The Register

Officially on El Reg, that is – Mini-chipzilla in the black after strong console chip sales AMD fans are over the moon today as their favorite processor designer has sold more chips than expected in the three months to June 25.…

Controversial Section 1201 of US law comes under fire The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has launched a lawsuit claiming that a controversial anti-digital-piracy law in the US is unconstitutional.…

Sir Jony ive's Waterloo Smartwatch shipments are in freefall thanks to slowing sales of the Apple Watch.…

Sustainability and sharing isn't just some 'silly, hippy thing,' says Musk Solar-panel roofs on cars, compact SUVs, and high-passenger-density urban transport are all part of Elon Musk's self-titled "master plan, part deux" for the world.…

Sentencing set for September Five men working at UK-based IT security reseller Quadsys confessed today to hacking into a rival's database.…

The WIMPs theory is still strong though An international team of researchers working on the Large Underground Xenon dark matter experiment announced today that they have failed to detect any dark matter particles.…

More than two data centres each? Perfectly reasonable The majority of the UK's local councils run two or more data centres each, suggesting cloudy adoption is still a long way off for local gov, according to Freedom of Information research.…

Helium premium Seagate has added three new 10TB helium drives, simultaneously re-branding its desktop/laptop disk and SSHDs, NAS and surveillance drive products in a complicated scheme involving disparate drive technologies.…

Microsoft, Twilio, Dropbox offer support Stack Overflow, a popular site for developer and IT admin problem solving, is taking on technical documentation, with support from companies including Microsoft, Paypal, Twilio and Dropbox.…

‘I vote Trump! free Internet’ A Wi-Fi hack experiment conducted at various locations at or near the Republican National Convention site in Cleveland, US, underlines how risky it can be to connect to public Wi-Fi without protection from a VPN.…

Step 1. Improve customer service. Step 2.???? Step 3 PROFIT!!! Three out of four ransomware criminal gangs are willing to negotiate the shakedown price. And all the operators of file encrypting ransomware scams will give victims more time to pay up.…

Gives de-bugging a new meaning Much of the current research on the development of a quantum computer involves work at very low temperatures. The challenge to make them more practical for everyday use is to make them work at room temperature.…

Oh well There is "general resistance" among both the public and private sectors to plans that would shift responsibility for ensuring that third party contractors are paying the right employment taxes from the individual to public sector employers, HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) has found.…

All the drama this week in tech

Another power problem, this time at Telehouse North BT customers are once again banging their heads against their keyboards this morning, due to a power outage which has thrown them offline for the second day running.…

12 videos to help you top up your grey cells Reg Events Whether you’re getting ready to hit the beach, or just hit the sofa, holidays needn’t necessarily mean turning off your brain for the summer.…

Who are you rubbing shoulders with? Private cloud computing can be a useful way to offload some computing overhead and manage your costs effectively. The switch to operating expenses from capital expenses, the elasticity, the business continuity benefits – they're all real. But so are the dangers of DDoS disaster.…

We can always rely on PCs, right? Er... Analysis Intel's stock price fell on Wednesday after it became clear the processor maker is not selling quite as many server processor chips as investors had hoped.…

Let a hundred disrupters bloom The UK government must explain how its long-awaited new digital strategy will be impacted by the country's decision to leave the EU, a committee of MPs has said.…

Wassenaar Arangement aims to stop sale of spyware to rogue states, but also goes further Microsoft and a team of concerned engineers from across the security sector have joined forces to suggest a major re-write of the arms control pact the Wassenaar Arrangement, as they fear the document's terms are a threat tot he information security industry.…

Corning's Gorilla Glass 5.0 can survive 80 per cent of 1.6m drops, at least in the lab Corning has revealed version 5.0 of its Gorilla Glass, the ubiquitous covering for smartphones. And this time around it says the substance has been toughened up again and will now remain intact “up to 80 percent of the time when dropped face-down from 1.6 meters onto rough surfaces”.…

Here's something to like about 2016: 'Quantum Software Engineer' is a job title A couple of years ago, a quantum physicist suggested to Vulture South that one of the best uses for quantum computers might be to model reality. Now, Google reckons its boffins have done just that.…

Redmond's decide you'll sound better if Skype runs in the cloud In the same month as Microsoft announced its alpha WebRTC-based Skype for Linux, Redmond has put it and the native OS X Skype client on the end-of-life list due to a rebuild for Skype that will replace its peer-to-peer architecture with cloud-centric code.…

US Justice Department claims site pinched ONE BEELLION DOLLARS of content The world's favourite torrent website, KickAss Torrents, is down and out with Polish cops arresting its alleged operator Artem Vaulin.…

It turns out some of you are happy running legacy cloud services Redmond wants killed In the cloud, we're constantly told, we won't have to bother about staying up to date with new versions of stuff. Our service providers will make non-disruptive upgrades for which we'll be non-disruptively grateful.…

Supreme Court lifts block ahead of full hearing; government mulls service regulation WhatsApp is back in Brazil, and the company hopes this time it's permanent.…

The very image of a remote exploit Here's another reason to press “install” on Apple's latest OS X and iOS security patches: a slew of image-handling vulnerabilities.…

ASEAN ministers flag 'Asiapol' in closed-door talks RSA APAC A closed-door meeting of cabinet ministers from more than a dozen countries met yesterday to mull the creation of a Europol-style organisation to crack down on cyber crime in the region and abroad, The Register has learned.…

Can Twitter now save itself? Comment Twitter this week permanently banned a high-profile self-proclaimed troll, marking a possible sea-change in how the social network tackles its worst users.…

China sales, overdue royalties help chip biz right its ship Qualcomm is crediting strong sales in China and an infusion of back royalty payments for a better-than-expected quarterly return.…

Phenomenal photographic proof of planet plundering Pics The surviving members of the Viking Mars probe team have been celebrating the 40th anniversary of the first probe to make it down onto the surface of the Red Planet, send back pictures, and perform scientific experiments.…

Umm-tsch umm-tsch umm-tsch umm-tsch At Facebook's F8 Developer Conference this year, Mark Zuckerberg revealed more details about his laser-firing drones that will encircle the world and relay Facebook, sorry, the internet to far-flung places, reaching potentially all seven billion of us.…

Carriers still in the dark about how much they'll get or when ahead of April 2017 deadline Australia's telcos and internet service providers still have not been told when they will receive promised grants to help them implement mandatory metadata collection.…

From SSL cert blowup to busted infringement appeal Blue Coat has lost its appeal challenging a nearly $40m patent infringement lawsuit brought by rival security company Finjan.…

Vous avez trois mois, Nadella Updated A French regulator has issued Microsoft a formal warning over Windows 10, saying the operating system collects excessive amounts of personal data, ships that information illegally out of the EU, and has lousy security.…

Browser tightens the screws on Adobe's internet screen door Firefox will in the coming months automatically block invisible Flash content that users cannot see when loading a page, says Mozilla as it continues its campaign against Adobe's plugin.…

Did Netflix's accusations force company's hand? The London Internet Exchange (Linx) has announced it will slash prices – just one month after the non-profit was pointedly criticized for charging too much.…

Where there is dark data let there be...umm...light data Teradata has teamed up with Nuix to enable customers to process "dark data" using its Aster Analytics technology.…

If it quacks like a Cyberduck.....it can swim in many different ponds Spectra has entered the Cyberduck universe; data stored in SpectraLogic's disk, tape and public cloud repositories can be transferred to/from other on-premises storage and public clouds with a BlackPearl Cyberduck plug-in.…

'Not a technology company and drivers aren't self employed' UK union the GMB has brought two test cases to the Central London Employment Tribunal today to determine if Uber acted unlawfully by not providing its drivers with “basic workers’ rights”, such as holiday pay and a national minimum wage.…

Trek works when the struggle is within, not when the fights are fast and furious Review The original Star Trek series and subsequent sequels stubbornly and persistently refused to frame their dramas in black-and-whites. Balance of Terror, for example, transformed heretofore-unseen Romulans from villains into tragic heroes over the course of an hour. As happened in so many episodes, the writers avoided the cheap path of good versus evil.…

That's what Acronis says French data protection supplier Acronis is making a big move into enterprise data protection with a comprehensive new software release, Acronis 12, a beefed-up marketing team, and a profile-raising one race-only sponsorship deal with the Toro Rosso Formula 1 Grands Prix team.…

Cannibalistic behaviour also affects evolution Spiroplasma, a small helical-shaped microbe, is responsible for bringing out a ‘male-killing’ instinct in African Queen butterflies, according to research published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.…

Kaminario service guarantees have six appeal Kaminario, the all flash storage array vendor, has come up with six individual guarantees - assurances - that build on its original 2013 Perfomance Consistency Guarantee programme.…

Faulty UPS takes out 10 per cent of BT customers Telecity data center owner Equinix has 'fessed up to a "brief outage" that knocked 10 per cent of BT internet subscribers offline this morning in the UK as well as a number of other providers.…

First among penguins The British government’s Digital Service is looking for a chief penguin to head up open source.…

Physicists show quantum weirdness of neutrinos over longest distance yet Physicists have found that neutrinos keep their quantum weirdness over the longest distance that quantum mechanics has been tested to date.…

Engineering worldview not always ... appreciated in the enterprise Red Hat has given its Ansible Tower a good scrubbing down before smoothing the UI to better penetrate big money corporate accounts.…

Installed base of subscribers will continue to shrink post hack, warns analyst TalkTalk has confirmed 9,000 customers abandoned its broadband services in the first three months of fiscal '17 ended June, and that overall group sales were pretty much flat on the prior year period.…