The Register

Last refuge for purists Dig through the annals of Linux journalism and you'll find a surprising amount of coverage of some pretty obscure distros. Flashy new distros like Elementary OS and Solus garner attention for their slick interfaces, and anything shipping with a MATE desktop gets coverage by simple virtue of using MATE.…

Bright future. Are you sure, minister? Microsoft Future Decoded Britons lack skills essential for tech bosses, overseas students are facing a clampdown on UK study, and Blighty lags behind international R&D spend.…

That's the European Securities and Markets Authority to you Listed companies should disclose the potential impact of Brexit in their financial statements, the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) has said.…

We're getting better at fixing Microsoft's OS but not so much with applications Brits are getting better at patching Windows on their personal computers but worse at updating their applications, according to a new study.…

Cervical surgery left patient with nasty burns, sparks new gas therapy Mildly NSFW Tokyo University Medical Hospital has published a pair of reports explaining an incident that left a woman badly burned after surgery.…

It looks like users won't adopt it if they have to pay for it Windows 10's market share has stalled, according to all three of the traffic-measurement tools The Register tracks at the start of each month.…

NEC touts machine-learning system that can spot 'suspicious behavior' NEC Corporation, one of Japan’s biggest IT providers, says it has built an AI that can rapidly search CCTV footage and spot a specific person out of a million or more faces.…

Supply shortage to end around March, we're warned A biting shortage of NAND flash has upended the storage chip supply chain, forcing vendors to quote customers elongated lead times – in some extreme cases by more than four months.…

Hiding in plain sight An engineer has shown how you can sneak a tiny cellphone base station into an innocuous office printer.…

And explain Uranus's dark band Supercomputing boffins may have solved the mystery of how it came to be that Saturn's rings are so bright in the night sky.…

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit among big ticket sites possibly affected A remote code execution vulnerability in popular website backend performance tool Memcached has been found and squashed.…

Cops say net crims launched 1.7 million attacks from 15 year-old's creation. A 19 year-old Hertfordshire man has pled guilty to running the Titanium Stresser booter service that offered distributed denial of service (DDoS)-as-a-service.…

OSes need one algo for all machines, so Redmond coded for the worst CPU it knew Microsoft's made an interesting confession: Windows file compression is rubbish because the operating system once supported Digital Equipment Corporation's (DEC's) Alpha CPU.…

If you didn't patch, you've probably been p0wned already Attackers are already exploiting a dangerous privileged account creation hole in the Joomla! content management system attempting, with attempts made on about 30,000 sites in the days days after a patch for the flaw landed.…

When the nagware stops working, there's another way to get you upgrading If you can get Dell, HP Inc, Lenovo or any other PC-maker to sell you a PC running Windows 7 Professional or Windows 8.1, please let us know how you did it because Microsoft no longer sells the operating system to OEMs.…

Joins Mozilla, Apple in ban on less-than-optimally-rigorous certifiers Google is set to jettison certificate authorities WoSign and StartCom next year in a move that shores up wider efforts to neuter the two companies.…

Allegedly Cisco has designed a storage server that it claims is 56 per cent cheaper over three years than paying out for Amazon's S3 service. The networking giant also reckons it's the first fully modular server architecture in the industry.…

Still super committed, though, we're told Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Mirantis have laid off roughly 200 OpenStack developers in recent weeks, calling into question the appeal of OpenStack, the open source project for cloud computing infrastructure.…

They were promised cake – that should have been the first warning Exclusive Quest, the newly liberated Dell software division, rang in its first day as a standalone company by announcing a restructuring that included significant layoffs.…

Automaker says backup power saved the day, but monthly financial reports delayed Ford is working to recover after a fire at its US corporate headquarters briefly shut down data center operations and prevented it from gathering sales data.…

New terms kill reinstatement path for year-old plans Organizations running software from HP Enterprise would be wise to read up on their support contracts – there's a new policy in town.…

Say goodbye to better mobile coverage and hello to happy spies In a surprise announcement, the Swedish government has scrapped its plans to auction off 700MHz spectrum citing security concerns.…

But cloud-based development still looks brighter in the business world Software may be moving to the cloud, but developers have been slow to follow.…

I'm strong to the finish, I'm Popeye the vapour man The humble spinach plant has been elevated into a bomb-sniffing sensor by embedding carbon nanotubes into its leaves.…

One, you are irresponsible; two, you are wrong Microsoft has not responded well to Google's bug grenade, accusing the ad giant of screwing over netizens and getting its facts wrong.…

Former Royal Signals sergeant was caught using DuckDuckGo A disgraced former Territorial Army soldier who made indecent images of children has been given a sexual offences order after being caught breaching a previous one – by enabling private browsing mode on his iPhone and iPad.…

Earth to Silicon Valley: Nurse will see you now Comment Can you remember where you were when the Berlin Wall came down, Mrs Thatcher resigned, or – um – David Cameron "learned" some HTML for an hour? Perhaps the first two, maybe not the third. Yet in Silicon Valley's bubble, the latter signified a "Sputnik moment" for humanity.…

Google AdWords has been spewing software nasties Security researchers at Cylance have uncovered a malware-spreading campaign that uses Google AdWords to pump out rogue code to macOS users.…

Sod the locals, we've got a corporate social responsibility PR budget to blow Amazon has taken on a stalled wind farm project in Ohio to power its data centres because, as we all know, intermittent and flaky power supplies dependent entirely on the randomness of the weather are just what mission-critical data centres need.…

Tintri tossing out out chatbot-ready TOS automation, cloud, container support Tintri has updated its Tintri OS and is adding a vRealize Orchestrator plug-in, container and cloud support, serving notice it is to extend predictive analytics to include host compute and memory resources. lastly, it seems to be looking to add a chatbot interface.…

Time is money, Athenry peasantry Apple has requested that the Irish High Court hurry up in hearing a legal challenge by three objectors to its €850m data centre investment in Athenry, Galway.…

Middle path between cheek-turning and all-out war Microsoft Future Decoded Britain will strike back against nations launching cyber attacks on the UK’s critical national infrastructure.…

Slowly but surely, they're gearing up. But for what? China has showed off its new J-20 fighter in public for the first time along with two jet-powered unmanned aircraft, according to reports.…

Tin-rattlers punt cure for raucous neighbours Ever wondered why the Bose-style noise-cancelling technology can’t be made to work for rooms? Actually it can, but getting it to muffle sudden noises such as dogs barking or gunshots, so your sleep isn’t broken, and doing so at consumer prices represents a whole new set of challenges.…

Rumours abound of product lines ending – and layoffs too Dell-owned infosec outfit SonicWall is to stand on its own two feet as Elliott Management and Francisco Partners slurp the remains of the artists formerly known as Dell Software Group.…

£1.9bn for crypto, new recruits and spam filters UK Chancellor Philip Hammond is due to reaffirm a pledge to spend £1.9bn up until the end of 2020 to bolster the UK’s cyber security strategy in a speech early this afternoon.…

Crapita still cocking up The IT system that was to underpin the smart meter rollout remains unfinished as another yet another deadline whooshes by.…

Fibre Channel market entering the merchant silicon end-game phase Analysis And so a storage networking era comes to a close, and we have been here before. Brocade is reportedly up for sale, as it has been three times before.…

Continuous Lifecycle 2017: Call for papers closes in one month If you want to take the stage at Continuous Lifecycle London 2017, you’ve got a month to convince us that your take on DevOps, Containerization, Continuous Delivery and Agile is the real deal.…

No more, er, movies4u, pirates Thirteen more pirate sites have have been added to the list of domains that the largest UK ISPs must block*.…

'Totally different' Schneider Electric PanelShock vuln appears Security researchers have discovered another serious vulnerability in industrial control kit from Schneider Electric.…

Depends who you're asking Open Source Insider Firefox Developer Edition offers a fantastic array of tools for web developers. From profiling memory use to debugging WebSocket and other HTML5 APIs, Firefox DE is a very useful tool.…

It's a colossal waste, says basically everyone Opinion The deputy head of "Unit broadband" - a section of the European Commission dealing with “investment in high-capacity networks” - Herve Dupuy, flew into London to attend the Wi-Fi Now conference last week. He ran headlong into a combination of fulsome praise and dramatic criticism.…

Workflow and automation tool needs no coding skills, can run from your smartmobe Programming-lite service ifttt.com has won plenty of fans with its ability to link services and devices, then automate things with “if this, then that” statements.…

The ultimate goal: A room temperature superconductor Physicists claim to have developed a method that forces a non-superconducting material into a superconductive state, according to research published today.…

Veteran dev says timed sampling's arrival in Berkeley Packet Filter makes Linux 4.9 a match for Solaris' DTrace In 2004 former Reg hack Ashlee Vance brought us news of DTrace, a handy addition to Solaris 10 that “gives administrators thousands upon thousands of ways to check on a system's performance and then tweak ….production boxes with minimal system impact”. Vance was excited about the code because “it can help fix problems from the kernel level on up to the user level.”…

More container management capabilities, more security Apcera, a San Francisco-based maker of container management software, on Tuesday plans to update the Apcera Platform with capabilities to help enterprises deal with containers more effectively.…

Raytheon gets the job of delivering death from above at Mach 5 Raytheon has scored nearly US$175 million to work on DARPA's ongoing research into hypersonics.…

Loose spec mangles data, creates security risks The ubiquitous message-passing JSON format is something of an untended garden with plenty of security and stability traps for the unwary.…