The Register

If the world wants a bonk-detecting WiFi mattresses, it must be a malware-free bonk-detecting WiFi mattress Washington DC think tank the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology is calling for regulation on "negligence" in the design of internet-of-things (IoT) devices.…

Used staffer creds, work laptop, to snoop on execs Former Expedia worker Jonathan Ly has admitted to hacking his own chief financial officer and investor relations head to commit US$331,000 in insider stock-trading.…

Gentlemen, we can rebuild it. Better … stronger … faster. And meshier, before long The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) has officially adopted Bluetooth 5 as the standard's new specification.…

Bill Moore is no more team as Emerging Technologies loses another top exec The Register's storage desk has learned that DSSD President Bill Moore has left Dell EMC.…

US telco settles cramming suit with $80m payout in bill credits AT&T will pay out $88m to settle an FTC complaint that it allowed excessive "cramming" charges on customer bills.…

'Allo' Siri-and-Cortana competitor now speaks Hindi Google this week added Hindi to the languages spoken by its "Allo" digital assistance service, the company's Siri-and-Cortana competitor.…

Last of the Mercury 7 crew passes on Obit John Glenn, America's first man into orbit and the oldest person ever to make it into space, has died at the age of 95 after a short illness.…

I said, honey, it's a perfect place to stash data from the N-S-A If you're looking for somewhere to run your computing instances outside the Land of the Free, then Amazon Web Services has an option for the Americas with its first Canada cloud computing region.…

Taxi app maker's stiff no-sex policy grows, thrusts rules in our faces amid Xmas party season Flirting with an Uber driver could be enough to get you banned from the ride sharing service, according to revised Community Guidelines for US passengers and drivers, published by the company on Thursday.…

President-elect considering friend of Thiel as FDA head Having chosen a climate-change denier to head the US government's environment agency, an opponent of minimum wage for the Labor Department, a creationist for Education Secretary, a mine-owner for Commerce, and a wrestling exec to oversee small businesses – president-elect Donald Trump is now considering putting a man with very strange ideas about medicine as head of Uncle Sam's Food and Drug Administration.…

Promises to take 'weed wacker' to internet rules In a speech to a right-wing think tank, FCC commissioner Ajit Pai explained how 2017 will be the year that net neutrality dies in the US, and that municipal networks can forget about existing as well.…

Shame of Thrones Pic It turns out King Joffrey isn't the biggest scumbag at HBO after all.…

New Evo techno-goggles emerge for 3D virtual reality desktops Vid Microsoft has entered the virtual reality race, announcing a new headset called Evo in collaboration with Intel.…

ThyssenKrupp acknowledges attack, claims defense is 'virtually impossible' German steel maker ThyssenKrupp AG on Thursday said trade secrets were stolen in a cyber-attack earlier this year.…

Costs more than double, lobbing Big Mike into the red If revenue growth is vanity but profits are sanity, then Dell EMC made something of an inauspicious start to life as one company: sales expansion was overshadowed by deepening losses.…

Servers fall over after JavaScript file trashed by mistake Trend Micro's antivirus software has flagged benign Sharepoint code as potentially malign and nuked the files, causing the Microsoft package to fall over.…

Android and iOS users get robo assistant Microsoft’s ravenous, data hungry ‘personal assistant’ Cortana has arrived on iOS and Android in the UK, and the app has been revamped.…

Lawyers won't like this The US Congress has published plans backed by both main US parties to reform the Copyright Office - and it wants your views. Amongst the proposals is a small claims track to make fighting The Man easier.…

'All the original function is so incredible' – Peter Mandelson A proposed Chinese theme park has started to build a full-sized replica of the Titanic so tourists can experience over and over again the moment which led to the deaths of 1,500 people – a project endorsed by New Labour minister Peter Mandelson.…

I thought it was getting dark later and later We know the Earth’s rotation is slowing, hence leap seconds, but by how much? Now we have a new number: 1.8 milliseconds per day each century for the last 2,720 years.…

DIY hero made Faustian pact. Now his company is dead Comment We just didn’t know it at the time, but Pebble’s fate was sealed in May 2013 when it surrendered control to outsiders who saddled it with debt.…

Not everything in the all-flash garden sparkles As part of a recent survey we asked Register readers to give us some thoughts on a hot area in the storage world but with a slightly provocative edge, namely: “What frustrates you the most about how storage vendors sell their products, and are there any specific irritations in relation to all-flash in particular?”…

No breaches should result from compromised identities, say gov bods A White House commission on improving cybersecurity has come up with a list of recommendations for US president-elect Donald Trump’s administration – including a target for no big hacks to involve identity-based compromises.…

Tech titan searches for corporate soul, discovers it hasn't got one Troubled outsourcing giant Capita is reacting to a post-Brexit slowdown by confirming it will axe roughly 2,250 staff, which includes sending more jobs to India and using robots to automate certain parts of the operation.…

Infosec folk spot web of compromised British devices Hundreds of Mirai-infected home routers across the UK are currently acting as DDoS bots.…

And a load of them say they'll keep using it in 2017 The NHS is still running Windows XP en masse, two and a half years after Microsoft stopped delivering bug fixes and security updates.…

Chinese chaps see these drives and fabric their own way Interview Huawei is a believer in the use of NVMe drives and fabric. Yet it thinks that shared array controller software and hardware will need upgrading to take full advantage of NVMe drives.…

National Audit Office puts head in hands, weeps for taxpayers' wasted dosh The government's plan to move all of Whitehall's back office IT into shared services centres has been such a flop, all but one department has pulled out of the scheme, according to the National Audit Office.…

Fat helium spinners and fast and fat flash stores Western Digital Corp wowed analysts with exec spiel and five – or was it six? – product announcements. We have helium gas-filled drives, a 3D TLC NAND microSD card, two SSDs and a promised furiously fast flash platform array overflowing with IOPS.…

Yet interweb access is still crap for two thirds, says Which? Broadband is more essential than owning a mobile phone, running a car or having savings, according to a survey by consumer watchdog organisation Which?…

An Android smartie with just one funny story Hands-on Last year, Huawei built a phone for Google called the Nexus 6P, and everyone who had one loved it. Huawei's "nova" (officially lowercase) resembles a slimline version of the Nexus 6P. But while it retains the quite beautiful design, the Nova is not a Nexus 6P at all.…

Apply best routing practices liberally. Repeat each morning Solve the DDoS problem? No problem. We’ll just get ISPs to rewrite the internet. In this interview Ian Levy, technical director of GCHQ’s National Cyber Security Centre, says it’s up to ISPs to rewrite internet standards and stamp out DDoS attacks coming from the UK. In particular, they should change the Border Gateway Protocol, which lies at the heart of the routing system, he suggests.…

Astride both sides of data centre startup line Sysadmin Blog I have met the enemy, and he is me. I stand astride a line. On one side I am an "IT decision-maker", on the other an "evangelist" for some startups I truly believe in. This year, I have learned a lot more about how the data centre sausage is truly made.…

Won't someone think of the children, literally? The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and the European Consumer Organization (BEUC) are calling for US and EU data protection authorities to take action against insecure networked toys.…

Broad smiles, good suits and fake IDs test security in new dimensions FEATURE "Go to this McDonald's," Chris Gatford told me. "There's a 'Create Your Taste' burger-builder PC there and you should be able to access the OS. Find that machine, open the command prompt and pretend to do something important.…

Hello [celebrity], please reset your password Bahamas man Alonzo Knowles has been sentenced to five years jail for hacking the email accounts of celebrities to steal and sell unreleased television and movie scripts, music, financial documents, and pornographic self footage.…

Who the hell needs zero days? A Flash vulnerability subject to emergency patching by Adobe has been used in all major exploit kits to compromise users not already updated.…

Situation goes from terrible to surreal The president of the European Patent Office has responded to a formal rebuke of efforts to impose his will on the organization by asking for more power.…

Same group compromised a million users A DAY. A two-year long, highly sophisticated malvertising campaign infected visitors to some of the most popular news sites in the UK, Australia, and Canada including Channel 9, Sky News, and MSN.…

Don't put your VMs in a spook-controlled cloud A couple of German boffins have taken a good look at AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV), and don't like what they see.…

Falcon's return to space delayed until January SpaceX has delayed its planned December launch until January 2017.…

Good news for embedded virtualisers, Debian users and anyone who likes stability A new version of the Xen Project's hypervisor has emerged blinking into the light.…

Are you reading this, Brian? First, it fired shots at Intel's data center margins. Now Qualcomm is gunning for its rival's notebook processor cash cow.…

Dr Matt Green to comb the code Johns Hopkins University crypto professor Dr Matthew Green is to lead a security audit of OpenVPN 2.4.…

Cheap US power costs a quarter of Japanese electricity Case study Yahoo! Japan has teamed up with DDN Storage and IBM Japan to help it avoid the country's relatively high electricity costs – and run a disaster-recovery backup site on another continent for an earthquake rocks the nation.…

Plans for version 3.0 canned as Distributed Management Task Force says the job's done Work has ended on the Open Virtualisation Format (OVF), the Distributed Management Task Force's (DMTF's) packaging format for virtual machines.…

Kit dumped after fears over battery life and durability The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) says it will not be equipping its officers with body cameras after the units were found to be not rugged enough for field use.…

It's been two years and no patches, say researchers Vid Amid ongoing malware infections of IoT gadgets and armies of commandeered gizmos attacking server, glaring security holes in web-connected CCTV cameras are going unpatched.…

'Here's your new password, champ – GoF*!#Urs3lf' Facebook is hiring an Offensive Security Engineer, and not the sort inclined to disparage the length of your keys or your choice of encryption algorithm.…

The good, the bad, and the Ctl-C, Ctl-V A couple of days after being warned it was dragging its feet on open government strategies, the Federal Government has released its Open Government National Action Plan.…