The Register

Contract extended to 2022... that'll be two decades and well over ONE BEELION spent El Reg can confirm that two things Brits love will be paired together for another couple of years - the Beeb has again extended Capita's telly tax collection contract.…

Going, going ... Three suspected cybercriminals have been arrested and extradited from Romania to the US over a multi-million dollar malware-facilitated scams.…

Might sound crazy but it ain't no lie... they need 'em to buy buy buy Analysis Startups arrive with fanfares of new tech and product surprise and then face the long grind to grow their business to newsworthy market status while adding bells and whistles to the basic product.…

What happens when Few things are more divisive than ideas that are perceived as radical; ideas that push against what we consider to be normal, against the social or political boundaries that we have grown up and lived within.…

Get real – it's not all about developers and DevOps Listen to some DevOps evangelists talk, and you would get the impression that IT operations teams exist only to serve the needs of developers. Don't get me wrong, software development is a good competence to have in-house if your organisation depends on custom applications and services to differentiate its business.…

Object storage networked drive JBOD with direct access OpenIO has launched its SLS-4U96 product, a box of 96 directly addressed drives offering an object-storage interface and per-drive scale-out granularity.…

Another recount in America: Cockup sends publishers back to their abacuses Amid its efforts to get out of the business of fake news distribution and to identify the fake accounts said to represent 2 per cent of its 1.79 billion monthly active users, Facebook for the fourth time in recent months is correcting erroneous advertising metrics.…

States seek to limit Napoleon-like tendencies of Benoit Battistelli The Administrative Council of the European Patent Office (EPO) has rapped its rampaging president on the knuckles at a two-day meeting in Munich but failed to take any public action against him despite pleas from staff.…

Stolen billion-user database being flogged for $300,000, apparently The hacked database containing the account details of more than one billion Yahoo! users is reportedly being sold for a meager $300,000.…

Could hold secrets to Earth's history and life on other planets Canada's oldest pool of water, nestled deep within a mine, is approximately two billion years old – and it could have sustained life, scientists have discovered.…

Plus: The forlorn attempt to put four disks into one drive On-Call Welcome to festive On-Call, in which we take our regular Friday tales of jobs gone wrong and run lots more of them because there's sod-all news to write in the week before Christmas. And also because we have lots of lovely submissions that deserve a run.…

Devs cringe apologetically at errors Linux Lord dubbed 'piece-of-shit branch' Linus Torvalds has unleashed a little ripe language on the Linux Kernel Mailing List, and quickly got results for having done so.…

It's late 2016 and a USB stick can make a hash of MD5 Cisco has popped out a curious Field Notice warning owners of Nexus 3000 devices to be careful when they upgrade the devices' operating software, lest they enter a boot loop.…

Can you dig it? Yes you will, if you're tired of being stuck in traffic Elon Musk has fired off a series of Tweets suggesting he wants to get into the boring business. As in boring tunnels.…

Re-branded app will offer the chance to migrate Vine friends to Twitter Twitter's decided not to completely kill its video-looping service Vine.…

If Intel and IBM think HPC is a two-horse race, they need to think again ARM has splashed an unspecified quantity of cash on Allinea Software, the maker of tools that developers can use to get the most out of high performance computing (HPC) rigs.…

Autopilot fail led to too-fast descent that bent wing beyond tolerances Facebook's plans to beam internet access from drones has crashed, literally, after the company revealed the first flight of its “Aquila” craft ended with a bang.…

Argument that security is improved by prohibiting testing challenged Australian Privacy Commissioner Timothy Pilgrim, together with noted security and privacy professionals, have called for amendments to a Federal Government Bill that would criminalise the identification of Government-issued anonymous data sets claiming it will impinge legitimate research.…

Lynda.com database accessed by 'unauthorized third party' Lynda.com, the training arm of LinkedIn, on Saturday issued email notices to about 55,000 members whose data it says has been persued by “unauthorized third party.”…

Back to pen and paper Every year Ottawa's Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO) tests secondary school students in their literacy skills. This year it rolled out online tests and the results weren't good.…

ESA signs contracts for ExoMars 2020 mission Undeterred by the crash of the Schiaparelli Mars probe during the first ExoMars mission, the European Space Agency has signed off contracts that will hopefully deposit a new and more advanced lander directly on the Martian Surface. In one piece.…

Yeah, this is just what we need Chinese researchers claim to have taken facial recognition to the next level – by predicting the personality traits of women from their photos alone.…

And so what are you gonna do about it, Barry? Analysis Outgoing US President Barack Obama has promised to take action against Russia over its alleged interference in the presidential election campaign.…

Disgraced smut-slinging catch one in the eye from Uncle Sam More than a dozen criminal charges have been filed against Prenda Law lawyers, who are accused of using porno movies to extort millions of dollars from victims.…

Code canned when it oversteps the mark CoreOS's Linux container manager rkt – pronounced "rock-it" for those willing to pay for a few vowels – can now defend against privilege escalation attacks on virtual machines hosting Intel Clear Containers.…

Bloke accused of seizing control, redirecting calls, pretending to be the boss A Texas radio station claims the software developer hired to build its mobile app has "gone rogue" – and is attempting to take control of the station.…

In fact, here's two dozen pages of 'No', 'Nope' and 'No way' Reddit's "Ask Me Anything" interviews where anyone and everyone answers whatever questions the website's readers throw at them has become an internet staple.…

Uncle Sam would like it back, please, pronto A diplomatic incident is brewing after US defense officials accused a Chinese warship of filching one of America's robotic submersibles.…

Must do more to identify fraudulent payments UK banks have been told they needed to go further protecting consumers against money transfer scams - a growing form of fraud.…

£200,000 ex VAT and the prototype ... not that any will ever be made NSF Kids Santa is going to get* a turbo charged helper this Xmas in the form a of the GS-900 gadget sleigh.…

Canadian smart phone maker passes baton to the Chinese Chinese giant TCL has snagged the global contract to design, make and sell BlackBerry-branded phones. The deal applies to all but four countries: India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh and Indonesia.…

Memories of East Texas venue shopping The legal case of TC Heartland v Kraft Foods may appear to have very little to do with technology, but it could make life a lot harder for patent trolls – thanks to a US Supreme Court decision on Thursday.…

And we won't read your notes - promise Evernote has scrapped changes to its data protection practices after a furious customer backlash.…

Has Hyde Park BSOD crashed Christmas? The annual Christmas kitsch fest that is Hyde Park's Winter Wonderland in London is desperately seeking two desktop bods to provide IT support for Windows 10.…

2016 sucked. 2017 won’t be much better, sorry DDoS attacks have been around since at least 2000, and they’re not going away. In fact, as the number of devices online grows, the volume and velocity of these attacks is also increasing.…

Thought Java was "free"? Think again (and you owe us $$$ in 2017) Oracle is massively ramping up audits of Java customers it claims are in breach of its licences – six years after it bought Sun Microsystems.…

'More likely than not' a fraudulent prize claim was made The National Lottery has been whacked with a £3m fine by the Gambling Commission over its failure to have proper controls in place to prevent a fraudulent ticket winning.…

WMF meets December Sprint fundraising target. Let's see. Will Wikipedia halt its guilt-inducing appeals for cash, as Jimmy Wales promised it would, once it reaches its fundraising goal for this year?…

Working with security firm and the Feds to investigate The US agency charged with ensuring that voting machines meet security standards may have been compromised, according to evidence uncovered by cyber security firm Recorded Future.…

Sooo. Universal Service Obligation. You reckon £1bn-£2bn will cover it? Around 1.4 million people in Blighty are unable to get speeds of 10Mbps, according to Ofcom's annual Connected Nations report.…

Wiganites in record freezer burn turn Pie-lovers were given a novel but unrecommended way to freeze a meaty delight this week by sending the little beauty into space*.…

Could launch preemptive strike on local pay TV The OnPrime service – which emerged this week from Sky in the UK and Germany, offering a number of foreign language packages for visitors - seems to be built around the end to end over-the-top* (OTT) service which Sky has been investing in for years from US firm 1Mainstream.…

Wants to create 'hostile environment' for illegal immigrants Schools are currently sharing the census records of up to 1,500 pupils per month as part of an attempt by the Home Office to crack down on illegal immigrants.…

Connected vehicles Car manufacturers active in the US market will need to ensure new models are fitted with technology that allows those vehicles to "talk" to other vehicles from as early as 2021, under new government proposals.…

Meanwhile, co-CEO Catz joins Team Trump Oracle is once more waving around its cloud revenue figures in response to another quarter of falling hardware sales.…

You boffins are just showing off now Video NASA's Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS) has made it safely into orbit after being air-launched from Orbital ATK's Stargazer aircraft.…

User who though he knew everything was satisfied by doing precisely nothing On-Call Welcome again to On-Call, our weekly column in which we recount readers' tales of jobs gone wrong, often at times or for reasons that are just plain wrong.…

Local companies take security seriously, says BSI head, but give 'em fake phone numbers and addresses anyway Germany's Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik (Federal Office for Information Security or BSI) has warned users to reconsider the security chops of their email providers and plugged local services in response to news a billion credentials were stolen from Yahoo!…

Six yankee dollars a month everywhere except the Eurozone Amazon's flicked the switch on the global rollout of its Prime Video service, making it available in 200 nations around the world..…

El Reg takes LG's webcam-and-WiFi equipped Roboking Turbo+Homeview for a spin Can you monitor a data centre with a vacuum cleaner?…