The Register

Crypto so bad that getting around it is shooting fish in a barrel Ransomware scum abusing the protocol of the popular Telegram encrypted chat app have been wrecked and their malware ransom system decrypted.…

US$770 MEELLION union will spawn networking suite for fibred-up data centres Connectivity collaborators Macom and Applied Micro Circuits have decided to tie the knot, with Macom laying out US$770 million in cash and shares to seal the deal.…

Synchronise your watches before someone exploits DDOS bug, or nine other nasties The maintainers of the Network Time Protocol daemon (ntpd) have pushed out a patch for ten security vulnerabilities.…

Secure messaging app invites you to dive in and figure out if it's done anything wrong Signal developer Open Whisper Systems has quietly posted some important documents for developer consumption: the specifications of its signature verification, key agreement, and secret key protocols.…

Lies, damn lies, and performance test results We've seen selected benchmarks that show Dell EMC Unity arrays giving Pure a hard time – and, unsurprisingly, Pure says the tests are "obviously flawed."…

More jobs going, or going offshore, even if cash stash comes home tax-free Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has posted its first full-year results as a discrete entity and says it has ticked most of the boxes it said it would when it spun itself out and then started selling bits of itself off.…

No word on number of cards stolen in physical breach. Carders have spent a year stealing an unknown number of credit card numbers from iconic New York City entertainment venue operator Madison Square Garden, after breaching payment card processing systems.…

A little bit of social engineering, a little bit of lax physical security and a whole lot of pain You may run security software, encrypt everything, protect your very complex passwords and use two-factor authentication for everything, but the humble mailbox and the snail mail it contains can still see your identity stolen.…

2016 keeps on giving Twitter today briefly suspended the Twitter account of Twitter cofounder and CEO Jack Dorsey. For a moment, we all thought the big boss had been unceremoniously booted out of the troubled biz or had fallen foul of his own anti-abuse complaints system. But it was probably a bug or something mundane like that.…

Agents want to hack suspected Tor, VPN users at will – no big deal Senior US senators have expressed concern that the FBI is not being clear about how it intends to use its enhanced powers to spy on American citizens.…

About 27 per cent of the entire WWW at risk, we're told Up to a quarter of all websites on the internet could have been attacked through a since-patched vulnerability that allowed WordPress' core update server to be compromised.…

Boffins spot wealth of H2-oh-yeah just waiting to be tapped Settling on Mars may not be as difficult as first feared. NASA scientists have discovered a huge deposit of water ice just under the surface of the Red Planet.…

And all he hears is crickets, apparently Billionaire contrarian and Donald Trump fancier Peter Thiel is reportedly having little success trying to get Silicon Valley to choke down its values and join a tech transition team designed to help the president-elect get up to speed.…

Warren, Bernie, Wyden push for changes before January Leading Democrat senators are pushing the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to address a number of hot topics, including zero rating and the use of the Stingray cellphone-tracking technology, before the Trump Administration takes over in January.…

Venerable vendor will provide ready-to-bury VDSL boxen Nearly 20 years after it was a supplier to Optus' hybrid fibre coax build, Australian comms-kit-maker NetComm will help replace the network.…

Packet loss equals knackered broadband service for some For the past nine hours or so today, bungling Brit broadband ISP Plusnet's internet service has been rather wobbly – with network packet loss wrecking some connections.…

Preferential E-3 visa deal likely to come under scrutiny for labor and free trade reasons In January 2016, the United States changed the rules of the E-3 visa to make it easier for skilled Australians working in the USA to stay there for longer. And yesterday President-elect Donald Trump announced he would “direct the Department of Labor to investigate all abuses of visa programs that undercut the American worker.”…

Software nasty also uses steganography to inject poison payload A Trojan targeting US healthcare organizations attempts to avoid detection by going to sleep for prolonged periods after initial infection, security researchers warn.…

Eight claims dismissed with prejudice Veeam has defeated two four-year-old legal challenges from Symantec, initiated before Symantec split from Veritas and its data protection software.…

Mass-client borkage leaves netizens SMH over SMTP An unknown issue affecting Microsoft's free email service Outlook has left users' email clients borked.…

Patient data access concerns prompts ICO probe DeepMind Health, the healthcare arm of the artificial intelligence business owned by Google, has signed a deal with the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust to provide an app called Streams.…

5 processor types, 4 basic form factors in server gallimaufry Backgrounder HPE has the biggest cojones in the server business, bending tin, designing silicon and pushing photonics, all the while mixing it in the rough and tumble of the COTS jungle.…

Simplicity is good, but what else can you do? In a world of complex technologies and unforgiving business environments, simplicity in IT is good.…

Uncle Sam goes crackers for hackers Security experts reckon the US government’s newly unveiled "Hack the Army" bug bounty programme may usher in greater co-operation across the whole arena of security research.…

Flash array backup jungle receives a new message from Mr Tambourine Man Flash array supplier Pure Storage and disk-based backup vendor ExaGrid want users to have Veeam backup software protect FlashArray data with ExaGrid's arrays.…

Sorry, data, the holiday's cancelled IBM is expanding its UK data centre footprint, tripling the number of facilities in the region.…

The five deny all wrongdoing The five officers from South Yorkshire Police accused of using a copper 'copter to record people who were naked or having sex will contest the allegations at their trial next year.…

Law enforcement dents cybercrime networks A pan-European crackdown has resulted in the arrest of 178 suspected money mules.…

Park your legacy apps here, they'll feel right at home Microsoft plans to emulate x86 instructions on ARM chips, throwing a compatibility lifeline to future Windows tablets and phones.…

Tales from the antitrust crypt Microsoft is offering to crack open access to LinkedIn to secure European Commission approval for its $26bn purchase of the social network for suits.…

Tuchen tells El Reg what's wrong with the per-core software pricing model Interview Founded in France in 2005, Talend made its initial public offering on the NASDAQ in July, listing as a French company although it's now headquartered in Redwood City, south of San Francisco.…

EU should not be 'too restrictive' with data protection law EU countries must not be too restrictive in how they apply EU data protection laws or risk damaging the development of big data projects, German chancellor Angela Merkel has said.…

'That there London gets all the speeds' More than half the population does not believe it is has access to superfast broadband – despite the government promising that 95 per cent of the country will have 24Mbps next year.…

Hold it, hold it, hold it – now sell it! Falling sales, burning batteries – but not everything associated with smartphones is bad…

Now stop wasting our time Veeam has defeated two four-year-old legal challenges by Symantec, initiated before it split from Veritas and its data protection software.…

Watchdog should look to the users for help User rating and review services provided by online platforms can help reduce the need to regulate the "sharing economy", according to a report by a US regulator.…

Stop drooling, BT. It's not for you The government is to release £400m towards full-fibre broadband in its Autumn Statement tomorrow, part of its Digital Infrastructure Investment Fund.…

King Battistelli, of course, remains unrepentant The extraordinary meltdown at the European Patent Office (EPO) has started to draw political attention, with the Dutch parliament planning a debate on the organization and its ongoing problems.…

To be fair, the same goes for many humans, too Researchers at Facebook have attempted to build a machine capable of reasoning from text – but their latest paper shows true machine intelligence still has a long way to go.…

D1000 can be directed to drop its firewall, allowing access to panel over the internet Eir, Ireland's largest ISP, has tens of thousands of customers with insecure ADSL2+ modems that appear to be vulnerable to remote takeover.…

Sorry, no climate change. Just faster Glacier retrieval and new cloud hijinks with desktops-as-a-service-in-a-browser Amazon Web Services (AWS) has made a few price cut announcements a few days out from its Re:Invent shindig in Las Vegas.…

The 'pseudogap' state could be key to high-temperature superconductors Physicists may be one step closer to cracking the mystery behind high-temperature superconductivity, as they confirm that a new distinct state of matter forms just before a material enters its superconductive state.…

Vendors don't care, so government should step in The Democrats 66 (D66) party, currently in opposition in The Netherlands, hopes it can legislate insecure stuff away from the Internet.…

'Stubby' aims to protect your metadata from snoopers The Internet Engineering Task Force's (IETF's) years-long effort to protect Internet users has taken a small step forward, with one option for better Domain Name System (DNS) privacy reaching the test stage.…

Wi-Fi, routing up; SANs down Ahead of its acquisition by Broadcom, Brocade has turned in another quarter of growing revenue but slumping net income.…

Developers may have dropped keys to drop cops Anti-malware outfit ESET has baked master decryption keys into a tool that lays waste to the Crysis ransomware.…

Kiwis plan a CERT with heart, not just a shield for business Kiwicon Kiwi security incident responders are gearing up to go live with New Zealand's first computer emergency response team (CERT) next March. And in a change of tack for CERTs, New Zealand's will help all businesses, not just the top end of town.…

AU$19.5bn loan made on cost grounds, not due to concerns about the business model When nbn™, the entity building and operating Australia's national broadband network (NBN), announced it had secured a loan for AU$19.5bn from Australia's government, it looked like the network-builder had failed to convince lenders it was a decent customer.…

Doubles down on new cyber-defence plan, too, even though USA already has one United States president-elect Donald Trump has released a statement outlining the things he plans to do in his first 100 days in office, three of which will impact the technology industries.…

AirPort taken behind shed, shot heard Apple has pencilled in the end-of-life date for its 17-year-old AirPort product line.…