The Register

Scamming ad-men send fake ad clicks to smut sites Malicious apps that have breached Google's defences and made it onto the Play store have netted 1.2 million victims, often hijacking phones to place fraudulent clicks on pornography sites.…

Objects to Bezos' ownership of The Washington Post. Et tu, Rupert? Donald Trump has belched out another technology-related thought bubble, this time puffing in the direction of Amazon.com and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos.…

MetaFilter gets blogging like its 1991 Blogging site MetaFilter has restored its Gopher server, after 15 years of downtime.…

Flash failures put drives on a slippery slope, Ad giant finds after crunching SSD stats If you're loading up a heap of flash drives for your data centre, don't bother with “enterprise-class” SLC (single level cell) technology, because cheaper MLC (multi-level cell) drives will do the job just as well.…

Leaks, schmeaks, says CFO Stephen Rue. By 2020 everything will be wonderful The company charged with building and operating Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN) is denying a Fairfax media report that its multi-technology model (MTM) rollout is stalling.…

Partial Inability To Support Totally Optimal Performance continues UPDATE Microsoft’s Azure cloud services are wobbling in Australia.…

If your internet thermostat's pinging servers all day, will the cops think you're a weed farm? Or just a hot yoga gym? Governments around the world are legislating to collect metadata, usually with the excuse that modern crime-fighting and national security efforts require access to records of citizens' communications.…

Olive branch may be more of a stunned snake The Staff Union of the European Patent Office (SUEPO) has denied it is prepared a sign a new memorandum of understanding (MoU) between it and the patent organization – saying the document still contains significant flaws.…

There's a revolution brewing Huawei has broken the 3 million IOPS barrier in the SPC-1 storage performance benchmark. Meanwhile, DataCore has shot past 1.5 million IOPS with staggeringly low latency and $/IOPS numbers. These two suppliers are virtually rewriting the future of SPC-1 performance.…

EDF's Pretty Curious comp kinda misses the point Energy giant EDF is in hot water for setting up a competition to encourage young women to get into science and technology careers – and then awarding the top prize to a 13-year-old boy.…

Third 'hacking' review shows epic levels of fail The US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has admitted that its problem with "Get transcript" scammers is much worse than first thought – over seven times as bad to be precise.…

Not the 'rounded corners' verdict, the other stupid one A US appeals court has handed Samsung a legal victory in its never-ending patent war with Apple.…

Biz gobble paused until the books are checked The $5.6bn takeover deal for Foxconn to buy Sharp is on hold after the ailing Japanese company passed new information to its potential buyers at the last minute.…

Did bad web design yield city a $6.1m windfall? Steve Jobs is owed $174 by San Francisco parking attendants.…

Details, snaps of latest addition to tiny-puter family turns up in FCC docs Pics A Raspberry Pi 3 with onboard Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) support has emerged today.…

Telco files to block city from letting ad giant climb its poles Updated AT&T is suing to block the city of Louisville from moving forward with its plan to bring in the Google Fiber service.…

Greenbacks needed for 'electromagnetic railguns, lasers, and electronic warfare' The Pentagon has asked for $582.7bn to bolster the US Department of Defense's (DoD) capabilities, especially when it comes to a future cyber and space war.…

Infection forces patients onto phones and medicos onto faxes At least two hospitals in Germany have come under attack from ransomware, according to local reports. The alarming incidents follow similar ransomware problems at the US Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center.…

2 bridges was 'unnecessary' says dev platform VP Microsoft has officially scrapped its Android to Windows 10 bridge, codenamed Astoria, but is forging ahead with its Objective C Windows compiler and tools for porting iOS applications.…

Also takes on former Coca-Cola chap MapR, the big data software business, has brought in new talent to expand its leadership team.…

Phys.org adopts stadium gas volume standard We're delighted to report that Phys.org has adopted the "Rose Bowl" standard for quantifying improbably large amounts of gas.…

'You will no longer feel any borders in the EU' promises UNICORN MAN Sketch Europe's dreams may be sinking like the Titanic, but wait: there’s €20bn of taxpayer’s cash swilling around for tech handouts. So we found at yesterday's Digital4EU shindig.…

Here's a few pointers if you wanted to get cracking When it comes to PC performance the elephant in the room is heat generation.…

Also tears up its OEM deals with contractors in Far East Exclusive Scandal-hit Toshiba is slashing jobs across Europe as it beats a retreat from the region’s consumer PC market.…

Behavioural ad-flinger once used by BT runs low on cash Controversial web monitoring business Phorm has temporarily suspended trading in its shares after failing to secure funds.…

Regulator needs political cover to bring fibre to millions of homes Opinion The publication of Ofcom’s 2005 Strategic Review of Telecoms was preceded by many long evenings of intense debates within Ofcom and with BT and other stakeholders. The review took 18 months and resulted in the UK having the most competitive broadband market in the world.…

Computer says "...oh" Nine in 10 SSL VPNs use insecure or outdated encryption, putting corporate data at risk in the process, according to new research.…

The X(5568) particle - two mesons in exotic marriage Sub-atomic boffins believe they've found evidence for the existence of a new "tetraquark" particle comprised, as the name suggests, of four quarks.…

Containers, CD, DevOps? It’s all there... Before you slow down for the weekend, just consider this: you’ve got three days to save a bundle of cash on tickets for Continuous Lifecycle London, the three day conference covering continuous delivery, agile, DevOps and containerization.…

Meanwhile, revolting peasants call for a trade union The Wikimedia Foundation’s executive director, Leila Tretikov, has resigned after less than two years in the post.…

Long on marketing and PR, short on technical detail so far Israeli startup E8 Storage is gearing up to emerge from stealth with a fantastical-seeming flying flash tray.…

Fancy knocking up BrewDog's Sink the Bismarck!? Now you can Scottish brewer BrewDog has agreeably released its entire recipe back catalogue, encompassing the 215 beers developed during its almost 20-year history.…

Quality is holding up real 4G voice MWC16 Interview Orange announced plans to offer voice over LTE (VoLTE) and Wi-Fi calling services in Europe this year, adding its name to the still short list of European mobile operators that offer either or both new voice services.…

Thunderbolting array capacity now 40TB LaCie has upped the capacity of its 5big storage for professional workstation users to 40TB by moving from 6TB to 8TB disk drives.…

Is there someone I should call? Something for the Weekend, Sir? My left testicle is bruised.…

Once the ransomware messes up your ops, expect polite demands for serious coin Criminals behind ransomware attacks are drinking the digital disruption Kool-Aid, changing their attack methods in new and nasty ways to target business according to forensics outfit Mandiant.…

Reader savours the sweet, sweet taste of vindication ON-CALL Welcome to On-Call, our Friday frolic through readers' tales of being "used and abused to serve like hell", as Grandmaster Flash once said.…

But you'll feel pretty good about yourself for standing up in the office for 90 minutes a day Convertible desks that allow you to sit or stand don't have a measurable impact on productivity, according to a pilot study of 30 call centre workers.…

Sweet 127.0.0.1 Chicago The Chicago Public Schools district has become the first in the nation to make computer science training a requirement for high school graduation.…

Ad giant adding a petabyte a day of new storage but says SSDs aren't up to the job Google has shared a White Paper (PDF) in which it calls for major revisions to disk drive design.…

Version 6.0 sent to code heaven, where old open source projects frolic among unicorns Drupal has patched 10 holes in its platform that allow attackers to do things like access blocked resources and gain remote code execution.…

Thirty-three fixes flung at Cupertino's telly-enhancer Apple has patched 33 problems, collectively named in 58 CVEs, in its latest TV-enhancing computer-puck, of which 10 enable arbitrary code execution, six with system privileges.…

Software Freedom Conservancy Oracle's Gnuts ZFS licence is the problem The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) thinks Canonical, the curator of Ubuntu, has breached the Gnu Public Licence (GPL).…

Eating an elephant slice by slice is much easier than eating the whole thing OpenFlow looks like it has all the hallmarks of inevitable success: it fits into a broad stack of open networking protocols, it has lots of vendor support, it's backed by the Linux Foundation, and it's been under development since 2009.…

Users didn't get all the cloud they paid for thanks to algorithmic error “People,” sang Nick Cave, “They ain't no good.” And Google's learning that applies double to clouds, after again finding human intervention caused an outage.…

Last-minute concerns ground bird SpaceX has scrubbed its planned orbital delivery with just 101 seconds left on the countdown clock.…

Soundbites galore as Apple tries to shift public opinion in its favor Analysis Tim Cook has moved the fervent debate over government access to an iPhone to what he hopes will be safer ground: the media.…

Machines are just too inflexible, says production boss In a surprise win for humanity, Mercedes Benz has announced that it's ditching the robots used on its assembly line in favor of human workers because they can cope with the job better.…

Reverse proxying traffic might save headaches Google has launched a free service to protect news websites against DDoS attacks.…