The Register

Needs more clarity, Theresa, but otherwise a very good effort The Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament has warned the Government that it needs to make "substantive amendments" to its draft Investigatory Powers Bill, before proceeding to outline changes which don't appear to be very "substantive" at all.…

Grainy B&W pics and footage just don’t cut it - we want pixels Irish schoolchildren will no longer have to experience the Republic’s blood and fire birth through grainy black-and-white pics and film reels - they can experience it through the full colour lumpenly pixelated reality of Minecraft instead.…

Step right up and get your two million IOPS bundle Violin Memory has two flash array starter bundles to give enterprises "an easy and affordable way" into all-flash array performance.…

Unless you're the one being pruned. Not that he'd know Comment Fresh fruit blosssoms on new wood and a little pruning doesn't hurt. So said John Joseph, DataGravity's president and founder as he discussed the recent headcount reduction.…

Enterprises want them, but they're still a pain in the ASCII Sysadmin Blog Are enterprises really starting to act like service providers? If you ask vendors, social media and "thought influencers" hired to speak at conferences, the answer is yes. I'm not so sure.…

Otherwise, everything's just fine and dandy The world’s wealthiest activist shareholder, Steve Ballmer, has offered another critique of Microsoft, the company he helped build.…

U mad bro? Twitter is seeking to stamp out the anonymous bullies and trolls who blight the “social” media site. Today the company announced the Twitter Trust & Safety Council, comprising more than 40 organisations and outside experts.…

Copy data reducing startup goes into staff reducing mode Copy data reduction startup Actifio has laid off some staff, the fifth storage startup we've heard about this month to do so.…

Pyongyang not yet ready to nuke California North Korean "Earth observation" satellite Kwangmyongsong-4 is "tumbling in orbit", according to US officials, suggesting a second failure by Pyongyang to get a functioning satellite aloft.…

We will, we will rock you "He doesn’t run any supermarkets and his market share in groceries is minuscule. But Chris North gives grocery the shivers.”…

Hands out cash for activist investor's fund to manage, too Analysis Activist investor-controlled Imation is setting up an investment advisor subsidiary and putting $20m into an offshore investment fund controlled by the activist investor controlling Imation.…

Be very slow with the brute force, Igor. Three times a week, only on Saturdays Cybercrooks are increasingly adopting tactics from more advanced hackers in order to steal millions of dollars from banks and other financial institutions.…

Is that how crims nicked the engineers' data? Exclusive Fraudsters who attempted to scam TalkTalk customers by using records of their maintenance engineer visits are thought to have bought that info from current or former staff.…

Steady on: Nothing shocking, but it's good kit nonetheless Review: Dell is a company with many arms: it does servers, laptops, desktops and like its competitors, tries to have those arms positioned in as many different areas of IT as possible. The server arm has extended us a Poweredge R730 2U server to review and it has served as a good reminder of why Dell servers are so popular.…

Desktop Linux to spring Google's OEM prisoner partners Canonical is courting Google’s Android partners in the hope they'll break ranks with the Chocolate Factory and deliver devices powered by Ubuntu.…

Al-Lu, Al-Lu... Notice anything new about us? And then there were four: the Big Five mobile network vendors are reduced to a quartet, though Cisco will be hoping that its new alliance with Ericsson will admit it to the inner circle, while Samsung and NEC remain hopeful of harnessing virtualisation to improve their radio access network (RAN) business.…

Silicon layout reverse-engineered Pic Ever since the silicon blueprints of the ARM1 – the grandfather of today's smartphone processors – were recovered in November, hardware guru Ken Shirriff has been poring over the layout and reverse-engineering the landmark chip.…

Orders The Social Network to stop sending data to USA, tracking non-members Monday June 8th will go down as a bad day in Facebook history, after France joined India by telling the social network to Zuck off.…

Cryptonets chew data fast but keep it safe Exclusive Microsoft researchers, in partnership with academia, have published a paper detailing how they have dramatically increased the speed of homomorphic encryption systems.…

Query-size predictor ran amok, grabbed nearly 4GB per login Microsoft techies have pinpointed the SQL query that smashed the software giant's Visual Studio Team Services offline for several hours.…

Landmark 1980s tutorials now available for download UK publishing house Usborne is giving out its iconic 1980s programming books as free downloads.…

Hoppers drained in sophisticated two-part network smack-down. Kaspersky researchers Alexander Gostev and Vitaly Kamluk have found a malware gang that can drain ATMs of cash by compromising banks and reversing transactions.…

Chronic infections keep a third of baguette-bashers off net shops Brits are less likely than the French to be p0wned by malware, phishing, or to have their privacy violated by some wretched online service, but are far more vulnerable than the Dutch, the European Union's numbers office has found.…

Six in one bugs a bust as boffins boom: Send us mooar! GitHub says it has paid out US$95,300 over two years under its bug bounty program.…

A press conference for a Nature paper? Guess that's a 'yes,' then After weeks of speculation, the stage is set for Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) boffins to announce their findings.…

Reader has 'a couple of dozen' Toshiba T1000s still in use 24/7, and a tale of embezzlement to dazzle The can of worms we opened when we learned of the server switched off after eighteen years and ten months' service is still wriggling, as a reader has contacted us to tell of nearly 30-year-old laptops still in service.…

Libgraphite font library buggy and vulnerable in Firefox, Thunderbird, WordPad and more says Talos Cisco-owned Talos has announced a bunch of font library bugs present in apps running on Windows and Linux, affecting client and-server-side machines.…

Australia's dominant carrier couldn't do 3G and 4G voice and data for a chunk of this afternoon UPDATE Australia's dominant carrier, Telstra, is experiencing a total inability to support usual performance (TITSUP) on its mobile voice and data networks.…

The 1990s called and want their cool brands back Verizon has decided its Yahoo! strategy is important enough to occupy the attention of the CEO of its AOL business unit.…

What's 'app-ening at the developers' darling? 'We have no comms on that' say flaks DevOps darling Atlassian has created new development teams for iOS and Android, and is seeking principal developers to lead both.…

Do we have another OPM disaster, or a NASA hack redux? Water cooler My Twitter feed's blowing up! My dad's calling about it because even the New York Times is writing about it. The FBI, the US Dept of Homeland Security and the Dept of Justice all got hacked over the weekend? What the hell, man?…

Redmond wants silver lining to cloud stack Barely a week after releasing the first preview of its cloud-in-a-box Azure Stack, Microsoft has doubled down with new tools for the code base.…

Toymaker says its insecurity is your fault – read the T&Cs and weep Insecure kiddie-IoT-tat merchant VTech has decided its insecurity is its users' fault.…

Free-space optics vendor crashes, burns Free-space optics vendor AOptix is reportedly on skid row, with Anova Technologies catching part of the company on the way down.…

Changing focus and re-skilling, not walking away from climate research, says CEO Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) has published a correction of recent reports about redundancies at the government-funded outfit.…

Mark Zuckerberg responds to India's Free Basics ban Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has taken to Facebook – of course! – to vent about India's decision to ban its neo-colonialist virtual land grab Free Basics internet-on-ramp.…

When is the IoT industry going to get smart on security? That shiny Internet of Things thermostat might look oh-so cool on the wall, but new research from Cisco shows it could be harboring a whole host of ugly malware.…

Eyeo, publishers said to be locked in talks on allowing more banners to appear in browsers The developer of AdBlock Plus is in talks with website owners to seal a deal that would allow more adverts to bypass the ad-blocker and appear in people's browsers.…

Gets NYSE listing compliance notice Imation has unravelled one of ex-CEO Mark Lucas's recovery strategy acquisitions and sold the IronKey business to Kingston. It's also received a non-compliance listing notice from the New York Stock Exchange; its valuation not being high enough.…

And don't go spoiling Spotify's IPO for us Two of the three major record labels last week promised to share some of the money from the windfall they may receive from a Spotify IPO with artists. Neither said how much will land in the busker's hat. But the implication was that this was an act of munificence, and whatever the amount is, they should be jolly grateful.…

RAT entrails dissected Security researchers have lifted the lid on Adwind – a malware-as-a-service platform which has hit more than 400,000 users and organisations across the globe.…

Autism and tech? Not such a new idea New Relic has become the latest software company to take a good look at its recruitment and training programmes and see how it might help people on the autism spectrum into tech jobs.…

Meet the new colonialists. They're white, wealthy and want your modem Comment Spurred on by wealthy white activists, the Indian telecoms regulator TRAI has stepped in to save poor Indians from themselves. Western elites think they shouldn’t get free internet.…

Commodity servers ate my storage hardware lunch Commodity server shipments are booming but there is a sting in the tail for specialist vendors, who are seeing their hardware sales cannibalised.…

One step forwards and one step back +Comment Financially troubled Toshiba is building a new 3D flash fab while Samsung is delaying an expansion of its 3D NAND fab capabilities.…

Unlisted company doing well off decline of legacy arrays Infinidat, Moshe Yanai’s attempt to re-invent monolithic arrays in hybrid array, super-reliable form, had a good final 2015 quarter and wants everyone to know it's growing while competitors are lagging.…

Psst. Need 'help' getting updates? Nah, don't go direct Security watchers have spotted a shareware scam targeting Apple users that features malicious code signed with a legitimate Apple developer certificate.…

...while lobbyists keep their seats at the table Privacy advocates have been secretly expelled from the NHS's care.data discussions group, while lobbyists backed by biotech corporations have kept their places at the table.…

London cops now also eyeing feathered interceptors The Metropolitan Police have confirmed they're looking into deploying drone-busting eagles, a few days after a Scottish MP called for cops north of the border to investigate the possibility of using feathered interceptors to deal with growing flocks of wild UAVs.…

Ponder: How much paper was used to promise paperless NHS? National Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt has promised £4.2bn investment to "bring the NHS into the digital age," part of an attempt once again by the department to force the service to go paperless.…