The Register

While also hoping to throw £1 in every £3 UK.gov spends on procurement at small biz Government procurement body the Crown Commercial Service is to start hiking up the amount it charges suppliers to sell stuff to the public sector.…

Bee pheremone is similar to genes found in mammals The genetic pathway toward social behavior for honey bees and mammals is more similar than previously thought, according to a new study published in PLOS Computational Biology titled "Conservation in Mammals of Genes Associated with Aggression-Related Behavioral Phenotypes in Honey Bees."…

Locky's deadly brood spawns a fresh horror A dangerous new ransomware variant based on the Locky ransomware has security experts worried.…

iOS bad, but not Android bad If your enterprise has 200 mobile devices at least one is infected, so says security firm Skycure…

Tempfile permissions a can of worms SQLite has pushed out an update to fix a local tempfile bug, to address concerns that the bug could be exploitable beyond the merely local.…

Bulk SMS sender, Tails, Tor, and some free WiFi It's easy to spam voters with text messages and get away with it.…

No Venue for droids Dell is getting out of the Android tablet market, citing oversaturation and weak overseas demand for a decision to quit offering the operating system on its Venue tablets.…

Hands were washed long ago ICANN has stiff-armed the content lobby, writing that it's not responsible for what people do with domains registered through the international registration hierarchy.…

Is it a bug or is it a backdoor? Lenovo, and possibly other PC vendors, is exposed to a UEFI bug that can be exploited to disable firmware write-protection.…

Sudden outbreak of modesty in the gun-for-hire business Boston Consulting doesn't want the people of New South Wales to know why it thinks a private college under police investigation is doing a better job than publicly-funded TAFEs.…

This is what your brain looks like on bad data A whole pile of “this is how your brain looks like” MRI-based science has been invalidated because someone finally got around to checking the data.…

Igor's got his hand on the Big Red Switch China's bolted down the last mirror of its Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST), put away the hex key, and is about to start trial observations with the instrument.…

Yeah actually it's probably time to switch off the internet Pic Gameplay streaming site Twitch.tv says it will be launching a dedicated channel for live videos of people eating.…

The unpalatable side of ICANN's effort to control internet root zone Verisign will retain control over the dot-com registry until 2024, providing it with a multi-billion-dollar cash cow for the next eight years.…

Meet the new BSoD – the Blue Screen of Despair Pic As the Windows 10 free upgrade period draws to a close, Microsoft is stepping up its operating system's nagware to full-screen takeovers.…

If only lawyers could make money rather than costing money Analysis Oracle's chalked up yet another stunning courtroom loss.…

Online freedom resolution passes despite best efforts by Russia, China et al The United Nations officially condemned the practice of countries shutting down access to the internet at a meeting of the Human Rights Council on Friday.…

Administrative Council leaves staff frustrated A determined effort to oust European Patent Office (EPO) president Benoit Battistelli amounted to nothing this week, as representatives from European countries instead spent two days rehashing a reform proposal.…

Hyper-converged upstart eyes up hypervisor flash caching biz Four independent sources say hyper-converged poster child Nutanix is buying hypervisor flash-cacher PernixData, thus gaining crucial technology to speed up its appliances.…

Doppler detections will help test Einstein's key theory Gravitational waves released from black hole “super kicks” may soon be detectable, according to new research published in Physical Review Letters.…

We asked vendors about it and they dodged the question Tech vendors don’t want to admit it but CIOs will need to return to their spending plan spreadsheets: hardware is going to get more expensive post-Brexit as sterling slides against the US dollar.…

Post-NAND explorations and adaptations; or, predicting future storage uses StoreServ arrays use special hardware, an ASIC, to accelerate storage array operations, and this is redesigned for each major generation of the arrays. The current design is generation 5.…

Ex-Catalogic CEO Ed Walsh assumes Big Blue's storage hot seat – again IBM has a new storage boss, Ed Walsh, Storage Division General Manager, replacing interim GM Greg Lotko who keeps his VP development slot in the unit.…

It's time we rebooted democracy in our start-up nation, apparently Alasdair Gray, the acclaimed Glaswegian writer and artist, penned a phrase now engraved on a wall of the Scottish Parliament: “Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.”…

Hollobone offer draws response from flame-haired acress turned pundit Troubled wildchild turned Brexit commenter Lindsay Lohan has accepted the challenge of turning on Kettering for Christmas, in order to “redeem her political reputation”.…

Brit boffins are worried about ... well, everything Science research funding from the European Union to the UK is set to continue until Britain officially terminates its membership of the bloc by triggering Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty.…

What's my name, fool Not so long ago you could barely move on Facebook for all the exquisitely crafted beheading videos. Now you can’t even watch a cute cat video – if your first name is Isis, anyway.…

Agile means aggressive dumping of big iron Dutch finance giant ING is moving away from mainframes as “aggressively” as it can, rejecting vendors’ hopes that a little sprinkling of Agile dust will give the venerable platform a new lease of life.…

Offside! Lack of encryption bares usernames, passwords and more The official UEFA Euro 2016 app is leaking football fans’ personal data, security researchers warn.…

Full cloudification of market still a drop of vapour in the supplier sky Cloud slinging (and tax evading) Amazon Web Services nearly doubled its revenue in the UK last year, pulling in £254m.…

How did TNS do it? Head of opinion polling explains to El Reg Analysis The EU referendum was a catastrophe for opinion pollsters. Remain’s official pollster, Populus, predicted a ten point margin of victory.…

150,000 user profiles bared to world+dog as well – report Hackers have leaked the personal details of 150,000 users of the Muslim Match website after breaking into the niche dating portal.…

Something weird happened last week Something for the Weekend, Sir? Thank you for submitting a support request. You can put your clothes back on now.…

Former Disney exec leaves the cartoon characters behind... oh hang on The fires were lit and a chicken sacrificed at Microsoft’s Reading HQ campus today as new UK CEO Cindy Rose was sworn in* - the first female to run the business locally.…

A 'UPS courier', extradition warrants and legal jiggery-pokery from the cops Feature Lauri Love was arrested on suspicion of offences under the Computer Misuse Act 1990 early in the evening of 25 October 2013, when a National Crime Agency officer wearing dungarees and posing as a UPS courier told Love's mother that Lauri himself had to come to the porch to collect his delivery.…

Giants drive what consumers can't When Facebook in January became the latest big-tech name to join Ireland’s roll call of data centre operators, its chief broke out the green flag – renewables.…

Folk in know confirm there's a Plan B if new net gets delayed The Home Office has already worked out the cost of extending Blighty's radio-based emergency services network, in the increasingly-likely scenario that a move to ubiquitous 4G coverage cannot be delivered by 2020.…

Nine vectors used as bad guys try to beat defenders. A chinese gambling company has been pulverised with multiple nine-vector, 470 Gbps, 110 million packet-per-second distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, some of the biggest and most complex ever recorded.…

Just need a couple of common bugs, some GPUs and time Android's full-disk encryption on millions of devices can be cracked by brute-force much more easily than expected – and there's working code to prove it.…

What a long, crazy ride it has been for ESA's Rosetta The European Space Agency (ESA) has set the date for the Rosetta probe's deathday and says that on September 30 the spacecraft will crash into the comet it has been orbiting for nearly two years.…

Ancient structures could help unlock secrets of volcanoes, earthquakes Scientists have revealed new data about two giant blobs at the edge of the Earth's core, larger than continents and possibly older than any rock on the planet.…

You may now kiss the C:\ drive A Tennessee man is suing Utah because, like the rest of America, it won't let him marry his computer.…

Service provider IOS version gets Yang module Cisco's embrace of open networking tools continues, with the company opening up code to connect its IOS-XR operating system to Puppet via Yang.…

LizardStresser makes a messer of Brazil banks, gamer outfits Lizard Squad may be mostly behind bars, but their LizardStresser botnet has spawned more than 100 clones.…

Is Oracle going to appeal? You bet Oracle is set to appeal a decision which, if it stands, will require Big Red to make a US$3 billion contribution to HPE's top line.…

Upgrade your libcommons-fileupload-java package A file upload library used in Apache Tomcat and various Linux distributions needs patching to plug a denial-of-service vulnerability.…

Toxic Foxit plugs bugs Makers of popular PDF reader Foxit have patched 12 dangerous vulnerabilities that could have resulted in remote code execution.…

Probe launched after ex-Navy SEAL, 40, dies in semi smash An investigation was launched today after the driver of a Tesla was killed in what is understood to be a malfunction of the car's autopilot.…

Colin Murphy, can we talk about SHA-1? Western Australia's Auditor General has panned the state's consistently-awful IT security, delivering its report from a site that Chrome warns isn't doing HTTPS right.…