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Devs have 'NO F*CKING EXCUSE to knowingly kill the kernel', says Linux lord Linus Torvalds gave the world Linux 4.8 earlier this week, but now appears to wish he didn't after spotting some code he says can “kill the kernel.”…

Chocolate Factory, Facebook slam Purple Palace's sellout Since word spread that Yahoo! backdoored its own email servers for US intelligence services, we've heard from rival webmail providers denying they have put in place similar arrangements.…

Boffins offer audit ideas to improve accuracy and transparency An international group of security, encryption, and electoral academics believe Australia's Senate voting software needs an audit.…

No market is safe from search engine monster In just 90 minutes Tuesday morning, Google took an enormous leap into the hardware market, offering new products to compete with Sonos in the music streaming market, Roku in video streaming, Linksys in routers, Amazon in voice assistants, Oculus in virtual reality, and Apple in phones.…

That's why it's called secure and private Open Whisper Systems – the secure messaging firm set up by respected crypto anarchist Moxie Marlinspike – has published the results of a federal subpoena and shown that the Feds got very little for their trouble.…

Won't it be strange when we're all fully pwned? Researchers are warning about a newly discovered security vulnerability in a popular open-source JPEG 2000 parser that could let corrupted image files trigger remote code execution.…

Political foes and allies gear up for oversight fight The quest to discover exactly why a SpaceX rocket exploded on the pad last month is getting complicated – with politicians fighting over who will control the investigation.…

If at first you don't succeed … you know the rest nbn™'s second satellite for delivering wireless broadband to remote areas, Sky Muster™ II, is unexpectedly still on the ground.…

Well, OK, Chromium's pretty nice – as is this new Android smartie Hands-on Google is taking on the iPhone.…

But but but we broke no laws, troubled web giant insists Internet has-been Yahoo! has stressed it broke no US laws when it apparently insecurely backdoored its email systems for the NSA or FBI.…

Canalys chief warns traditional hardware skills could die out Channel Forums The world’s largest cloud players are in danger of becoming too big to fail, the boss of Canalys warned today.…

Network provider stumbles, drops voice traffic Backbone carrier Level 3 says it is investigating the cause of an outage that took out its services in North America.…

Campaign for Real Minerals, queue here Apple claims its iPhone is the world’s most popular digital camera, but perhaps it isn’t as robust as it should be.…

Come hither if your thing is VDI and biz analytics Hyper-converger Scale Computing is adding business applications to its offerings with virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and business analytics available to its small and medium business customers.…

Heavy lifting work done and dusted Hewlett Packard Enterprise is sat on pile of cash that will be used to fund “tuck-in” buyouts, with cloud services a potential hunting ground, the company’s number two has told The Register.…

Apparently your flesh is the equivalent of a 1950s modem Computer science researchers at the University of Washington are developing a technology to securely send data through the human body rather than wires or the air.…

Any intelligence would be a start, grumble partners CCF Artificial intelligence will make the tech channel a happier place by removing much of the tedious grinding interaction that poisons relationships between vendors, distributors and partners, Lenovo’s boss claimed today.…

Make it easier on everyone When you get to a certain age, and you've been in the IT industry for enough years, you start to get an idea of what auditors are looking for when they descend on you and ask you pointed questions about your systems.…

Is iPhone fire first sign of the Apocalypse? An American student's iPhone has exploded in his pocket - the latest in a global wave of smartphone combustions increasingly suggesting one of the seven signs of the modern Apocalypse is upon us.…

'Compete on products, not management interface' LinuxCon Berlin Huawei today announced OpenSDS, an open-source project to replace vendor-specific storage controllers and says it has the weight of world number three Dell EMC behind it.…

Join us in London Roundtable On the afternoon of Oct 12, in central London, we’ll be gathering a select group of senior IT leaders together to discuss the changing nature of end user computing.…

You mean BSODs? Actually, no If you were to design a client operating system with the goal of being used by two billion people, what would it look like?…

Virtual SAN get-out for some ... believe the hype Comment A rising tide lifts all boats and the Nutanix IPO signals that all the hyper-converged infrastructure product boats are going to get a lift. Where does that leave software-defined storage (SDS) – stranded on a mudbank?…

Oh, what japes! We are indebted to "Lourdes" for this tweet.…

Oh, and that HP split? That was me, adds Texan supremo Michael Dell shrugged off the threat from the public cloud this morning, suggesting that many users will eventually realise running a server on Amazon is a lot more expensive than actually owning one.…

'Opened door to unknown world where matter can assume strange states' A trio of British scientists working in US universities have been awarded this year's Nobel prize for physics.…

Plus: Ethernet I/O device's web app 'fails to sanitise user input' Multiple vulnerabilities in MOXA ioLogik controllers placed industrial facilities at risk if they do not apply patches.…

Redmond snuffs out its only promising wearable “Devices come and go,” mused Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella this March, discussing the wearables market. Now Nadella can notch up another hardware kill. Microsoft, the only enterprise vendor with a wearable platform, has confirmed it has no plans to launch a third version of its activity wearable, the Microsoft Band.…

Has Assange just trolled us all? Julian Assange has said WikiLeaks intends to publish documents ahead of the presidential race between Clinton and Trump that will include "significant" material about how the US election operates.…

'Intellectual property crime does not pay' says FACT head Two fraudsters who supplied fake Premier League football broadcast viewing cards to pubs and betting shops have been ordered by a court to stump up nearly £1m.…

'Not convinced Microsoft is committed long term to the OS' Lenovo will not build smartmobes running on Microsoft’s Windows operating system because it doubts the software giant’s long term commitment to the market.…

Overview of comet-chaser's mission It has been an epic journey, much more than 12 years in the making, but Rosetta has gone out in a blaze of glory. The final commands were uploaded to the spacecraft mid-morning on September 29 – and now there is no going back. Rosetta was programmed to touch down on comet 67P some time in the late morning of September 30.…

CND: Meh, come to protest against austerity The United Kingdom is to get a new fleet of nuclear-powered submarines to deter Soviet President Brezhnev from invading West Germany, the Defence Secretary announced on Saturday.…

Take back control... that's the plan, right? Analysis At this week’s Conservative Party Conference there will be a lot of talk about making Brexit happen, putting the “Great” back in Britain, and taking back control of our laws. However, there is one law where the government is reluctant to express much enthusiasm for sovereignty at all; it is the Computer Misuse Act (CMA) 1990.…

The React/Node platform makes Walmart's website sing @WalmartLabs – which practices deviant punctuation and develops software for the retail giant that bears its name – on Monday released Electrode, an open-source platform for building universal React/Node.js applications.…

European project to clean up software hits halfway point Midway through SUPERSEDE, the EU three-year project backed by €3.25m in funding to make software better, software still sucks.…

European project to clean up software hits halfway point Midway through SUPERSEDE, the EU three-year project backed by €3.25m in funding to make software better, software still sucks.…

Hyper-converged version has 192 servers in 3U Kaleao is a startup developing ARM-based servers and hyper-converged appliances under a KMAX brand. Its marketing-speak says it has a “true convergence” approach, it involves “physicalization” and there is a “microvisor” – oh dear, what does this mean?…

Up to half a million downloads clocked for one poision app. More than 400 malicious apps from a single attacker have been successfully uploaded to the Google Play store, with one downloaded up to half a million times, Trend Micro malware researcher Echo Duan says.…

Nation-state attackers probably pwn you anyhow This one needs the words “Don't Panic” in large friendly letters on the cover: privacy researchers have worked out that Tor's use of the domain name system (DNS) can be exploited to identify users.…

Do try this at home – but carefully The SANS Institute is hoping sysadmins can help it to do what vendors won't: improve Internet of Things security.…

'Complete compromise': DIY admin, or DoS your victim Researchers with Digital Defence have reported six dangerous vulnerabilities in EMC's VMAX product line that can grant remote attackers arbitrary command execution with root privileges.…

Implementation a bit slack British developer Ross McKillop says Apple's implementation of URL previews leaks users' IP address and operating system information to websites.…

NFV tie-up puts Samsung software on HPE kit HPE and Samsung are getting together to give carriers a shove towards a more cloudy future.…

Musk's chief competitor gets a visit from investigators In its search for the reason behind last month's explosion that destroyed its Falcon 9 rocket, SpaceX has vowed to leave no stone unturned. Now one of its staffers may be taking things a little too far.…

Having conquered social networking and disease, Zuck sets his sights on flea markets Facebook is looking to kill yet another reason to ever leave its walled garden with the launch of a classifieds service.…

US NRL does the arithmetic Vid Whether it's a satellite breaking up or the detritus of a launch, the whole space community agrees that space junk is a huge problem.…

Data slurper slurped is the best we can tell Salesforce is buying data aggregator and analytics outfit Krux for US$700m in cash and shares.…

'We have to destroy competition in order to save it', whine startups The favourite exit strategy for Australian retail “disruptors”, get yourself acquired by Woolworths or Coles, is under threat – and startupville isn't happy.…

Not even pro Bono For the second time in three weeks, delegates are flooding into San Francisco for a big conference – last month it was Oracle OpenWorld and now the Salesforce Dreamforce conference kicks off on Tuesday.…