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Verification, certainty and stable doors Microsoft has explained the rationale behind last month’s announcement that you won’t be allowed to simply download Azure Stack and get going.…

Never mind real kit, hipsters want to make butterfly drones The Ministry of Defence is making £800m available for a Dragon's Den-style miltech startup funding panel – even as civil servants struggle to balance the books after the Brexit vote.…

4K revives forgotten format Vinyl LPs aren’t the only antiquated disc format that’s enjoying a revival. So is the almost forgotten Blu-ray disc.…

Linux kernel dev Christoph Hellwig says court didn't even begin to consider code copying Linux kernel developer Christoph Hellwig's bid to have VMware's knuckles rapped for breaching the GNU General Public Licence (GPL) has failed, for now, after the Landgericht Hamburg found in Virtzilla's favour.…

Shiny GUI makes ruining someone's life fun and easy! Black Hat A security trio has brewed a toolset to help attackers find sensitive open source intelligence on human targets.…

Thing-makers get a bi-directional wireless standard they can all agree on Three companies backing the LoRa Alliance have joined together to push things along with an Internet of Things development kit.…

Yuliya Stepanova fears her cover has been blown by parties unknown Former Russian runner turned whistleblower in-hiding Yuliya Stepanova has had her World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) account hacked, possibly revealing her physical location to attackers.…

Big Red gets into the data business with 400m-strong business profile trove You might have nothing to do with Oracle's databases, but you're probably in one: Big Red has announced it's selling a database of 400 million business profiles.…

Crack military apiairist removes huge swarm from F-22 Raptor's exhaust In June, the US Air Force had to call on an apiarist for help after more than 20,000 bees swarmed at the exhaust of an F-22 Raptor.…

Is it spooks building something big or a cloud trying to stay off the radar? Someone has successfully applied to hide data on CPU and/or server imports to Australia in June 2016.…

Coincidence, or more MICROS fallout? Another 20 US hotels have been identified as being infected with point-of-sale malware earlier this year.…

Attack still needs malware, can be defeated by silent solid state disks Video Researchers from Israel's Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Cyber Security Research Center have found a way to exfiltrate information from a PC using the noise created by hard disk drives.…

'Retroscope' smartphone app can retrieve your last five screens USENIX VID University researchers have developed a new method to help forensic investigators extract data information from memory.…

More than 200 UK customers' data might be at risk Accounting software outfit Sage Group has been hit by a data breach affecting between 200 and 300 of its customers.…

iOS, Android will also lose their native Skype apps Microsoft's killed off a native Skype client for Windows Phone and will force users to rely on Web Skype instead.…

Netflix speeds are not a good indicator of the NBN's progress The new communications spokesperson of Australia's opposition Labor has made a mess of her first foray into the portfolio.…

Riot breaks out the lawyers to take down illegal boost scripts The makers of the popular game League of Legends have filed suit against the operators of a site that helps players cheat.…

Typical specimen is older than America Researchers from the University of Copenhagen have overturned biological thinking with the discovery that the Greenland shark, an apex predator swimming in the Arctic Ocean, can grow to over 400 years old.…

Breakneck growth company hires ex-Micron CFO Is an IPO being planned? Hyper-converged system supplier Pivot3 says it had record growth in the first half of 2016, with a 103 per cent revenue increase and more than 400 new customers, and has hired a new CFO.…

Flip Feng Shui, quicker than the human eye Security researchers at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam have found a way to subvert virtual machines using a combination of hardware and software shenanigans. The end result is the ability to flip bits in another VM's memory to weaken its encryption or mess with its operation.…

Who, what, when, why, how? When hackers, believed to be a Russian crime gang, broke into Oracle-owned payment terminal biz MICROS, it was assumed the crooks were snooping around other register makers, too.…

This arms race will never end Those hoping for a quick resolution to the cat-and-mouse game between Facebook and Adblock Plus will be disappointed to know that the back-and-forth battle shows no signs of letting up.…

Whack-a-mole against online drug sales continues Two men from Brooklyn in the US have been indicted on charges of selling heroin and cocaine on AlphaBay – believed to be the world's largest dark web marketplace.…

Davis' lawyers concerned about his Aspergers Syndrome and depression An Irish court has authorized the extradition to the US of a man accused of helping to administer the infamous Silk Road website.…

Roll-your-own-malware kit Scylex offered for seven large Cybercrooks are touting a new DIY financial crime kit that lets you roll your own ZeuS-like software nasty.…

With health warnings all over it m Flow, Microsoft’s stealth-mode scripting engine, has arrived on Android, six weeks after seeping onto iOS. The Flow app is similar to conditional workflow tools like IF (formerly IFTTT) and Tasker, which are far more mature.…

... or something like that. Spend it on essential IP Analysis As well as launching several new flash products, Seagate revealed the four pillars of its flash product strategy at the August 9-11 Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara.…

Techies at SCC's hosting sub throw an all-nighter to fix service crash Gremlins that showed up during a planned upgrade to the UK Department of Work and Pensions’ systems brought down online services for more than 24 hours, sources have told The Register.…

Pulled ahead of Apple, still struggling to grow Asus has reported a double digit slide in net income for the fourth quarter, highlighting that even overtaking Apple in the computer sales stakes is no golden ticket to world domination.…

Well, duh A £1m British Army Watchkeeper drone had to be scrapped after crashing at an airfield in Wales when the ex-RAF officer piloting it disabled the unmanned aerial vehicle's anti-crash systems.…

No keymasters, just keys Microsoft researchers are working to enable secure data exchange in the cloud for applications.…

If you’re really doing IoT, we want to hear from you Reg Events If you’re making the Internet of Things a reality, we’d really like to see you at Building IoT London next March.…

QTH? Lower-frequency 'scope seeks ET The Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence Institute is launching a pilot experiment that will hunt for signs of alien civilisation using the Murchison Widefield Array, a low frequency radio telescope.…

Nice idea in theory, but there's good reasons nobody else has succeeded with them Russia is reportedly spending up to $240bn developing transport links to Siberia, the country's far eastern provinces and the Arctic – and is actively looking at using cheaper-than-plane airships as part of those transport links.…

Undeterred by moneybags Avnet's massive counter-offer Swiss components distributor Dätwyler is still interesting in acquiring mega electronics distie Premier Farnell, despite their last offer being trumped by a later (and larger) one from Avnet.…

The power browser that China doesn't own The Vivaldi browser continues its rapid progress its third release in four months. The new binary largely contains bug fixes, with theme support the biggest new feature. In addition to the eight default themes you can add your own.…

High-end all-flash testing methodologies needed Comment Despite all the recent noise around software-defined storage (SDS), vendors still keep coming to the market with new hardware solutions. Over the past weeks we’ve seen new products from Nimbus Data and emerging startup E8.…

Let’s get physical, physical Something for the Weekend, Sir? I owe everything to a quick one off the wrist.…

But fear not – our galaxy has in-built SPF protection Astronomers led by the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) in Australia have calculated that ten trillionths of your suntan comes from beyond our local galaxy.…

West's lovebombing of Erdogan doesn't disguise tech transfer threat Comment Turkey has hinted it may try to leave NATO – which could cause difficulties for the Lockheed Martin F-35 programme because the country has signed up to buy 100 of the advanced jet fighters.…

And don't throw out your Cloud Platform System or Azure Pack kit, it will play with the Stack Microsoft has revealed that its forthcoming Azure Stack will be able to run on as few as four servers and will also be able to play nice with its earlier cloud-in-a-box efforts.…

Blinded observers granted gift NASA has gifted blinded space fanciers another glimpse of Jupiter through its Juno cameras.…

Proof-of-work turned to nefarious purposes, like taking down a Census A curious proof-of-work project built on cryptocurrency has emerged that offers a means to prove participation in distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.…

Plus the strange case of the wrong number, the right admin, but the wrong database On-Call Welcome again to On-Call, The Register's Friday morning folly in which we usually feature a reader's tale of gigs gone goofy.…

Don't pop the champagne: it means Adobe is coining it in the cloud without licence checks Adobe has stopped doing software licence audits in most parts of the world, according to Gartner research director Stephen White.…

Developers warn that cary people are out there doing this already Scientists have found a way to accurately identify completely obscured faces using recognition systems trained on only a handful of well lit photos.…

Support for Skylake kit extended until end of life for Windows 7 and 8.1 Microsoft has backed down on its plan to hustle owners of certain PCs to Windows 10 by crimping support options.…

Storage tech's real performance figures fail to match marketing claims +Comment XPoint will substantially undershoot the 1,000-times-faster and 1,000-times-longer-lived-than-flash claims made by Intel when it was first announced – with just a 10-times speed boost and 2.5-times longer endurance in reality.…

Chinese vendors and Red Hat are the big movers in Gartner's virtualisation Magic Quadrant Gartner's annual Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualization Infrastructure has escaped into the wild, with a suggestion the Reds are taking over.…