The Register

Why not follow the moon and send VMs to where the electricity and compute is cheap The Register's virtualisation desk has sometimes heard talk of a concept called “follow-the-moon” computing that aims to reduce the cost of running apps by placing them in spots where electricity is cheap.…

No space telescopes required, archive discovery reveals A reexamination of astronomical records has shown that an astronomer unknowingly snapped an exoplanet during the First World War – well before such bodies were confirmed in the 1990s.…

When one wire carries data and power, you need to protect against dodgy devices The USB 3.0 Promoter Group has announced it has devised and will adopt a new “USB Type-C Authentication specification.”…

State-sponsored hackers will do 'everything' to get in, says CISO ACSC 2016 Airbus chief security officer Stephane Lenco says the company is hit by successful state-sponsored and ransomware attacks a dozen times each year.…

It's all about making mirrors less noisy, natch A University of Western Australia (UWA) boffin who played a major part in Australia's contribution to finding gravitational waves reckons detectors can get a lot more sensitive.…

Talk AT commands at the phone over USB and see wait for the fun to start A bunch of Samsung Galaxy variants leave their modems open to receiving AT commands over the USB cable, even when they're locked.…

Why breach a bank when you can target a laptop running torrents and games? ACSC 2016 Australians are having their retirement savings accounts drained as hackers move to breach broker platforms rather than the tougher target that is banking infrastructure.…

And this time, do it right A security researcher that pointed out serious Java Runtime Engine vulnerabilities to IBM in 2013 has accused Big Blue of not fixing the bugs properly.…

Zuck clings to 24 million BBC News, ESPN readers Internet.org aka Free Basics – Facebook's slice of the web for the developing world – has been controversial, but that isn't stopping the social network.…

New York state mulls 'Evan's Law' to snare distracted drivers Poll Drivers in New York may have their phones and gadgets scanned after crashes to see what they were doing moments before a prang.…

Attorney General's department yet to convene meetings for consultation Despite having worked on the problem for a year, Australia's government has sent telcos no funding to assist with the cost of metadata retention.…

Internet registry tells g-men where to go … to find publicly accessible information One of the five regional internet registries (RIRs), RIPE, has published its 2015 transparency report reviewing requests from law enforcement for information.…

Keep an eye on your wireless mouse, too Patch Tuesday Microsoft has posted the April edition of its monthly security update, which kills a bug that allows guests to escape to hosts on Hyper-V.…

Ancient OSes, unauthenticated servers ... and much more Bsides Sydney hacker Edward Farrell says scores of small and medium businesses in Australia and some Fortune 500 companies are open to attack through running ancient Windows operating systems and unauthenticated servers.…

Windows, Samba vulnerability needs patching – but don't panic The Badlock flaw in Windows and Samba file servers has been revealed after weeks of hype and anticipation. It is not as critical as feared, but it's still an annoyance. Fixes and mitigations are available today.…

Ten-year global domination plan: Get everyone online and sell 'em stuff At the opening keynote of the Facebook F8 developer conference, Mark Zuckerberg has outlined his company's plan to get everyone online and hooked on Facebook within the next decade.…

Taxi-booking app is upset – abusing customer data is its job Uber has produced its first transparency report and called for a public debate over the type and amount of data it is obliged to provide to the authorities.…

Cosmic storm, my ass Sweden suspects a hacker group linked to Russian intelligence was responsible for an attack on its air traffic control systems last November, we're told.…

Talk about pushing the envelope Famed physicist Stephen Hawking and Russian billionaire Yuri Milner are putting their weight behind a research project to send a tiny spacecraft to another star system.…

Paying off your 'technical debts' As one of my coworkers used to say when confronted with The Latest Development Improvement Methodology: “Why don’t you come down here and chum this stuff?” – except he used the language of a sailor.…

Integration and geo-specific file location at your fingertips Rival file sharing services Box and Dropbox are gunning for massive expansion by exploiting the huge scale of IBM, Amazon’s AWS – and of Facebook.…

Get ready to expose yourself... intellectually I was an early adopter of XP (Extreme Programming). I read Kent Beck’s book when it was first released in 1999 and though sceptical of some of the ideas, others resonated very strongly with me.…

Marathon five-knuckle shuffle ends in cuffing A passenger aboard a Megabus service to Coralville, Iowa, was cuffed on arrival on Sunday after cracking one off for three hours in the mistaken belief that a female fellow traveller appreciated his marathon five-knuckle shuffle.…

Puppet boss talks about the ties that don’t always bind Major DevOps players are meshing together with acquisitions, alliances and technical partnerships, but are not in danger of splitting into a series of competing armed camps, the CEO of Puppet has claimed.…

Just waiting on European directive, assuming no Brexit The communications regulator Ofcom has promised to release more details on how it intends to give BT's competitors greater access to Openreach's poles and ducts by the summer.…

Outage outrage when it lasted more than 24 hours... Symantec.cloud is in the middle of rebuilding its portal this lunchtime following a prolonged outage spanning more than 24 hours.…

Top Eurocrat could become Brexit poster girl after UK begging letter Comment Years ago, we used to mock Ofcom for its Ofcom-branded bottled water, and its tediously technocratic “evidence based” approach, something which is actually enshrined in the 2002 Act that created it.…

Breeding programme benefits from Microduino-packed sensor podule Devastated vulture populations in India, Nepal and Pakistan are being pulled back from the brink of extinction thanks to an artificial breeding programme agreeably assisted by a 3d-printed egg packed with diminutive Microduino microprocessor kit.…

HTC desperately needs this flagship to be a hit. Does it deliver? Hands On HTC has unwrapped its make-or-break flagship for 2016, the Ten, and we’ve had a look.…

US multinationals in firing line The European Commission is reported to be updating its planned rules for tackling aggressive tax planning.…

Don't sweat, Marc: $33m/yr is still enough for a Pot Noodle and a cuppa Mark Benioff won’t be getting a pay rise this year thanks to shareholder discontent over the “excessive compensation” of Salesforce management.…

Defence firm BAE Systems' team spotted it Researchers have uncovered a new strain of data-stealing trojan Qbot.…

Ransomware, 0days, malware, scams... all are up, says Symantec There’s been a sharp (35 per cent) increase in crypto ransomware attacks, with the UK ranked as the nation third most targeted with ransomware.…

Shiny new Canadian UAVs for Surrey and Sussex police Surrey and Sussex Police have received almost £250k of Police Innovation Fund cash to acquire four UAVs as part of the "largest trial of police drones in England and Wales".…

It's time to bring your sales into the 21st century Sysadmin Blog Dear readers, I apologize in advance for the cursing, horrible metaphors, similes and so forth that will populate this blog. I am writing this after a day of dealing with a network cryptolocker outbreak and finally hitting that wall where I no longer care about anything except venting unto the world that silent, rage that has been building inside for years.…

What's good for customers isn't so good for the industry Comment A few days ago Dell announced that they are reselling hyper-convergence solutions bundling software coming from Nutanix and VMware – and possibly others, too.…

The Snowden factor unnerving your bank Feature Writing anything about Bitcoin or blockchains is a challenge. It's not the easiest technology to understand – not because it's particularly complex, but because it's grown into something of a confused mess of different technologies and applications. It also "looks" strange compared to most technologies that we're used to.…

Doesn't quite manage itself but does much more and gets Gartner stroke Cloudian has lowered the management burden for its S3-compatible HyperStore object storage with automated this, predictive that, and dynamic, pro-active, non-disruptive other stuff.…

Overnight drizzle a trickle feed of power. Solar panels could generate power at night and during inclement weather by harvesting energy from raindrops, research finds.…

GNU man doesn't mention Oracle or Ubuntu, but that's who he's lashing Free Software Foundation president and Gnu Public Licence (GNU GPL) author Richard Stallman has weighed in on the spat over whether Ubuntu can legally include ZFS in Linux, with a resounding “No!”…

MoU kicks off five-year effort to share people, projects, ShinyHappy jargon Exclusive The United Kingdom's Government Digital Service (GDS) has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Australia's Digital Transformation Office (DTO), under which the two organisations will share expertise and staff.…

China's emerging enterprise giant eyes major vendors' lunches, fetches cutlery Huawei reckons it can outgrow its enterprise competitors without seeking a bumper acquisition and is going to spend two years cloud-enabling its entire networks product line.…

c those charges move A platinum-tin “topological metal” discovered by the Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory could cut energy needed in computing applications, by moving electrons around faster.…

101 things to do with a nuclear stockpile Russian space scientists want to deploy nukes against killer asteroids.…

New bots 10 times more efficient than old bots. Thousands of miniature microbots could be used to clean up toxic heavy metals in contaminated water in tests purging some 95 percent of lead in an hour.…

Startup decloaks with DevOps API-driven flash-first elastic storage The latest storage startup to shed its stealth cloak is Datera, which says it has an Amazon EBS-like storage software offering for DevOps users' private or public clouds.…

Ouch: PSUs can restart switches that brick on restart Network admins in Cisco Nexus shops might want to check their inventories for a particular combination of switches and power supplies.…

Interesting idea but we can imagine the downside Microsoft has added a QR code to its infamous Blue Screen of Death in Windows 10.…

Gartner, IDC Q1 numbers have landed, and they're not pretty The ongoing decline in PC shipments has continued in Q1 2016, according to Gartner and IDC.…

New, sneakier forms of the malware appearing every day An anonymous security researcher has published code that can unlock the encryption used by the Petya ransomware that surfaced last month.…