The Register

Projectors and credit card readers under consideration LG has conducted a developer day to interest gadget-makers in developing third-party modules for its LEGO-like G5 smartphone.…

What the bet Tay doesn't get a look-in? Mac users have been wrapped up in the warm embrace of Microsoft's Skype Bot strategy.…

NewPosThings back as Multigrain, says Fireeye The NewPosThings malware has spawned an offspring that exploits the DNS protocol to sneak data past firewalls.…

Indonesian Gracilimus radix adds a new genus to rats If the newly-documented forest-dwelling rat happens to be an omnivore whose diet includes roots and it's described by an Australian-led team, of course it will get called a “root rat”.…

And a million suffer credit card fraud in a PCI-D-MESS-MESS! New data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) asserts that tech support scams have become the most prevalent way to defraud the nation's residents, 113,000 of whom responded to such scams over a year.…

Numerous security and privacy issues couldn't be addressed in time for poll New Zealand's online voting trial, slated for local government elections this year, has collapsed with the national government scrapping the plan.…

CEO Pat Gelsinger announces above-expectations Q1 results and share re-purchase plan VMware has reported a cracking first quarter for 2016, with year-on-year revenue growth of five per cent making for a US$1.59bn revenue haul for the three months to March 31st.…

Only 71 per cent of devices run security-supported versions of Alphabet's OS There's still too many unpatched Android devices, Google reckons: to wit, 29 per cent of mobes and tablets running The Chocolate Factory's operating system are running out-of-date code.…

Malware recruits Billy the Puppet to extort money Video A new strain of ransomware is adding psychological tactics to its code to try and extort money faster, borrowing from cult horror film franchise Saw.…

Revenues down, losses mounting, how can Verizon say no to that? Yahoo! seems resigned to its fate, and says it is "pleased" with taking a $98m loss on the quarter.…

And here's our transparency report to prove it? Apple's fight with law enforcement has stepped up again, with the iPhone giant forced to deny that it hands over user information to Beijing while refusing the authorities at home.…

Cops stole hashtag, chaos ensues A social media campaign by the New York Police Department (NYPD) and the Manhattan District Attorney to garner public support for forcing tech companies to install encryption backdoors has backfired spectacularly.…

While banking a $2bn profit in first three months of the year Intel will axe 12,000 employees globally – more than one in ten of its workforce – as it moves further away from being a PC chip company.…

S'not fair, says Google The European Union's digital chief has told YouTube that it needs to start compensating copyright owners properly.…

31 others caught up in spying row A computer technician at a Chinese state encryption lab has been sentenced to death for selling government secrets to foreign intelligence agencies.…

Telco says testing mishap to blame for flooding poor Steve Webb's mailbox The UK's biggest broadband provider BT redirected its customers' outgoing emails to a single account for three hours on Tuesday.…

Cord-cutting has doubled since 2013 The number of American households relying solely on mobile networks for internet access has doubled over the past two years.…

Build your own Airbnb infrastrucutre, or complete ours Software upstart Mesosphere has open-sourced its commercial Datacenter Operating System – DC/OS – with the backing of 60 big names in tech.…

Aircraft grounded as Prez meets Queen The Secretary of State for Transport has imposed flight restrictions over London for US president Barack Obama's forthcoming visit to the capital, meaning aircraft including "any small balloon, any kite weighing not more than two kilograms, any small unmanned aircraft and any parachute including a parascending parachute" are banned from large swathes of airspace below 2,500ft.…

Founding chief exec promoted upstairs to exec chair Structured data copy virtualising startup Delphix has appointed Chris Cook as president and CEO, with founding CEO Jedidiah Yueh become executive chairman of the board. Why?…

James Cunningham talks about how he makes it all work Pusher describes itself as a hosted real-time messaging service, sporting as it does a selection of APIs, developer tools and open source libraries. The firm’s claim is that it simplifies the integration of real-time functionality into web and mobile applications.…

Replication and cloud backends extend disk'n'tape combo for off-premises use SpectraLogic has added replication and a cloud gateway to its BlackPearl disk and tape storage combo.…

Plenty lined up for 25 June to 1 July The acronymically-abundant UK Robotics and Autonomous Systems Network (UK-RAS Network) tentacle of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) has announced further events which will feature at the first UK Robotics Week from 25 June to 1 July.…

Biz admits coding error 'affected' 67 servers Ross County Football Club's website was among those deleted amid a web-hosting company 123-reg's mega cock-up.…

312% increase in Flash vulns over 2014, says study Exploit kit writers are no longer fussed about Java vulnerabilities, focusing their attention almost entirely on Adobe Flash.…

Small change from the $80bn Horizon 'innovation' fund The EU is launching a €6.7bn (£5.3bn) mega “science cloud”, intended to better exploit the continent's academic research via big data.…

Beancounters may not like us, but they need us Storagebod There is no doubt that the role of the storage admin has changed. Technology has moved on and the business has changed, but the role still exists in one form or another.…

It depends on where they live, critical research reveals Scientists have critically discovered that men with beards are not necessarily more sexist than clean-shaven chaps, despite previous research which indicated "a connection between facial hair and negative attitudes about women".…

Slurps keystrokes, mines Bitcoin, even sets up web servers Malware authors have put together a strain of malicious code written entirely in Python, in what may turn out to be an experiment in creating a new type of cross-platform nasty.…

Gartner numbers make hard reading for Lenovo and Dell too Acer and Lenovo's PC sales tumbled during the first three months of 2016 as the EMEA market contracted by 10 per cent, according to Gartner.…

Thunderbolt 3 compatible external drive? Ooh, nifty Seagate's LaCie external storage drives unit has come up with a video editing workstation user's wet dream: 96TB capacity and 2.6GB/sec throughput from a Thunderbolt 3-accessed desktop tower.…

Quarterly results reveal a six per cent revenue slump IBM's storage hardware revenues continue falling as growth businesses stay submerged under the declining ones.…

And it is all the fault of the soggy PC market Job queues in Intel’s home state of Oregon are to swell in 2015 with Chipzilla steering thousands of workers to the chopping block.…

Baidu awaits, then Analysis Google structures its entire organisation to avoid privacy laws, minimise taxes and de-risk itself from competition oversight*. Today Google’s European supremo hinted that being in China might be less of a hassle, and that losing Google would serve us Europeans right for being so backward.…

Longterm aim is to bridge infosec skills gap Cambridge University is due to host a cybersecurity hacking competition between the top UK universities next Saturday (23 April).…

There's a lot of lazy and/or lousy webmasters out there who don't know they're p0wned Google and university researchers say the tech giant found some 760,935 compromised websites across the web during a year-long research effort.…

1,000 cats chill in NZ while NASA waits for a break in the weather Weather has again delayed the fourth launch of NASA's super pressure balloon (SPB) from Wanaka in New Zealand.…

News Corp's Google News complaint has sprouted in Brussels The European Union looks to be formulating plans to charge Google with anti-competitive conduct over the Android operating system.…

Boffins' tale of Neutrino source beyond the Milky Way spotted by Ice Cube observatory “Big Bird”, a neutrino spotted in December 2012, probably started its life nine billion years ago in a quasar far, far away: so says the international team of boffins who run the IceCube detector beneath the Antarctic ice.…

'Phineas Fihser' says embedded device pwnage exposed spyware-for-states firm The hacker who claims responsibility for the flaying of Italian spyware-for-States firm Hacking Team says the vulnerability they used is yet to be patched and has detailed the process by which they claimed to have gained access to the huge trove of data and documents later dumped online.…

Also opens vSphere beta beyond the devoted faithful VMware's signalled a new push into open source by advertising for a Director, Open Source Programs.…

Hires new chief bean counter and sees revenue decline reversing – maybe Quantum says it has won a major cloud storage deal that could help reverse years of falling revenues. It's also announced a new chief financial officer: Fuad Ahmad will take over from Linda Breard.…

Middle Kingdom won't allow any more reality shows featuring celebrity offspring It might be time to reconsider the evils of China's censorship regime, after the Middle Kingdom slapped a ban on reality TV shows featuring celebrities' children.…

Signups are growing, but cash is hard to come by Netflix is pleased with its first quarter results, but has warned it will face headwinds in Q2.…

Trio tried to buy stolen Navy Xilinx FPGAs for $37k each, replace them with duds Chinese national Daofu Zhang has pleaded guilty to conspiring to buy top-end field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) stolen from a US Navy base and replacing the swiped silicon with counterfeit duds.…

With 3.2 million unpatched servers, scum have a lot of targets Cisco is warning that the SamSam ransomware that has been plaguing US hospitals is now moving into schools, thousands of which have already been infected.…

Big surprise. But the bright side? Analysts thought it was going to be worse IBM's attempts to re-organize its businesses and focus on its Watson cloud-AI-offering-thing did not prevent Big Blue from tumbling to its sixteenth consecutive quarter of falling revenue.…

Panic over SS7 flaw resurfaces on 60 Minutes telly news probe America's flagship news program 60 Minutes has demonstrated how to "hack" a US congressman's smartphone. One little thing to bear in mind about this incredible scoop: the vulnerability has been in circulation since 2014 ... and it requires high-level access to global phone networks.…

Copyright Act's new 'block the bandits' provision wheeled into court Australia's music industry wants Kickass Torrents blocked by local internet service providers.…

The TL;DR you need BlackBerry CEO John Chen has responded to last week's reheated news that police can pull text messages from BlackBerry handsets.…