The Register

Open protocol published for all app, web devs to implement Usenix Enigma 2017 Facebook has published a specification for providing secure and reliable account recovery in websites and applications.…

Could this get any weirder or more silly? Apparently confirming that the United States of America has become its own strange reality TV show where brash billionaires and pantomime villains make decisions and everyone else has to clean up after them, Elon Musk has announced he will resolve the immigration crisis that has enveloped the Trump Administration over the past few days.…

And a good job too, seeing as blocks can be dodged by setting DNS to 8.8.8.8 Australia's government will conduct a “future review” into Section 115a of the nation's Copyright Act, the amendment introduced in 2015 that requires internet service providers to block websites.…

Software exploits presidential tantrums aimed at big biz US President Donald Trump's tweets about Boeing, General Motors, and Toyota have affected the companies' stock price – and creative agency T3 believes that consequence will be repeated.…

If at first you succeed, try, try again, think extortionists A top Austrian hotel coughed up thousands in ransom to cybercrooks, who hacked its computer system and locked guests out of their rooms until the money was paid.…

Feeling pretty Blu-ray DVD and Blu-ray income has collapsed faster than Sony expected, obliging the company to take a $976m (Y112bn) impairment on its movie business. Sony’s movie and TV boss stepped down earlier this month.…

NAND revenues top $800m/quarter with XPOint forecast to be a 2018 revenue driver Intel made $816m from flash memory products in the final 2016 quarter and sees XPoint contributing 10 per cent of revenues in 2018.…

Masaya Nakamura famous for popularising the iconic 80s arcade game The father of the world's most iconic arcade game Pac-Man, Masaya Nakamura, has died at the age of 91.…

Apparently survived YouTube shooting The tech world's equivalent of Jarndyce and Jarndyce rolled back into a New York Court last week, with a judge refusing to grant John McAfee an injunction blocking Intel from transferring trademark rights to the name McAfee to a proposed cyber-security spin-off.…

Hammy eating pups alive French farmers’ embrace of modern farming is turning the already endangered local hamster population into black-tongued baby eating pyschos, scientists have found.…

We are all 'Removable Aliens' now Analysis President Trump’s Executive Order (Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States) has caused controversy over its temporary ban on all Muslims entering the USA from certain countries. It has consequences for data protection.…

Does Clickbait cause blindness? Yes it does Zeitgeist-hungry MPs at the UK Parliament will conduct an inquiry into “Fake News”.…

Competitors are raising prices. Who knows, it could work TalkTalk has spotted an opportunity to win back customers following its mega data breach in October 2015 with a flash sale broadband promotion.…

Dr Jesper Sorensen takes aim at forum posters The UK parenting website Mumsnet has been ordered by a court to give up the identities of two users who criticised a plastic surgeon, along with the contents of their private messages.…

Bring your own key to the encryption kingdom Businesses would be more likely to use store data in a public cloud environment if they were allowed to "manage and control their own encryption keys", a new study has found.…

Could be costly for Zuck. But who really cooks the Spam? Facebook has failed to dismiss moves to file a class action lawsuit over its practice of sending "unsolicited" text messages when your friend has a birthday.…

Tech visionary pushed parallel IO processing to the end Obit Datacore co-founder and chairman Ziya Aral has passed away, aged just 64.…

Tie me up, tie me down Demand for cyber security skills in the UK means that salaries for full time IT security jobs are increasing faster than contractor rates, according to a new survey.…

Will shed up to 160 lb kg jobs, say sources Fitbit is to cut some 80 to 160 jobs as the “smart” wearable novelty wears off. According to a scoop by The Information, cuts will affect between 5 per cent and 10 per cent of employees, and are part of a reorganisation designed to take $200m costs out of the business.…

What are you doing with machine learning? And how are you doing it? 2017 looks like being the year of AI. Or at least that’s what a friendly computer keeps telling us.…

Parliament receives petition to prevent President's state visit More than a million Britons have signed an online petition begging the government to prevent American President Donald Trump from making a state visit to the United Kingdom.…

Two failed attempts to sell company revealed in Chapter 11 filings One "VM Bidco" has been revealed as the successful bidder for Violin Memory at its auction. Violin's Chapter 11 bankruptcy filings have now revealed two failed attempts, spaced a year apart, to sell the firm.…

HD TV in 1945? Nearly BBC TV, famed for such nation-capturing programmes as Playschool and Great British Bake Off, celebrated its 80th birthday last November. It did so in the same week that watching the country's then most popular TV programme, The Crown, required neither the BBC nor a TV set. Just a Netflix account and a connected mobe.…

You gotta buy American, right? Right? Opinion Results from Ericsson this week will have all of us pundits reaching for just how the Swedish telecoms giant is going to survive the continual onslaught from China’s Huawei. How long will it be before it needs to be acquired and why Cisco needs to be the acquirer.…

'People do tend to have a negative perception of Hull' Feature Most people are aware of Hull's status as the UK City of Culture this year - along with it being serial holder of the Crappiest Town in Britain. But few also know about the city's unique telecoms history.…

Yes it is. You at the back, stop sniggering! Ronald Rubens, Europe North veep at telecommunications biz Avaya, is busy doing some serious damage limitation, after the US Avaya parent company filed for bankruptcy protection earlier this week.…

Guests gain XSSive privileges in IBM's Hadoopery IBM has patched twin cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities in its Hadoop-probing InfoSphere BigInsights platform.…

Big freighter order keeps the Jumbo Jet aloft and it was the internet wot won it Boeing's iconic 747 looks safe for a few years yet, thanks in part to the internet.…

Incompatible Timesharing System now compatible with modern machines Among the more interesting denizens of GitHub are the many projects devoted to rediscovering and preserving the history of computing – such as a system called the Incompatible Timesharing System for the legendary Digital PDP-10.…

Larry Ellison did promise Oracle's cloud would be faster and cheaper Oracle has changed the way it charges users to run its software in Amazon Web Services, effectively doubling the cost along the way.…

Alphabet subsidiary decided hardware emulator that's plagued Zen had to go Google's revealed how it hardened the open source KVM hypervisor to run in its cloud and removing the QEMU hardware emulation tool looks to be a big part of its efforts.…

Firm that leaked 13M records shames firm that leaked 400k More than 400,000 phone call recordings that include names, addresses, phone numbers and credit card information have been leaked online by Florida marketing company VICI Marketing following suspected security blunders.…

Don't try this at home. And if you do, please RTFM about ventilation About that “3D laser printer killed Berkeley couple” story? It's more likely to have been a laser cutter.…

HPE's all-but quoting Rick Astley as Cisco finds another way to nobble Arista imports HPE has gone the full Rick Astley with Arista, telling its sales team and partners customers it will never give it up, let it down, run around or desert it.…

Traditional owners still have to put up the Facebook founder as a neighbour Mark Zuckerberg has abandoned the lawsuit he hoped would let him buy Hawaiian real estate without having any actual Hawaiians as neighbours.…

Huge ransomware. The best ransomware. Ransomware fixed with a wipe-and-restore Criminals infected 70 percent of storage devices tied to closed-circuit TVs in Washington DC eight days before the inauguration of President Donald Trump.…

'Small and calm release candidate' suddenly gets 'a bit distressing' as rc8 looms Progress on Linux 4.10 has to date been steady. So steady, in fact, that it's not been worth reporting.…

SoftNAS spans on-prem and Azure with virtual NAS, and there's news to come in April Microsoft's cooking up something to do with virtual storage appliances spanning on-premises storage and Azure and will reveal all in April.…

Cross-site scripting, cross-site request forgery shuttered WordPress has fixed three flaws in its content management system, shuttering cross-site scripting and SQL injection bugs three weeks after its last update.…

One political hack is worth one Director of National Intelligence and one Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. No, really In case the first week of the White House of President Donald Trump hadn't scared you enough, alt.right news service Breitbart executive chair and now Senior Counselor to the President Steve Bannon has managed to insert himself into the United States' National Security Council.…

All you need is the right tools, says Citrix Promo Although flexible working offers significant cost benefits for companies and enhances satisfaction for those employees who are allowed to work at the place and time of their choosing, a recent survey of 1,024 office workers across Australia found that despite the demand, flexible working is being held back by a culture of “presenteeism”.…

Cisco's collaborationware is a mess: that WebEx bug also hit Firefox and IE Cisco has turned up a packet fragmentation issue in its TelePresence Multipoint Control Unit software that opens up a denial-of-service and remote code execution vulnerability.…

Anti-corruption body finds project was more corrupt, for longer, than anyone thought The corruption watchdog in the Australian State of Victoria has concluded that the state's failed "Ultranet" project was made vastly more expensive by official, rampant and long-standing corruption.…

Songstress reaches settlement with 'secondary reality television personality' It was a battle of the Kylies: in one corner legendary actress and singer Kylie Minogue; in the other, a girl that occasionally appears on a reality TV show.…

Not the first time we've come across this, say cops A randy van man faces three points or a driver education course after he and a female passenger were nabbed in flagrante while whizzing down the A3 at Guildford in Surrey, England, yesterday.…

Researchers spot bad behavior abounding in mobe apps A worrying number of VPN apps for Android mobile devices are rife with malware, spying, and code injection, say researchers.…

It's a grim week of remembrance for America's rocketeers Pics and video On Friday, NASA unveiled a new memorial for Command Pilot Virgil "Gus" Grissom, Senior Pilot Edward White II, and Pilot Roger Chaffee, who perished when fire broke out in their Apollo 1 capsule.…

If true, we hope he got the file on avoiding truck trailers Tesla has sued a former employee who left to set up a rival business, claiming he tried a not-so cunning plan to steal company secrets and lure away key staff.…

Hardware dump will help pay costs from failed energy venture Toshiba says it will sell off its memory semiconductor business as it looks to recuperate from the write-off of losses to its nuclear power business.…

Yes, we're being sarcastic. We're always sarcastic The FBI has released documents detailing its inconclusive investigation into threats made by online gamers against several women that started in 2014, particularly media critic Anita Sarkeesian and game developer Brianna Wu.…