The Register

Big Red threatened with government IT contract armageddon over pay gap Oracle could lose its lucrative US government IT contracts after the Department of Labor accused the tech giant of racial and gender discrimination.…

'Healthy' smoking puts American bloke in hospital NSFW pics A man claims his e-cigarette exploded mid-puff, blew out seven of his teeth, gave him second-degree facial burns, wrecked his bathroom, and put him in intensive care.…

M-I-S-S-I-sue-your-ass-you-creepy-spy Google is once again facing allegations that its cloud for education has been used to harvest and sell information on school kids.…

Sacked techie claims school retaliated over race complaint Shortly after the American College of Education (ACE) in Indiana fired IT administrator Triano Williams in April, 2016, it found that it no longer had any employees with admin access to the Google email service used by the school.…

Recreating old work to the tune of £500m per year Some Whitehall departments are saddled with more than 100 terabytes of legacy data, and are wasting time recreating old work at a cost of £500m per year, according to a Cabinet Office report.…

Sitting in a tree, K I S S I N G DDN has signed a deal for Inspur to sell tested and configured systems to worldwide HPC customers, using DDN storage alongside Inspur servers, networking, software and services.…

£3m granted for 'emerging architectures' supercomputing mashup A fellowship of four UK universities, along with HPC veteran Cray and the Met Office have been handed £3m to build a 10,000+ ARM core supercomputer.…

More secure than PC? Ha! Security researchers at Malwarebytes have discovered a Mac backdoor using antiquated code that targets biomedical research facilities.…

Belgian data governance business only loses a single board position too, sweet Belgian data governance business Collibra has today announced the closure of its Series C round, almost tripling its venture capital funding.…

Dynamically allocate without an admin over your shoulder Enterprise Linux biz Red Hat has revised its OpenShift Container Platform to include support for dynamic storage provisioning in local and remote applications.…

One in eight have stopped, admits org's director general The European Union’s GPS-alike system Galileo is suffering a number of unexplained clock failures on its satellites, the EU Space Agency has admitted.…

Small flaws, but they add up Vulnerabilities in a network attached storage (NAS) devices made by QNAP Systems create a potential means for hackers to steal data and passwords, execute commands or drop malware on vulnerable kit, say security researchers.…

Hyperconverges hyperconverger, thereby converging market Analysis SimpliVity, the second-placed hyperconverged infrastructure appliance startup, has been bought by HPE for $650m, setting the stage for mainstream vendor dominance of the hyperconverged market.…

More adventures in fintech Logowatch From the world of fintech comes some momentous news.…

Navigator and Pathfinder beget Aviator Flash drive life extender NVMdurance has enlarged its market by developing techniques for extending the life of 3D flash drives.…

Hallelujah for the planned ISO symbol standard! Japan’s electronic toilet-makers have vowed to clean up the baffling symbols on their techno-khazis so anyone can crimp one off in the Land of the Rising Sun “with peace of mind”.…

That'll end well...

Dear Leader flips eye-popping Uber and Tesla figures Hey, it's the new year. Time to let those annual planning slides shimmy over you, washing away the dangling tickets of last year like a purifying clean install. Somewhere amid pictures of robots shaking hands with meat-maws and millennials writing on glass walls will, no doubt, be the details of your firm's "digital transformation".…

Tick 'em off, impress the boardroom Comment Object storage is a relatively new market segment that has continued to grow steadily and is starting to find more reasons for adoption.…

Key to unlocking mega smartphone market Analysis LTE-Broadcast is poised for mass adoption at last, claims the Alliance which was set up last April to promote it. The Alliance aims to make a splash at next month’s Mobile World Congress, to boost operator confidence in the mobile TV standard and outline some of its use cases beyond the consumer TV sector.…

Small island's big telco talks to El Reg Interview Jersey Telecom recently rolled out a LoRa network covering the entire island. The telco’s wholesale director, Tom Noel, spoke to The Register to elaborate a little on what it hopes to achieve.…

Some 40,000 customers were overcharged £250,000 EE has been slapped with a £2.7m fine by regulator Ofcom for overcharging tens of thousands of customers.…

Smaller firms make up over 20% of business Promo In the face of industry upheaval, Cisco retains its status as the go-to enterprise networking choice for big businesses.…

So many things to solve, eg: how can there be conversation without memory? Analysis “Alexa, are you the best chatbot in town?” “Sorry, I don’t I understand the question I heard,” she replies.…

US Navy ordnance contract goes Raytheon DARPA, the boffinry nerve-center of the US military, has awarded a contract to develop a cross between a missile and an artillery shell for use by the Navy.…

You're still gonna die, probably Artificial intelligence can predict better than real doctors when patients with serious heart disorders are likely to die. That's according to a paper published this week in Radiology.…

Akatsuki probe finds huge thing lurking in planet's clouds An enormous, mysteriously stationary structure high over the surface of Venus may be the largest gravity wave in the Solar System, according to Japanese astronomers.…

Intel taps IoT tech to gather stats on shoppers Intel promises to provide real-world retailers with the same analytics as online stores, with the release of a new internet-of-things retail platform.…

Instead we're getting version '11.next', 'SPARC.next' and a Big Red SPARC IaaS In late 2016, The Register received credible-but-ultimately-unverifiable reports that Oracle was scaling back Solaris development, perhaps with significant sackings. We chose not to publish because Oracle denied the specific allegations we'd received.…

Cloud giant's staff party leaves little to imagination Video China's biggest internet biz Tencent has apologized after women employees were filmed on their knees in front of male coworkers in a raunchy end-of-year party game.…

AEConnect cable expands university research networking Researchers are getting another 100 Gbps of dedicated connectivity between America and Europe, courtesy of a link on the AEConnect cable activated by Indiana University.…

Net boffins float RFC to fix the protocol before things turn nasty A trio of 'net experts argues that a key IPv6 protocol needs fixing to get rid of a fragmentation attack vector against routers in large-scale core networks.…

ImageMagick exploit earns chap US$40k bug bounty Facebook has paid US$40,000 to vulnerability hunter Andrew Leonov for disclosing how the hacker gained remote code execution on its servers through the widely-reported ImageMagick flaw.…

Net scum lowers bar. Ransomware scum have hit a new low by infecting a not-for-profit cancer services organisation.…

Oracle software, that's what Oracle has revealed its quarterly Critical Patch Update Advisory for January 2017, which offers users a buffet of 270 fixes to apply.…

Researcher says Zyxel and Billion kit in Thailand, and probably beyond, are rotten Yet again, home routers are the home of SOHOpelessness: Zyxel and Billion units distributed in Thailand by TrueOnline have backdoors, and the researcher who found the flaw says the vendors have ignored his attempts to notify them.…

Japanese company's foray into fission has been a fiscal flop that a RAM plant sale could fix A troubled nuclear power station strategy in the USA has Toshiba considering the partial sale of its Japanese semiconductor business.…

Shadow Brokers may have loosed a zero-day so you're better safe than sorry The US computer emergency readiness team is recommending organisations ditch old versions of the Windows SMB protocol and firewall off access to file servers – after a potential zero-day exploit was released by the Shadow Brokers hacking group.…

Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg grilled over the now-$3bn VR acquisition Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg shed new light on the social network's 2014 acquisition of Oculus VR Tuesday in a Dallas federal court.…

Midyear data release hopes to crowd source academic data-matching brainpower The Centrelink “robo-debt” debacle hasn't dimmed the Australian government's enthusiasm for data-matching as a policy tool.…

Hyperconverged unicorn loses its horn As predicted by The Register last September, HPE has announced it will acquire hyperconverged contender SimpliVity for US$650m in cash.…

Snapdragon biz broke monopoly laws, FTC claims in bombshell lawsuit America's trade watchdog the FTC has sued Qualcomm, alleging the California-based biz trampled over US laws on fair competition.…

Pack your bags Julian, you're off to America, right? In the final days of his administration, President Barack Obama has commuted Chelsea Manning's remaining sentence, meaning she'll be free on May 17, or shortly afterwards.…

Can we just go ahead and call it 'the Samsung device' now? Researchers at Stanford University say they have developed a method for building fire-extinguishing materials into standard lithium-ion batteries.…

Thiel's upstart has the info needed for a Muslim registry Silicon Valley engineers will protest outside the headquarters of data analytics firm Palantir Technologies Wednesday, demanding greater transparency over how its databases may be used by the incoming Trump Administration.…

If you work in any HPC field, don't miss the Frankfurt conference Promo Catch up with the latest developments in high-performance computing at the five-day 2017 ISC conference and exhibition in Frankfurt June 18-22. The theme is high-performance computing, systems and networking, as well as HPC applications in scientific and commercial environments.…

As if backup competition happens to someone else It's news but kind of expected; Veeam has seen almost 30 per cent year-on-year growth in its final 2016 quarter, and full-year revenues of $607.4m. Veeam on.…

Hoping to replicate Big Blue deal with additional partners WANdisco's OEM selling deal with IBM has brought home the Big Blue bacon with total bookings up 72 per cent year-on-year to $15.5m.…

It's kinda easy when all the passwords are 1234567 Hackers achieve a success rate of 0.1 to 2 per cent when reusing stolen credentials to access other sites, according to a new study by Shape Security.…

Follows startup's agreement with Huawei Alluxio, the multi-silo Big Data access accelerating startup which did a deal with Huawei last year, has signed a similar one with Dell EMC for its ECS product.…