The Register

Know when to break out the emergency release tools... Comment There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to DevOps. In small operations DevOps will likely mean very little as developers will probably already be managing production environments in addition to the deployment of applications.…

The rest of you using cheaper handsets can wait until Sammy gets around to your Android upgrade Android's jerky upgrade elevator has arrived at Samsung, which has decided it's time for the Marshmallow edition of the operating system to come to its Galaxy products.…

Big fines for non-compliance Commercial porn websites face big fines if they allow British children unfettered access to their content.…

Phrenological footling fuzzes theories on little people from Indonesian island The skull of one “Hobbit” found on the Indonesian island of Flores was in no way human, according to new analysis of the creatures' skulls.…

Is this any way to run a supposedly cloud-grade hypervisor? The Xen Project has announced a new maintenance release for version 4.6.1 of its hypervisor, but along the way has admitted it forgot to add some recent patches.…

CMA also plans to publicise probe into paid endorsements The operators of five online review websites have committed to take action to resolve concerns raised by the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) that consumers were not getting a "complete picture when making buying decisions", the regulator has said.…

And also futile: how on earth could Europe stop its citizens downloading crypto tools? The European Agency for Network and Information Security (ENISA) has weighed into the cryptography debate, warning that crimping cryptography will “create vulnerabilities that can in turn be used by criminals and terrorists”.…

Got data at kimonolabs.com? Not for long, you don't Kimono Labs, which claims its Internet data-collection tool is used by 125,000 developers, is so excited to be acquired by Palantir Technologies that it's shuttering its service.…

Crims lifting customers' credit card records thanks to negligent failure to apply patch Malware researcher Denis Sinegubko says attackers are compromising and stealing credit cards from online shops that run on eBay's Magento platform by pretending to offer a patch for the very hole they are exploiting.…

Patches not yet ready Cisco is warning customers of a couple of new medium-level security vulnerabilities.…

Here's a novel use for February 29th: ending security updates for Debian “squeeze” 2016 is a leap year so we're all blessed with an extra day to use. And the folks behind Debian Linux are using it to end support for the sixth version of the distro.…

Perth's skies are polluted so ESA puts new sat-tracker in the hamlet of New Norcia The European Space Agency (ESA) has flicked the switch on a new antenna in the West Australian town of New Norcia.…

RFC asks IPv6 admins to quiet routers so mobile devices don't have to wake up quite so often Unknown and unseen to most users, your smartphone is “talking” in its sleep, and that can sap your battery.…

Pathology, pharmacy, and medical machines impacted Ransomware scum have crippled a Hollywood hospital, bringing critical machines to a crashing halt and demanding US$3.6 million ransom.…

Blowouts, corruption, failed projects: just another day in Oz state government IT Yet another of Australia's state education departments is mired in allegations of misdeeds, with the state of Victoria's failed Ultranet project now the focus of a corruption inquiry.…

Cue "plucky Aussie versus international juggernaut" tropes Redflow, which started life building batteries for industrial applications like remote telecommunications facilities, says its first residential offering will land in March.…

No more will service delete important bits from your root directory Adobe has re-issued a software a Creative Cloud update that had gobbled users' storage data.…

Ability to access 'net from mobe no longer considered a miracle Nobody could accuse India’s telecoms regulator, TRAI, of being in the operators’ pockets. This month it has, once again, set eye-watering reserve prices for the upcoming 700 MHz spectrum auction (see separate item), and now it has taken one of the toughest stances in the world on net neutrality, in effect banning zero rated or discounted content deals like Reliance Communications’ Facebook Basics, or Bharti Airtel’s Zero.…

New hurdles for victims to prove abuse Google’s High Court victory against Streetmap on Friday will have a chilling effect on digital startups and British SMEs.…

NYC-bound flight forced to return to Heathrow A Virgin Atlantic flight from Heathrow to New York was forced to return to London yesterday after the co-pilot was dazzled by a laser.…

Sod it, let's just go back to carrier pigeons VoIP phones running default or weak passwords can be used for secret surveillance, independent security consultant Paul Moore warns.…

You don't need to risk your capital when banks start paying out again The US Federal Reserve’s decision in December to increase the target range for the interest rate it pays banks by one-quarter of one per cent, to 0.25-0.5 per cent, didn't seem like an Earth-shaking event at the time.…

Old school tech for tomorrow's Earth-watching launch The European Space Agency's (ESA) Sentinel 3-A satellite will soar heavenwards tomorrow from Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia, riding a "Rockot" converted ICBM lifter.…

Distributed in-memory parallel processing nodes face off against storage-class memory GridGain Systems software provides an in-memory facility for running transactions, streaming and analytics applications using clustered x86 server nodes in a grid defined by a distributed, massively parallel architecture.…

Matei tells us about his brainchild Interview Spark is the open source cluster computing system started in 2009 by Matei Zaharia, when he was but an 'umble PhD candidate at Berkeley's AMPlab. Some people hope it will become the logical successor to MapReduce.…

Change of direction in Verizon's data centre jet stream Comment The Grand Old Duke of Verizon has marched his troops up the public cloud storage hill; is it time to march them down again?…

Dial P for pwnage A new Trojan banker for Android is capable of wiping compromised smartphones as well stealing online banking credentials, security researchers are warn.…

Trinidad and Tobago quite the bug-reporting hotspots, it transpires Facebook security engineer Reginaldo Silva says Menlo Park has paid out $4.3m (£3.8m, A$6m) for more than 2,400 vulnerability reports submitted since its bug bounty began in 2011.…

Microsoft unveils new Windows 10 biz workhorse - but sorry, no Continuum Microsoft has unveiled what may be its last ever Lumia-branded phone, the Lumia 650. It’s a lightweight “business” workhorse priced at $199 before local taxes and subsidies.…

A mix of Ceph, Gluster and ZFS on a virtualised hardware grid base Comment OSNEXUS is a six-year-old startup making software-defined storage in the shape of QuantaStor, which is based on a grid of up to 32 nodes virtualised into a platform for ZFS, Ceph and Gluster and providing scale-out block, file and object pools of storage.…

'Unacceptable' for sub-1Mbps internet speeds in 2016 Shadow digital economy minister and former Ofcom head Chi Onwurah has called on the communications regulator to tackle BT’s hold on the broadband market, ahead of its major sector review next week.…

There be nasties out east, y'know Security researchers have linked attacks against Ukrainian power utilities in Dec 2015, which used the BlackEnergy trojan, to similar attacks against a mining company and a large railway operator in Ukraine.…

It can be done in under 30 minutes The set up of an Elasticsearch cluster can differ strongly depending on its scenario. In order to quickly deliver visible, individually customized results to our customers we have automated the installation process for Elasticsearch clusters and are now able to run a local demo cluster at the flick of a switch.…

Thin Blue Line reaches over cyberspace A 16-year-old Brit has been arrested for allegedly hacking the email account of CIA director John Brennan.…

The world's big three PC vendors explain what they think you want to buy The personal computer market has been in the doldrums for years, with global sales falling under 300 million a year, slipping nine per cent in 2015 alone. But there are also some rays of light in the market, as Intel's predictions of a sales rebound were confirmed by a nice little bump in sales over Christmas, due in part to Windows 10.…

ATM hacking tool used to place $500 million in orders. Hackers caused the Russian Ruble to swing 15 per cent in minutes by hacking a bank with a newly-discovered and highly capable malware.…

Net scum target florists on day of commercialised romance Net scum have bashed florists with distributed denial of service attacks over Valentine's Day in a bid to extract ransoms, security analysts say.…

Is Uncle Jeff's cut-price bit-barn rental company contemplating HPCaaS? Amazon's sparking speculation a more ambitious high-performance computing (HPC) plan with the acquisition of Italian company NICE Software.…

Log-less network service targeted in wake of global bomb threats. French police have arrested the operator of a log-free Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) service allegedly used by a hacking gang responsible for making dozens of fake bomb threats to schools around the world.…

Come to Pune or miss the bus, apparently. Also, you rock harder than Shelbyville Cisco has foreshadowed adding India to its global manufacturing chain, suggesting the city of Pune as a possible location.…

Sourceforge also in belated apology mode as it kills hated 'DevShare' ad-injection plan GitHub has promised to pay better attention to the concerns of users.…

Precision optics lost its balls, not all of its brains, thanks to robots In an example of how heated the debate over the much-reduced budget at Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) has become, an argument has broken out over whether the division that helped craft mirrors for the groundbreaking LIGO experiment still exists.…

Of 68.5 million desktop storage devices sold in 2015, just 1% had 3 or more bays The very small network attached storage (NAS) market is scarcely alive, according to IDC's 2015 Worldwide Personal and Entry-Level Storage Tracker.…

That's a bug, not a feature, so Cisco urges patching to protect its IP and carriers' networks Cisco is asking service providers using its Universal Small Cell kit to install a patch, because as it now stands, the devices' firmware could be copied by an outsider.…

Immersion rumbles Cupertino with sueballs Haptic outfit Immersion, once rumoured to be in talks with Apple, has fired off a lawsuit against Cupertino, AT&T and AT&T Mobility over alleged patent infringements.…

First patch didn't patch so isn't a patch on the new patch There's egg on face down VMware way after the company 'fessed up that a patch it delivered last year didn't completely work.…

Solar power's the thing The British military is reportedly set to purchase two planes that can fly for months on end without needing to land. These large solar-powered “Zephyr” drones would likely be sent to carry out long-term surveillance missions and could constantly monitor an area with high-quality imagery. They could also be used to provide mobile and internet communication signals in remote areas, to support ground missions, and even conduct long-term research projects.…

Whole lotta shakin' going on There's a new smartphone app that could save your life by giving an early warning of an impending earthquake.…

Khosla joins list of people it's really worth not listening to Close on the heels of Marc Andreessen's anti-colonialism comments about India, a second billionaire Silicon Valley VC has exploded his ego all over the internet.…

Photoshop giant pulls download after directories go missing How about this for bizarre bug of the week: the latest version of Adobe Creative Cloud deletes the first hidden directory in root directories on Macs.…