The Register

ISPs told to get real by advertising speeds punters will get at busy times Australia's consumer watchdog is trying to ensure advertising offers comprehensible and accurate broadband performance information.…

Use this for good, not for evil. But not if you care about your penguins Linux sysadmins with a sense of adventure: Tokyo-based developer Hector Martin has put together a set of scripts to replace an in-use Linux system over SSH.…

Government and business don't get on, AI is bunk and politics rules BSides SF Comfortable illusions about how security is working are crippling the ability of government and industry to fight the threat, a former member of the FBI’s netsec team has told the B-Sides San Francisco security conference.…

'I could have released the final 4.10' but preferred not to over-complicate things Those waiting for the milestone that would have been version 4.10 of the Linux kernel have another week to wait, after Linus Torvalds decided not to release the final version this week.…

Public servants' 'misinformation' warning seemingly set aside for politics Following last year's megastorm and blackout in South Australia, Vulture South opined that the events had nothing to do with the state's use of wind power. Now, a freedom of information release reveals the government was advised to that effect before ministers started to cast blame.…

What bits of the boffins' cloud do we build ourselves? Australia is re-crafting the roadmap that guides its national research infrastructure, a task that covers everything from the network to the nation's high performance computing systems.…

If at first you don't succeed, try { try { again } } Oracle has brought its legal war with Google back to life, alleging Android's Java framework ripped off Big Red's copyright.…

Moldovan malware slinger faces up to 15 years in the cooler A Moldovan miscreant has admitted infecting computers at a US oil company and school district in an attempt to rob the organizations blind.…

Malware can spread to gizmos and gadgets after slipping into internal systems The Mirai malware that hijacked hundreds of thousands of IoT gadgets, routers and other devices is now capable of infecting Windows systems.…

The one who went to France once and loves sitcoms Say what you like about Amazon, it has never been cool.…

Taking 'mobile operators are our customers' a bit too far? Nokia has wheeled out a worldwide IoT network grid (WING) that sounds remarkably like an all-in-one mobile virtual network operators offering.…

Furious loyalists bemoan Sir Jony's shoddy craftsmanship One of Apple's newest iPhones is being slammed by fans for its lack of quality, in what should be a worrying development for the Cupertino iStuff slinger.…

We're here to chew gum and demand info, and we're all out of gum, say antitrust cops The US Department of Justice is digging into the highly unusual auction of internet extension .web last year, the company that purchased it has admitted.…

Subheading'); DROP TABLE articles;-- Microsoft says it will fully power up its Azure SQL Database Threat Detection service this spring.…

We sheltered our heads until there was a pause for reporting Incoming! Boom, boom and boom again – storage news announcements hit the wires in a relentless barrage. Here's a few we've received showing developments in data protection, cloud storage, hyper-converged storage, the dregs of flash memory and more.…

Indefinite injunctions trouble travel ban judge Microsoft is clear to sue the US government for gagging the company from telling users when their data has been accessed by the State. The lawsuit, filed last April, jumped another legal hurdle this week – thanks to the Washington judge who also battered President Trump's executive order on travel.…

'Not one of you has accepted dishonest involvement,' says judge Four men, who conned Barclays Bank and Belgian banking group KBC out of £160m in a super fast broadband scam, have today been sentenced to a collective 44 years in the clink.…

Er, we're going to break even next year, says CEO Bearden Hortonworks has officially failed in its bid to stop burning cash by the end of this financial year.…

Pledges to eradicate drone burglary threat by 'any means necessary' A farmer in County Tipperary has declared war on drones, claiming criminals are using the buzz-some devices to scope out rural areas for burglaries.…

Steel, construction, oil and gas, telecoms bottom of the list Telcos have been identified as a "low-priority" sector in Theresa May's brave new post-Brexit Britain, according to a list of industries compiled by the government which ranks them in order of importance.…

Plus: Full details of the ex-stripper who controls his European enterprise Peter Sage, the jailed motivational speaker accused by Hewlett Packard Enterprise of perpetrating a $17.5m fraud against them, once ran a company which claimed “‘traditional' pharmaceuticals simply intoxicate your body”.…

Users can do more as management goes automatic Interview Tintri's Alexa speechbot is no piece of eye-candy gimmickry. CTO and founder Dr Kieran Harty says it will enable users to do more with less hassle as system management gets automated. We quizzed Harty on the how-and-why of its development.…

Sammy attempts to take Chrome OS high end Hands-on It's been nearly six years since Google announced the launch of its own operating system, Chrome OS, and the CR‑48 Chromebook running it.…

Terms of settlement not disclosed SHOCKER Oracle has reached a settlement with a former finance manager who alleged she had been fired for refusing to follow what she believed to be unlawful accounting practices that bumped up the firm's cloud numbers.…

No boats capable of chasing off naughty Russians, we're told None of the Royal Navy's seven attack submarines are deployed on operations at the moment, according to reports, which potentially threatens the security of Britain's nuclear deterrent.…

The commentards have spoken. BBC, take heed To be cast as Doctor Who once might be regarded as fortunate, but to be Doctor twice would be AWESOME!…

Taking over your data centre? Study How many stories have you read about all-flash arrays taking over your data centre or computer room? You've probably heard this line even more than you’ve read about how everything is moving to the cloud, how IoT will change the world next week, or how cyber-attacks are going to bring civilisation to its knees by Easter.…

Errr... does that work? Openreach has shipped in two BT bods to head regulation and strategy at the broadband provider, yet it still hopes to convince regulator Ofcom it can run Openreach as an independent entity.…

Japanese researchers turn tiny drones into robot bees Video A failed science experiment involving a sticky gel has been revived to create robot pollinators.…

Hasty and botched consultation revealed by El Reg Exclusive Proposals for a swingeing new Espionage Act that could jail journalists as spies have been developed in haste by legal officials, The Register has learned.…

Pleading guilty to assault on battery Something for the Weekend, Sir? I'm getting funny dreams again. Either that or I have stepped into one of Arthur C Clarke's episodes of Mysterious World of The Unexplained albeit without the Sri Lankan foliage and Eric Morecambe glasses.…

But we won't have to pay fines to Europe for being crap... Brexit could further exacerbate the woeful IT track record of farmers receiving rural payments, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has warned.…

Personal data gathering ruled 'intrusive, excessive and unjustified' A Scottish couple have been awarded damages of more than £17,000 in total for the "extreme stress" they suffered as a result of the "highly intrusive" use of CCTV systems by the owner of a neighbouring property.…

Why can’t Big Tech drain the swamp? Maybe governments don't want to Special Report Google's ad blacklists, intended to stop big brand advertisements running over YouTube terror videos, aren’t working.…

Best quarter yet, says CEO, while share price slips Nvidia continues to ride the AI hype wave, raking in $2.17bn in sales in three months – its best quarterly results yet, apparently.…

Previous Venus probes hardly lasted an hour. This stuff survived three weeks before the boffins lost their lab booking NASA boffins have found a way to make electronics that can survive on the surface of Venus, at least for a few weeks…

Join us in London this May to talk DevOps, CD, containers and more We’ve added more workshops and conference speakers to the Continuous Lifecycle lineup, making the three-day event a must-go for any tech pro looking to get on top of DevOps, containerization, and Continuous Delivery.…

Same org saw users catch ransomware twice. In one day. After being warned On-Call Welcome again to On-Call, our weekly therapy session for readers who need to share terrible memories of jobs gone horribly, horribly, wrong.…

'Hypervisor introspection' probes guest VMs for advanced malware from splendid isolation Citrix and Bitdefender have revealed a security tool that runs inside the hypervisor – in this case, Citrix's own Xen Server – to detect advanced persistent threats running in guest VMs.…

Pinterest-owned web scrapbook 'hit system limit for hosted database', probably in AWS Web scrapbook Instapaper has suffered a 30-plus hour outage and is warning of a week-long restore time.…

S/4HANA 'Cloud' now comes with vertical editions, but not notably more cloud SAP has updated the cloud edition of its in-memory S/4HANA ERP suite and tacked the word “Cloud” onto the end of its name.…

Software to overtake hardware by 2020, say abacus-shufflers at IDC Analyst outfit IDC reckons the world will spend US$2.4 trillion (€2.25tn, £1.91tn) on technology products in 2017, with just under half of the cheques to be written by very large companies.…

Again. So now Google's re-building dangerously centralized routing rigs Google's explained why new cloudy virtual machines in its cloud engine couldn't connect to the world for a couple of hours in January: a canary didn't fall off its perch, so the company was unaware of a problem.…

Cupertino giant quickly purged supposedly dead files when word got out Apple appears to have fixed a flaw in iCloud that retained a copy of deleted Safari browsing history data synced from local devices for more than a year.…

Judges deal stunning blow to president's executive order President Trump has suffered a serious blow to his authority following a decision by a court of appeals against his controversial travel ban.…

Ajit gets a Florida-style full Nelson after study scrapped US FCC Chairman Ajit Pai is facing criticism for his decision to axe a study on improving internet connections at public schools and libraries.…

Brogan BamBrogan is back! And this time he means BamBusiness Three months after settling a lawsuit with former employer Hyperloop One, engineer Brogan BamBrogan (of the BamBrogans) has launched a rival to the tube-travelling transport company.…

And it has nothing to do with South by Southwest Software engineers should ditch their coveted Silicon Valley jobs and look for opportunities in Austin, San Diego or Seattle.…

Now give me €45 MEEELLION to make up for it A French businessman is suing Uber for a ridiculous amount of money, with the claim that the dial-a-ride app cost him his marriage.…

Expanded executive order calls for no fewer than 10 reports The latest draft of a cybersecurity executive order to be signed by President Trump has become an unusually precise, report-ordering extravaganza.…