The Register

Cupertino's amazing software quality showcased once again Watch out: setting the time and date on an Apple iPhone, iPad or iPod to January 1, 1970, may brick the thing.…

How depressing: British Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy hijacked Malware appears to have hijacked the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP)'s website – and held it to ransom.…

So that's that, then Blighty's spying nerve center GCHQ has a license to hack computers and devices at will, a UK intelligence oversight court has ruled.…

We need ways to snoop, er, innovate Groups representing telcos, cable operators, and wireless carriers are pressing the FCC on its plans for privacy protections in the US.…

Sci-Hub loses domains and Twitter account wobbles A repository of 47 million research papers is playing a game of internet cat-and-mouse with publisher Elsevier.…

Dial G for guilty – one miscreant admits laundering role A bloke has admitted laundering millions of dollars for hackers who ripped off US companies by hacking into their telephone systems.…

Surprise, surprise The city of Louisville, Kentucky, has approved a plan to bring Google Fiber service to residents and businesses.…

Estás muerto para mi Google will shut down Picasa on May 1. Any pictures stored in the online album service will be moved to Google Photos automatically.…

It simply ain't true – until Mr Wales publicly denies it The Wikimedia Foundation has finally disclosed details of its controversial Knowledge Engine grant – and it confirms that Wikipedia is getting seriously into search, despite Jimmy Wales' categorical denial that WMF is “doing a Google”.…

The decomposable infrastructure endpoint and our route into its gaping maw Comment At the far end of HPE's storage and compute strategy is the Machine, the dynamically composable infrastructure thing with separately scalable compute, memory/storage and networking resources. It has a huge flat and persistent memory space – storage class memory (SCM) – using Memristor technology.…

Although that could be a bit of a problem under the new EU rules... A Parliamentary report has called on the government to make the identifying of individuals by de-anonymising data a criminal offence.…

First step on a thousand-mile journey For those languishing in the doldrums of traditional IT, DevOps-style development offers hope. Or would, if you weren’t too scared to try it.…

Iron.io announces project to beat cloud lock-in; but is it that easy? Iron.io, a San Francisco company which has recently secured $11.5 million venture capital funding, has announced Project Kratos, which "will enable enterprises to run AWS Lambda functionality in any cloud provider, as well as on-premise," according to the project description.…

South African supersized spicy steak sarnie It's February, and the weather's crap this side of the equator, so travel with us if you will to South Africa's sunny Cape Town for a wobbly dining experience so substantial it's more of a team sport than a post-pub dining exercise.…

Radio astronomy, sheds and high-explosive ordnance Geek's Guide to Britain A field full of bits of old wire and an abandoned garden shed: it doesn't look like the place where Nobel prize-wining research was conducted, pushing the frontier of radio astronomy.…

Dominant? Yes. Abusive? No, rules the judge Google has won a High Court case brought by StreetMap over anticompetitive business practices, one of several in the legal pipeline.…

Chances of communication 'close to zero' Scientists have glumly concluded that the Philae lander on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is almost certainly dead, and have given up trying to contact the spacecraft.…

But fear not – the taint has now been purged Cybercrooks have been caught running booby-trapped ads on Skype to redirect users towards an Angler exploit kit trap.…

Massive population-wide pupil data slurp also available to private sector The Department for Eduction has enlarged its mega database containing sensitive personal pupil information to nearly 20 million individual records, according to a Freedom of Information response.…

Near enough 8TB SSDs on the way At a briefing with HPE’s Chris Johnson, VP and general manager for EMEA, we found out that the company’s 3PAR arrays are in line to receive a flash capacity boost to around 8TB per SSD.…

Does regulator have time to make policy? Updated Communications regulator Ofcom spent nearly £10m over the last two years fighting off legal threats by providers, according to a Freedom of Information response.…

300% better at it than non-business apps Business apps for Android are three times more likely to leak login credentials than the average app, according to a new study by security firm NowSecure.…

Reg reader enjoys deferred payment and free shopping voucher If you're one of the estimated 96 per cent of Brits who lives within 10 miles of an Argos outlet,* then you've probably enjoyed the in-store tablet-based catalogue shopping experience, browsing and purchasing goods for immediate collection from the front counter.…

They’re almost medieval anyway Something for the Weekend, Sir? It begins with a murmur. Despite my best attempts to ignore it for as long as possible, the indistinct mumbling gradually becomes intelligible, forcing me to pay attention.…

A journey without end... DevOps is 2016’s tech holy grail – unified development and operations, both working to deliver what the business needs, quickly, reliably, and adaptably. Done well, DevOps transforms the way organisations work; it helps break down barriers between tech teams, and between technology and the rest of the business.…

Everyone says they'll go big, then puts together a bunch of small silos In recent chats I had with end users and vendors I found a common pattern that made me think about Big Data analytics and how data is collected, organized and analysed in many organisations. This is also, I think, an explanation for the slow growth of some Big Data companies and slower than expected ROI in some Big Data investments.…

Early edition of product is aimed at DevOps folk The container movement developers missed out storage, unlike their shipping container cousins – but startup Portworx has put storage in a dedicated container for use by other containers.…

First they came for the local IM services, then they came for the world's Indonesia has joined Russia with a crackdown on emoji that depict gay, lesbian, bisexual or transexual people.…

And then there's the Reg reader way, as used on a chap who 'lost my blue E' ON-CALL Welcome again to On-Call, the weekly feature in which we share readers' experiences on help desks or out in the field fixing things.…

Boffins predict jet streams to strengthen, which will mean longer trans-Atlantic flights Increasingly powerful transatlantic jet streams thanks could by 2050 add a global 2000 hours of extra flight time, says a University of Reading study.…

Prehistoric nookie has knock-on effects It's now well established that ancient humans interbred with their Neanderthal cousins and their DNA intermingled with ours, but a new genetic analysis has shown that shagging around has had consequences.…

Skills gap? What skills gap? Computer science grads are still finding it much harder to secure jobs than their peers in other STEM subjects, with one in 10 out of work six months after uni.…

Admissions software piles pressure on anxious parents Families waiting to find out if their kids have been accepted into their secondary school of choice were bamboozled on Thursday by a computer blunder.…

Eight year migration ends after year spent beating up billing application Netflix has announced it no longer does any meaningful work in its own data centres.…

Pwn2Own hackerfest names its targets and prizes for 2016 CanSecWest There's US$75,000 up for grabs to hackers who compromise VMware's hypervisor software in an upgraded Pwn2Own contest next month.…

If ever you wanted proof there is no honour among thieves, this scam proves it Netcraft security man Paul Mutton says net narks have spun up a fake version of Alphabay Market, a popular darknet venue, in a bid to steal login credentials.…

Red Hats enterprise linux OpenStack comes to former AWS-chaser's cloud Rackspace has announced private-cloud-as-a-service running Red Hat's cut of OpenStack.…

Thousand-dollar increase for vCenter instances, but you get new goodies for the price VMware's reduced the number of vSphere packages from six to three and increased prices for the survivors.…

A falling tech market sinks all boats Dell's US$67bn mega-merger with EMC could be in trouble, with bankers reportedly having trouble raising the funds to foot the acquisition.…

Punters told they have until April 12 to save their data Verizon will shut down two of its cloud services in two months' time.…

How's that for colonialism, Andreessen? Fresh from squashing Facebook's effort to grab the enormous India market, the sub-continent's regulator has another goal in mind: open source software.…

Report on heavy stingray use could make NYPD blue Police in New York City used stingray mobile phone trackers on more than one thousand occasions since 2008.…

A discovery to make Einstein proud Analysis A 15-year experiment using some of the most advanced technology known to Man has picked up the first detection of a gravitational wave, the first direct measurement of black holes, and the first direct evidence of binary black holes. It has also opened up an entirely new field of astronomy.…

47 sharing-economy outfits ask not to be limited by local laws Uber, AirBnB, Taskrabbit and another 44 online businesses built around the "sharing economy" have written to the European Union urging politicians not to limit their development through new laws.…

Social networking has-been is Joe Ripp's problem now Time Inc. said it has acquired what's left of social networking ghost town Myspace.…

Over 1k programs and games preserved by Internet Archive The Internet Archive is taking us back to 1992 with the release of over 1,000 programs and games that run on what was arguably the first mass-market graphical interface: Windows 3.1.…

Star Wars production company due in court The UK's Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has announced it will prosecute the company allegedly responsible for squashing Harrison Ford during filming of Star Wars: The Forces Awakens.…

Cheer at Test results, find yourself hit by SQL injection The continuing rivalry between India and Pakistan has spilled over into cyberspace, with activity peaking around nationalist holidays and sports fixtures.…