The Register

MATE, Gnome and chums Review Canonical's next version of Linux-based operating system Ubuntu has hit its first beta stage – and while Ubuntu's Unity release is sitting out its first beta, as is Kubuntu, there are plenty of changes and new features in the rest of the Ubuntu family.…

The sordid truth about Bracknell and Guildford – as Slough cleans up its act The UK’s tech hotspots have made a shockingly prominent showing in an adultery website’s list of the most adulterous towns in the UK – though some, thankfully, showed a dramatic slippage in extra-curricular activity compared to last year.…

Fine weather over El Reg Spanish outpost, eye in the sky shows Europe's Sentinel-3A Earth-watching satellite has delivered its first snaps from aloft, two weeks after it impressively thundered upwards atop a Rockot converted intercontinental ballistic missile.…

Jenkins, bring me some qualifications. Now Continuous delivery outfit Cloudbees is to join the certification game before the summer, debuting an accreditation scheme for its Jenkins-based platform.…

Impressive images grabbed during 340-day ISS stay NASA has compiled an impressive album of astronaut Scott Kelly's best images grabbed during his 340-day stay aboard the orbiting outpost, which ended earlier this week when he and fellow One-Year mission participant Mikhail Kornienko returned to terra firma.…

Brian Chant exits Hampshire and TVP tech job, insists innocence The recent head of IT services for Hampshire and Thames Valley police has been arrested on suspicion of bribery.…

Get ready to soak legacy vendors Sysadmin blog: A new marketing push by legacy tech vendors that I expect will be particularly beloved by old school storage vendors is afoot: prepare for the "complexity" onslaught. The answer to lower total cost of ownership (TCO) claims made by the likes of public cloud or hyperconvergence vendors is going to be money funneled into endless blog posts and presentations about how complex these solutions are.…

Captain's log: Will peace remain among product lines? Comment With SEC filings describing the top execs heading the intended Dell-EMC federation, the structure of the storage business becomes clearer. Basically – and surprisingly – there is no change yet.…

Just under half of firms surveyed know where their data is stored Just one-third of cyber attacks are being reported to the police, according to a wide-ranging survey from the Institute of Directors.…

One spree alone cost victims $40m The hacker behind an attack on the US banking sector that caused $55m in damages has pleaded guilty – and faces more than 57 years in prison.…

Probably not ET, but possibly a new way to weigh the universe Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) have gone from mysterious to intriguing, intriguing to exciting, exciting to maybe-explained, and just took a jump back to mysterious.…

Being zapped to score a branded USB stick just got dangerous RSA 2016 The official RSA app exhibitors use to scan delegate badges contains a hardcoded password allowing vendors to access the full features of the device, says Bluebox Security's Andrew Blaich.…

Standards bods race to catch up with deployments The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has kicked off standardisation for symmetrical 10 Gbps optical broadband services over 20 km.…

Proof found that going all Gandalf is down to genes, not environment University College London boffins have identified the genes that makes hair go grey, cause baldness and even induce the dreaded monobrow, think they can prevent all from happening.…

Amazon's Snowball array-for-rent now available for data export Amazon Web Services has announced it will happily delivery 50TB of cloud data to your doorstep.…

WhatsApp spat grinds on The Facebook executive briefly jailed in Brazil has been released.…

Ugly ping times after quake, Telstra confirms comms are knackered Updated Once again, it seems, submarine cables around Asia are in trouble.…

Just pass the background test The Pentagon will next month launch the US government's first bug bounty program encouraging hackers to break into its websites in what could lead to a broader invitation to hack state assets for cash.…

Staffer who set up system gets immunity from prosecution A former staffer to Hillary Clinton has reportedly been granted immunity from prosecution, to get answers about her private email server.…

Rivals cast gibes at struggling company RSA 2016 Judging from comments both public and private, a lot of attendees at this year's RSA 2016 conference were somewhat surprised to pick up badges and lanyards emblazoned with the logo of threat intelligence firm Norse Corp.…

Translation: We're touting services but please don't forget to buy our on-prem kit Cisco Partner Summit The emergence of containers will spark a renaissance for on-premises data centers, thus luring many businesses away from public cloud services, Cisco CTO Zorawar Biri Singh reckons.…

Revenues up, loss down, Dietzen delighted, competitors less so It was pure pleasure as Pure Storage reported a final fiscal 2016 quarter with revenues up higher than expected and losses down.…

One European instance experienced eight-hours PITSTOP incident UPDATE One of Salesforce.com's European instances is enduring a lengthy un-planned PITSTOP incident – that's a Partial Inability To Support Totally Optimal Performance, a whit below our other status indicator of a Total Inability To Support Usual Performance or TITSUP.…

When trust fails, thieves rush in RSA 2016 For years, the security industry has been primarily focused on stopping data theft, but more and more people in the trade are worried that the next wave of attacks won't steal data, but alter it instead.…

Switchzilla will be your one-stop IT management shop, come hell or high water Cisco Partner Summit This week, Cisco gathered its partners in San Diego to make one thing abundantly clear: it's not just about network boxes any more.…

Even cost-saving good ideas are now being leaked The company building Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN) is once again denying the veracity of a leaked document.…

Also complains about Rightside propaganda and unfed mad aunts One of the biggest names in the domain name market, Rightside, has been hit with a broadside from an activist investor.…

Coders and tech bros playing chance with the future RSA 2016 Security guru Bruce Schneier has issued a stark warning to the RSA 2016 conference – get smart or face a whole world of trouble.…

After rumors of upcoming layoffs, Big Blue kicks off round of 'mass' cuts IBM axed a wedge of workers today across the US as part of an "aggressive" shakeup of its business.…

The other union? Less impressed The European Patent Office (EPO) has come good on its promise to sign an agreement with its staff union – just not the union that it has spent more than a year locked in combat with.…

Something to do with a miserable lack of creativity? The CEO of mobile games company Zynga, Mark Pincus, has resigned – a second time – following bad results.…

Just set SSLv2 on fire Security experts are split on how easy it is for hackers to exploit the high-profile DROWN vulnerability on insecure systems.…

Firm said to have broken data protection rules A competition authority in Germany has opened proceedings against Facebook for allegedly violating data protection rules.…

Selling crates of gear is so 1999 Cisco Partner Summit Cisco is continuing in its efforts to escape the world of the network appliance with a trio of tools aimed at managing virtualized systems and cloud services.…

Cost overruns, complexity... stop me if this sounds familiar Anybody who thinks cloud ERP is the answer to their monolithic, on-premises vendor pain is wrong – according to Gartner, anyway.…

Crafted tool to brute-force, take over accounts, buy stuff RSA 2016 Security researchers have thrown the spotlight on a popular cybercrime tool that’s used by crooks to automate the process of taking over accounts on major websites before making fraudulent purchases.…

In 'rare cases' users might get electric shocks Amazon is the latest fondleslab maker to initiate a voluntary recall and exchange programme for potentially shock-inducing power adapters.…

Latest StorageTek VSM 7 is bigger and badder Oracle has updated VSM 6 to v7 four years after VSM 6 was launched, adding beefier CPUs, greater scale and auto-tiering to Larry’s own cloud.…

Far Eastern ODMs marching to Europe, rubs belly, eyes major brands' lunc Mega hardware vendors beware: the big gun Taiwanese contract manufacturers are stepping from out of the shadows to build local sales channels for their own branded hyper-scale bit barn gear.…

And it’s starting to make its own phones, pundit reckons Google is getting serious about building its own handsets after the failure of OEMs to update Android. So says former Nomura (now independent) analyst Richard Windsor, who thinks Google-as-an-OEM has already started.…

We all know spinning rust is dead. Get on with it already Storagebod This should be an interesting year for the industry with the mergers, takeovers and companies simply thrashing around trying to reinvent themselves.…

Goodbye fat-cat make-work schemes, hello to proper accountability Telcomms regulator Ofcom should also regulate the BBC, a review for the Ministry of Fun has found.…

Open Sesame: '12345' New research takes a fresh perspective on the passwords hackers use while scanning the web rather than the weak login credentials users often pick.…

Reseller lost $27m to fraud, will make a return when Carl and Gilbert Fiorentino cough Two former brothers that held high office at Systemax before being found guilty of perpetrating a multi-million pound swindle have been ordered to repay $35m to the company.…

Rooftop hot hatch Cops on the island of Gran Canaria have sensationally discovered evidence of super-advanced hot hatch technology in the form of a flying Daewoo Matiz.…

Humanitarian worth 16.6 Donald Trumps, says Forbes Tech billionaires dominate the upper reaches of the Forbes Rich list this year, which proves that while he’s good at many things, Bill Gates just ain’t cutting it at throwing away cash.…

If you have a heartbeat, then of course you are... One of the TLAs* we come across all the time in IT is CIA. It's not, in this context, a shady American intelligence force: as far as we're concerned it stands for Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability – the three strands you need to consider as part of your security and data management policies and processes.…

Fibre Channel accelerates to flash array speeds Broadcom’s Emulex unit is pushing out 32Gbit/s Fibre Channel HBAs, the host bus adapters linking servers and storage arrays to Fibre Channel cables.…

With Storagezilla, EMC's Chad Sakac, NetApp's Amy Lewis

It's not a trickle, or even a stream – it's a flood In company with Brocade, Emulex and QLogic, ATTO has launched its 32gig Fibre Channel HBA.…