The Register

Fatter pipes for some, BT Openreach verdict and plenty of hype Blighty’s post Brexit diet must include a "full-fibre" eating plan, or so says the UK’s new digital minister Matt Hancock. Amid all the political noise over the last 12 months, the volume for infrastructure investment was dialled up to 11.…

Crypto currency's 2017 cracking start bouyed by devalued yuan Bitcoin has surpassed the US$1,000 mark for the first time in three years.…

1. Enter recovery mode

Where were you in June 1995? Coding image libraries? Let's have a chat Slackware has raced out of the blocks in 2017, issuing one patch for the libpng image library on New Year's Day, and two Mozilla patches on January 2.…

Borked patch opens remote code execution on web servers Websites using PHPMailer for forms are at risk from a critical-rated remote code execution zero day bug.…

Space 'scope spots staggering galactic resonator The name's boring but the science isn't: an entire galaxy spied by the Hubble Space Telescope is acting as a microwave-emitting laser, or maser.…

Google joins Microsoft, Apple, Adobe in top of the pops Of any single product, CVE Details reckons, Android had the most reported vulnerabilities in 2016 – but as a vendor, Adobe still tops the list.…

Happy New Year, let's get ranty next time around The latest Linux 4.10-rc2 build nearly didn't happen because L-triptophaniac developers were Christmassing, but Linux Torvalds decided to set it free as a New Year treat.…

One laptop does not a blackout make Updated Russian hackers have not penetrated America's electricity grid, in spite of an end-of-year media flurry saying they did.…

Dismissed hacker calls US Govt buddy to nix exposed database A Pentagon subcontractor has exposed the names, locations, Social Security Numbers, and salaries of Military Special Operations Command (SOCOM) healthcare professionals.…

Pressure vessel buckled, something sparked, oxygen exploded Only a regulatory sign-off stands between Elon Musk's SpaceX and the restart of its Falcon 9 launch program within a week. With its anomaly investigation complete, the company hopes to launch a Falcon carrying Iridium's NEXT satellite from Vandenberg on January 8.…

Putting the 'AI' into FAIL “Fake News” vexed the media classes greatly in 2016, but the tech world perfected the art long ago. With “the internet” no longer a credible vehicle for Silicon Valley’s wild fantasies and intellectual bullying of other industries – the internet clearly isn’t working for people – “AI” has taken its place. But almost everything you read about AI is Fake News. The AI coverage comes from a media willing itself into a mind of a three year old child, in order to be impressed.…

If you all ask nicely, maybe they'll restore Program Groups? Because it’s not complicated enough already, Windows 10’s Start menu will support folders in a forthcoming release.…

VR gets a bit too real A flight simulator turned into a real life hazard of its own, after it caught fire and caused €16m (£13.6m) in damage at Frankfurt airport.…

This is what got you stoked Brexit and Windows 10 stories dominated reader discussions in 2016.…

'When's the bin man coming?' A Yorkshire council's website has been out of action since Boxing Day, causing a headache for residents mostly seeking info on bin collections.…

3 billion fewer banners ads as fundraiser is finally cancelled If you’ve noticed that Wikipedia has been much less annoying this Christmas – you can thank El Reg.…

Technical and HPC gains offset commodity server losses IDC bean-counters saw strong high-end server revenue growth in the third quarter high-performance technical computing market but revenue falls in low-end sysyems.…

Russian Embassy responds with pic of 'LAME' duck, says move is 'Cold War deja vu' President Barack Obama has ordered the expulsion of 35 suspected Russian spies in response to "malicious cyber activity and harassment" by Putin's government for attempts to undermine the 2016 election.…

A drone flying over a human face forever In an image straight out of a dystopian consumerist vision of the future, Amazon has filed a patent for a huge flying warehouses equipped with fleets of drones for airborne drops.…

Soz bumpkins, it's not for you The government is asking for ideas on how it should splash £400m earmarked for fibre broadband investment.…

Avoidable harm prevention for things like 'surgery on the wrong part of the body' The NHS is stamping barcodes on breast implants, replacement hips and surgical tools in a bid to improve patient safety.…

Refuses to release info without a 'valid and binding legal' demand Amazon has resisted a warrant to release information to US police seeking data from its Echo device, in order to gather evidence on a murder investigation.…

Up to seven New York law firms targeted, say Manhattan prosecutors US prosecutors have charged three Chinese men with making more than $4m (£3.2m) by allegedly trading on information obtained from hacking top merger and acquisition law firms.…

Chip biz to challenge decision in court US chip giant Qualcomm is to face a fine of $853m (£696m) for alleged antitrust violations by South Korea's top regulator.…

History made How often can we say that an IT blunder might have changed the course of world history? Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server whilst serving as outgoing US President Barack Obama’s Secretary of State became a key element in the US presidential election this year.…

What the Brexit PM and Orange POTUS elect meant Year in Review If 2016 proved anything, it proved the existence of the law of unintended consequences making this a miserable year for lovers of liberty and privacy.…

Only smart survives the cloud consolidation Review of 2016 Blame Mark Zuckerberg. Not for the election of Donald Trump as US president, but for Artificial Intelligence becoming the trend du jour in enterprise tech circles in 2016.…

Consumer Reports nerd baffled by bizarre results Geeks at Consumer Reports have, for the first time, declined to award a "recommended" status to an Apple laptop – after the latest MacBook Pro proved unreliable during testing.…

Container data layer biz signs off with unavoidable expletive Preempting cheap shots at his company's failure, CEO Mark Davis on Thursday announced that ClusterHQ is shutting down with a single, unassailably apt headline: "ClusterF***ed."…

Great timing, Chris Microsoft's marketing boss Chris Capossela has confessed the infamous your-Windows-10-upgrade-is-ready pop-up that tricked so many people into installing the thing was a step "too far."…

Firmware updates on the way Netgear has downplayed the significance of newly discovered flaws in its WNR2000 line of consumer routers.…

ESG says Apeiron NVMe array delivers real time Splunk goods Case study Apeiron has had its Splunk processing speed advantage confirmed by ESG. Big deal. So what?…

Five, four, three, two, one... one Most people are over 2016 - although god knows what next year has in store. But unfortunately they'll have to endure it bit longer: one second longer to be precise.…

Festive giving has become a ‘Googlicious’ sales push Special Report The dictionary defines charity as unselfish acts that benefit other people. Google boasts that it does a great deal for charity. So how come the biggest beneficiary of Google’s charity seems to be Google itself?…

Meanwhile Musk advances Autopilot advances Tesla Motors is bumping up its vehicles' prices in the UK by five per cent, purportedly because of currency effects post-Brexit.…

One licence or two, sir? A project for a microservices-friendly Java is to be overseen by the Eclipse Foundation.…

Great. Keep an eye out for medical device hackers, though US healthcare organisations, including hospitals, are increasingly vulnerable to medical device hijacks as well as the growing ransomware threat, according to a new study by security vendor TrapX.…

Should you be free to tinker with a combine harvester? Silicon Valley’s desire to open up the software that controls heavy vehicles has come under criticism from industry experts.…

Plus: How DOOM II and Nokia's N-GAGE each derailed Christmas ON-CALL Welcome again to On-Call, the column on which we conduct a Friday forage through the inbox full of readers' stories of jobs gone wrong.…

In the shadow of Christmas, LEDE and OpenWrt look like un-forking In May 2016, disgruntled developers of the embedded-Linux-for-routers distribution OpenWRT forked the project and headed off to do their own thing.…

Microsoft embiggens cloudy BLOBs from 195GB to 4.77 TB, blocks from 4MB to 100MB The waistline of Azure's storage service continues to expand, with Microsoft upping the size of the Binary Large Objects it can define.…

Wins 7,000-core supercomputer build deal way down under Huawei's scored a nice HPC win in Australia, with the University of Tasmania selecting it to provide a 7,000-cores-plus machine.…

Deadline for App Transport Security adoption delayed until time of Cupertino's choosing One of the initiatives Apple trumpeted at its 2016 WorldWide Developer Conference was a requirement for all iOS and OS X apps in its Store to use adopt App Transport Security as of December 31st 2016.…

Reasonably secure messenger has, for now, outwitted those who would block it The latest update of Signal, one of the most well-regarded privacy-focused messaging applications for non-technical users, has just been revised to support a censorship circumvention technique that will make it more useful for people denied privacy by surveillance-oriented regimes.…

What you really don't want to see at 20,000 feet A Virgin America flight from San Francisco to Boston was nearly diverted after someone onboard named their phone's Wi-Fi hotspot 'Samsung Galaxy Note 7'.…

Vulture South does the prediction thing and sees trouble on the horizon Today's the last day anyone from Vulture South will show up for work until January 3rd. So while we're at the beach, cricket and bottom of a beer glass, we leave you with our almost-traditional prediction for technology news in the year after next…

Auction site slapped on list as haven for counterfeit goods The United States Trade Representative (USTR) has put Alibaba's Taobao, the Chinese internet giant's online auction site, on its "notorious markets list" of sites that regularly deal in counterfeit goods.…

After registration revoked in Cali, upstart looks for less regulated climes Analysis The California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) on Wednesday revoked the registration of 16 self-driving Uber vehicles, sending a signal to the regulation-averse startup that the agency is not to be publicly defied.…