The Register

Crims aimed for a Christmas Number One and scored Net scum behind the Cerber ransomware have been pounding enterprises infecting more corporate machines than any other, according to Microsoft.…

If you want to catch as many people as you can, go for the old legal razzle dazzle Usenix Enigma 2017 Research has shown that older people – particularly older women – are more susceptible to phishing scams. You may think our oldies are more suspicious of strangers, but that's sadly not the case.…

Probe went this close in 2004, but the light is better this time around The Cassini probe's commenced its death dive into Saturn's clouds, but is still sending back high-resolution of the gas giant's rings.…

Great way to monitor effects of being in orbit As it prepares for interplanetary missions, NASA is offering a glimpse of its study of the effects of space on twins.…

It's growing, new products are flowing and Microsoft's sending it new punters In 2015 Citrix was in trouble: the company fired 900 employees and warned it would miss guidance on earnings, endured a profit slump and cleaned out its C-suite.…

Then they resell that info to dodgy share traders Staff are taking to the dark web to leak corporate secrets for cash, research reveals.…

Big Red lets C/C++ types talk to its call interface Oracle has taken DPI, the data access layer in its node-oracledb driver, refactored it, and used it to give C/C++ developers an API to its Oracle Call Interface.…

No, seriously. Microsoft-supported scientists think this is a good idea in the data centre Microsoft-supported boffins hopes to eliminate cables in the data centre entirely.…

Project AirGig looks to solve bandwidth conundrum in the sticks AT&T says it is set to begin public trials of a project to backhaul high-speed mobile internet over power lines.…

Upstart said it had outgrown the cloud – now five out of five restore tools have failed Source-code hub Gitlab.com is in meltdown after experiencing data loss as a result of what it has suddenly discovered are ineffectual backups.…

Holiday phablet shortage was our fault, says Tim Cook Apple recorded its best quarterly numbers ever despite an admitted shortage of iPhone 7 Plus phablets.…

Going for a song: Hedge fund pulled the strings to snap up busted biz for $14.5m A Soros hedge fund vehicle made the winning bid at Violin Memory's January 23 auction.…

Simple rules for organisers, courtesy of Citrix Promo Marketers rely on webinars as one of the most important elements in helping savvy technology decision-makers to evaluate their next purchase.…

Splashed big bucks for a fancy display? Let's hope you have a big office too LG's space-age monitors are suffering from an engineering flaw that causes the screen to become unusable when placed too close to a Wi-Fi hotspot.…

Follows briefings heavy on blame, light on Russia US President Donald Trump unexpectedly cancelled the signing of a new executive order on cybersecurity Tuesday, following a day of briefings by the White House on its contents.…

Turnbull's Transformers' left hand no longer speaking to right hand The Australian government's Digital Transformation Agency says one of its signal projects, GovShare, is just fine – but nobody's told the developers that are quietly shovelling dirt onto its coffin.…

Microsoft exploring 'less is more' for its operating system Microsoft's latest Windows Insider build, released on Friday for participants in the software preview program, contains a reference to a new Windows SKU called Cloud.…

Phew! US ISPs finally free to roll out broadband, right? The new head of the US Federal Communications Commission has promised to cut back on red tape and free up Big Cable – which has been suffering under record profits for too long.…

For pity’s sake, stop reusing passwords Usenix Enigma 2017 The life of the security IT professional would be a lot easier if people were capable of remembering enough passwords so that they didn't need to reuse them.…

Cisco research paints a grim picture of corporate defences More than a third of organisations that experienced a breach last year reported substantial customer, opportunity and revenue loss.…

Furious clicktivists wear out keyboards in online virtue-signalling battle Proving that democracy is just fine in the internet era, a petition demanding that Donald Trump should be invited to make a state visit to the UK has passed 100,000 signatures – passing the threshold to be "considered" for a Parliamentary debate.…

This is an entirely sensible view of the near future. Cough “What if you need to update 50 million hairdryers and something goes wrong? How can you roll it back?” Thus spake Maarten Ectors, Canonical’s Internet of Things veep, who painted a picture of an IoT future where your fridge will be taken away from you unless you constantly use it as a smart app store.…

Big Tech gets ready to defend Low Pay. Again Analysis President Trump's immigration reforms are set to open a divide between Silicon Valley bosses and their technology workers – much as Brexit did. Unlike many of Trump's policies, this one will find favour with Congress and strike a chord with American technology and engineering graduates, who have seen wages stagnate as Big Tech exploited the H-1B visa program.…

Cloud-managed Wi-Fi access for 'DNA' (acronym, not ludicrous business metaphor) Datto is getting in a right mesh. The backup service vendor is buying Open Mesh to improve its managed service provider offering.…

Accenture blamed for system swamp The NHS reply-all email fail last year involved 500 million emails being sent across the health service's network in just 75 minutes.…

Securobods file data hostage report A security firm has floated the theory that malware authors are using German firms as a testing ground for their wares prior to wider distribution.…

Adds 5,000 connections, but still has a long way to go before taking on BT Wannabe BT challenger CityFibre is expecting to swing into profit for the full-year 2016, having added more than 5,000 fibre-to-the-premises connections last year.…

Where could the tech end up? Sysadmin Blog HPE recently purchased SimpliVity for $650m. Some folks, like me, think this was a heck of a bargain for HPE. Others – most notably SimpliVity's competitors – think SimpliVity wasn't worth all that much anyways.…

ExaGrid CEO Bill Andrews on backup's major players Interview After our relatively crude attempt to segment the backup market, ExaGrid CEO Bill Andrews got in touch wanting to talk about their way of divvying up the market. What he described seemed a neat enough way of doing it, and far better than our three-group attempt.…

Switching suppliers could save people of UK £327m a year Millions of Brits would rather pay through the nose for services via their existing broadband provider than switch suppliers and risk a prolonged period without access to the web, a poll has found.…

More VMware, more containers, more switches Big Switch Networks has peeled back the veil over its Big Cloud Fabric 4.0, revealing broader VMware support, multi-container networking, and scale-up to 128 leaf switches.…

Will deliver an NVMe over Fabrics FlexPod system in a rack all ready to go Interview El Reg has asked a large number of storage array vendors about their views of NVMe solid state drives and NVMe over Fabrics access to such drives. The combination promises to effectively kill array network access latency issues and make array access equivalent to reading and writing data from a locally attached flash drive.…

Yet more rewriting of rules, as majority of patent attorneys say it's time to resign The president of the European Patent Office has embarked on yet another effort to undermine his organization's staff union.…

What’s the frequency, Kenneth? Usenix Enigma 2017 Hacking sensors isn’t as big an area of research as hacking operating systems and firmware, but the results of simple physical hacks can be far-reaching.…

No, says Tintri, it isn’t nonsense. (Psst, want to see a demo?) When we rather fancifully wrote a column about storage system management by chatbot, and added the idea of an Alexa-type, speech-recognizing front end, we thought we’d left the back of our envelope far, far behind. Turns out we hadn’t.…

Give them problems to solve, not solutions to bodge in, says Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson believes companies should let their software developers off leash.…

Actually, we do want to alarm you. At least enough to take your printers off the internet Take your printers off the Internet: a bunch of researchers from a German university have found a cross-site printing bug in the ancient PostScript language.…

More warnings for users, downgrading insecure APIs Usenix Enigma 2017 Google and Firefox have been key drivers in the quest to get more people using HTTPS online, and starting later this week the hammer is coming down.…

Most of the kit at 2016 plugfest worked just fine and should be backwards-compatible There's already product a-plenty on the market, but it still matters that the Google-led 25G Ethernet consortium has formalised the release of its technical specification.…

AirWatch's Android app and Agent need an update, stat VMware's AirWatch enterprise mobility management service has two flaws that means the software needs ran update ASAP.…

One was fixed before anyone realised it was a security issue, so be careful when applying OpenSSL's released patches for a trio of denial-of-service bugs.…

Hardware hack steals serial numbers from legitimate users Video Apple has closed its iCloud activation lock check in a possible move to neuter a bypass method that allowed stolen devices to be reactivated at the expense of legitimate devices.…

Amid the AI hype is a real chance to spot more anomalous behaviour, faster The information security industry's rush to adopt machine learning will help businesses burn US$96 billion on big data, intelligence, and analytics by 2021, says research house ABI .…

Give 'p's a chance... no? Linux encryption app Cryptkeeper has a bug that causes it to use a single-letter universal decryption password: 'p'.…

Kennedy pad needs more prep, Elon's next flight will be to ISS SpaceX's spectacular explosion last September is still producing fallout, with the company deciding its EchoStar launch will have to wait, while it prepares its new launchpad.…

Programming blunders allow miscreants to snatch home gateways' admin passwords Researchers are warning of a serious security hole that can be exploited to hijack potentially hundreds of thousands of Netgear routers.…

When the elderly can't access services or communicate, we all lose My dad seems to have a propensity for breaking the all of the kit we’ve given him to allow us to have a trans-oceanic video chat pretty much any time either of us wants. Apple’s Facetime came along just around the time I moved to Australia. Skype wasn’t far behind. Between these two we’ve been able to keep our relationship going strong, even at a 13,000 km remove. The tyranny of distance has been just a little less tyrannical as a result.…

American ISP giants' stooges urge watchdog to tear down safeguards on customer data Full of confidence in Ajit Pai – the new boss at the FCC, America's communications watchdog – groups representing US telcos are seeking a repeal of the regulator's privacy rules.…

What else do you expect from a glorified hotel manager? US President Donald Trump has emitted another executive order: this latest one is aimed at reducing the number of government regulations.…

As cloud era sweeps in, Redmond faces up to fresh competition Analysis Amazon's cloud service AWS has replaced Oracle and VMware as Microsoft's chief rivals, the Windows giant's CEO Satya Nadella has said.…