The Register

Student teams think smaller is better in cluster battle HPC blog Although the teams in the ASC16 Asian Student Cluster Competition are all using the same Inspur-provided gear, there's a LOT of variety in what they built. Cluster sizes in this competition range from three to twelve nodes, with anywhere from zero to eight accelerators.…

Disk capacity rises are working against endurance Storage Architect A recent Register article reminded me that hard drive vendors are introducing warranty limits on their products for the amount of data that can be written to them in any one year. SSDs have always had this restriction; does the same now apply to HDDs?…

Don't be too proud to ask for help Information security (infosec) is no longer a nice-to-have. It is a matter of corporate survival. Even the smallest company can be weakened by the simple loss of a customer list, ruined by the fallout from the loss of protected customer information.…

Blighty has 900k lines of code per mission critical app, one-third above world average Another major banking outage similar to the RBS disaster back in 2012 is likely to happen again in the UK, given the amount of legacy code in the sector, according to research.…

Welcome to Hotel Zuckererga: You can log out, but you can never leave Analysis Facebook smashed through expectations for its first quarter of the year.…

Unpatched Joomla possible entry point for Angler, Cryptxxx combo Popular die cast car manufacturer Maisto has been slinging the deadly Angler exploit kit which in turn installs the Cryptxxx ransomware on victim machines.…

I can prove I am the man who can prove he is the man who invented Bitcoin "If you are going through hell, keep going." – Albert Einstein, 1991.…

Tells waiter 'I'll have the Nasi Goreng, Bing Tang, and a Faraday cage'. US penetration tester Matt South has ripped off and reverse-engineered an automated teller machine skimmer, finding videos of entered PINs stored within.…

Chinese regulators want Baidu to stop advertising quacks' one weird trick Chinese search engine Baidu is under investigation after a case of dodgy medical advertising hit the headlines.…

Site offering checks of your email among mega-breach hauls to close Security researcher Bob Hodges has found a critical flaw in PwnedList, an email service that allows users to check if their email addresses have been exposed by prominent hacks.…

All in a good cause: FamilyNotes is for learning the Face API Microsoft has GitHubbed a framework that could finally make an Internet-connected refrigerator useful: an application for family members to leave notes for each other.…

Dispute settlement, environmental regulation still sticking points The controversial EU-US Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) treaty text has been leaked to Greenpeace.…

Canadian expert probes whether prongs equal prangs A Canadian car safety expert has introduced the world to a surprising moral panic, warning that if people no longer have to drive their cars, they'll have sex in them instead.…

Fears spark two-hour delay as nervous passengers disembark Australian airline QANTAS delayed a flight for two hours on Saturday after a passenger reported seeing a Wi-Fi network named “Mobile detonation device”.…

Braaaaaiiiins. Fat, rich, digital braaaaaaiiiins Qualcomm wants to stick a neural network in your hands, and has announced it will ship a software development kit (SDK) in the second half of this year to get the ball rolling.…

Analysis of US government traffic trends suggests Androids sleep on weekends If you run online services, concentrate your efforts on making sure they can handle iOS devices on weekends.…

Don't click on the links, don't click on the links, don't … A water and electricity authority in the US State of Michigan has needed a week to recover from a ransomware attack that fortunately only hit its enterprise systems.…

Except for PCs, which will still be called 'Dell', and enterprise, which will be 'Dell EMC' Michael Dell has written to his staff to tell them that Dell will soon become known as “Dell Technologies”. Except for the bit of Dell that sells PCs, which will be called “Dell”, and the bit that sells to the enterprise, which will be called “Dell EMC”.…

Microsoft slips to second in market share Google's Chrome displaced Internet Explorer as the top desktop browser by market share in April.…

Software for simple gear given way too much control over locks and sensors Samsung has said there's nothing for owners of its SmartThings home security gear to worry about – after researchers showed numerous ways to commandeer devices and disable locks.…

Judges say mobile software can't sell info like websites do A US judicial panel has greenlighted a lawsuit over the way mobile apps handle people's private information.…

Hack the Planet uni club lands in court over 'white hat' MiFare probe WAHckon University students in the Australian city of Perth have landed in hot water, with one charged by Police, after finding and exploiting severe holes to rewind travel charges incurred using the city's SmartRider public transport smart card.…

01010110 01101111 01110100 01100101 00100000 01101101 01100101 In the race for one of California's two Senate seats, one candidate has hit on a novel way to draw attention to himself and his platform: binary.…

Another month, another round of critical vulnerabilities patched by Google Google has today issued a bundle of 40 security patches for its Android operating system.…

We review season 3, episode 2 of HBO's tech satire Recap If there was one standout moment from the latest episode of tech satire Silicon Valley it would have to be when our eponymous hero finds out he is being shafted by his new CEO while in the background a thoroughbred horse is literally shafted by a white stallion.…

After swerving through the courts with lawsuits, tech giants call last-minute truce Samsung and Nvidia say they have agreed to a settlement that will end all patent litigation between the pair.…

Mark June 1 in your calendar Microsoft has announced that SQL Server 2016 for Windows will go into general availability on June 1 and is positioning it against Oracle on cost, security, and speed.…

Designers of brains inside your networking gear wheel out the 24-core Octeon-TX Cavium – the brains behind the chips in big-brand networking products – has plumped for the ARM architecture over MIPS in its next-generation network processors.…

Note to industry: Must try harder Business Intelligence (BI) systems are designed to turn raw data into useful information, so why don’t they do the job properly? Why do most of them fail so completely to make use of the huge range of capabilities that the analytics world has to offer?…

Can the Windows XP soufflé rise again and maintain its lead over Windows 8.1? Windows 10's business push may be slowing, at least according to data gathered from visits to United States government web sites.…

Seventeen-character identifiers mean cloud can scale for 'new AWS regions launching in 2016' Amazon Web Services has extended its resource numbering scheme, after last year warning that without a new scheme it would “start to run low on IDs for certain EC2 and EBS resources within a year or so.”…

Try turning it off and … The F-35 warplane still needs reboots to get the aircraft airborne, a US Senate committee has heard, and troubling problems persist in the project's security.…

Book now to send 13,600kgs to the red planet in 2018 for the reasonable price of US$90m Elon Musk's SpaceX has started offering cargo haulage to Mars.…

Governments relying on bad data will make bad decisions WAHckon Manipulation of small amounts of data among huge data sets could be an unrecognised threat to scientific organisations, security man Craig Searle says.…

Putting final polish on processor and smartwatch announcements Apple and Qualcomm will be doing a bit of looking-over-their-shoulder competitive analylsis: rising Chinese Chinese electronics manufacturer Xiaomi is prepping a smartwatch and mobile processor.…

It takes an hour to boot and you need to tickle the Watch with a stick while it loads A chap named Nick Lee has managed to run Windows 95 on his Apple Watch.…

Use of mt_rand means there's free .flac for those who crack WAHckon Users of popular audiophile torrent site What.CD can make themselves administrators to completely compromise the private music site and bypass its notorious download ratio limits.…

First step in Uberfication is $50m to head off future network SNAFUs Telstra wants to become the Uber of Telstra.…

Radio silicon offloaded to Cypress Semi for US$550m as founder and CEO retires Cypress Semiconductor has made Broadcom an offer too good to refuse: US$550 million in cash for its wireless Internet of Things business unit.…

Net ratbags probing how much a koala can bear with dinky-di scams WAHckon Strewth! Australian organisations are gunna be shirt-fronted by malware that includes colourful local language.…

No escape in sight from Delaware and eastern Texas US appeal judges have shot down a bid to end the practice of so-called venue shopping in patent battles.…

Lousy three months ends multi-year stream of profit +Comment As expected, Seagate's revenues totaled $2.6bn in the three months to April 1, the third quarter [PDF] in its fiscal 2016, down 21 per cent year-on-year.…

The Broxton, SoFIA terminator says 'I'll be back ... with 5G modems' Intel has thrown in the towel on smartphone processors after losing round after round against the ARM architecture – the dominant brains of the mobile world.…

Rules proposed in Michigan perfect example of tech-illiterate politicians writing tech rules Two state senators in Michigan, US, have proposed a set of laws that promise life imprisonment for anyone fiddling with a car's software.…

Deal with Royal Free London to slurp info surprises and shocks Google has been given access to huge swatches of confidential patient information in the UK, raising fears yet again over how NHS managers view and handle data under their control.…

Like getting 47 'maybes' and a couple of 'yeses' on a Facebook party invite Some of the world's biggest brands, including Intel, Nike, Target, Netflix, Lego, UPS and the NFL have been told to put their namesake dot-word domains live in the next three months or risk losing them altogether.…

Incinerated hungry mammal wrecks transformer CERN's search for exotic particles has been put on hold for a couple of weeks – after a small mammal gnawed through a power cable, incinerated itself and killed current to the world's most expensive scientific instrument.…

Weight to go, Internet of s*** Owners of Fitbit's Aria internet-connected smart scales are being advised to install a firmware patch following the discovery of critical security flaws.…

FTC investigation 'may result in substantial costs' PayPal says it is under investigation by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for alleged "deceptive or unfair practices" involving its Venmo app.…

Untested commands bork $286m instrument The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has officially declared the ASTRO-H space telescope, renamed Hitomi after its launch, has been lost in space after a series of errors.…