The Register

Has America's telecom regulator finally pushed its luck too far? Analysis When America's comms watchdog the FCC passed its net neutrality rules despite an onslaught of criticism from telcos, the world rejoiced.…

Symantec and partner say HTTPS certificate-issuing powers used only for testing Blue Coat has denied it's up to any shenanigans – after the security biz was seemingly given the power to issue crypto certificates that could be used to spy on people.…

Cable giant loses bid for tax break on gigabit broadband The US state of Oregon says it will charge Comcast tens of millions of dollars in taxes after revoking a tax break the cable giant had claimed on its broadband service.…

How a weird system crash has plagued expensive lap-slabs for months Hands-on In its most recent quarterly earnings report, Microsoft highlighted its increasingly popular Surface line as the growth leader in its More Personal Computing line of business. Surface led the category with 61 per cent growth in constant currency, a rise driven by the top products in the line, the Surface Pro 4 tablet and the Surface Book detachable-tablet laptop.…

US senators' bill won't make it to the floor of Congress A proposed piece of US legislation that would have required American tech companies to cripple the encryption in their products is dead in the water.…

Four-year contract to be drawn up after six weeks of protests Verizon has reached a deal that will end the six-week strike by many of its network technicians.…

He wanted records – and got sued instead amid terror fears The sysadmin-activist at the center of a bizarre legal battle over a smart meter network in Seattle, Washington, says he never expected a simple records request to turn into a lawsuit.…

Commodity kit means catalogue pricing StorageBod So have you taken my advice and started to build your own storage arrays? I certainly hope so; it’s a lot of fun and could really save your organisation some money.…

Containerisation could be coming to storage and that could be beneficial Blog B as in back-end, of course...…

We stroll down Memory Lane and weep for what might have been Special Report We stroll down Memory Lane and ask: was this The Ultimate Curse of Fry?…

Don't disturb piggy at the trough, he's busy Tech Data has said it is countering the slowdown in IT spending across Europe by nabbing market share from Ingram Micro rivals, though it stopped short of naming those leaky ships it is pinching business from.…

Revenues decline Q-on-Q as late flash array entry takes toll Hybrid array and recent all-flash array supplier Nimble Storage shows the effects of its late AF-Series flash array market entry and hyper-competitive market with its first quarter-on-quarter revenue decline.…

Revenues walk the falling walk again as CEO talks the turnaround talk – again Another great quarter. Not. Violin Memory made a paltry $9.7m in revenue and posted a $22m loss for its first fiscal 2017 quarter.…

Interactive display firm latest to go Chinese Loss-making interactive display vendor Smart Technologies has agreed to sell up to Foxconn for $200m.…

Has Sony Pics' Lazarus crew come back from the dead? A fourth bank, this time in the Philippines, has been attacked by hackers targeting the SWIFT inter-bank transfer system.…

DRAM, dude! Rowhammer brings down secure browser Security researchers have discovered a means to use previously unknown vulnerabilities found in in-memory deduplication to attack otherwise well-defended systems.…

What do you call a bunch of venture capitalists in orbit? A start… Wait. Can you hear it? Yes, it’s final countdown for The Register Summer lecture series, bringing space and robots to a connected home near you.…

Cops found eight minutes of voyeuristic footage A programmer has been banned from Oxford Street for filming up the skirts of young women.…

Market probe by regulator results in publicly slapped wrists The Competitions and Markets Authority (CMA) has found cloud storage providers were using contract terms and practices which could have breached consumer protection law – and has secured a “commitment” from three companies to not be naughty.…

Never mind our latest results, gaze at our petabyte-gobbling flash racks NetApp has re-engineered Data ONTAP, its main, FAS array operating system, to make better use of flash storage, and operate across software-only and cloud deployments to form what NetApp calls a data fabric.…

Sidles up to the enterprise: Psst, want some IP? Telecoms provider Kcom stemmed its declining revenue for the first time in eight years, reporting growth of 0.4 per cent to £349.2m for the full year 2015/16.…

Warning: Contains improbable Japanese CubeSat acronyms NASA has announced three more CubeSats which will travel on the first mission of the Space Launch System (SLS), slated for lift-off in 2018.…

Hoping that the Wi-Fi is better than the app Something for the Weekend, Sir? It’s sunny outside, which can mean only one thing: I am about to go on holiday to a place where it will be pissing down with rain and sleet for the next fortnight.…

Also covers MS and Docker bases Ansible has pushed out version 2.1 of its eponymous automation platform, with a large part of the update consisting of peeling off beta stickers on features it announced earlier this year.…

Andy Burnham writes open letter to Terrible Theresa IPB After winning a review of Blighty's Investigatory Powers Bill, the Shadow Home Secretary has repeated Labour's discomfort over the Snoopers' Charter.…

And then they gave him a new job on pay he set himself ON-CALL What's that it says on the calendar? It's Friday! Yoinks! That means it must be time for On-Call, our end-of-week stroll through readers' memories of odd office occurrences.…

Chipzilla slurps computer vision company Itseez to target autonomous cars Intel reduced to a component supplier to auto-makers? Don't rule it out, readers, or rate it a cut-rate fate for Chipzilla, because the company has just made a bet in just that field.…

When compromise becomes why bother at all Analysis The European Commission (EC) has approved a series of ecommerce rules designed to make Europe more competitive online.…

Outage extends beyond a week so carrier ships free modems to the afflicted Australia's dominant carrier, Telstra, has revealed that a botched fix for a DNS service is the reason for a week-long outage that has taken some of its broadband customers offline.…

Yes we do mean shrink: Martian cold snaps shift ice closer to the equator New analysis of Mars' poles suggest they get bigger when the red planet's not experiencing an ice age.…

Government promises more data-sharing and analytics of everything Chinese premier Li Keqiang has graced an otherwise obscure big data conference with his presence and outlined a new national analytics strategy.…

The co-developer of RSA's SecureID explains how he fought against Chinese crack AusCERT In March 2011, a suspected-to-be-Beijing-backed hacking unit infiltrated security giant RSA, successfully subverted its SecureID product and hacked top American defence contractor Lockheed Martin.…

Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Caught in a landslide, no escape from reality Queen guitarist Brian May is an enthusiast for stereo imagery, the Victorian-era 3D craze for viewing photos through a stereoscope in order to be awed by the illusion of depth in static images. May's put his money where his eyes are, operating the London Stereoscopic Company to promote the technology.…

Strange bedfellows decide to build 160 terabit-per-second trans-Atlantic submarine cable Microsoft and Facebook have decided to fund a submarine cable together.…

States won't issue new license numbers, leaving victims vulnerable for years AusCERT One in five Australian identity theft victims reporting to a government-backed crime monitor ID-Care have had drivers licenses stolen, according to Dr David Lacey of national ID theft support service ID Care.…

US broadband watchdog quietly targeted in new proposals A new budget proposal would effectively bar the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from enforcing its net neutrality provisions.…

ISPs legally obliged to prevent access to servers political masters don't want you to see Canada's second largest province, Quebec, has passed a law that obliges ISPs to block gambling websites.…

Big Red tells us it immediately plans to appeal Google has won the latest round in its long-running battle with Oracle over the use of Java class library APIs in Android.…

Well, he was a fan until a $3.3bn fine loomed An Alphabet shareholder is suing company executives – including exec chairman Eric Schmidt, CEO Larry Page, and president Sergey Brin – for their roles in Google's EU antitrust case.…

Things go from bad to worse for EPO's Benoit Battistelli Exclusive Every CEO knows it's impossible to be universally liked. But when staff start cutting your brakes, maybe it's time to consider moving on.…

All-flash box biz boosts sales, deepens losses, comes out swinging at analysts All-flash shipper Pure Storage delivered higher-than-expected revenue for its first fiscal 2017 quarter, but also had the first quarter-on-quarter revenue decline in its history since the IPO. Analysts thought it could have done better.…

Let them finish... 'for the short term'. But mostly chalks up loss to M&A costs Mergers and acquisitions and restructuring costs led to Lenovo booking its first annual loss since 2009, but crappy demand for PCs and smartphones didn’t exactly help to wax the bottom line either.…

New report rushed out ahead of EU referendum purdah A new report from the UK's independent biometrics commissioner has revealed that more than half of people on British counter-terrorism databases are innocent, more than a thousand more than previously thought.…

Work in development, analytics, data science? – this is for you Promo A coding competition is coming soon, brought to you by The Register in partnership with IBM. For now all we can tell you is that IBM's Cloudant platform will play a part in the proceedings.…

Length and girth swell a deflating 'few inches' NASA and Bigelow Aerospace earlier today scrubbed a first attempt to inflate the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM) - the "human-rated expandable structure" which is clamped to the International Space Station (ISS) for a two-year test.…

Wonder whose idea that was... Bank customers may be obliged to bear the bill for fraud against their accounts, under proposed changes under consideration between banks, the UK government and GCHQ.…

Evidently didn't fancy fast fibre deal A feisty Swedish sexagenarian earned herself an appearance before the beak for clearly demonstrating that she wasn't interested in fast fibre or pay TV by allegedly pulling what looked like a pistol on a hapless salesman.…

What do you people want? You said we weren't fast enough! Dropbox is on the defensive after revealing its file-sharing service will in future tap into the very heart of your computer’s operating system.…

Live at 15:00 BST/ 07:00 PDT Webcast We'll be broadcasting live from 15:00 BST today with a studio packed full of experts exploring the question: if hybrid is the answer, how well are organisations achieving it and what challenges are preventing them from progressing further?…

Services basketcases cling together = bigger basketcase Hewlett Packard Enterprise CEO Meg Whitman is dismantling another legacy bequeathed to her by a predecessor as she waves goodbye to Enterprise Services.…