOS Telnet vuln the CIA knew about before Cisco It looks like Cisco won't be chasing up a partnership with Wikileaks: it's combing the "Vault7" documents itself, and has turned up an IOS / IOS XE bug in more than 300 of its switch models.…

Would you like data on 2.2 MEELLION users with that API query? McDonald's India has 'fessed up that its app spaffed personal data to all and sundry and has urged users to install an update.…

If you want 45 IDs for 45 government services, go ahead says minister Taylor Australia's federal government is sticking with its plans for a federated identity service, but disruption minister Angus Taylor has moved to quell fears of a revived “Australia Card”.…

Chipzilla want us thinking about queue depth and latency, not just raw IOPS Intel has finally revealed an Optane product and told us how fast it will go.…

Super fast but you'll need line-of-sight In five years or so, Wi-Fi access points could carry data at rates 100 times faster than today using infrared light rather than other portions of the electromagnetic spectrum.…

And light shed on WikiLeaks' CIA tools handover Updated Friday is usually a good day to bury bad news and there are a number of stories bubbling under before we all head out for the weekend.…

Newsweek writer attacked on Twitter after telly appearance – now FBI, cops collar suspect A man suspected of maliciously tweeting a GIF to a magazine writer that induced an epileptic attack has been collared by the FBI.…

Settlement conveniently avoids deciding whether app-cabbies are employees A federal judge has accepted a proposed $27m settlement to resolve a dispute between ride-sharing service Lyft and more than 200,000 current and former drivers in California.…

An armored station with enough power to destroy an entire... drone Vid Lockheed Martin says it is ready to deliver its most powerful laser weapon yet to the US military. This Death-Star-on-wheels can shoot down drones, missiles, and similar stuff, we're told.…

EC wants language that gives tech giants legal legroom torn down and replaced The European Commission is threatening to fine Facebook, Twitter, Google and other social networks unless they overhaul their terms and conditions to pull out legal escape clauses.…

What would Jesus do? Jump on Tor and blow cryptocurrency on blow, apparently A New Jersey pastor and a Florida software engineer were today found guilty of bribery, wire fraud, bank fraud, and fraud conspiracy.…

That may not be enough to dethrone Git – but it counts for something Next month, if all goes well, developers working on the open-source Subversion version control system will resolve a "critical bug" that has gone unaddressed for 15 years.…

Hires Flavio Santoni into presidential role Block storage startup Datera is partnering with Accelerite, and has hired Flavio Santoni as a senior exec in a president's role.…

Also, yes, we can handle the CIA, says F-Secure lead researcher Jarno Niemelä Interview The very software that is supposed to protect your security is an under-appreciated threat to privacy because of the massive amount of data many products secretly gather on customers, according to F-Secure's Jarno Niemelä.…

Who needs humans to gaze over the seas anyway? A British firm has won a contract with the EU to supply border control surveillance helicopter drones.…

Small matter of an ongoing personnel shortage, though The National Audit Office has confirmed that F-35 fighter jets should be flying from new British aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth by the year 2020, if all goes to plan.…

The giddy storage news whirl whirls on and on and on The cloud and Big Data and Hadoop feature strongly in this week’s round-up of storage news, along with channel news. And, just for a moment, we thought we’d found a new disk drive manufacturer. But no, it was all tosh.…

Live long and (don't) prosper Audacious cybercriminals have created an Star Trek-themed strain of ransomware.…

Needs reassurances they'll be delivered in 'appropriate' way The British government has suspended its ads from YouTube amid concerns the content is appearing against "inappropriate" material.…

State aid considered to keep tech smarts and jobs in Japan The Japanese government is considering providing state-backed aid to Toshiba’s memory business, amounting to near partial nationalisation, to prevent it falling into Chinese or South Korean hands, according to a report.…

Judge Shred UK intelligence agency GCHQ has dismissed US reports - cited by the White House press secretary - that it was involved in running a surveillance operation on Donald Trump before last year's US election as "utterly ridiculous".…

The PC doctor will see (in) you now... Something for the Weekend, Sir? I have taken it all off. Would you like to join me? Loosen those straps and let it all slip onto the floor. You might feel naked and not a little bit exposed but no one is watching, I assure you.…

Why logic is driving graph databases Microsoft arrived on the graph-database scene last month. Three years in the making, Microsoft released Trinity under a typical-by-now-of-Microsoft-boring-trade name of Graph Engine.…

We slap Google-y eyes on the launcher First Look The Google-Facebook duopoly has created a Silicon Valley empire of that stretches from sea to shining sea. With two exceptions: Russia and China. While we think of Russian and Chinese internet companies as exclusively focused on their home territories, this isn’t totally the case.…

Imagine Clippy dishing out sarcastic headlines. Who wouldn't want that? Hands on Microsoft has invested big in its Cognitive Services for programmable artificial intelligence, along with a Bot Framework for using them via a conversational user interface. How easy is it to get started?…

Testing and ongoing checkups NodeSource has offered to clean up Node.JS with a program certifying modules as “safe.”…

Plus: the PC that ate disks and was sated with sticky tape ON-CALL Welcome again to On-Call, The Register's weekly trawl through readers' memories of dealing with dim users or dangerous bosses, often at ridiculous times.…

Probably yes, warns CERT in HTTPS interception advisory Your antivirus and network protection efforts may actually be undermining network security, a new paper and subsequent CERT advisory have warned.…

That's snaps as in uses cameras and brakes as in slows down If you're trying to sell something to the European Space Agency, today could be the day to move in and close the deal because there should be smiles all round after two missions achieved important milestones.…

Image-shrinker can shrink pics by 45 per cent, but is cursed by heavy compute requirements Google's revealed details of a new JPEG encoder it calls “Guetzli” and which it says can shrink images by between 29 and 45 per cent without making them appreciably less pretty.…

Nuke boffins mine recently-declassified films of atmospheric tests for new insights The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has released a recently-declassified collection of films depicting atmospheric nuclear weapons tests conducted between 1945 and 1962.…

Journey into live volcano is a feature, not a bug Google Maps' Street View can now show you the interior of an active volcano, complete with bubbling lava lake.…

Storage cluster lost power and Azure flickered as a result Users of Microsoft's Azure storage service “may have experienced difficulties provisioning new resources or accessing their existing resources “ for over eight hours on Wednesday and Thursday . Azure storage was also tough to provision for a short time on Wednesday night.…

Not even if you've got lots of cash… One of Microsoft's most hated operating systems (Windows ME is difficult to beat on that front) is destined to die in less than a month.…

And SpaceX will be happy While some government departments are facing swinging cuts in President Trump's "America First" proposed budget, NASA appears to have escaped lightly – so far.…

A meltdown week for the Chocolate Factory Google’s bad week continues with an emborkened Android update pushed to some Nexus 6 users.…

And, nope, no patch Security researchers have gone public with details of an exploitable flaw in Ubiquiti's wireless networking gear – after the manufacturer allegedly failed to release firmware patches.…

Court order casts wide net over 50,000 people A US judge has granted cops a search warrant to direct Google to provide personal details about anyone searching for a specific name in the town of Edina, Minnesota.…

Silicon Valley's smartest battle to fix outage Updated The Google Drive app for Windows has crashed and burned – after the tech genius hub pushed out an unfinished and faulty software update.…

Website and Intel Security (McAfee) products excluded from 'Wild West' payouts scheme Intel has launched its first bug bounty program, offering rewards of up to $30,000.…

Watch web giant destroy its own product Video Google Home, the web giant's internet-connected talking personal assistant, has started spamming audio adverts to unsuspecting folk today.…

Lines being drawn after Trump executive order prompts heavy-handed customs response The Canadian privacy commissioner has opened an investigation into the Canadian border police and a recent uptick in phone seizures.…

They're from the government, and they're here to help The National Cyber Security Centre has ineptly tried – and failed – to Rickroll someone taking the piss out of them on Twitter.…

Melts ISE software from hardware, reveals new product tech Analysis Back in January X-IO was back from a restructuring and refinancing and talking about product refreshes after a downturn in 2016.…