The Register

Sagittarius B2 a veritable plastic factory For the first time, astronomers have made an interstellar observation of a molecule that can exist in left- and right-handed versions – which could help unravel how life can come to exist.…

Names, addresses, emails, and 4,300 valid passports leaked Japan's largest travel agency JTB Corp says 7.93 million passport details, and home and email addresses may have been stolen by hackers.…

Booming borkage bashing blitz Russia is mulling a bug bounty program to find and eliminate bugs in government-approved software.…

Unpatched flaw exploited since March An eastern European group has for more than three months been using an unpatched Flash zero day vulnerability to target 'high profile' victims, Kaspersky Labs researcher Costin Raiu says.…

Ziggy was warned against penning op-ed An op-ed written by nbn chairman Ziggy Switkowsky defending the company's handling of leaks breached the “caretaker conventions” that apply during election campaigns.…

High interest payday loans come with a nasty threat Loan sharks in China are reportedly accepting nude selfies as collateral, presumably on the basis that the threat of publication is an effective way of ensuring the loan is repaid.…

Taps little-known hooks in iOS and Android to make BYOD more secure VMware's extensive ecosystem has been a massive part of its success, as demonstrated by the fact that even when server virtualisation looked like a reason to stop buying servers it created an opportunity for Intel to make virtualisation sing and arguably left Chipzilla making more coin from virtualisation than VMware itself.…

All my ex (ISPs) live in Texas Add Dallas, Texas to the ranks of cities set to enjoy Google Fiber broadband.…

You wouldn't rather be a mule NSW Police has published photographs of nine men and three women wanted for questioning over Internet banking fraud.…

DevOps in easy mode? Chef, IT automation for DevOps, has announced Habitat, an open source project for application automation.…

Government market think-tank also floats universal basic income. Lions lie down with lambs With surprising timing, the Productivity Commission has dropped a report during the election campaign, criticising the widespread belief that science, technology, maths and engineering (STEM) education is an employment panacea in the digital era.…

Double Donkey punch from bear duo The US Democratic National Committee (DNC) has confirmed that hackers thought to be part of Russian state intelligence have had access to their servers for nearly a year. They have read emails, chat logs, and opposition research documents.…

Siri opened up and AI expanded – but only to a point In the age-old tech struggle between open and controlled systems, Apple has realized that when it comes to artificial intelligence, it needs to edge toward open.…

New company will be a copy, like ...oh...what's the word? Xerox has detailed the plans that will see the legendary compute company split itself into two different branches.…

Snappier security updates on the way Analysis The Snap application container system released in April with Ubuntu 16.04 is now going to be opened up to many other Linux distros after a surprise discovery by developers.…

Another month, another patching cycle... Critical fixes for Office, Internet Explorer, and Windows DNS Server highlight this month's edition of Patch Update Tuesday.…

It's not ready for primetime, but it may prove revolutionary It didn't get any airtime at the big opening day of the annual Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), but excitement is building around Apple's next-generation file system.…

Big Telco loses critical legal battle Analysis Net neutrality rules that make it illegal for ISPs to interfere with data traffic across their networks have been upheld in full by the Washington DC Court of Appeals.…

Randomness done wrong reduced likelihood of winning The body overseeing elections in the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW) has acknowledged researchers' claims of a bug in the software it uses to count votes.…

Traditional storage sales are shrinking, so move on I’m not going to re-define software-defined. Instead I’d like to look around and try to make sense of different interpretations and architecture designs that make this claim.…

Vague hint about the weather in bland company statement TalkTalk is down again, with frighteningly little being said by the business as to why.…

And anonymous trolls threaten free speech, we're told. Hurrah! IPBill It's that time of the year again, and plucky little indie outlet Apple has been nominated for the internet hero of the year award at the 2016 UK Internet Industry Awards, which has also nominated Donald Trump as the villain of the year.…

Ease of exploit kit use may be behind growth of nasties Releases of new ransomware grew 24 per cent quarter-on-quarter in Q1 2016 as relatively low-skilled criminals continued to harness exploit kits for slinging file-encrypting malware at their marks.…

Firm boasts that it's now a threat to established players Hyper-converged systems supplier SimpliVity has won a Global 50 customer, a financial services one.…

See no evil, hear no evil, suffer evil Almost half (48 per cent) of Britain's small businesses were hit by cyber-crime in the last year, with 10 per cent targeted many times.…

Half a million fine, stung for £98k in costs BT has been fined £500,000 and ordered to pay costs of £98,913.51 after one its engineers broke both ankles after falling seven metres from a loft onto a concrete stairwell.…

Then the Midwich Cuckoos show up Publicly owned open spaces in Wales now feature a Red Button that panic-stricken citizens can smack in fury when they spot a vaper on the premises.…

10,000 places for front-line folk of the future Cisco is setting up a $10m scholarship fund to train the next generation of IT security staff.…

Find out at New Relic’s London conference on 5th July Promo New Relic’s FutureStack 16 Tour: London conference is taking place in London on 5th July and is your chance to hear how leading brands are monitoring their app performance to deliver a better customer experience.…

Thousands more to follow as company attempts to make up £850m shortage Swedish telecommunications business Ericsson is reportedly set to rid itself of up to 4,000 employees this summer, and potentially thousands more thereafter.…

Pirates, rejoice! The rest of us... er... Special Report An upcoming EU court decision could strip half a billion EU citizens of their copyright protection, and all because of an accidental translation error.…

Report claims Chipzilla producing 4 SSD product familes Intel looks to be producing four Optane product families, with Mansion Beach, Brighton Beach, Stony Beach and Carson Beach code names seen on what looks like a leaked Intel slide.…

Project managers and biz analysts in app delivery at risk too More details have surfaced about the British Airways job axe hovering above the app delivery team, with project managers and business analysts - not just techies - also at risk of redundancy.…

Running away with worst-case scenarios Sysadmin blog In case you've been living under a rock, Microsoft has bought LinkedIn. Unlike many, you'll notice I'm not laughing. I am not amused. I'm am, in fact, quite afraid.…

What to do with $50m in VC funding? CD vendor JFrog has proclaimed the Internet of Things (IoT) is the next frontier in DevOps as it ponders how to spend the $50m investment shot it received earlier this year.…

HTTPS-buster and root cert bods joining up? Hmm Analysis Symantec’s deal to to buy Blue Coat, the controversial web filtering firm, for $4.65bn will bolster its enterprise security business.…

1,400 white hats jostle for vulns White hats have found more than 100 vulnerabilities in Pentagon infrastructure under its bug bounty program.…

Backups never fail until you REALLY need them The US Air Force Inspector General is investigating the corruption of around 100,000 investigation records, and presumably someone's asking hard questions about backups.…

Astronomers welcome their new robot overlords Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory boffins are getting ready to point thousands of optical fibres at the night sky, starting with a 10-robot system proof-of-concept.…

Mobile data annihilated. Researchers have found what they say is a flaw in the Telegram that allows messages of any size to be sent.…

Defence docs raided. North Korea has hacked a whopping 140,000 computers located in 160 South Korean firms stealing 40,000 defence-related documents, Seoul says.…

For that price you could run a decent cloud instance all day, every day Who pays AU$2,500 for an annual software license, for a handful of users? That question is on Vulture South's mind, with the Liberal Party under fire during the election for doing just that.…

VM isolation for OpenWRT A fairly straightforward idea by Imagination Technologies could rescue American geeks' ability to run Openwrt on their routers.…

Console set to land in time for Christmas ... next year Microsoft has unveiled its entry into the VR gaming space with a souped-up Xbox One console dubbed "Project Scorpio."…

Malicious DLL can lead to pwnage Another vulnerability has emerged in Samsung's Software Updater (SW Update) service – this time giving an attacker potential “full control” over a system.…

'Not us' says network builder Job ads in Ireland seeking “copper jointers” and “copper gurus” for the National Broadband Network have been pulled from Monster.ie after they were spotted by Australian media.…

FLocker malware shows regional preferences Researchers at Trend Micro have spotted a new variant of ransomware code that can be used to lock down Android-powered smartphones and televisions.…

The Apple internet of things arrives, in theory, with iOS 10 Apple has finally launched its internet-of-things (IoT) smart-home service with a new mobile app called "Home." The only problem? A distinct lack of products to work with.…

Limits lifted on patent payouts The US Supreme Court has struck down rules limiting patent infringement damages in a decision opponents fear will embolden trolls.…