The Register

Something to bear in mind as Snoopers' Charter looms IPB Letters between GCHQ and an official overseeing the spy agency shed new light on how Blighty's eavesdroppers interpret laws to suit their surveillance efforts.…

Solidfire is cool. I reckon NetApp's got a hidden gem here Comment Yesterday I was at the Solidfire Analyst day and this idea about the cloud-enabling vendor popped up just after a couple of hours of presentations and demos. The new licensing model, new features and also how the software works and is presented is unusual, not only from traditional storage vendors, but also from many storage startups.…

'Expanding the frontiers' of space habitats NASA astronaut Jeff Williams will today enter the International Space Station's (ISS) Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM) - the pump-up podule on trial at the orbiting outpost "to investigate the potential challenges and benefits of expandable habitats for deep space exploration and commercial low-Earth orbit applications".…

Public assistance requested in locating 'hard to miss' bird A "massive great big" vulture which went missing over the West Country last week is still at large, and its owners are asking members of the public to keep an eye out for the "hard to miss" bird.…

Wrangles Jenkins, GIT, TeamCity and Gherkin for code jockeys Application Lifecycle Management – ALM – was, in many ways, the early 2000s version of DevOps.…

Tech skills in Europe? Dev ops? Yes we aware of them Services-based reseller SCC has complained a dearth of skilled techies that come at competitive rates in Europe has forced it to look east: a service delivery centre is set to open in Vietnam.…

A tax expert explains The UK government would be likely to have an "emergency" budget shortly after next month's EU referendum if there is a "leave" vote. It would use that budget to give clarity on its priorities for changes to the tax regime.…

Wi-Fi pre-shared key in owner's manual. Hmmm Security weaknesses in the set-up of Mitsubishi Outlander leave the hybrid car exposed to hack attacks - including the potential for crooks to disable theft alarms.…

'Taler' is anonymous-but-taxable and tied to actual money GNU and an outfit called “Inria” have released Alpha code – version 0.0.0 to be precise – of an anonymous-but-taxable electronic payments system they say is “a currency for the mainstream economy, and not the black market.”…

Power usage effectiveness score of 1.03 with custom Xeons and cold pipes on chips Dell is getting into the water-cooled server business for hyperscalers with an offering called “Triton” that it developed for eBay.…

New chips longing for a home in next refresh's scale-up servers As expected, following the announcement of the Xeon E5 v4 server chips, here comes Intel's Xeon E7-8800 and E7-4800 v4 processors.…

Elon Musk's just a little bit too happy about this one, but his optimism is well-placed Norway's sparked a flurry of applause and misunderstanding in equal measure, with a report that the country is going to ban the sale of petrol and diesel cars by 2025.…

Copy+paste crew rip off white hat proof-of-concepts and make them dangerously real Symantec engineer Dinesh Venkatesan says malware writers have one up on Google with the pillaging of a keystone trick that permits attacks on Android Marshmallow.…

Catching dodgy content Microsoft has followed Google's by making the malware warnings in its Bing search engine more nuanced.…

Rovi floats deals with third-party box-slingers to get out of nasty hardware business Tivo's new owner Rovi has hinted that it might get out of box retailing and focus on software and services.…

Net scum have figured out that crims like meaty upgrades on a short release cycle Net scum behind the ransomware upstart CryptXXX have parried white hat attacks and released a new and as-yet-uncracked malware variant that can encrypt network shares, and steal account logins.…

Big buffers, 100 Gbps support Arista is touting interoperability with the likes of HP Enterprise, NetApp, EMC, Nutanix and PureStorage in its latest data centre release.…

Switch to higher speeds also depresses 10 Gbps Ethernet The Ethernet market remains limp, with IDC's first-quarter data showing a mere 1.4 per cent increase compared with the first quarter of 2015.…

VK.com member details cracked some time in 2012 Russian social networking site VK.com appears to have been breached with hackers selling some 100 million records for a mere US$580 in Bitcoins.…

Makes 4.7rc2 change after merge window because he's Linus, and by Jupiter he can Linus Torvalds has loosed release candidate 2 of version 4.7 of the Linux kernel on the waiting world.…

Redmond to users: download and then 'Please let us know if the issues are indeed solved' Microsoft has issued fixes to its last round of Windows Server Management Pack fixes, but is asking you to help it understand if the new fixes fix the messes the last fixes created.…

Shari Steele explanatory post fails to quell speculation Jacob Applebaum has departed the Tor Project.…

Heavy clouds take out clouds Sysadmins in Sydney had a horrible Sunday, while their CEOs bent their attention to wondering why their Foxtel Rugby sportscasts weren't working.…

Boffins decode 'coil whine' while encryption code runs Discerning secret crypto keys in computers and gadgets by spying on how they function isn't new, although the techniques used are often considered impractical.…

It's Friday and we've hit rock-bottom on the car puns, people Uber's $100m settlement with thousands of its drivers has spun around, mounted the curb and is careering back toward a California courthouse.…

Former AFRINIC CEO makes shocking claims over Board control efforts A race row has broken out at the organization responsible for the allocation of IP addresses across Africa.…

Lives could have been put at risk by pushy upgrade When you're stuck in the middle of the Central African Republic (CAR) trying to protect the wildlife from armed poachers and the Lord's Resistance Army, then life's pretty tough. And now Microsoft has made it tougher with Windows 10 upgrades.…

'Bittersweet' thermostat gadget chief exits after bumpy year The CEO of Nest, Tony Fadell, has quit.…

The great grammatical argument of our age While nerds have the pronunciation of "gif" to argue over, the rest of the world continues to battle over whether the word "internet" should be capitalized or not.…

Nobody wants modules any more, admits Switchzilla Exclusive Cisco will kill off its M-Series modular server line, citing lack of customer interest.…

Stable door settles for bolt long after brief relationship with passing horse TeamViewer is whacking anti-hacker protections into its remote-desktop tool – as its customers continue to report having their PCs and Macs remotely hijacked by criminals.…

Share trading in troubled AIM-listed cloud biz suspended as fiscal numbers postponed Investors in beleaguered cloud biz Outsourcery may well take a bath after the company confirmed it is in talks with suitors who made offers for its assets that will leave them little or no return.…

Good news for some, and bad for hyperscaler folk IDC’s number crunchers have crunched their quarterly enterprise storage numbers and found HPE has done very well, while the storage market has declined somewhat and ODM supply to hyperscalers has plunged downwards.…

Remains off island of Zakynthos actually natural formations Greek and British scientists have announced that submerged remains off the Ionian island of Zakynthos bearing an uncanny resemblance to a lost city are in fact natural formations.…

Where did you say you'd run those mega-database apps again? The UK Home Office has revealed that its ICT losses for 2015 amounted to 125 devices.…

Regulator coughs to cock-up, spills the details to El Reg A software snag was behind a number of EU citizens in Britain being sent polling cards for the EU referendum later this month – even though they aren't eligible to vote in it.…

Network also says it will impose 'baseline' security standards The SWIFT global payments system has announced it plans to suspend banks with weaker cyber defences until they improve their security.…

We told you the Chinese were coming. And all you did was make a lousy Watch. Two years ago, Huawei was to premium smartphones what Datsun was to family cars in the late 1970s. Cheap and cheerful, and sometimes not all that cheerful. The idea (promoted here) that Huawei would be able to challenge Apple and Samsung was considered ridiculous.…

Database theft generated $2m in illegal profits Two men have admitted to running a computer hacking and identity theft scheme which hijacked customer email accounts, stole personally identifiable information (PII) from millions of people, and generated more than $2m in illegal profits.…

The Times wants to put the horse before the cart The NHS has been hit by a new scandal – overpaying for generic drugs. It’s a cracking story, and all credit to The Times for breaking it.…

At least it consulted... The public? Parliament? No one? WHAT! EXCLUSIVE The Home Office is secretly creating a centralised database on the good folk of Britain without presenting the capability increases to the public or subjecting them to Parliamentary scrutiny.…

Meanwhile, Daily Mail actually in talks with beleaguered biz Twitter is reported to be the latest suitor eyeing up Yahoo! for a possible sale, according to reports.…

Faizel Lahkani sounds bleak warning over future Stuxnet-style attacks Hoping to keep industrial control systems out of reach of hackers by keeping them air-gapped is a hopeless mission that’s bound for failure, according to the inventor of the technology.…

Arrow gets a Trolle, Wick Hill bigwig retires and Ingram's Brit boomerang returns What a week it has been for high level UK departures, with three major tech distributors – Arrow ECS, Ingram Micro and Wick Hill – parting with a big cheese.…

Doner kebab also on the menu for 9.0 On 21 June, the world will become a slightly more agreeable place with the release of Unicode 9.0 - not because the standard will offer "Arabic characters to support Bravanese and Warsh, which are used in North and West Africa, along with Pakistani Quranic marks" and "significant updates to segmentation algorithms", but rather for the inclusion of a bacon emoji.…

The growing cloud platform war takes shape Analysis Salesforce’s cloud server staff, those behind its flagship SaaS cloud, fought tooth and nail against their employer’s embrace of Amazon’s cloud.…

If the shoe fits... it’ll be a miracle Something for the Weekend, Sir? I’d like to try these in a size nine-and-a-half or size 10, please.…

There's nothing new under the Sun StorageBod Recently I’ve been spending time thinking about what DevOps really means to my teams and to me. A lot of reading has been done and a lot of pondering of the navel.…

When the going gets tough, the tough get messy This Damn War “What’s the smallest fire I could start to be noticed, but not so big that I risk burning down the building?” is one of the stranger thoughts to have entered my head, in many years of working in IT. No, I'm not a closet pyromaniac, so why was I entertaining such thoughts?…

Farmer tried turning it off and on again, but didn't know how to do it properly On-Call Welcome again to On-Call, our Friday frolic through readers memories of odd jobs in odd spots.…