The Register

Weakest slap on the wrist – and FCC lets mobile giant keep its opt-out for subscribers Verizon will pay $1.35m for its use of "supercookies," but its customers will still have to opt out of the permanent trackers, under an agreement [PDF] reached with the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on Monday.…

NASA's Dawn probe glimpses strange dome and hole on midget-world Ceres Pics NASA has released images of a smooth-sided dome three miles (five kilometres) high, studded with bright reflective spots, on the surface of the dwarf planet Ceres.…

US Supreme Court snubs Cupertino's final appeal Apple's long and stubborn efforts to avoid the sting of ebook price-fixing probe and an accompanying $450m fine have finally ended: the US Supreme Court has decided not to hear the iTunes giant's appeal.…

The backend just ain't important any more Comment I've had a lot of conversations lately with vendors and end users about secondary storage - the scenario is quickly changing, with new products targeting this space and more end users adopting different forms.…

G-Cloud should be model for all gov spending – report The government could save up to £10bn per year if it were to create an "Amazon-like" procurement portal for all its purchases, similar to the underused G-Cloud, according to a think tank report.…

Weirdly, it also lets Eastern Europeans go free Ransomware miscreants have developed a strain of malware that lets victims known that their computer has been encrypted verbally.…

It says so on the Global Resourcing Blueprint Exclusive Just 20 per cent of IBM’s Global Technology Services workforce in mature economies could remain under offshoring and near-shoring plans set out by the company’s top brass, The Register can exclusively reveal.…

StoreServ carries HPE's storage growth hopes on its shoulders Analysis HPE’s traditional storage declined faster in the first 2016 quarter than the newer converged storage revenues rose. Hence the storage segment in HPE’s Enterprise Group was down three per cent year-on-year to $810mn, from $837m.…

Bus bore claims saucy crypto bragging rights Stob Once there were a million A&B stories on the Naked Web. Now there are a million-and-one.…

Cabinet Office rolls up sleeves, snaps on gloves The government is to cast a critical eye over all its contracts with Atos – worth £696m per year – after MPs urged the Cabinet Office to review its relationship with the outsourcer following an IT failure last year.…

If at first you don’t succeed then try and try again HPE is nothing if not persistent. Having launched a hyperconverged appliance that was half the price of Nutanix last August it’s now going to launch a better one – one that’s 20 per cent of Nutanix's cost. Sounds odd, and that’s not the only odd aspect.…

They're not our overlords: They're here already Interview Fatigued by bluster about the implementations of yesteryear's machine learning algorithms, we spoke to Dr Sean Holden of the University of Cambridge to enthuse ourselves again.…

Educational honour for legendary Playmonaut mission We're delighted to report that our legendary Paper Aircraft Released Into Space (PARIS) mission has appeared in a Spanish language textbook, agreeably exposing young minds to stratospheric Playmonaut tomfoolery.…

Stop gorging and start sweating, fat cats NAND flash industry revenue was $8.307bn in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2015, five per cent less than a year ago and 2.3 per cent lower than in the third 2015 quarter.…

In tech, filtering signal from noise is a full-time job Sysadmin blog Last week was the hardest time in recent memory for me. My best friend of over a decade, a feline companion by the name of Prometheus, has just passed away. While such a personal event might not seem relevant to things technological, it has served as something of a focusing effect for me.…

Let a million Echoes bloom? Analysis Even if Windows 10 Mobile was flawless, the debate would rage about whether continuing to develop a phone-friendly branch of Windows is the wisest thing Microsoft could do.…

Canary squeals when domain admin credentials are pinched RSA 2016 Dell SecureWorks duo Joe Stewart and James Bettke have created a free honeypot loaded with fake domain credentials in a bid to help admins trap and block attackers.…

Software engineering senior veep Craig Federighi cranks up debate about that iPhone Apple's opened another front in its argument over FBI access to San Bernardino killer Syed Farook's iPhone, arguing in a Washington Post column that creating even a single possible point of attack threatens national and personal security.…

George W Bush painting leaker plucked from Romanian cooler for stateside trial Convicted hacker Marcel Lahel, better known by his handle "Guccifer" under which he hacked celebrity and government accounts, is being extradited to the US to face computer intrusion and identity theft charges.…

He chose 'name@host' scheme for directing mails between computers Obituary Raymond Tomlinson, a formative figure credited with just about inventing email, has died. He was 74.…

If you downloaded 2.90, you've got a few hours to get rid of it The first "fully functional" ransomware targeting OS X has landed on Macs – after somehow smuggling itself into downloads of the popular Transmission BitTorrent client.…

Methane-covered peaks snapped just 45 minutes before New Horizons' closest approach New images from NASA's New Horizons Pluto probe suggest the used-to-be-a-planet possesses methane-frost-covered mountains.…

Legal bickering over temporary workers could be cover for wider trade unpleasantness India has complained to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) about the United States' decision to increase visa application fees.…

Anti-virus engine easily disable. Intel Security has fixed a flaw that made it possible to shut down its McAfee Enterprise virus engine, thereby allowing the installation of malware and pirated software.…

Move to offshore support 'done and dusted' in Australia, with many redundancies Oracle's planned consolidation of support locations is “done and dusted” in most of Europe and complete in Australia, meaning support for “most products” is now done offshore, The Register has learned.…

Multi arcade machine emulator says PEW PEW PEW to closed licences Retro-gamers rejoice! Cautiously. The multi arcade machine emulator (MAME) is now open source.…

Patch for Piledriver chips emitted this week to kill off potentially exploitable glitches Analysis AMD will release on Monday new processor microcode to crush an esoteric bug that can be potentially exploited by virtual machine guests to hijack host servers.…

Under-Fire web biz finds reverse gear after outcry from Fire and Kindle owners Amazon has U-turned on its decision to remove filesystem encryption from Fire OS, which powers its Fire and Kindle slabs.…

First, Trump with The Apprentice. Now, Jason Calacanis in San Francisco First comes satire then something that makes satire impossible.…

Rocket water landing is a washout After four aborted attempts, SpaceX's latest and greatest Falcon 9 rocket has successfully delivered the SES-9 communications satellite into orbit.…

Redmond responds: Our OS is so great! The founder of Epic Games says that Microsoft is trying to lock Windows developers into using its app store for all their products.…

Excrement short-circuit fingered for fowl play In a bizarre turns of events, a large bird shut down a nuclear power plant after it crapped on vital equipment.…

But it actually makes more sense than that Analysis OK, we got it: Apple good, FBI bad.…

Whistleblower's revelations mean vendors make bank RSA 2016 This year's RSA conference was the busiest on record, with over 40,000 people cramming the halls (and later, bars) of San Francisco, and more than a few of them were raising glasses to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.…

Creeps finagled positions on bank board The head of a New Jersey credit union has been accused of turning control of his bank over to the operators of an alleged illegal Bitcoin exchange.…

Because terrorism The French parliament has voted in favor of punishing companies that refuse to decrypt data for government investigators – by threatening businesses with big fines and possible jail terms for staff.…

Friday memo warns hundreds more at risk Exclusive HPE is planning to axe roughly 1,000 Enterprise Services techies in the UK, The Register has learned today.…

But its role in the attack remains unclear Fresh research has shed new light on the devious and unprecedented cyber-attack against Ukraine's power grid in December 2015.…

Chocolate Factory rolls out geolocation filter on search results If you use Google in Europe, your search results will be censored under the Continent's right-to-be-forgotten policy – even if you try to use one of the ad giant's non-European sites.…

Uncle Sam can't argue against science Analysis Apple versus the FBI has generated much discussion and conjecture lately.…

Fifth go at SES-9 comms sat launch tonight SpaceX will have a fifth pop today at getting its SES-9 communications satellite mission off the ground from Cape Canaveral.…

Revenue rises tempered by deepening losses Nimble Storage’s revenues rose to $90.1m in its fourth fiscal 2016 quarter but its losses deepened, to $32.4m, counter-balancing that good news. Overall revenues didn’t rise enough to assuage investors' concerns about future profitability.…

I know it's crowded. Breathe deeply, folks Hewlett-Packard Enterprise has Nutanix in its sights, with a hyper-converged server due this month.…

No, really. We’re here to help Far from killing the advertising industry, ad blockers are saving it from itself, says the company behind AdBlock Plus.…

Of unicorns, centaurs and the #Slacklash Comment That thing you love so much – no, not pizza, or reruns of Game of Thrones on Netflix – wants more money from you.…

It looks pukka but it's actually fraudsters, warns watchdog British customers of the NatWest bank should be on their guard against a particularly convincing SMS-based phishing scam, Action Fraud warns.…

Over to you Google Microsoft has quietly settled a lawsuit over unpaid music royalties with a drummer and his band’s music publisher.…

Firm says it'll rebrief everyone to 'meet its usual high standards' Virgin Media has promised to ensure all its agents are fully equipped to offer advice on the Poodle vulnerability, after a security expert exposed the failure of outsourced Indian call centre staff to explain and fix the problem.…