The Register

Inclement high-altitude conditions keep lifter on pad SpaceX was once again thwarted in its mission to get the SES-9 satellite off the ground from Cape Canaveral yesterday, this time due to "extreme high altitude wind shear", according to Elon Musk.…

Avoid my nightmares and change your threat model Sysdamin blog The more that I move away from front line systems administration and towards data centre architect the more I absolutely convinced that systems administration can cause PTSD.…

It's catching on - but not all blockers are militant 22 per cent of British adults now use ad blocking software, up from 15 per cent last July – and by four per cent over three months.…

Public Accounts Committee says civil servants' turf war caused mega IT cock-up The Government Digital Service's reset of the Rural Payments Agency's IT system, which ended in disaster last year, was “inappropriate for farmers”, according to a Public Accounts Committee (PAC) report.…

'One giant leap toward putting boots on Mars' Scott Kelly and Mikhail Kornienko returned to terra firma from the International Space Station earlier this morning at the end of a "historic" 340 days aboard the orbiting outpost.…

InfiniFlash gets Big Blue Spectrum Scale integration IBM and SanDisk are jointly adding Big Blue’s parallel filesystem software Spectrum Scale to SanDisk’s InfiniFlash all-flash array.…

And is this a bug or a beauty in OpenSSL? Line break Hello, world. Welcome back to Line Break, our weekly column of terrible code readers have spotted in the wild – think of it as a group therapy session.…

Samsung Gear 2 also has some problems, researcher says BSides SF A cheap smart watch often peddled on eBay uses a pairing app for Android or iOS that contains a backdoor that quietly connects to an unknown Chinese IP address.…

You knew SSLv2 was poison, so why was it still there? In the wake of the DROWN vulnerability, organisations like the Australian Signals Directorate that offer security incident mitigation strategies might consider adding another item to their lists: test your configuration to make sure it's what you expected.…

Windows 8.x is fading fast, but XP hangs on, and on, and on ... Windows 10 is still growing, but its rate of growth has flattened to about one per cent of market share per month.…

Sorry, tinfoil types. Crims operate from home base, don't care for cross-border sharing Trend Micro security bods have 'capped' their epic research efforts to catalogue the world's regional cybercrime undergrounds.…

Plans to break the sound barrier with a steady thump rather than a nasty boom NASA has slung a bit of spare change at Lockheed Martin to lead preliminary design work for a mooted supersonic airliner.…

It's 2016, of course you need to patch software to keep data centre doors locked Data centre doors around the world could pop open at the click of an Enter key: Schneider Electric's Struxureware building management system, which includes access management functions, ships with weak default credentials.…

Don't panic! It's just the anonymised national address database under an open licence Australia's government has delivered on a promise to release the Geocoded National Address File (G-NAF) as open data.…

Google switches from Chocolate Factory to Fat Factory Forever on the lookout for ways to avoid criticism that its packaging creates unnecessary litter, McDonald's has remade its Happy Meal boxes in Sweden so they can be re-folded into Google Cardboard VR sets.…

Yes, you get more, but you pay more for it whether you want it or not VMware's recent vSphere licensing changes are upsetting some users.…

JavaScript for the masses Oracle has published the code for its long-awaited open source JavaScript Extension Toolkit (JET) version 2.0.0.…

Look where the lookers are looking at you, rather than at BEELLIONS of galaxies If there are other civilisations out there on Earth-like planets orbiting Sun-like stars, we're likely to waste a lot of time filtering out billions of prospects.…

Dell the man emails all hands to say EMC acquisition is on track Michael Dell has emailed all staff at Dell, the company, to reveal the organisation's leadership team once it acquires EMC.…

Security firms getting competition from Redmond RSA 2016 Microsoft will be rolling out a new form of security system for enterprises later this year aimed at stopping attacks as soon as they happen.…

Flannel rag again shown to be essential kit for freeloaders RSA 2016 Security analyst Jerry Gamblin has turned a hotel towel into a pass for RSA's San Francisco conference.…

Strap in, we're going to loopy land! Analysis In a marathon session that would have tested the patience of even the biggest Apple fanbois, the House Judicial Committee spent the entirety of Tuesday afternoon discussing the conflict between the FBI and Apple over access to an iPhone.…

Coughs up $7.5m to make this episode go away – and emits best corporate-speak of 2016 Qualcomm has coughed up some cash after it was accused of bribing Chinese officials by giving their relatives plum jobs.…

Hint: None of them are Apple RSA 2016 Admiral Michael Rogers, head of the NSA and the US Cyber Command, has told delegates during his keynote address at RSA 2016 the three things that keep him awake at night.…

NY-born firm now totally Docker native The Tutum technology Docker borged late last year has resurfaced in the form of Docker Cloud.…

US senators get hands on regulator's internal memos sent during open net order wrangling US Republican senators have today published emails that suggest the President "unduly influenced" the FCC – America's nominally independent telco regulator.…

Latin America exec refused to hand over natterers' natterings Facebook's most senior executive in Latin America has been arrested over the social network's refusal to hand over its users' private data.…

Technology's Noble Prize exchanges hands with Diffie-Hellman exchange gurus RSA 2016 The Association for Computing Machinery used the RSA 2016 conference to announce the winners of its annual Turing Award: encryption wizards Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman.…

Bods work on semantics-defying definition Analysis If there's one thing we've learned from the Snowden revelations it's that when you're dealing with law enforcement and national security, words matter.…

Reaction from the industry pours in The discovery of a HTTPS encryption vulnerability, dubbed DROWN, again proves that supporting tired old protocols weakens modern crypto systems.…

And the government isn't helping either RSA 2016 RSA president Amit Yoran used the opening keynote of his company's conference to warn about the dangers of trusting new technology – and to launch a stinging attack on government stupidity over encryption.…

Emits new switches and also gobbles up CliQr Cisco Partner Summit Cisco has announced new Nexus 9000 and 3000 switches with a theme of 25 and 100 gig Ethernet for 10 and 40 gig prices, calling them cloud-scale products. It's also buying cloud app wrangler startup CliQr.…

Re-enters storage market via hyper-converged door Cisco Partner Summit Let battle be joined; Cisco has re-entered the storage market via the hyper-converged infrastructure appliance door, with its HyperFlex system able to separately scale performance and capacity.…

Carl Essenbach exits amid flurry of senior exec deck chair rearranging Amid a flurry of senior personnel changes, VMware is parting with a long serving exec that joined when it was a fledgling virty biz.…

But nothing changes and SimpliVity's Cisco partnership will continue Comment Has the Cisco HyperFlex announcement delivered a hammer blow to SimpliVity and its UCS server-based partnership?…

Spinning platform as CD now DevOps and conitnuous integration outfit Shippable has restyled itself as an end-to-end delivery platform, with tighter Git integration, container support and expanded cloudy options.…

Another one out as Fibre Channel industry doubles link speed to 32gig QLogic has a 32Gbit/s Fibre Channel host bus adapter, the QL2700.…

'This is not about selling public or personal data' The government wants to introduce legislation to make it easier for local authorities and government departments to share citizen data without breaching the Data Protection Act, it said in a consultation opened this week.…

Son of Snooper's Charter is just as bad as feared IPB The Investigatory Powers Bill (IPB) has been formally laid before the UK Parliament, renewing criticisms that the government is trying to force it through without adequate democratic scrutiny.…

It's not just web pages being nixed at source, you know Two weeks ago we disclosed that CK Hutchison Holdings’s network-level ad blocking can not only block ads on websites, but it is capable of blocking ads served to mobile apps, too.…

Hackers can break TLS using SSLv2 Security researchers have discovered a new technique for deciphering the contents of supposedly secure communications.…

Good luck buying it, though Review Chinese phone manufacturers are offering punters a Happy Hour that lasts until closing time. That's if you're prepared for a few UI eccentricities, and keeping your fingers crossed for any customer support or OTA updates… and the value for money is fantastic.…

Henchperson wanted: Must have Java, C++, signature villain cackle RSA 2016 Cybercrooks, much like ethical security defenders, are facing a skills crisis and difficulties in recruiting qualified staff. Their attempts to bring workers into criminal organisations leave it possible for experts to learn more about their strategies and tactics, according to new research from threat intelligence firm Digital Shadows.…

Firm says its umpty-million IOPS Gen 6 switch is the business Comment Brocade has announced a 32Gbit/s (Gen 6) Fibre Channel switch that doubles connection speed from the current 16Gbit/s level.…

Open source CI tool finally gets the 2.0 treatment The first alpha builds of Jenkins 2.0 have been released, setting the open source continuous integration project on track for a Spring release.…

Hoping to avoid stray tugboat intervention tonight SpaceX will reportedly make a fourth attempt to get its SES-9 mission off the ground later today from Florida's Cape Canaveral.…

SIDN drops acid, experiences 'array of colours' LOGOWATCH Admit it, for years you've regarded the Dutch net registrar SIDN as a "fairly conservative organisation", concerned mainly with administering the .nl domain.…

'Privacy Shield' contains gaping holes, says Max Schrems et al The final text of the EU's patchwork replacement for the Safe Harbour agreement, “Privacy Shield”, has been sent to data protection authorities. Privacy campaigners aren’t impressed.…

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