The Register

'Webmentions' spec promises future linkspam outbreak Something called Webmentions – which looks remarkably like the old WordPress pingbacks, once popular in the late 2000s – is grinding through the machinery of the mighty, and slow-moving, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).…

Get comfortable, you're not going to be using it to transfer data any time soon Hawktalk In this blog, I make a few comments about “Safe Harbor 2” (or the “Privacy Shield” to use the flash marketing term for the recently announced agreement). In summary, there is no published evidence that the Privacy Shield actually provides an adequate level of protection: so contrary to all those optimistic news reports, can you please “hold your horses” if you are anticipating transfers to the USA under Privacy Shield.…

Try to look delicious, Blighty firms Acquisition-hungry network giant Cisco is looking to gobble a string of UK businesses this year – specifically in cyber, "fin-tech" and analytics, Tom Kneen, head of business development at Cisco UK has said.…

PCS holds ballot for 166 staff under threat The Public and Commercial Services trade union has - as expected - opened a ballot calling for work-to-rule action over HPE's plans to axe 166 jobs in Lancashire.…

Chinese spending to shrink for the first time ever, dragging growth down to just two percent The world will spend US$2.3 trillion on information technology hardware, software and services in 2016, but that represents a “major slowdown” according to analyst firm IDC.…

More greenbacks for the big green monster If you thought the slump in PC sales was going to hit Nvidia like it whacked Intel and AMD, then, well, you were wrong. Nv just reported a record quarter to round off a record year in terms of sales.…

Digital video recorders open to probe of networks, contents ... just about anything, really Researchers say up to 80,0000 digital video recorders (DVRs) used to record footage from surveillance cameras employ hardcoded passwords - or don't use one at all - opening avenues for attackers to breach home and business networks and compromise privacy.…

Updates land for borked Surface Book and Pro 4 Microsoft has delivered an update to fix annoying problems with Microsoft's Surface Pro 4 and Surface 4 typoslabs.…

Research: tech regen widens gap between rich and poor For many cities, tech hubs have been a key to jump starting economic growth in the wake of the global financial crisis. In an era of uncertainty, tech-sector growth is proving to be a driving force for nations attempting to reach into the “next economy”.…

And I'm free, free fallin' Its publicity thunder stolen by last week's announcement that the Laser Interferometry Gravitational-wave Observatory has seen the signal of the waves, the European Space Agency's LISA Pathfinder has passed what the agency calls a “major milestone”.…

This'll come in handy if the pilots are unconscious AND you have WiFi An actual airline pilot has posted a how-to video explaining the best way to land a Boeing 737.…

But SMS still a mess. Hipsters and selfie-lovers will enjoy extra security after Instagram added two-factor authentication to its service.…

Apollo just chucked samples in a suitcase. China wants in situ studies When humans first made the long trip to the Moon, we were more worried about whether something from out there might contaminate us back here. So in the early days there was more attention paid to quarantining returning astronauts than to keeping their returned samples free of contaminants from Earth.…

Saving battery is always a good thing, so get to it mobe-makers Overnight, Qualcomm dropped a bunch of silicon for its OEMs to improve various aspects of RF design, including antenna switching and amplifier efficiency.…

Who needs the speed of road when you can go with the flow of mighty rivers? The Indian government's stream of announcements can be fascinating to read: one day there's a plan like the Make In India scheme to turn the company into a high-tech manufacturing powerhouse, the next there's something about helping craft weavers in remote villages.…

So soz, says Redmond: Your VMs were there, but Azure forgot they were there Microsoft's Azure cloud has had a nasty hiccup that saw it unable to find virtual machines recently added to its backup service.…

Hands up, don't root! Hands up, don't root! Hands up, don't root! Pics After Tim Cook gave the FBI the finger when asked to help unlock a mass murderer's iPhone, fanbois are planning to hold rallies outside Apple stores to support the iGiant.…

Symmetrical broadband over TV cables looks lovely ... and distant and theoretical CableLabs has popped over to Amazon and ordered a few dozen ten-gallon back-patters, with the announcement that its standardisation boffins have applied the ACME firehose expander to hybrid fibre-coax networks to get full-duplex gigabit transmissions happening.…

How to make an infection go away in US healthcare system – throw money at it A hospital in Los Angeles, California, has paid a US$17,000 (£11,900, AU$23,800) ransom to hackers who injected its computers with malware that scrambled its files.…

Pirate-site SolarMovie first test for Australia's not-a-filter Internet filter Australia might be set to join the UK and Singapore in bringing down the boom on an unlicensed Philippines-registered movie-streaming website.…

Case is over ... and two boffins are about to get paid Chipmaker Marvell has agreed to pay $750m to settle its long-running patent feud with Carnegie Mellon University.…

Places bet on software for future transactions IBM has open sourced a significant chunk of the blockchain code it has been working on, putting its weight behind the Linux Foundation and its Hyperledger project.…

New design for demanding real-time applications Brit processor designer ARM has drawn up a quad-core Cortex-R8 CPU so storage drives can cope with the demands of increasing capacities – and phones can download stuff faster.…

Continues run of good results, but share price barely budges T-Mobile US has continued to tap into widespread frustration with competing mobile phone carriers by adding 2.1 million customers in the last quarter of 2015 and tripling its profits.…

How to break into hundreds of thousands of homes in America Pics and vid If you've got a SimpliSafe wireless home alarm system, as hundreds of thousands of homes in the US apparently do, then it's time to buy a new alarm system because yours is screwed.…

Purple Palace lightens its load by dropping seven publications Yahoo! has eliminated seven of its digital publications as the sputtering web giant continues to cut costs.…

Feeling Locky, punk? Well, do ya? Greedy miscreants have created a new strain of ransomware, dubbed Locky.…

Typical wedding night: Embrace, extend ... something else beginning with 'e' Penguinistas can now run Red Hat Enterprise Linux instances on Microsoft's Azure cloud.…

Lots of upset, little insight Speak Your Brains A moment of mass collective commentary is upon us following the response of Apple CEO Tim Cook to a judge's demand that the computer company unlock the iPhone of San Bernardino shooter Syed Farook.…

Here's a clear, technical Q&A Water cooler Everyone is losing their mind over Apple being forced to help the FBI unlock an iPhone. Just what is going on?…

Flies like a bird, sings like a plane, or the other way round Storage Review has tested an all-flash EMC VxRack config and found it flies, beating X-IO's ISE-860 and, unsurprisingly, a hybrid Nutanix rig.…

Chocolate Factory fed up with tardy hardware giants Google is on the verge of a takeover that will change the way Android development and updates are handled.…

Slabs, laptops and phones to get Microsoft's latest OS within a year The US Secretary of Defense has ordered all Department of Defense (DoD) agencies to shift four million Microsoft-based devices onto Windows 10 over the next year.…

New 'pragmatic' open source language developed by JetBrains hits version 1.0 JetBrains has released version 1.0 of Kotlin, an open source programming language for the JVM and Android.…

What's it like to be a startup in 2016? There's roadtripping involved

It’s all about the old days, not the 0-days, folks Mobile application security is beginning to eclipse that of web apps as a significant risk to enterprises, according to a new study by Hewlett Packard Enterprise.…

9000+ calls made between 1am and 6am A nuisance-calling firm from the West Midlands had been hit with a £70,000 fine for making 'frightening' automated calls to pensioners in the wee hours of the morning with sales pitches for burglar alarms.…

Sticky and loyal OpenStackers: Firm reveals AWS, Azure hopes Rackspace saw growth across most lines during its fourth quarter and year – alas, that also included costs, it has said.…

Apple should be unable to comply with this request Opinion Apple has recently released an open letter explaining why it will challenge a judicial order requiring it to hack the iPhone of one of the accused San Bernardino terrorists. As someone who believes in individual civil liberties and personal privacy above nearly all other considerations, my first instinct is to applaud Apple. Upon reflection, however, I believe that in this instance it is in the wrong.…

Demand increases for Grunters, Reacters and Dockers A fifth of of contractors saw their hourly rates cut last year, while 51 per cent saw rates rise, compared to 59 per cent of permanent IT staff who saw their salaries increase, with just 2 per cent experiencing a slide.…

You're an electromagnetic menace, here's an eviction notice China will "evacuate" 9,110 residents living within a five-kilometre radius of its new "Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope" (FAST), in order to create "a sound electromagnetic wave environment".…

She also wants more 'free flows of intelligence and information' Theresa May has declared that the UK's partners in the Five Eyes surveillance alliance should copy Britain's online counter-terrorism policy and force service providers to help purge “extremist messages” when they appear on the web.…

E-business told to shape up and implement modern crypto – or else Online businesses in the UK will have to update their systems and adopt SHA-2 before June in order to avoid losing access to vital payment and money transfer services.…

Opens up the 15nm flash front for client devices It’s a PC disk drive killer: a 1TB SSD built by Toshiba, using TLC flash, and built with 15nm cell lithography.…

Reckons it'll get three million coders for its platform in next four years Cisco Live For a company specializing in making 80 per cent of the world’s networking kit, Cisco ought to be good at transmitting its corporate plans – but that's not the case when it comes to Cisco's software-defined networking (SDN) ambitions.…

It's as clear as the clouds... Microsoft would like us to think of Office 365, its hosted email and collaboration service, as “cloud”. And it is in many ways; you can even get all your email and OneDrive-stored documents direct from a web browser.…

... then it took an Arrow to the TLP The Apache Software Foundation has today announced Apache Arrow, its new project which aims to provide a cross-system data layer for columnar in-memory analytics.…

360TB, glass, light, polarisation vortices, eternity – what’s not to like? Boffins in the UK’s Southampton University have devised a five-dimensional storage scheme using glass, femtolasers and a lifespan of billions of years, so they say.…

iThink, therefore iEncrypt Apple CEO Tim Cook has penned an open letter to Apple fanbois as the company refuses to decrypt an iDevice belonging to an alleged criminal.…