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Not the brightest lights in the harbor Administrators at the University of Calgary, Canada, have caved in to criminals and paid a $20,000 ransom to decrypt their computer systems' files after getting hit by a malware infection.…

SEC settles case over alleged payoffs in Middle Kingdom Content delivery network Akamai will pay the US government more than $650k to settle charges it bribed Chinese officials to secure service contracts.…

Two more attempts coming down the line US legislators are making another attempt to give the FBI access to anyone's web browser history with a new amendment to the pending review of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) Amendments Act of 2015.…

Germany cracks the whip A German regulator has fined three companies for failing to change the way they share people's personal information following the invalidation of the Safe Harbor agreement last year.…

Aircraft warned to stay out of area The US Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) is warning aircraft to stay a few hundred miles away from the Naval Air Weapons Station at China Lake, California, because the military is testing a new gizmo that disrupts GPS – and may also mess with flight control systems.…

Better yet, why have 50 million people downloaded it? Security biz Pentest is sounding alarms after it found an Android app it says has been downloaded 50 millions times despite being "little more than malware."…

Take you down to the bakery city, where the pies have cream and the cakes are tasty Legendary rocker Axl Rose has faced struggles with drink and drugs, but he may have bitten off more than he can chew with an effort to remove his own fat meme from the internet.…

How do I defraud thee? Let me count the ways Global trade body the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) has produced a useful guide to the digital ad industry's toxic sludge. The WFA represents the biggest spenders on digital advertising, such as Unilever and MasterCard, and they're not happy.…

T Rowe Price voted 'yes' when it meant to vote 'no' Some former Dell shareholders can thank a voting mishap for an upcoming windfall.…

Read this while you can, EPO bods The European Patent Office (EPO) has reacted to criticism of its latest proposals – by blocking access to a blog that raised concerns.…

(No it doesn't) The Storage Architect Last week the CoreOS project announced the release of Torus*, a scale-out storage platform for container clusters built and orchestrated by Kubernetes.…

Whitman Wonder Machine says it's the densest and most scalable AFA in the industry HPE is boosting all-flash 3PAR capacity with support for high-capacity SSDs, adding persistent storage for containers, and improving snapshots and file management services.…

Unicode Consortium ignores cries for flag emancipation The Scottish former First Minister Alex Salmond has bemoaned the absence of a Saltire emoji from the forthcoming Unicode 9.0 release.…

IO-bound Big Data apps love NVMe over fabrics All-flash array startup Apeiron claims it blows EMC’s XtremIO away when it comes to Splunk speed testing.…

Some questions just answer themselves Wilson: Who's Harvey?

Yet another hyper-converged offering from Netzilla? We are hearing Cisco is going to partner with Nutanix and have Nutanix hyper-convergence software sold on UCS servers, echoing similar meet-in-the-channel partnership deals it has with SimpliVity and others. The company has denied it, though.…

Sample: Apparently fondleslabs weigh 65kg A computer science exam paper set by the Scottish Qualifications Authority was infested with errors and an impossible question, prompting teachers to call for an immediate inquiry.…

Outage stopper helps stop you having an Australian-style disaster, firm says Datos IO has announced the launch of its RecoverX distributed database protection and recovery tool, designed, we're told, to specifically protect against the sort of AWS outage in Sydney El Reg reported on Monday.…

Reg Summer lectures ponder changing of the astral guard Once upon a time exploring space required a mix of the “right stuff” and some serious aeronautical chops. Nowadays you’re as likely to need an out of this world ego and background in Silicon Valley financing.…

BBC proves Betteridge's law, riles Daily Mail The BBC has simultaneously proved Betteridge's law of headlines and got the Daily Mail into a right tizz with an interactive piece entitled "Is it wrong to dress as a crusader for an England match?"…

Well-known evangelist for software parallelism is retiring early Intel's HPC director and evangelist James Reinders is leaving Intel after 27 years - or as he puts it, 10,001 days - accepting the firm's offer of early retirement for long-standing employees.…

'Massive great big' bird does indeed prove hard to miss The "massive great big" vulture which went AWOL in Somerset last week has indeed proved as "hard to miss" as his owners promised, after he was spotted at Royal Naval Air Station Yeovilton yesterday.…

Mobe tech is proven but it's the backhaul that's becoming Blighty's bottleneck When it comes to improving mobile network coverage and increasing capacity with small cells, the UK needs more access to dark fibre and easier planning permissions. So says O2 CTO Brendan O’Reilly.…

But challengers to its high-end dominance should BRING IT, says Hitachi bloke According to IT Pro Nikkei, Hitachi is freezing further investment in its VSP high-end storage because it is a low-profit business and Hitachi wants to increase its operating margin.…

Biz will submit a second-round offer – reports Verizon has submitted a second-round bid to acquire Yahoo!'s core internet business, according to reports.…

Milky Way muso might just unlock secrets to galaxy's youthful years Astrophysicists from the University of Birmingham have captured ‘sounds’ from the oldest stars in the Milky Way in a bid to study how the galaxy formed, according to research published today in the Royal Astronomical Society journal Monthly Notices.…

Culture wars, generation shift... hipsters Since the publication of the Agile Manifesto, there’s been a steady acceptance that Agile is the way to go when it comes to software development. The old waterfall method was seen as something rather quaint and old-fashioned, the equivalent of hanging onto your vinyl LPs when the rest of the world was downloading onto their iPods.…

Never mind, we've got loads of sunshine. Right? The head of the wind industry’s trade body in the UK has admitted England isn’t windy enough for any more wind farms.…

So says IBM, as it re-tunes its Spectrum HPC-wranglers for clustered workloads IBM reckons the rigs assembled to run the likes of Hadoop and Apache Spark are really just supercomputers in disguise, so has tweaked some of its supercomputer management code to handle applications that sprawl across x86 fleets.…

Turnkey appliances in OEM-style deals give Lenovo tier 2 and 3 storage products. Chinese smartphone, tablet, notebook, PC, server and storage vendor Lenovo is spreading its storage wings, striking software deals with Cloudian and Nexenta.…

America's highest court isn't coming to ad giant's rescue Google has failed to convince the US Supreme Court to derail a long-running ad-fraud class-action lawsuit. Proceedings will therefore continue against the advertising goliath.…

Out-of-this-world bonkers reality show starts the cameras rolling The Mars One project – which plans to make a reality TV show out of an attempt to settle on the Red Planet – will now put 100 space colonist hopefuls through selection tests.…

Microservices make a lot of traffic that needs taming, which can get expensive and in-locky Citrix is mere weeks away from releasing the containerised version of its NetScaler application delivery controller is revealed last December.…

VM format switches have to happen in the cloud, unless you go from vSphere to Hyper-V Microsoft has announced “the upcoming retirement of Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter” (MVMC) and its replacement with Azure Recovery Services.…

Because even democracy is an opportunity for Facebook to learn more about its users Update: Opposition says no, now what? Facebook is about to learn the flavour of disappointment, since it apparently reckons a pre-election debate between prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and opposition leader Bill Shorten will let it plant tracking cookies on any Australians who bother to tune in.…

Because what the world needs now is another HPC filesystem The HPC-focussed parallel cluster file system, BeeGFS, has received certification to run over Intel's OmniPath Architecture (OFA).…

So you can know, before Twitter does The Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) is getting closer to giving the world live 'net congestion maps and alerts.…

For message authentication, not for tracking. Promise! A proposal raised late May at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) suggests adding cookies to the DNS to help defend the critical system against denial-of-service exploits.…

Senior veeps responsible for 'spin-in' acquisitions exit Updated Last week, a Cisco reorganisation switched three of its big names to advisory roles: this week, they've left the company.…

Complaint accuses Big Red of mishandling finances Just days after Oracle was sued by an ex-employee, who accused the IT giant of making up its cloud sales figures, its shareholders are now hauling the company into court.…

A conversation with Mikko Hyppönen Infosec 2016 Cyber-conflict between nations has entered a new phase with a switch from espionage to sabotage and theft, according to infosec guru Mikko Hyppönen.…

We keep asking, but all the Shorten Squad will say is they liked online services first Australia's opposition Labor Party (ALP) won't commit to continued funding or operations of the nation's Digital Transformation Office (DTO).…

Forget filter coffee, jerks in suits, and awful hors d'oeuvre. Expect metal, craft beer and zero-days galore Special report In Australia and New Zealand, hackers are doing it for themselves by creating vibrant security conferences that run on their own terms and actively avoid the corporate-speak and fear-mongering that characterises so many vendor-led events.…

Networking website owners may be liable for not warning users of predators Analysis A terrifying case in which an aspiring model was drugged and raped may result in a limit being placed on a critical piece of online free speech legislation in the US.…

Lost your Bitcoins to Karpeles? Here's some salt for the wound Phishing scammers are going after people hoping to claw some of their money back from the MtGox collapse.…

Serial litigator was asking for $600,000 damages and still fighting over online sale A Massachusetts accountant has vowed never to sell anything on Craigslist again, after getting embroiled in a nearly seven-year legal fight over the quality of a printer he sold online.…

Driver bugs leave kit open to hijacking It's the first Monday of the month, and that means another batch of patches for Android, fixing flaws that can be exploited by apps and webpages to hijack devices.…

Run SQLmap, get sent to the big house A hacker has been jailed for a year and fined $124,000 (£86,000) after admitting he infiltrated a protected computer system.…

'Significant' number of people affected yet 'incredibly small' portion of users Beleaguered remote support tool maker TeamViewer has apologized for blaming its customers for the recent spree of PC and Mac hijackings.…