The Register

Brexit means Brex... hang on, you want to store... WTF? A petition to Parliament requesting the repeal of the Investigatory Powers Act has received the 100,000 signatures required to make Parliamanet “consider” debating the issue.…

The economics look good for Mediatek, though Review Does anyone buy phones purely on specs? If so, this one might interest you. If software updates, support, and overall fit and finish can be ignored, then perhaps Blu, a Miami-based phone brand might make you pay attention.…

An IoT marriage is the future Loyalty cards – the little buggers are everywhere these days. When British supermarket chain Tesco launched its Clubcard back in 1995, it was a forward-looking idea, so much so that Lord Ian MacLaurin, then Tesco chairman, suggested that he knew more about his customers after three months than he did after 30 years in the retail business.…

Attempt to have Foreign Ministry rule before he lands dismissed by Supreme Court Whistleblower Edward Snowden will not visit Norway to pick up the Ossietzky Prize, awarded for “outstanding efforts for freedom of expression”, after the nation's Supreme Court decided its foreign ministry does not have to say in advanced whether the Russian resident would face extradition.…

It's all fun and games until someone loses a life The Internet Society (ISOC) is the latest organisation saying, in essence, “security is rubbish – fix it”.…

Pitch prepped, European Space Agency to press flesh at ministerial confab Later this week in Lucerne, Switzerland, the European Space Agency (ESA) will ask its 23 member states' ministers for a €400 million top-up to its ExoMars program.…

We won't know the possibilities of VR or any other technology until we play with it An acquaintance recently asked if he should buy his child an expensive virtual reality system for Christmas, worried that it would be used for little more than gaming. I put his fears to rest, informing him that simply having an amazing device like that at hand - regardless of how it gets used - changes the way you think.…

But he thinks the code in rc 7 is still pretty noisy, so expect another release candidate The world almost certainly needs to wait another week for Linux 4.9, says the operating system's overlord Linus Torvalds.…

The usual unnamed 'state-based' attacker blamed Japanese defence officials are investigating a reported penetration of the country's high-speed Defence Information Infrastructure (DII) network.…

Piratir's policy cutlass is still sharp as President tells Alþingi to find any port in a storm Iceland's Pirate Party is still in with a chance of profoundly influencing Icelandic politics, after a second set of coalition talks collapsed over the weekend.…

DIY-phishing code advertised YouTube have predictable by-products A malware writer is running YouTube ads for a phishing tool they have secretly backdoored to steal victims' information.…

Patch proffered, pen-tester paid Microsoft has patched flaws that attackers could exploit to compromise all Azure Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) instances.…

Why hello there, new electronics-making superpower Between September 2015 and October 2016 India opened 38 new mobile phone factories with a combined peak output of 248m handsets a year.…

Cloud launched, but support, services, channel etc coming real soon, promise Alibaba's Aliyun cloud may have switched on in Australia, but hardly anyone is home: the company has hired only a modest support team and is yet to hire the consultants, evangelists and other staff to help it achieve its stated aim of encouraging organisations to take their on-premises apps into the cloud.…

Workstations, servers, ticket machines derailed by malware Hard-drive-scrambling ransomware menaced more than 2,000 systems at San Francisco's public transit agency on Friday and demanded 100 bitcoins to unlock data, The Register has learned.…

Reefs lift from sea and drain, roads cut, house torn off foundations VIDEOS New Zealand's geoscience agency GNS Science has released videos showing the fault lines that ruptured during the recent earthquakes that moved the nation two metres north.…

Alternative headline: Euro sats monitor surface changes 'down to the millimetre' San Francisco's $350m leaning Millennium Tower is continuing to sink into the ground, European satellites orbiting Earth have confirmed.…

Einstein was wrong, reignited theory suggests Einstein was incorrect about the speed of light being a fixed constant in our universe, a new theory suggests. A team of physicists are backing an idea that the speed of light is not constant and have made a prediction that can be tested.…

Oh boo, cellular operators are hurting. Nobody hurts operators better than us Analysis When the first fixed-line phone systems were installed, you paid for everything, but particularly for each minute of each call.…

Musk's lot better get on this A smartphone app flaw has left Tesla vehicles vulnerable to being tracked, located, unlocked, and stolen.…

SAP veep on 2U, 24-drive, NVMe storage boxes Analysis SAP VP Renu Raman thinks 2U, 24-drive, NVMe storage boxes could provoke a storage VMware moment.…

HMIC also hits cops for shrugging off responsibility for 'streetwise' children A broken police information system hampered efforts to protect children at risk of sexual exploitation in the UK, according to Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabularies (HMIC).…

HFS A-Series given pink slip, told to walk the plank We’re hearing HDS is retiring or downgrading its 11-month-old HFS A-Series all-flash array.…

Intrepid clusterers tackle a new(ish) benchmark HPC Blog Student teams at SC16 were faced with a new(ish) benchmark during their 48-hour marathon run for the Student Cluster Competition Cup (there is no actual cup). The teams have always run the HPL (LINPACK) program, which is used to rank the TOP500 supercomputers in the world. But this year, they're also running the "book-end" HPCG (High Performance Conjugate Gradient) benchmark.…

IoT would be great for healthcare... if it wasn't so damn insecure An EU agency has grappled with thorny issues surrounding the adoption of IoT technology in hospitals to draft a series of best practice guidelines.…

Stop: drop your shop Quidco, the cashback site, has gone TITSUP amid a push to encourage British consumers to engage in the US-imported Black Friday sales fest.…

Privacy campaigners against personal data sharing plans Digital Economy Bill Privacy campaigners and academics have called for the removal of personal data sharing proposals in the forthcoming Digital Economy Bill.…

El Reg chats to Nimble man about coming wave of NVMe adoption Analysis A sea change is gathering pace in storage, powered by NVMe drive-level and fabric-level connectivity, the two declaring war on data access latency, and combining to bring data closer to compute and get more applications running in servers faster.…

Cloud = 42 Reg Reader Study If you were to re-design your data centre today from a clean sheet, would it look anything like it does at the moment?…

RealTek codec vuln can switch speakers from output to input Experimental malware has highlighted the possibility that hackers might be able to turn headphones into microphones in order to snoop on computer users.…

Before you get excited, there is a snag... MBBF2016 Engineers at EE recently managed to get speeds of 2.1Gbps out of a trial LTE deployment, according to Tom Bennett, the British telco’s director of network services and devices.…

Perhaps if we club together, we could Something for the Weekend, Sir? "That member is the wrong way around," confides the gym receptionist in hushed tones, nodding towards a middle-aged fellow ambling into the cardio room.…

Unless they do... The government “probably won’t” force internet service providers with no history of working with the intelligence services into retaining internet records following wide-ranging new powers passed in the Investigatory Powers Bill, the Home Office has said.…

It hasn't ceased to be... but crowdfunding? Not happening Radbot Previously, you intimated that most of you would not relish a night out on the tiles with our team (boo).…

Microsoft specialist made human rights complaint Can you fire someone for not telling you they have a criminal record and did time for dealing drugs? Australian system integrator Data#3 has just been told the answer to that question is “no”, under some circumstances.…

Bletchley Park to house student codebreakers after £5m refurb The home of Britain's World War II code-breaking effort, Bletchley Park, is set to once again house young codebreakers with the first national information security college planning to open in the complex following a £5 million renovation.…

Cick-to-self-p0wn attack sneaks Locky ransomware past Zuck's security model Checkpoint has found an image obfuscation trick it thinks may be behind a recent massive phishing campaign on Facebook that's distributing the dangerous Locky ransomware.…

Reader says he wanted to keep his boss, and company, safe from scammers On-Call Welcome to Friday, readers, and therefore to another edition of On-Call, where we share readers' stories of things they get asked to do in the name of keeping computers up and running.…

A350-1000 takes off into competition with Boeing's 777 Airbus has successfully flown a new commercial jet model, with the first A350-1000 taking to the skies over Toulouse on Thursday.…

It looks a lot like Redmond has new servers with faster disks on tap Microsoft's levelling up its A-series Azure virtual machines, the vanilla instances in its cloud, and has a new way of letting you know whats under the hood of a cloudy computer.…

Files trademarks for 'interactive touch screen computer interfaces' Dell's applied for the US trademarks “Canvas” and “Dell Canvas”, both covering “Interactive touch screen computer interfaces”.…

Two reports suggest this is what happens when government agencies hollow out Australia's census all-but failed due to a combination of poor design, bad operational decisions, human error and numerous lazy and/or bad decisions that could have been avoided had warnings about corporate culture been heeded and Australian government agencies properly educated about what it takes to deliver digital services.…

Four remote code execution holes patched along the way Mozilla has given the widely-used cURL file transfer library a thumbs up in a security audit report that uncovered nine vulnerabilities.…

Commerical kit, not hacking, all that's needed. Melbourne man Paul Sant has been charged with unauthorised broadcasting over to pilots over radio bands restricted to aviation users, causing one plane to abort a landing to Tullamarine Airport.…

Altitude reading of 'below ground level' turned probe into Magrathean Whale The European Space Agency (ESA) has released results of its early investigations into the crash of the Schiaparelli Mars probe and it sounds like software may have been a part of the problem.…

Servers, books, virtualisation software, training and PCs at unusually attractive prices Black Friday and the Cyber Monday that follows have become big discount shopping days for consumers, but enterprise vendors are getting in on the act too with hefty discounts on training and some kit.…

70 heads get early Xmas gift delivered in P45 wrapping paper RM Education sprinkled some festive cheer among its staffers by confirming in a Skype call with them that redundancies are in the offing.…

Social media tracking... yep, this is the future This has not been a good year for opinion pollsters, most of whom failed to predict either Britain’s vote to leave the European Union or the election of Donald Trump as US president.…

But while the all-flash kit sales are up, hybrid arrays are down Analysis A considered look at Nimble Storage's latest quarterly results show that its all-flash array (AFA) sales are rising but hybrid product sales are falling, suggesting some cannibalisation is going on.…

Brainier students? Maybe. New hardware, almost certainly HPC Blog SMERSH! That was the sound of the Student Cluster Competition LINPACK record being shattered – in a huge way. How huge? Really huge. As in more than doubled.…