The Register

Bad news. Even worse news if you're in China... Miscreants have forged a strain of iOS malware which poses a greater risk than previous nasties because it can infect non-jailbroken devices without the user’s confirmation.…

Promises big tax cuts Budget UK Chancellor George Osborne has said today the government will make online marketplaces such as Amazon and eBay liable for traders evading VAT in the UK - in his 2016 budget which outlined a swathe of tax cuts.…

US takes 13th spot, Blighty 23rd, and pity Burundi at 157th If you're feel a bit glum, then get yourself off to Denmark, which has secured top spot in the 2016 World Happiness Report.…

Plus: Obama crashed SXSW. As you do

He got shlebs' passwords by asking for them over email, says DoJ A 36-year-old US man has admitted hacking into the iCloud and Gmail accounts of celebrities through a long-running phishing attack.…

500Gbps silicon drives next-gen optical networking systems Nokia has pushed out the first high-capacity optical systems it has introduced since it absorbed Alcatel-Lucent and Bell Labs Electro-Optic Innovations – the latter being the source of the underlying technologies we're talking about today.…

The bounty is the exposure. You oughta be grateful! Analytics firm New Relic has coupled up with vuln disclosure firm HackerOne as part of a “responsible disclosure program” for bugs. But while it pledges not to take legal action against anyone spotting a hole, it won’t be ponying up cash for them either.…

They thought they could hide. Then the law got involved Analysis The jury is still out as to whether Universal Credit will go down as one of the major IT disasters of our time.…

Departing Baikonur on Friday, ahead of six-month stay A trio of 'nauts is gearing up to launch to the International Space Station on Friday, ahead of a six-month stay on the orbiting outpost.…

'Supplier didn't deliver' The Met Police has canned its £90m command-and-control system responsible for handling 999 calls with Northrop Grumman following major delays to the contract.…

Think of it as a productivity kit Deep dive Jide’s Remix OS is Android for a desktop or tablet OS: with multitasking, overlapping windows and the shortcut conveniences you need for productivity-style work.…

Fly to Africa for the winter? Nah, I'm off to the local landfill Storks which nest on the Iberian Peninsula are increasingly rejecting the annual migration south to Africa in favour of spending the winter at their nesting sites, thanks to the ready availability of landfill "junk food".…

Enter the Student Cluster Competition HPC blog Do you want to secure a place in HPC (high performance computing) history? One route would be to single-handedly design and implement an exascale supercomputer, which most would categorize as "hard".…

London comp-sci study scores part-time gig A payments firm has hired reformed LulzSec hactivist Mustafa Al-Bassam (formerly known as tFlow) for a new blockchain research project.…

Wow! Crazy! It's a reader comment special! Line Break Is it that time of the week again already? You've reached Line Break, our weekly roundup of terrible code you've seen in the wild. Today, we're going to delve into submissions from reader comments rather than the usual postbag.…

If you're running below version 2.7.3, you're at risk Code dive A chap who found two serious security bugs in Git servers and clients has urged people to patch their software.…

802.3bw, aka 100BASE-T1, is optimised for wire weight The march of Ethernet into motor vehicles continues, with the IEEE launching the first automotive standard for 100 Mbps Ethernet over single twisted pair cables.…

Plans to write mass surveillance into law face a bumpy ride IPB The Investigatory Powers Bill – better known as the Snoopers' Charter – has passed its second reading in the UK Parliament amid fierce criticism.…

NASA, that's who. Because we don't know if we build right for zero-G fires The next resupply mission for the International Space Station (ISS) will include the kit needed to light a fire in a spacecraft. And NASA plans to strike a match and make it happen.…

FSF board member with time on his hands highlights hole An attendee at the KubeCon Kubernetes conference in London has exposed a serious lack of network security in the hotel where he was staying.…

South African university spins up OAM-capable laser The world has known that information can be encoded on “twisted light” for some time, but only with complex equipment. Now, boffins from South Africa have demonstrated a laser that can add the twist at its output.…

'Zero point' could help tie temperature to fundamental physics A moment with Google will reveal all kinds of cranks offering “free” energy from quantum “zero-point” phenomena, but it's a real thing with real effects.…

Virtzilla's also released first maintenance release for vRealize Automation A tricky Tuesday for VMware's vRealize products, which have received the first maintenance release for version 7 and also become the subject of a security alert.…

Turn off SSL, install patches, block traffic at firewalls Juniper Networks has identified products it says are vulnerable to the DROWN attack.…

Feds want less crypto, Google wants more Call it another shot in Crypto Wars 2: Google has launched a transparency report specifically to track the progress of the Internet's encryption efforts.…

We're today's special on the menu, say investors SanDisk shareholders have voted in favour of Western Digital buying their company.…

Cable ship costs are staggering Tasmania's telco woes could get even worse, with Basslink's boss hinting that the company might exit the telecommunications business.…

Qualcomm's broken kernel code is the tip of the iceberg If you've got a Qualcomm Snapdragon chip in your Android phone and tablet, make sure you grab its latest security updates – if you can.…

Apparently posesses 'innate sense of customer expectations' Former Nokia boss and victim of Microsoft's acquisition of a business it didn't know how to run, Stephen Elop, is headed to the antipodes for a role with Australia's dominant carrier, Telstra.…

Quick summary: 'Something something cloud, something something constant currency, something something we're still rich' Oracle is blaming a strong dollar in cutting into its Q3 fiscal 2016 numbers.…

Store paid people to pose with dress, never disclosed fact Fashion retailer Lord & Taylor has been slapped on the wrist by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for paying people to post pictures wearing one of its dresses without disclosing the fact.…

Ex-Nokia biz has a problem with Redmond HERE, the mapping arm of Nokia that Microsoft didn't buy up when it acquired the Finnish manufacturer, has announced it's no longer going to be doing apps for Windows 10 and Phone devices.…

Ride-sharing has been blamed for a lot of things, but this is a first The man accused of killing six people during a shooting rampage in Michigan last month says an "artificial intelligence" controlled by the Uber mobile app was to blame.…

Bye-bye hardware and hello big vision +Comment The DataGravity array is no more as Paula Long reorganizes her company and axes some of its workers.…

Open letter criticizes UK government for pushing bill that fails to meet standards IPB An open letter signed by hundreds of senior lawyers and several high-profile QCs (Queen's Counsels) has criticized the UK's Conservative government for pushing a surveillance bill that is "not fit for purpose."…

Single figure per cent drops show need for fillip Dell's storage revenues are declining while its servers and networking figures increase. Of course, when Dell buys EMC, that'll sort out Dell's storage numbers.…

Ma Bell pushes out whitepaper on ECOMP tools it uses for SDN AT&T says it will open source the software it is using for an in-house network virtualization push.…

We are about to IPO, I think, this time we will, I'm sure of it, says CEO Wiederhold Open-source NoSQL database purveyor Couchbase has raised $30m in a series-F funding round.…

Elaborate CV writing skills from man alleging hacktivist nous Members of the security community are nonplussed by claims that a Romanian hacker “GhostShell” has seemingly risked arrest by doxxing himself in a bid to get a job in information security.…

msn.com, nytimes.com, aol.com et al hit by malware-injecting banners Top-flight US online publishers are serving up adverts that attempt to install ransomware and other malware on victims' PCs.…

Cloudbees opens registration for cert program Cloudbees will go live with its certification program in May, giving wannabees eight weeks to swot up if they want to be the first to take the exam.…

Initial release of engine to work on at least four websites. Success? Mozilla is planning an initial release of its new Servo-based new web browser engine in June, according to a post on the developer mailing list by research engineer Paul Rouget.…

Will work together on high-performance data center designs ARM and TSMC today announced they are working together to make chips featuring 7nm FinFETs a reality. This follows on from their work on 16nm and 10nm FinFETs.…

Better chance of success than gradual reduction Those attempting to give up smoking have a better chance of success if they quit "abruptly", rather than attempting a "gradual cessation".…

I'm just a teenage startup, baby +Comment Ageing startup Pivot3, fresh from buying all-flash and hybrid array startup Nexgen has taken in a whopping $54.6m of fresh funding.…

You can trust your staff. Trusting their infosec knowledge, though... There are a couple of alternative interpretations of the concept of data ownership. The first relates to the legal ownership of data – the intellectual property aspects such as copyrights, designs and trademarks.…

Right-to-Left script Mac omission finally fixed tropeR laicepS You know the cliches: software is always late, and some features take longer to implement than others. The software feature you’re about to read about has only taken 13 years to implement, and turned out to be one of the most politically explosive we’ve ever covered.…

Mmmm, let's just stay in and have a Baileys and a choccie Modern Britons would rather sit at home in a pair of lady’s leggings quaffing Baileys, downloading computer games and sucking lemons than grab a ham roll down the pub before going to a nightclub.…

Are there buyers for Pure's full-rack systems? Backstory It's not vapourware, this scale-up Ethernet cluster-in-a-box that Pure calls FlashBlade, but it's sure not hurrying to market. Announced yesterday, March 14, it's expected to be generally available by the fourth quarter, although we understand Pure engineers could take until the end of the year to finally clear it for GA.…