The Register

Headline may be fake. Facebook's really outlined four tactics to crimp fake news Facebook's revealed its plans to tackle fake news.…

BitDefender, Trend Micro, Check Point, Emisoft, others, join No More Ransom project More security players have joined the No More Ransom initiative, which should make life hard for the cretins who create ransomware.…

So long and thanks for all the clouds, Pip Marlow, and hello Steven Worrall Microsoft's Australian tentacle has a new leader after managing director Pip Marlow left to take up the position of chief executive officer for Strategic Innovation at financial services outfit Suncorp.…

Luckily, there's a security fix Until earlier this week, Apple's FileVault 2 disk encryption could be defeated in the time it takes to reboot a Mac, given a few hundred dollars in hardware and physical access to the computer.…

That said: Nearly 10 million bucks for one acre of land? Take it and buy Montana It seems that there is something that Google can't buy, beg or steal: a small piece of land right in the heart of its Silicon Valley campus.…

To everyone else, get patching Users and administrators of Ubuntu Linux desktops are being advised to patch their systems following the disclosure of serious security flaws.…

More accurate than American system and open to all After a long and much-delayed 17-year gestation, Europe's answer to America's GPS system has been switched on.…

In related news: $7.3m-richer troll wanders into Lamborghini garage... Apple has been ordered to pay Core Wireless Licensing $7.3m for infringing on two patents covering mobile communication. The amount is a rounding error on the iPhone giant's books.…

Read our quick review of Tom Wheeler at the helm of the US regulator Analysis Following weeks of speculation and a refusal to state his plans, on Thursday chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Tom Wheeler, announced he would step down from the role on January 20, allowing president-elect Donald Trump to select a new head of the US comms watchdog.…

Consumer rights law forbids retaliation for poor scores President Obama has signed into effect a new law that bars businesses from punishing customers for giving bad reviews.…

Upstart defies permit demand, offers autonomous rides in San Francisco Shrugging off a demand from California's Department of Motor Vehicles to obtain a permit to operate its self-driving cars on state roads, Uber contends it doesn't need a permit because the DMV's rules do not apply.…

'This is our moment': Platform 10 lands Red Hat’s released its dual-support mode OpenStack Platform 10, for rapid cloud adoption.…

Thales Watchkeeper WK006 dived itself into Boscombe Down's runway An Army Watchkeeper drone flown by the Royal Artillery crashed on landing after its crew selected the self-flying craft’s “master override” function, according to the official report into the accident.…

Oh, Evernote. What have you done? Comment Just weeks after Evernote announced that it is migrating users’ data from its own servers to Google’s servers, the company has now casually dropped a privacy bombshell. In order for some (unspecified) occult AI magic to work in the future, your data will be merged with other data. Oh. And Evernote staff can read all your notes.…

Now, about that uptime... Microsoft is offering private connections to its UK data centres as a means of wooing government customers to its sometimes less-than- resilient cloud.…

22 million customers, one old media mogul at the top British broadcaster and phone service provider Sky is to be bought by Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox for £18.5bn, according to reports.…

Kreeee-PLONK. Five blokes cop combined 16 years' jail time A gang of five men who met at roadside cafes and used free public Wi-Fi to try to hide their £10m cigarette smuggling ring, have been jailed for 16-and-a-half years.…

Public dosh given to... what? Actual techies? Networking folk Cambridge Wireless (CW) have been picked to deliver the Cambridge arm of IoTUK Boost, a government plan to pour taxpayers’ cash into Internet of Things startups.…

Shares worth 5 cents and company just $1.5m +Comment Violin Memory has bowed to the inevitable and made a Chapter 11 filing.…

Hyperconverged box humming away nicely? Time to take things up a notch So, you’ve had a crack at hyperconverged architecture. You’ve bought your cloud-in-a-box solution from Nutanix, VMware or whomever and tried it out on a pilot project - something manageable and discrete that didn’t interfere with the rest of your architecture too much. And now that you’ve dipped your toe in the water, you’d like to wade in a little further.…

... we can easily kill off products ourselves Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s chief recently told customers that Micro Focus, the soon-to-be new owner of its Software division, has never closed a product from a firm it acquired. What HPE didn’t tell those clients is that it itself was going to kill off a certain line - Service Anywhere.…

WhatsApp, Skype face tighter constraints New EU laws set to be proposed in January will give telecoms companies more options over how they might use data they gather that relates to customers' communications, according to a media report.…

Claims servers find its array data in an instant Interview An array without limits sounds a great idea and the ADS 1000 is built by a startup whose name, Apeiron, is Greek for without limits. Its ADS1000 uses hardened Ethernet to have array network access latency cut to <3 µS for a round trip. That’s fast.…

Using science to own old-school games With Christmas Day within sight, it’s time to dust off your Monopoly set and concentrate on your Settler’s strategy. Or, maybe, consider some new board-game purchases. It’s not just me caught up in this wave of nostalgia – venerated institution the Victoria and Albert Museum is hosting a major board game retrospective. Of late, games clubs – such as the one in Hackney where your correspondent is practising her potentially world class Carcassonne skills for next year’s UK games Expo – seem to be springing up like weeds.…

It looks like you're trying to run Flash: would you rather fire it into the heart of a star? Microsoft's signalled it will join the crackdown on Adobe Flash in the forthcoming Windows 10 Creator’s Update, which won't even bother loading the pesky plug-in whenever possible. For sites that rely on Adobe's hellspawn, Edge will go all Clippy on users and ask if they really want to run it or would rather fire it into the heart of the sun to enjoy a fiery death it so richly deserves.…

Protests erupt again as country representatives meet in Munich Staff at the European Patent Office (EPO) have pleaded with the organization's Administrative Council for a third time to take action against its rampaging president.…

Suits should have done more to protect users, rather than user numbers ANALYSIS Fallen web giant Yahoo! has been branded negligent for failing to tackle the prodigious challenge of upgrading its MD5 password security before some one billion accounts were stolen.…

If you use one, stop now. If you write heist movies, write safe-crackers out of your script Attackers can locate and pop safes protected with high security commercial locks thanks to poor Bluetooth implementations, say researchers at Somerset Recon say.…

Beta is available to two customers for now. More coming soon, promise Amazon.com has revealed that it's made its first delivery by autonomous aerial drone, to a chap named “Richard B” who lives somewhere in Cambridgeshire, England.…

Follow the money – they did The same hackers who turned out the lights at Ukrainian utilities last December have been running attacks against the same country’s banks over recent months.…

Good job almost nobody's had time to put it into production Microsoft's had to hurry out a fix for a problem that breaks live VM migration. And it's a problem Redmond brought upon itself with an Update Rollup to System Center 2016 Virtual Machine Manager.…

Jury finds similar CLI syntax and manuals don't create Copyright claims Arista's taken a round from Cisco, as the two companies continue their long-running legal wrestle.…

But online services were down for days so maybe some tax office data is AWOL The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) has revealed that no taxpayer data was lost as a result of the weird crash of Hewlett Packard Enterprise 3Par storage kit.…

Vote of confidence in company after losing critical contract Neustar has agreed to sell itself for $2.9bn to a San Francisco-based investment firm, taking the public company private.…

Big T wants to know why the government is going to let airspace sell cheap and competition cherry-pick Australia's dominant carrier Telstra has expressed its displeasure with yesterday's decision to exclude it from an auction for some useful-for-4G spectrum in the 700MHz bands, in the name of enhancing competition.…

Purple Palace plundered in new breach unrelated to previous p0wnage Yahoo! says hackers have probably stolen details from more than a billion user accounts, including names, addresses, phone numbers, and weakly-hashed passwords in attacks dating back to 2013.…

Photojournalists plead for secured data in professional cams Over 150 prominent filmmakers and photojournalists have asked leading camera makers to add support for data encryption to their devices.…

Super Cali goes ballistic over claims global warming's bogus California Governor Jerry Brown promises that no matter how "absurd" the upcoming Republican presidential administration's response to climate-change science, the state of California will be ready with a robust response – with weapons ranging from satellites to databases to lawyers.…

Once the US government has paid for their training Ginni Rometty, CEO of IBM, has pledged to recruit 25,000 Americans to Big Blue over the next four years, but wants Uncle Sam to pay for it.…

The Schmidt meets the Man US president-elect Donald Trump today meets Silicon Valley's tech leaders face to face for a frank chat about what to expect under his administration.…

Just bad timing, right? ... Right? Apple once again finds itself drawing the ire of customers after its decision to remove part of the battery-monitoring tools on macOS.…

Dodgy API let apps and plugins silently pry into chat logs, record calls and more A security hole in Skype for OS X allowed installed apps to silently delve into the user's chat logs, record their calls, and leaf through their contacts.…

Cheeky British outfit cracks a big problem Mixed reality VR systems like Microsoft’s HoloLens and Google’s Project Tango are incredibly complicated, but maybe they’ve been approaching it from the wrong direction. A British outfit has improvised a very low cost alternative to costly nerd goggles, using cardboard. The Zapbox could open up many new uses cases for AR, such as giving people the ability to create their own Pokémon Go-style adventures.…

And tech plays a huge part because Death Star plans have no password and are too big to upload in a hurry SPOILERS Rogue One is a fine addition to the cinematic Star Wars canon, and almost perfectly tailored for Register readers to mock.…

Says machine learning, predictive analytics squashed downtime to under 25 secs/yr Nimble says its storage arrays (all-flash and hybrid) have reached six “nines” availability.…

Rents third party space for London region... not that anyone wants to talk specifics Amazon has opened its long-awaited AWS jumping off point for UK cloud customers by renting racks in two separate third party-run British-based bit barns.…

Plus: Visual Basic in 21 days?

IDC marketscapers scope out rankings IDC has updated its object-based storage marketscape to show IBM has leapt to a chart-topping position through buying Cleversafe. Scality is second. Dell EMC has hustled up the charts to third place, pushing most other players down the rankings.…

Get stuck into a containerization runtime this Xmas. Go on Docker on Wednesday plans offer the open source community a "boring infrastructure" component that nonetheless should excite those focused on software-based containers and benefit the blissfully unaware masses.…

Planning for the worst 'just in case', says chief exec Seb James A spectre is haunting Dixons Carphone - the spectre of Brexit. Despite posting a 19 per cent jump in half-year profits to £144m, the reailer is warning of stormy times ahead.…