The Register

Machine learning IP snapped up in $100m deal Sophos has announced a deal to acquire the core technologies of anti-malware protection outfit Invincea for $100m plus up to $20m, dependent on first-year revenues.…

€20m is srs bsnss so we will keep talking about it Comment Data was a hot topic last year and it's already big in 2017: Microsoft continues to resist the US government's attempts to get hold of data held in its Irish data centres. But just as it seems to be making progress, the government has won a favourable first instance ruling against Google forcing it to disclose data held outside the USA. This looks set to end up in the US Supreme Court.…

Piracy reaching 'epidemic' proportions, as streaming goes plug and play Pay TV and other copyright industries are pinning their hopes that new prosecutions of “Kodi USB stick” sellers will thwart what they call an “epidemic” of streaming piracy.…

We called; your digital crayons answered Pics Last week we challenged our commentards to redesign The Register's masthead in the style of David Hockney, after the artist scrawled over The Sun's logo in Paintbrush.…

Sorry – t'cloud for accents? Microsoft has build a cloud service for applications so that software can attempt to understand specialist vocabularies and cope with dialects and accents.…

Concorde 216 rolls into its very own hangar at Aerospace Bristol museum VID The last Concorde to take to the skies, G-BOAF (216), has come to a stop for the final time in the soon-to-open Aerospace Bristol museum.…

You catch more crooks with honey than vinegar Feature The hackers breached the transport operator's systems and before they knew it had sent a passenger train hurtling into a wall. And the only reason you didn't read about it in the papers was that the systems were an entirely fictitious network created in 2015 to test just how far snoopers or crims would go in attacking vulnerable transport systems.…

Nexus owners are sweet. The rest of us have to hope we don't get bricked by baddies Android's revealed 58 patches, but good luck getting your paws on them: as ever, owners of Nexus devices may already have the February update but OEM customers have to wait.…

Marketing told to sit 'shoulder to shoulder' or else Exclusive IBM is cracking down on remote workers, ordering unlucky employees to either come into one of six main offices and work "shoulder to shoulder" – or leave for good.…

Cross-platform dev is for low-rent chumps, unless it's our cross-platform dev Apple, which once dismissed cross-platform development for forcing developers to use lowest-common-denominator technology, has proposed a cross-platform JavaScript API for 3D graphics rendered in browsers called WebGPU.…

Astroboffins have searched for magnetic neighbor for 50 years Fifty years after pulsars were discovered, scientists in the UK and South Africa have spotted the first white dwarf that mimics the emissions of a neutron star.…

It was either shallow cuts now or no cash for new product investments says CEO Rackspace has revealed plans to trim six per cent of its workforce in the United States, and plenty of people elsewhere.…

Bad TLS cert handling escaped Apple's attention and leaves 18 MEEELION at risk Seventy-six iOS applications with an accumulated 18 million downloads between them are vulnerable to having their encrypted HTTPS traffic compromised.…

BlueMix welcomes database migrants to the Hotel California with cut from $.02 to $0.00 IBM has revealed that the standard tier BlueMix Lift service is now free. Which sounds great save for one small problem: the service was just about free already.…

New law will make criminals of boffins who probe badly-anonymised data Australia's proposed laws outlawing research into data de-anonymisation look set to proceed after a Senate Committee report landed yesterday complete with just one recommendation: that the bill be passed.…

For God's sake, Vlad, stop giving Donald ideas Putin and his pals' ongoing attempt to keep Russians safe from the evils of pornography has taken another step forward with the banning of popular smut site Brazzers.…

Proposal would oust Lord Hoodie from chairman role An activist shareholder proposal is calling for Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to give up his position as chairman of the board.…

Vendors clocked C2xxx flaw when returns spiked Exclusive The flaw in Intel's Atom C2000 family of chips has been vexing Intel's hardware customers for at least a year and a half, according to a source at one affected supplier, but it wasn't immediately obvious that Intel's silicon was to blame.…

Five years after first floated, bill passes lower house vote, flogs offenders with wet lettuce Australia's long-awaited and long-delayed data breach notification laws are back on the political agenda, after the nation's House of Representatives passing the legislation yesterday.…

Time to put these ol' ATI patents to use, mini-Chipzilla chuckles Advanced Micro Devices has accused a handful of companies of infringing patents it holds on graphics processor technology.…

Will senators prevent axe falling on 180-day slurp rule? On Monday, the US House of Representatives – normally a body that can't agree on anything – voted unanimously to pass the Email Privacy Act (HR 387).…

Offending DSLR became 'wedged behind control stick' An RAF pilot sent his military airliner into a dramatic dive after the DSLR camera he was mucking about with became wedged in the aircraft's controls, a court martial heard yesterday.…

Burglary didn't compromise payment system or financial info London-based payment processing firm GoCardless is warning customers that their personal information might have been exposed following the theft of 19 laptops from its offices last month.…

SFF SSD goes NVMe to blow SATA interface away WD has introduced a Skyhawk SSD, an NVMe version, as it were, of its acquired SanDisk’s SATA interface CloudSpeed SSD, along with its very own post-SanDisk and post-HGST Skyhawk branding.…

Welcome to the party, guys. A bit late but welcome anyway MapR says it is has immediate availability for the industry's first persistent storage for containers that offers complete state access to files, database tables, and message streams from any location.…

Attacks up 33 per cent across the five most-targeted industries Ransomware attacks are increasingly focusing on organisations that are more likely to pay up, such as healthcare, government, critical infrastructure, education, and small businesses.…

Talking technical with Dynatrace Dynatrace has launched a virtual digital assistant named Davis which you can talk to using Amazon's Alexa or via text on Slack through a proprietary engine - and has invited devs to take a pop at it.…

Ready to take on Ofcom after O2 merger block Analysis Three’s £250m acquisition of loss-making UK Broadband shows the operator has a large appetite for spectrum, but it will be the forthcoming spectrum auction where the land-grab for frequencies will really take place.…

What do we want? No more nuisance on-prem hardware. When do we want it? Soonish SAP HANA managed services biz Centiq is launching its cloud-readiness service to help users of the in-memory RDBMS figure out if they should move to the public cloud.…

Neat SSD for disk substitution adds both disk and flash capacity Whacking up high-end capacity by 71 per cent takes scale-out filer startup Qumulo into 3PB per rack territory, in its bid to win enterprise business.…

Part-sale of flash biz to fund nuclear power station losses In its attempts to sell a flash memory business stake to offset multibillion-dollar writedowns in its US nuclear power station business, Toshiba is leaning towards private equity and away from chip industry players.…

But you still look like a douche The first long-term, real-world study on carcinogens in e-cigarettes has found that they are significantly safer than smoking.…

Cloud democratising IT? Nah, it's shared by even fewer players AWS sucked up over one third of all cloudy infrastructure sales globally in the closing quarter of 2016 - more than three of its next biggest rivals could muster together.…

Hearing to take place in San Francisco Tuesday Entrepreneur Elon Musk has join the Big Tech battle against Donald Trump's immigration ban by signing up his companies to the amicus brief filed against it.…

'A sad day for the internet' says cartographic Brit competitor Streetmap has lost its application to appeal against last year’s High Court judgement that Google did nothing wrong by promoting its own Maps product above Streetmap’s.…

30,000+ into a single 'valley data centre - but whose is it? Supermicro says it has shipped 30,000-plus servers into a "Fortune 100" company’s Silicon Valley data centre.…

Reg Whitehall spend analysis reveals cash flowing away BT, which until 1984 was part of the UK public sector, is losing its grip on the public purse.…

Fiery Samsung's feeling drained The rollout of Android 7.0 on some Samsung devices has smacked them right in the battery. Meanwhile in the background, further competition issues around the Google mobile OS are brewing.…

New management technique is burying everyone else's heads in the sand Exclusive While front-line techies at King's College London have been slaving away to solve the problems of last October's IT disaster, their embarrassed superiors have been dipping into the IT budget to “reputation manage” the incident.…

Brilliant, it's about jolly time someone invented one of those In-memory computing hopeful Hazelcast is launching Hazelcast Jet, a distributed processing engine for the streams of big data which the business expects will be pouring into enterprises soon.…

£5bn for Arqiva: Anyone? Bueller? Analysis UK cellular tower and TV mast radio specialist Arqiva has been put up for sale with an optimistic price of between £5bn and £6bn, but its two core areas of business both have questionmarks hovering over them.…

Storage and VMs get cheaper, especially for wimpy Windows VMs in Brexit-land Microsoft's made another round of cuts to its cloudy costs, for both virtual machines and storage.…

Code gets a lifeline, a new home at the Linux Foundation, and a new open-source license RethinkDB has bounced back from the passing of its corporate parent last year to land under the protection of The Linux Foundation and a more business-friendly software license.…

Read sci-fi, kids! Save the world from killer robots! Universities should step up efforts to educate students about AI ethics, according to a panel of experts speaking at the AAAI conference in San Francisco on Monday.…

Think rural broadband, come rain, hail or shine Terahertz transmissions, literally the last frontier of radio communications, come a step closer this week with a group of Japanese researchers demonstrating a 100 Gbps system at an IEEE conference.…

Gains capacity for 3,340 cabinets crammed with kit in fabulous Slough Equinix has revealed that it quietly acquired a data centre operated by US outfit IO.…

CEO Jeff Hawn acknowledges recent changes brought 'fear and uncertainty' for staff The Register has learned that Quest Software has taken “an opportunity to shape the APJ organisation in a way that will create a greater focus on our customers, improve productivity and provide each of you with more opportunities for personal and professional growth.”…

About that whole running liquid on the surface thing… Data from NASA's Curiosity rover on Mars has left scientists scratching their heads. On the one hand, the bot appears to have found evidence that water once flowed on Mars, but on the other hand, the readings suggest there couldn't have been.…

If a sat's sinking and the radio goes down, it's time to light up! A satellite's radio-communications failing is a crisis if you need to keep it from drifting off station, so a pair of boffins suggest firing up an Earth-bound laser as a backup comms channel.…

Former FireEye intern has since seen the light and is very, very, sorry for Android exploit A malware writer and one time FireEye intern hauled in as part of massive global raids of cybercrime giant Darkode has been handed three years probation, ducking a possible 16 months sentence.…