The Register

Extra sub-band opened for nation's Netflix-noodlers Ofcom plans to open up an extra sub-band to Blighty's Wi-Fi users, allowing the transmission of large amounts of data as well faster download speeds.…

M'Lords quiz the government on e-cig clampdown Revolutions have started for flimsier reasons than draconian new laws that assault the population’s health.…

But we need $400m cost savings. Which means fewer people, less real estate Symantec is slipping back into cost-cutting mode just months after the split with storage arm Veritas was supposed to provide the healing balm the business so clearly needed.…

Fixing Java-related bug trickier than it sounds, claims ERP security firm Analysis A vulnerability in SAP systems that some enterprises have failed to patch for six years is more difficult to fix than previously reported and estimates of enterprise exposure are way too low, according to the security consultancy that originally found it.…

Calls on consumers to submit evidence in crusade for greater competition EU competition commish Margaret Vestager reckons the decision to smack down the proposed £10.5bn merger between O2 and Three this week was one it did "not take lightly".…

Encryption? Baddies use that for terrorism, we hear Analysis The government is poised to legislate on how it intends to use your data for public services – but its woefully worded “data sharing” consultation suggests it hasn't learnt much from the ongoing controversies of Care.data.…

Epic battle for musical supremacy in prospect In what promises to be an entertaining night, politically at least, Russia, Ukraine and Georgia will face off in Saturday's Eurovision Song Contest final in Stockholm.…

Application costs up, lines longer... now this Apart from marrying an American, the best known route for foreign techies wanting to (legally) share their expertise for a fee in the US is a work visa.…

My messaging apps are spouting lines from a 'Carry On' script

Left pad chaos highlighted madness behind scenes Open Source Insider Open source software rarely receives the kind of attention that the press lavishes on the latest hot new thing blessed by Silicon Valley venture capitalists. Yet these projects are the foundations of the web world.…

Outside the Silicon Valley hype cycle Three years ago few people other than hardcore gamers and those working in specialist industrial fields were still talking about VR.…

34 million observations from two Martian years prove Mars is cold, dry and nasty NASA boffins have crunched 34 million weather observations collected by the Curiosity rover its two full Martian years trundling about the red planet.…

So Microsoft fired them, then paid a bonus to play LAN games for three months On-Call Welcome again to On-Call, in its regular Friday slot where we bring you readers' stories of stuff that goes on in the workplace.…

Googly McSearchface releases natural language tool called Parsey McParseface Googly McSearchface has released SyntaxNet, “an open-source neural network framework” and an open source tool for parsing the English language called Parsey McParseface.…

Legal Decision Of New Zealand Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan File storage site Mega has been ordered to hand over IP address information to the Kazakhstan Government that could identify a user alleged to have uploaded more than 100,000 stolen documents to the service.…

Defacer teaches r/howtohack how to hack with mass defacement spree A seemingly benign Twitter pest has popped what they claim is more than 100 Reddit subreddits including those devoted to the upcoming big ticket Battlefield One game, Marvel Studios, Star Wars, and Game of Thrones.…

Calls for counter-narratives and collaboration plan with tech giants The United Nations Security Council is going to try to do something about the internet's role in promoting hateful ideologies and terrorism.…

Follows Flash, Microsoft fixes. Google has slung patches at vulnerabilities in its Chrome browser for Windows, Mac, and Linux.…

Software-defined everything plan is leading to ever-deeper deals, says CEO VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger has quashed rumours he will depart the company once the EMC/Dell merger concludes.…

Desktop users targeted with JavaScript-crimping, animation-slowing efforts Browser minnow Opera may have less than two per cent of the market, but thinks the 50 per cent boost to battery life it's baked into a new browser will help it to do better.…

Three-and-half-hours of data has evaporated. Maybe forever Salesforce.com's protracted outage earlier this week caused data loss.…

How could things get worse for telco? Glad you asked that US telecoms giant Verizon is once again facing government scrutiny for a rollout of its network services in a major US city.…

Fiercely missing the point is part of the job description The director of the FBI, James Comey, has again claimed that citizens' use of mobile phones to record the police is causing an increase in crime, despite previous direct criticism over the claim from President Obama.…

Go ahead and bang your head on the desk. We'll wait. Adobe has pushed out a patch for 25 vulnerabilities in Flash Player, including one that is already being targeted in the wild.…

Wait til you see what caused it British astronaut Tim Peake has sparked an orbital kerfuffle after he tweeted a picture showing a crack in the International Space Station's window. It was caused by space debris.…

Richard Li, owner of the top-level domain .richardli In the ultimate sign of online vanity, the billionaire chair of Hong Kong telecoms company PCCW, Richard Li, has bought his own internet address: .richardli. for $250,000…

Deutschlanders could soon dump liability rule Germany could soon roll back a law that holds Wi-Fi network owners liable for crimes that individual users commit online.…

We don't need no .edu Students who have access to computer devices in the classroom do significantly worse than colleagues without them, a study has found.…

Market reducing manufacturing but driving up capacity Seagate is reducing its manufacturing capacity while still focusing on high-capacity disk drives for cloud and hyper-scale storage of unstructured data. This means it needs higher capacity drives, requiring new read-write head technology.…

It's in our policy ... but 'we would never' A Scottish council has published a new policy paper which justifies its "investigating officers" creating fake accounts for snooping purposes on social media, though it denies ever having conducted such covert surveillance.…

New spintronics material in town – it's antiferromagnetic A team of international researchers from the University of Nottingham has found a new material – copper manganese arsenide – which could be the future of computer storage, according to a study published in Science.…

Campaigners bemoan 'shadowy way' Police National Computer is run Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC), which inspects Britain's police forces, has reported on several cases of misuse of the Police National Computer (PNC) by non-police organisations.…

Vows to send boxen at its expense until it does HDS promises 100 per cent of your VSP-stored data will be available 100 per cent of the time and is now guaranteeing at least a doubling of flash capacity when using its data reduction technologies.…

Elementary IBM is teaming up with eight North American universities to further tune its cognitive system to tackle cybersecurity problems.…

Reg lecture shows where scientists AND VCs are boldly going next We all know the ambition of Silicon Valley’s finest know no bounds - not even gravity. So it’s no surprise that some of the world’s finest business minds are training their brain power and considerable fortunes far beyond our own, rather limited world.…

Apparently took months to contain Wendy’s confirmed on Wednesday that malicious software affected PoS (point-of-sale) devices in around 300 of the burger chain’s 5,500 franchised stores, or about five per cent of all its restaurants in North America.…

Principal lender Vodafone reads Outsourcery riot act An insolvency and restructuring veteran has taken a seat at the board of moribund cloud services firm Outsourcery as one of the requisite Ts&Cs to secure a funding lifeline from Vodafone.…

Profits halve in 2016. Otherwise biz as usual TalkTalk's profits plunged by 56 per cent during 2016 to a mere £14m, but chief exec Dido Harding claimed the company "bounced back strongly in the final quarter". That quarter was certainly unusual.…

Only Pluto and Eris larger than trans-Neptunian '2007 OR10' Astronomers have used observations from the Kepler space telescope and the Herschel Space Observatory to determine that the trans-Neptunian object "2007 OR10" is bigger than previously thought, and now ranks third in the solar system's dwarf planet size league table, behind Pluto and Eris.…

Stop smirking in the back, Google Opinion Data controllers could face more severe regulatory fines than data processors for failing to keep personal data appropriately secure under the new General Data Protection Regulation.…

Going north: More than an icy blast in your chiller cabinet Dotted around the near-Arctic are several data centres, each taking advantage of the cold air in that region. We know that low temperatures are great for cooling, but it isn’t the only reason that operators chose those locations.…

Researchers reckon Verizon's been very lazy and unsophisticated Information security boffins have pilloried Verizon's latest data breach report, suggesting its list of top security vulnerabilities do not represent reality.…

One was so good at doing nothing he was asked to do it again On-Call Welcome again to On-Call, our usually-on-Friday romp through interesting things readers have been asked to do at work.…

US-CERT issues first-ever alert for SAP users, advising them to become competent The United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team has taken the unusual step of enumerating just how many organisations have a particular problem, by calling out “36 organizations worldwide are affected by an SAP vulnerability … that was patched by SAP in 2010.”…

Instagram upgrades its iconography, with a marvellously silly explanation LOGOWATCH Instagram's changed its logo. And given us a spectacular example of the astounding language Silicon Valley manges to emit when talking about itself.…

Attackers can score user privileges thanks to heap corruption hassle Some of the world's biggest security and software vendors will be rushing to patch holes in implementations of the popular 7-zip compression tool to stop attackers gaining full control of customer machines.…

Election shocker as disruptive meta-disruption comes to Australian politics If there's one thing that Australia's two main political parties agree on, it's that replicating Silicon Valley on local shores is a Very Good Thing.…

Adopts KVM, plans own Linux distro and software-defined storage product Virtuozzo is going to build a comprehensive stack of tech for containerised computing.…

Yet another mess we can blame on the combination of Flash and advertising Tsinghua University postgraduate student Jianjun Chen has reported a critical cache poisoning vulnerability in the Squid proxy server, a transparent cache widely deployed by internet service providers.…