The Register

But it came at a cost: Operating profits down by almost half Hewlett Packard Enterprise spends much of its time talking about hybrid IT taking over the world, but it was good old fashioned hardware - boosted by a $3.5bn buy - that made Q1 of fiscal year 2016 better than it might have been.…

SkyWall100: Gas-powered intelligent projectile interceptor As the world's skies darken with drones, a British firm reckons it's come up with the ultimate solution to the UAV flying menace: the mighty SkyWall100 handheld net-firing cannon.…

Why can't we all just get along? Opinion How people in IT treat one another is a subject whose taboo nature is having a deleterious effect on talent acquisition and retention.…

'We will not make ransom payments in such circumstances' North Dorset District Council is working with police to identify the source of a ransomware attack this week, the latest incident in what security experts believe to be a growing problem for local authorities.…

Something to entertain while waiting for the FAA It's a tip of the hat today to Low Orbit Helium Assisted Navigator (LOHAN) sponsor Lucidica for demonstrating an entertaining way to fill the time while waiting for Federal Aviation Administration approval for an audacious rocket-powered spaceplane launch.…

Spare us your files, guv? Microsoft is asking its certificate authority (CA) affiliates to send it their own copies of audit data after a MS system crash resulted in data loss.…

Free content ad network says it'll pay much more tax in future, though. So that's OK Facebook is to pay millions more in taxes in the UK, a day after it was revealed that HMRC paid Facebook six times more to advertise on the site than the ad platform paid HMRC in taxes during 2014, according to reports.…

You know it’s going to go wrong, don’t you? Something for the Weekend, Sir? “Ah, it’s sod’s law,” murmurs the person sitting next to me. I nod agreeably. It was inevitable.…

'Essential...but the Home Office is blasé about delivery' MPs have slammed officials' misplaced confidence in the Home Office’s "vital to national security” e-Borders project, which will eventually cost the taxpayer more than £1bn and arrive at least eight years late.…

Welcome to the enterprise minefield It’s clear that Docker is on a tear as it ushers in a brave new world of DevOps. What’s less clear is whether this is a good idea. At least, today.…

Chap reeked of 'rotting onions', crashed a train simulator but came up smelling of roses On-Call (Tales of Sales) Welcome again to On-Call, our foetid Friday feature in which readers share their stinkiest memories of being asked to fix stuff at unpleasant times of day and night.…

Gartner's anointed 'IoT Architect' as the must-have business card of tomorrow Data scientists are reeling, having seen their business cards marked down by up to 70 per cent in value, in after-hours trade overnight.…

Can you keep your books? No guarantees Barnes & Noble's Nook business in the US is faltering, but that's nothing compared to the UK, where it's exiting and handing operations to Sainsbury's.…

'Award-winning' boy in blue given 'final written warning' Detective Constable Leigh Valentine of Essex Police has received a "final written warning" from a misconduct panel after misusing Police intelligence systems to snoop on his ex-wife's stepbrother.…

Or $7.2 million a day, by some measures Criminals can pay distributed-denial-of-service attackers less than US$60 to inflict as much as US$720,000 in damage to an organisation per day, researcher Dennis Schwarz says.…

It's going to get worse before it gets better RSA 2016 Security guru Bruce Schneier is a regular at shows like RSA and his talks are usually standing-room-only affairs.…

Real-name-only policy is governed by Irish law Facebook has landed a win in Germany: the Hamburg Administrative Court says the website's real-names-only policy is governed by the laws of Ireland – and not Germany.…

Eight high-severity flaws found Google has released Chrome version 49, closing 26 bugs and shelling out US$51,000 to support bug hunters.…

Skiff-sailing slimeballs screw shoddy shell Clever pirates have hacked into a shipping company to determine the location of valuable cargo before hijacking vessels in targeted attacks.…

290m people join program already targeting 520 million – Zuck on that, Facebook India this week outlined a plan to conduct digital literacy training for an additional 60 million rural households.…

Misfortune or carelessness? Both are at work down Virtzilla way “To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune,” Oscar Wilde is reputed to have said, before adding “to lose both looks like carelessness.”…

Next-gen radio jamming starts The United States has confirmed it is attacking computers used by the Islamic State in an effort to wreck its communications systems.…

Oxford uni egghead says plans are afoot RSA 2016 Developing massively intelligent computer systems is going to happen, says Professor Nick Bostrom, and they could be the last invention humans ever make. Finding ways to control these super-brains is still on the todo list, though.…

Complaint asks FCC to punish cable colossus Open internet group Public Knowledge is accusing Comcast of violating net neutrality rules.…

Be still my beating heart? The iPhone won't notice Quantified self types not only fill Twitter feeds with reports from every walking, running, breathing and bonking app around – but the spewed data isn't always particularly accurate.…

Reg Coutts fears misuse of Brandistan's metadata Reg Coutts, long-time telecommunications consultant and academic, has dropped a bucket on what he sees as a big danger in Australia's data retention regime.…

Eat it, Musk, Gates and Khosla Analysis According to the head of ARPA-E – the research arm of the US Department of Energy – a number of breakthroughs in battery technology have been achieved, with huge implications on the use of renewable energy and electric cars.…

Patch plugs remote pwning telnet vector for Nexus kit Cisco has slung patches at its Nexus 3000 and 3500 switches to shutter a default remotely-accessible administrative account.…

Revenge porn and data leaks both in lawmakers' sights New South Wales is set to become the first state in Australia to give citizens the right to launch legal action over serious privacy invasions.…

Well, that's one way to differentiate from Apple Amazon is warning customers that the latest version of its Fire OS will disable storage encryption in Fire tablets and Kindles.…

Pretty neat way to smuggle evil code past Apple, Google app store guards RSA 2016 Researchers have shown off a new way to evade the security mechanisms in Android and iOS – by using social networks as command and control servers.…

Payment upstart encouraged people to send passport scans, SSNs in plain email Updated: Dwolla's apology US payment processor Dwolla has been slapped with a US$100,000 fine for wrongly claiming it was super secure.…

Cometh the migration hour, cometh the migration technology +Comment WANdisco has active-active replication technology that's been used for disaster recovery and other business continuity-type uses. That's all well and good but not epoch-making or associated with major disruptions ... until now.…

Ancient galaxy beamed its light just after the Big Bang The Hubble Space Telescope may be old enough to rent a car, but the aging orbital lab is still making new discoveries, the latest being the furthest-recorded object ever spotted.…

Is the tech robust enough to handle what is being thrown at it? Amazon is putting its full weight behind its surprise tech success, the Echo voice system, with the release of two complementary products.…

Build 10586.122 addresses 'upgrade experience' Microsoft has released Build 10586.122 of Windows 10 Mobile, following four preview builds last month, as it prepares to upgrade phones running Windows 8.1 to Windows 10.…

Hellooo? Can anyone explain the logic? Six of 17 major US banks have weaker password enforcement procedures than most social networking websites, according to a new study by an American university.…

You want batch computations? Step into our database love nest Hadoop spinner Hortonworks is tweaking Spark for bulky workloads with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise as part of a "new strategic direction."…

First time this one's been seen in the wild, says Kaspersky Security researchers have discovered a trojan targeting Android devices that can be as complex and functional as Windows-based malware.…

A brief history of Li Ka-shing's feisty challenger network Hutchison Whampoa’s Three network turns 13 today. The fifth mobile network to launch in the UK went live on … the March 3, 2003. Or 3-3-03.…

Who says Chocolate Factory and State Department are too close? RSA 2016 Eric Schmidt is off to the Pentagon to marry up pampered Silicon Valley brains and the US military's obsession with violence.…

$66 a pop, if you're the sort who pays for these things OPSEC mistakes by a cybercrook have allowed security researchers to estimate the revenue of a Russian DDoS booter merchant.…

We're regulated even more than traditional telco providers, reckons ad-slinger Europe needs a single telco regulator if over-the-top providers are to flourish across the continent, Google's public policy manager of EMEA, Theo Bertram, has said.…

It's even smaller than the 10TB 3.5-inch version Samsung's 2-5-inch 15.36TB SSD is now shipping, with half as much capacity again as the 10TB 3.5-inch disk drive capacity alternative, and taking up less physical space.…

Not enough hands to cough up? There's an app for that Google is testing a mobile payment system for those loaded down with too much shopping.…

Though 'it's hard to see', adds Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu, told The Register that converged devices – phones that can also be PCs – are the future of personal computing.…

Fruity autopilot fun The Raspberry Pi 3 is only four days old, but it can already fly, thanks to Spanish outfit Erle Robotics and its PXFmini autopilot shield.…

Culture Sec's speech less scary than the headline, though UK Culture Minister John Whittingdale compared ad-blocking software to “a modern day protection racket” in his Oxford Media Convention keynote yesterday.…

Walks away from shoebox XMA is to shutter its London offices because too few staff were based there to justify the relatively expensive lease.…

Compulsory subscription for iPlayer will become law, vows Minister of Fun Minister for Fun John Whittingdale will rush through legislation to allow the BBC to impose a compulsory subscription onto people using iPlayer to watch catchup TV.…