The Register

You look down – why not buy some stuff to cheer yourself up? Google Next '17 Google is pitching retailers on a total conversion of their floor, register, and warehouse systems to its Chrome, Android, and Cloud platforms.…

Comey blames Snowden for popularity of encryption FBI director James Comey has told a cybersecurity conference that any communications – be it with your spouse, your priest, or your lawyer – and any of your memories are up for grabs should a court order it.…

'People won't think we make mistakes if you stop reporting our mistakes' Australia's Department of Human Services (DHS) has doubled down, telling a Senate Committee yesterday its troubled robo-debt system will continue, and if there's something wrong, it's all your fault.…

Battistelli fighting to avoid lame duck status European governments have finally had enough of the head of the European Patent Office, Benoit Battistelli, and are pushing for a vote that could turn him into a lame duck president.…

Drink data from networked boxes with no CPU overhead Storage startup Excelero slides out of stealth today with its NVMesh v1.1 Server SAN software, which can drink data directly from a remote node, bypassing that node's CPU.…

Video recog, audio training data pave way to more intelligent machines Google Next '17 Following on the heels of its image dataset dump last year to aid the training of image recognition models, Google has done the same for sound, even as it beefs up the visual machine learning capabilities available through its Cloud Platform.…

Other news: Windows 10 not that great; Uber a little bit nasty A new report into nearly 300 websites run by the US government has reached an unsurprising conclusion: they suck.…

Chocolate Factory makes friends for support, integration Google Next '17 Google Cloud is in a full-on push to build an ecosystem for itself with a fresh line of partnerships.…

Spy agencies more interested in stockpiling bugs than closing the gaps WikiLeaks' dump of CIA hacking tool documents on Tuesday has kicked off a debate among security vendors about whether intel agencies are stockpiling vulnerabilities, and the effect this is having on overall security hygiene.…

Almost 40 trademarks given for tourists seeking the company of bad mamacitas China may soon be home to Donald Trump-themed escort services.…

Get ready for a fragmented net... and RAGNAROK Peter Thiel makes a perfect modern sinister panto villain. From investing in deep state spookware Palantir to supporting Donald S Trump, Thiel ticks all the boxes. Throw in an eccentric medical practice – like, say, a fondness for injecting himself with young people's blood – and all that's missing is an impregnable offshore lair, and a seat on Facebook's board.…

Poll finds most pirates aren't even using streaming stick With some in the media industries predicting an imminent "Kodipocalypse", a survey of more than 2,000 UK internet users suggests that simply being nice to those users who download illegal content – on Kodi or otherwise – isn't effective.…

An internal problem in corporate, nothing to see here, move on... Payment processing giant Verifone is playing down the impact of a recently discovered breach on its internal computer networks, as well as concerns over wider problems against point-of-sale systems.…

52PB X100 ActiveScale system landed in January WD has extended its disk-based archive array line scaling out to 52PB with a newish X100 ActiveScale product. This arrived in January with no fanfare and holds 47 per cent more data than the largest SA7010 Active Archive product. What gives?…

You might love technology, but do you want it to start loving you back? The Register Lectures are back, and on April 19 we’ll be considering one of the most fascinating topics in the world of tech: how AI and robotics are going to interact with and affect human sexuality.…

No remote connections to pricey electric dream wagons? Better use your keys Over the past few days Tesla punters from different corners of the globe have claimed an update borked their iOS app, preventing them from connecting to their electric dream wagons.…

Et tu, Microsoft? Then fall, Intel Microsoft has ported its Windows Server operating system to the Qualcomm Centriq – a 64-bit ARM-compatible server-grade system-on-chip.…

Tax digitisation plans for small businesses delayed Self-employed folk are to be slapped with additional National Insurance contributions, Chancellor Phillip Hammond announced today.…

A quarter of prime British chip goodness will fall under Middle Eastern ownership Softbank is selling a stake in ARM to a Saudi investment group less than a year after buying the Brit chipmaker, according to reports.…

Devs patch after researchers Confide in them about encrypted app's issues Security researchers have discovered multiple vulnerabilities in Confide, the encrypted messaging app reportedly used by President Donald Trump's aides to speak to each other in secret.…

'On a $349 device this amounts to extortion' rages irate user Video doorbell company Doorbird charges its customers $80 for a remote admin password reset, an outraged customer has said.…

Android adware poses as YouTube clip utility A malicious app that bombards Androids with ads is using all sorts of trickery to boost its ratings.…

Claims to be two times faster than Chipzilla's latest data centre processor In a raid on Intel's x86 server heartland, AMD has unveiled its next shot at server market glory with Naples, a 32-core, 64-thread CPU based on its Zen microarchitecture.…

Murder accused consents to device being examined We'll have to wait a little longer for a test case on the use of data collected by Amazon's eavesdropper Echo in criminal investigations.…

Direct your outage outrage where it's deserved

The architects of Michigan's maligned MiDAS system called to court Last week, a proposed class-action lawsuit was filed against the companies responsible for developing and installing MiDAS, the Michigan Integrated Data Automated System.…

And nobody noticed One of the perils of launching a clever new feature at the zoo called Mobile World Congress is that clever new things get lost in the noise.…

Save big now on conference and workshops You have just a few days to save £100s on Continuous Lifecycle London, our three-day conference on all things DevOps, Continuous Delivery, and Containers.…

Backup software - your best friend Sysadmin blog Hardly a day passes without some kind of major security breach. The type of attack that was once considered staggering in scale has now become the norm.…

You don't need fluent English when you speak digital disruption Comment Perhaps it's time to retire the term "sharing economy" once and for all. The Confederation of British Industry (CBI) this week swallowed up the "gig economy" trade group Sharing Economy UK.…

Google, Microsoft and Mozilla say they won't trust anyone who hasn't migrated One in five websites (21 per cent) are still using certificates signed with the vulnerable SHA-1 hash algorithm, according to a new survey.…

Blade-centric Borg surprised by hunger for pizza boxes, also ponders multi-hypervisor NFV Cisco's underwhelming performance in hyperconverged appliances is attributable to the company's heritage as a blade server vendor, the company's executive veep for worldwide sales and operations Chris Dedicoat told The Register at Cisco Live in Melbourne, Australia, today.…

We went through 8,000 documents so you don't have to We're still going through the 8,761 CIA documents published on Tuesday by WikiLeaks for political mischief, although here are some of the highlights.…

New cross-platform tools and streamlined setup options First Look Microsoft has released Visual Studio 2017, marking 20 years of the software development tool's, er, development.…

Prenda Law's John Steele done for fraud after courts ordered repayments of extorted funds One of the architects of the notorious Prenda Law copyright-porn scam, John Steele, has admitted that he and Paul Hansmeier made US$6 million out of the operation.…

Five years? What's the matter? Can't afford Prime? Video Blue Origin, the orbital delivery service funded by Amazon supremo Jeff Bezos, has taken its first satellite launch booking. We're told the sat will be put into orbit in 2021 or 2022 – basically, once Bezos has finished building the rocket to do the job.…

New browser also crumbs cookies and finds new ways to speed web apps The Mozilla Foundation has has given the world the fifty-second version of the Firefox browser, complete with some significant changes.…

Unless you want your backups to be in 'Someone Else's Cloud' Western Digital is preparing patches for its My Cloud storage devices because they can be easily hijacked from across the internet or network.…

Bad code or backdoor? Whichever it was, patch it now Chinese security camera/DVR company Dahua is pushing firmware patches after accusations by a security researcher that a swathe of its products carried a back door.…

'Will we do this the easy way, or will we do it the hard way?' Spiral Toys, makers of the insecure Bluetooth-connected stuffed animals dubbed CloudPets, is being grilled for information by a US Senator.…

Bad requirements make bad systems, episode 1,001 When Australia's Department of Human services decided to create its now-notorious “robo-debt” system, it did so without consulting one of its major data sources, the Australian Tax Office.…

Convicted fraudster says he was given personal details in records requests Prison authorities in Ohio, US, mistakenly provided the social security numbers of thousands of inmates to a man convicted of identity theft.…

Saving the furniture to burn later Bankruptcy-beset Avaya is cashing out of its networking business for just $100m, with Extreme Networks the buyer.…

Nest adds two-factor auth – where's the rest of 'em? Smart home poster child Nest has stolen a march on the rest of the smart-home industry by adding two-factor authentication to its systems.…

Wall Street greed meets Silicon Valley delusion – and they all get rich First, we'll look at some quick facts at Snap – the Los Angeles-based developer of Snapchat that debuted on the stock market on Thursday, March 2.…

Kalanick vows to bring in a grownup to knock sense into toxic, sexist upstart Following a string of damaging revelations about its atrocious corporate culture, Uber is seeking fresh help to clean up its act.…

Cloudy software giant marries Einstein to tech behemoth's Watson Analysis A partnership between IBM and Salesforce involving the namesakes of two of the most influential people in the worlds of business and science. It must have sounded like genius in the PR brainstorming session.…

Upstart got tired of grinding out sales against deepening yearly losses Analysis In buying Nimble Storage for $1.2bn, HPE has signaled that it needs a complementary all‑flash array architecture to its 3PAR StoreServ arrays.…

You could also have uncertain costs and lose handy powered, fibred FTTN cabinets nbn™, the organisation that builds and operates Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN), appear to be escalating its efforts to rebut those who call for it to abandon its fibre to the network build.…

وای نه. ما واقعا به دنبال به جلو به که روتر Chinese giant ZTE has been fined $900m by the US government for skirting trade blocks by selling comms hardware to Iran.…