The Register

Time NASA pulled its finger out A month after NASA published a paper suggesting a controversial electromagnetic engine design appears to work, Chinese eggheads claim they've had similar results – and have sent an EM Drive into space for testing.…

New magic quadrant plus other bits and bytes from the enterprise backup world Just another sweet week in storage with a blitz of news candy covering archiving, flash arrays, compression and removable disk backup.…

Code release for info-leak bug brought forward to this week An information-leaking security hole in widely used email agent Exim – scheduled for repair on Christmas Day – may now be publicly patched earlier, possibly as soon as Friday.…

Frontline battlefield operatives are Fandoids? The Russian hacking crew controversially linked to hacks against the Democrat Party during the US election allegedly used Android malware to track Ukrainian artillery units from late 2014 until 2016, according to new research.…

Full restructuring needed, it says +Comment Cyrus Capital Partners, a major Sphere 3D shareholder, has filed a highly critical public letter calling for a full restructuring of the company to fix "cost" and "under-performance" issues.…

Look on the bright side, they might never arrive Looking back over a turbulent year, some things remained reassuringly constant. England lost the football, Julian Assange stayed vitamin D deprived, and Blighty's smart meter rollout continued at a snail's pace.…

Intepretation is in the eye of the beholder. In this case, British courts Analysis Yesterday's judgment from the EU Court of Justice offered hope to many of those critical of the wider culture of communications data retention, but what does this mean for the Investigatory Powers Act?…

SK Hynix seems persuaded +Comment SK Hynix, the world's second largest DRAM and NAND fab company, is going to build a new flash foundry in South Korea.…

Nuts, bolts and more for devs, architects and engineers If you’ve had all the vision you can handle, and just want to know how to actually develop devices, applications and networks to exploit the internet of things, you really need to join us next March for Building IoT London.…

Shoes and handbags, of course Working out what to get anyone for Christmas is tricky, so you can be forgiven for falling back on broad stereotypes. A drill for dad. Perfume for the girlfriend. Wirecutters for BOFH.…

The Internet of Google Things Comment Google has launched the developer preview of Android Things, updating and rebranding the Brillo IoT operating system which was unveiled over a year ago.…

And why the rebellion is COOL again (warning contains Rogue One spoilers) It’s on: the fight over Rogue One or Force Awakens. Which was better? Which has the best bad character - is it calculating Commander Orson Krennic or bratty Kylo Ren?…

Been re-using passwords again, bud123? Groupon has blamed fraudulent purchases from some UK customers' accounts on password leaks from other sites.…

Channel overlord Lee Hughes slips off boss overcoat, hands to Mark Armstrong The veep chosen by Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s to run its sales channels in the UK and Ireland has quit to take up a post an at online security services startup.…

Low supply put them in the mood, so Micron results are up now Happy days for Micron, it seems. Its first fiscal 2017 quarter results were lifted by high demand and price rises driven by supply constraints. The market wanted more DRAM and NAND bits than the firm's fabs could ship and DRAM prices went up.…

Under your skin, in your head - what got you reading Systems got bigger and more removed from ordinary mortals during 2016 as West Coast tech firms centralised more and more computing on server farms.…

600,000 homes to get 24Mbps by 2020 The government has clawed back £440m from its superfast broadband programme to connect an extra 600,000 homes and businesses in remote areas.…

Slurped £1.9bn of taxpayer cash in 2016, research claims Despite all the mini fires burning at beleaguered Capita, the much maligned outsourcing giant remained the UK's biggest public sector tech services supplier in 2016 as revenues swelled to £1.9bn.…

Google's compression algo shrinks Edge's page load times without taxing your CPU Microsoft's announced it will adopt the Brotli compression algorithm that Google open-sourced last year in future versions of its Edge browser.…

Plus: The crummy computer that did double duty as a pie-warmer ON-CALL Welcome to another festive edition of On-Call, the column in which we recycle readers' horror stories.…

Server virtualisation is so 2006. But other virtual ideas are just getting started END-OF-YEAR ROUND UP 2016 was a year in which virtualisation became so mainstream, so expected, so accepted that it started to look like a moribund market.…

Debian-derived PIXEL brings Pi experience to x86s, as Foundation chases 'best desktop environment, period' The Raspberry Pi foundation has ported the PIXEL OS it released in September to the PC and Mac.…

Christmas miracle: Government preparing properly for problem expected to land in ~20 years The United States' National Institute of Standards and Technology has issued a “Notice and request for nominations for candidate post-quantum algorithms.”…

Multi-process plan, for the sake of security and stability, is moving fast The Mozilla Foundation has outlined plans to add more multi-process features to its Firefox browser.…

Metadata extensions, copyright and Turnbull abandoning transformation show we're way off the pace That Australian policy-makers cannot muster a coherent and consistent approach to the changes wrought by the internet has again been made apparent in recent weeks, by a number of events.…

Drivers and cashiers, it's time to look for a different line of work In a followup to its smash hit, Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence, the White House on Tuesday released Artificial Intelligence, Automation, and the Economy, a report that attempts to outline the economic consequences of expected advances in automation and machine learning without actually risking a prediction of what's to come.…

Redmond delivers source code and personal services to Green Machine Satya Nadella’s team will be smiling today after the US Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) – the IT wing of the Department of Defense (DoD) – awarded his firm a five-year $927m support contract.…

Back to the drawing board, boys It's third time unlucky for the scumbags behind CryptXXX ransomware, as their shoddy coding has been cracked yet again.…

All change End-of-Year Round Up The mobile landscape this year was dominated by an air war of far greater importance taking place over the players’ heads.…

Nokia is trying to 'compensate for its own failing cell phone business' Apple on Tuesday filed an antitrust lawsuit against Acacia Research Corporation and Conversant Intellectual Property Management, alleging that the two "patent assertion entities" have colluded with Nokia "to extract and extort exorbitant revenues unfairly and anticompetitively from Apple" and other companies.…

Streaming steaming Netflix's US Twitter account was briefly hijacked on Wednesday.…

Also in the spirit of the season, volunteer Time Lords sought... The current release of the Snapchat app on iOS contains a coding error which is flooding the internet's Network Time Protocol (NTP) pool.…

Remotely killing one customer's copy was not an isolated incident, say readers On Monday, The Register reported on the story of Jim Giercyk, an amateur radio enthusiast who had his copy of the popular Ham Radio Deluxe (HRD) software revoked after posting a negative review.…

Github star count has it beating Ceph and Swift Backgrounder Minio and its µServer were first described by El Reg in December a year ago. Now we have had a closer look, courtesy of a press tour to Silicon Valley earlier this month.…

Mobile coverage 'frankly appalling' Analysis The UK’s National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) has blasted the level of coverage achieved with 4G and urged early action to deploy 5G more effectively. The organisation’s report particularly highlighted the role small cells will play in providing good services in urban areas, and on roads and railways, where the NIC says cellular coverage is “frankly appalling”.…

It's certainly been an eventful year for the vendor Replication vendor WANDisco has won a million-dollar deal with a car manufacturer, vindicating CEO Dave Richard’s reinstatement.…

Directors told, 'Here's some cash, now for god sake GET your kit ON Under the weight of customer demand - we presume - the powers that be at London-listed reseller Softcat this year agreed to not appear naked in the Christmas digital greetings card.…

Plus: Oracle's Safra on Team Trump

Erm, it was hovering between -9˚C and -1˚C that day A cyber attack is suspected in connection with an outage of the Ukrainian power grid that affected homes around Kiev last weekend.…

Mangstor: We wanted a biz brain, and we got one Mangstor founder and chief architect Ashwin Kamath contacted us to correct and clarify our story about the Mangstor CEO change, in which we wrote that its new CEO had no storage background. He noted that its former one hadn't either.…

Want to eyeball retained data? You need a decent reason The legality of the UK's Investigatory Powers Act has been called into question by a landmark EU legal ruling this morning, which has restated that access to retained data must only be given in cases of serious crime.…

Read the small print Move to the cloud, they said, everything will be better, they said. Security, reliability, scale. We take the work and the worry off your hands. Except nothing is that simple or straight forward – and that includes cloud.…

Takes stealthy startup job with ex-XtremIO big data-sorter A storage marketing guru has left security-focused, file services cloud storage gateway CTERA for a mysterious big data startup led by an ex-XtremIO techie.…

Scale-out and tape firm knows how to adapt Analysis Pot plant cams in a Colorado marijuana farm feeding Quantum’s StorNext multi-tiered and scale-out, file virtualisation and data services software with surveillance camera footage show the substantial market changes to which Quantum is having to adapt.…

Client loved new lighting and focus, but this story does not have a happy ending ON-CALL Welcome again to a festive edition of On-Call, the column in which readers send stories of jobs gone bad and we sanitise them for general consumption.…

GoldenDrive, The Spy Who Defragged Me, Die Another Bay... we could go on Analysis You wait for a bus for ages, and then two come along at once. Two data-transfer buses. Something like that.…

'IRIS' plans to replace spoken instructions, works on four test flights The European Space Agency has successfully trialled its air-traffic-control-over-IP-and-satellite plan that it is hoped will one day reduce the amount of spoken instructions delivered to aircraft.…

Web giant fends off lawsuits from all corners this week Families of the victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, earlier this year are suing Google for failing to take down online materials they say influenced the killer.…

Left-aligned chap says Big Red should not be 'with' president-elect's divisive policies An Oracle employee and anti-Donald-Trump activist has quit the company over co-CEO Safra Catz's decision to join president-elect Donald Trump's transition team and her expression of Oracle's intention to support his policies.…

Keep your wig on, Ziggy. This is about erosion features. Not our new arachnid overlords NASA thinks it has found an explanation for the “spiders” it's spotted on Mars.…