The Register

Please, miss, is that competitive enough? Three UK is making a last-ditch attempt to win EU approval of its £10.25bn O2 merger with a number of sweeteners, including £3bn in network deals with competitors, according to reports.…

Election officials shrug: Yeah, we were hacked - but not of sensitive info... A massive data breach appears to have left 55 million Philippine voters at much greater risk of identity fraud and more.…

'Insider' update includes Linux along with new Skype, dark theme and more Microsoft's latest "Insider" Windows 10 preview Build 14316, includes the Windows Subsystem for Linux along with a flurry of other new features.…

Content may be king but content management is deffo not EMC-Dell deal EMC’s Documentum business may be up for sale, as part of a non-core asset-ditching process during the Dell-EMC coming together.…

NASA's super pressure balloon mission on hold The fourth launch of NASA's high-altitude, heavy-lift super pressure balloon (SPB) is on hold while scientists wait for a break in the weather over Wanaka Airport, on New Zealand's South Island.…

Beats dating virtualisation, but – oh – the rules Linux is all grown up. It has nothing left to prove. There's never been a year of the Linux desktop and there probably never will be, but it runs on the majority of the world's servers. It never took over the desktop, it did an end-run around it: there are more Linux-based client devices accessing those servers than there are Windows boxes.…

Thrill-seekers look elsewhere: Most of the criminal bits are about financial crimes Despite its reputation, less than half of the sites on the dark web are illegal, according to a new study by security intelligence outfit Intelliagg.…

Clue: It's nothing to do with terrorism, even though that's what UK.gov wants you to think A very unusual exchange is about to take place over the Atlantic. The UK is sending some 700kg of highly enriched uranium to be disposed of in the US, the largest amount that has ever been moved out of the country.…

Another middle class job gone as CAPTCHA-crackers beaten Black Hat Asia Google's and Facebook's CAPTCHA services have been defeated in research that successfully designed an automated system to solve the "are-you-human?" verification challenges.…

Supreme Court rules Wikimedia needs to pay artists for images in street art directory The Supreme Court of Sweden has ruled the local Wikimedia chapter must have explicit consent from artists, some of whom may choose to be anonymous, as part of its project to take photographs showcasing the country's public street art.…

You didn't know sales uses SalesForce? Redmond can tell you all about it The first fruits of Microsoft's 2015 acquisition of Adallom are ripening with Redmond announcing its Cloud App Security offering is now generally available.…

The ministry giveth, and the ministry taketh away The Italian government has revoked the blanket export license that allowed Hacking Team to ship its surveillance tools around the world.…

What could possibly go wrong when sending oil into space at 500 times sea level pressure? China has announced the successful launch of its SJ-10 probe, which ascended into the heavens atop a Long March 2-D rocket overnight and will one day return to Earth.…

Password token snatch might explain that unexpected weirdo in your next online meeting Recurity Labs hacker Andreas Lindh has found four vulnerabilities, including a remote code execution hole, in Apache OpenMeetings. The flaws mean attackers could hijack installations of the popular virtual meetings and shared whiteboard application.…

This is kind of a big deal because the mess is in 14.04 LTS, expiry date 2019 Ubuntu has patched four Linux kernel vulnerabilities that allowed for arbitrary code execution and denial of service attacjs.…

If you could talk to the thermostat, think about how lazy you could be Amazon wants more developers to make it impossible to control their devices without an Internet connection, and has added extra APIs for third parties to use.…

The failboat of a decade sunk at last The long-running legal stoush between IBM and the Queensland state government is genuinely, finally, truly over, and the government has to pay Big Blue's costs.…

Nice elliptic curves, now show us your hardware so we can do this to TLS A pair of German engineers want to give a push to the adoption of new crypto in the IETF by pushing the curves in RFC 7748 into hardware.…

Middle Kingdom calls for 'cloud platform' at heart of new modernisation push, plans to stop cranking out crud China's State Council has signed off on a plan to place the internet of things at the heart of new efforts to upgrade the nation's manufacturing capabilities.…

The CPU arch that refuses to die OpenPower Summit IBM's Power9 processor, due to arrive in the second half of next year, will have 24 cores, double that of today's Power8 chips, it emerged today.…

Forthcoming legislation looks dead in the water Multiple sources have reported that the White House isn't keen on forthcoming legislation that would force companies to decrypt their products if a court orders it.…

Fresh round of network security patches served Cisco has released a fresh crop of security advisories, including warnings for critical flaws in the UCS, Prime Infrastructure and Evolved Programmable Network Manager (EPNM) that would allow an attacker to gain root access over its products.…

One second of buffering is entirely acceptable for almost anything Australian political commentator Waleed Aly has made a spectacularly non-useful intervention into the debate about the technologies used to build Australia's national broadband network (NBN), setting the ridiculous expectation that streaming video must always load in under a second.…

Two holes become one Scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope have spotted a huge black hole with 17 billion times the mass of our sun residing in an otherwise nearly empty backwater of the universe.…

It's a great place to fail! No, really, look at the Fire product line Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has defended criticism of his company's culture in a letter to shareholders.…

Prime Minister Turnbull is strangling our economy On a recent trip to the shops, I priced a massive UHD OLED telly, with blacks so dark the panel looked like it actively sucked in light. Staring into the most beautiful television I’d ever seen, I had a moment of clarity: Gorgeous and expensive, but useless.…

Regulators say deals with carriers went too far Apple is reportedly facing a €48.5m (US$55.3m) suit claiming it violated anti-trust rules in France.…

A dual lens beauty that can play with the big boys Hands On "Samsung should be very concerned at what Huawei might be demonstrating in two to three years' time," I wrote in 2014, prompting some derision. Fair enough: Huawei didn't even have a 4G phone at that time. The consumer division hasn't even turned five.…

Open source software and a DNS for the internet of things needed The extraordinary decision of Nest to brick its $300 Revolv home automation hub has served as a wake-up call to the tech industry.…

Vaping California rep Steams over 'unauthorized' expense listings A member of US Congress is facing scrutiny after he logged more than $1,300 worth of video game purchases as campaign expenses.…

Yes, we're looking at you, McAfee The organizers of the Open Sourced Vulnerability Database (OSVDB) have announced they are having to shut up shop.…

Web giant loves to keep its options open ... right, Intel? OpenPower Summit Google and Rackspace are working together on blueprints for servers that use IBM’s Power9 processors. The designs will be shared publicly via the Open Compute Project, it is hoped.…

Not the most effective getaway vehicle A Florida drug suspect proved last weekend that so-called hoverboards are not an effective means of escape from law enforcement officials when he was cuffed following an unsuccessful attempt to evade arrest aboard the electric getaway vehicle.…

The NVMe fabric shared flash storage sun rises Comment X-IO Technologies' Axellio* is a rackmount hyper-converged server/all-flash storage platform that will be sold through OEM, ODM and system integrators – and it provides an almost unbelievable combination of performance and density.…

At least that’s what Red Hat says... Red Hat has thrown out a slew of new qualifications it promises will show your DevOps chops – at least when it comes to its technologies and those of a few chosen partners.…

Pushing one laser beam inside another Boffins hope to turbo-charge the speed of “unbreakable” quantum cryptographic systems with a new technique involving “seeding” one laser beam inside another.…

Smart Lab for pesky human experiments? You're not the first, Mr Alphabet A top Google executive says he’d love to build a city from scratch - without the messy humans getting in the way.…

'Every bot on Kik should have the potential to improve people's lives' says company Kik, the company behind the eponymous teen messaging platform, has kicked open its doors for bot developers.…

Turn around – every now and then I get a little bit nervous... Logicalis European head honcho Arnaud Spirlet is to exit the business before fully implementing the turnaround strategy he drafted.…

Get patching. Stat One in five doctors’ mobile devices might be at risk of leaking sensitive data due to either malware or poor password security practices, according to a new study.…

Possible partial outage also comes to light Vodafone has once again come under fire for poor customer service, this time for its handling of a computer glitch that led to customers being overcharged.…

Sample-gathering gadget heads for zero-grav tests The European Space Agency is poised to conduct zero-grav tests on an impressively brushy "asteroid cleaner".…

Elon Musk is a perpetual kickstarter. When will he run it like a company?

External servers now get SSD class response times, firm says German storage supplier Zstor has fabricated its external shared NV-Series array with RDMA access, giving accessing servers the same response as internal NVMe SSDs – more than 10,000 times faster than Fibre Channel SAN array access.…

Bigelow's soft habitat off to ISS this Friday The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM) is set to travel to the International Space Station later this week, ahead of a two-year trial to see how it performs in the rigours of outer space.…

Speedy, but some way to go Opera founder Jon von Tetzchner’s plan to recreate Opera reaches a major milestone today. The Vivaldi browser is out of beta after more than a year.…

And if you're an evil BOFH type, here's how to tell if your Boss is an eejit IT is perceived in mixed ways by users. Some look on the amazing stuff it does and think there must be witchcraft going on in there somewhere. Others think that because they configured their Wi-Fi printer and Sky box at home, they're a genius of computing.…

Ready and waiting for you, sir, please do come in... The “V” in SimpliVity now stands for Hyper-V as well as virtualisation, with the startup adding Microsoft hypervisor support to its existing vSphere and KVM use.…

It's the end of an era Blog Last week I had an interesting chat with Andy Warfield (CTO and founder of Coho Data). We started a debate about his latest article and the pros and cons of custom hardware design in modern storage products. However, the conversation quickly got side-tracked to another topic: the role of the storage admin, if any, in 2016.…

Says all other tech companies care only about following competitors Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos has penned a new letter to shareholders in which he points out that Amazon Web Services is bigger, and growing faster, than its parent company did at the same age.…