The Register

Get IT covered Promo Nothing is certain but death and taxes. Everything else, including lawsuits, happens to other people, right? Which is why you still haven't got around to sorting out professional indemnity insurance.…

Leaky diary gone, say security researchers Developers have responded to warnings about massive privacy problems with the Magic Kinder App for children by casting off insecure code, dropping poorly implemented functionality in the process.…

Trying to gag your customers from talking about your gear is utterly shameful Comment IT business customers are thrice-stuffed “see no evil, hear no evil, say no evil” monkeys. Why? Take a look at Atlantis Computing's EULA.…

And Culture Sec still not a fan of splitting BT and Openreach Digital minister Ed Vaizey has shied away from guaranteeing a legal right to a universal service obligation of 10Mbps by 2020.…

Well that seems, er, fair and reasonable Making the terms on which patents are licensed available for public scrutiny could help businesses, courts and regulators determine if the terms of other patent agreements are fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND), an expert in valuing intellectual property (IP) has said.…

Got US$5k to spare? And that's the the liquid-cooled entry-level version. The rack's $20k Intel's fulfilling its 2015 promise to let developers get their hands on a Knights Landing developer platform before the 14 nm HPC silicon reaches general availability.…

Kurt Vonnegut and Robert Heinlein cited as prisoner denied access to holy relics A United States District Court judge has ruled that Pastafarianism, the cult of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM), is not a religion.…

Carders crushed and malware re-use stymied thanks to speedy sharing. ACSC2016 Carders targeting Australian banks may have a tough time re-using attacks thanks to a regular invite-only gathering of anti-fraud boffins.…

'VP of 24x7' apologises in person for latest TITSUP A couple of days ago Google's cloud went offline, just about everywhere, for 18 minutes. Now the Alphabet subsidiary has explained why and issued a personal apology penned by “Veep for 24x7” Benjamin Treynor Sloss.…

'These Russians speak really good Farsi' and other signs thieves lack honour ACSC2016 Malware writers are selling each other out to white hats and hacking through each other's infrastructure to frame rivals, Shadowserver's Richard Perlotto says.…

Chipzilla goes all—in with OpenStack, but multi-hypervisor plan no longer includes Virtzilla Intel's decided it can do without VMware's ESXi hypervisor as part of a big upgrade of its private cloud.…

CentOS-powered big data playground aims to rescue devs from dependency hell Microsoft has taken a data science bundle it crafted last November and put it onto an Azure-hosted Linux VM.…

Internet of Things We're Gonna Crush Next? Having nominated the Internet of Things as key to its future strategies, Intel has added a super-cheap development board to its Quark lineup.…

Everspin ships 256MB MRAM samples, says 1GB kit due by year's end Persistent storage that's just about as fast as RAM is widely held to be a year or three away from giving the server and storage industries a generational shakeup, and that change is now rather closer after US outfit Everspin started shipping samples of 256MB Magnetoresistive random-access memory (MRAM).…

Security fixes for privilege escalation, DoS, TLS spoofing and more Juniper's code reviewers have been hard at work, and have shipped a bunch of security bug-fixes.…

Party like it's 1970 Back in February, Apple nearly fixed the “1970” date bug that bricked iDevices running 64-bit iOS 8 or higher when their clocks were set to January 1, 1970.…

Aries and Terradata blueprints published in hope of getting more people on Facebook Facebook's quest to connect the remaining four billion people on the planet without internet access up to Facebook the web is a huge task.…

Proposed privacy act clears committee stage yet future is uncertain The US House Judiciary Committee has unanimously approved the Email Privacy Act (EPA) – which will require the police and Feds to get a warrant before searching email accounts.…

Court orders DNS overseer to halt delegation of new gTLD for a second time DNS overseer ICANN has been hit with a preliminary injunction ordering it to halt the delegation of the .africa internet space for a second time.…

You will probably want to install this fix Cisco has patched a vulnerability in its Unified Computing System (UCS) Central Software that could be exploited by miscreants to take remote control of machines.…

And then cabbies hand over in-car recordings of their chatter ACSC2016 Blundering Australian executives have left sensitive financial documents and tenders in the business centre of prominent luxury Canberra hotel, security man Wayne Ronaldson says.…

El Reg takes latest Burr-Feinstein legislation apart – and it's worse than before Analysis In the wake of the FBI's failed fight against Apple, Senators Richard Burr (R-NC) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) have introduced a draft bill that would effectively ban strong crypto.…

WebKit could soon get support for open conferencing standard Apple is adding support for WebRTC videoconferencing to WebKit, the engine at the heart of Safari. This will allow the web browser to handle websites and apps that offer WebRTC's encrypted video-nattering.…

San Francisco officials deem micro-apartment a fire hazard Illustrator Peter Berkowitz had been forced out of his $400-a-month box home in San Francisco after officials ruled it a fire hazard.…

Must try harder (to prevent personal info being used by US spies) Europe's data protection authorities have graded the new Privacy Shield agreement that covers data sharing between the US and Europe a fail.…

When you need 15 nines Western Digital has added another HGST archive array, the SA1000, to its range of gear plus software enhancements across the product line.…

Telco says service will continue as wireline techs walk off job The workers who handle Verizon's wireline services in the Eastern US have gone on strike.…

Why use the 'gimme password or else' law when you can evade even that? Alleged hacktivist Lauri Love appeared in a London court on Tuesday in a case that could establish new powers for UK police to compel criminal suspects into handing over encryption keys.…

Virtual private array supplier now does Swift access The Zadara Storage Cloud, available on-premises and in the cloud (remotely) or both, has had the ZIOS Intelligent Object Store service added.…

Stop wading through alerts and get serious We all want to protect our customer and employee data, but as the threat landscape changes and the publicly disclosed data breaches get increasingly larger, our approach may need to change. What constitutes "state of the art" information security in 2016?…

Scale-out NAS-er gets usable capacity gain. Neat Scale-out filer startup Qumulo has replaced mirroring with erasure coding in v2.0 of its Core OS to deliver a 33 per cent gain in usable capacity.…

Click your fingers and qualified folk appear from nowhere ... that's how it works, right? Former state monopoly BT is on the hunt for 900 security bods to help it meet the "surge" in customer demand for those skills, following a number of high-profile security and data breaches.…

You want the cloud? You are going to get it anyway, like it or not Microsoft is to take 12 "old world" accreditations out back to be shot as it drags channel partners – some of them kicking and screaming – into the cloud.…

But why exactly does it want to be a hardware company? Judging by the hype around Facebook VR, you'd think the '90s never happened. Back then, the Social Network™ didn’t exist and it was the era’s video game giants – Sega and Nintendo – rolling out virtual reality with great fanfare.…

Yup, it's another Total Inability To Support Usual Performance moment Symantec.cloud’s portal is back online following a day-long outage. However, sysadmins report a continuing inability to perform basic functions such as adding new email accounts for new starters at the corporate firms they manage.…

Firm apologises for 20th century service after 'server outage' Not wanting to be totally outdone by the recent outage at arch rival Insight Enterprises, online reselling rival Systems Europe - trading as Misco - has battled its own web demons for the best part of this morning.…

Do conservative Brit bosses face a DevOps Waterloo? UK IT bosses are amongst the most conservative in Western Europe, focusing on keeping the lights and shying away from innovation or adopting new approaches such as DevOps.…

Read and it weep, you young'uns Comment There are three tiers of storage: Primary storage, or block; secondary storage, or file; and object storage comes third. Object storage is immensely scalable, cheaper, durable... and slooooow. Could that be changing soon?…

Board-level relationships and lots of influence When Cisco entered the hyperconverged product area with its SpringPath software-powered HyperFlex system, it had already invested money in SpringPath and gained board-level representation.…

It's far simpler than salesmen would have you believe Business occurs everywhere, all day long. In the Western world, organisations where every member of a business shows up at a single premises, does work to a fixed set of hours and only deals with customers that enter the premises is quaint to the point of nearly extinct.…

Enters the NVMe SSD space Micron has entered the enterprise NVMe flash drive space with a pair of products spanning a range of form factors and capacities.…

Recorded from launchpad to SPAAAAAAACE

Comment Pity poor Juniper. The networking company’s alliance with Ruckus Wireless last summer raised hopes that it would strike it third time lucky in the Wi-Fi market, filling the gaping wireless gap in its platform. Now Brocade has snatched carrier Wi-Fi leader Ruckus from under its rival’s nose with a $1.2bn acquisition.…

Bigelow expandable habitat set for two-year ISS trial NASA is preparing to unpack Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM) - described as "first human-rated expandable structure that may help inform the design of deep space habitats" - which arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) last Sunday aboard a SpaceX Dragon resupply vehicle.…

Mostly it's financial crime. Here's what all the cool kids' terms mean in English If corporate IT infrastructures are a battlefield, then the cybercriminals are putting up a good fight. Last year saw some nasty breaches.…

Cosy club comes up with flashy little reference architecture Micron has devised a set of all-flash purpose-built, scale-out product designs in collaboration with VMware, Supermicro and Nexenta.…

So was agile making it up as they went along? Documents released after a four-year legal battle reveal the extent of the UK government's blithe disregard for the risks faced by Universal Credit.…

Sasha Levin kicks off 'security tree' side project Linux developer Sasha Levin has kicked off a project in which he proposes gathering up kernel security fixes under a single tree.…

Lawmakers take one in the eye in fap-based fight-back Famous grumble-flick site xHamster has stiffed stung North Carolina lawmakers over that state's anti-LGBT laws, shutting off their access to its various and extensive smorgasbord of smut.…