The Register

On the second hand... Amazon has launched a new service called "Certified Refurbished" to encourage customer confidence when purchasing second-hand consumer electronics.…

Intel's chief IoT security bloke puts forward one possible solution The best way of protecting us from Internet of Things botnets is to compartmentalise the entire internet, Intel’s chief architect for IoT security solutions has said.…

Storage stalwart flashes past lumbering Seagate +Comment WD's disk and SanDisk-boosted flash sales boomed as overall revenues in its first fiscal 2017 quarter rose to $4.7bn, up 40.6 per cent on the year-ago $3.4bn. But it reported a net $366m loss.…

The PC is dying, but better, richer apps might just save it Comment Yes, I know the new Surface kit unveiled by Microsoft (hands-on and roundup) is both lavishly over-engineered and ludicrously expensive. You know that. We all know that.…

Don't call it FTTP! Digital minister Matt Hancock has promised there will be a forthcoming government strategy to ensure Blighty's "full fibre future" is realised in the next decade.…

S3 worshipper's funds now stand at $79m Cloudian, the S3-or-bust object storage software startup, has passed a VC begging bowl around and raised $41m in a D-round of funding.…

'6-month jail sentence ... converted into payment' as part of tax probe A payment from the head of Apple's besieged Irish company was accepted by an Italian judge to settle a case against him or her as part of a tax probe into the firm, according to a report.…

Fantastic price, but connectivity more roulette than reliability REVIEW Members of the IT community rave about networking kit vendor Ubiquiti. You'll find praises sung both on Spiceworks and amongst vExperts for their UniFi devices. Unfortunately, my recent purchase of Ubiquiti's latest offering, their EdgeMax EdgeSwitches, has proven that Ubiquiti are also capable of putting out gear that is outright dire.…

Provider Schneider would've had hackers inside 'er A vulnerability in Schneider Electric’s industrial controller management software created a possible mechanism for hackers to plant malicious code on industrial networks.…

Will it float? Markets say nope Misys has scrapped plans to IPO, blaming market conditions. Earlier this month, the UK banking software vendor announced its intention to returned to the London Stock Exchange four years after it was bought by a private equity firm, Vista Equity Partners, for £1.3bn.…

UK.gov raises eyebrow at firms hiring 'self-employed' staffers A new compliance team which will address the "risks" associated with the changing nature of employment is to be established within HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC).…

But can they fund the deal? Fujitsu is in talks with Lenovo to offload its PC arm to its Chinese rival.…

Insides out examination for open-source fluffers OpenStack Summit Dynatrace is taking on open-source cloud tools with a performance suite it claims is “enterprise grade.”…

Perhaps it's time the cloud pioneers snap up Docker Storage Architect VMWorld Europe was held last week in Barcelona. We saw the release of vSphere 6.5, plus a suite of other products and enhancements to the core platform. There was also the announcement of a partnership with AWS, which had many (including myself) scratching their heads as to exactly what it meant. So where is VMware headed?…

Mark Dearnley was in charge of Europe's biggest public sector IT project HMRC IT chief Mark Dearnley walked away from his £185,000-a-year job because the private sector paid better, MPs heard yesterday.…

MacOS, iOS task threading was open to hijack When Apple shipped its security bug-fixes earlier this week, one patch mostly passed under the radar.…

No phone? No worries Paypal has patched a boneheaded two factor authentication breach that allowed attackers to switch off the critical account control in minutes by changing a zero to a one.…

Making devices secure by design requires more effort than vendors currently allow At the end of April my home was broken into by a professional who silently and systematically looted my residence of all my portable wealth while I slept.…

Popular RC protocol pwned PacSec Security researcher Jonathan Andersson has developed a tidy hardware module capable of fully hijacking a variety of popular drones and remote control gear running over the most popular protocol.…

It's ALIVE: Juno back online after reboot NASA's Juno space probe has successfully rebooted after a recent Jupiter fly-by was disrupted by an unexpected “safe-mode” event.…

ARM vs. x86 can wait as first decent Xeon alternatives in ages pressure Chipzilla AMD has deployed a team of folks to charm enterprise server users ahead of the debut of its Zen designed-from-scratch x86 processor microarchitecture and the message they're sending is that the new silicon represents a chance to supersize servers.…

'Don't buy rubbish Webcams', carrier tells customers StarHub in Singapore is the latest large network to get hammered with attacks on its DNS infrastructure – apparently by compromised kit owned by its customers.…

But it did beat the street as vSphere sales held, new products grew, cloud strategy worked, desktops drooped a bit If VMware is a legacy software company soon to be killed by cloud, you may want to find more more legacy companies in which to invest, because Virtzilla has just posted another another quarter in which its core virtualisation products helped it to beat guidance for earnings and revenue.…

Buffer overruns, remote code execution, you know the drill LibTIFF has three bugs that let booby-trapped files pwn a target - and only two of them have been patched.…

DNS really needs to be fixed if it can be taken out by 100,000 home devices With more time to analyse its logs, DNS provider Dyn reckons about 100,000 Mirai-infected home web-connected gadgets knocked it out last Friday.…

No worries, just plug your old earbuds into the… oh, right Apple is going to miss its own deadline for shipping the AirPods wireless headphones.…

Borked two factor authentication also fixed Joomla! has revealed it's patched twin critical flaws allowing attackers to bypass rules and create elevated privilege accounts.…

And Paint 3D – the emoji killer Hands on After sitting through two hours of presentations, Microsoft has let journalists loose on the new kit it has announced, and the results are surprisingly good – at least from a hardware perspective.…

IndexedDB API 2.0 spec has reached draft form. Contain yourself, and your data The Indexed Database API 2.0 has arrived in draft form, promising a variety of improvements in the way developers of web applications can store data in browsers.…

Pigeons, meet cat Listen carefully, and you can hear the sound of Australian mobile carriers briefing lawyers and competition economists: the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has opened its inquiry into mobile roaming prices.…

Children will die, companies will shout 'sue me then,' and you'll still be using Facebook IoT World Congress The future of personal data sharing is that “everything will become as-a-service” and nobody will own any property outright ever again, a gloomy lawyer told a wide-ranging data ethics discussion at IoT Solutions World Congress this afternoon in Barcelona.…

Chocolate Factory's chat app goes dark Google says it has now resolved the issues that caused its Hangouts meeting service to go down earlier today.…

New study: You'll get better LTE connections with Qualcomm-equipped mobes Apple's iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus come with one of two cellular modems, Qualcomm's MDM9645M modem or Intel's XMM7360 modem, depending upon the associated mobile carrier.…

Partners 'highly likely' to build and sell BB-flavored QWERTY devices Analysis The more BlackBerry explains its phone strategy, the more people insist there will never be another BlackBerry. Which must be annoying. Headlines a month ago that the company had “hung up on its handset business” were only half right. Executives reaffirmed to us this week that they expect to see more BlackBerry phones rather than fewer – it’s just that BlackBerry won’t be making them.…

Windows folks – how can we say this? UPDATE ASAP Adobe is advising folks to update Flash Player – as malware is right now exploiting a newly discovered hole in the internet's screen door to hijack Windows PCs.…

IT defense overall must be prioritized, says Intel Security’s Raj Samani Cybercriminals are spreading into the healthcare sector even though the price per stolen medical record remains lower than for comparable financial account crime.…

Ambitious pledges ahead of Article 50 negotiations Universities and science minister Jo Johnson has promised that the UK government will not "dip into the ringfence" of the allocated science budget to underwrite EU funding following Blighty's departure from the European Union.…

Phone staff overwhelmed by middle-class complaints Customers of John Lewis Financial Services in the UK are still being forced to re-register for the service after a "recent website upgrade" accidentally downgraded the service.…

Not-a-PC biz touts new PC and Windows 10 Creators Edition Microsoft today revealed the Surface Studio, a 28" drawing-board-like PC you can stick a hockey-puck-looking dial on to control software. The touchscreen super-fondleslab was announced alongside an updated Surface Book.…

Daisy-chaining for scale-up SATA SSDs Well, this is unfashionable: UK-based Integral Memory and Korean Flash storage provider Novachips have co-produced a SVR-PRO SATA III SSD suited for scale-up use.…

Campaign says #thinkrandom, but experts demand cyber-security rethink The UK government has renewed its efforts to persuade consumers to pick stronger passwords.…

What will happen if this momentum continues? After 20 years, Workbench, the graphical file manager for AmigaOS, received its first update earlier this month, and it's only taken a fortnight to get its first bugfix too.…

Modular Edge servers and augmented reality too IoT World Congress Beer-as-a-service at American football games is just one of the things Hewlett Packard Enterprise has brought to the Internet of Things playground, its chief IoT technologist, Colin I’Anson, told The Register this morning.…

Adds analytics + biz process automation as losses narrow Commvault has software-defined storage and business process automation in its future, as it announces a $600,000 net loss on revenues of $156.3m in its latest quarter. The firm is hoping this sets it up for a sustained turnaround.…

Workers wait with Whitehall whiteout The website for the British government has suffered a little TITSUP, that is a total inability to support usual politicking.…

New tech aims to boost security and range of quantum cryptography Physicists have produced "near-perfect" clones of quantum information that can be used to send and retrieve information securely over long distances through quantum cryptography.…

Float prospect of federated alternative to AWS Openstack Summit OpenStackers have sought to alleviate concerns that applications on rival clouds are locked in and not portable.…

Czech 'em out IoT World Congress “Our customer base is growing very fast,” Huawei CTO Wu Chou told The Register at IoT World Congress in Barcelona yesterday. The firm is long on smart Czech streetlights but short, it seems, on customers.…

Six feet under or on your album shelf? The choice is yours... The Vatican has put itself on a collision course with the rock music industry, after banning the spreading of human ash-ley remains.…

Begloved Dijonaise Mac fan attacked Apple store with outsized metal ball A bellicose Burgundian has been served a six-month suspended sentence and a pile of damages after being driven to distraction by a glitchy iPhone and taking revenge on his local Apple store with a shiny metal ball.…