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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.…

Virtualisation isn't protection: an attacker can escape containers Here's another reason to pay attention to patching your Linux systems against the Dirty COW vulnerability: it can be used to escape Docker containers.…

'Customers shouldn’t have to be the ones discovering these bugs!' says vExpert VMware says its NSX network virtualisation product is growing fast … perhaps too fast, because it's again been found to have a nasty bug.…

It's nearly 2017, and Word macros are STILL spreading malware The miscreants behind the Nymaim malware dropper have updated their code to include better obfuscation and blacklisting against security software.…

Even hackers are worried about the Internet of S**t backlash The success of the Mirai botnet was apparently a shiver looking for a spine to run up: HackForums has killed off its “server stress test” DDoS-for-hire section.…

Redmond reckons open source hardware needs Alphas to fork with, just like open source code Microsoft thinks the Open Compute Project (OCP) moves a bit too slowly, so has tossed out some half-baked server designs in an effort to speed things along.…

Amazon and Huawei sales up, everyone else is drooping It sounds like a big number, but the 43 million tablets that shipped in Q3 2016 are a disaster for vendors, according to prognosticator IDC.…

Study finds dial-a-car services also tend to overcharge women Passengers who use Uber and Lyft to dial up rides are often subject to racial and gender discrimination, claim researchers.…

Guess what it's over? Yep, copyright infringement Updated A subpoena can be served against Cloudflare compelling it to reveal the identities of two website owners, a New York judge has ruled.…

Native code spec gets buy-in from major browser makers Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla on Monday announced preview versions of WebAssembly, a low-level safe binary format designed to allow C/C++ code to run in web browsers.…

Even Adobe pushed its patch faster than Windows giant Google has slung a grenade at Microsoft by disclosing a Windows vulnerability before Redmond has a patch ready. The bug can be exploited by malware on a machine to gain administrator-level access.…

Contrarian blood-sucker continues to confuse Billionaire venture capitalist and professional contrarian Peter Thiel hailed a new political reality this morning with another public endorsement of fellow billionaire Donald Trump just days before the US elections.…

Lawmakers call for action over Rule 41 changes In one month, an obscure procedural rule tweak will come into effect allowing US cops and federal agents to hack any computer in the world using a single warrant issued anywhere in America.…

Bet shops ready for old layer 3 stayers, less for IoT swoopers, says Akamai "The race that stops a nation" could also stop betting agencies if the regular barrage of timely distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) extortionists utilise insecure embedded devices, Akamai says.…

Computer-generated horrors not just limited to Microsoft Exchange updates AI can learn to speak, drive, play games, and recognise faces – but can it learn to incite fear?…

Now with less-random information wiping Apple has once again posted an update to iOS, this time to address a bug it introduced with the last patch.…

Dubbed Linux/IRCTelnet, nasty's source code based on Aidra Miscreants have put together a new strain of malware designed to turn insecure IoT devices into a DDoS attack platform.…

Major medical issues diverted to neighbouring hospitals An NHS trust shut down all of its IT systems today and has all but ground to a halt in general after a virus compromised them on Sunday.…

If you believe that, I’ve got a bridge for sale... Lockheed Martin, designers of the super-expensive F-35 fighter jet, is working on a system claimed to reassure foreign customers that the US won't be able to read their pilots' personal data.…

External drive doubles console capacity and loads titles faster Seagate has produced an external 512GB flash drive for capacity-strapped Xbox One gamers.…

With 'I just casually chucked this here' magnetic stand Seagate’s LaCie unit has announced three Neil Poulton-designed Thunderbolt 3 desktop storage boxes, one being a flash drive moving data at up to 2.8GB/sec.…

In the 21st century, kids can be a real nuisance Customers of 123 Reg suffered more tricks than treats this morning when a DDoS attack hobbled the registrar's services.…

Silicon for machine learning that it hopes will 'challenge Nvidia' A Bristol upstart backed by Samsung and ARM daddy Hermann Hauser has raised $30m to make chips designed especially for machine learning.…

HPE adds Hitachi gen 2 VSP features to its XP7 array range-topper HPE's XP7 is an OEM'd Hitachi VSP array, which was announced in April 2014 as an update to the similar OEM'd XP.…

CEOs can hardly contain their delight American telco firm CenturyLink has announced a merger with tier-one networking business Level 3.…

And store more data, of course Analysis Disk drives are getting more platters so they can be fattened up with more data.…

Accompanying gibberish encourages disrupting US election The Shadow Brokers hacking group has posted a fresh dump containing a list of servers compromised by an NSA-linked group.…

Now IT bricks it: A 'series of extremely unlikely events' Exclusive We are two weeks into the outage issues at King's College London, and a communiqué from IT has warned staff that those issues won't be completely resolved for at least a fortnight more.…

OTCQX replaces delisting NYSE as its share trading body In an astoundingly fast piece of work Violin Memory shares were listed and trading on the OTCQX market a day after the New York Stock Exchange said it was halting trading in Violin’s shares.…

Too much 'tinkering round' the edges means transformation yet to happen The UK government could save £2bn by 2020 by overhauling its clunky technology and legacy contracts and shifting citizens to digital services, according to the Institute for Government.…

And break every computer crime law along the way A GitHub user going by Leo Linsky has forked a repo created by researcher Jerry Gamblin to create an anti-worm "nematode" that could help to patch vulnerable devices used in the massive Mirai distributed denial of service attack.…

Adds double-buffered rendering to stop terminal-era flickering Software developer and Google employee Daniel Colascione has cooked up what he calls “Buttery smooth Emacs” by adding rendering code to the venerable text editor that does away with long-standing flickering and resizing issues.…

Root? Horticulture? Geddit? Okay, on with the BSODs Entries are thinning out for our irregular roundup of Blue Screens of Death, so the series will take a break (unless, of course, readers flood us with amusing sightings).…

Don't fence us in, sings British Infrastructure Group Parliamentary bloc the British Infrastructure Group (BIG) has dropped something of a bombshell, calling for Ofcom to push roaming between mobile carriers.…

Wix admits to code sniff, says it groks the GNU vibe WordPress daddy Matt Mullenweg says the editor offered by drag-and-drop website-builder Wix.com “explicitly contravenes the GPL” (GNU General Public License) and “is built with stolen code, so your whole app is now in violation of the license.”…

'Scout' scope gives us an asteroid-misses-Earth-by-not-much horror story for Halloween NASA's pleased with its still-under-development asteroid-hunting program after it spotted a 25-metre rock that buzzed Earth at about 1.3 times the distance to the moon on the weekend.…

Crew threw it in a bucket of water before things got nasty Perhaps more airlines could install more phone pockets on seats: two more instances have emerged of crushed smartphones putting aircraft at risk.…

Certificate Transparency for Chrome will ruin phishing spots by Oct 2017 Criminals are about to lose a reliable attack vector for malware infection and phishing, thanks to Google's Certificate Transparency initiative that will force websites to enforce proper certificate security within a year.…