The Register

We'll keep laying our own fibre for now, thanks Ofcom's move to open up BT's ducts and poles to competitors is the cornerstone of the regulator's strategy to break the country's reliance on the former state monopoly, but small fibre firms say they are not holding their breath.…

'Enhanced Attribution' will anonymise threat data, reveal past and future crimes The US Military skunkworks Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is hoping to build a platform to help bolster the treacherous world of attack attribution that would generate, anonymise, and share threat data.…

NASA's latest New Horizons data haul NASA's latest data release from its New Horizons probe has confirmed the reason that Pluto's moon Hydra is covered by ice.…

Crusty bait makes for great phishing The six-year-old vulnerability first burnt by Stuxnet remains the internet's chief pwning vector and is a key instrument of the world's worst exploit kit known as Angler.…

Savage Havij Vanguard Cybersecurity man David Levin was arrested after disclosing SQL injection vulnerabilities that revealed admin credentials in the Lee County state elections web site.…

An even tastier dog's toffee British Telecom has offered the UK government a familiar devil's bargain: protect us from competition and we'll spend an extra £6 billion on our broadband networks.…

Judge flicks ad-network's attempt to dismiss Facebook has lost the first round of a US class action lawsuit in Illinois, with a judge ruling it can proceed to trial.…

Take a walk on the hot planet NASA, the US Geological Survey and various university faculties have released a dream package for the imaginary hiker and geodata geek: a topographical model of Mercury.…

Users to choose own codecs The Linux Mint project has decided version 18, scheduled for June 2016, will end out-of-the-box installation of multimedia codecs.…

Google bug-hunters disclose 26 vulnerabilities Aruba Networks is slinging patches at a bunch of vulnerabilities in management platforms, its Aruba Instant Platform, and its proprietary ArubaOS PAPI management API.…

Offers AU$594 million for 20 MHz of 4G goodness Vodafone has put a half-billion-dollar offer to the Australian government for the 700 MHz spectrum it skipped in the government's 2013 spectrum auction.…

Megadeal gets go-ahead after vote The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has given its blessing to Charter's $78.7bn acquisition of Time Warner Cable (TWC) and Bright House Networks.…

You're making it look easy, folks +Pictures The remarkable engineering achievement of landing a rocket on a ship was repeated for a second time earlier today – and under more difficult circumstances.…

Beloved hacker mag comes out of four-year hiatus More than four years since its previous issue, iconic hacker zine Phrack has published a new issue.…

And they are not going to tell anyone the details of their cosy settlement A long-standing lawsuit between thermostat company Honeywell and Google over the Nest smart thermostat has been settled, with both sides agreeing to a "long-term patent cross-license agreement".…

You can always update to Windows 10. Eh? Eh? A recent Windows 7 update partially bricks computers that have an Asus motherboard fitted, it emerged this week.…

VK chief pwned, allegedly Hacktivists have leaked what could be the email inbox of Boris Dobrodeev – the boss of Russian social network VK, previously known as VKontakte.…

Zombies should be exorcised from gadgets they infect Online software bazaars – such as Apple's App Store and Google Play – need to claim responsibility for "dead applications" and notify people when their programs have been revoked or removed, a study by security firm Appthority recommends.…

Rise of the ... er, online tat bazaar droids? eBay has announced it is buying AI firm Expertmaker, which specialises in AI, machine learning and data analytics.…

Will be 'disabled and removed' Microsoft's "Get Windows 10" nagware that has been driving some people bonkers will be killed off in July, when Redmond pulls its free upgrade offer.…

The greatest change takes place outside CABs One of the more wickedly astonishing findings from the current DevOps Report is that change review or advisory boards have little effect on a company’s performance. In fact CABs – as they are called – tend to slow down IT’s ability to release software quickly and regularly, negatively affecting organisational performance.…

Ashwin Ram will lead AI R&D department Amazon has hired Ashwin Ram, an ex-Xerox PARC employee and a researcher in cognitive science, in an effort to step up its AI R&D department.…

Um, Google… I thought you hated patent trolls? Yieldify, the Google Ventures-backed startup accused of stealing code from British adtech company Bounce Exchange, has been making some unusual friends.…

Hyper-v hyperconverger Gridstor has hit up Meg's firm for new leader Nariman Teymourian, an ex-SVP and general manager for converged systems at HPE, has been appointed as Gridstore CEO, replacing the departed George Symons, who left on April 19.…

Pay up and feel like you're doing something good, say dastardly villains Ransomware crooks are offering to donate ransom fees to a children's charity. Security experts dismiss the promise as “psychological manipulation” from unscrupulous crooks.…

Project Nitro turns Isilon into unstructured data dragster EMC has an all-flash, bladed Isilon Nitro project to boost its scale-out file performance to 250,000 IOPS per node and 400+ nodes.…

Flash gets a stay of execution – for now Mozilla is excluding Flash from a more general clamp-down on the enablement of browser add-ons with the latest edition of Firefox.…

BPI takes pop at UGC loophole Analysis The latest record industry middleman takes more than ever from the mouths of musicians, at least compared with the old record industry middleman.…

Apple adds software giant to the IBM collection Apple and SAP are partnering to create native iOS apps for the enterprise firm's HANA platform.…

Boaty McBoatface not entirely sunk, though The Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) has announced that its shiny new £200m, 15,000 tonne polar research ship will be named RRS Sir David Attenborough, in honour of the Brit naturalist and broadcaster.…

In an as-a-service world, everything hinges on trust Sysadmin blog Microsoft makes a number of truly fantastic technologies and it is legitimately at the cutting edge of a number of hybrid cloud technologies. By the same token, Microsoft is also an asshat, so any attempt to make decisions about it gets complicated and messy in a right hurry.…

Pro Brexit AND pro EU - is that even possible? There appears to be a broad consensus that a Brexit would be bad for Ireland: that Ireland’s economy would be seriously affected if the UK decides to leave the EU on June 23.…

Ops folk should spend a bit of time in the engineering bunker You’ve almost certainly heard about DevOps and the fact there’s a skills shortage.…

When white goods go bad Something for the Weekend, Sir? We have installed a water feature in Dabbs Mansions. It’s an impressive vertical fountain with a splash radius of two metres. In hindsight, it was probably a mistake to install it in the utility room.…

At least this was better than the comedy meeting in which his chair collapsed On-Call Welcome again to On-Call, our Friday folly in which readers share stories of their professional adventures.…

300 million of us slurped it for free. Anyone left willing to pay US$119/£99.99? Microsoft has announced that the free all-you-can-eat Windows 10 upgrade buffet will close forever on July 29, and that after that you'll have to pay for all the fun of its latest operating system.…

POWER-as-a-service was 'Due in the second quarter' of 2015, started in April 2016 In March 2015 IBM's Softlayer cloud operation announced it would start to offer bare metal servers running Big Blue's POWER8 chippery.…

Reg readers share their tales of spontaneous OS upgrades At the end of April, Microsoft's Windows 10 nagware interrupted a live TV weather broadcast to urge meteorologist Metinka Slater to upgrade her computer.…

Two hours on the ground is enough for flying menaces to damage flying machines More proof that everything in Australia is trying to kill you: the nation's Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) has published details of how wasps have caused two passenger jets to make emergency landings.…

Drag and drop tools that teach through experimentation have a place beyond the classroom As we move into the mid-21st century - what historians will probably note as the Dawn of the Connected Era - our emphasis on what’s important to teach children has changed. Where once we tried to cram kids heads full of facts, these days we tend to favor the capacity to find an answer.…

Steep increase in phone use produces 'no increase in brain cancer incidence' An Australian study has found no increase in brain cancers over the last 29 years, despite enormous increase in use of mobile phones.…

Big Blue wants RefStack secured and networked by the time Newton falls from the three IBM wants to make OpenStack implementations more interoperable and hopes it can add security and networking features to the RefStack project in time for the Newton OpenStack release due in October.…

Patch aims to alleviate issues with unpacking downloads Microsoft has a released a fix to address problems with its Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) tool. For those not in the know, WSUS is a component of Windows Server that lets IT administrators push particular updates to users' PCs.…

270,000 signatures achieved nothing at all last time, but clicktivists are trying again! The Australian Labor Party has hinted at its policy for the nation's national broadband network (NBN), with leader Bill Shorten promising “a first-rate fibre national broadband network” in his Budget in Reply speech.…

Washington lobbying dollars: Exhibit 1 Sixty US congressman have sent a letter [PDF] to Tom Wheeler – chairman of America's internet mall cop, the FCC – urging him to "press pause" on plans to open the cable box market to competition.…

Redmond says it's time to make your peace with its mail client Microsoft says users who access their Outlook.com addresses with Windows Live Mail 2012 will soon be cut off from sending and receiving mail.…

I do not have the courage to, er, prove I'm not messing with you The creator of Craig Wright, Craig Wright, has managed to stay in the news for a fourth day: this time for having a depressingly inevitable meltdown following his failure, yet again, to prove he is the inventor of digi-currency bitcoin.…

Alert after heavy-handed sync nukes files Apple Music users are being warned after one fella says the streaming service deleted more than 100GB of files from his computer.…

Victor Lund sweeps in as new old broom +Comment Data warehouse and biz intelligence wrangler Teradata made a loss in its first quarter of 2016. It also recruited a new CEO to get the company motoring again.…

No, seriously, it's a bad idea. Honestly The UK government has, on World Password Day, repeated its advice against the common security practice of routinely changing passwords.…