The Register

Supplier oligopoly will take a hit, says Public Accounts Committee Chief executive of the civil service, John Manzoni, has promised the government will start chopping up its big IT contracts in the next year and kick its dependency on just a handful of suppliers.…

Internal emails reveal more of Chad Sakac and Vaughn Stewart's rivalry Three months before EMC bought DSSD in May 2014, the storage goliath was thinking about buying Pure Storage, admitting in emails that its rival would always win out in head-to-head proof of concept de-dupe battles.…

The future is single factor second factor authentication, bleats Purple Palace Yahoo! has gone partially password-free with the stable release of a second-factor account sign-in tool that uses push messages to identify users.…

CEO steered Intel into the CPU business and oversaw extraordinary growth Former Intel CEO Andrew Grove has died, aged 79.…

New draft outlines startling future for STARTTLS Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), that staple of e-mail communications, was born in an era when nobody thought the Internet needed security.…

News sites bork-bork-borked for spreading 'false propaganda' News outlets in Sweden went dark over the weekend in the face of a large-scale distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.…

F5's David Holmes talks SSL with The Register Australia's wildly-enthusiastic adoption of cloud computing is providing the rest of the world a crucible in which a host of security challenges can be cultured, according to F5 security researcher David Holmes.…

Linux-on-KVM-OpenStack servers dodge cloud giants GoDaddy has decided to get into the cloudy server caper.…

Android re-installation ahoy to sink privilege elevation that opens avenue for rooting apps Google has shipped an out-of-band patch for Android shuttering a bug that is under active exploitation to root devices.…

Another day, another outage, for Australia's biggest telco Telstra is experiencing another outage/brownout, this time reportedly impacting calls from mobile phones to lines handled by session initiation protocol (SIP).…

'UbuntuBSD' promises the best of several possible bootloading worlds Another shot has been fired in the war between *nix true believers and systemd advocates, with a group of diehards welding the Ubuntu body onto the FreeBSD chassis.…

NSA stopped giggling at the back, handed over an exploit? The FBI has come to a sudden and surprising all-stop in its legal war with Apple.…

Innovation! Agile! Research! Oh, and privacy! Australia's Productivity Commission has kicked off an inquiry to work out how to spread individuals' data far and wide, sprinkled with the magic unicorn-dust of a privacy benchmark.…

American carrier says it won't throttle or promote any traffic on its network Verizon has laid out its own set of net neutrality rules it will impose – regardless of whether the FCC keeps its grip on America's broadband service.…

Not so fast, upstart – get back here First, EMC dealt Pure a $14m blow when a court ruled that Pure's FA-300/FA-400 arrays infringed one of EMC's patents.…

Unannounced Wi-Fi deal trailed in historic trip by US president President Obama has promised to bring internet access to Cuba – by pre-announcing a deal best-pal Google has struck with the island.…

Night Shift and True Tone will make bed-readers and designers very happy It may be true that Apple has moved from a genuinely innovative company to one that iterates its bestsellers, but one of those updates will leave many people happy.…

Samsung, start your Xerox machines Shy and modest Apple today unveiled a pair of small iPhones and iPads for people with itty-bitty hands.…

iOS 9.3, OS X 10.11, watchOS 2.2, tvOS 9.2 all out now Apple has today emitted security updates for pretty much everything it makes, and you should install them as soon as you can because it's all bad news.…

Come on, make a decision, you can't just keep us hanging on It's a busy week for Apple, with the company showing off new products this morning and a court showdown with the FBI tomorrow. Now the US Supreme Court has just added more to the workload with Case 15‑77 [PDF].…

Chairman Wheeler is having the last laugh Tom Wheeler, chairman of US broadband watchdog the FCC, has given telcos a firm poke in the eye over their net neutrality doomsday predictions.…

Would Windows 10 fall for this? Microsoft is developing tools for its Edge browser to import extensions from Chrome.…

Real talk: What does this mean for our Netflix subscriptions? Consumers are partly prevented from accessing online services and content across the EU by "contractual barriers" put in place by businesses, the European Commission has said.…

The good people of Blighty have spoken The good folk of Blighty have voted with their fingers - the polar-bound Royal Research Ship is to be called Boaty McBoatface.…

Not a donkey in sight as Vatican overlooks Google, Apple platforms The pope has celebrated the most solemn week in the Catholic calendar by expanding his social media presence and signing up to Instagram.…

IDS steps down – what next for disastrous online benefits system? Universal credit, the proposed one online benefits system to rule them all, has always been Iain Duncan Smith's brainchild – but with his shock departure from the Department for Work and Pensions, will the government finally put a bullet in the troubled project?…

Mind the app, says Secunia as bug count remains stable The number of zero-day vulnerabilities last year was the same as in 2014, according to a new study by vulnerability management outfit Secunia.…

Is demand creating long-term career prospects with big salaries? As career buzzwords go, you’d struggle to find one that trumps DevOps judging by the number of conferences, software tools and books flooding the market.…

You can't respect women and work in IT, duh An IT jobs site in the UK has been criticised for running an ad campaign featuring women in languorous poses with the strapline “hot tech talent”.…

Stuff gets virtually real for Qualcomm's Snapdragon, too Comment Intel and Qualcomm are increasingly extending their reach beyond their core chip technologies and into surrounding technologies and even applications. Both seek to enhance their revenues and account control with end-to-end offerings in key emerging areas of technology such as virtual reality.…

Digital infrastructure plans may be disrupted by the EU referendum Analysis George Osborne's budget may have provided a sprinkling of sweeteners for businesses and middle class savers alongside the headline-grabbing sugar tax last week, but details on digital infrastructure plans were distinctly lacking.…

The internet. Before Kim Kardashian. Yes, it really existed Pics A large photo of a woman's bottom greets you as you walk in. Chat messages are emerging from it.…

Dell, HPE, Intel, VMware and Microsoft target BIOS, PCIe and storage management The Redfish data centre management standard looks like it will be updated with its first set of extensions by the middle of the year.…

inSync cloudily protects Box, Google Work and Office 365 Druva has extended its base in end-point data protection to cover cloud apps Box, Google Work and Office 365.…

Apple promises patch, boffins won't reveal details, FBI presumably salivating Johns Hopkins University professor Matthew Green says a hard-to-exploit zero day vulnerability in iOS encryption allows skilled attackers to decrypt intercepted iMessages.…

Thanks for the career, guys, covering you and connecting me to the storage community Twitter turns 10 today and I, for one, would like to thank for sustaining my career by connecting me to important people and giving Reg writers an almost-car-wreck to chronicle.…

This is not the time to take your Kindle camping, people Readers will be unable to download their purchased books or buy new ones without a computer handy if they fail to update their Amazon Kindles by Wednesday.…

Lack of consultation fingered for CVE allocation disaster. A pilot project launched by vulnerability handler MITRE to address stagnation in the assignment of bug identification numbers has been shelved less than a day after its announcement and before its scheduled launch today.…

Be patient: first code won't land until 2017 The slow reveal that is Microsoft's SQL-Server-on-Linux strategy has taken a small step forward, with Redmond pressing “publish” on a blog post discussing SQL strategy.…

Big Red takes on home-grown software push by querying open source support, or lack thereof Oracle's Russian paw has found a way to fight the nation's regulations about software purchasing for government agencies, by sending local customers a letter containing stern criticisms of PostgreSQL.…

Or any other talking head you choose: let a million memes bloom! Video Boffins are racing towards the goal of being able to make anybody seem to say anything in video, and nobody will be able to tell whether it's real.…

Students and startups Cisco and India continue their love-in, with The Borg announcing another US$100 million investment for the country over the next 18 months to two years.…

Vulture South ventures into the fibre-to-the-premises Goldilocks Zone Reg Roadtrip Last week, The Register was invited on a tour of new installations comprising part of Australia's national broadband network (NBN).…

It's great that doctors can email pictures of you to experts, but not when they use default apps An Australian doctor has warned the profession that while smartphones provide good support for telemedicine, medicos need to remember they're not secure by default.…

More data, faster, is all very well until it hits your network and servers. Which is why convergence matters If you listen to all-flash array vendors's shiniest, happiest, propaganda, you'll learn that moving from disk to solid state storage will more or less immediately turn your organisation into a white-hot innovator. Flash puts you in with a chance of both becoming the Uber of [insert your industry here] and avoiding an Uber-reaming by some new competitor where not a single employee has ever owned a suit.…

Social networks decide one per cent market share isn't worthy of native app support The writing probably appeared on the wall when WhatsApp announced its disinterest in BlackBerry APIs: Facebook has followed the lead of its subsidiary, and dumped native support for the ailing smartphone-maker.…

Up to $15k on offer Microsoft has expanded its bug bounty program to include OneDrive.…

Ask the French, they'll tell you: Li-ion batteries explode Self-balancing scooters, which in late 2015 and early this year set records for the number of product recall notices issued in Australia, are now subject to a wide-ranging ban from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC).…