The Register

'PetrWrap' tries to blame its predecessor for attacks Researchers have spotted a variant of last year's Petya ransomware, now with updated crypto and ransomware models.…

HANA User Self Service isn't meant to give crims self-service, but it can. And you can plug it Once you stop reeling from Microsoft's monster two-month patch dump, VMware's new patches and news that Dungeons & Dragons is going digital, brace yourself again because SAP has popped out has 25 patches and two patches for patches for you to consider.…

Phones blindly trust what their sensors tell them. So they're open to spoofing. Sigh Smartphone vendors might be learning to mistrust software, but what about the hardware? University of Michigan boffins have put this question to the world by sending unauthorised data to a Samsung turns-out-to-be-not-so-smartphone by buzzing its accelerometer.…

Crew douses flaming 'phones in bucket of water, but passenger couldn't escape nasty singeing Travellers who favour noise-cancelling headphones should watch vendor announcements for battery recalls, because a pair has caught fire on a China-to-Australia flight.…

Vodafone's network wasn't talking for a few hours on Wednesday In the year 2010, Vodafone Australia's networks suddenly became horribly unreliable. Dropped calls became common, outages semi-regular.…

How about switching to a recent version that's actually secure, Nintendo? A couple of console enthusiasts have run up a proof-of-concept showing a Nintendo's new games machine, the "Switch", being p0wned thanks to an old Webkit vulnerability.…

Tovarishch Cook accused of sending retailers to gulag unless they follow price list Russia's anti-monopoly regulator has taken a bite out of Apple, finding that Cupertino's local outpost fixed iPhone prices in the country.…

Get busy for the Critical one, nail the Important one while you are at it Time to patch your desktop hypervisors, folks: VMware Workstation and Fusion have a pair of problems apiece.…

Character sheets and bits of the rule books look like they're coming to the Web Seminal role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons looks to be going digital.…

Secure programming is hard, kids Patch Tuesday After taking a month off, Microsoft's Patch Tuesday is back – and it's a blockbuster edition. There are 18 bundles of patches covering 140 separate security vulnerabilities.…

'We have a problem and we intend to fix it' Video In a hearing at the US Senate Armed Services Committee in Washington DC, the commandant of the Marine Corps, General Robert Neller, promised swift action against those swapping pornographic pictures of his troops.…

Up your application policing, fruit-branded phone maker is told Faced with an existential threat to its hot patching service, Rollout.io is appealing to Apple to extend its app oversight into post-publication injections of JavaScript code.…

But why? In a bizarre, fawning letter, Oracle has given America's broadband watchdog, the FCC, the equivalent of a telco reach-around.…

Look over here! Federated identity! Secure cloud! User-centred design! The former Digital Transformation Office's vaunted “gov.au” project collapsed because it duplicated work that other government departments were already doing for themselves, and didn't do what agencies wanted.…

And hate speech, too The German government has formally proposed fining Facebook and Twitter up to €50m ($53m) for failing to remove slanderous fake news and hate speech within 24 hours.…

Like virtual machines but, well, like virtual machines Intel has tweaked its Clear Containers software so that it is compatible with Docker Swarm and Kubernetes orchestration.…

Le nom est Bornibus, Francois Bornibus Lenovo EMEA has dropped its top ops man into the CEO chair following five quarters of shrinking turnover and recent operating losses.…

Jade kingdom has massive home advantage Analysis An analyst poring over IDC’s fourth 2016 quarter server stats has found that Cisco is slipping, and white-box manufacturers and China-based vendors are overtaking the historically dominant US server suppliers.…

Still keeping schtum on IPO, though Cloudera is adding a data science workbench to its enterprise product, based on the offerings of acquired startup Sense.io, which the company bought last year.…

Stand by for 'targeted marketing' Google has dumped a class of applications that employed a fraud botnet on its Android Play Store - the apps tapped malware that tried to game Google’s advertising network.…

Probably better to, erm, talk to them and do some parenting Researchers from the University of Oxford have suggested that, instead of rolling out internet filters, those who are concerned about what teenagers encounter online should spend some time helping their parents parent them.…

Startups, PaaS and Blockchain So, you’re a developer with a great tech idea. You have a vision for a world-beating product, perhaps even one that defines a new category. But the journey from idea to execution is long, painful, and often expensive. The cloud can help developers realize their dreams while minimizing capital outlay. Here’s how.…

Loans text outfit fined £20K A Manchester-based firm that hired an outfit in the central American country of Belize to send around 64,000 spam texts promoting loans has been fined £20,000.…

... Euro firms getting better at detecting breaches more quickly The European energy sector is being targeted by advanced threat actors seeking proprietary information to advance the capabilities of domestic companies, according to FireEye Mandiant.…

Guess what the former Sun man runs now? Yup. A marketing company You're better off with your data in the hands of a marketer than a government, says former Sun Microsystems supremo Scott McNealy, because you can change who you buy from, but you can't easily switch countries.…

But will it work? We're about to find out Analysis Last week in the High Court, Justice Arnold agreed to a request from the Football Association and the Premier League, and supported by the BBC, amongst others, that broke new ground, technically and legally.…

Means providers'll be 'forced to violate foreign privacy law' The kindly community of benevolent technology corporations has written to a Pennsylvania court to support Google as it fends off a warrant demanding information stored on overseas servers.…

Reg lecture considers the limits of human computer interaction Reg lectures If you’ve ever wondered just how intimate human computer interaction can get, you’ll want to pop into our next Register lecture on April 19 where the topic is Sex, AI, Robots and You.…

Federal Trade Commission says it won't step in... this time The US Federal Trade Commission is holding off regulating the Internet of Things industry until there is an event which “harms consumers right now”, according to its acting head.…

And cheap IoT kit's not helping matters The National Crime Agency and newly formed National Cyber Security Centre joint report on cybercrime unsurprisingly names ransomware as the top internet menace.…

That's the aim, at least, as surveillance cam commish stays on A national surveillance camera strategy for England and Wales has today been published in an attempt to curb public authorities from excessive meatspace snooping.…

Won't use GCP? What about now? And now? And... “We don’t use Google,” the CIO of a fairly major enterprise with a very recognizable brand told me some time ago. He runs the cloud component of his corporate IT on AWS and Microsoft’s Azure.…

Your dependencies are not dependable The web has a security problem: code libraries. Almost 88 per cent of the top 75,000 websites and 47 per cent of .com websites rely on at least one vulnerable JavaScript library.…

One slightly-soiled application packager, a steal at US$13bn Citrix's share price took a sharp step in a pleasant directions after Bloomberg found “people familiar with the matter” willing to say the company is trying to sell itself.…

UV photons prevent gravitational collapse The earliest supermassive black holes have always puzzled astronomers. These ancient voids – about a billion times the mass of the Sun – were discovered more than a decade ago and formed only 800,000 years after the Big Bang.…

And in 2017 Huawei replaced HPE as a Platinum Member of OpenStack Foundation Tristan Goode recalls that at the first OpenStack conference in China, in 2012, the deputy director of nation's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology Software and Integrated Circuit Promotion opened his speech by saying “OpenStack will smash the monopoly of the western cloud providers!”…

If we change the definition of 'time crystal', so scratch that Doctor Who screenplay, okay? A new quantum state of matter has been experimentally observed for the first time, according to two papers published in Nature.…

The PaaS plot is thickening with big data, AI and the cross-application workflow creation SAP probably isn't high on the list of companies you'd contemplate as a host of a virtual machine in the cloud, but the company's just doubled down on a service that offers just that.…

'Richard's iPhone' could be anybody's, but it's easy to find out which Richard's it is If you must give your devices names, please don't leak them on the Internet.…

Recently-dimmed South Australia plans grid-scale batteries and gas, gas, gas Sorry, Elon Musk: if you want to ship 100MW or so of battery so Atlassian's founder Mike Cannon-Brookes can save the Australian State of South Australia, you'll have to go through the boring process of a public tender.…

Now that we can spot things the size of a fridge 380,000km away, dodging debris or asteroids should be easier In 2009, a lunar orbiter launched by India went quiet and never heard from again. Fast-forward eight years and NASA say it's spotted it using an Earth-based radar.…

Which is why lucky Nexus owners have had two OS updates in a week Last week's Android security update broke Android's Pay for some Nexus 6 users, so it was pulled and re-posted.…

Canuck tax and stats outages revealed as patch pauses Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) says its online services were taken offline over the weekend so it could patch the Apache Struts 2 vulnerability.…

Windows giant approached, Google, Apple next, we hope Last week, WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange said he would hand over the CIA hacking tools that fell into his lap to various technology companies before making the exploits public. We're told he has at least reached out to one tech corp.…

Windows giant approached, Google, Apple next, we hope Last week, WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange said he would hand over the CIA hacking tools that fell into his lap to various technology companies before making the exploits public. We're told he has at least reached out to one tech corp.…

'High risk' gTLDs pondered by money-loving DNS overseer For five years, more than a dozen companies have been waiting to hear whether they will be able to run the generic top-level domains .corp, .home and .mail. And this month they finally got their answer: we're still thinking about it.…

Greater transparency about snooping, tracking needed In light of the contrast between widely observed personal security routines such as locking the door at night and more carefree behavior online, Mozilla decided to interrogate its community to find out what people think about security, encryption, and privacy.…

Ex-employee turned whistleblower is $10m richer CA Inc will cough up $45m to end allegations it overcharged American taxpayers while offering discounts to companies.…

DataSphere's claims – make believe or real? Analysis Primary Data has updated its storage silo-converging DataSphere product, and says it’s ready for mainstream enterprise use, not just test and dev. The new release can save millions of dollars, handle billions of files and accelerate Isilon and NetApp filers.…

Mining social media accounts is our job, Uncle Sam Facebook and its snap-sharing app Instagram have updated their terms and conditions to bar developers from scanning profiles for surveillance purposes.…