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New authentication for PCs gives passwords the middle finger Lenovo, Intel and others are aiming to make online payments more secure by bringing the Fast Identity Online (FIDO) biometric authentication standard to PCs.…

Nowt wrong with a good old HDD Storage Architect Recently I was asked to review a document that used as a reference a piece of work from Google (PDF) which talked about the need to relax the resiliency levels of hard drives and SSDs.…

Containers, containers, containers, containers, says Azure CTO (well, sort of) Ignite Microsoft announced the release of Windows Server 2016 and System Center 2016 at its Ignite event in Atlanta. The commercially supported edition of the Docker engine is included at no extra cost.…

We have proof. Or a Photoshop. You decide China’s shopping spree of premium Western brands continues and not just footballers. It’s snapping up technology brands, too - but with these brands some finesse is required.…

Turns to Intel Altera FPGAs IGNITE Microsoft is using Intel Altera Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) chips to speed up Azure services, according to an announcement at the Ignite event under way in Atlanta.…

Mountain View's motor not to blame, insists Mountain View spokesman A Lexus fitted with Google's self-driving car tech was hit by a non-autonomous van that is said to have run a red light at a junction, according to local reports.…

Integration Dynamics, CRM, Azure and AWS. Jumble words as needed IGNITE Microsoft and Adobe announced a new cloud partnership at the Ignite event this week in Atlanta in a really unclear announcement.…

Internet of Amazingly Insecure Tat? That's the one The huge distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack which wiped security journalist Brian Krebs' website from the internet came from a million-device-strong Internet of Things botnet.…

Beta keeps your Unity 8, er, hoodlum friend waiting outside Before I dive into what's new in Ubuntu 16.10, called Yakkety Yak, let's just get this sentence out of the way: Ubuntu 16.10 will not feature Unity 8 or the new Mir display server.…

Who needs a ginger sidekick anyway? Former Friends star Matt MeBlanc has penned a £1.5m deal with licence fee payers of the BBC to front up Top Gear for the next two series.…

Allegro vivace to andante to largo to coda Analysis The elusive hunt for renewal and regrowth at Violin Memory has moved into a new phase – with a product launch holding up sales, sales leadership change, and the CEO focusing on finding funding for the future.…

Even the Chinese prefer an Indian takeaway Asian tech giant Huawei is to start manufacturing smartphones in India next month, in a move that could signal China is starting to lose its shine as the world’s low-cost manufacturing sweatshop, with even native companies looking to expand elsewhere.…

Flash fantasia NetApp has comprehensively refreshed its all-flash FAS and hybrid FAS arrays, adding performance, capacity and scalability upgrades, and supporting 32Gbit/s Fibre Channel and 40GbitE connectivity. ONTAP also gets upgraded, with Azure support for ONTAP Cloud…

Remastered Turing-aided synthesiser tunes to make Christmas number 1? Audio Kiwi boffins have claimed to have restored the earliest known recording of computer-generated music, from 1951.…

Poor mental healthcare, internet porn also a problem confirms priest A Catholic priest has said virtually all his free time is taken up with exorcisms these days as he struggles to counter the tide of demonic possession washing up Silicon Valley and the rest of Northern California.…

It's always a good time for a skills update Promo Yes, Continuous Delivery. You have heard the hype, but how does it translate into tangible business benefits for your company - and career smarts for you?…

Finally! A solution to the croissant crumb problem French nationals, tourists - in fact anyone and everyone - may soon be able to get their kit off and walk through Paris - well, a designated area - without fear of a hefty fine.…

Upstart reckons it's positioned to take on BT Plucky Openreach challenger CityFibre has gobbled £5m worth of service provider Redcentric’s network - adding 137km of fibre to the upstart’s network.…

From Acorns to bedrooms Geek's Guide to Britain King’s Parade in Cambridge looks like the last street on earth to have anything to do with computing. On one side is an absurdly ornate college gatehouse in yellow stone and King’s College Chapel, which combines the barn-like shape of a tiny chapel with the scale and detail of a cathedral.…

Utopian dreams of the concept's creators blur into crappy reality Life in a London firm is tough: it’s full of jewel heists, flying bullets and car chases. Well, this was the case during my last foray into Virtual Reality.…

Breaking up is hard to do STOB Pay attention, campers. I have conducted an impartial analysis of the post-Brexit landscape and identified a list of concrete, must-have programming skills for your edification.…

Bi-modal IO distributions a purer way to see array performance Interview We interviewed Dimitris Krekoukias, Nimble Storage's global technology and strategy architect, on the subject of storage array performance claims – he has some strong opinions – particularly about Pure Storage's approach to performance.…

New on-prem kit coming in December, when we'll learn what the Red Cloud's made of When Larry Ellison promised on-premises cloud kit identical to Oracle's cloud, we wondered just what form those boxes would take. The answer? Pretty much more of the company's Engineered Systems.…

Research finds faster cracking flaw Apple is brewing a fix to patch an iOS password flaw that allows credentials to be stolen from backups.…

Crims are so keen to chat they respond to random hipsterisms and send legit discount codes Brian Weinreich has been trolling spammers for two years using a bot that fires realistic and ridiculous replies to the pervasive online salespeople.…

Time for competition authorities to take a hard look at Nominet UK domain name holders are being overcharged while the company behind it wins contracts by undercutting the market in what may be illegal market abuse.…

Intel software speeds HPC distributed file work DataDirect Networks has upgraded its EXAScaler array to run the latest version of Intel’s Lustre software.…

Bonus: even more Acorn on show BSOD WATCH It's no surprise that public transport delivers up a huge number of BSODs, since transport needs to disseminate lots of information.…

HTML5 all the way. But nor for ads, so keep those malware shields up, people Yahoo! has joined the flood of companies flushing Adobe's Flash.…

'Obscene songs' also get the ban-hammer in the Australian State of Victoria Buttnote Public service announcement: if you're going on a bender in the Australian city of Melbourne, do not indulge in the practice of “mooning”, because you could end up with your arse in jail (and the rest of you).…

600 Gbps traffic flood overwhelmed CDN Google has provided free distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) mitigation services to security publication Krebs on Security, stepping in after Akamai withdrew support.…

Andre Leibovici's out of time, so it's your turn to step up Virtualisation identity Andre Leibovici has open-sourced his desktop virtualisation (VDI) infrastructure calculator.…

Pen testers, devs, and other infosec bods with all skills wanted The antipodean spy agency the Australian Signals Directorate is seeking cleaning staff information security personnel for offensive and defensive operations.…

It's time to make Layer 2 scaleable again Interview It's way too easy to get past a firewall, map out an enterprise's network, and start tapping IP addresses looking for vulnerable machines – so why are we using Layer 3 addressing as the basis of the enterprise network?…

What were they smoking? Good e-commerce strategy: couriers are nicer to tellies than pushies Ditch bicycle company VanMoof has found that disguising its products as televisions leads to lower rates of damage in transit.…

Must do better: still lagging Telstra in the TITSUP stakes Vodafone has moved to reassert its once-dominant position in the Australian network outage stakes, suffering a seven-hour TITSUP (Total Inability To Support Usual Performance) on Sunday evening, 25 September.…

Remember kids: don't light what comes out of the tailpipe The US Air Force says a strong tailwind is behind the runway fire that's grounded yet another of its F-35 fighter aircraft.…

The Digital Transformation Office typifies Australian Government agencies' troubling attitude to privacy What is going on at the Digital Transformation Office (DTO)?…

Have the makers SEEN the rates of street crime here? An Estonian robotics company is trailing six-wheeled delivery robots that can trundle through San Francisco delivering goods to the local population.…

Canonical on OpenStack dev You’ve heard of hyperscale, but now “Big Software” is the new big thing over at Canonical, and the open source outfit is keen to promote anything that fits with its vision of how massive, hyperscale infrastructure is going to be built and managed in future.…

'We are well aware of these websites' says black-shirted Border Force Australian authorities say they can detect dark net transactions.…

Class-action lawsuit in California expected to be first of many in the US Just two days after Yahoo! admitted hackers had raided its database of at least 500 million accounts, the Purple Palace is being dragged into court.…

Investigations team probed rocket debris and data from 1 September explosion A large breach in the liquid oxygen tank of SpaceX’s Falcom 9 rocket likely caused the explosion during a test at the start of this month, investigators have said.…

Larry, Mark and Safra's pay packet $46.5m lighter in fiscal '16 It still pays to run Oracle, just not as much as it used to - top executives’ packages shrank by double digits in fiscal ’16 as the software titan continued to desperately seek out cloud business.…

'New 'soft closers' good, but the acrylic panels make the bogs look like a CDT project Smelly toilets, smoking outside and questions as to who is the best Kardashian: these were just some of the issues Virgin Media top brass were grilled on in a Q&A session with staff seen by The Register.…

Na shledanou Česká republika, dobry den Czechia! The British government will start referring to Czechia rather than the Czech Republic, following advice from an official committee.…

Group lessons for self-styled 'lone wolf' tech entrepreneurs Radbot In which Damon Hart-Davis talks about life as a tech entrepreneur and tells us about his product.…

Bureau of Stats says spooks signed off IBM's plan, but Big Blue mucked something up Australia's Bureau of Statistics has heavily criticised IBM for the security it applied to the nation's failed online census, which was taken offline after a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that battered a curiously flimsy defensive shield.…

Raffles technology ensures a stay in the Big House Updated The owner of a firm involved in sending speculative invoices to suspected downloaders is in trouble of his own after being convicted of a brutal assault on an Uber driver outside an exclusive London members-only club.…

Fatality – wait, no, what? That's the other game A fresh update for Capcom's Street Fighter V for PCs includes a knock-out move: a secret rootkit that gives any installed application kernel-level privileges.…