The Register

Blowing up cash machines is blowing up Bank raiders are increasingly turning to explosives in order to break into cash machines.…

Independent report slams officials' cock-ups The UK Home Office's dream of a database state – in which Theresa May's anti-immigrant policies can be automatically executed through SQL commands – now looks less likely.…

But not quite in a Rise of the Machines way ... for now The Royal Navy’s ongoing drone exercise Unmanned Warrior has been a “transformational opportunity”, Rear Admiral Paul Bennett said this morning.…

'Speed and growth' needed, not 'thought leadership' as thousands axed Cloud whisperer-turned-venture capital influencer Zorawar Biri Singh has floated free of Cisco Systems.…

Hackers gonna hack Security spending is predicted to grow from $73.7bn in 2016 to $101.6bn in 2020, according to analysts.…

A look inside the DPRK First hand accounts from The People’s Republic of North Korea (DPRK) are very rare - only around a hundred outsiders get to see it each year. Simon Bickley spent two weeks exploring the secretive state, and have reported back with a fascinating, 8,000 word account which is by far the most detailed you’ll have ever read.…

POETS day is in danger for those without cash The Royal Bank of Scotland's debit card system has suffered a TITSUP, that is, total inability to support usual payments.…

Looking for lessons for FOSS from OX OX Summit Back in the dot com heyday, around 1999 and 2000, Linux and open source conferences were huge events: they were packed and brimming with excitement. There was optimism, new initiatives in every conceivable direction, and anything seemed possible. Move over, Grandad: everything traditional was going to be up-ended by open source.…

Cheer up, Europe, love. Cyberwar might never happen European enterprises are teaming with information security agencies and governments to run a pan-European cyberwar readiness exercise today.…

Interest rate rise going to kill public cloud kingpin? Sounds like wishful thinking Cisco is the latest member of the technology old guard to take a pop at Amazon Web Services, claiming that the public cloud giant’s financials mean “one hiccup” and it could go bust.…

Web retailer builds a better email opener Like so much in Britain, you can credit the weather for this. Ocado has rolled out AI using Google’s open-source TensorFlow to improve service at its customer call centre.…

Saudis: You want to do this? SoftBank: Yeah man. Saudis: Don't mention Yemen! SoftBank and Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund are preparing to launch a technology investment fund, to be based in London, which will invest as much as $100bn into the global tech sector.…

Time for suppliers to raise their game All-flash arrays are arguably coming of age, but in an early market, with lots of vendors jostling for position and making all kinds of promises, you need to be careful when evaluating options. While most of the historical challenges have been largely neutralised or at least made significantly smaller, there are still some uncertainties that need to be taken care of, so it’s important to seek the right kind of guarantees.…

'It won't happen to me...' but best be prepared Hacking is big news and we’re all susceptible. In the UK, hackers could face jail time under the Computer Misuse Act, but the question on many businesses’ minds will be where the liability lies if they are hacked.…

Look out! It’s gonna blow! Something for the Weekend, Sir? “Ooh, I’m so hot! And I’m getting even hotter for you, big boy!”…

When a public cloud provider's involved, things get tricky As I write this, Security Information and Event Monitoring is considered rather hip and cool. Everyone's talking about it, and the vendors of SIEM software are promoting the life out of it.…

'The problem with NHS IT is that it is just such a massive tanker' When Margaret Hodge was appointed chair of the Public Accounts Committee in 2010, she was the first Labour leader since 1997 - as its head is always drawn from the main opposition party.…

Tough net neutrality rules draw fire, too Government bodies in the Netherlands will have to use open technology standards for communications after next year, following a vote by the nation's parliament.…

King Battistelli faces another revolt from underlings Staff at the European Patent Office (EPO) have asked its administrative council to adopt new guidelines to protect them from the organization's rampaging president.…

Privacy watchdog calls for Digital Economy Bill safeguards Plans to increase the UK government’s access to citizens' private records without the public’s consent should be subject to greater oversight, head of the Information Commissioner’s Office Elizabeth Denham has told MPs.…

It's New Year's day. A critical casino app is down. So one reader started digging ON-CALL Welcome again to On-Call, El Reg's Friday foray into readers' reminiscences of things that went wrong in the night.…

Strewth! Apple fired staff from one of its Australian stores this week after they secretly snapped and shared photos of fellow workers and customers.…

The Social Network™ has slung more than US$5m to bounty hunters Facebook has paid security researchers US$5million in five years, after they found vulnerabilities in its platforms and quietly disclosed them under its bug bounty program.…

Which is clever, but 'hybrid virtualisation', not hybrid cloud, won't combat Microsoft Apologies if you've heard it before, but Airbnb is bigger than Hilton or Marriot, but doesn't own a single building. Uber is bigger than taxi companies but has never changed a tyre or burned a drop of gasoline.…

Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is New Brit Hubble analysis finds 2,000 billion galaxies, 10x previous count Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is Douglas Adams was right. Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is, because new analysis of data from the Hubble Space Telescope and other observatories suggests there are ten times more galaxies out there than previously thought.…

Full compromise over USB bacon-ed in to smartmobes Security researcher John Sawyer says a limited backdoor has been found in some Foxconn-manufactured Android phones, allowing attackers to root phones they have in hand.…

None critical, some embarrassing, all worth the auto-upgrade Google has patched 21 bugs in its Chrome web browser, closing six high-severity holes along the way.…

Sometimes you need to compute on the edge, as well as live there Dell's teased something interesting ahead of next week's DellWorld gabfest: a “micro Modular Data Center (MDC)” that can be deployed outdoors if required.…

Purple Palace buyout might be Ya-screwwww-ew-ew-ed Verizon has acknowledged that it could call off its $4.8bn acquisition of Yahoo!, after the Purple Palace fell victim to the largest user data breach on record.…

Gaping security holes, but a fix may be coming for Owlet Not long ago, top computer security researcher Jonathan Zdziarski was blessed with a new baby and did what a lot of parents do – spent money on gizmos to keep an eye on it.…

vSphere to be rented out on Jeff Bezos' cloud Amazon Web Services and VMware have agreed to work together to make VMware's vSphere server virtualization software available on AWS infrastructure.…

And Quantum is summoning them At one end of the storage spectrum is fast and flashy SSD storage and at the other – still – is tape; streaming ribbons of rust that are cheaper and more reliable than disk, and still selling for on-premises and off-site archive data storage.…

Punters will vote with their wallets – before they're roasted Samsung's Galaxy Note 7 fiasco continues to erode the South Korean goliath's customer base.…

Messaging conked out in North and Latin America Messaging app Telegram went wobbly on Thursday as one of its North American data centers closed down due to melting servers.…

Telco plans to board up seven US facilities US telecom giant Verizon says it will be closing seven US call centers and tossing the jobs of 3,500 employees in limbo in the process.…

Exec-only presentation encourages intimidation of staff A leaked presentation to Samsung executives has provided further insight into the company's damaged internal culture.…

Internet of Unpatchable Things Hackers are exploiting a 12-year-old vulnerability in OpenSSH to funnel malicious network traffic through Internet of Things (IoT) gizmos, Akamai warns.…

Modern Business Solutions keeping quiet A US-based data aggregator that trades people's personal information with the automotive industry and real estate companies has seemingly spilled the private information of more than 58 million people online.…

Revoked certs may linger for days, locking people out of sites Final update GlobalSign's efforts as a root certificate authority have gone TITSUP this afternoon – that's total inability to support usual protocols.…

New research combines neural networks with external memory Google's DeepMind has beefed up machine learning capability by coupling a neural network with external memory, using it to find the shortest path between stations on the London underground.…

So says Open Exchange CEO OX Summit European politicians are using a bogus terror threat to coerce their populations, says Open Xchange founder Rafe Laguna. It’s a year since we caught up with the always-quotable CEO, and he hasn’t mellowed.…

Bet they're glad they switched streams Barracuda can smile as another solid quarter's work, the appliance of cloud science as we might say, brings in revenue growth and profits.…

Ready for mainstream enterprise use, firm says Fujitsu's second-generation all-flash ETERNUS arrays are poised, priced and positioned to replace disk storage arrays in serving primary data to servers, it says.…

Education, not immigration, is UK’s dangerous burden Comment “If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what the very word ‘citizenship’ means." So British Prime Minister Theresa May told her party’s conference last week.…

National Cyber Security Centre wants you to come in for a reassuring chat The new National Cyber Security Centre is pitching itself to CEOs as a friendly government organisation which won't get the regulators involved after data breaches.…

Paid himself £40k when biz was insolvent, says UK.gov Anthony Hodges, a Basingstoke-based IT consultant, has been barred from acting as a company director for eight years due to mischief undertaken as his company went into liquidation.…