The Register

Michael Thomas' appeal will send shockwaves through IT industry if successful Back in December 2011, Michael Thomas did what many sysadmins secretly dream of doing: he trashed his employer's network and left a note saying he quit.…

Watchdog forces them to drop claims of privacy protections Three US companies have settled with the FTC after they were accused of lying about the security safeguards on their customer information.…

Most argued articles include Pervez Musharraf, Niels Bohr and Schwarzenegger Analysis An investigation into Wikipedia bots has confirmed the automated editing software can be just as pedantic and petty as humans are – often engaging in online spats that can continue for years.…

Tired old algo underpinning online security must die now Google researchers and academics have today demonstrated it is possible – albeit with a lot of computing power – to produce two different documents that have the same SHA-1 hash signature.…

Tired old algo underpinning online security must die now Google researchers and academics have today demonstrated it is possible – albeit with a lot of computing power – to produce two different documents that have the same SHA-1 hash signature.…

Eleventh-hour amendment, but will it stick with government? An eleventh-hour amendment has been added to the UK government's Digital Economy Bill, proposing an increase of the Universal Service Obligation from 10Mbps to 30Mbps.…

How many swallows do you need for a summer? One will do The adoption of prophylactics to protect users against advertising failed to rise in 2016, according to pollsters YouGov.…

Brit firm 'missed the jackpot', says High Court judge The High Court in London, UK, has agreed that a company's former employees who took thousands of confidential files away on USB sticks when they quit the firm were indeed naughty – and ordered them to pay damages of just £1 each.…

And the Oscar for the best story about why you have recovery tests goes to... Exclusive An external review into last October's catastrophic data loss at King's College London has placed the blame squarely at the feet of the IT technical team, which it found neither understood nor followed the university's system for backing up data.…

Creating 'a one-stop shop for digital shared services' French managed file transfer (MFT) company Axway has bought file sync and share supplier Syncplicity.…

I expect to remain with Tesla forever... and ever, and ever Amid larger than expected losses at Tesla, founder Elon Musk promised he would not be diverted by a mission to Mars and intended to stay at the company "forever".…

Google Ventures-backed Storj Labs makes its pitch Startup Storj (pronounced storage oddly enough) has an open source, distributed cloud object storage platform using blockchain technology and end-to-end cryptography across a peer-to-peer network to secure files.…

Blames it on weak pound Sales at Telefónica UK, which owns O2, plunged 12.5 per cent to €6.8bn (£5.7bn) for the firm's full year, mainly due to currency changes.…

But at least TSS staffers won't have to get career advice from Capita this time Exclusive IBM is hoping to lighten monthly payroll costs by, er, dangling minimum statutory redundancy terms in front of UK staff who volunteer to cut short their career at the creaking tech titan.…

Cops probing Mirai telco takedown UK police have arrested a suspect in connection with an attack that infected nearly 1 million Deutsche Telekom routers last November.…

Rentokil man tells BBC it calls them automagically, so that clearly explains the price Pest control firm Rentokil has developed an Internet of Things mousetrap that gasses rodents and automatically calls out a disposal bod – and it can be yours for a cool £1,300.…

Peter Sage was playing the old grey reseller game, claims US tech monster Peter Sage, the imprisoned "serial entrepreneur" and one-time principal of the company Space Energy, is said to have defrauded Hewlett Packard Enterprise out of tens of thousands of servers in a scam that unfolded over three years.…

Well... not Microsoft, Cisco or HPE, according to a consultant A consultancy reports that Nutanix, Simplivity and VMware lead the SDS/HCI market, while Microsoft, Cisco and HPE lag behind.…

Sorry, Dave. I can’t do that – without an appropriate multi-GPU framework or Python library Machine learning has become a buzzword. A branch of Artificial Intelligence, it adds marketing sparkle to everything from intrusion detection tools to business analytics. What is it, exactly, and how can you code it?…

Ambiguous contract language didn't guarantee outcome If you use software licensed by SAP, you had better read your licence. If you have not yet acquired SAP software, you should make sure you use an experienced IT licensing lawyer before contracting.…

We're working on it Updated The BBC has acknowledged that problems with the latest iPlayer software for PCs and Macs have left users unable to download shows to watch offline.…

1TB chip incoming Toshiba has introduced its first 64-layer 3D NAND device that doubles the capacity of its 256Gb product to 512Gb using a TLC (3bits/cell) design.…

Stop. We don't want to hear it, mutters uSwitch Customers are losing £5.8bn per year by sticking with the same mobile supplier, according to research from comparison site uSwitch.…

Machine learning is cropping up more and more in research papers – does it work? Feature Powerful artificially intelligent algorithms and models are all the rage. They're knocking out it of the park in language translation and image recognition, but autonomous cars and chatbots? Not so much.…

The 5G internet of virtualized networked things is calling and Chipzilla wants to be ready Intel's tossed out a batch of new products ahead of Mobile World Congress, all of them handy for internet of things applications operating on very fast wireless networks.…

Critical update deals with five ways to do remote code execution on Windows Microsoft's popped out a Security Update for Adobe Flash.…

Wearables giant finally reveals cost of gobbling up and killing off rival hardware Fitbit has confirmed the long-held belief that it scooped up rival wearables maker Pebble for a bargain basement price before murdering the watchmaker.…

Malware? Check. Camera? Check. Let's go sniff passwords That roll of tape you use to cover the Webcam? Better use some of it on your hard-drive LED, because it can be a data exfiltration vector.…

No, you're not reading that wrong: PCs are selling better than since the XP upgrade rush HP Inc has reported its first quarter results with a highlight being increased sales and revenue for PCs, but a dip for printer-related activities.…

Broadcom waves farewell to what used to be Ruckus and the ICX switch business Arris Technologies will buy Ruckus Wireless from Broadcom, for US$800m.…

Upstart Sapho gives Son of Notes the 'kids want all software to be Facebook clone' treatment The last time The Register covered IBM Domino, we rode to work on a brontosaurus and wrote the story with a a chisel.…

DCCP code cockup lay unnoticed since 2005 Eleven years ago or thereabouts, the Linux kernel got support for the Datagram Congestion Control Protocol – and also got a privilege escalation bug that has just been fixed.…

Mozilla devs debate whether this is a bug or a feature Firefox's intermediate certificate cache can be tricked into leaking to a deliberately mis-configured server, creating yet-another chance to fingerprint users (including those who think they're protected by Private Browsing).…

Readings raise fears of nuke, probably a boring factory fumble The US military has sent one of its atmosphere-analyzing aircraft to Europe to hunt the source of a radioactive leak on the continent.…

Uncle Sam's vaguely worded raid warrant knocked down by the Constitution Analysis An Illinois judge has rejected a warrant sought by the US government to force everyone in a given location to apply his or her fingerprints to any Apple electronic device investigators happen to find there, a ruling contrary to a similar warrant request granted last year by a judge in California.…

First devices cleared for sale as chip biz, carriers rejoice The FCC has approved the first crop of LTE-U base stations for sale in the US, a move aimed at opening unlicensed spectrum space to boost broadband speeds.…

Navigational computer blunder halts cargo capsule hook-up SpaceX today called off an attempt to berth its Dragon cargo capsule with the International Space Station after the, er, podule got a bit lost. It's fine, though: they'll try again on Thursday.…

Think tank is upset not every hack is spewing marketing spiel (it's just most of them) The tech press has dared to lean away from its core mission of making technology companies more profitable, says tech advocacy house ITIF.…

It's a Trap...pist mini solar system 44 million years away by jet plane Pics and video NASA has discovered a mini solar system of seven Earth-sized planets orbiting a small cool dwarf star, including three within the Goldilocks zone where liquid water is possible.…

Its own security software could have stopped data exposure Global aerospace firm Boeing earlier this month sent a notification to Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson, as required by law, about a company employee who mistakenly emailed a spreadsheet full of employee personal data to his spouse in November, 2016.…

NComputing packages up ARM PC into RX300 box Using the Raspberry Pi 3 as a Windows thin client is not a new idea, but NComputing has wrapped it all up in a nice package for its target markets of schools and verticals.…

You could set your watch to it ... but best not Oracle says it will finally land Java Enterprise Edition 8 in July 2017 – only eight months behind schedule.…

'The limitations of automation' So it begins.…

We OWN you, WE review the products, WE say what stays Oracle today poured cold water on efforts by Apiary top brass to reassure customers about the future of its software under Big Red – the very same day Oracle's acquisition of Apiary concluded.…

HTTP still being used eBay uses HTTPS on its most critical pages, such as those where payment or address information is entered, but a lack of encryption on several sensitive pages still poses a concern for the privacy conscious.…

Redundancy axes loom over Global Tech Services workers Exclusive IBM is about to fling another bunch of Technical Services Support staffers down the redundancy chute, internal documents leaked to The Register reveal.…

Chipzilla gets in on Last Level Cache design A new cache is needed between memory and the tri-level processor cache structure in servers in order to avoid CPU core wait states.…

Mobile ad boom favours the happy app Advertising revenue flowing back to app developers from Android apps has exceeded the amount returned to developers by Apple for the first time.…

Misses full-year forecast by, oh, only 20 per cent Cybersecurity firm NCC Group has launched a strategic review after issuing a profit warning.…

Peering peers reject proposed rules on keeping quiet about secret govt gagging orders Members of LINX, the London Internet Exchange – the UK's largest net peering point – have rejected proposals that would reshape the company’s constitution and could block members from being consulted about government tapping instructions.…