The Register

Indepedence up in smoke Struggling London-based managed service provider (MSP) Adapt has fallen into the arms of acquisitive US firm Datapipe for an undisclosed amount.…

Boffins mull a new way of historic dating An archaeologist and an astrophysicist have discovered a new method of timekeeping that could reset key historic dates by inspecting ancient radioactive tree rings.…

Long-awaited tech 'now available in volume' IDF16 Intel is now apparently beginning volume shipments of its Silicon Photonics networking technology, which uses light through thin glass fibers to replace copper wires.…

EMC not a leader - yet - and Pivot3 in the top 3 Surprise, surprise: EMC is not top of the hyper-converged charts … yet.…

And some folks flinging malware are prowling about too A new wave of targeted attacks against corporations in multiple countries around the world has been launched. The so-called "Operation Ghoul" attacks use the tactics of cyberspies but are more likely to be the work of profit-motivated cybercrooks, according to Kaspersky Lab.…

Keep those multi-billion dollar fabs pumping

Smarter, leaner update Microsoft has begun to roll out the Anniversary Update of Windows 10 to phones.…

Hyper-converged gear QoS extended Ageing startup Pivot3 has added policy-driven data protection to its hyper-converged systems.…

This would be funny if it wasn't worth 31 years of non-existent Brexit NHS funding There has been yet another delay in the ongoing saga of cash-burning that is the UK’s national smart meter initiative.…

Really? The digital ad biz is hoping that ad-blocking has reached a plateau in the UK, after its rolling survey of users failed to detect an increase. The IAB's July poll, conducted by YouGov, found that 21.2 per cent of the sample used prophylactics, down from 21.7 per cent in February.…

Flings lawsuit at capital's transport regulator Uber is embroiled in another legal battle over Transport for London’s new rules, which will require all drivers to take a compulsory English test.…

BMW battered with giant sausage, says police report German police were called to an outbreak of sausage-related violence this week, after a man used a mega wurst to inflict serious damage on a BMW.…

Doesn't need so many backend staff in post-tin world Cisco is rumoured to be laying off up to 14,000 staff - nearly 20 per cent of its global workforce - part of a shift toward becoming a software-focused biz.…

President: Where we're going, there are no steering wheels Ford has claimed that it will be mass-producing a self-driving car by 2021.…

If Cerber can do it... Cybercrooks are harnessing the “ransomware-as-a-Service” (RaaS) business model to mount a new scam.…

Want to pump files to the cloud? Go right ahead Nasuni has added file sync and share to its cloud storage gateway.…

Shift from supercomputer to mobile continues Analysis Artificial intelligence and machine learning engines are underpinning many emerging applications and services, from making sense of big data for enterprises, to supporting hyper-personalized consumer content, or virtual reality gaming.…

Military kit firm's Radway Green factory tweaks its bullet designs Interview BAE Systems is, for the first time in many years, offering new types of small arms ammunition to the armed forces. It all boils down to achieving better penetration and pleasing the customer.…

Hacker's supple wrist plants new imagery in and streams data from Hobbit game Security pro Mark Lachniet has stamped himself as a p0wnball wizard by cracking a commercial pinball machine.…

Net scum fall hook, line and sinker for infected .ZIP file Vengeful security boffin Ivan Kwiatkowski has infected the computer of an Indian tech support scammer with the Locky ransomware.…

Systems can be roped into amplification attacks Sysadmins are making mistakes configuring and managing DNSSec, and it's leaving systems that should be secure open to exploitation in DNS reflection attacks.…

RIG, Sundown, deployed in Java campaign. Web pests have taken an unusal step and delivered two competing exploit kits for the price of one.…

Xeon Phi vs. GPU comparison needs a level playing field Nvidia has fired its latest salvo in the ongoing “benchmark wars”, accusing Intel of fudging Knights Landing (Xeon Phi) comparisons to GPUs.…

Both its users, sorry, handsets are safe It may now live in the frozen wastes of the “other” in smartmobe market share sales charts, but Blackberry has moved faster on Quadrooter than the rest of the Android OEMs.…

Big data network analytics platform gets the open-source embrace The Linux Foundation has added the Platform for Network Data Analytics – aka PNDA – to its stable of officially supported projects.…

Claimed NSA hacker outfit Equation group confirmed to be breach victim. One of the most interesting hacks in recent memory is almost certain to be a compromise of infrastructure operated by an ultra-elite hacking group thought to be the United States' National Security Agency.…

NASA's bean-counters okay US$1.4 billion rock-munching space robot NASA has pressed the “Go” button for its Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM).…

Protocols pwned, but patches parachuted for many popular platforms For the many people that dislike corporate proxies, this probably won't be much of a surprise: a bunch of environments are vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks.…

Someone's impersonating the likes of Linus Torvalds with attacks via keyservers The issue of short PGP IDs is back on the agenda, with unknown scammers spoofing identities like Linus Torvalds and Tor core developer Isis Agora Lovecruft.…

New South Wales grasps Google's gear in its one-stop-services-shops The Australian State of New South Wales (NSW) has adopted Android Pay at is “Service NSW” one-stop-services-shops.…

Plus other developer kits: Joule and Euclid IDF16 Intel has a bunch of new and updated hardware kits for engineers to toy with and use to build prototypes – from a DIY drone kit to a bunch of beefy Internet of Things packages.…

You're fired – into space NASA has confirmed that the Russian Federal Space Agency Roscosmos is mulling whether or not to continue staffing the International Space Station with its usual compliment of astronauts.…

GE and Intel among big winners in security spend spree The US Department of Energy (DOE) has awarded $34m in funding to pay for 12 programs aimed at improving the security of the US power grid.…

We do know it assessed 12 gov data-matching ideas last year, but the code is voluntary Is that good or bad? Who can say: compliance with the guidelines is voluntary The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) received a dozen requests to review data matching programs in the last financial year, The Register has learned.…

Okay. You wanna play rough, Samsung? Okay IDF16 Intel has vowed to open up its new all-in-one Project Alloy virtual reality headset, unveiled today at its Developer Forum in San Francisco.…

Groups argue interceptors not just a privacy risk; they also throttle communications Three civil rights groups have filed a complaint with the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) over the use of Stingray devices by the Baltimore Police Department (BPD).…

Botnet harvests user data for spam and profit Microsoft-owned LinkedIn has filed a lawsuit in California against 100 unnamed individuals who circumvented its security technology to harvest data from its network of 400 million people.…

2016 is just full of surprises, isn't it? IDF16 Intel's chip fabs will roll out 10nm ARM-compatible processors starting next year.…

Telcos to begin bidding on space to expand networks The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has formally opened the bidding process on a spectrum auction that looks to raise billions in revenues and expand the coverage and quality of wireless broadband networks.…

We're a long way from the Start Menu now IDF16 First, it scrapped the classic Start Menu and gave us Tiles.…

Billionaires a-flutter in Silcon Valley bubble as Rubrik trousers their cash Bucking any notion of down rounds and funding droughts, Rubrik has completed a massive $61 million C-round – taking total funding to over $112m – and released its Firefly Cloud Data Management platform.…

'Boson X' related to dark matter? A team of physicists has released tantalizing evidence claiming that there may be a fifth force of nature, according to a paper published in Physical Review Letters.…

But 'pioneering paper' also contains some contradictory data, says prof A physicist claims to have created a sonic black hole to observe Hawking radiation and its quantum weirdness, all within the safe confines of his laboratory.…

Follows Foreshew-Cain out the door Janet Hughes, the head of the government's much-delayed identity assurance scheme GOV.UK Verify, is stepping down.…

Apple drops too, as Chinese shun tiddlers Only nine months ago China’s Xiaomi was being touted as “the next Samsung” - a consumer electronics giant with the breadth and ambition to create platforms or "ecosystems". The markets valued Xiaomi at an astronomical $46bn, bigger than Oracle or Coca Cola, and twice the valuation of BAE. But this year, Xiaomi forgot to do something quite basic: sell enough phones.…

'Either the government pays for it, or consumers do' Telco regulator Ofcom has admitted that internet service providers are not particularly eager to sign up to the government's Universal Service Obligation.…

Virtual reality: Because one meaningless and uncaring universe isn't enough If you don't particularly enjoy reality then you can look forward to not particularly enjoying virtual reality when the Oculus Rift headset reaches UK retailers in September.…

Worldwide Cerber ransomware franchise exposed Cerber, the world's biggest ransomware-as-a-service scheme, has evolved to become a multi-national franchise.…

Hadoopery comes to Coho's DataStream along with QoS Coho Data has added concurrent Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) to its block and file access on the DataStream array system, along with multi-tenancy quality of service.…

How many API calls does it take to keep 1 million users a day happy? Grindr is rolling out New Relic’s platform into its production environment as it looks to become a fully fledged “comprehensive lifestyle resource” for gay men and the men who want to meet them.…