The Register

You had one job ... Password strength meters used during web sites' signup process remain incapable of doing their job, says Compound Eye developer Mark Stockley.…

Plus: The misguided tale of the 20-second support response time that wasn't On-Call Welcome yet again to On-Call, our unimaginatively-named regular recap of readers' recollections of jobs gone wrong.…

Workspaces can now be scheduled to shut down and are cheap for half-time workers Amazon Web Services' “Workspaces” desktop-as-a-service offering can now be paid for by the hour.…

Nearline storage mystery deepens as Cloud SQL, Datastore and Bigtable go live Google's cloud has grown more database options.…

World's most unpopular browser, now with opt-in SuperStalking Microsoft is so keen to attract users to its Edge browser that it will pay people to use it.…

For now, anyway, as Australian regulator says it needs time to ponder a complex matter Apple has had a partial win in its attempt to prevent banks using iPhones' NFC chips for payment services other than Apple Pay.…

Devs challenged to train humanoid helper for red planet mission NASA has announced a million-dollar prize it will award to whomsoever can program a virtual robot to get stuff done ahead of a crewed mission to Mars.…

And the sound of robot drivers is something quite ferocious A California judge has rejected the nearly $100m settlement deal between Uber and a group of aggrieved drivers.…

Why bother with computer defenses when billions are at stake, eh? You'd think, with the amount of money the SWIFT inter-bank payment system transfers every day, that the group would be strong on security. Not so, says a former head of the organization.…

Database giant claims web ads goliath tricked court, Android isn't just phones Analysis Oracle says one of the foundations of Google's legal victory in the Java API copyright trial has exploded – and that means a retrial is needed.…

Filing challenges authority of trademark bod to extend deadlines A patent-holding company is suing the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) claiming an administrator's decision to extend filing deadlines has led to its patents being challenged in court.…

Filter-flinger suggests the FTC could even step in The developers of the banner-busting Adblock Plus (ABP) browser plugin say they will continue efforts to shield Facebook users from the social network's sponsored content.…

Wait, whaaat? This isn't supposed to happen According to emails released under the US Freedom of Information Act, Google briefed the White House on an antitrust investigation into itself, breaking a 40-year precedent of the President's office staying out of competition issues.…

Can't use your favourite OTT voice app? FTFY Cisco has partially put aside its rivalry with Microsoft and launched a new collaboration product that is compatible with Microsoft’s Skype for Business.…

Bennu.... no, not a scientology overlord NASA is preparing for its first mission that will see a spacecraft retrieve a “pristine sample” of an asteroid so that it can be studied on Earth.…

OpenSSH remoting will be baked in, too Microsoft has published PowerShell, its scripting and automation platform, as open source under the permissive MIT licence, as well as porting it to Linux and Mac, with an alpha build now available on GitHub.…

HipChat escalates the face Atlassian is adding group video to its HipChat service, but has promised that you can can hit the red button on overeager “collaborators”. For now, anyway.…

Two more quit before internal tribunals, one cleared of wrongdoing Two G4S staff who were investigated over a scheme to fraudulently meet quotas for responding to emergency calls within a reasonable time have been fired.…

Operators join hands for laboratory love-in BT and Nokia have signed a research collaboration agreement on 5G at the BT Labs at Adastral Park, Suffolk.…

More details confirmed ahead of 2017 desktop, server launch – and don't mention ARM AMD is continuing to drip feed information about Zen, its long-awaited designed-from-scratch x86 processor microarchitecture.…

And shifts its data center processor wing into its own Inq, er, Inc Qualcomm will today announce it has picked the name Centriq for its forthcoming family of 64-bit ARMv8-compatible server processors.…

Shadow Брокеры? NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden reckons Russia is the most likely suspect behind the leak of advanced hacking tools allegedly stolen from an elite NSA hacking unit. He postulates a complex motive for the leak involving gaining diplomatic leverage that wouldn’t look out of place in a modern retelling of a John le Carré novel.…

Android on Chrome in the spotlight Oracle appears to have opened its campaign for a third trial over its claims Java copyright was infringed in Google's Android.…

Flying solar panel runs off batteries and a 300W motor The Ministry of Defence has bought a third solar-powered Zephyr-S surveillance drone for £4.3m, and says it “performs more like a satellite than a conventional UAV”.…

Hospital combed for cause of sweet infection Pest control was called to Rockwood Hospital, Cardiff after elderly patients noticed honey oozing from the ceiling and dripping down the walls.…

20 is plenty Let's Encrypt has revised its rate limits to make life easier for large organisations and hosting providers who use its services.…

S1 shows you're snacking on something again. Care to tell us what it is this time? We’ve been banging on about Nutanix buying PernixData. Now Fortune’s Justin Warren noticed this nugget in an amended Nutanix S1 filing to the SEC:…

Profits rebound and new marketing boss hired away from IBM NetApp revenues dropped 3.7 per cent year-on-year to $1.29bn for its first fiscal 2017 quarter, ended July 29, but it turned a year-ago loss of $30m into a $64m profit as it reined in expenses.…

Woman nicked on suspicion of fraud A 32-year-old woman was arrested by the City of London Police last night on suspicion of attempting to defraud software firm Sage.…

So says Institute for Fiscal Studies report Analysis The UK could lose out on a 4 per cent boost to gross domestic product (GDP) if it was no longer a member of the EU single market, with particular repercussions for the financial services industry, according to an influential think tank.…

Locky ransomware running rampant, mounted on personalised phish The dangerous and as-yet-undefeated Locky ransomware is being hurled at hospitals across the United States and Japan in a 'massive' number of attacks, according to FireEye researcher Ronghwa Chong.…

Macabre video was a joke, but boffins promise better security MILDLY NSFW Staff at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) spend their days trying to prise open the secrets of other dimensions … including by staging occult rituals.…

Any regrets on the pro-BT stance? Nah BT's Openreach is the internet provider best placed to deliver the government's plan for a Universal Service Obligation (USO) of 10Mbps by the end of the decade, former digital minister Ed Vaizey has said.…

Slams 'questionable tactics to cause users to download software many didn’t want' The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has called on Microsoft to offer a “single unified screen” on which Windows 10 users can control how Windows 10 deals with their personal information and monitors their use of the OS.…

Boffins find interrupting users with pop-ups in the middle of things just doesn't work Developers, advertisers, and scammers be warned; boffins say your pop ups will be almost universally ignored if they interrupt users.…

Autonomous electric nine-seaters get a start from the Finnish Helsinki has taken a plunge, and let some (semi) autonomous buses out in traffic.…

Cloudflare says they just won't peer so it has to pay 17 times European data prices in Oz Content delivery network Cloudflare has outed Australia's Optus as one of the six most expensive internet service providers in the world, and says the other major local player Telstra is rubbish too.…

Attacker could log in to account without triggering confirmation text PayPal has patched a two-factor authentication (2FA) bug that could have let an attacker bypass its login processes.…

LED on 'Step-It' Happy Meal fitness tracker scalds child Burger baron McDonald's' short foray into the fitness-tracking wearables caper has ended badly, with a device called “Step-It” pulled after burning at least one child's arm.…

'Santa' will tell MacAdmins if code is naughty or nice? Google's Macintosh Operations Team has quietly been working on a whitelisting application for OS X .…

We like big blimps and we cannot lie, as the Airlander takes to the sky Video To quote Douglas Adams, “uglier things have been spotted in the sky, but not by reliable witnesses”: England's Airlander 10, nicknamed the “flying bum” for obvious reasons, has taken its first test flight.…

Versions after August 2012 are in the clear Whatever the source and whoever the backers, evidence is mounting that the Shadow Brokers vuln-dump is real: Fortinet has followed Cisco in confirming its place on the list.…

Bitcoin Core devs don't know about threat, advise usual signatures and hash checks Update Bitcoin.org is warning that the Bitcoin Core, the as-close-to-official-as-it-gets version of Blockchain consolidation software and Bitcoin wallets, may become the target for an attack.…

Switchzilla to terminate connection on 5,500 employees Cisco is reporting record financial numbers on the same day it says it will cut 5,500 employees from its payroll.…

Each State is doing its own thing and some are yet to adopt the new national curriculum Australia's schools have gone crazy for coding, but kids in different states will be offered different programs that may use some, all or none of the national Digital Technologies Curriculum.…

Tech giant rushes to fix firewall remote code execution flaw It's looking increasingly likely that the hacking tools put up for auction by the Shadow Brokers group are real – after Cisco confirmed two exploits in the leaked archive are legit.…

Report says carrier offered to pre-install apps for moolah Verizon has reportedly approached app developers about pre-installing their software on customer handsets in exchange for cash.…

Official cull figure not quite the 14,000 rumored Cisco will lay off up to 5,500 staff, or seven per cent of its worldwide workforce, from this month – the start of its 2017 financial year.…

Well, at least we know what our future cyber overlords' brains will be called IDF16 Intel is working on a powerful Xeon Phi processor for servers and workstations that is "optimized" for artificial-intelligence software – and it's codenamed Knights Mill.…

WebWatcher goes from chat logs to court logs The developer of a monitoring app has been ordered to face a civil wiretapping suit in the US.…