The Register

Pipe down, London commuters on Southern Rail A migrant worker in China, hoping to cycle back home for Chinese New Year, realised a month into his 2,000km trip that he had been going the wrong way.…

Slashing away at Big Data access latency like Zorro Can Pure Storage keep up its booming growth as FlashBlade, its Big Data flash box, becomes generally availabile?…

Dispel your Bond stereotypes, says white, male, officer-class, privately educated chief The chief of MI6, Alex Younger, yesterday called for more female technologists to come and work for him at Vauxhall Cross.…

Also set to launch broadband-based service TV service without satellite Sky increased its number of broadband subscribers by 140,000 to more than six million households in the first six months of its financial year.…

zbit:connect, as built by one-time Nexsan man Pics A one-time storage hardware designer has launched a range of add-on boards for the BBC Micro:bit.…

Mobile integration a lifeline out of domestic drudgery Analysis Huawei’s upcoming launch of a smartphone incorporating Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistant will mark a new phase in one of the most important battles for the modern internet experience.…

Barracuda's BJ on cloud... and Reg man on that sweet, sweet data protection honey Analysis A conversation with Barracuda CEO BJ Jenkins revealed a company whose customers are heading steadily towards the cloud – where the full stack approaches of Dell, HPE and others can’t hold sway – and where Barracuda, natch, thinks it can grow and grow.…

One sales head left and no country manager in Blighty, industry sources say Infinidat has slimmed its UK office from 17 heads to just four since January 2016, and has not won a new customer in that time, we're told.…

Pair needed dialysis after downing equivalent of 300 cups of coffee Northumbria University in England has been fined £400,000 by a Newcastle court after a botched experiment resulted in two students almost dying from caffeine overdose.…

Shamoon 2 software nasty is back and more evil than before At least 15 Saudi government offices and private companies have been hit by another wave of attacks from Shamoon 2 malware that leaves hard drives completely erased.…

I was hooked on porno, says chap who nicked compromising selfies of 300 people An American bloke has been jailed for breaking into the online accounts of 30 or so celebrities (and 270 other people) and swiping their most intimate snaps and secrets.…

Censorship efforts backfire on President Snowflake and team In an extraordinary and seemingly unlikely battle, US President Donald Trump and his transition teams have had their authority challenged by none other than park rangers. On Twitter.…

Wasn't there some issue about Hillary doing this? Nah Senior members of the Trump administration have been accused of blatant hypocrisy after it was revealed they are continuing to use personal email accounts.…

Execs get Bern notice to talk up $85bn deal Fifteen US Senators are asking AT&T to provide them with an outline of how they plan to benefit the public with the $85.4bn acquisition of Time Warner.…

It turns out there are better ways to enhance strength than heavy metal armor Exosuits have featured prominently in comic books and films for decades, but as they move from research labs to the work environment, they're looking more like couture from Robin Hood: Men in Tights than artifacts from Iron Man.…

One-billion Yuan lawsuit in Middle Kingdom alleges further royalty wrongdoings Apple has taken its legal battle against Qualcomm international with a pair of lawsuits in China.…

Poor Panasonic power packs pinpointed HP Inc is warning that over 101,000 laptop batteries sold in the US, Canada, and Mexico are at risk of catching fire, and it would like them back please.…

Linux-Proxy-10 allows crooks to remain anonymous online Several thousand Linux devices have been infected with a new Linux-based trojan, Russian security software firm Doctor Web warns.…

Next step: Get it working on mobile phones An algorithm that promises to diagnose skin cancer as well as dermatologists can may work with mobile phone cameras in the future, according to a paper published in Nature.…

Reports link arrest to receipt of money from foreign companies A top cybercrime investigator at Kaspersky Lab has been arrested by Russian police investigating alleged treason.…

LeBlanc retires after decades in IBM, two years in cloud IBM software veteran Robert LeBlanc is stepping down after just two years heading the firm's growing cloud business.…

Desktop productivity – without the Windows crap Microsoft may have relinquished SQL Server's Windows monogamy and let Linux join the party, but still it refuses to yield Office.…

One person falls for scam, now everyone's at risk of fraud A school district in Texas says it lost sensitive tax information from every worker after a single employee was duped by a phishing attack.…

Don’t panic. LG is betting on …. electric cars and Android smartwatches You’re an investor in LG: do you want the bad news or the even worse news?…

Better be, hmmm. Earnings up despite falling revenues In its second fiscal 2017 quarter, Seagate's profits rose even as it shipped fewer disk drives, through manufacturing cost reductions and increased component counts in high-capacity drives.…

Protest arrives over alleged mistreatment of whistleblowers and bad management relations United Nations staff are demonstrating in Geneva this afternoon to demand the ousting of Francis Gurry, the controversial boss of the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO).…

Daddy *sniff* they're gonna mix behavioural data with searches and texts *blub* and it's not fair! The European Commission has confirmed that it will probe competition concerns over Google's decision to allow personal user data in its silos to co-mingle, to create "super profiles".…

Oh, and ailing outsourcing biz hires fourth boss in two years, swaps Wilson for Wilson Sickly outsourcing titan CSC UK is strapping another 1,101 staff to the employment catapult to be hurled out of the organisation between March and September, according to Unite the union.…

Slippage of life-critical system could cost taxpayers millions Hugely ambitious plans to replace the radio system used by the emergency services need more testing and are likely to face delays, the Public Accounts Committee has warned today.…

More pr0nz-filtering plans under the Digital Economy Bill Internet Service Providers could be given powers to block user access at their own discretion in an amendment to the controversial Digital Economy Bill.…

Scale Computing's Jeff Ready on Scale, the HCI boom and more Interview El Reg talked with Scale Computing co-founder and CEO Jeff Ready and asked him about the HPE SimpliVity acquisition and what it means for HPE, for the hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) market, and for Scale.…

Yes, you can stick IoT sensors on tractors - and John Deere's been doing it for 20 years Two decades ago a tractor manufacturer was fitting smart sensors to its devices. Blending the agricultural and the technological were a natural fit, the firm’s Georg Larschied told The Register.…

Concerns raise could spark exodus of self-employed talent UK government departments are advising IT contractors to hike their fees by a fifth in order to avert an exodus of self-employed techies that will be hit by a forthcoming tax clampdown, multiple sources have told The Register.…

Addressing the 3D XPoint elephant in the storage-class memory room Comment When Martin Fink resigned from his positions at HPE in August 2016, the announcement said: "Martin Fink, our chief technology officer and head of Hewlett-Packard Labs, will be retiring from HPE at the end of the year, after more than 30 years with the company." He was retiring, we were told, but he was just 51.…

S4 and S5 A single TXT message is enough to cause Samsung S5 and S4 handsets to return to factory settings, likely wiping users' data along the way. And because the attack exploits Android's innards, other vendors' handsets are at risk.…

America's new Earth observation sat sends home sharpest images ever The United States' newest Earth-watcher, GOES-16, has sent back its first high-resolution images, and it's making the Earth observation community get a bit misty around the eyes.…

No more waiting for exploitive, data-gobbling applications to download Google has begun testing Android Instant Apps, a mobile application format delivered by streaming rather than as a downloaded file.…

Meanwhile, Faraday's Future looks like the debtor's prison Former bodybuilder, movie star and California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has gone electric.…

128 ports of 100 Gbps switching grunt in a single 'Backpack' Facebook has pulled apart a bunch of its Wedge 100 Gbps switches and reassembled them as a hefty 128-port 100 Gbps open network switch dubbed 'Backpack'.…

Just imagine what a printer jam looks like Vid 3D printing for most users is limited to polymer printing, or in some cases metal – but now a team from Spain has built hardware that can print actual human skin.…

Of course, of course it has a cloud subscription Cisco is kicking out a new set of screens and conferencing software aimed at overhauling its video conferencing and collaboration lines.…

Independent user group HQ excluded Virtzilla rivals, fired volunteers Ongoing tension between Nutanix and VMware has spilled over into Virtzilla's user groups, which have decided to exclude volunteers who work for rivals. That decision has left both vendors somewhat diminished and the user groups' governing body facing possible rebellion by individual user groups.…

If it wants a password and doesn't use HTTPS, Mozilla will breathe fire Shoddy sites will have fewer places to hide with Firefox joining Chrome in badging cleartext sites that collect personal information as insecure.…

If you really want to run MS Office 2013 on Linux, you can Wine, the open source tool that translates Windows API calls into POSIX calls, and therefore lets Windows apps run on Linux, Mac OS and BSD, has reached version 2.0.…

Not official. Not documented. But not bad-looking, either With close to 60,000 employees, Google/Alphabet has an awful lot of desktops, laptops, notebooks, tablets and phones to support, and it's taken the covers off one of the tools that helps it do that.…

Cloudy storage kit needs firmware patch, will anybody notice? Western Digital has issued a fix for its My Cloud Mirror backup disks, after ESET "detection engineer" Kacper Szurek found an authentication bypass with remote code execution in the system.…

Automated hacking weapon with human smarts does the business LinkedIn has shuttered five dangerous privacy holes that could have allowed users' phone numbers, email addresses and resumes to be downloaded, plus the deletion of all connection requests.…

'Rebalancing' will make IBM great again. America? That's someone else's problem IBM's post-election promise to President Donald Trump to bring jobs home appears not to have been entirely accurate, as the company is making redundancies at home and stands accused of shipping jobs to Asia and Europe.…

Borg wants you to assimilate real-time performance info for everything Cisco has announced it intends to acquire AppDynamics, a maker of software that performs real-time monitoring of application performance, the better to understand the impact on infrastructure and the end-user experience.…