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£5bn for Arqiva: Anyone? Bueller? Analysis UK cellular tower and TV mast radio specialist Arqiva has been put up for sale with an optimistic price of between £5bn and £6bn, but its two core areas of business both have questionmarks hovering over them.…

Storage and VMs get cheaper, especially for wimpy Windows VMs in Brexit-land Microsoft's made another round of cuts to its cloudy costs, for both virtual machines and storage.…

Code gets a lifeline, a new home at the Linux Foundation, and a new open-source license RethinkDB has bounced back from the passing of its corporate parent last year to land under the protection of The Linux Foundation and a more business-friendly software license.…

Read sci-fi, kids! Save the world from killer robots! Universities should step up efforts to educate students about AI ethics, according to a panel of experts speaking at the AAAI conference in San Francisco on Monday.…

Think rural broadband, come rain, hail or shine Terahertz transmissions, literally the last frontier of radio communications, come a step closer this week with a group of Japanese researchers demonstrating a 100 Gbps system at an IEEE conference.…

Gains capacity for 3,340 cabinets crammed with kit in fabulous Slough Equinix has revealed that it quietly acquired a data centre operated by US outfit IO.…

CEO Jeff Hawn acknowledges recent changes brought 'fear and uncertainty' for staff The Register has learned that Quest Software has taken “an opportunity to shape the APJ organisation in a way that will create a greater focus on our customers, improve productivity and provide each of you with more opportunities for personal and professional growth.”…

About that whole running liquid on the surface thing… Data from NASA's Curiosity rover on Mars has left scientists scratching their heads. On the one hand, the bot appears to have found evidence that water once flowed on Mars, but on the other hand, the readings suggest there couldn't have been.…

If a sat's sinking and the radio goes down, it's time to light up! A satellite's radio-communications failing is a crisis if you need to keep it from drifting off station, so a pair of boffins suggest firing up an Earth-bound laser as a backup comms channel.…

Former FireEye intern has since seen the light and is very, very, sorry for Android exploit A malware writer and one time FireEye intern hauled in as part of massive global raids of cybercrime giant Darkode has been handed three years probation, ducking a possible 16 months sentence.…

Out of all the executive orders he didn't sign, why did it have to be that one Analysis President Trump reportedly can't read, can't accept reality, and can't take a joke.…

Presidential think tank also wants more respect for media. Unlike, oh, where exactly? While the United States wrestles with president Donald J Trump's attempt to suspend refugee intakes and ban visits from citizens of seven nations, China's decided it's time to make it easier to become a permanent resident, beef up its diplomatic corps, elevate the role science and technology plays in its economy and even improve the public's opinion of journalists.…

DoS-able bugs splatted OpenBSD and two of its SSL libraries need patches against a pair of denial-of-service bugs that can crash Web-facing servers.…

Super Canucks go ballistic: Uber filter's bogus (and writing these headlines is a sign of psychosis) A Canadian phone network says a wayward spam filter is to blame for blocking text messages that contained the word "Uber".…

But who is the mysterious Samuel Gold? An online banking malware scam netted criminals $1.2m in stolen funds – and now one of the ringleaders is now facing hard time in the big house.…

Chipzilla and Switchzilla won't confirm connection but the writing is on the wall Intel's Atom C2000 processor family has a fault that effectively bricks devices, costing the company a significant amount of money to correct. But the semiconductor giant won't disclosed precisely how many chips are affected nor which products are at risk.…

Inexpert regulation, scope creep, more metadata stored - what could possibly go wrong? Australia's telecommunications industry's peak bodies have joined with a broad industry lobby group in the forlorn hope that Australia's Attorney General George Brandis can be persuaded to keep his department out of their networks.…

Hotel chain hacked in the middle of convention season A posh US hotel chain says a trio of its popular San Francisco night spots were infected with bank-card-stealing malware from August to December of 2016.…

What you watched, when you watched it recorded to the second by hardware biz Electronics giant Vizio will cough up $2.2m after its smart TVs spied on millions of people.…

Check your firewalls, people – no need to leave all this gear facing the internet Printers around the world have been hacked and instructed to churn out pages and even sales receipts of alarming ASCII art.…

Second generation 64-layer flash chip goes to 512Gbit WD is firing up an early production run of its 512Gbit 64-layer 3D NAND chip at its Yokkaichi, Japan, foundry, with its partner Toshiba. The silicon uses a triple-level cell (TLC) flash design, which stores 3 bits per cell.…

But unlike David Cameron, they know what LOL means Most adults have no idea what their kids mean when they use text terms such as "KMS", "99" or emoji faces with cross eyes, according to an unsurprising piece of research by BT.…

Two solid state exec moves as Kaminario CTO quits to join startup Two exec moves have flashed up in the solid state world. Micron CEO Mark Durcan told analysts he was going to stop being CEO and Kaminario’s CTO has quit.…

Distie takes the poisoned chalice Tying up loose ends, BlackBerry has found a licensee to sell BlackBerry-branded devices in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, Nepal. It now has deals in place covering the planet, the largest by far being with Chinese giant TCL.…

Adds 15,000 customers, equivalent to one-tenth of Croydon After being smote by regulators in its attempt to buy O2 for £10.25bn, Three has snapped up UK Broadband for a cool £250m instead.…

Reform outlines chilling vision of future in wonky research A think tank is calling for hundred-of-thousands of public sector jobs to be automated. The UK should also take a look at using drones for policing, apparently.…

Tech CEO crazy security spending rundown When Snap's filed documents last week for its IPO filing, among the interesting snippets that emerged was the cost of security for its CEO Evan Spiegel: a somewhat extraordinary $890,000.…

A Trump-repatriated cash pile could give the borg acquisition hunger pangs Analysis While HPE and Dell are concentrating on being better on-premises data centre suppliers in a hybrid cloud world, IBM on becoming a cognitive computing software supplier, and both Oracle and Microsoft on a move towards cloud, what is Cisco’s gameplan?…

Associates of man accused by HPE of $17.5m fraud carefully whitewash over his jailing Contractors working for jailed motivational speaker Peter Sage, who is accused by Hewlett Packard Enterprise of masterminding a $17.5m fraud against them, had to read The Register to figure out what had happened to their boss.…

Thanks for nic, KNF Polish banks are investigating a massive systems hack after malware was discovered on several companies' workstations.…

Vertical Millennials meet your Dad at the Disco The BBC gave the controversial Silicon Valley tech IPO Snap a priceless publicity boost today, by bringing its Planet Earth II series “exclusively” to Snap’s app and nerd goggles before the show launches on terrestrial TV in North America.…

Details emerging of re-org tweaks to get business closer to customers Following on from an exec-level re-org and top table resignations in December, and layoffs in January, lumbering tech monster Dell Technologies is again ringing the divisional changes in a bid to reduce reporting lines move up the sales dial.…

Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft et al join legal battle The world of Big Tech has joined the legal showdown over Donald Trump's immigration ban, with a joint filing that argues the ban is not only illegal but would damage their businesses.…

Board chair and CFO resign FireEye has bid farewell to two of its top executives, who are departing on the heels of the hundreds of staff who left following CEO Kevin Mandia's restructure of the business last year.…

Our 1,600 KiloJubs beat your 23 Kelpies An eagle-eyed Reg reader has spotted a dastardly BBC attempt to muscle in on the Reg Standards Soviet’s turf – by devising a new and highly unauthorised measure of weight.…

Will Global Services finally be put out to pasture? Analysis Former state monopoly BT is juggling so many regulatory, financial and operational balls it’s a wonder it has a free hand to get on with the day-to-day business.…

Of risk, re-invention and doing what's good for you New year, new Linux – or, in the case of Ubuntu, two. As in years past, Canonical's distro gets two updates in 2017 – the spring and autumn releases numbered and named respectively 17.04, Zesty Zapus, and 17.10 – name TBD, actually.…

Cease this silliness with haste Sysadmin Blog The 25 and 50Gb switching standards have finally been ratified. Switches from various manufacturers have been available for some time, but now there's a better than average chance they'll interoperate with one another. While more speed is generally good, the 25 and 50Gb standards will complicate things for data centre administrators by making us have to think carefully about which 100Gb switches we buy.…

'FFForget' tool backs up social media if you quit. But who really needs paid service? If things look awful c-c-cold on social networks and you no longer dig what we all say online, Kaspersky Labs have cooked up a novel software-as-a-service product that will let back up your accounts before you decide to you f-f-f-fade away.…

We're asking because Juno's still in a bigger-than-hoped orbit. The pics are still lovely though NASA's revealed that its Juno probe has made another close pass around Jupiter, but sadly not as close as was first hoped.…

Predictions of the present past from today's future, or something Comment The data center market is hot, especially now that we are getting a raft of funky new stuff, from promising non-Intel chips and system architectures to power and cooling optimizations.…

Anonymity-lovers best not watch movies as .WMV files Windows users running the Tor browser can be tricked into uncloaking themselves, with a pretty straightforward trick based on Microsoft's DRM system.…

Mac and Windows Skype users given until March 1st to modernise themselves Microsoft's hurrying desktop Skype users to new client software.…

Security-centric distro also has some fixes in new version 2.10 The privacy-paranoid Linux distribution Tails has decided it's time to send 32-bit distributions the way of the 8086, from the planned June release of version 3.0.…

The last browser to support NPAPI plugins – Firefox 52

That headline will never happen, so one darkmart just started a bug bounty program A popular dark net marketplace hawking drugs and stolen credit cards has opened a security bug bounty offering to pay hackers for reporting vulnerabilities.…

Data from GPS systems helps to predict how satellites and radios fare when the sun flares National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has released 16 years' worth of GPS solar weather data gathered by the Los Alamos National Laboratory for all comers.…

Linux lord wishes he'd consulted his calendar before last week's hurry-up suggestion Last week Linus Torvalds suggested Linux kernel developers should hurry up and calm things down, because he worried that version 4.10 might take longer than he wanted to complete.…

Shhh! Nobody tell President Bannon you need lots of science to make this work Vid The United States' long series of attempts to shoot down missiles in flight have delivered failures-a-plenty, but last week the Friday the Missile Defense Agency was able to reveal a successful test.…

If you get taken down by this 13-year-old malware, you probably deserve it One of the world's most famous net menaces, SQL Slammer, has resumed attacking servers some 13 years after it set records by infecting 75,000 servers in 10 minutes, researchers say.…