The Register

Feeling lucky? Say what you like about Microsoft, but it has created a really worthy successor to the Japanese game show Endurance. Microsoft’s perpetual beta test programme “Windows Insider” overnight delivered new code with which to torture the most hardy contestants.…

Wants props for World of Warcraft attack too Lizard Squad has hit gaming firm Blizzard’s servers with a massive DDoS attack.…

Polymath rebooted debate on climate change, co-founded software biz Obit David MacKay, or more formally Sir David John Cameron MacKay, FRS, FInstP, FICE, was a true polymath who achieved greatness in the fields of physics, computer science and energy policy. He died of cancer this week aged 48.…

Move to tackle 'unsightly' tackle A New Zealand hotel has struck a blow for dining decorum by banning Lycra-clad cyclists, lest elderly customers and wide-eyed kiddies cop an unwelcome eyeful of their "unsightly" tackle.…

But can you get Bouncing Babies by the Teardrop Explodes? Last month Sainsbury’s began stocking vinyl for the for first time in almost 30 years. The BPI today predicted estimates for vinyl sales will likely top 3m in the UK, and perhaps 3.5m. 2m vinyl LPs were sold in 2015, the highest for 21 years, and only broke back through the million mark in 2014.…

RTFM not rm -rf, man! FFS! The owner of a web host has unwittingly deleted his customers data after executing a powerful line of code on his servers.…

Hybrid strains combine to form biz hacker A new piece of malware has been linked to thefts of $4m from more than 24 American and Canadian banks in just a few days.…

FalconStor’s storage software gets a bunch of predictive smarts FalconStor has added predictive analytics to its FreeStor storage software.…

Activist investor Elliott Management strikes again... Elliott Management has struck again: Mitel has agreed to cough $1.96bn for bigger unified comms rival Polycom some months after the activist investor took a stake in both businesses and started the match-making.…

But is it a Cultural Revolution? Review Huawei has grabbed the headlines with its audacious partnership with Leica – but does it measure up? Here’s the verdict on the P9: that is, the regular 5.2 inch model, not the larger P9 Plus, which has a few tricks of its own.…

Czechia - coming soon to a map near you The Czech Republic will henceforth be known as "Czechia", if the rebrand agreed by government leaders yesterday wins parliamentary approval.…

Google, Microsoft push fixes but others likely exposed Cornell Tech researchers Vitaly Shmatikov and Martin Georgiev claim web URL shorteners are built on predictable syntax that can be searched and identified in a potential breach of privacy.…

Exclusive pictures of feline WMD programme Our recent speculation that it might be possible to hoist 1,000 cats aloft under a helium-filled, stadium-sized sandwich bag and then drop them from 32km to devastating effect appears to be somewhat more than idle Friday afternoon pre-pub musing.…

$100m revenue miss alert – could signal loss +Comment Seagate has issued an early warning that its third fy2016 quarter revenue will be off by $100m from its forecast of $2.7bn.…

Comparex on shelf with boxed software, other dusty things The sales process for Microsoft enterprise licensing house Comparex is "ongoing", the parent company has told us, denying claims from multiple industry sources it is dead in the water.…

Or, how to do it right first time and avoid confrontational siloes Information security (infosec) isn’t a game for amateurs. No one solution will do. Proper information security requires defence in depth: layers of technologies, techniques, best practices and incident response woven together into the tapestry of everyday operations.…

Unfortunately, it can count my laughter lines Something for the Weekend, Sir? I like to pick roses on a summer’s day and meeting friends. I dearly wish for world peace. I hope to work with children, just as soon as I have completed my doctorate in astrophysics.…

You say old IT system, I say finely tuned technology Interview In the UK, IT Godzilla Fujitsu is perhaps best known for its unwieldy public sector contracts, being responsible for running a sizeable chunk of the government's legacy technology.…

Would you expose it? Delete it? The choice is yours, dear readers ON-CALL+POLL Welcome again to On-Call, our weekly (and preponderantly prurient) piece in which readers share horror stories from their workplaces.…

Zuck ducks difficult questions on internet expansion Analysis One of the central themes of Facebook's F8 developer conference in San Francisco this week has been Mark Zuckerberg's plans to wire up the world with Facebook internet access.…

Fuming punters hit El Reg's inbox London-based online backup biz Monster Cloud is under fire from customers after hiking its prices and switching up its subscription plans.…

And reveals that for really bad problems, Microsoft will break Azure to fix it Microsoft has issued guidelines about Azure security that spell out when a problem is your problem and when a problem is Microsoft's problem.…

And bin kit running 'MacOS', whatever that is, after four Apple has dropped a little hint about the expected working lives of its products, suggesting its Watch will only be used for three years.…

Automated, faster hacking for fun and profit ... or evil? BSides Canberra Hacking duo Shubham Shah and Nathaniel Wakelam will publish two tools that have helped them to haul in big bucks from bug bounty programs.…

All payloads alive and kicking as craft sends new photo of cosmic nothingness to ponder The European/Russian ExoMars craft is doing just fine, says the European Space Agency (ESA), with first light reaching its cameras and everything humming along nicely.…

Military to purchase speakers capable of being heard 10km away, in NORKS South Korea has issued a tender for a new national defence stereo system.…

Dropping exploits in Chrome? Sure. Private homebrew CMS? Not so much ACSC2016 Australian hackers are free under the Wassenaar Arrangement to bring zero day vulnerabilities overseas, demonstrate them on stage, in training sessions, and to exploit them to win cash as part of hacking competitions, according to the Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO).…

What we knew in 2010, 2012 and 2014 we still know in 2016 Reg Water Cooler – What's this about the Canadian Mounties hacking millions of BlackBerry messages or some crazy moose doodie like that?…

♫ Mothers, don't let your babies grow up to be hackers ♫ The author of the infamous "Blackhole" exploit kit has been sentenced to seven years in a Russian penal colony, local media report.…

Let's hope it's more successful than the open virtualisation format The Open Container Initiative (OCI) has started work on open container Image Format spec.…

What's the harm in obnoxious people tapping at their phones in a crowded theater? The CEO of AMC Theaters says his company will consider allowing people to text during movies.…

'You're a talented lot, but your marketing sucks'. ACSC2016 Australia should become the 'Switzerland for data' Cisco chief security man John Stewart says.…

Burr-Feinstein's proposed legislation will screw over the NSA, too, says Bruce Schneier The proposed bill put forward by Senators Richard Burr (R-NC) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) to force US companies to build backdoors into their encryption systems has quickly run into trouble.…

And every article like this makes the thousands spent on SEO and PR more wasteful The University of California, Davis has spent $175,000 on search engine optimization (SEO) and online reputation management – to hide an embarrassing incident in which students were pepper-sprayed on campus.…

Oh irony of ironies: The vSphere web client needs a fix just as HTML5 versions emerge Patch now, vAdmins: that's the message from VMware after it revealed a "critical security issue in the VMware Client Integration Plugin."…

Apple, Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, Google etc etc etc Tech firms are the largest corporate tax dodgers in the US, according to a new report from Oxfam.…

Two critical flaws found and the official fix is: remove the app RIP QuickTime for Windows. Apple is "deprecating support" for the application, and will no longer patch security flaws in the software.…

FBI not exactly shining with this one The iPhone at the center of the huge public fight between the FBI and Apple has "nothing of real significance" on it – just as we suspected.…

Mad Nad and bad-ass Brad slam Sam in court thwart Microsoft has sued the US Department of Justice (DoJ) over the software giant's right to alert users when their personal data has been accessed by cops and Feds.…

Mandatory info leak reporting is coming Analysis The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has been ratified by the European Parliament.…

So long and thanks for all the market share There’s one less hideout for Windows XP hangers-on when it comes to browsers.…

But overall TalkTalk entices more customers across its mobe and TV offerings Broadband customers at TalkTalk continued to flee the operator during the first three months of this year, with 126,000 customers switching away from the provider.…

Free content ad network plans to copy Google's success too Facebook has snatched an ex-Google exec and former chief of the US government’s DARPA boffinry branch to lead a new research facility.…

Patch, patch, patch Two denial of service vulnerabilities in SAP’s latest monthly patch batch can allow full system compromise, ERP security specialists warn.…

Cheerio Controversial ad targeting firm Phorm has ceased trading.…

While IBM sings the blues in Gartner's report If you buy into the IBM and Oracle PR that they are cloud “leaders” and are successfully transitioning their on-prem software businesses, think again.…

A story of wellies, the DMCA loophole, and music Analysis If you want to understand the economics of the music industry, imagine that you make wellies: Prestige Boots. They’re excellent wellies, well reviewed and loved by customers.…

Distributed intelligence across the Earth? Let's call it 'Skynet' Version 0.8 of Google's open source machine learning library, TensorFlow, has been released, adding support for distributed computing so you can get your whole Beowulf cluster infected with its Skynet.…

Good old reliable cloud Reseller giant Misco has confirmed it will embark on a crash migration program to shift its infrastructure into the cloud - a day after a datacentre meltdown that froze its e-commerce front-end for six hours.…

Poor soul fell through roof tiles, clung on until arms gave out One-time monopoly telco BT is in court on charges brought by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) after an engineer fell seven metres onto a concrete stairwell and broke both his ankles.…