The Register

Re-ee-mind, when the cloud says don't select... er... me A second round of UK redundancy consultations are set to kick off for IBMers working in the Global Business Services (GBS) division, company insiders have told us.…

Ashley Madison rebrands. #FindYourMoment. For realz

Mobile RAN disruption Never before have events coincided so neatly to demonstrate the gap between mobile operators’ thinking about 5G, and how future networks will really be deployed for disruptive effect. While Europe’s leading MNOs were presenting a backwards-looking "5G Manifesto" to the European Commission, veiling pleas for net neutrality special treatment with promises of 5G build-out, Facebook was announcing an open source approach to the mobile network, OpenCellular – part of a wider trend which could rip apart the network cost base and the operators’ and 3GPP vendors’ cosy world.…

Dumping all our IT eggs in one basket? You betcha, says CTO Interview Mark Holt, CTO at TheTrainline.com, is an unashamed AWS believer. He is dumping all of its legacy tech in a complete migration to the cloud, with the US cloud firm now being its sole supplier.…

Win yourself an Occulus Rift and Alienware system Compo If you'd like the chance to bag yourself some top class gaming kit, and have coding skills in your armoury, we've got a competition you might like.…

Here's hoping it's not a load of piffle Next week, top eggheads will unveil a new anonymizing internet tool that they claim is snoop-proof and faster and more reliable against attack than Tor.…

One of the messes munched this Patch Tuesday is very nasty, for you and Redmond Among the Microsoft messes addressed in latest round of Patch Tuesday updates is a real doozy that allows remote attackers to compromise Windows machines thanks to a critical security vulnerability affecting printer drivers.…

Man behind exposed.su document dump and swatting rampage jailed The New York man behind a 2014 data dump site exposed.su has been sentenced to a year in prison, plus 12 months for time already served, for doxing high-profile figures including First Lady Michelle Obama, Presidential candidate Donald Trump, and artist Jay Z, and placing dozens of highly-dangerous swatting calls.…

In China, they get it, QR codes are like money and mobile payments are everywhere On a recent trip to Shanghai, I saw a person in front of me in a supermarket queue present their mobile phone when asked for payment. The clerk quickly pointed the laser scanner at the phone - blip!- the sale completed. But not thanks to NFC.…

Funding brings Skylon spaceplane closer to liftoff The makers of the newfangled Synergetic Air-Breathing Rocket Engine (SABRE) have secured the necessary funding to fire up their hardware by 2020.…

Probe survives first pass around gas giant and sends low-ish res snaps of the Jovian system NASA has released the first images captured by the Juno probe.…

NY District Court stings Stingrays and tosses out evidence A US federal judge in New York State has pushed back against Uncle Sam's Drug Enforcement Agency's use of Stingrays, saying evidence collected by the fake phone masts isn't admissible.…

PIA tells users 'we logged nothing', deletes Russian servers from clients VPN provider Private Internet Access (PIA) says its servers have been seized by the Russian government, so has quit the country in protest at its privacy laws.…

Automotive Grade Linux vastly expands its hardware support list in version 2.0 The Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) project is about to unleash the second version of its unified code base - snappily called UCB 2.0 - with expanded hardware support and…

Skills minister gets another bright idea Its budget gutted, in part, by dogged devotion to a failed software project, the Australian State of New South Wales Technical and Further Education (TAFE) institutions are to be reorganised to eliminate its current structure of individual regional institutes.…

First target is Middle Kingdom's Big Data province and its 2.5 million servers Huaxintong Semiconductor Technology, the joint venture between Qualcomm and China's Guizhou Province, has advanced its ambition to build ARM-based server silicon by licensing the ARMv-8-A architecture.…

It's so lonely and cold out here I don't even have a name Astroboffins are excited about a newly-discovered dwarf planet, despite not knowing what it looks like.…

Mozilla's safer-C programming language used to shore up media wrangling code Mozilla says it will next month ship the first official Firefox build that sports code written in its more-secure-than-C Rust programming language.…

Business service goes dark amid mystery outage Comcast says it is still investigating the cause of outages that killed its business phone service in the US on Tuesday.…

Want to use Nano Server? Software Assurance is non-optional Microsoft has released details of how Windows Server 2016 will be released and maintained, and as with Windows 10 it includes a "Windows as a service" model of frequent operating system updates.…

And this time it's final, all right? A surreptitious effort to introduce so-called "dotless domains" – where you type a single word into your browser to reach a website – has been noticed and shot down.…

Plus: 52 security bugs fixed in Adobe Flash Microsoft will fix critical holes in Internet Explorer, Edge, Office and Windows with this month's Patch Tuesday security bundle. Meanwhile, Adobe has patched dozens of exploitable vulnerabilities in its Flash player.…

As Seattle surfaces surface as a service service. Serious.... IBM has become the latest sometime hardware giant to agree to push software giant Microsoft’s client hardware - years after selling off its own client devices business.…

Microsoft rolls enterprise dice in repackaging game WPC 2016 Microsoft is moving into new as-a-service pricing and bundling territory with the full-fat version of Windows 10 Enterprise.…

Documentation could be better, but this is a real reason to upgrade Hands On Even those who do not care about Microsoft’s Universal Windows Platform (UWP) might have some interest in Project Centennial, also known as the Desktop App Converter, which lets you convert desktop applications to the Appx format used by Windows Store apps.…

'Nation-state' fingered Security researchers have identified a strain of malware that has already infected at least one European energy company.…

Advanced Storage bloke joins marketing-heavy firm Rob Peglar, Micron’s departed VP for Advanced Storage, is joining Symbolic IO. Instead of evangelising 3D XPoint memory he’ll be talking about ten times faster IRIS Compute.…

Continuous deployment, compliance, and Habitat magic, in one bundle ChefConf Chef has announced Automate, a new product which incorporates all its main DevOps tools into one bundle.…

With CD and downloads crashing, is this the end? Digital music is a loss leader for tech giants, driving traffic to other parts of the plantation as they harvest personal data. But it’s creators who are carrying the loss.…

When you've paid up, but there's nothing to unlock Lazy but sneaky cybercrooks are slinging a new ransomware variant that falsely claims to have encrypted files when in reality it has deleted them.…

Betting men push chips behind Marc Waters as managing director Hewlett Packard Enterprise has made Marc Waters acting managing director of the UK and Ireland as the process to recruit a permanent head begins.…

In force as soon as member states realise it's been adopted The European Commission has this morning adopted the EU-US Privacy Shield agreement, which will enter into force as soon as all member states are notified of the adequacy decision (PDF).…

Yes, all six of them have signed an online petition asking for a WP release Frustrated Windows fans are lobbying the creators of Pokémon Go to bring the augmented reality game to their smartphones and devices.…

Could expose highly sensitive info, says Open Data Institute A government experiment to store the information of benefits claimants using blockchain tech has been slammed by experts, who have warned it could expose highly sensitive personal data.…

Thousands of layoffs announced as spinning rust enters its death spiral Comment Seagate has announced its latest quarterly results will be unexpectedly good but there will be employee bloodshed. Another 6,500 layoffs on top of the 1,600 announced in June will take place.…

Toss me a screwdriver... Yes I'll wait 3-5 days One of the few "horizon" technologies that is really making a difference right now is 3D printing.…

Connecting Canada is a slow and political process Sysadmin Blog Bell Canada has lost their second appeal of the July 2015 decision by the CRTC requiring the opening of fibre networks by Canada's major telcos for wholesale consumption by third party ISPs. The result solidifies Canada's presence amongst the nations embracing Local Loop Unbundling (LLU) and heralds a round of massive changes in Canada's third party ISP landscape.…

In the mean time, of course, the data must flow Analysis The European Union's attempts to make data transfers to the United States compliant with privacy laws are an opaque exercise, so much is obvious, but will they work?…

Capabilities are still far from ideal Have we all been caught asleep at the capacity planning wheel? Business users today want, and expect new IT services to be delivered in the blink of an eye, the necessary resources provisioned instantly, and changes made “on demand”. But such IT flexibility requires that physical resources, server, storage and networking are ready to be allocated when required. The need for capacity planning has never been greater, yet a recent survey tells us that few organisations have the capabilities they need.…

'Driving with both hands on the wheel where possible' The government is paving the way for driverless cars by launching an open consultation online – and a £30m competition to win funds for research and development into autonomous vehicle technologies.…

A million sites are at risk. Again. So patch, please Wordpress has patched a hole in its popular All in One search engine optimisation plugin, a tool that's been downloaded by some 30 million users and is used on a million sites.…

No American CPUs and accelerators in sight Before any country can deploy an exascale system, they have to get pre-exascale prototypes into the field to test out their underlying technologies and determine what approaches have the best chance of scaling up performance and being manufactured affordably. It looks like China is looking at three different pre-exascale systems, and none of them will deploy processors or accelerators made by US companies.…

Software bug confused SSDs into thinking they were full during maintenance Google has 'fessed up to breaking its own cloud. Again.…

Chap codes tool that scans social media sites to figure out where passwords work Lazy password reusers are at even higher risk of having accounts compromised following the publication of a proof-of-concept tool that can quickly test credentials against a host of sites.…

Google's new cert policy should make it harder to chew through its mobile OS Google will sweeten the forthcoming Nougat release of Android by changing the way apps work with certificate authorities (CAs) and simplifying APIs.…

Or at least a database so simple it looks and behaves like a spreadsheet MIT boffins reckon they've cracked one of the tough nuts of usability, creating an easy-to-use SQL interface for non-database administrators.…

Workaround de-glitches rover's computer The Curiosity Rover is not about to become a nuclear waste dump on Mars as the trundling science lab has become mobile again after a glitch put it in safe mode last week.…

Devs wanted nine little brains, not one big juicy brain Microsoft has taken its Project Oxford “cognitive services” suite and broken it up into a bunch of projects of smaller scope.…

Crypto Drop looks for tell-tale signs that files are being encrypted Researchers from the University of Florida and Villanova University reckon ransomware can be stopped by watching what it's doing to the target's files.…