The Register

I want geeks, the future and a pony Sysadmin Blog It's merger day, it's merger day! Everyone please crank out a pile of speculation, research, facts, and innuendo about Dell, EMC, VMware and the ever important "what it all means". We will watch and participate as the entire internet completely overloads everyone's signal-to-noise filters by bombarding them with unprecedented levels of contradictory bullshit – rendering the topic meaningless.…

Sod this. Let's just start over Insurance tech biz SSP Worldwide has decided to “permanently decommission” one of its data centres, following a huge outage that lasted for ten days.…

Booted bods urged to stay professional for 'future win back opps' IBM is to pull the flusher on Technical Support Services staffers in the UK after losing a meaty ATM maintenance contract with Produban, Grupo Santander’s tech arm, which designs and operates the bank's infrastructure.…

How, by the numbers, Star Trek should – but didn't – go red shirt Star Trek @ 50 Thirteen films, TV spin-offs, millions of loyal fans and the ultimate of accolades for any work of science fiction – spoofs. Confirmation indeed of Star Trek's status as a cultural force.…

How Kirk and Co bested Star Wars Star Trek @ 50 So how many Star Trek fans does it take to change a lightbulb? As long as there are two, four, six or eight of them, it doesn’t matter. But you can forget about decent illumination if there are one, three, five, seven or nine of them.…

4.5G 'Pro', 4.9G and 3.9G! Oh come on... At Mobile World Congress this year, Nokia emerged as the most aggressively "5G-ready" of the big vendors, while Huawei was still stressing "4.5G", a term it coined, but which has been widely adopted. This week saw Nokia going one better with "4.5G Pro" and even "4.9G", recalling the build-up to LTE, when some vendors and operators were still majoring on 3G extensions, and insisting on labelling HSPA+ "3.9G".…

This week on Podcast Idol: a UK IT architect

Global Chinese restaurant chain serves old recipe of Darkleech with exploit kit sauce Popular Chinese food chain "Mr Chow's" has been caught plating up ransomware from its website.…

Accuses advisor of 'brazen scheme to claim highly confidential secrets as his own' Palantir Technologies says an advisor to the company stole its trade secrets and then tried to use them to claim trademarks and patents.…

He's sweary, but probably right on 'fundamentally insane' idea of driver/firmware disconnect Add another Linus Torvalds swearing incident to his long list of linguistic indiscretions. The Linux lord has unloaded on proposed new code in typically robust language.…

Japan's exascale Flagship 2020 looking more like Flagship 2022 after CPU design headaches Fujitsu's monster ARM-powered supercomputer, the Post-K, will miss its 2020 deadline.…

If Apple updates the Watch today, it's ignoring the wearable market's trend towards dumb Basic wearables are what the people want, according to box-counter IDC.…

As the gent says, 'this shouldn't work' Security consultant and blogger Rob Fuller has turned a USB SoC-based device into a credential-sniffer that works even on locked machines.…

Oh, and CERT's left a message or two Fortinet's load balancer has been found to include a bunch of vulnerabilities, and so far, the Carnegie-Mellon CERT hasn't been able to determine whether or not they've all been patched.…

Can LTE cut it for real-time pizza delivery? What drones need is 4G connectivity, Qualcomm reckons, and it's put together a deal with AT&T to prove it.…

Intel and boffins let cores talk among themselves without software mediation Intel and boffins at the North Carolina State University have cooked up a framework that coordinates core-to-core communications in hardware rather than software.…

NBN contract miss puts pressure on field staff Telstra's 2015 miss on major National Broadband Network (NBN) construction contracts is biting the carrier's networks delivery operation, and the Communications Workers Union (CWU) says there are to be 120 redundancies as a result.…

IoT == Immensely Obvious Threat Millions of internet-facing devices – from home broadband routers to industrial equipment – are still sharing well-known private keys for encrypting their communications.…

Hopefully the new biz has better luck than the current one Dell has reported near-flat revenues for its second quarter of the year, up just 1 per cent from the position 12 months ago.…

Trade negotiations will take years, says minister Australia reckons it can be the first to secure a free trade deal with what's left of the UK post-Brexit, with the two countries to create a trade working group next year.…

First set of security fixes issued for Nougat aka Android 7 It's a smaller-than-usual Android patch bundle from Google – just 47 patches for 57 flaws.…

Daytime TV reruns mourn passing of beloved advertiser For-profit US-wide college ITT will shut down in the wake of a government decision to bar it from accepting federal student aid money.…

Chairman Wheeler to propose agency act as copyright holder The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is to take another crack at breaking the multi-billion-dollar consumer rip-off that is cable set-top boxes by setting the regulator up as a copyright office.…

Can anyone leave this company without a lawsuit being filed? HPE is suing a former senior executive who absconded to Dell with a head allegedly full of trade secrets.…

It's worth how much? WeChat maker Tencent became Asia's highest-valued company today; not bad going for an app that launched long after well-established instant-messenger brands moved to mobile.…

Overlay malware gets angry if you try and say no Gugi, a bank-account-raiding trojan for smartphones, has been retooled to bypass Android 6's security features designed to block phishing attempts and ransomware infections.…

O2 bumps along the bottom. Shoulda tried harder with LTE EE has edged ahead of CK Hutchison’s Three as the most reliable UK mobile network, according to RootMetrics' biannual survey.…

Powdered metal is big business GE, the US industrial jack-of-all-trades, has pledged to invest a whopping $1.4bn in two 3D printing suppliers to boost materials science and improve manufacturing capabilities.…

£25k sought for judicial review against UK Dept for Transport Frustrated Southern Rail passengers – like there’s any other kind these days – have launched a crowdfunding page to pay for a judicial review against the UK Department for Transport (DfT) over its handling of the franchise.…

Brimming with personality from the Strategy Boutique Logowatch Fresh ripples of excitement reach us from the world of rebranding, after Deliveroo parked its bike against the walls of the Strategy Boutique.…

'Net pics last forever, login details ... send The campaign for a leadership candidate for the UK's Labour party, Owen Smith, accidentally tweeted a photo that showed the login details for the campaign's phone bank system over the weekend.…

Overwhelmed by post-Snowden crypto demand Encrypted communications collective Riseup.net has launched a funding drive, saying it has run so short of money that it might need to close next month.…

Eyes up Movidius, reaches for its wallet Intel is not just content to build the silicon brains that will power the Rise of the Machines – it is bidding to own their eyes too, with the acquisition of computer vision developer Movidius.…

The Times shrieks about a security breach, MoD yawns The Ministry of Defence has been accused of creating an Islamic State hitlist by publishing the names and ranks of Royal Navy, Army and Royal Air Force officers.…

Frisky older women reap positive benefits Men of a certain age who enjoy frequent sex are putting themselves at higher risk of heart attacks and other cardiovascular problems, US researchers have warned. And just to rub salt in the wounds, older ladies who still enjoy a bit of the other reap positive benefits from frequent nookie.…

Max continuous use of 30 days, may not apply to UK The European Union has published draft plans to force telcos across the EU to offer customers free roaming for at least 90 days a year.…

Some 12 years later we might have a working IT system The disastrous £16bn one-dole-to-rule-them-all Universal Credit programme may be turning a corner, according to a report by think-tank the Institute for Government.…

Not just mankind: Ladies love 'em too, we're told Humankind is still considering whether we could create sex robots – but should we, considering the ethical and legal questions arising from the creation of sex data and non-adult sex robots?…

Chilling on –70°C comet, leg stuck in the air... Fancy a beer, friend? The European Space Agency's (ESA) obsolete robotic lander Philae has been spotted lying on its side in the dark depths of Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko as the Rosetta mission nears completion.…

New, intuitive tech smacked by 'computer problems' British Airways has blamed “computer" problems for its inability to check in passengers worldwide.…

Hold on a sec. We've heard this one before NHS Digital, the body formerly known as HSCIC, has released a roadmap for the government's long in the tooth paperless health service plan.…

Divorcing Europe, custody arrangements, post-nups and more... The reality of running a new business or doing something innovative is that you're hunting for cracks and niches that others have not yet filled – spaces too small for the big girls and boys already in the market. And many of those niches are fragile, formed in part by chance, opportunistic spaces in the current markets and regulations.…

'Whaling' attackers fall for poison PDF 'invoices' HITB Florian Lukavsky hacks criminals profiting from out-of-control multi-billion dollar CEO wire transfer scams... and they hate him for it.…

Elon Musk must wish he could order media to remove mention of failures like China can It wasn't just a bad week for SpaceX: China's is mourning the loss of an Earth observation satellite launched on September 1.…

First responders coming? Google-mobiles will see them flashing and flee Google has decided it's a good thing if its autonomous vehicles know when there's an emergency services vehicle in the vicinity, and has scored a patent for doing so.…

Calls for new world no-hack order so we can fight the real bad guys – criminals United States president Barack Obama says the nation he leads has the world's foremost digital arsenal.…

We told you Pokémon are evil, but no, you wouldn't listen A Pokemon fan has brewed up a stealthy rootkit targeting Linux.…

'Яussian Yahoo!' may just have become world's biggest breach An eye-watering 98.1 million accounts, and their cleartext passwords, have been stolen from Russia's biggest web portals Rambler.ru.…

New beta kicks off with three big features plus 'various enhancements' VMware's kicked off a new round of beta testing for its virtual storage area network (VSAN).…

Resumes updates after four years because even retro-Penguinistas deserve security Adobe has reversed its decision to kill the NPAPI Flash plugin on Linux, instead deciding that penguinistas deserve some love after four years of neglect.…