www.theregister.com - Articles

Chandra spies orphan X-ray source Boffins analysing old Chandra x-ray telescope data have spotted a rarity indeed: an X-ray source that seems to be a black hole, but without a galaxy to surround it.…

Plans own European data centre for cloudy VM failover from new all-flash rack-mount NAS Taiwanese network-attached storage (NAS) vendor Synology is about to pick fights with several far larger competitors.…

Not by much and we know mass enterprise adoption is still to come Microsoft may have used its Ignite conference to trumpet Windows 10 now running on 400 million devices, but the operating system's market share went backwards in September according to two of three traffic-watchers we track each month.…

Established enterprise players are coining it, with hardly a white-box vendor in sight World spent US$7.7b on cloud in Q2, and that was during a soon-to-end lull in construction of hyperscale data centres.…

In theory this should mean two-day waits for sat snaps are a thing of the past Geo-geeks rejoice (and, if you're in a country that has such things, pray for your download allowance): Google is now hosting Landsat and Sentinel-2 data on its public cloud.…

White box is putting too much of the market in merchant silicon hands (and not enough in ours) Juniper Networks CEO Rami Rahim has looked at where the world of “white box” merchant silicon is going, and doesn't seem to like it much.…

Two year consultation ditched Look out, Australia: the government wants to turn the Triple-Zero emergency call service into a fully-agile, IP-enabled multimedia extravaganza.…

Nexus switch owners, pay attention Cisco's ongoing fix-all-the-things effort has emitted its regular weekly round of patches – and some, like in the NS-OX operating system that powers a bunch of its switches, deserve your attention.…

Filing tells NSA exactly where to send cable-sniffing divers The Hawaiki Cable, which would create trans-Pacific competition for those shipping bits across the ocean to Australia and New Zealand, plans to get its Australian landing in place by August 2017.…

Traffic-stopping hack could mean six years inside under Indonesian 'Immoral act' law Indonesian police have arrested an “IT expert” in South Jakarta after he reconfigured a giant LED video screen to show porn.…

Fine, go ahead, cyber-crook – cyber-steal my muffin cyber-recipe Online security for the general public is just too much bother. According to a study released on Tuesday by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and published in IEEE's IT Professional, people are overwhelmed with messages about online perils and have just given up.…

Successful escape capsule test and dual landing Vid + pic The fifth flight of Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket saw a successful blast-off for the crew capsule, as the company simulated an emergency escape for future crews.…

Cupertino's stingy communications strategy stops anyone from being sure Comment For over a year, Apple's software has been the subject of more derision than might be expected for a company of its size.…

Hey Cortana: It's all about the syllables Analysis One of the oddest things about this week's Google hardware launch was to constantly hear the same phrase over and over again from everyone in the same room: "OK Google."…

Finally, something that crosses the political divide Australia's famous two-party divide doesn't apply to our attitude towards the Internet: nearly everybody thinks the Internet is an essential service.…

When smart things go wrong Hands-on "I thought it was supposed to talk and tell us when the battery was low," my wife said. In retrospect, that was the first sign that all was not well with the Nest Protect smoke and CO detector.…

Flammable Sammy could bring about another recall A replacement – and supposedly non-exploding – Samsung Galaxy Note 7 caught fire on a crowded aircraft today, we're told.…

Pixel emerges as the One True 'Droid Comment This year’s bid by Google to fill your home with its tat collapsed like a soufflé yesterday – but at least one part will have a huge impact. In the phone world, the impact of its Pixel brand on its partners will be huge.…

Bloke, 51, worked at Snowden's old haunt Booz Allen An American who worked at the same intelligence contractor as NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has been charged with the theft of classified documents.…

Purple Palace twists words to wriggle out of its surveillance hell Updated Almost 24 hours after refusing to deny allegations that it allowed US intelligence free reign on its email systems, Yahoo! has issued a carefully worded non-denial.…

Another set of terrifyingly Orwellian use cases IPExpo Siloed databases will be the downfall of your Internet of Things venture, warned Avaya’s chief technologist Jean Turgeon on stage at IPExpo Europe today.…

For when you really fancy poring through that 'hidden' folder IPExpo Yorkshire-based "IT solutions" firm Oriium was hawking its CX:inSync spy-on-your-employees platform at ITExpo Europe today.…

Performance analytics make this fast array go even faster Big iron array vendor Infinidat has made its third major software release, adding compression, baked-in iSCSI support and enhanced array analytics.…

'Yes, but what does that actually mean?' ask alt-nets UK Prime Minister Theresa May has suggested her government could intervene in failing markets, such as rural broadband.…

New light on licensing plans Interview BlackBerry says it won’t license its brand and security hardened Android “to any Tom Dick and Harry” as it tries to maintain the value of its brand.…

Cheeky pair cuffed after National Crime Agency and Met Police team-up A pair of cybercriminals responsible for laundering millions of pounds stolen using a banking trojan have been sentenced to a combined total of 12 years in prison.…

Christmas tat-pickers wanted Amazon is advertising to fill more than 20,000 seasonal roles within its UK fulfilment centres.…

Details of carelessness disclosed with in-depth investigation of breach The UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has issued TalkTalk with a record £400,000 fine for allowing attackers to access customer data “with ease”.…

It's still not making profit, but at least it's losing less Micron has reversed its downward trend and pulled off a fourth fiscal 2016 quarter with increased revenues and decreased losses.…

Imagine a boot transmitting data about human faces forever, says Comms365 IPExpo “The majority of SMEs are bamboozled by the Internet of Things and how it will support their business,” Mike van Bunnens, MD of comms tech firm Comms365 told The Register today.…

Crap for average download speeds, though Data from Which? today reveals that London has the best 4G connectivity in Britain - but some of the worst average download speeds in Blighty.…

Network dropped calls because it was told to Backbone provider Level3 says an outage that knocked out VoIP service for much of the US Tuesday morning was the result of improperly configured equipment.…

IPO freely: Whatever you do, you can't wrest control away from Wall St

NVMe over fabrics vs direct NVMe drive = little difference Analysis How does local NVMe drive access compare to accessing the same drive over an NVMe over Fabrics link? Zeta Storage Systems has compared the two access methods and found... not a lot of difference at all.…

That's not including VAT The University of Edinburgh's supercomputer, Cirrus, is now being rented to businesses for their mega-performance computing needs.…

Among other things, Active Directory needs an overhaul Sysadmin blog What works for 100 users frequently doesn't work for 10,000. The same is true in reverse, however, there are far fewer vendors worrying about tailoring software designed for the enterprise to the needs of the SMB. True mass market software needs to walk the tightrope between both worlds, and very little of it succeeds.…

Will people vote the same way they'll claim to have voted on social media? LOL Analysis Facebook was in hot water this May over allegations of a liberal bias in its “Trending” topics feature.…

Well, you look like you're good for it. Have some products Analysis MaterCard’s "selfie pay" will be coming to Europe next year after trials in the US, Canada and the Netherlands.…

UK banks report 75 cyber-attacks to FCA in one year Concerns about the security and resilience of bank IT systems have not yet been addressed, a prominent MP has said in a letter to UK regulators.…

LTE it be, prays vendor Analysis Will 5G bring Samsung the network infrastructure success which has largely eluded it outside of its home country?…

Vulnerability scans miss most of the iceberg, startup insists Schrödinger's cat, as described in a famous thought experiment formulated to explain the indeterminacy of quantum states, sits in a steel box, at once alive and dead.…

Risk of malicious injections 'extremely low' allegedly Johnson & Johnson's Animas division has issued a letter [PDF] warning diabetes patients using its OneTouch Ping insulin pump that the device could be triggered remotely.…

Bling signature scheme might just improve privacy, too CloudFlare has backed up its promise to get rid of the CAPTCHAs that Tor users complain discriminate against them.…

We have the T-shirt. Plus Digital's 64-bit Alpha-powered pen Conference Couture Welcome to another edition of Conference Couture, in which we relive odd moments of technology history through the branded tat given away at trade shows.…

Open source software is here to help sat-watching hams Radio ham with an interest in free software and satellite signals? Pop over to the GitHub repo run by Daniel Estévez, and take a look at his GNU radio decoders.…

Alphabet sub's lounge-room assault omitted fondleslab, amid falling sales Google today announced new phones, VR kit and home gadgetry. But it didn't announce a tablet. And nobody cared.…

0.4 milliseconds? An eternity in quantum dog-years Bit by bit, the world gets closer to creating the quantum equivalent of a storage gate – a silicon-based qubit that can last long enough for general-purpose computing.…

Chinese hackers thanked for help finding flaws Google has crushed 78 Android security flaws in its October bug blitzkrieg, repairing critical core Android services along the way.…

Customization and abstraction in container king's future LinuxCon Docker is removing some of the hurdles to running its poster-child technology on various cloud platforms.…

MarsJoke ransomware tarred and feathered. Kaspersky has released a decryption tool that neuters the MarsJoke ransomware, less than a month after it was first revealed.…