The Register

Ingenious IT boss banishes hapless callers to on-hold Hades with Extension 666 Nobody likes having to deal with cold calls to the office. But when you're manning the IT help desk, you have no choice but to pick up the phone – even when it's a pushy sales pitch.…

'I feel vindicated (about) Mono... turns out that Java is the big problem' Interview At Xamarin's Evolve conference in San Francisco, I sat down with Miguel de Icaza, the initiator of both the GNOME desktop for Linux and the Mono open source version of Microsoft's .NET Framework. Miguel de Icaza co-founded Xamarin with Nat Friedman, who became CEO.…

Embiggening UK.gov tentacle will be banished to hot-desk hell The Government Digital Service (GDS) is to hire nearly 300 more staff, beefing up its full-time employees to 830, according to sources.…

Native OS tools, living off the land... it's all very crunchy Hackers have figured out how to bypass application whitelisting software by utilising tools that are built into Windows by default.…

But, EU Robo-Commish: we don’t have one. And we don't want one Analysis The EU’s enquiry into online plantations platforms will recommend a hands-off approach that will delight Silicon Valley. A draft of the enquiry was leaked this week.…

Europe's satnav fleet gains operational pair The European Space Agency (ESA) has announced that for your future metre-level accuracy navigating pleasure, satellites Galileo 11 and 12 are now fully operational and "broadcasting working navigation signals".…

Not everyone pleased with proposed access rules The FCC has put forward a new set of rules governing the data network connections that glue our modern lives together.…

Beta over After a long beta programme, the Ordnance Survey has officially launched its “slippy”-style smartphone app and website - just in time for shivering in a parka on a Bank Holiday Monday, as you wonder who nicked your bike.…

Hopes it will sync and swim to growth with Transporter tech Nexsan has added acquired Connected Data’s Transporter file sync’ and share technology to its NST file storage array, called the combined product UNITY.…

Insight Enteprises sales slip, blames data centre spending Tough times are here again for the on-premise infrastructure providers with Insight Enterprises the latest to report top line slippage.…

But infosec folk say full revamp needed Security vendors are pushing for a more comprehensive revamp of the SWIFT international inter-bank financial transaction messaging system beyond a update prompted by an $81m hack against Bangladesh's central bank.…

HP still on top with £1.2bn spend in 2014/15 Central government splashed £6.3bn with IT suppliers for the year 2014/15 – with 42 per cent going to just three suppliers, according to government data shared with The Register.…

China blamed as billionaire activist investor ends stock flirtation, makes $2bn Billionaire activist investor Carl Icahn has offloaded his Apple shares after the stock dropped below $100 a piece this week following the vendor's first sales slip in 13 years.…

'We will determine our own paths powered by our technology', declares PM India yesterday celebrated the launch of the seventh and final "Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System" (IRNSS) satellite - IRNSS-G - which rose from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, in the southeastern state of Andhra Pradesh, atop a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV).…

Mad, bad and dangerous for trade The Republic of Ireland’s IT industry would be damaged if its second-biggest trading partner Britain left the European Union. Firms are concerned about the impact on exports - particularly if the British economy and sterling hit the skids.…

Puppet white paper distils transformation insights and tips Promo The paper, Getting Started with DevOps: A Guide for IT Managers, is based on the experiences of Gareth Rushgrove, senior software engineer at Puppet and former technical architect for UK’s Government Digital Service, responsible for building GOV.UK.…

SSD cashflows do little to ease the growing HDD drought WD is experiencing global disk drive cooling as the slowing PC jetstream and flash El Nino jointly disrupt the HDD environment.…

Transformation is the word... don't overuse it Deep Thought calculated the number 42 to be the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. Over at IBM it was the frequency the word "transform" was used to explain another dire quarter.…

Svalbard archipelago poses for Sentinel-1B Europe's Sentinel-1B Earth-watching satellite has delivered its first image, a tad over two days after soaring aloft from Kourou, French Guiana, and a mere two hours after its Synthetic Aperture Radar was fired up.…

As its lithe synthetic fingers fumbled with my trouser buttons... Something for the Weekend, Sir? Things are getting steamy. My valet is trying to pull down the back of my trousers. “We’ll have these off you in a jiffy, sir,” he sings.…

It's not going to save you: You still need data to stop a fail DevOps can solve anything, can’t it? Well, no. In fact, if you don’t implement DevOps correctly, you’ll find that not only do you carry over the problems of the old world but that birth a few brand new ones, too.…

Yes, they really are. Enrico Signoretti takes a look at what firms are up to A couple of weeks ago I published an article about high performance object storage. Reactions have been quite diverse. Some think that object stores can only be huge and slow and then others who think quite the opposite. In fact, they can also be fast and small.…

Reader recalls a series of own goals doing tech support for a big football club On-Call If it's Friday it must be time for On-Call, our regular reader-written romp through fun times at work.…

It's the busiest thing in DC A new project to uncover the symbiotic relationship between Google and the US government has uncovered some mind-boggling details.…

Simple HTML scams look to be sneaking through the app inspection process Security researcher Joshua Shilko says phishing apps targeting some of the world's biggest payment services have slipped past screening and landed on Google Play.…

Suvlu'taHvIS yapbe' HoS neH The Language Creation Society is very unhappy about an effort by movie studio Paramount to copyright the language of bumpy-headed Star Trek aliens, the Klingons.…

Readers share retro-computing rebuilds, plus a Microsoft CD fit only to be used as a coaster Last week we brought you the story of the Mac Pro put out to pasture as a coffee table and asked readers to share similar stories.…

Tanking PC trojans turn VXers to Android. IBM malware murderer Limor Kessem says Android VXers are using legitimate screen overlay features to hose handsets.…

Devuan 'Jessie' betas debut in the name of 'Init freedom' The effort to create a systemd-free Debian fork has borne fruit, with a beta of “Devuan Jessie” appearing in the wild.…

'Cool Blobs' restore ASAP, 99 per cent of the time Microsoft's joined the market for cold storage at a cent a gigabyte a month, with something called “Azure Cool Blobs”.…

Email addresses, names and phone numbers accessed, but only in Australia UPDATE eBay's even tattier tat bazaar Gumtree says it's suffered an attack during which users' personal data was encountered by parties unknown and unauthorised.…

Congress? Democracy? No need for that On Thursday, the US Supreme Court approved a change to Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. It sounds innocuous, but the effects will be felt around the world.…

Sky Muster 1 gets ministerial button press for symmetrical 25Mbps services Australia's national broadband network (NBN) has turned on its 25Mbps satellite service.…

Board says with Veritas gone, its time for pure-play security CEO Symantec CEO Mike A. Brown will leave the company, after it today announced it will miss its projected Q4 2016 sales.…

Cable giant thinks 1TB a month ought to be enough for anyone Comcast has decided that rather than slap a 300GB-a-month download cap on some of its broadband customers, it will instead give them a 1TB limit.…

Next month: Wow, everyone's a massive fan of Bing and Edge! What a surprise! The Cortana search box in the Windows 10 task bar will, from today, always use Bing and Microsoft's Edge browser to find stuff on the web.…

Bezos' biz bolstered by billowing clouds Amazon has reported bumper first quarter results, with profits of $513m and sales increasing 28 per cent.…

Vinod Khosla may be forced to provide public access The six-year effort by VC Vinod Khosla to prevent public access to a California beach may be going against the billionaire.…

Nothing like some healthy competition The US military has awarded SpaceX an $82.7m contract to launch a next-generation GPS satellite into orbit.…

Linda Katehi slammed Linda Katehi, the chancellor of the University of California, Davis, has been suspended pending an investigation into the decision to spent hundreds of thousand of dollars improving Google search results for her name, amid a range of other questionable activities.…

Global sales see first-ever decline, analysts say it's not just Apple losing ground For those wondering if we've reached Peak Smartphone: global smartphone shipments saw their first ever quarterly drop, say analysts.…

After five profit-free quarters they're back in the black The sum of $83.7m exceeded Barracuda’s revenue estimates for its fourth fiscal 2016 quarter, ended Feb 29, 2016. It was a 16 per cent rise year-on-year and a 4.5 per cent rise quarter-on-quarter.…

Disappointingly, there's no snazzy name or logo with this one. Which is actually good Sysadmins, brace yourselves: OpenSSL has announced upcoming security fixes will fix a “high” impact flaw.…

3D NAND expansion coming along with second generation product SanDisk enjoyed fatter revenues on an annual compare in its first quarter, driven by higher enterprise product sales.…

Here's the lowdown on making your package bulge like theirs There’s a skills shortage in DevOps and that’s forcing up salaries.…

Get it off before the end of May Cloud-based secure storage outfit SurDoc has announced plans to discontinue its consumer service in order to concentrate exclusively on enterprise sales.…

No evidence of UAV impact, investigators say The UK's Transport Secretary, Patrick McLoughlin, has told Parliament that what was thought to be the Britain's first recorded incident of a collision between a UAV and an airliner was probably "not a drone incident" after all.…

S7 propels chaebol Samsung delivered what Apple couldn’t in the first three months of 2016 - increased smart phone sales.…

Loosely-coupled alliance with IP, product, staff, and engineering services aspects X-IO is going to add Pivot3 hyper-converged products to its customers and provide IP, software and engineering services to Pivot3.…

Sometimes Nanny doesn’t know best The Royal College of Physicians has issued a report strongly critical of “public health” scolds, such as GPs and EU officials, who want the use of e-cigarettes of restricted.…