The Register

'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.…

Deal a go-go unless Chinese anti-trust regulators play tough Staffers at EMC and its subsidiaries are to get Dell email addresses from the start of next month as the proposed mega buy edges closer, insiders have told The Register.…

Notes from the underground ¡Bong! Special We’d been jeered, we’d been jostled. Overnight, we’d become un-people.…

How to pick your hosted solutions In 2009, I moved to Jersey to become the network and telecoms manager for a multinational company. It was tremendous fun, as I had a variety of kit to play with.…

Building internet mousetraps and enchanted umbrellas Reg Lecture Every inventor wants to build a better moustetrap, so it’s no surprise that IBM master inventor Andy Stanford-Clark make sure he applied his IoT expertise to inflicting mayhem on his unwanted mursine visitors.…

Power outage in London fingered A raft of BT customers were knocked offline this morning due to a power problem at one of its web peering partners’ sites in London.…

Hint: It's relational Comment Microsoft grabbed the headlines this week when it announced a Professional Degree Program at its annual partner conference. It starts with data science.…

Blue/Green also a deployment option Electric Cloud has promised a raft of new deployment options in the latest release of its application deployment platform as it looks to bring the joy of DevOps to even the most crusty and sprawling customers.…

Just don't go on Facebook, people. You're giving yourself up to crims Unrestcon It takes nothing more than a home address for hacker "Nixxer" to find enough information to ruin your life.…

Ideas dreamed up by BitTorrent and Google people should speed Windows Microsoft has announced it will add five new features – some experimental - to the TCP stack it will ship in Windows Server 2016 and the Anniversary Update to Windows 10.…

Your cryptic storage crossword clue of the day Spectra Logic has added direct archive to Amazon's S3-accessed public cloud from its BlackPearl object storage gateway.…

The two companies are now collaborating nicely, thanks in part to an intern When VMware acquired Nicira and released its NSX product, it looked like Virtzilla and Cisco were on a collision course. But now Cisco has added a vCenter plug-in to the new version of its own software-defined networking (SDN) software, one of several signs that the two companies are working together while also competing to manage networks.…

Google, Microsoft won't have to block searches for 'les torrents' The High Court of Paris has decided there's a limit to France's unpopular anti-copying regime: Google and Bing can't be required to block the word “torrent” from their search results just because BitTorrent is sometimes used for piracy.…

A Big Red Oracle Quarterly Patch Dump, that's what! Oracle has emitted its quarterly patch payload, along the way claiming an unwanted record by squashing an all-time-high 276 problems across 84 products.…

400,000 submissions received, some critical of carriers claiming 5G costs justify fast lanes It's hard to work up a good lump in the throat in sympathy for a bureaucrat, but staff at the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC) probably need just a little: they're going to have to work through 400,000 submissions about Net Neutrality in the EU.…

Patch frenzy imminent, say researchers, thanks to bad use of code hooking Hundreds of security products may not be up the job, researchers say, thanks to flawed uses of code hooking.…

Royalties rumble could cost chip-maker US$880m, a bit less than LG and Samsung pay South Korea's Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) has Qualcomm in its sights again, telling the Korea Times the company could be up for a trillion-won fine (nearly US$880 million) over anti-trust violations.…

'Genie' test simulated pocket nukes' potential to evaporate bombers Vid The date was 19 July, the year was 1957 and America was worried that the Soviet Union could amass too many bomber squadrons to be stopped.…

Win some, you lose some: profit up, revenue down Analysis All eyes were on Microsoft's cloud business today as it published its fourth-quarter and full-year financial results.…

P0wnage party pops plugins, providing plenty of party-pooping projects The Dutch hacking community's Summer of Pwnage (SoP) has disclosed three vulnerabilities in WordPress plugins, including an XSS in the popular Ninja Forms.…

Rocketeers apply for two more landing pads, but faces NIMBY challenge SpaceX has applied to local authorities for permission to build two new rocket landing pads in Florida ahead of the launch of its Falcon Heavy rocket later this year.…

National shut-down starts Tuesday, just in time for the Olympics The standoff between Brazil's legal system and Facebook's WhatsApp messaging platform continues, after a Rio de Janeiro judge ordered all carriers to block the app as of next Tuesday.…

German software house says sailors are just the wurst A German software developer has accused the United States Navy of illegally copying $596m worth of its product.…

China, Russia, Iran will 'devour' the web after IANA transition The planned transition of the internet's critical technical functions from the US government to a technical body may come under further attack after the Republican Party officially agreed to block it on Monday.…

Oh, and BamBrogan's a childish drunken misogynist, allegedly An extraordinary fight at tube-travel company Hyperloop One has hit warp speed with a court filing filled with more wild claims.…

Cupertino pondering cellular broadband tech in laptops Apple has been granted a patent that suggests its future MacBooks will come with built-in phone hardware, giving the notebooks mobile broadband connectivity.…

Flaws also squashed in Safari, iTunes and iOS Apple has released a bundle of patches to fix security holes in OS X, iOS, iTunes and Safari.…

You WON’T BELIEVE THE ANSWER Sketch So, what, if anything, keeps former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani awake at night? Actually, he told a BlackBerry event today, there is this one thing.…

World's biggest tech merger is on EMC shareholders have voted overwhelmingly to accept Dell's $67bn offer to merge the two companies into a new entity called Dell Technologies.…

Judge picks friends of court in case studying info safeguards An Irish high court judge has accepted the US government into a high-profile case involving Facebook and mass surveillance – but rejected a number of civil liberties groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).…

If you see what I mean. Do you? Does anyone? BlackBerry CEO John Chen said his company has an internal project to bring Android security up to the level of its BlackBerry 10 platform, which should bear fruit after the release of Android N.…

10Gbps is the new norm, warns Arbor Networks DDoS attacks once again escalated in both size and frequency during the first six months of 2016.…

Will confer new name on Confer Endpoint security firm Carbon Black has bought "next-generation antivirus" firm Confer.…

Container biz blames downtime on traffic flood Updated Websites running on the Docker Cloud hosted container management and deployment service were taken down by an apparent DNS outage on Monday.…

UK watchdog barks at careless consumers Lessons have not been learned from an incident where a Russian website provided links to access baby monitor cameras, according to the UK’s data protection watchdog.…

Quarterly storage hardware revs continue slow slide +Comment The storage hardware portion of IBM's quarterly revenues continued its long-term decline, with a 13 per cent annual drop.…

Administrator's Statement of Affairs doc confirms AV distie owed £6.7m at collapse Unsecured creditors of audio visual distributor Steljes that are owed £6.72m by the fallen specialist will likely receive just three pence in the pound, according to the company’s administrator.…

Control centre staff reverting to pen and paper, says union Ambulance service union the GMB has called for an urgent review of the UK's South East Coast Ambulance’s computerised dispatch system for control centre staff handling emergency calls.…

Eyes NVME, flash farms with 128 Gbps-capable ports Brocade's having none of this FibreChannel doomsaying, with the launch of its FibreChannel Gen 6 director family.…

As Reg news team snare art desk menacing Charizard Suspicions are rising that Pokemon Go is some sort of massive Darwinian experiment, after HM Coastguard was forced to warn the UK populace about the dangers of attempting to capture waterborne varieties of the non-existence pocket monsters.…

How are the government's beancounters going to audit 'agile' now? Sally Howes, the executive lead responsible for scrutinising government IT projects at the UK National Audit Office, has stepped down after six years in the role.…