The Register

Tool running secret jobs and deleting the evidence as it goes Researchers at Dell SecureWorks have spotted a new and dangerous way to misuse of Microsoft's Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS).…

Cable giant taken to task for crap service The New York's Attorney General office is taking Time Warner Cable (TWC) to task for its poor service in the Big Apple.…

Software glitch borks cars' infotainment system US owners of later-model Lexus cars have had a frustrating day after an over-the-air update left the entertainment and navigation systems locked in a loop of restarts and flashing purple hues.…

Chip biz alleges console maker let tech pact lapse Chip designer Broadcom is suing Sony over allegations the PlayStation 4 has been using patents without a license.…

Big changes needed to bring America's court up to speed on today's internet privacy America's legal world needs to rethink what it considers people's private information so it can get a grip on today's spying techniques.…

Telecoms cables just above sea level? They'll be just fine in a flood! NOT. To understand the lessons of this week's Amazon Web Services outage in Sydney, which took down the local AWS cloud for a few hours, take a walk down Huntley Street, Alexandria, an unlovely street in a light industrial suburb.…

Microsoft eggheads crunch queries for early tell-tale signs of disease Search engine results can be a useful predictor for cancer and can even beat doctors to the mark, according to new research from Microsoft.…

Plus: C# Mac development bunged into Visual Studio Microsoft's Miguel de Icaza, who joined the Windows giant earlier this year with the Xamarin acquisition, has announced new features for cross-platform development using Visual Studio, Xamarin Studio and C#.…

Civil asset forfeiture goes digital and politicians wake up Police in Oklahoma are deploying an electronic scanner that can drain currency from prepaid credit cards seized at the roadside using civil asset forfeiture laws.…

Photophores complete the camouflage Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania have used fiber optic cables to reveal how glass squids turn themselves invisible, according to a paper published in the Journal of The Royal Society Interface.…

InTune? Doesn't sound like it to us Microsoft UK’s online enterprise mobility device management service Intune suffered a near four-hour wobble this morning that was rectified early in the afternoon.…

You’re going? Here, have 50 per cent more dosh The former head of the charity that collects and dispenses cash from Wikipedia’s fundraising secured a pay rise worth almost 50 per cent – after she stepped down as chief executive.…

For some reason, it's illegal for the public to know this stuff Dyfed-Powys Police in Wales, UK, sent confidential information that could identify convicted sex offenders to a member of the public by accident.…

Quantum interference may become a useful secure comms tool, reckon scientists It may be possible to send quantum-encrypted messages through space, after physicists showed a beam of light sent to a satellite could return to Earth with its quantum properties intact, according to new research published in Physical Review Letters.…

Let us spy on you or we'll choke off civil liberties, says ex foreign sec Infosec 2016 Lord Hague has predicted that Western societies will enact laws and regulations against unbreakable encryption – while conceding that the technology has always existed.…

Buying storage more on $/TB metric could become popular Storage architect If you’ve ever had to scope out and purchase enterprise storage, you’ll know what a nightmare it can be. Vendors love to make the process as opaque as possible, with quotes that run into multiple pages and dozens of line items – including bezels and racks.…

First quarter 2016 numbers show firm climbing past Pure, HPE and IBM NetApp is now second in the all-flash array market, according to IDC numbers we have been given.…

Imagine Siri repeating 'I love Steve Jobs' forever Google’s TensorFlow machine learning engine is now available on your iPhone and iPad.…

Rio athlete to leave missus a chilled deposit – just in case British long jumper Greg Rutherford and his other half Susie Verrill have responded to the possible threat posed by the Zika virus by having the athlete's sperm frozen before he jets off to the Rio Olympics in August.…

Will kick away AOSP for faster upgrades, he claims Google is preparing to seize control of Android with its own proprietary closed-source version of the mobile operating system, an analyst claims.…

Flagging support for high-cap SSDs could embiggen your data centres Analysis NetApp's SolidFire arrays needs four times more rack space than HPE and EMC for equivalent amounts of flash storage. It has 1U hardware boxes and these appear to be limited in what capacity SSDs can be supported.…

Pick a card. Any card, so long as it's from Redmond Remember the days when you could accurately predict what would appear in next year’s version of Office or Windows by looking at CNet’s Top 10 download chart this year? Well, happy days are here again.…

C'mon analysts. Let's break out all all-flash array market share Comment An IDC all-flash array (AFA) supplier numbers table, forwarded to us by EMC, appears to contain a few oddities, such as the exclusion of Dell, HDS, Kaminario and Violin products. We asked IDC and it has explained its reasoning.…

Do you think he even needs a Facebook password?

15m telnet nodes, 4.5m printers, TCP port 445... Millions of services that ought to be restricted are exposed on the open internet, creating a huge risk of hacker attack against databases and more.…

Keep calm and carry on registering The Cabinet Office is huddled in meetings to determine why its voter registration site crashed ahead of Tuesday’s critical deadline for those wishing to take part in the EU referendum.…

Hackers stay longer in compromised EMEA networks - Mandiant Traditional methods including spear phishing and social engineering still account for more than a third of hacker attacks.…

Power station incursion prompts four-hour outage Kenya yesterday suffered a four-hour nationwide blackout caused by a monkey tripping a transformer at a hydroelectric power plant.…

*Trump followers demand an enemy. Silicon Valley is that enemy Opinion Technology has been replacing men with machines for over 200 years. It’s a good thing, except for the men and women whose jobs get replaced.…

'It's healthy to have competing options' Interview In a side room of this year's Strata + Hadoop conference at the ExCel centre in London, Hadoop creator Doug Cutting spoke to The Register about finding proprietary value in the open-source world, and Cloudera's “not entirely commercial” opposition to the Open Data Platform.…

EU body: ISPs' obligations are to the network Internet service providers (ISPs) do not need to ensure that the quality of service received by internet users is the same across all of their customers to meet their obligations on treating data equally as it passes over their networks, an EU regulatory body has said.…

Plus: How to rack up a huge supercomputer bill using rsh Line Break Welcome back to The Register's weekly software bug parade, Line Break: Season Two.…

This is what Microsoft Office now makes possible with 'GigJam' and 'Planner' In the olden days, when Reg hacks rode dinosaurs to work and used chisels and stone to write stories, Microsoft Office offered four applications: Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access.…

Browser to split into a UI process and a content process, with secure sandboxes to come Firefox 48 entered beta this week, complete with a feature called “Electrolysis” that Mozilla bills as “the largest change we’ve ever made to Firefox.”…

Bug would have allowed miscreants to rewrite messages A vulnerability in Facebook's web chatrooms and its Messenger app would have let miscreants surreptitiously tamper with messages after they had been sent.…

Last year we bought 44 per second, but growth has slowed so its frowning time Prognostication-producers Gartner reckon the disappointing start to 2016 will continue for smartphone makers, with the year to end a mere seven per cent ahead of 2015.…

Femto-gravity at Lagrange point makes space a good place to look for gravitational waves European Space Agency (ESA) boffins are tossing hats in the air as data from their LISA Pathfinder mission suggests its gravitational wave detection kit is going to live up to expectations.…

Sparse matrix architecture advanced as better algo-cruncher than current silicon A company led by a former NASA boss wants to take tricky and compute-intensive algorithms off general-purpose silicon and has just popped out of stealth mode to show off its first efforts.…

The world's run out of reasons for new connectors but is in no rush to adopt the newbies USB-C and Thunderbolt are the last mainstream connections devices will need to the outside world, according to analyst firm ABI Research.…

Here's some firewall rules while we work on a fix That IPv6 neighbour packet discovery bug Cisco warned about last week? Juniper has just followed Switchzilla by warning it has the same problem.…

Sysadmin fingers auto-update mechanism as source of accidental-self-DoS-hell An Australian sysadmin frustrated with his business' sudden loss of performance has sparked a conversation about whether Windows 10 is behaving badly on network connections.…

Not the brightest lights in the harbor Administrators at the University of Calgary, Canada, have caved in to criminals and paid a $20,000 ransom to decrypt their computer systems' files after getting hit by a malware infection.…

SEC settles case over alleged payoffs in Middle Kingdom Content delivery network Akamai will pay the US government more than $650k to settle charges it bribed Chinese officials to secure service contracts.…

Two more attempts coming down the line US legislators are making another attempt to give the FBI access to anyone's web browser history with a new amendment to the pending review of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) Amendments Act of 2015.…

Germany cracks the whip A German regulator has fined three companies for failing to change the way they share people's personal information following the invalidation of the Safe Harbor agreement last year.…

Aircraft warned to stay out of area The US Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) is warning aircraft to stay a few hundred miles away from the Naval Air Weapons Station at China Lake, California, because the military is testing a new gizmo that disrupts GPS – and may also mess with flight control systems.…

Better yet, why have 50 million people downloaded it? Security biz Pentest is sounding alarms after it found an Android app it says has been downloaded 50 millions times despite being "little more than malware."…

Take you down to the bakery city, where the pies have cream and the cakes are tasty Legendary rocker Axl Rose has faced struggles with drink and drugs, but he may have bitten off more than he can chew with an effort to remove his own fat meme from the internet.…

How do I defraud thee? Let me count the ways Global trade body the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) has produced a useful guide to the digital ad industry's toxic sludge. The WFA represents the biggest spenders on digital advertising, such as Unilever and MasterCard, and they're not happy.…

T Rowe Price voted 'yes' when it meant to vote 'no' Some former Dell shareholders can thank a voting mishap for an upcoming windfall.…