The Register

Miscreant turned FBI informant gets out after 37 months The self-confessed creator of the infamous Gozi trojan was sentenced to time served and ordered to pay $6.9m in restitution by a New York court on Monday.…

High-denomination paper wedge too handy for crims The European Central Bank (ECB) will likely agree today to stop production of the meaty €500 note, which has long been considered a handy tool for criminals wishing to do illicit transactions with cash wedges of manageable dimensions.…

Survey finds public information campaign was 'ill-informed and utterly ineffective' The UK wasted £20m on raising awareness about cybercrime, a study has shown, as the public still knows almost nothing about protecting itself online.…

Greg wades in on Twitter after blowout from last week's show

To avoid blindness, watch live with NASA Mercury will transit the Sun next Monday, and those wishing to witness this occasional event without risking blindness will be pleased to know that NASA will have full coverage.…

... in November. Until then, OK to say '10kMb/year for £30 per month, not inc. £12e3 line rent' The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has announced it will be cracking down on dodgy fixed broadband price claims... from 31 October.…

Meteor shower peak ahoy, cloud and rain a cert The annual Eta Aquarid meteor display will peak on the night of 5/6 May, with skygazers not suffering the traditional cloud and driving rain advised to keep an eye out for maximum burning dust from Halley's Comet at around 3-5 am on the 6th.…

Gutsy overclockers set new record HPC Blog Excitement reigned at the Asia Student Supercomputer Challenge Cluster Competition as Zhejiang University set a new student LINPACK record with 12.03 Tflop/s.…

You can read Anne Frank, Julia. You just don't want to pay for it Comment A tasteless attempt to recruit Holocaust victim Anne Frank to the case of weakening European copyright protection has backfired on the EU's only Pirate Party MP, Julia Reda.…

It's certainly going to try to be a little bendy If EU member states can, by law, exercise legislative “flexibility” when implementing 50+ Articles of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), how can the regulation ever become harmonised across European Union?…

Customers aren't as focused on performance as they were Last week saw yet more stories and announcements on all-flash storage. IBM released new FlashSystem products based on XIV and an all-flash version of their mainframe/enterprise platform, the DS8888. I had another briefing from Violin (although that didn’t reveal anything new) and rumours started to swirl that X-IO Technologies might be stepping away from the AFA business.…

All the more reason to deploy mitigations and patches Code dive Samples of booby-trapped image files that exploit ImageMagick to compromise servers and other computers are well and truly out in the open now.…

Biz tells Reg reader his email was 'full of attitude', adds 'price increase was only 340%' A Reg reader has passed on the most beautiful email exchange we've seen this year, between himself and backup business Monster Cloud, after the company suddenly bumped up its prices mid-contract.…

And you think you’ve had tough remote support jobs Waking up to a phone call in the wee small hours of the morning are never good. It’s usually a wrong number, a drunk ex wanting to talk, or the news that someone has died.…

Syed Hoda ejects less than four months in post Syed Hoda is Chief Marketing Officer at Sight Machine. No surprise there, except that he was CMO at object storage software startup Scality, joining in December last year, and leaving in April this year. That's a CMO stint of just three months, signalling a sudden and deep misfit between person and post.…

Leave the spin to the quibits, please In a troubling development today, IBM demonstrates it still hasn't quite grasped this cloud computing thing at all.…

Paul Perez peregrinates outta da picture Dell's CTO for Enterprise, Paul Perez, has left the company.…

Are you Shor you want to try this? Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to help the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) defend cryptography against the onslaught of quantum computers.…

Closed source, open holes Commercial software is riddled with old critical open source flaws that are largely hidden from the eyes of enterprises, according to Black Duck Software.…

But you've already removed it from your servers, haven't you? Microsoft has posted the next step in its deprecation of SHA-1 certificates, but they'll survive for nearly another year.…

No Jeff, Amazon won't get its own drone airspace just yet America's Federal Aviation Authority has ruled out changing low-altitude airspace rules for drones at least until 2019.…

Lays everyone off again after presidential running mate Cruz ends bid for White House Carly Fiorina's astonishing career trajectory into oblivion remains on target tonight after her bid to be US Vice President was cut mercifully short.…

$10 MELLLION thrown in bid to stop XP users clicking phishing links Budget 2016 The Department of Defence will haemorrhage A$122.2 million and the National Innovation and Science Agenda A$38 million to implement the Federal Government's A$230 Cyber Security Strategy, budget papers reveal.…

Input validation bug opens code execution vuln The popular Libarchive open source compression library needs an update to cover a code execution vulnerability.…

Will AI kill or cure? The Obama administration says it wants everyone to take a closer look at artificial intelligence with a series of public discussions.…

Shortfall: at least $16.5 billion. Cancellation price: $9.4 billion. Place your bets Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN) won't get anywhere near completion before direct government funding for the project dries up, the 2016 Budget reveals.…

Video check on LINPACK, HPCG hijinks HPC Blog The first task that students have to perform at the ASC16 Student Cluster Competition is to run the venerable HPL and newish High Performance Conjugate Gradients (HPCG) benchmarks. High performance Linpack (HPL), also known as LINPACK, is a routine that measures floating point performance and is the basis for the Top500 list.…

Disgruntled staff still holding out as stoppage drags on Last month, Verizon staff along with the Communication Workers of America (CWA) decided to go on strike as union and the US telco failed to agree on a new contract.…

Finnish lad earns serious pocket money from Instagram flaw discovery The record for the youngest security researcher getting paid by Facebook’s bug bounty scheme has been smashed by Jani, a 10-year-old Finnish lad who found a major flaw in Instagram.…

Two innocent programming blunders breed high-risk flaw Six security patches – two of them high severity – have been released today for OpenSSL 1.0.1 and 1.0.2.…

Budget telly outlet finds a second job to feed the kids Satellite TV service Dish has announced plans to moonlight as an unauthorized iPhone repair service.…

Apply mitigations now – poisoned selfies are in the wild A wildly popular software tool used by websites to process people's photos can be exploited to execute malicious code on servers and leak server-side files.…

Infy becomes infamous Security researchers have lifted the lid on a decade long cyber-espionage campaign.…

Announcement overload? Oh, you'll love it just as much as Big Mickey Dell EMC World The first day of EMC World in Las Vegas caused announcement overload, with the Unity array top of the list, closely followed by a Virtustream storage cloud and more.…

Captain Cook's famous ship scuttled off Rhode Island Researchers in the US believe they have identified the remains of Captain James Cook's HMS Endeavour – the ship aboard which he famously sailed the Pacific Ocean between 1768–71.…

Electricity-producing bacteria to power your mobe A team of developers from Barcelona has created the world’s first plant pot phone charger, which supposedly harnesses the natural power of photosynthesis.…

Does huge cluster equal huge reward? HPC Blog We've saved the biggest for last in our round-up of the ASC16 Student Cluster Competition competitors. All of the teams below are driving clusters with more than nine nodes, most with several GPU accelerators. They're definitely power hungry beasts, which will require the teams to apply heavy throttling in order to stay under the 3,000 watt power cap. Let's take a look at the teams....…

Tony Porter is 'confused'. Why? He didn't ask for any... The government has refused to give the Surveillance Camera Commissioner (SCC) extra enforcement powers. The problem is that the SCC hadn't asked for any more powers.…

Possibly not fatal to Continuum – but it doesn’t help Analysis Intel’s retreat from mobile chips is one of the biggest disruptions to the Wintel relationship in Microsoft’s 35-year business relationship with the chip giant – if not the biggest of all.…

'Serious design flaws and veering off track' claims Resolution Foundation The IT underpinning Blighty's troubled Universal Credit programme could soon begin to creak as the programme takes on more complex claimant cases, a think tank report from the left-wing Resolution Foundation has found.…

Takes better advantage of flash and has sub-$10k starting price EMC's mid-range VNX/VNXe arrays have been re-engineered to make better use of flash, producing the Unity array with a starting price of less than $10,000.…

Lake Maracaibo is planet's strikes per year hotspot Venezuela's Lake Maracaibo has wrested the world's "maximum lightning activity" crown from Africa's Congo Basin, according to electrifying data from the joint NASA and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM).…

Tianhe-2: Where's the manual - we wish we could RTFM HPC Blog Four teams in the ASC16 Asian Student Cluster Competition decided to stake out the middle ground in the competition with clusters that aren't too small and aren't too big. Is their "just right" approach going to get them into the winners' circle at ASC16? Let's meet the teams and see what they're packing...…

... except not online. Sorry America The value of online fraudulent transactions is expected to reach $25.6bn by 2020, up from $10.7bn last year, according to a new study from industry analysts Juniper Research. The researchers predict that by the end of the decade, $4 in every $1,000 of online payments will be fraudulent.…

When will you lazy louts learn to configure your instances? You shouldn't expect to see any end to data breaches caused by misconfigured instances of MongoDB soon, the company's strategy veep has told The Register.…

Three Earth-sized bodies spied circling diminutive star Astroboffins have discovered a trio of roughly Earth-sized planets orbiting an ultra-cool dwarf star, the first time such a system has been identified.…

Nom-nom. Another day, another purchase Oracle has announced it will acquire Opower in a $532m deal to close by the end of 2016.…

System now alleged to be 'recovering'; bank keeps stumm Barclays.net has been shrugging off business customers' login attempts since Friday, leaving many unable to process payments over the bank holiday weekend.…