The Register

Blames partner's lax security American Express has told the California Department of Justice that some of its customers had their credit card numbers stolen, and that it happened almost three years ago.…

Under-fire Benoît Battistelli has lost confidence of EPO staff European Patent Office (EPO) president Benoît Battistelli has survived a meeting of the organization's administrative council, but remains under significant pressure to tackle growing unhappiness in his staff's ranks.…

Covert snooping code runs afoul of federal law The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has fired off letters to a dozen mobile app developers, warning that their software could be in violation of federal privacy laws.…

$250 million real-estate deal nets storage biz admen's cash NetApp is selling eight office buildings in Sunnyvale to Google for $250m, with the option to lease back the space.…

Low-cost attack just needs a $2 magnetic probe and a USB sound card Researchers have broken the encryption schemes used in mobile money transfers by “sniffing” electromagnetic radiation from smartphones.…

Are you sure that’s the right tricolour you’re flying there lads? Amateur drinkers will be cramming into Irish pubs the world over tonight to slurp Guinness and neck whiskey (with an e) in honour of St Patrick.…

How do you know your feature flags and canary launches worked? Dark launches, feature flags and canary launches: They sound like something from science fiction or some new computer game franchise bearing the name of Tom Clancy.…

Told off by ICO for being a nuisance A Glasgow-based boiler replacement firm has been fined £180,000 for its prolific and obnoxious nuisance call campaign.…

Named after the really fast bullet train. Geddit? Google will open-source its super-duper load balancing Maglev tool to developers – a move that will also bolster its own infrastructure developments.…

It's the chairman's office for you, Mr Vendorland veteran A couple of months after Hewlett Packard Enterprise veteran sales chief Martin Hess quit, he’s rocked up as chairman at OCSL – one of his former employer’s nearest and dearest in the channel.…

Trainspotters now armed with UAVs, it appears Chilling evidence has emerged of trainspotters deploying drone hordes after a UAV collided with the rear carriage of the Flying Scotsman over the weekend.…

Security stack will stop miscreants getting behind your wheel IBM is developing a security stack for connected cars as part of a wider strategy to secure vehicles against a growing range of hacking attacks.…

Three sees 50% YoY increase - Google and Facebook to blame CK Hutchison’s Three network says each customer burns through 5GB of mobile data a month, on average, and around half of that is YouTube traffic*.…

Whether you want to go deep or deeper still... You can’t deny the explosion of interest in container tech this year, whether or not you believe it is the definitive solution to software, the universe and everything.…

After it passes they'll be able to see what you think anyway The government committee tasked with scrutinising the highly controversial Investigatory Powers Bill, which was this week waved through Parliament by an overwhelming majority of MPs, now wants evidence from Joe Public.…

After two years, Swiss crypto-messaging provider leaves beta Interview Secure email service ProtonMail has come out of beta and re-opened free registration to all for the first time in almost two years.…

Lifter on the pad ahead of tomorrow's ISS launch The Soyuz TMA-20M which will tomorrow transport 'nauts Jeff Williams, Oleg Skripochka and Alexei Ovchinin to the International Space Station is standing ready to roll on launch pad 1 at Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.…

Less hunger for low-margin PC stuff, apparently Mid-market reselling monster Softcat is still piling on the pounds after adding hundreds of new punters and squeezing more out of existing ones. But the tech supplier agrees with Chancellor Osborne - storm clouds are gathering over the UK economy.…

So here are some FOSS alternatives Open-source software is not possible without collaboration and collaboration is not possible without communication. Collaborative communication in open source projects typically means some form of distributed chat.…

Keep your head, don't lose it The chief data officer is on the rise. The number of CDOs appointed by major organisations rose from 400 in 2014 to 1,000 in 2015, according to Gartner. By 2019, 90 per cent will have a CDO, the analyst says.…

Plus bug-fixes Chipzilla has decided Vulkan, the replacement technology for the ancient OpenGL, is worth supporting and has announced a bunch of beta drivers that implement the API.…

Been there, read the Bill, got bulk-intercepted IPB “Let me be clear,” Theresa May said on the introduction of the Investigatory Powers Bill blueprint, “the draft Bill we are publishing today is not a return to the draft Communications Data Bill of 2012.”…

How 2006 was like 1914 for Microsoft, IBM, Oracle et al Ten years ago, Oracle was mid-snack, taking a break between swallowing PeopleSoft for $10bn and Sun Microsystems for $8.5bn.…

The Royal Research Ship Titanic? Maybe not The Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) is inviting Joe Public to suggest names for its forthcoming polar research ship, due to hit the world's oceans in 2019.…

Comms patterns ID OS, browser and application Encryption might hide important content from prying eyes, but a group of Israeli researchers has found that HTTPS traffic alone can fingerprint a user's operating system, browser, and application.…

Hard disk biz mulls optical interconnects for key-value storage gear Seagate appears to be working on possibly adding an optical interconnect to its Kinetic Ethernet disk drives, which organize data in key:value stores.…

Laser grown on silicon substrate can last 10 years Silicon photonics is one of the industry's hottest research fields, because it holds out the promise of accelerating on-chip communications without the extra heat that faster copper-based comms generate.…

Apple co-founder questions vanity price tags, says he won't snoop in your undie drawer. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has slammed Cupertino's decision to charge hundreds of dollars for Apple Watch models that offer users little more than an overpriced band.…

Except, darn it, the nice guys still probably finish last GPS and navigation systems make it a lot easier to find the most direct way to get where you're going, but with a downside: they funnel everybody onto the same congested route.…

Paper lays out how to bypass Google's ASLR A group of Israeli researchers reckon they've cracked the challenge of crafting a reliable exploit for the Stagefright vulnerability that emerged in Android last year.…

Fibre-to-the-distribution-point trials for remote-ish users, also future-profing option nbn, the organisation building Australia's National Broadband Network, says the copper network it acquired from Telstra requires less remediation than it budgeted for.…

First of its kind project a mammoth effort. Nullcon Bangalore hacker Rahul Sasi has built the beginnings of what he hopes will become a vulnerability scanner that thinks like a human.…

The Gemini VIII mission that nearly killed its crew Pics March 16 is a double anniversary for space travel – it's the 90th anniversary of the launch of the first liquid-fueled rocket by Dr. Robert Goddard, but also the 50th of the first time mankind successfully docked two spaceships, with the flight of Gemini VIII.…

vSphere 6.0 Update 2.0 lands, complete with a VAIO (not that VAIO) VMware's popped out its second update to vSphere 6.0 and addressed a long-time vAdmin gripe by adding a new web interface that doesn't rely on old-school plugins.…

'Burrito' giant told to wrap up social media policies A US judge says fast-food "burrito" chain Chipotle broke US labor laws by sacking an employee after he trashed his bosses on Twitter.…

El Reg ponders life after FlashBlade debut Comment Back in 1992, NetApp was founded and competed with Auspex in the file storage array market. It overtook Auspex and grew and grew, entering the Fortune 500, becoming a storage platform company and a multi-billion dollar revenue corporation. No other startup has managed that feat since. Could Pure Storage be the first one to follow in NetApp's footsteps?…

Statistically just one airplane will be damaged every 1.87 million years, says study US government officials' grave warnings that drones could cause a disaster above the nation's airports are overstated, a study by George Mason University has found.…

Only a handful of Georgians will get to slurp from broadband motherlode Comcast has opened up its unlimited gigabit-a-second internet service to customers.…

Storage hardware infringed dedupe designs, jury finds Pure Storage has been given a mild slap on the wrist for infringing part of an EMC-owned patent describing deduplication.…

Thomas Jefferson would kick your ass for this Apple's latest response to US Department of Justice (DoJ) demands that it alter its operating system to allow access to a terrorist's iPhone using the 1789 All Writs Act is typically blunt.…

Looks like the tech shakeout is with us In a sign that the long-anticipated tech shakeout has begun in earnest, poster child for the new economy LivingSocial has announced it is slashing its workforce in half.…

Tennessee kills bid to expand muni fiber network The city of Chattanooga in Tennessee has been told it cannot expand its broadband service to other counties.…

Privacy Shield needs substantial rewrite, say Amnesty, EFF, ACLU etc Civil liberty groups have decried the new Privacy Shield agreement that covers people's personal data flowing between Europe and the United States.…

Hahah ... wait, what? A software developer whose example encryption code was used by a strain of ransomware has released the decryption keys for the malware.…

Carry on Torrenting! Public Wi-Fi doesn’t need a password, prof reckons The Attorney General advising the European Court on a case that pits a Pirate Party member who operated a public, password-free Wi-Fi network in Munich, has sided with the Pirate.…

Luxury and utility – at Mayfair prices Review I've always wondered what people who pay more than £2,000 for a Windows laptop are thinking when they boot the machine.…

Infamy, infamy, Amazon and Microsoft have all got it in for me! Oracle is brushing off challenges from Amazon Web Services and Microsoft to its core database business as a natural consequence of leadership.…

Anyone would think its Microsoft's year-end sales grab... oh it is Microsoft is again chucking wads of cash at channel types that convince entirely new customers - those not familiar with outages - to sign up to SKUs of Office 365 and CRM Online Pro.…