The Register

Ex-Xbox exec now ex-Sonos exec Perhaps he disagreed with the voice-control strategy? Whatever the reason, Sonos’ high-profile chief product officer, Marc Whitten, has streamed right out of the company he joined two years ago, in March 2014.…

Gerrere, lad, yon man's giz us broadband in t'Hull The government's plans to make 10Mbps a 'legal right' by 2020 do not nearly go far enough, Bill Halbert, chief exec of telecoms sector firm Kcom has said.…

World's worst malvertisers serve world's worst exploit kit through world's worst browser Malwarebytes researcher Jerome Segura says malvertisers have served the world's most dangerous exploit kit - Angler - through compromised advertisements run on LiveJournal.com and news service Likes.com.…

Files appeal in epic 'Who owns Linux' case against IBM The Santa Cruz Organisation (SCO) just doesn't know when it's dead: the company that thinks it owns Linux is having another try at milking IBM for money.…

Join the discussion at IRX 2016 in Birmingham PROMO Need to keep abreast of the latest developments in ecommerce and multichannel retailing? Then check-in at Internet Retailing Expo 2016 (IRX) for two days of conferences, clinics, workshops and exhibitions at the NEC in Birmingham (27-28 April 2016). And it’s all free.…

SamSam virus is highly contagious and Bitcoin's the only known cure Security types are warning hospitals to stay on alert for a "widespread campaign" targeting vulnerable servers with new strains of ransomware.…

Also adds 'secret' browsing mode that encrypts your history Creating its own ad-blockable browser for Android is a step too far for Samsung, but it has decided to let third-party blockers into the tent.…

Hoarding spectrum isn't cool or practical, but if wireless operators everyone wins Static spectrum allocation is going to pass its use-by date soon, according to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which has kicked off a US$2 million challenge to find co-operative ways to share radio frequencies.…

Perfect for virtual reality A 16-year-old lad in Manchester, England, exploited flaws in Valve's developer site to publish on Steam an unapproved game about watching paint dry.…

When is a release cycle not a release cycle? When it's a important enough to break Mozilla's changing the way features land in future versions of its Firefox browser.…

Hiding behind all those points is a patch for an admin-interface XSS mess If you missed the March 17-issued patch for shopping cart application Zen Cart, get busy, because among other things it fixed serious cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities.…

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory gets its hands on 64,000 cores and 80 BEEELLION transistors IBM's TrueNorth platform will form the basis of a collaboration with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) to chase the exascale dream.…

Pinboard founder wigs out over terms of service that make API dependency toxic Bookmarking site Pinboard has discovered one of the downsides of the so-called “API economy”: that moment when lawyers get in the way of a service.…

Redmond reported as Purple Palace suitor Yahoo! has been accused of getting serious about the contentious slow-motion train wreck that is its sale process.…

'Shut down the dark net, give governments backdoors', CIGI study finds Canadian think-tank CIGI (the Centre for International Governance and Innovation) reckons ordinary citizens are more comfortable with government oversight of the Internet and their privacy than, for example, Apple.…

Courts or Congress – Hobson's choice on privacy Comment While fans of strong crypto and privacy are celebrating the US Department of Justice decision to back down in the San Bernardino case against Apple, it's important not to get too giddy – this is going to be a long battle and the FBI has nothing but time.…

Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am stuck... AT&T and Verizon are taking heat on opposite sides of the US over their networks.…

Dial M for murder Absolutely no one can make sense of the United States' infatuation with firearms.…

Spaceport software over budget and behind schedule While NASA can do some amazing things in space, back on the planet's surface its coders are less than stellar.…

Target appears to have been two Chinese domain names The internet's root servers were not the target of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack in December which for a short time took out four of the 13 pillars of the global network.…

NPM republishes unpublishing rules Analysis The programmer who sparked a brief meltdown in the JavaScript world last week says he has no regrets – and that it should be a learning experience for the community.…

Turn the tables on tables Analysis Despite being assaulted from all sides, the relational model for databases is still the king of the hill and it looks like it will not only survive, but thrive as well.…

No NIT software exploit code for you The FBI is refusing to hand over details of the software it used to track and unmask anonymous viewers of a child sex abuse websites. The Feds said the details are irrelevant to the case.…

Surprise, the bad guys have helpdesks too! US federal courts have alerted Americans to a fresh crop of scams in which conmen are setting up call centers and impersonating government agencies.…

PowerWare does its dirty work via booby-trapped files Miscreants have put together a strain of ransomware written in Microsoft Word macros and PowerShell, Redmond's scripting language.…

News falls on Ceph ears SanDisk and Red Hat have formed an alliance: the crimson cranial-covering company’s Ceph Storage software will be offered as the preferred Ceph software by SanDisk for its InfiniFlash box.…

Behold, a new platform from Microsoft Analysis Microsoft's Surface Hub is finally shipping, almost eight months after Microsoft began to take orders for the kit.…

So much more than the Unity bit Review Ubuntu 16.04, named after a type of African ground squirrel, Xenial Xerus, is here – in beta.…

More convergence, please Arista is taking on the big boys of Cisco and Juniper with its new switching and routing platform for cloud service providers and enterprise data centres.…

Sir Clive Sinclair's tin rattles to the tune of £366,000 The champagne corks are popping down at Sir Clive Sinclair's Retro Computers after an Indiegogo tin-rattle to raise funds for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum Vega+ passed its deadline with more than £360,000 pledged.…

You can’t have too much thought leadership – or revenue Container security outfit Twistlock has drafted in a DevOps luminary as a strategic advisor and an experienced industry insider as chief revenue officer.…

Boaty McBoatface faces Blas de Lezo in 'name that ship' showdown A band of Spanish net buccaneers has mounted a determined incursion into Her Maj's territorial cyberwaters by demanding that Blighty's forthcoming Royal Research Ship be named the RRS Blas de Lezo, in honour of the man who administered the British a serious military shoeing during the War of Jenkins' Ear.…

Behind every robot lies a good human Software automation is becoming intelligent, going deep into systems and is even going "autonomic" and helping create self-healing systems.…

NetApp’s E-Series gets accelerated NetApp says the latest version of its E-Series all-flash and disk arrays, along with its SANTricity operating software, makes data analytics apps such as Splunk run faster.…

Facts, Willy? Don't let those trip you up, now William Hague, the Conservative former Foreign Secretary, has claimed that the latest Brussels terrorist attacks “show the need to crack terrorist communications.”…

Infosec bloke pokes hornet's nest with stick; patch ASAP Security researchers were able to access default SAP accounts on enterprise systems worldwide by using default passwords.…

Beancounter says scheme's pitfalls keep him up at night MPs from across the political spectrum have attacked the government's plan to close a further 86 courts while investing £700m in a court “digitisation” plan which has been flagged as “high risk”.…

NVMe fabric delivers the low latency access goods, says its marketing spiel Storage upstart Apeiron's array is a Godzilla of all-flash arrays, delivering up to 3PB of capacity, 120-plus million IOPS and less than three microseconds' latency from a rackful of its ADS1000 array built from separate, scale-out, compute and storage nodes.…

Firm doesn't hold card details – except when it does Update Clothes website SportPursuit was hit by hackers over the Easter weekend, potentially losing customers' bank card details.…

IDC stats reveal who's who in the backup appliance bearpit IDC has published its quarterly confirmation that EMC’s Data Domain is crushing the competition in the purpose-built backup appliance market.…

Egos, bean counters and being Larry Page's buddy have stalled Google's consumer IoT plans Remember Nest Labs? Google spunked $2bn (£1.41bn) on the home appliance outfit two years ago.…

'32,000 years of wearable evolution' – this is what it's come to The consumerisation of wearables has got HP Inc’s chief techie thinking about ways to reach out and touch everyone on the planet. The obvious way to do it? Sex up the corporate name badge, of course.…

Oi, Siri? You there: Cortana! Why can't you run on my Pi? Amazon.com has released a Raspberry Pi version of its Alexa Voice Assistant, the company's voice-activated “companion” bot that resides in its Echo range of speakers and offers voice-driven home automation and shopping.…

Load, simulate and monitor my virtually dynamic instrument Load DynamiX, a storage workload monitoring and simulating company, and Virtual Instruments, a Fibre Channel/Ethernet tapper and monitoring business, are merging after the tapper ran out of meaningful growth room.…

German firms fleeced by 'Petya' nastyware that performs fake chkdsk Ransomware has been detected infecting master file tables, rendering Windows PC useless unless payment is made.…

New version shows off Edge extensions and revised Maps app Microsoft is releasing preview versions of Windows 10 at a rapid rate, perhaps in preparation for its Build developer conference later this week in San Francisco.…

Photons as building blocks for AND, OR, XOR and NOT Quantum research boffins in Australia have demonstrated one of computing's universal gates, the Fredkin gate, operating with qubits instead of bits.…

We read what people had to say, so you don't have to The much-hyped virtual reality headset Oculus Rift is finally shipping to its first customers this week, and the Facebook-owned company dished out a few of them ahead of time to select publications.…

Phonebook app used IMEI as user ID Called ID app "Truecaller" has been called out for using IMEI and nothing else to identify users in its systems.…

ODPi publishes runtime spec and test suite ODPi, the group formerly known as the Open Data Platform initiative and set up last year as an attempt to standardise Hadoop applications, has published its first runtime specification.…