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Come and have a go, if you think you’re hard enough Sponsored Digital transformation has been a boardroom buzzphrase for the last couple of years. If your CEO hasn’t asked you to explain it, then the invitation’s in the mail. Are you ready to tell them what it is, and what you’re doing to help make it happen?…

Please now wash your hands Something for the Weekend, Sir? I'm off to the toilet. Would you like to join me?…

Looks like revenues are up by almost $6bn Analysis WD took advantage of stable disk drive and strong flash markets to crank revenues and profits in its third fiscal 2017 quarter, giving Seagate an object lesson in how to run a storage business.…

Independence from distros The world of Linux has long been divided into tribes, or distros as we called them. But what actually makes a distro? The packages it uses? The people who put those packages together? The philosophy behind the choices the people who put the packages together make? The question of what makes a distro is actually very difficult on to answer and it's about to get even more difficult.…

Ad biz disputes claims, but duopoly marches on Internet advertising revenue continues to grow, thanks to mobile, but the Silicon Valley duopoly of Facebook and Google swallowed up almost the new money.…

TalkTalk's £400,000 penalty was big – how about £59 MILLION? Fines from the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) against Brit companies last year would have been £69m rather than £880,500 if the pending General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) had been applied, according to analysis by NCC Group.…

Support chap reveals the squalid horror of restaurant computers ON-CALL Welcome again to On-Call, our weekly sharing session in which readers unburden themselves by sharing memories of nasty jobs.…

Kali's a favourite for white hats, but that doesn't stop black hats guys from using it too Think passwords, people. Think long, complex passwords. Not because a breach dump's landed, but because the security-probing-oriented Kali Linux just got better at cracking passwords.…

License to print money renewed in full, thanks to mobile Google's parent company Alphabet has enjoyed a bumper start to the year, raking in more and more ad cash, sinking dosh into hobby projects, and generally having a great time.…

Single phone call by journalist probed, Feds then self-report breach to Ombudsman Australian Federal Police Commissioner Andrew Colvin has admitted that one of the force's investigators accessed a journalist's telecommunications metadata without a warrant, thereby breaching the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979.…

'Meteoric' success downgraded to mere 'rocketing' Amazon Web Services growth slowed down a bit, but still brought Amazon cash at a record clip in the first three months of 2017.…

DARPA's current thinking for potential future bright sparks The boffinry nerve center of the US military is working with seven American universities to see if electrically stimulating the brain will increase the ability to learn new skills.…

Phones also dead – but hey, $53m profit A DAY is still $53m Microsoft has reported strong results in its latest quarter, pulling in nearly $5bn in profits and showing good cloud revenue growth. Just don't mention the sagging Surface fondleslab sales.…

Space Launch System and Orion Crew Vehicle won't lift off for planned 2018 test flight The United States Government Accountability Office has found that NASA's return to crewed space exploration will likely not commence in 2018, as planned, and will probably slip into 2019. And familiar technology integration challenges are partly to blame.…

Google's ongoing HTTP exposé comes to Incognito Mode and forms Google's efforts to make unsecured HTTP connections untenable will step up in October, when its Chrome browser starts to warn users that more web sites are insecure.…

We're trying our best here, OK? Arcserve has bought its way into the email archiving game by gobbling up FastArchiver.…

You could wait for servers and apps to grok storage-class RAM … or just supercharge 'puters Memory-centric analyst firm TrendFocus reckons Intel's Optane is going to take years to make a difference in the data centre, which means using it in PCs is as good as it will get for the foreseeable future.…

Basically what he was saying while bragging about sales Intel today revealed that its first-quarter earnings and sales were more or less as forecast, sending its stock down in after-hours trading.…

And, oh for $DEITY's sake, yet ANOTHER best-practices standards organization? Traffic bouncer Cloudflare has outlined what it claims is the solution to the perennial internet-of-things security problem: pay it.…

Not quite 'lock her up,' but they'll take what they can get – like formal criminal charges US House Republicans are demanding prosecutors bring charges against the IT chap who hosted Hillary Clinton's private email service.…

Once dismissed by Zuck, misinformation now merits revised security strategy Analysis Last November at the Techonomy Conference in Half Moon Bay, California, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg dismissed the notion that disinformation had affected the US presidential election as lunacy.…

Probe plunges deep into dark cosmic hole Photo NASA's Cassini probe has made its first dive inside Saturn's rings, skimming about 1,900 miles (3,000KM) over the surface of the gas giant's stormy atmosphere.…

Here we go again On Wednesday, Ajit Pai, the boss of America's broadband watchdog, decided to reopen the decade-long debate over net neutrality, despite rules having been finally decided back in 2015 and held up by the court last year.…

The Dark Knight of malware's purpose remains unknown Hajime – the "vigilante" IoT worm that blocks rival botnets – has built up a compromised network of 300,000 malware-compromised devices, according to new figures from Kaspersky Lab.…

Mark Durcan gets to retire at last as Sanjay Mehrotra takes over Micron has hired ex-SanDisk CEO Sanjay Mehrotra as its new president and CEO, replacing the retiring Mark Durcan.…

Researcher claims it's riddled with flaws. Vendor denies it Security researchers claim to have uncovered a variety of serious security holes in a heavily touted secure email server technology. Nomx, the firm behind the device, strongly disputes the claims and has challenged researchers to a hacking challenge, involving the creation of an email account on a designated remotely hosted nomx device.…

And it weighs the same as 5.7 million adult badgers China has launched its own aircraft carrier – the first ship of its type to be built from scratch in the rising Asian superpower's yards.…

Helped along by billion dollar-plus cash pile outside USA BI and data warehouser Teradata's revenues fell 10 per cent on the year from $545m to $491m in the first quarter of 2017, with a loss of $2m as the firm's recovery under new CEO Victor Lund still has a ways to go.…

Staying compliant & off the front page There’s nothing quite like a nice, juicy financial crisis to wake up the regulators’ rule-setters, psych up the lawmakers and get the lawyers sharpening their quill pens and breaking out a fresh bottle of Quink. And so it seems to have been proven since the financial car crash of the mid to late noughties, with the appearance of a variety of new rules and legislation to keep the financial services industry on its toes.…

We’re testing, testing, testing...the food We’ll be opening the doors for Continuous Lifecycle London 2017 in less than three weeks, meaning time is running out to secure a front row seat for three days of the best in DevOps, Containers, Agile, CD and more.…

Not so smart now, eh? Seven in ten UK universities have admitted falling victim to a phishing attack in which an individual has been tricked into disclosing personal details via an email purporting to be from a trusted source.…

Catalogue of errors by stuck-in-the-rut firm Comment Here's a suggestion – Seagate, led by a combined chairman and CEO, has made a catalogue of tactical errors in the face of the NAND tidal wave while rival Western Digital has pivoted sideways to embrace flash.…

All 28 countries' navies now speak the same language below the waves Boffins at NATO have managed to ratify, across the entire alliance, the first ever official standard for underwater digital communications.…

Go wild, the KEYone is here BlackBerry Mobile has begun shipping its first post-BlackBerry phone in the UK today, although fans will need to cross their fingers and pop into Selfridges' Oxford Street store in London to find one.…

Woes whack Wi-Fi webcam willy with weak websec walls The US Federal Trade Commission has been urged to launch a probe into a hackable sex toy, which is potentially exposing couples' teledildonic frolics to cyberpervs.…

31.7 trillion flops – pretty sporty HPC Blog Another world record has fallen. Asian Student Cluster competitors have broken the student LINPACK record with an amazing score of 31.7 TF/s. This barely tops the former record of 31.15 TF/s set at SC16 by the University of Science & Technology of China.…

Disappearing platforms problem SourceForge wants tighter ties with other code repositories following Microsoft’s decision to shutter CodePlex.…

The scramble for space driving the commodity race There's a war brewing in the cloud, and machine learning may well determine the outcome. With infrastructure services trending toward commoditisation, each of the big-three cloud purveyors is racing to augment vanilla IaaS and PaaS with not-so-vanilla machine learning (ML)/artificial intelligence (AI) smarts. Sure, they're way out in front of the market – most enterprises simply aren't doing much with ML – but the hope is that by paving the way to a dystopian future when the machines take over they will make boatloads of money along the way.…

New standard addresses wireline aspects of low latency 5G Analysis We can no longer see 5G as a wireless standard alone. Its heart may still be a 3GPP-defined radio, but to deliver commercial benefits to operators (old or new), wireline links will be as important as wireless ones, and architectural change will be more important than an updated air interface.…

Verizon super depressing report's in Cyberespionage and ransomware attacks are on the increase, according to the latest annual edition of Verizon's breach report.…

It's basically a promise to do better and not mess things up Symantec is hoping to get its certificates back on Google's trust list.…

All too easy to choke enemies' gateways, it seems Broadband modems using Intel's bungled Puma 6 chipset can be overloaded and virtually knocked offline by a trivial stream of packets, it is claimed.…

Met cops gloat after pair admits to pilfering subscriber records Two chaps in the UK have admitted stealing more than 150,000 customer records from TalkTalk.…

Faulty LPC clock bus timed out Intel finally has reworked its flawed Atom C2000 chips, which have been failing at a greater-than-expected rate for about a year and a half.…

Virtual Skype turns out to be a reason to pick up the phone Citrix has posted a solid first quarter in which it posted modest revenue and profit gains, beat its expected earnings-per-share and said its transition to selling cloudy subscriptions is coming along nicely.…

'You shall not use the silhouette of any fruit' commands Cupertino idiot tax operation In the never-ending effort by Apple to think higher of itself, the computer giant has opposed a trademark featuring the silhouette of a pear.…

Cisco won't blink, but high-frequency traders may get twitchy Australian company Exablaze has released a switch with claimed latency of just 49 nanoseconds.…

Five nasties await netadmins Admins of SolarWinds system management systems can block out a biggish chunk of their diaries to implement a bunch of serious patches.…

‘Antbleed’ attack could crock 70 per cent of all mining. Time to try another flavour? A new branded bug (sigh) has landed, specific to an ASIC-based Bitcoin miner: dubbed “Antbleed”, it allows remote shutdown of hardware sold by a company called "Bitmain".…

Boffins turned up hard-coded password in ancient controllers General Electric is pushing patches for protection relay bugs that, if exploited, could open up transmission systems to a grid-scale attack.…