The Register

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.…

Auto maker pumps $182.2m into PaaS firm Ford is pumping a hefty $182.2m into platform-as-a-service spinner Pivotal as part of a key strategic stake.…

Gartner gets out the crystal ball The hyper-converged integrated systems (HCIS) market is set to engulf the integrated systems market by 2019, according to Gartner.…

Biz has 2.3 million customers. Half a million of them actually pay, too Alibaba’s cloud computing division Alicloud reported bumper growth of 138 per cent to $468m (£322m) for its full financial year 2016, as more paying customers flocked to the Middle Kingdom's AWS equivalent.…

'It’s challenging to show the community what’s being done' The British public remains "clueless or indifferent" to smart cities, according to a report released by the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET).…

Ice age hits ISE and iglu manufacturer X-IO sent a formal letter on April 29 to the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment, saying it intended to close its Colorado Springs manufacturing operation, and warning that up to 107 people could lose their jobs.…

World’s first PLC worm spreads like cancer BlackHat Asia A world-first proof-of-concept worm - if unleashed - could spell disaster for the world’s critical infrastructure, including power utilities by making attacks exponentially more difficult to detect and stop.…

Cuffed for allegedly exploiting bank error with gusto A 21-year-old woman has appeared in court in Sydney accused of taking advantage of a Westpac Bank glitch which saw her accidentally granted an unlimited overdraft against which she allegedly withdrew AU$4.6m, "part of which she spent on luxury handbags", as news.com.au puts it.…

Pastebin is for old hats. Cool black hats use Twitter now Hackers collectively tripled the production of Proof-of-Concept exploits last year, according to a new study out on Thursday.…

Minority stake buys them a board seat Payroll and accounting software firm Sage Software is taking a stake in Salesforce-HR platform partner Fairsail.…

It's all change in the cloudy upstart world Rob Mason, the founder, CTO and EVP for engineering at Nasuni, has left the company he started up with CEO Andres Rodriguez.…

Where next for the former Eurocrat regulator-in-chief? Controversial taxi app biz Uber has appointed former EU competition and telecoms regulator "Steelie" Neelie Kroes to advise it on, er, competition and regulation.…

I expected a ransom note and all I got was this stupid Locky Pranksters have infiltrated the control system behind the infamous Locky ransomware and replaced the malware’s main payload with a dummy file.…

Tragic victim of Strategy Boutiqueers LOGOWATCH Those of delicate linguistic sensibilities are advised to look away as we report today that the Siemens tentacle previous known as Siemens Healthcare has gone under the surgeon's rebranding knife and emerged as the quite remarkable Siemens Healthineers.…

This is what deduplication means in the real world When Dell completes its acquisition of EMC and its subsidiary VMware, the combined Dell Technologies will become one of the largest technology employers in Ireland.…

It's finally happened EU telecoms providers must cut surcharges for 'roaming' phone calls and data use in EU countries from 30 April, in preparation for the complete abolition of roaming charges in June 2017.…

Hardware keeps getting left behind...your TV's always nearly out of date Analysis BT has been as bold over distribution technology as the content itself for its sport channels, but then it had to be given Sky’s entrenched position in sports rights in the UK.…

'Lower than planned' says BT amid 'more synergies' hint BT's £12.5bn gobble of EE will cost the business £550m in integration costs - according to the company's full-year financial results which were given a significant boost this thanks to the acquisition.…

Copyright Hub finally issues something useful “Imagine if a Facebook rival emerged that didn’t require users to surrender their rights, and that rewarded them for their creativity with real dosh. Who’d want to stick around with the old Facebook that doesn’t do either?” we mused last year.…

Checks found three potentially outage-causing scripts Continuous Lifecycle For a business that processes 120 customer transactions per minute, the fear of IT outages is never far from the mind of Trainline's head of IS operations, Dave Stanley.…

Dox pays lots. An unknown number of staff at US corporations are at high risk of having their tax returns plundered after criminals siphoned their publicly-disclosed personal details and a unique company URL to obtain their records from payroll provider ADP.…

Researcher who paid a pittance also discloses 34m account leak from Russia's QIP A hacker has sold hundreds of millions of stolen email credentials - including 42.5 million never before disclosed - for just one dollar to researchers at intelligence firm Hold Security.…

Home antivirus is rubbish, so you don't use it on your work PCs. Do you? Have you ever suspected filters that decrypt traffic of being insecure? Canadian boffins agree with you, saying TLS proxies – commonly deployed in both business and home networks for traffic inspection – open up cans of worms.…

Soft-tissue surgery automation looms Surgeons beware, your jobs may not have a long-term future after a robot managed to stitch together live soft tissue better than its fleshy counterparts.…

Where do you get the weird thermal paper? Wherever fax rolls and scissors are sold! Emails are still trickling in with readers trying to trump the almost nineteen-year-old server we found was just being decommissioned back in January.…

Because you pay Microsoft Singapore for software bought inside the Sydney Opera House Australia has copied the United Kingdom's Government Digital Service and has now decided the UK's Google-busting Diverted Profits tax is also worth replicating.…

Marcel Lazar turns pigeon for Fox Romanian hacker Marcel Lehel Lazar – aka “Guccifer” – has had a chat to Fox News from a Virginia jail to claim he waltzed through an e-mail server run for Hillary Clinton.…

Screen OS not affected The next vendor to kill off the OpenSSH roaming bug announced in January is Juniper Networks.…

ATP via ‘aggregated threat’ Security researchers have spotted an on-going global botnet campaign seemingly linked to North Korea.…

VxRack 1000 gets neutrino nodes, DSSD option and has hybrid cloud dev platfiorm built on it. EMC World's second day saw hyper-converged rackery put front and centre, with a stronger DSSD offering, Neutrino nodes coming to the VxRack 1000 as well as a DSSD variant, and a hybrid cloud VXrack offering.…

Disgruntled core devs take bat and ball to new LEDE Project A split seems to have emerged in the Linux-router-OS community, with a breakaway group splitting from OpenWRT.…

Big plans ahead if the FAA gets its act together Cloud seeding – spraying chemicals into the air to encourage rainfall – used to be regarded as a fringe science at best, but now it's kinda of big deal. As such, eggheads in Nevada hope to use drones to turn parts of the largely arid US state, otherwise famous for the Las Vegas adult playground, green.…

How about dat Enterprise upgrade, huh? Last month, while we were all distracted by iPhone hacking and Jay-Z's web fiasco, Microsoft silently bumped off the ability for IT administrators to easily take the Windows Store off Windows 10 Pro PCs.…

Ɔlonp ƃɐqɟǝsʇ ɥǝɐps poʍu nupǝɹ The November 2017 OpenStack summit will take place in Sydney, Australia.…

Elon Musk sticks with 80,000 unit production target for 2016 Tesla might have pleased Wall Street with its latest financial results, but the company has also lost a couple of high-profile production executives in the last 24 hours.…

Software-defined networking suite gets entry level version VMware has taken the scissors to its NSX product's feature list to offer versions that won't set back customers quite as much as the full product, at the same time hiking the price of the top version of the product.…

Critical flaw among trio of bugs blatted this week Cisco has released three security patches to address flaws in its TelePresence, FirePower and Adaptive Security Appliance lines.…

Whaddaya mean abuse of privacy?! Police in Maryland, US, used controversial cellphone-tracking technology intended only for the most serious crimes to track down a man who stole $50 of chicken wings.…

The 'unpublished research' the punishment was based on? Yeah, we made it up Exclusive The UK government's Intellectual Property Office (IPO) has admitted it simply made up an official justification for 10-year jail sentences for copyright-infringing file sharers.…

Businesses gobbling businesses, it's like a buffet in here America's internet mall cop the FCC has approved the proposed $17.7bn merger between Altice and US cable provider Cablevision.…

Ack! I've been poisoned A rogue advertiser abused the Taggify self-serve ad platform to inject malware-installing code into browsers visiting the websites of two US TV stations.…

Special Breakthrough Prize for all scientists and engineers working on LIGO The team of scientists involved in the successful detection of gravitational waves has been awarded the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics – along with $3m.…

Staff futures still up in the air as X-IO tries to avoid lay-offs Talks between X-IO and Pivot3 about IP licensing, engineering services and potential X-IO staff moving to Pivot3 have stalled.…

No iPhones apparently a rule. Imagine that Privacy guides meant for journalists are being re-purposed by terrorist groups, Trend Micro researchers say.…

Director general in the sights as legislators urge publication of controversial report The heads of several congressional committees have written to John Kerry, the US Secretary of State, to urge him to deal with the corruption scandal boiling over at the UN's WIPO.…

Sooo... looks like more public money will be coughed by NHS A health trust that exposed the private details of 6,574 members of staff on its website has been fined £185,000 by UK data privacy watchdogs.…

Empty threats from faux hackers doing the rounds again What kind of a grifter pretends he's going to DDoS you? The kind that easily makes off with a lot of cash, it seems. "Hackers" who have been making empty DDoS threats while posing as the Armada Collective appear to have have moved on.…

'Don't do DevOps because it is trendy' Continuous Lifecycle Throwing collaboration tools such as Slack at a business with fundamental communications problems will do nothing to solve development and operational issues, said Katherine Daniels, senior operations engineer at Etsy.…