The Register

Battle for next-gen transport system hots up Spectators in the Nevada desert have witnessed the first public test of a Hyperloop test vehicle as it accelerated from zero to over 100 miles per hour in a few seconds before running out of track.…

Adobe readies patch cannons. Yet again Adobe will this week patch a critical vulnerability in Flash Player that is being actively exploited in the wild.…

The only thing lower than our prices is your security! Retail giant Walmart has filed suit against Visa over the ability to force chip and PIN authorization for card purchases.…

Patent-holding firm alleges two violations A company is suing Apple, AT&T and Verizon for a combined total of $7bn over claims that they violated its voice-over-IP patents.…

Battle lines drawn and redrawn Google has open-sourced the Thread networking protocol used in its Nest smart thermostat in an effort to win the ongoing internet of things standards war.…

Armageddon outta here Californian scientists are testing a system this month that may save humanity in the not-too-distant future.…

Leave the AdWords. Take the cannoli. Google says it will no longer serve ads for short-term loan services it considers to be predatory lenders.…

CRM floater breaks with precedent, jumps aboard bandwagon In a major break from the past, Salesforce is turning to an outside supplier to run a portion of its cloud.…

Bankers take a shine to the Emerald Isle The mad money bags at Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) has announced they will be throwing an additional $100m at Ireland's Strategic Investment Fund, doubling the bank's involvement in the nation's tech sector.…

DevOps biz SourceClear says its shiny thing is better than everyone else's DevOps outfit SourceClear has released a free tool for finding vulnerabilities in open-source code.…

Same chap also built an IoT mousetrap. No, really Privacy needs to be baked into Internet of Things developers’ thinking from the outset, one of IBM’s IoT supremos said today, pointing out that “just because you can do something, it doesn’t mean you should”.…

Weakening enterprise storage hits profits Quantum’s latest results show that scale-out storage is still not growing fast enough to outweigh declining tape storage revenues – and Quantum is still a shrinking business.…

VC funding clears way for product, sales and marketing build-out NVMe flash array startup E8 Storage has snagged a $12m B-round of funding.…

More mobile operators to incorporate the software Analyst firm Juniper Research has stared into its crystal ball and predicted that digital publishers stand to lose over $27bn (£18bn) by 2020 due to ad-blocking.…

Edgier and Linuxier, too The latest Windows 10 preview has been released by Microsoft, with changes making it more Linux and web-friendly.…

Spent over $8m trying to defeat ballot

Your phone becomes a microscope down at Kickstarter An Italian "microscopy, consumer electronics and micro-optics" outfit is offering smartphone and tablet owners the chance to get up-close and personal with the world via "an ultra portable and very affordable set of 2 mini lenses which turns your smartphone or tablet into a digital microscope".…

Political junk mail OK when it's pro-EU and from gov.UK Pro-Brexit group Leave.EU has been fined £50,000 for sending up to 500,000 unsolicited text messages urging people to support its campaign, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) said today.…

Ofcom whispers 'non' into EU's ear, regulator over the water sleepily agrees Hutchison is considering a legal challenge against the EU over its decision today to block the proposed £10.25bn merger between mobile operators Three and O2.…

Believe it or not, this is what the owners want +Comment About turn! You never lack for excitement with Imation, which has turned the previous quarter’s $94m in revenues and near $10m in losses into this quarter’s $10.7m revenues and $91.1m losses.…

A taxing problem for US and European firms relocating Ireland has a very good track record of using its corporation tax rate to attract foreign tech firms - anyone who is anyone is either in Ireland or has been here.…

A SCSI-brained 'friend' in need is a pain indeed This damn war Friends of friends can be a pain in the nuts when you're in IT: you find yourself invited to someone's house “for a beer” and then somehow end up kneeling in a dark, dusty under-stair cupboard trying to coax a six-year-old router back into life.…

Departs orbiting outpost today bearing return cargo Crew aboard the International Space Station (ISS) are preparing to wave off the SpaceX Dragon resupply capsule, which will return to Earth later today bearing over 1,600kg of cargo.…

Goatse hosty leak makes cheeks toasty A data breach at a forum for "anal fisting" has resulted in the exposure of 107,000 accounts.…

Mostly we're stuck with 'former monopoly' BT Analysis The pace of fibre broadband deployment in the UK remains a highly contentious issue. But the current lack of fibre isn't our biggest problem: it's the absence of any national strategy.…

Zuck Squad thinks it can do SDN for the entire internet with decentralised smarts Facebook has promised to open source a “modular routing platform” it says powers many of its own networks.…

Private data said to be safe. British mobile device detection company 51Degrees used by the likes of Unilever, T-Mobile, IBM, and Microsoft, has been hacked.…

Unicode considering doctors, scientists, software engineers and even rockstars Google has decided that emoji need to offer better role models for women and has therefore proposed 13 new emoji, all depicting women in the workplace.…

World's biggest flesh site offering cash if you can expose its seamy underbelly The world's most popular porn site PornHub has launched a somewhat restrictive security bug bounty.…

Sales of €5.6bn about €500m shy of last year's effort, so the sackings start When Nokia Networks and Alcatel-Lucent officially became one company, on January 14th this year, board chair Risto Siilasmaa declared “Our earnings, market cap and growth opportunities have multiplied.”…

49,000-year-old blade pushes humanity's history of tooling around back 10,000 years The world's oldest known ground-edge axe has been discovered in Australia's remote north Kimberley region, pushing back the date of the invention to some 49,000 years.…

New Xeon bits make virtual machines more reliable, secure VMware will add support for Intel's Page Modification Logging (PML, aka Dirty Page Logs) in a future version of vSphere, according to the product's chief platform architect Richard Brunner.…

Navy builder popped. South Korea is fingering its northern neighbours for an attack last month against a navy defence contractor.…

If you'd spent $16 billion, you'd be tired of people Slacking off, too Brace yourself for a new round of panic about consumer IT providing new ways to leak stuff to the outside world, because Facebook has released Mac OS and Windows versions of messaging application WhatsApp.…

Downtime approaches 12 hours and irate customers stop selling online and start satirising online Workers across the US have been tearing their hair out after the Salesforce NA14 instance suffered a Total Inability To Support Usual Performance around 11 hours ago.…

'GEEK FACTOR' trademark application mentions 'game software for mobile phones' Cisco's trying to get into the games business.…

And nine of them are similar to Earth, says NASA It's barely been 30 years since NASA spotted its first planet outside our solar system but on Tuesday the agency reported its biggest collection of sightings to date – 1,284 confirmed planets, along with 1,327 additional probable sightings and 707 possibles.…

Another unicorn loses its horn The CEO of online money merchant Lending Club, Renaud Laplanche, has been fired, raising more questions over tech startups and how far from business norms - and the law - they have strayed in an effort to make money.…

Hearing digs into controversial Section 702 The legal justification for the NSA to tap the internet's backbone was put on the table Tuesday in a hearing of the Senate's Judiciary Committee, with some senators vowing to add privacy protections to the law as expert witnesses noted the FBI was likely reading the love letters of US citizens rather than tracking down terrorists.…

Get updating before the crims catch on There's 15 flaw fixes covering 36 vulnerabilities in this month's patch bundle from Microsoft.…

Bombastic orange billionaire has at least one vote in California Paypal co-founder, Facebook investor, dope-loving Silicon Valley VC Peter Thiel is an official Trump delegate for California.…

Not that that makes mass exposure of folks' financial info any better, natch Hackers linked to the Qatar National Bank (QNB) breach have leaked data siphoned from the UAE’s InvestBank.…

Micro-services are now the latest hype topic Comment Gartner is telling its enterprise IT followers that hyper-converged systems are okay to use, and set to develop into composable micro-services infrastructures by 2020.…

Two in five Flash users DO update. Surprised? A quarter of all Windows devices are running outdated and unsupported versions of Internet Explorer, exposing users to more than 700 known vulnerabilities in process.…

Hops over Apple's garden wall to do it CEO and co-founder of Apple’s Siri, Dag Kittlaus, has launched a demo of his 2012 project with co-founder Adam Cheyer – a new virtual AI platform named Viv.…

But anti-harassment plans will worry photogs and parodies Plaid Cymru MP Liz Saville Roberts has tabled a series of amendments to the Policing and Crime Bill which, among other things, could make it illegal to install spyware on someone's phone.…

Hello RS-28 Sarmat, goodbye Texas Russia has announced it's ready to start field trials on its RS-28 Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile, intended to replace the existing R-36M2 Voevoda (NATO designation SS-18 "Satan").…

Sets up new business unit to mine the deep money seams Hitachi has set up a Hitachi Insight Group (HIG) to focus its variegated and so far separate Internet of Things (IoT) efforts.…

Libraries and other code scanned for known programming blunders Docker has hit upon an idea that perhaps other platforms could potentially incorporate: scanning software components for publicly known vulnerabilities prior to deployment.…

Watchdog slams Auntie’s open-ended data slurp A £75m “Agile” BBC IT project has evaded scrutiny because managers could make up the benefits as they went along, according to the spending watchdog the National Audit Office. Any likelihood of the project achieving savings is now officially rated as “in doubt” by the BBC’s own project monitoring.…