The Register

Back in Bacs A UK government regulator is calling for greater competition in banking payment infrastructure provision.…

Internet toilet wall graffiti spat ends up in High Court A user of satirical wiki Encyclopedia Dramatica has been hit with libel damages of £10,000 after posting untrue accusations of paedophilia and mocked-up sex photos featuring a former Labour councillor on the site.…

Today, it's all about you To all you systems administrators out there, wherever and whomever you are: Happy Systems Administrators Day! That's right, ladies, gentlemen and emacs users, the yearly holiday of sysadmin day is upon us!…

The readers must decide Reg towers was plunged into internal strife today, with the production desk struggling to keep the news production line humming as senior editors were forced to launch an investigation into the question that has split the editorial team down the middle: is it acceptable to add the milk to the tea pot?…

Security, meet the requirement for an informed and educated populace Sysadmin Blog I don't know that I can afford to read the news anymore. As a columnist for several tech magazines I find this somewhat ironic, but my occupation makes the truth of it no less real. Technology can solve this problem for me, but politics probably won't allow it.…

A dalek asks: 'Wanna buy some speakers?' Something for the Weekend, Sir? There was a time when I used to spend my free hours looking for a man.…

Holy cascading cloutage catastrophe! Cloud computing is wonderful, until it isn’t. A digital screw comes loose somewhere, and before you know it the whole engine has ground to a halt in a cascading cloud outage – or, as we like to call it, a cloutage.…

El Eg – whoever they are – really upset this one FotW An innocuous El Reg story about Russian web miscreants provoked an entirely unexpected reaction when an offended cyberpunk took it upon himself to tell us how the headline hurt his feelings.…

Basic security fail spotted by Reg reader let anyone divert parcel deliveries Catalogue store Argos has changed shop passwords for its drop-off store facility after a Reg reader inadvertently discovered staff relied on weak in-store access credentials to service orders.…

Silicon enhanced, too Samsung will have 64-layer 3D NAND in mass production before Western Digital (WD)/Toshiba and is looking into 3D XPoint memory alternatives.…

You'll have to wait until Nougat comes out to get improvements The security folks at Google have been detailing how they intend to harden up Android against attack.…

Team does nothing but explain config problems aren't hardware problems On-Call Welcome again to On-Call, our festive Friday frolic through readers' recollections of jobs gone bad.…

A cruel and unusual punishment Vid Microsoft is laying off a further 2,850 smartphone and sales staffers on top of the 1,850 workers it axed in May.…

Production cut, again, to just six a year as completed planes await buyers Six months after slicing production of the iconic Boeing 747 to just one plane a month, the aerospace company has decided to halve the rate of production and flagged it is close to killing off the plane.…

Former CEO to spend more time with his family after hiring his own replacement Ehud Rokach, XtremIO's general manager and previously CEO before EMC bought it, is going to take a break from the biz he cofounded.…

Revenues grow, losses shrink and tape market stabilises Quantum’s first fiscal 2017 quarter – the three months to June 30, 2016 – showed revenue growth as the tape market stabilized and big deals came good.…

Huawei's rise and rise may have been just the beginning China has decreed it will grow several more world-class, multinational enterprise technology vendors by 2025.…

Claims it has has tenants waiting to fill big slabs of bit barns, if lizards allow it Exclusive A startup data centre builder/operator called AirTrunk has applied to build a substantial data centre on the fringes of Melbourne.…

Stickers touted as solution to ban on customers seeing Cupertino's kit Exclusive Staff at EMC who go out into the world to meet customers have been told their Apple Macs aren't allowed to come with them.…

Cloudy with a chance of windfalls Amazon Web Services (AWS) is on a roll after closing a financial quarter in which its operating income more than doubled.…

Still totally reliant on advertising Alphabet, the holding company for Google and the Chocolate Factory's other concerns, has reported strong growth in the second quarter ending June 30, with revenues up 21 per cent from this time last year.…

GPU maker opens wallet to make class-action suit go away Graphics goliath Nvidia has agreed to a settlement that will see it pay $30 to American gamers who purchased its GTX 970 graphics cards and can file a valid claim.…

DNS overlord literally doubled its annual revenue in one day An unnamed organization just paid $135m for the rights to sell ".web" domain names. This is three times the previous record of $45m for .shop, and seven times the average auction price for top-level domains.…

Jury trial beckons as hyper upstart risks business disaster Hyperconverged software biz Springpath has lost an attempt to have SimpliVity's patent infringement case against it thrown out.…

Arab monarchy tries to slam door on privacy tools A royal edict from the president of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) may have effectively made it illegal for anyone in the country to use a VPN or secure proxy service.…

It's not even a real software rollout anyway The Ottawa data center housing Phoenix – the Canadian government's bungled payroll system for federal workers – was shut down on Wednesday after smoke was detected inside.…

100/40Mbps services available to 2,300 Perth homes nbn™, the entity building and operating Australia's national broadband network (NBN), has announced its first services delivered over the hybrid fibre-coax (HFC) cables formerly owned by Australia's dominant carrier Telstra.…

The long and painful transition is getting there Accessing websites via IPv6 is not only comparable in speed to IPv4, but is actually faster when visiting one in five of the world's most popular sites, according to German researchers.…

You could be one of our brains in a bar After another cracking series of summer lectures, we’re planning our next run of talks, and we want you to help us put them together. So whether you want to take the mike, or know someone we simply must speak to, now’s your chance.…

Background to the embiggened XM1440 explained Seagate’s 2TB XM1440 M.2 NVMe flash drive doubled the previous 960GB maximum capacity and we asked Seagate how that was done.…

Mission aims to find little green men, no less The European Space Agency’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter has successfully completed its engine burn and is on track to enter orbit around Mars on 19 October.…

So that $3.69 BEEEEEELION for more adult toys then Lazza? Database titan Larry Ellison’s Oracle is slurping NetSuite - a company he and his family already own a big slice of - for a cool $9.3bn (£7bn) to help him compete better with Salesforce, another firm he part owns.…

Barton Aqueduct – where heavy metal shifts HO Geek's Guide to Britain There are several fine examples of Victorian engineering still working in Blighty. Tower Bridge in London is one of my personal favourites. I was surprised to discover that another was on my doorstep. Well, 4.34km (2.7 miles) from my doorstep to be more accurate.…

Americans arrive late to spoil Swiss acquisition of Premier Farnell Avnet, the American technical component distributor, has come in at the 11th hour to outbid an existing offer for Premier Farnell, distributors of the Raspberry Pi.…

Readin', writin' and a-bit-matic QLC flash primer Quad-level cell (QLC) flash stores 4 bits per NAND cell and is very tricky stuff to use, far trickier than TLC (3 bits/cell) which is harder to user than 2 bits/cell MLC which, you guessed it, is more difficult to use than 1bit/cell SLC. Why is QLC the hardest of all to use?…

App level, OS level, VM level - we break it down for you So. Hybrid cloud. Let's start with a quick definition, courtesy in this case of TechTarget which describes it as: “a cloud computing environment which uses a mixture of on-premises, private cloud and third-party, public cloud services with orchestration between the two platforms”. I like this particular definition as it sums it up nicely: note that by “private cloud” we mean an on-premise virtualised server and storage setup.…

Targeting the 'underserved mid-market' pays off nicely Revenues at Sophos were buoyed by the growing threat of ransomware and the like to its target mid-market customer base.…

So cool we're even hosting them at RAF Brize Norton Vladimir Putin's air force is flying strategic reconnaissance missions over the UK. Not only is the Ministry of Defence relaxed about it, they're even hosting the Russians in Oxfordshire. What's this all about?…

Clever, huh? Google’s only major consumer mapping rival, HERE, has dropped Maps from its app name in a bold rebranding exercise. After many hours in the Strategy Boutique, the map apps is now named after the ancient British football chant... Here We Go.…

Weak pound affects sales reporting in Blighty Sales at O2 UK fell by 8.9 per cent to €3.46bn (£2.91bn) for the first half of the year, as customers opted to hang on to their old handsets rather than upgrade.…

Why people matter in open source Open source insider There's an old adage in the open source world – if you don't like it, fork it. This advice, often given in a flippant manner, makes it seem like forking a piece of software is not a big deal.…

Look Ofcom, we're reforming Openreach OK. No need for legal split Sales jumped by 35 per cent for BT's first quarter to £5.7bn, with profit before tax up 16 per cent to £802m - mainly due to its £12.5bn slurp of EE.…

Prefers to avoid legal limbo Hosting provider Skyscape is changing its name to UKCloud, following allegations from Sky that it has infringed the broadcaster's registered trademarks.…

Designing for hyperconvergence hyperconballsups Hyperconvergence is one of those relatively new names for something that many of us having been doing for years: consolidating sprawling infrastructures into tight, largely virtualized setups that vastly reduce the number of devices one has to manage (not to mention the number of things to spend maintenance fees on, and the number of things that can go wrong).…

Might pretend airports favoured by flight sim fans defeat nefarious intent theories? The Australian Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC) overseeing the search for missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 has confirmed the plane's captain simulated a flight over remote southern reaches of the Indian Ocean.…

Academic licence-holders get new education versions whether they want it or not Microsoft has announced two new cuts of Windows 10, for schools.…

Pikachu, I spoof you! Well, that didn't take long: Pokémon Go players with sore feet and a case of sitzlust* are sending virtual robots out into virtual reality to catch virtual creatures and bring them home.…

Unix? It's got YEARS left in it HPE has told a news outlet in The Netherlands that it's pressing ahead with an Itanium refresh for 2017.…