The Register

NSA: It's hard to tell. Now could you reauthorize our authority to keep doing it? If there is one piece of information that would fatally undermine the NSA's argument that it doesn't abuse Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), it would be the number of American citizens whose personal information it has "incidentally" hoovered up.…

And no, you can't use Stackoverflow and Google Analysis Amid the Trump administration's tough talk on immigration and executive orders calling for border barriers and immigration bans, recent anecdotes describing a more confrontational entry process among travelers arriving in the US appear to confirm expectations set by the President's rhetoric.…

Tough year for big box shifters as shipments, revenues, hopes, dreams fail Analysis HPE, IBM and Lenovo each lost their market-share footing in the server box shifting world at the end of 2016, according to Gartner and IDC. Server sales revenues also dropped in the final three months of the year.…

Army baffled as Shadow goes invisible Vid The US Army is investigating how one of its drones took an unplanned 623-mile excursion and ended up stuck in a tree two states away.…

Blueprints and staff shifted to different projects after EMC spent '$1bn' on tech +Comment A year after first shipping the DSSD D5 array, Dell Technologies is axing the standalone product.…

Basically, Team Bezos pulled a GitLab Amazon has provided the postmortem for Tuesday's AWS S3 meltdown, shedding light on what caused one of its largest cloud facilities to bring a chunk of the web down.…

Regulator publishes draft guidance, opens consultation The UK Information Commissioner's Office has published draft guidance for data controllers on what it's actually going to mean for users to consent to their data being collected and shared under the European Union's looming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).…

IT-business misalignment woes When IT teams and their colleagues within the business get along, life is good for everyone.…

Incumbent Oracle: 'We'll aggressively compete too. It's what we do' Software biz SAP is eyeing up BT's business following its acquisition of the firm's existing customer EE for £12.5bn last year, with the former state monopoly having already set aside £550m for integration costs.…

When Machines Won’t Learn Facebook has revamped its Messenger bot platform that allows businesses to engage with the app's massive audience – and the story is a lesson for anyone looking for practical applications of the AI and machine learning hype.…

We're talking revenues. Positive cash flow ... haha. Maybe later As Pure’s quarterly results show revenue growth continuing, CEO Scott Dietzen is leading the company out on a highwire towards the billion dollars/year revenue goal, with the FlashBlade sales ramp essential to them not falling off.…

VoIP kitmakers probed IoT devices from a Chinese vendor contain a hidden backdoor that the vendor is refusing to fix, according to security researchers.…

Bet both of those cloud customers are angry now Oracle DBAs who weren't so eager to trial 12cR2 in the cloud can now check it out on their own premises.…

Did we say tears...sorry, meant cheers. Profits crash to blame Capita chief Andy Parker is stepping off the executive merry-go-round after the little loved outsourcing company today reported financial results that showed a crash in profits - the worst in its corporate history.…

Steering a path from Docker to Kubernetes Events Continuous delivery and DevOps mean continuous change, and one of the biggest changes over the last year has been the explosion in interest in containers.…

Doorstepped by the 'inspectors' Exclusive Two-thirds of TV Licensing prosecutions in a London court were brought against women, according to an exclusive analysis of court data by The Register.…

We'll try and sort it out by the end of the day, it says An unspecified technical infrastructure issue has left GoDaddy customers with serious DNS issues this morning.…

Three weeks later, and no word Sigaint, one of the largest dark web email providers, is approaching its third week of unavailability with still no clear signs about what's happening to the service.…

But reorgs yet to translate to growth across biz MWC Interview On the basis of its first quarter results last week, HPE still seems to be in troubled waters. Despite numerous major reorgs to dramatically shrink the biz, revenue still fell 10 per cent in the last three months to $11.4bn (£9.3bn).…

Forget gigabit phones – what do we do with all that lovely bandwidth? MWC Two "gigabit" phones are being shown off at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week.…

18 months to change a chip? Better believe it Exclusive EDMI, the UK maker of residential smart meter comms hubs, is seeking approval for a major modification to its kit - a process it had expected to take 18 months and cost £7m, leaked internal documents show.…

This'll all end in tiers It's purely coincidental that GitHub is now offering a 99.95 per cent uptime guarantee after the downtime experienced by Amazon Web Services customers on Tuesday.…

Lessons learned from Tuesday's cloud, er, fog storage mega-failure Analysis With Amazon now recovered from a four-hour outage that brought a large portion of the internet to a grinding halt, analysts are looking back to see what lessons companies can learn from the ordeal.…

Our comics and games should flow. But no hacking, terrorism or US hegemony please China has issued a “International Strategy of Cooperation on Cyberspace” in which it outlines rules it think should govern nations' online conduct.…

Microsoft responds to 'explicit' demands to fix update process If you're fed up with Windows 10 downloading updates, installing them, and rebooting at awkward times all by itself, you're not alone.…

Dog houses to cruise ships, Gopman is running a little rich No one doubts that San Francisco has a homeless problem.…

Hay, Erik Sch;midt, you sukc!1 Google's Perspective API, created in conjunction with Alphabet incubee Jigsaw, is supposed to provide an automated way to detect "toxic" language in social media.…

Decent effort, but it is hard to see why Redmond is bothering Skype's original peer-to-peer architecture has been bidding the world a long farewell since last year, and another peer just waved goodbye, with the latest Skype for Linux client graduating from Alpha to Beta status.…

XML and cross-site scripting bug-fixes Aruba AirWave systems need patching against multiple bugs in their control interface.…

Investigation reveals 32 million accounts were attacked with forged cookies, costing CEO Marissa Mayer her bonus Yahoo!'s board has decided CEO Marissa Mayer should not be paid her bonus, after investigating the 2014 hack that has so besmirched the company's reputation and finding the company knew about the gravity of the situation but failed to act properly to address the situation. Mayer has also decided to forego an award of equity due to her this year.…

Also patched today: Cisco Prime Infrastructure Cisco has disclosed a denial-of-service bug in its NetFlow Generation appliances that remote attackers can attack with a bad packet.…

The nuclear option for troubled Toshiba Foxconn has confirmed speculation that it is one of the companies bidding for a slice of Toshiba's silicon business.…

Anyone? Bueller? Asking because Microsoft, Google, have just offered free migration tools Today might not be the best day to contemplate migrating to the cloud, given that yesterday's epic Amazon Web Services outage. But that hasn't stopped Google and Microsoft from issuing new offers to help you take on-premises workloads into their clouds.…

The plan is to infill HFC-rich areas to create homogenous service zones nbn™, the organisation building and operating Australia's National Broadband Network, is installing new hybrid-fibre coax cables in some suburbs.…

'We were silenced by the Feds!' Shoppers of 40 online stores have had their bank card numbers and addresses slurped by a malware infection at backend provider Aptos.…

Spies given carte blanche thanks to Trump order The critical transatlantic data agreement, named Privacy Shield, is worthless, gives intelligence agencies complete free reign, and should be discarded, according to Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union.…

No need for a big panic, says Big Blue Updated You know the out-of-office automatic emails that we've been using for the past 20 years? Well, IBM has just been awarded a patent that states it practically invented the system.…

Find out which apps, protocols, or people slow your networks with the SolarWinds Bandwidth Analyzer Pack Promo Nobody enjoys slow networks. If your organisation is wasting productive time watching virtual sand pour through virtual hour glasses, you need to get to the bottom of the problem.…

Privacy warriors drag reluctant aviation watchdog to court Privacy advocates are pressing the US Federal Aviation Administration to ground creepy peeping-tom drones.…

Using NextGEN Gallery? Update or kill it with fire A critical flaw has been found in the third-party WordPress NextGEN Gallery plugin that is, according to wordpress.org, actively used by more than a million websites.…

My files belong to me – and it's getting easier to protect them Like it or not, collaboration and file-sharing services like Dropbox have become embedded in corporate IT.…

A status dashboard post about last week's cockup disappeared – but that's apparently normal The baffling mass logout of Google accounts last week was the result of accidental OAuth token invalidation, a cause Google acknowledged, but only to a subset of those affected.…

Brits catch God yet again screwing with our heads Video As far as we know, nearly four billion years ago nothing walked the lands of Earth, but there was life in the seas. Now British boffins think they've found a fossil record of some of the earliest lifeforms on the planet.…

Data is not stored in AWS or Azure Explainer Nimble’s Cloud Volumes (NCV) store block data for use by Amazon or Azure compute instances, but the NCVs themselves are not stored in either Amazon’s Elastic Block Store or in the Azure cloud.…

Ex-EMC exec takes CEO reins Former EMCer Guy Churchward has taken the reins at DataTorrent as CEO and president.…

Why should modern OSes and silicon have all the fun? The cloud's great for x86 CPUs, Windows and Linux.…

Chief beanie made CEO, asked to lead review into crappy finances Yet another senior exec has fallen on his sword at cybersecurity and managed services outfit NCC Group, just weeks after the latest profit warning. This time around it was CEO Rob Cotton.…

Look out, Google, your killer pram does not impress us Britain's most successful engineer Sir James Dyson is taking on Google and Facebook with a $2.5bn investment to turn the former RAF base at Hullavington near Malmesbury into a research campus for robotics, AI, and other advanced technology, including batteries and vision systems.…

Soulless contraptions in the home or at work are a risk – not to humanity Common security flaws in mainstream robotic technologies leave them wide open to attack, infosec researched have warned.…