The Register

Policy power-up makes us enterprise-strength, says Redmond Backup and disaster recovery are brilliant applications for cloud and Microsoft now reckons it has made Azure an enterprise-grade contender, at least for workloads and data already in Azure.…

Shake your tail feather or Redmond wrist-job will dip into your pocket Microsoft-backed academics have developed a internet-of-things wristband that will send donations to charity when exercise runs are missed.…

Brigadier General (retired) Gregory J. Touhill gets the job of Putin-and-China-proofing America US president Barack Obama has named the nation's first ever Chief Information Security Officer (CISO).…

Plans to make world better place … but first needs to sort its channel, local leaders A running gag in the the HBO sitcom Silicon Valley points out that every other technology company has “making the world a better place” as its mission statement. Add Dell to that list: the leaders of the company's Asia-Pacific limb yesterday used more or less that mantra as to explain the company's next moves.…

When even the pornographers think you've got a problem, you've really got a problem Security sentient smut site Pornhub has decommissioned Flash and will swap to HTML5 in a bid to modernise and protect its estimated 60 million daily visitors.…

Web giant will start labeling insecure websites insecure Starting New Year's Day, Google will begin labeling as "insecure" all websites that transmit passwords or ask for credit card details.…

Triple whammy of bugs in popular open-source platform Analysis The Xen project has today patched four security bugs in its open-source hypervisor – three potentially allowing guest virtual machines to take over their host servers. The other programming cockup allows a guest to crash the underlying machine.…

Congressmen threatening to derail IANA transition The US government's plan to hand over control of critical internet functions at the end of the month is heading for an extraordinary showdown next week, as Congress debates whether to block it.…

Campaigners urge watchdog to examine info snatch Facebook is facing an FTC probe after snatching millions of people's phone numbers from its WhatsApp subsidiary.…

'Unique' relationship with big shareholder questioned Influential investors are opposing NetSuite’s $9.3bn acquisition by Oracle for selling their firm short.…

NVLink, big bandwidth, but is it enough? HPC Blog IBM is mounting its strongest challenge yet to x86 hegemony with the unveiling of its spanking new Linux based S822LC system. What makes this system different is that it’s based on a new processor/motherboard configuration, complete with a sporty NVIDIA NVLink connector.…

Cash comes AFTER senior appointments for a change... HashiCorp has pulled in $24m in funding, which should give its founders carte blanche to crack open an extra bottle or two at its user conference in Napa, California this week.…

Confused? Don't worry, that's the idea Analysis The EU’s bizarre, home-brewed doctrine of copyright evolved further today, with a ruling that URLs linking to infringing material are not themselves an infringement, except when they are. Confused? You should be – and perhaps that’s the idea.…

Humble Pi most successful British 'puter in history Raspberry Pi has sold over 10 million units and has announced today a new Raspberry Pi Starter Kit to celebrate its achievements.…

Engineered, er, systems for, you know, 'stuff' Dell’s acquisition of EMC is large by several measures: a $67bn purchase price – the most ever paid in tech.…

Though tossing more than coins in the Trevi fountain could still merit a fine A 61-year-old Italian convicted of public masturbation has had the threat of hard time lifted, after judges declared the dirty old goat’s favoured pastime isn’t actually a crime in the country.…

Behold the ... er, most cat-friendly smartphone of all time Analysis Analyst outfit CCS Insight issued a report about the innovation crisis in smartphones this week – and Apple has done little to address this with an iPhone update quickly labelled as incremental.…

The dinosaurs that refused to die out Interview In a world of new “agile” network players offering over-the-top services, BT is something of a dinosaur, having been privatised as far back as 1984 after previously running as a state monopoly.…

INCA people warn govt it's falling behind on fibre comms civilisation The government must create an “ambitious strategy” for the majority of the UK to have access to a fibre-to-the-premise (FTTP) connections in the next 10 years and near universal coverage by 2030, the representative body for small "alternative network" providers.…

'No detectable impact' on consumer cash splash after vote to leave EU The UK's vote to leave the European Union has not dampened UK shoppers’ gadget lust, according to Dixons Carphone, which has reported a four per cent year-on-year hike in Q1 sales for the 13 weeks ended 30 July.…

A fragmented franchise and tired direction demand a new medium Star Trek @ 50 Visiting the new Star Trek Exhibition in Blackpool recently I was reminded of my soft spot for quark – no, not the elementary particle or the curdled dairy treat but that ugly little alien who runs a strip bar in Deep Space Nine.…

Money, servers, power, control ... a sad tale Customers of analytics business Hitsniffer have been left in the lurch following its collapse after arguments over ownership of the service.…

Capture the flag romp will offer chance to do the thing governments everywhere fear Kaspersky Labs is launching a capture-the-flag event at which hackers will have the chance to pop a simulated power station.…

Whaddaya mean no new products? Colors are products too Smart home poster child Nest has responded to criticism about a lack of new products by... releasing its thermostat in three new colors.…

Judge slams bureaucrats, lousy evidence database for 'hampering' crucial investigation Dame Lowell Goddard, the former chairwoman of the UK's high-profile inquiry into historic child sexual abuse, has blamed "bureaucratic" officials and a lack of adequate systems for "critical delays" in the investigation.…

BitDefender's senior threat analyst Bogdan Botezatu despairs of IoT security The Internet of Things is exactly as bad a security nightmare as pessimists think it is, according to Bitdefender's Bogdan Botezatu.…

Realistic tech or lazy plot device – what do you think? Star Trek @ 50 Zooming through space faster than the speed of light is integral in science fiction if the story unfolds over different planets, galaxies and universes.…

BJM reckons striding out every week beats the booze risks It's probably just as well as the walk to the fifth pub takes a lot longer than the first four, because according to a four-country collaboration of sports boffins, exercise helps offset ethanol.…

Why bother buying a zero-day when casual piracy and old code can p0wn thousands? Net scum are still finding ways to take down users with a decade-old Windows Media Player attack.…

Cheaper than an acquisition, anyhow A report – and a job ad – have popped up suggesting that in the wake of its aborted multi-billion-dollar Slack acquisition, Microsoft's gearing up to roll Slack-like capabilities into Skype.…

It's 'macOS' from now on. Oh and watch out for scratches on the Darth Vader Black iPhone 7 Amid all the glamour and excitement of the the iPhone 7 launch, Apple snuck out a few other nuggets, some of them a little unhappy.…

Because everybody wants to run better exploding star simulations America's Department of Energy (DoE) has announced US$39.8 million in funding for the first round of grants in its Exascale Computing Project.…

At least he didn't use Excel as a database for credit cards We shouldn't encourage readers to waste their time like this, but it's the kind blend of wonderful insanity that springs from a sysadmin with time on his hands: an enterprise instant messaging platform that runs in Excel.…

How hackers broke into millions of US govt personnel files The congressional investigation into the hacking of the US Office of Personnel Management has shown how a cascade of stupidity that allowed not one but two hackers access to critical government secrets.…

Ex-Autonomy code smuggled out in Micro Focus 'spin merge' Hewlett Packard Enterprise will eject its non-core software business in what it calls an $8.8bn "spin merge" deal with UK-based Micro Focus.…

Chipzilla wing loses $3.5bn in six years – almost as fast as John McAfee in a strip club Intel is selling off a majority stake in its security software arm – formerly known as McAfee – to private equity firm TPG, which will rename itself to, er, McAfee.…

Defibrillator security saga will go to court Medical device maker St Jude has filed suit against a security startup that shorted its stock and publicized alleged flaws in its products for profit.…

Finally – an iPhone we can use, er, in the shower? Apple held court in San Francisco on Tuesday to announce updates for the iPhone and Apple Watch lines.…

Creative but only semi-useful snooping hack Uni eggheads have stolen 3D printing designs by monitoring the acoustic and electromagnetic signatures of a printer in action using a nearby smartphone.…

Upstart is everything that's wrong with Silicon Valley A judge in San Francisco has rejected a settlement between startup poster child Wash.io and angry former employees – because the company can't afford it.…

Too hot to handle, too rubbery for banks Refund checks promised by Intel after recalling its ill-fated wrist-burning Basis smartwatches are bouncing for some unlucky punters.…

Alan, why don't you just admit it and relieve the pressure in your skull? It's been a number of years since an Apple PR staffer secretly admitted to one of our reporters that The Register was on a blacklist.…

Payroll printer, HR's server - wahey... jackpot! Network Management Systems are far more easily attacked than previously reckoned, according to new research by Rapid7.…

Concerns about cybersecurity info sharing shared in interview The UK will “certainly be cut off from the full intelligence picture” after Brexit, Europol's acting head of strategy for cybercrime warned The Register. This comes after UK law enforcement agencies from the National Crime Agency to Police Scotland have been meeting with Europol in an attempt to mitigate this.…

Co-ords cockup causes confusion – but not calamity Finger trouble with onboard navigation systems led to an Air Asia flight making a two-hour internal hop in Australia before its scheduled journey to Malaysia.…

Office 365 and Azure go local Microsoft has opened the doors on UK data centre facilities for local customers with a chip at Amazon.…

The legacies of Wang, Prime, DEC and Data General live on in mega-deal Over the years I've followed EMC, executives have told me that cloudfather Joe Tucci would sometimes gaze out of his office window at the company's Hopkinton headquarters and ponder the company's place as the last surviving Massachusetts technology giant.…

Firemen were unable to approach the wreck due to electricity hazard The driver of a Tesla Model S electric car has reportedly died in a crash in the Netherlands this morning – and firefighters on the scene were nervous about being electrocuted as they fought the fire.…

Oh, British firms... you're not alone – 1 in 3 pwned firms agree Almost one in three firms that pay ransom fail to get their data back, according to new research from Trend Micro.…