The Register

Or neutralise? At the very least, we'll slow you down A newly created cross-industry initiative aims to pool resources in order to bring down – or, at least, disrupt – the hackers behind the infamous attack against Sony Pictures back in 2014.…

Smooth UX draws in crowds unfazed by crypto concerns Secure messaging app Telegram boasted on Tuesday that it had crossed the 100 million users milestone.…

5GHz band: Who will make room for mobile firms? MWC16 Here’s something you wouldn’t expect to see at Mobile World Congress: LTE and Wi-Fi service providers and vendors together in a room, clinking champagne glasses to celebrate a new technology that will allow the two wireless standards to use the same band of unlicensed spectrum. So it was at the MulteFire Alliance launch on Tuesday.…

Firm joins Atos and Steria in taking on Dixon of Dock Green's PCs The Met Police has handed £250m in contracts to CSC, part of its potentially risky plan to carve up large chunks of its IT in the hope that outsourcers can do a better job.…

Finely optimised for read-intensity or endurance Toshiba has updated its HK3 series of read-intensive and long-life SSDs with doubled capacity through using smaller flash cells, while keeping performance more or less constant.…

'A hazardous exercise', ESA snap shows The European Space Agency (ESA) has released a nice snap of a rather lonely figure in a chemical suit fuelling the ExoMars mission's Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), due to launch between 14–25 March 2016 from Baikonur Cosmodrome.…

Weapon cocked while eyeballing mobe smut, police affadavit claims A former South Carolina cop has been arrested and charged with "Misconduct in Office" after allegedly pleasuring himself in his patrol car while eyeballing smut on his mobe.…

RH-owned automation vendor draws up certification scheme App automation bods Ansible will launch a formal training and certification program in May, making it a little easier for employers to work out who really does know their onions when it comes to the continuous delivery platform.…

Motorola buys firm, tells it to put down the lawyers Airwave will no longer be pursuing legal action against the Home Office over its decision to award part of a chunk of its Emergency Services Network contract to EE.…

Hyper-converged systems would up UCS’ game Comment Cisco’s storage array game has been broken since the Invicta all-flash arrays were canned last year, but the growing tide of hyper-converged systems, featuring server-centric, virtual SAN-based storage, presents it with a big opportunity. Albeit, one with a dash of VCE partner EMC competition but, hey, what’s new?…

'We don’t need a cooling pipe system,' says global veep MWC16 Following a hypetastic presentation from Xiaomi Global VP Hugo Barra, your correspondent was among the first to get a quick hands-on with the 5.15” Mi 5, Xiaomi’s newly announced smartphone.…

Everyone else seems 'more challenging in assessing Google’s tax position' The government may reopen its £130m tax settlement with Google due to concerns that HMRC "appears to have settled for less corporation tax than other countries are willing to accept", an official report has warned today.…

$500m for the lot?! Inside Oracle's tough VM rules Oracle has been telling a number of organisations running its database software that they are breaking the company's licensing rules – and therefore owe it millions of dollars in unpaid licence fees.…

Kelly and Kornienko heading home after 340 days aloft ISS residents Scott Kelly and Mikhail Kornienko are preparing to wrap their One Year Mission aboard the International Space Station, and will return to terra firma on 1 March after 340 days aloft.…

Tech happens outside of NY and California

At odds with white hat over handling of glaring security hole The developers of child-tracker app uKnowKids have responded to reports of a data breach, admitting an issue had also exposed its proprietary IP.…

The Mi5 wants to be your next Samsung MWC16 Xiaomi is heading West, and its new Mi 5 flagship brings Galaxy quality for £250 to Western markets this Spring.…

More admin for public sector beancounters. Guess who'll be paying for that in the long run? Government bodies seeking to reclaim cash from the taxman for expensive IT purchases will face more stringent compliance rules from April.…

Bar to 'malicious attack traffic' may be lowered Tor users crying over CloudFlare's CAPTCHAs will soon be able to put away their onions, the company has suggested.…

It's all fun and games until someone gets hurt Line Break Welcome back to Line Break, our weekly column of terrible code our readers have encountered in the wild.…

MouseJack attack lets you send anything into wireless peripherals radio dongles Fake wireless computer mice and keyboards can be used to compromise laptops from up to 100 metres away using the portable peripherals from at least seven big vendors including Logitech, Microsoft, and Amazon, software engineer Marc Newlin says.…

'It's the way they handled our data that turned us on' croons music streamer Google's cloud has scored big: music streaming service Spotify, the subject of an Amazon Web Services (AWS) case study, has gone all in with The Chocolate Factory's cloud.…

EMET knocks out EMET. And the winner is ... nobody. Except Linux advocates FireEye security wonks Abdulellah Alsaheel and Raghav Pande have twisted the barrels of Microsoft's lauded EMET Windows defence gun 180 degrees and fired.…

And the winner is: cryptography A group of French cryptographers reckons public lotteries are the perfect seed for elliptic curve cryptography.…

Redmond updates official guide If you don't know how to control the information Windows 10 sends back about you to Microsoft, the Redmond giant has updated its guide on how to do so.…

But the Apple fan in your office wins the Darwin Award for running a pwned iOS app Users have downloaded more than two billion data-stealing Android apps, while large swathes of enterprises are reportedly housing malicious iOS apps, according to security firm Proofpoint.…

Bikie boss sent straight to isolation cell after phone emerges from deep down inside Australian prisoner Constantine “Kon” Gergiou's protestations that an object detected in his innards was a metal fragment left after surgery have been proven false, after he yesterday passed a mobile phone.…

Hide our snooping? Why bother asks China's Google clone Sit down, so you don't injure yourself falling down in surprise: the browser provided by China's Baidu is a privacy nightmare.…

Security guru is CTO of biz believed to have been bought by Big Blue IBM is allegedly splashing a reported US$100m on buying incident response outfit Resilient Systems.…

Going virtual would mean certifying hardware and that way lies dumbness Nimble Storage has created a virtual version of its storage appliances and the company is debating whether or not to let you use it.…

Mostly muted response to the Regional Telecommunications Review Australia's federal government re-ignited debate about rural telecommunications with the suggestion that today's Universal Service Obligation (USO) scheme be abandoned and replaced.…

A sober reflection on wireless comms University of Washington boffins are touting extremely low-power Wi-Fi transmissions – if your application can put up with a maximum 11 Mbps capacity.…

Hosting outfit also working on new cloud storage and monitoring services DigitalOcean has announced it plans to bring a bit barn to Bangalore, India.…

It's all about the support experience and how many 'nerd knobs' you want to tweak, says consultant Whatever choice of hardware you make – on-premises, cloud, roll-your-own, converged or hyperconverged – don't expect to save any money.…

Google warrant fingers culprit A rogue IT manager has been sentenced to 30 months in prison after he changed jobs and decided to take revenge on his former employer.…

Open Mainframe Project announces 2016 work schedule The Open Mainframe Project, launched in August 2015, has announced its development goals for 2016.…

C'mon, Bill. It's not a stretch. We remember the 1990s Bill Gates says reports of him backing the FBI in the ongoing saga with Apple over the unlocking of a killer's iPhone are inaccurate.…

The big brass begging bowl gets another refill Australia has reiterated its commitment to the Toothless Tiger Moth, with prime minister Malcolm Turnbull announcing an expansion of defence capital and personnel.…

Rallies in spport of world's richest company will be held in 40 cities around the world As the Apple verses the FBI row rumbles on, demonstrators will take to the streets today in support of the American corporation.…

Open letter warns new visa waiver rules will cost jobs and business A slew of Silicon Valley leaders have warned US Congress that changes to visa waiver rules for entering the United States are impeding business.…

Mobile data, calls TITSUP for over half the day – total inability to support usual PDP UK cellphone network EE has struggled to provide a decent service to Brits for most of today.…

One crappy vendor down, who's next? Asus has settled its case with the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) after hackers pwned nearly 13,000 home routers via an unpatched security flaw.…

Fiber deal will be used to bolster enterprise services and phone network Verizon has agreed to purchase the fiber network branch of XO Communications for $1.8bn.…

US Federal Trade Commission gives deal thumbs up Dell and EMC have received US Federal Trade Commission clearance for their $67bn merger with the expiry of the 1976 Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act-mandated waiting period.…

Samsung 3D V-NAND SSDs power the boxes Nimble has fixed a great hole in its product line with a quartet of all-flash array products, reaching up to 2PB of effective capacity (assuming 5:1 data reduction) and 350,000 read IOPS, beating competition from Pure, EMC and NetApp/SolidFire.…

Why's it a Swiftie? it's all about wrapping its back-end services MWC16 IBM has released Kitura, an open-source web server framework written in Swift, Apple's young but popular programming language which was designed for iOS and Mac OS X.…

Wait. We've just seen one! No, it's gone MWC16 Everyone knows physical SIM cards have had their day. Small connected devices like wearables and IoT kit don’t have the space to accommodate SIMs, and shouldn’t have to. Nor should bikes. But as the operators’ "most potent instrument of control", they haven’t been in a hurry to give it up.…

Suppliers have been told they are on the list, but left to twiddle thumbs for two months The government's replacement for the widely-criticised digital services framework, which SMEs have blamed for merely "body shopping" their services, has been delayed by two months.…

Grounded pending development of 'fire-resistant packaging' The International Civil Aviation Organization has declared that as of 1 April, lithium ion batteries cannot be carried in the cargo holds of passenger aircraft, pending development of "a new fire-resistant packaging standard".…