The Register

A storage bear growls Comment Data volumes are growing like crazy and yet there's a case to be made that 2016 is going to be a tough old year for storage, and could be an annus horribilis and not an IDC prediction-fuelled glory year.…

Egad, WGAD says he was arbitrarily detained A UN panel has found that Julian Assange's occupancy of the Ecuadorian embassy in London amounts to an "arbitrary detention" on the parts of the UK and Sweden, and called for his immediate release, with "compensation".…

Ad fraud rises again – and the UK is the particularly mucky Figures indicate that web advertisement fraud grew significantly in the last quarter of 2015 – and also showed that the UK’s ad biz is one of Europe’s poorest performers.…

Maybe ISPs don't have to be dumb pipes after all Sysadmin Blog: Wide Area Networking (WAN) solutions are not discussed enough in the tech press. We babble incessantly about consumer broadband, or some new top end fibre speed achieved in a lab, but this is merely a fraction of the story.…

IBM politely shown the door in digital revamp bid RSA, one of Britain's oldest insurance firms, has awarded a seven-year IT infrastructure transformation deal to software company Wipro.…

Mac vendor wants to build over a field of Athenry Apple’s Irish operations have hit another little local difficulty this week, as it emerged that national authorities are still reviewing its plans for a mega data centre in the beautiful Galway countryside at the behest of local bats and badgers supporters.…

All about patent litigation now? Crossroads has finally abandoned any pretence of being an archival systems products company any more and has signalled its product portfolio is up for sale.…

When a networked toaster just isn't enough You know how it is - you've hooked up a networked drone-sensing doorbell, Java-enabled remote control toaster and Bluetooth toothbrush, and can now determine the degree of browning of your morning slice via smartphone app from the other side of the kitchen, while commanding Smartbrush™ to order extra teeth-whitening paste for automated UAV delivery once your teeth fall below a predetermined level of brightness, but you're still missing that certain interconnected je ne sais quoi.…

Let's go visit sawmynutsinhalf.com! Something for the Weekend, Sir? “Put down the sacrificial dagger and step away from the goat.”…

Sees 'em, raises 'em Opensourcer MapR has been granted a patent for technology to reliably herd big data.…

Staff council to be formed, 45-day consultation begins mid-Feb IBM has entered into a 45-day consultation with UK staff in the Global Technology Services division, El Reg can reveal.…

Pure Pods and yes-we-can-ery Analysis Scott Dietzen is leading Pure Storage along the flash array high road, determined not to cede any advantage at all to flash array rivals and driving Pure to stay in the flash market forefront by investing for growth.…

Who knows? This boss made most of it up … then shafted our reader royally On-Call Welcome back to On-Call, our Friday glimpse at readers' tales of being asked to fix the ridiculous.…

Humph, responds board to ex-BBC Trust chairman's review A long-awaited review into the future of .uk registry operator Nominet by former chairman of the BBC Trust has told the company it's time to grow up.…

From the land of cuckoo clocks and horology HPE has bought Switzerland-based Trilead, according to Trilead's home page.…

'Eyeballing a computer' gets closer thanks to Anglo-Australian collaboration University of South Australia associate professor Drew Evans has created proof-of-concept work that could in the future lead to computerised contact lenses.…

*In its HR software. But Big Red's been named as a creative taxpayer in the past Good news, britons! Oracle says it is now fully compliant with the nation's latest tax regulations, including those that come into force on April 6th. That's the first day of the UK's new financial year, thanks to some sixteenth-century calendar-realignment shenanigans.…

The folks at Eurocom have released another monster 'mobile workstation' When Eurocom releases new laptops – or 'mobile workstations' as it prefers to call them – it can be hard to keep one's jaw from the floor.…

Borked browser blows, to no one's surprise. Antivirus vendor Avast has patched a vulnerability in its very own fork of the Chrome browser. And a good job too: the vuln allowed remote attackers to completely compromise the platform.…

CoreOS blasts off for planet production in the microservices nebula CoreOS has decided that rkt, its open source container, is fit for production purposes and therefore ready to fly as version 1.0.…

About one dollar in five will go on smartmobes, but servers and storage will also grow Information technology analyst house IDC says that world spending on information technology will hit US$2.8 trillion in 2019, up from this year's $2.46 trillion.…

Ex-Homeland Security boss University president says it's all about safety Academics at the University of California Berkeley have protested after it emerged that management had put a secret data slurping device into the campus that was mapping and storing all network traffic.…

1800 MHz auction will bring 4G to the Australian bush Australia has scored AU$543.5m (US$391m) for part of its 1800 MHz spectrum.…

It's part of ECS update that includes database-less searching and other things With ECS v2.2, EMC has improved its storage efficiency, searchability and security, we're told.…

Silver Lake slips its PIPE into troubled security firm Symantec has announced its results for the third quarter of fiscal 2016 and they aren't looking pretty. Revenues are down 6 per cent and profits plummeted by 23 per cent.…

Goodwill impairment's long shadow Data warehouser and analyzer Teradata is suffering still. It's made a full-year loss as fourth-quarter 2015 revenues continued a multi-quarter tumble.…

Taking a pop at Comcast – election-winning move, that Six US Senators are taking aim at the excessive fees cable and internet providers charge for modem and set-top hardware.…

Workforce trimmed in UK, Netherlands in response to 'revenue at any cost' Exclusive Today we learned hybrid and all-flash array supplier Tegile has sacked half its staff in the UK, and all its staff in the Netherlands. It had only just recently opened its Dutch office.…

Plummeting fuel prices cause tech budgets to shrink, which is bad news for tech suppliers NAS appliance maker Panasas was forced to restructure after falling oil prices caused its customers in the energy sector to spend less on its technology.…

And has a good old moan at his former employees Norse Corp cofounder Sam Glines has hit out at the media after he was fired on Monday as CEO of the threat intelligence company.…

IPv6 LTE fingered in networking mystery A problem with the handling of UDP network packets is leaving T‑Mobile US customers unable to make FaceTime or WhatsApp calls with the latest Apple iOS beta.…

Biggest dive into the red in company history expected Life isn’t getting any easier for Toshiba: the accountancy-scandal-hit Japanese conglomerate has forecasted a wider net loss of ¥710bn ($6bn) for its fiscal year, which ends in March.…

Republican presidential frontrunner sends nastygram to CEO US Senator Ted Cruz has accused the head of domain name overseer ICANN of being complicit in Chinese online censorship.…

Shiny, shiny .. with a catch Last year Sony offloaded its Vaio PC division and brand, and it was snapped up by a private equity outfit. The new owner promised to make luxury tech hardware that was irresistibly attractive. It's now unveiled its first Vaio phone, a stylish aluminium design, aimed at business people. What can go wrong? Well, nothing.…

Ah, great. Ave AV Part of the distribution channel of the Dridex banking Trojan botnet may have been hacked, with malicious links replaced by installers for Avira Antivirus.…

Version 2.6, expected in May, will be the last release Mozilla's Head of Core Contributors, George Roter, has announced the end of development of Firefox OS for smartphones.…

'We’re fixing oversight. When will you?' - USA Analysis Does this week’s Safe Harbour 2.0 restore confidence in US-European data flows - or does it change absolutely nothing? Either way, the European Court needs to produce better argued and more robust judgements, reckons one of the UK’s top data protection experts, Dr Ian Walden, a Professor of Information and Communications Law at Queen’s Mary’s.…

How does a halo actually help you drive down rents? One of the US’s major mall operators blamed Apple for dragging down the performance of its high end properties, potentially compounding the discomfort for the i company.…

Obligatory: Ability to solder and US passport Registration is open for the ninth annual NASA-hosted RockOn! workshop, which runs from 18-23 June at Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.…

It's less risky if you do it their way, they say Druva is adding Disaster Recovery (DR) functionality to Phoenix, its converged cloud-based data protection system for enterprises.…

Code review highlights problematic RNG Days after fixing a rare but dangerous key recovery attack, the developers of OpenSSL have been dealt a fresh blow with a poor review of the technology from a German government agency.…

Apple gearing up for a mega Surface challenge? Do you baulk at the size of Microsoft’s mega Surface Hub whiteboard, and want something a little more Apple-tastic for your wall?…

But hey, losing 3,200 staff plumped profits. And it is nearly the weekend The relatively weaker economy in China and slumping demand for gadgets puts Lenovo between a rock and a hard place.…

Promises to help titans 'get in front of a Libor-type event' Hewlett Packard Enterprise is rolling out a hosted investigative analytics service in response to a report that regulators imposed $260bn in fines on firms in the wake of the 2007-08 financial crisis.…

Meanwhile pallid webmaster's support site wobbles The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD) has found in favour of Julian Assange in a complaint alleging he is suffering "arbitrary detention", a report claimed.…

Long-serving chairman to call it quits, in IT that is... Networks First chairman Peter Titmus is to exit the IT industry once he complete the handover of the business he founded 26 years ago to the new owners - but the old dog has some bite in him yet.…

Where are the straps? Pebble delivered a major update today to its watches, which boast the biggest third party app ecosystem of any wearable platform.…

Impressed by Dutch anti-UAV squadron plan A Scottish MP has suggested cops north of the border might consider the idea of drone-busting eagles, following recent Dutch trials of a winged anti-UAV operative.…