The Register

And then the extortion starts and you're asked to steal critical data A newly-detected piece of malware dubbed "Delilah" has been fingered as probably the first such code created with the intention of extorting victims into stealing insider data.…

US$32 BEEELLION to change hands as Japanese giant gets into the chip biz British semiconductor designer ARM is about to be acquired by Japan's SoftBank, according to reports in financial press.…

In July 1966, Charles Kao looked into glass and saw the future of telecoms One of the seminal developments in modern telecommunications turns 50 years old this month: the paper that bootstrapped the world of optical fibre communications.…

Virtzilla's mistakes show how Microsoft must not package its hyperconverged cloud By most accounts VMware's first stab at hyperconvergence, the EVO:RAIL software-defined Nutanix clone, was a decent set of software.…

Blowfish is faster than SHA256, and that's a problem when servers talk back A bug in OpenSSH allows an attacker to check whether user names are valid on a 'net-facing server - because the Blowfish algorithm runs faster than SHA256/SHA512.…

SKA precursor publishes 'first light' images The operators of the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa have switched on its first 16 dishes and, pretty much immediately, spotted more than 1,200 new galaxies.…

Aerial inspectors, air traffic control and flying COWs ahead Vid AT&T is planning to rapidly expand its use of drones – it can already put one of the gizmos in the air virtually anywhere over continental United States.…

Someone pressed the wrong button in portal redesign Weird emails from Samsung to third-party developers containing usernames and passwords had some worried that the chaebol had been hacked. But the electronics giant says it's nothing to worry about.…

Quick, man the VPNs! Access to YouTube, Facebook and Twitter is blocked in Turkey tonight amid an ongoing attempted military coup in the NATO nation. The cyber-blockade has failed to prevent pictures from the unfolding uprising spilling onto the internet, though.…

Mall patrol droid maker hits back at claims its machine ran over a kid The maker of the security guard robot that allegedly ran down a toddler in a Silicon Valley shopping mall last week has claimed its droid is innocent.…

US watchdog puts out advisory for other smart home makers The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has decided not to move forward with an investigation into smart-home company Nest and its decision to end support for the Revolv hub.…

All that nagware hasn't worked When Windows 10 launched, Microsoft claimed it would have the new operating system on a billion devices by mid-2018. That isn't going to happen, however, Redmond has now admitted.…

Senatorial janitorial US Senator John McCain (R-AZ) has thrown a hissy fit over the refusal of Apple CEO Tim Cook to attend a Senate hearing on encryption.…

Which one is the secure one, you ask? Ha ha, you crack us up Adobe says a buggy installer is the reason some people have two different versions of Flash Player on their Windows PCs.…

Cyber-robbers flee Taiwan with swag swiped from 'malware-infected machines' Authorities in Taiwan are trying to work out how hackers managed to trick a network of bank ATMs into spitting out millions.…

Everyone except Google wants reform Technology trade organizations have urged the US Congress to replace the country's antique privacy protection laws – after a New York court stopped American prosectors from seizing emails from servers offshore in Ireland.…

Could containerised server protection be coming too? It's likely Backgrounder Commvault’s Chief Communications Officer Bill Wohl was in London yesterday, and wanting to emphasise how well Commvault has recovered from the dip in its fortunes caused by customers moving to the cloud faster than anticipated.…

Use old hardware and inexpensive, even free, storage software In the last two or three years I've talked a lot about "Flash & Trash." A two-tier storage strategy to best cope with the increasing demand of high IOPS and low latency from primary applications on the one hand, and high capacity, associated with throughput at times, on the other.…

Web schmeb: Telly is back ad-slingers The upfront market for broadcast and cable networks has taken an unexpected U-turn from last year’s dip, seeing an increase in advertising sales of $800m to $18.6bn in the most recent completion.…

Expect 10 x longer life 3D NAND SSDs from biz NVXL is bringing an enhanced endurance SSD to market by using NVMdurance technology.…

Pokemon Go mobile malfeasance spinning out of control Security firms have repeated warnings that unofficial versions of Pokemon Go are likely tainted with spyware or trojans.…

Team says it has already sniffed malware-flingers BAE Systems has been recruited to help SWIFT's newly formed Customer Service Intelligence team in a bid to get ahead of cyber-criminals targeting banks connected to the global financial messaging service.…

Er. What? Comment ISPs should be banned from “speeding up” internet packets, says a former senior member of Obama’s White House crack tech team, the Office of Science and Technology Policy.…

What next for the Capita-loving chief exec? Head of O2 Ronan Dunne - he of "sending staff to Capita is better than redundancy" fame - has stepped down from the biz after eight years.…

Just as well it’s a post-money sharing economy Impossible.com, the world-changing “sharing economy” website founded by millionaire supermodel and polymath Lily Cole lost even more money last year.…

Tell me, what is it your department is in charge of protecting again? The department entrusted with the protection of corporate data is seemingly somewhat less bothered when it comes to guarding personal info.…

Insured against malware? Security experts have already waded into the UK government's consultation into self-driving technologies.…

Just why were retail sales s*$%t last year? Microsoft's OS roll out didn't help Microsoft’s free upgrade of Windows 10 hit PC makers where it hurt though the extent of this was apparently a surprise to the software giant, data druids at Gartner have claimed.…

Go-to-market machine is in gear Springpath is becoming a Cisco-only development shop, we hear. It’s going to concentrate on its Cisco OEM deal for the hyper-converged Data Platform product and we’re hearing it will defocus from other marketing and selling activities.…

Time for trouble (make it double) Something for the Weekend, Sir? Back in the 1970s, cockney actor Mike Reid’s catchphrase on children’s TV was “Runaround – GO!!!”…

Beyond gongs and incubators: 'Fess up, Old St Open up the business pages of any national newspaper and much of the coverage is focused on the latest fintech startup, the marvel that will transform the global financial system, backed – inevitably – by big name venture capital firms.…

Taking you way back with content-addressable storage Backgrounder This is a terrific object storage history map from Silicon Valley object storage guy Philippe Nicolas*, who has put together a spreadsheet detailing the history of content-addressable storage (CAS**) – otherwise generally known as object storage.…

NCS 6000 and ASR 5000 routers need some lovin' Cisco has patched two vulnerabilities, including a remote denial of service bug in its Network Convergence System routers.…

It's 1AM, backup's failed and the boss says you're about to lose all insurance On-Call Welcome again to On-Call, our Friday fumble through memories of jobs on which things didn't go as planned. Or sometimes went in ways it's not possible to plan.…

The on-premises pie is shrinking, but perhaps not disastrously Infrastructure as a service sold by public clouds will become a US$43.6 billion market by 2020, according to abacus-rattling firm IDC's new Worldwide Public Cloud Infrastructure as a Service Forecast, 2016-2020.…

Dark matter measured in our cosmic backwater Pics After ten years of work by hundreds of scientists, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III has produced the most complete map of our nearby universe covering over a million galaxies.…

Most droids are not the ones you are looking for if you value security Nexus devices are, unsurprisingly, the most secure Androids, says security outfit Duo.…

If your application faces the internet and you like security, go containers-first says Gartner Containers are more secure than apps running on a bare OS and organisations that like not being hacked therefore need to seriously consider a move, according to analyst firm Gartner.…

Portal to help devs remember that cluster they ran last week and don't need any more One of the problems users run into in the cloud is that the cost of using servers-for-rent can sometimes be surprising.…

F35, F22 and Boeing data sent to People's Liberation Army Chinese national Su Bin has been sentenced to 46 months jail after admitting his role in stealing information on the Lockheed F-22 and F-35 aircraft, along with Boeing's C-17 cargo plane.…

Reminds hunters of fines and jail terms for using recording devices in court houses The Department of Justice in the Australian State of New South Wales has warned Pokemon hunters that if they hunt for digital critters inside courthouses they may find their next trip is to an actual jail.…

People too trusting about tech, mag finds Tesla is misleading drivers about the efficacy of its Autopilot feature and is putting lives at risk, according to Consumer Reports.…

Patch Tuesday wasn't just about browser bugs Microsoft has quietly killed a vulnerability that can be exploited to unlock ARM-powered Windows RT tablets and boot non-Redmond-approved operating systems.…

It's because, you know, there aren't enough of them Facebook has explained away another year of dreadful diversity figures by claiming that there simply aren't enough minorities available for it to hire.…

Tech titans trash-talk Trump – what do they hope to achieve? A veritable Who's Who of the tech industry have signed an open letter aggressively criticizing Donald Trump and his proposed presidential policies.…

Clouds turn to rain to hide your tears Microsoft is cutting its free 15GB OneDrive cloud storage space down to 5GB, and eliminating the 15GB free camera roll for many users. Files will be deleted by Redmond until your account is under the free limit.…

What could go wrong? Nest has launched its first new product in several years: an outdoor surveillance camera.…

Pays out for status/incident communications specialist Atlassian has made its first buy since raising $462m in its December IPO, snapping up StatusPage.…

Judge orders megadeth for Dave Mustain's class action Hewlett-Packard has succeeded in breaking up a class-action lawsuit brought by its tech support workers who say the IT giant stiffed them on overtime pay.…