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Helping internet scammers proved profitable, for a while Western Union will forfeit more than half a billion dollars after admitting it broke money laundering laws.…

Just get rid of it – bin it now Malicious websites can remotely execute commands on Windows systems that have Cisco WebEx's Chrome extension installed. About 20 million people actively use this broken software.…

Apple squashes a bunch of security bugs, so get installing Apple has emitted a set of software security updates for all of its major operating systems.…

A big leap forward, you say? Tell that to the anti-trust authorities Google is hardwiring its Android app store, Google Play, into all new Chromebooks.…

良藥苦口 The Chinese government has started an 18-month crackdown that will require all VPN providers to seek government approval for their activities if they want to stay in business.…

Larry's biz swings the axe after denials and silence Oracle will cut hundreds of jobs from its embattled hardware division in California, a move the tech goliath had previously denied.…

Putting the US of A first could require arms from Europe Making America great again may require foreign-made weapon systems, a possibility that would contravene the Trump administration's stated goal to "buy American and hire American."…

President Snowflake slots in an easy campaign goal first thing US President Donald Trump has made good on a campaign promise and signed an executive order backing the United States out of the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal.…

San Francisco's Agile 3 Solutions acquired IBM has announced a deal to buy data visualization firm Agile 3 Solutions, a San Francisco-based privately held company. The terms of the deal, announced Monday, were not disclosed.…

The man they call Martin gives post-work life the elbow, lands at WD Well, well, whaddya know? Meg Whitman announces Martin Fink’s retirement as CTO and HPE Labs top dog, where he evangelised the Machine and memristors, but the fabled techie was clearly not ready to swan off into a post-work life of shed-building and ocean cruises just yet. He's back in the industry and mad for it.…

Memory is king: Industrial, auto, storage app ICs grow Global semiconductor revenue is set to rise 7.2 per cent over 2016 because of ramping demand for DRAM and app-specific standard products for the IoT and allied markets, according to Gartner's digital witch-doctors.…

Bids Kaycee Lai farewell, welcomes Robert Wilson In comes Robert Wilson and out goes Kaycee Lai at Primary Data.…

Again, nobody is saying rexit-bay The gods of channel sales growth did not smile on Computacenter in 2016 as the UK filed standstill top line numbers and progress in European ops was unpicked by unfavourable forex rates.…

Yes, from the English university. No you shut up Researchers at Cambridge University believe a psychological "vaccine" could help prevent the spread of "fake news" - in a study that on the face of it might also pass for a bogus story.…

Cites demand on his family, will be replaced by 2019 The Director General of GCHQ, Robert Hannigan, has announced his intention to step down as leader of the signals intelligence agency.…

Terix partnership pulls PC maker into Larry's crosshairs Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and Oracle are heading back to court – this time over an alleged violation of IP rights on Solaris.…

A wild early adopter programme appeared! Microsoft has previewed its support for SUSE Linux Enterprise in its next version of SQL Server, and announced an early adopter programme.…

But it is keeping schtum A DDoS attack was reportedly behind online outages at Lloyds Bank a fortnight ago.…

Come with us now 'on a journey away from PSN' The Cabinet Office wants government departments to buy public cloud rather than services from the Public Services Network (PSN).…

Not so, er, fab for storage tech, innit? Storage Blockhead Say hello to Wilbur Ross, "King of Bankruptcy" and the likely next US Secretary of State for Commerce – the man charged with implementing President Trump's promise to bring home the jobs stolen by cheap labour countries using free trade policies.…

Preview of next flagship delayed as embers of Note 7 debacle still burn MWC 2017 The great and the good attending next month’s Mobile World Congress won’t be getting a sneak peak at Samsung latest premier Galaxy S8 smartphone after all, a company exec has confirmed.…

Firms fighting off rocket docket suit as a matter of principle Cloud host Rackspace and storage vendor NetApp are fighting a patent holder who's targeted some of tech's biggest names in the notorious Eastern District of Texas.…

Ummm, good luck with that! The government is to throw an extra £4.7bn at R&D for smart energy technologies, robotics and artificial intelligence, and 5G in its Industrial Strategy to be published later today.…

Unite: IT giant's bosses gave us a bigger package, would be rude not to have a butcher's Unite has suspended all industrial action in its dispute with Fujitsu over planned cuts to job, pay and pensions in the UK.…

SNAFU reported via bug bounty program Beads of sweat must have surely run down the face of one hacker who, while trying to score a bug bounty, inadvertently infiltrated an "internal US Department of Defence website that requires special credentials to access."…

Little love for Crown Hosting from Whitehall depts Analysis Only in IT is “legacy” a pejorative term, where it is used to condemn ageing systems and forgotten workarounds.…

What does it take to get people patching? Not Reg readers, obviously. Other, silly people Some 200,000 systems are still susceptible to Heartbleed more than two years and 9 months after the huge vulnerability was disclosed.…

Another shot at spook-proofing email It's taken longer than first expected, but the first fruits of Lavabit founder Ladar Levison's Dark Mail Technical Alliance have landed with the relaunch of the encrypted mail service he closed in 2013.…

Code named for Prince of Darkness offers commissions for spreading evil Satan is infecting computers, encrypting files and demanding ransoms.…

Because that worked so well for Firefox OS, and Ubuntu Touch, and Sailfish, and Tizen … The Free Software Foundation has published a new High Priority Projects list, the document it uses to highlight “a relatively small number of projects of great strategic importance to the goal of freedom for all computer users.”…

Claims phablet was phine, but bad manufacturing short-circuited battery quality Samsung has blamed two un-named battery-makers for setting fire to its reputation by sending Galaxy Note 7 phablets up in flames, but has also admitted it may have pushed those suppliers too hard.…

You had one job ... and it wasn't letting test certs escape into the wild and then revoking them Symantec has confirmed that it's revoked another bunch of wrongly-issued certificates.…

Chief Mozillan calls for grass roots movement akin to 1960s' environmental awakenings Mozilla has issued a prototype of its first internet health report in a bid to make humans give security and privacy the same level of attention they devote to climate change.…

Gin Palace plugs Junos DoS bugs Juniper Networks pushed out patches for its Junos operating system over the weekend.…

We can either build more submarine cables or more efficient submarine cables Today's international optical systems carry impressive quantities of data, but as 'net traffic continues to grow they'll likely run out of capacity.…

Cracks limit of 32-bit table size without realising it. Back to the books, guys? Learn-to-code site Code.org is apologising to its students after being caught by a database table maxing out, and dropping progress for an unknown number of participants.…

Asteroid 391257 is now Asteroid Will Wheaton Actor Asteroid 391257, who rose to prominence for playing annoyingly precocious teen Starfleet member Wesley Crusher in Star Trek: The Next Generation, now has an asteroid named after him.…

Snapdragon biz's bad week just got worse Following the lead of the FTC, Apple has filed suit against Qualcomm alleging it was charging excessive patent royalty fees for cellphone technology.…

IDG into the hands of the Middle Kingdom – except its HPC bit Two Chinese investors are buying the owner of PCWorld magazine and the IDC market research outfit – International Data Group (IDG) – but IDC’s high-performance computing research businesses are not included in the sale.…

Computer researchers uncover yuuuge dormant army Computer boffins Juan Echeverria and Shi Zhou at University College London have chanced across a dormant Twitter botnet made up of more than 350,000 accounts with a fondness for quoting Star Wars novels.…

Self-driving ride take on a whole new meaning The future of self-driving cars is already with us – although maybe not in the way we had hoped.…

New spymaster Pompeo ponders massive metadata collection, death for Snowden While Washington is busy with the inauguration of President Trump, not all political business has stopped. The incoming administration is hoping to get its new CIA boss appointed today, but the Senate is having none of it.…

We're gonna have the best 404s! The greatest 404s! With Donald Trump taking over the presidency Friday morning, a different type of transition has also taken place: a digital transition.…

Security gurus condemn sensational reporting of encryption backdoor-that-wasn't Computer security experts and cryptographers have accused The Guardian of overblowing what was reported to be a backdoor in WhatsApp's encryption.…

Only a local hacker in a facility would be able to run an attack General Electric (GE) has pushed out an update to its industrial control systems following the discovery of vulnerabilities that create a way for hackers to steal SCADA system passwords.…

Benign neglect, managed decline, whatever Analysis <IBM's fourth quarter and full year 2016 results showed the now traditional storage hardware revenue decline, while all-flash array and software-defined storage revenues grew double digits.…

We've got four more years, people Passwords used by Donald Trump's incoming cybersecurity advisor Rudy Giuliani and 13 other top staffers have been leaked in mass hacks, according to a Channel 4 investigation.…

Incoming FlashSystem A9000 with 3D TLC makes it obsolete IBM is not going to develop a fourth-generation XIV storage array because an upcoming FlashSystem A9000R using 3D flash can be sold for the same cost as disk.…

As for that fabled IPO? May happen 'when market is right' French Internet of Things connectivity folk Sigfox are still hoping for a 2018 IPO – but it is not an "end in itself", a company rep told The Register.…

Move 'unjustified', says analyst BT is to hike its broadband and TV prices in an inflation-busting increase that will come into force this April.…