The Register

Still burning bank notes, but at least not at both ends All that glitters in the world of big data is not necessarily gold - just ask Hadoop-flinging Hortonworks and its army of investors that are today counting the latest annual losses.…

Painful realities of the Investigatory Powers Bill It is the topic that they don’t want us to discuss. When it came up in the Joint Committee on the Investigatory Powers Bill there was a desperate attempt to shoot the messenger, William Binney, as an alternative to the debating his message.…

Satya Nadella continues Finning out the herd Nadella isn’t not done yet. Microsoft has made further redundancies in its the old Nokia phone division, as Finnish paper Helsingen Sanomat reports.…

Never mind the rest, we're the only viable open-source choice Open Stacker Mirantis CEO, Alex Freedland, has given out an anti-Amazon message: “Our outstanding growth is reflective of the huge market opportunity we have in front of us. As AWS continues disrupting the $150 billion dollar cloud infrastructure market, OpenStack will rise up as the only viable open source alternative.”…

The mark of a healthy and active ecosystem Docker has declared members of its Community have performed 2 billion pulls since 2013, a quadrupling of the total just a year ago.…

£130m tax bill over 10 years biggest settlement outside US Google has not been fined for taking six years to settle its controversial £130m tax bill with HMRC, the company confirmed in front of MPs today.…

Data transmission barrier smashing demo Researchers from University College London's (UCL) Optical Networks Group have demonstrated a 1.125 TB/s data transmission rate as part of their investigation into the capacity limits of optical transmission systems.…

Why trawl the world, when the world is inside Wiki? Wikipedia developers have sketched out designs for a Wikipedia Search Engine, which would give users a one-click replacement for Google search. The search engine could also be embedded in devices such as the Kindle, or smartphones.…

Plus SMB support and encryption Converged secondary storage startup Cohesity has added public cloud tiering, encryption and replication to its clustered storage arrays.…

Impressed panel with 'holistic' computer solution The second edition of a business-development focused cyber security challenge, the Cyber 10K, has concluded – with the worthy winner receiving £10,000 to further develop an innovative security dashboard tool.…

Lots of clever signal processing coming to a hotspot near you California chip designer Qualcomm says it has crafted an LTE modem capable of downloading data at 0.98Gbps.…

One of the 'most efficient and resilient data centres in Europe' Nottingham-based web hosting company Heart Internet has gone TITSUP* due to a power outage at what it claims is "one of the most efficient and resilient data centres in Europe".…

Like playing a frustrating game of whack-a-mole In 1999, when a fierce crypto war was raging between governments and developers, researchers undertook a global survey of available encryption products.…

Enterprise ops people best placed to float clouds for devs Automation vendor Automic has clambered onto OpenStack with a plug-in to link its software to the open Cloud platform.…

Depends what the object of your quest is... There is no doubting that scale-out storage is now thoroughly achievable. Indeed, scale-out is pretty much the norm for object storage, plus it is now the primary option when it comes to huge volumes of file-based NAS, where scale-out means a highly-scalable file system that supports clustering. It is growing in popularity for block storage too.…

Game dev tool service terms address undead apocalypse A couple of days back Amazon unleashed Lumberyard - a free game engine and development tool locked into Amazon Web Services (AWS).…

The new IT chief and you... the new IT chief is you The proliferation of smartphones, tablets and apps means everyone everywhere has an opinion about IT. Some experts believe the rise of interest in technology is a good thing – but for IT professionals, this attention creates a problem.…

Suggests ICRs may be up for the chop... or maybe not IPB The Joint Committee set up to provide pre-legislative scrutiny of the Snoopers' Charter has made 86 recommendations to the government. The recommendation made most often was the one most of us yelled at the screen when we first clapped eyes on it: explain what is meant by these terms.…

Picking apart the new 'data-aware' storage trend Comment The term data-aware storage is fairly new to our industry and its definition, as often happens, is not very clear. Of course vendors have their own view of this term.…

VSAN's the man from now on, but there may be another plan VMware launched VSAN 6.2 yesterday, proclaiming it as the company's new hyperconverged software – and repeating the claim that VSAN adoption makes it number one in the hyperconverged market.…

If the cryptocurrency can't organise its own evolution, we lose a chance at better security Civilisation is an agreement. We agree to pay our tax, obey the laws, and generally avoid berserking around the joint. Where these agreements breaks down you get riots that scale into civil wars, then collapse. That’s less of an issue so long as the problem is over there - so that when a culture soils the sheets you don’t have to deal with the stink.…

Did you pull last night? ... Code. We're talking about code A new study has found that women are more likely than men to have their open-source software contributions accepted – but only when their gender is hidden from project leaders.…

In Soviet Russia, computer uninstalls you! The Russian government says it is looking to dump Microsoft and adopt Linux as the operating system for agency PCs.…

Judge wanted copyright-holders to charge pirates a pittance so Dallas Buyers Club folded Copyright-holders of the film Dallas Buyers Club have given up their pursuit of Australian pirates after a local Judge blocked their efforts at speculative invoicing.…

Rabbit and pig brains look fine, but haven't been transplanted. Sorry, Walt Scientists have preserved and recovered cryogenically-frozen brains in near-perfect condition.…

Regulator's Zuck-off to Free Basics has carriers worried they might be in trouble too Hard on the heels of India implementing a net-neutrality regulation, its telecommunications carriers have asked the country's regulator to clarify its impact on them.…

Hang on! Doesn't Wi-Fi already let 'things' do that? The Bluetooth special interest group (SIG) reckons connecting "things" to PCs and smartphones is passé and wants to add direct-to-router connections to its technology.…

Kaesong Industrial Complex to be 'completely closed', says Unification Ministry North Korea's launch of a useless satellite atop a thinly-disguised intercontinental ballistic missile has turned out to have immediate terrestrial implications, including some for the technology industries, after South Korea closed a manufacturing enclave in the North.…

South Korea recovers chunks of rocket from ocean as satellite tumbles on North Korea briefly got its tumbling satellite under control, but before the satellite made any transmissions it started tumbling again.…

It's a fire-bug, not a feature. So Panasonic's recalling machines from 2011 to 2013 Panasonic's the latest company to fall foul of dodgy batteries, finding that the rechargeables shipped with its CF-S10 laptop "may overheat, cause smoke, or may ignite" causing "a risk of a fire or a burn hazard to consumers" and the computer.…

Remote sites owned as router, controller and server all fall to pen-test team An IBM-led penetration testing team has thoroughly owned an enterprise building management network in a free assessment designed to publicise the horrid state of embedded device security.…

In who’s behind the startup and who it’s linked to Move over Stephen Fry: a retired Australian rules footballer, motivational speaker and reality television contestant is fronting a startup.…

Patch your ASA appliances now unless you like the world reading your secrets Patch it now and don't wait: Cisco has announced that a bunch of its Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) products are vulnerable to a remote code execution bug.…

$11bn is still $11bn The financial market turmoil that's characterized 2016 has led Cisco to set modest expectations for the coming three months.…

US Prez wannabe rails against 'crony capitalism', puts boot in Hillary After her campaign garnered just four per cent of the vote in the New Hampshire primaries, Carly Fiorina has announced that she has suspended her run to be US commander in chief, but will carry on campaigning.…

Inside the surreal world of US-EU trade treaties A German MP has given an insight into the surreal restrictions imposed around the upcoming US-EU trade deal, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).…

You'd think someone filing your tax return for you would be doing you a favor. Guess again Crooks generated the keys necessary to file tax returns for 101,000 people in the US – allowing the crims to potentially siphon off their victims' rebates.…

We might ban it, we might not, but we will be in charge US Congress is preparing no fewer than three new bills over the ongoing encryption debate: one banning end-to-end encryption, one setting up a commission to review the issue, and a third to make sure that it is Congress that gets to decide what happens next.…

Meanwhile, biz slams $521m into the red. Yeouch! It's official – Twitter is slightly moving away from being a hosepipe of real-time wittering.…

Terahertz radio transmitters lead to possibility of high-speed pipelines A group of university researchers in Japan say they have achieved wireless data connections of up to 100Gbps with a new transmitter operating at the submillimetre terahertz frequency range.…

Coachella Valley uses its imagination for IT setup America's second-poorest school district is also home to a surprising IT program that has won it national acclaim.…

Judicial Redress Act passes European citizens will soon win the right to sue the US government for snatching their personal and private data.…

Self-service-as-a-Service. Clear? Good In Brief Self-service-as-a-service start-up Trifacta has proudly announced that it has raised $35m in VC cash for "growth financing".…

Don't you DARE call us paternalistic. We've got people to NANNY The venture capitalist and Facebook board member Marc Andreessen has stoked the growing row about banning a free data service that gets impoverished rural Indians online.…

Takes on rivals Simplivity and Nutanix VMware has updated VSAN, its virtual SAN software, to version 6.2, adding data reduction stuff to catch up with Nutanix and Simplivity hyper-converged infrastructure appliances.…

Exagrid, owncloud and Simplivity all say they're bucking the trend Amidst the six-way storage startup staff lay-off gloom, another three companies are going the other way. Exagrid, owncloud and Simplivity are showing the storage market still has a thirst for great products. Wake up competitors, and smell the coffee.…

Overdue cinematic celebration of our fave figurines In long-overdue news, it's been announced that 2018 will see the release of a full-blown animated Playmobil movie, the first of a planned trilogy.…

Six firms and counting. Who'd be a storage engineer these days? Coho Data, the storage startup with the clever storage array that can also compute, has joined the craze and laid off a load of unfortunate staff.…

Chinese mega firm part of buyout offer consortium Opera's board has recommended its shareholders accept a Chinese consortium's buyout offer of $1.2bn, about 53 per cent above where it has recently been trading.…

Do what you like, as long as you play in our forest Amazon has released a beta of Lumberyard, a free game engine and development tool – but with the condition that your game may not read or write data to competing cloud services.…