The Register

No really. Insurer's details on 60k people lost forever An insurance business has been fined £150,000 for its lax security practices after a hard drive containing customers' unencrypted information was stolen.…

MTI Europe swaps one private equity parent for another MTI Europe, a tech supplier to the British Transport Police, has swapped one private equity owner for another with Endless LLP slurping the Surrey-based business for an undisclosed fee.…

But... but... you're using it... as just another VDI box A Moonshot-class, Internet of Things HPE server is being used for down to Earth VDI by Citrix.…

Banks 'effectively unregulated on cybersecurity' It might take a major bank to fail as a result of a cyber attack for meaningful changes in cybersecurity practices, regulation and governance in the UK banking market to be implemented, a leading industry commentator has said.…

Armed with EU ruling, Liberty seeks to nix indiscriminate surveillance Civil liberties advocacy group Liberty is seeking to crowdfund a judicial review of the Investigatory Powers Act.…

Turn your PC into a green-eyed monster Redmond has released Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 15002 – one of the biggest updates to its cloudy operating system – ahead of the release of the Creators Update later this year.…

Section 40, Crime and Courts Act 2013, threatens our work for you Reader appeal The government is about to commence a piece of legislation that will seriously affect The Register’s ability to Bite The Hand That Feeds IT. You have until 5pm today to tell the government it should be stopped.…

No chance of data retrieval, experts say A Los Angeles school has made a whopping US$28,000 ransomware payment after hackers raided its network.…

Moonlets glommed together The birth of the Earth’s Moon didn’t begin with a single huge collision – rather it grew as lots of baby moons from smaller impacts fused together, according to a new theory published in Nature Geoscience.…

Hidden forms capture LastPass autofill Phishers have a new tool in their arsenal with the discovery that web browsers Chrome and Safari along with LastPass will autofill hidden registration form fields.…

In January 1997, the Internet learned to count January 2017 marks the twentieth year since the birth of an important Internet Request for Comment – a then-new way to account for customer's use of their then dial-up services.…

Be still my beating heart Months after steadfastly denying its heart implants have serious security vulnerabilities, St Jude – now owned by Abbott Laboratories – has issued a patch.…

German infosec agency: 'Patch! Patch! PAAAATTCCCCHHHH! More than 6,000 online stores running eBay's Magento platform have been hacked with credit cards stolen under a campaign that could span almost two years, Germany's Federal Office for Information Security says.…

Tech sector needs decluttering In the nearly 25 years since last walking the showfloor at the Consumer Electronics Show, the video game industry spun off its own show - E3 - while once-dominant television manufacturers now find themselves consigned to an ever-shrinking footprint with the Las Vegas Convention Centre.…

Verizon deal looks like it could go ahead Marissa Mayer, the CEO of perennial drain-circler Yahoo!, will step down from its board of directors, along with five other members, after Verizon finishes gobbling up most of the internet portal.…

First flyby for 2017 On Saturday, the Catalina Sky Survey spotted a near-Earth asteroid of respectable heft – and today, it passed between us and the Moon.…

Reseller accused of passing off malfunctioning health bands as refurbished gear Fitbit has sued a company it accuses of deliberately selling shoddy units.…

'Just a little off the top, barber' The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission yesterday suggested trimming the price of wholesale broadband connections.…

While Google pushes its onboard sensor package Renault is embracing open source with its new car – an electric vehicle named POM.…

Gaming house's hot work-in-progress gear just got hotter CES 2017 The head of gaming PC company Razer says someone stole a pair of prototype devices from its booth at the CES conference.…

Swarm. Huh. What is it good for? A cluster of robo-Top-Guns over China Lake Video In October, three F/A-18 Super Hornet jets dropped an unusual payload into the air over the US Navy's China Lake weapons testing facility in California – more than 100 semi-autonomous drones.…

When is unlimited not unlimited? When you use 200GB a month Verizon is kicking heavy downloaders and streamers off their "unlimited" not-actually-unlimited mobile plans.…

By providing anonymized data to cities, Uber aims to shape transport policies Uber, which has been fighting to withhold ride destination data from New York City, on Sunday threw municipal governments a bone with a service called Movement.…

Oliver Schmidt accused of coordinating cover-up The FBI has arrested a senior Volkswagen executive for allegedly coordinating a cover-up over its diesel emissions cheating.…

The ballad of Brixton nick A prison librarian in England was today sentenced to more than seven years in prison for trying to buy a handgun and bullets online and for drug offenses.…

And the dodgy IT contractor? He got 14 months bird time to think about life Corrupt NHS official jailed for £80k IT contract bribe…

Attention seeker gains yet more oxygen of publicity One-time pharmaceutical exec and distasteful windup merchant Martin Shkreli has had his Twitter account suspended after a Twitter spokesman alleged he had harassed a female journalist on the site.…

Claim customers need a degree in Amazon pricing to understand it British-based infrastructure services-slinger UKCloud says it is “fighting back” against the giants of industry by slashing the price of online storage.…

Marketing exec, board advisor get new gigs in the new year Kevin Kilbuck has become chief marketing officer at NVMdurance, a tiny Irish flash endurance lengthening company that first popped up last year. It uses machine learning techniques to understand better how to write data to flash drives over the drive’s life so as to extend the drive’s endurance.…

Freemium biz model to be retained Freemium digital post-it business board Trello is to be acquired by productivity software floggers Atlassian.…

Chief Superintendents' Association prez opens mouth, inserts foot +Comment The president of top cops’ trade union the Police Superintendents’ Association (PSA) has suggested that teens convicted of computer-based crimes should be fitted with ankle-mounted Wi-Fi jammers.…

Call for papers opens for M conference on AI, ML Reg Events 2017 looks like being the year of AI. Or at least that’s what a friendly computer keeps telling us.…

Hear that? That's the sound of IP lawyers rubbing their hands with glee IBM’s lawyers were busy little bees last year, getting a shade more than 8,000 patent applications granted for Big Blue’s American brainboxes.…

Lazarus-like miraculous recovery with chairman/CEO putting in his own cash Update X-IO Technologies chairman and CEO Bill Miller has called in to say: "I was very surprised and disappointed to read our name in the "Deaths" section of your 2016 year in review article.…

HMD debut device breaks cover - but only in China Anyone looking for the much-anticipated “New Nokia” to make a splashy comeback might have to wait a little longer. HMD gave a very low key launch to the new phone, the first Nokia-branded smartphones for two years*, at the weekend.…

Press-released their pride at taking down kingpin... Spare a thought for Ross LeBeau, who spent three days in jail when Texas cops confused cat litter for methamphetamine during a routine traffic stop.…

If it hadn't been for that pesky Schrems kid... Opinion This article adds two reasons to why I think a post-Brexit UK is very unlikely to offer an adequate level of protection in terms of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).…

Argo out, NASA tells The Reg; time for the magnetic method Research scientists working at NASA have hit upon a potentially revolutionary way of measuring the heat hidden deep in Earth's oceans: track the subtle shifts in our planet's magnetic field caused by tides, swells, eddies, and even tsunamis.…

Jobs and Co just worked out how to cream off profits from network operators Feature Apple didn’t invent the smartphone. The iPhone wasn’t as good as many of the other phones the likes of Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Motorola were selling to the mobile networks. The real breakthrough was that Apple circumvented the buying process.…

Upstart sees move as less important than HDD to flash change, though Interview El Reg has been quizzing array vendor after array vendor on their views about the technology change from SAS/SATA to NVMe flash drives and to NVMe over Fabrics array access. Today it's the turn of Tintri, and it thinks NVMe is an important technology watershed, but not as huge as the change from disk to solid state storage – the first such vendor to utter this thought.…

Mad Mazz strikes again Comment You've heard of "Fake News" – but how does Fake History gradually supersede the reality-based version? It's through repetition, and Christmas found the BBC busy doing some scrubbing.…

TruffleHog snuffles through your dirty commit drawers,. A researcher has published a tool to help administrators delve into GitHub commits to find high-entropy secret keys.…

Another reason to avoid those DEF CON charging stations. Google has capped a dangerous but somewhat obscure boot mode vulnerability that allowed infected PCs and chargers to put top end Nexus phones into denial of service states.…

Why is public transport connectivity so hard, anyway? Privacy activists and the NSW Greens in Australia have come out against the NSW State Government's umpteenth Wi-Fi-on-buses trial.…

Debian plugs overflow vuln An important fix for libvncserver has landed in Debian and on the library's GitHub page.…

Aussie comms watchdog reporting exposed databases. MongoDB databases are being decimated in soaring ransomware attacks that have seen the number of compromised systems more than double to 27,000 in a day.…

And the US trade ban hasn't even started yet ZTE is greeting the new year with job cuts, following disappointing smartphone sales and uncertainty about its future in the USA.…

A muffled shot was heard, and the API is no more If you were working on an app using the Google+ Hangouts API, pour some coffee and purge the code, because Mountain View's killing it off as part of its strategy of nibbling the flesh from the Hangouts skeleton.…

Launch lovers and explosion enthusiasts wait another week Sorry, Musketeers, you'll have to wait until at least January 14 to see how many satellites SpaceX can get into space.…

What happens in Vegas should really, really, really stay in Vegas Pics It's that time of year again, when over 100,000 people cram into the Las Vegas Convention Center to show off the latest in consumer electronics gizmos, make deals, and exchange interesting viruses to get the inevitable conference cough.…