The Register

Lack of transparency also catches flak from Parliament MPs have highlighted "new concerns" over the glacially slow Universal Credit programme, concluding in a report that the programme "still has a long way to go."…

Mike Munoz strides into the sales bearpit VMware distributed hypervisor cacher PernixData has recruited Mike Munoz to run its sales organisation as Chief Revenue Officer.…

Services staff in Lytham at risk of redundo as regional delivery centres consolidate The Public and Commercial Services union is gearing up to test the appetite for industrial action among services staff at Hewlett Packard Enterprises over the latest round of planned job cuts.…

Why Jeff Bezos laughs at your 'big' team Dilbert might mock the mythical man month, Fred Brooks’ argument that “adding manpower to a late software project makes it later,” but most enterprises still think they can hit their deadlines by hiring more people, feeding ever larger teams, rather than by embracing DevOps-friendly practices that favor small teams and high communication between developers and operations.…

Our readers' first batch of terrible source code witnessed at the coal face Line Break Welcome to the first proper installment of Line Break, the weekly column in which Reg readers share truly horrifying code they've seen in the wild.…

Europe's satnav system should now be even better at settling in-car arguments Two more satellites in Europe's Galileo satellite navigation swarm are up and running, so to speak.…

Auditors crawl over Defence security, drop report. The Pentagon is unable to check in on key maintenance of the hugely expensive F-35 joint strike fighter (JSF) thanks to information security failings of a Lockheed Martin database.…

Insane wiring leaves expensive Pixel borked Getting hold of USB-C cables can be a pain, but a Google engineer has found one that actually qualifies as dangerous after it broke three pieces of hardware, including a very expensive Pixel Chromebook.…

Stolen VoIP and text-to-speech used to cloak Bitcoin operation. A gang of internet idiots are using voice-over-internet-protocol (VoIP) services to phone-in fake bomb threats to schools across the UK, France, and Australia in exchange for Bitcoins.…

Money-laundering powers seen as crimp on terror funds if virtual currencies offer (unlikely) help The European Commission (EC) wants to end anonymous trading in virtual currencies in order to help track terror groups's funding.…

$40,000 price tag half rival models Exoskeletons designed to help the paralyzed to walk again are usually expensive and bulky, but a startup from University of California at Berkeley has built a lightweight version that's about half the cost of the nearest competitor.…

Model 9718 bears the number of The Beast, Cisco swears Cisco's taken the whip to the FibreChannel horse, shipping a bunch of kit ready for the next iteration of the venerable storage area network (SAN) standard.…

Outsourcer plans world's biggest clock tower on campus of corporate university Infosys, which reckons its Mysuru education centre is the world's largest corporate university, says it's going to build a 135-metre clock tower there.…

Mac SE/30's nine-inch screen is ideal for font-wrangling, says dev, 16Mhz 68030 not so much Our ongoing look at very, very old computers still in production has turned up another ancient artefact in the form of a 1989-vintage Mac that's still being used, for the very modern task of developing smartphone apps.…

Amazon's desktops-as-a-service upgrade to handle unified communications Amazon Web Services has tweaked its Workspaces cloudy virtual desktops service, adding the ability to voice-over-internet-protocol (VoIP) software.…

*If your fibre is 10 cm long Come close. No, closer. Much closer: Fujitsu and the Tokyo Institute of Technology have demonstrated millimetre-wave transmissions operating at an eye-watering 56Gbps, over a far-less-impressive 10cm.…

JavaScript attack spreads among sites, re-infects after cleansing Sucuri threat researcher Denis Sinegubko says a "massive" advertising scam campaign is affecting users visiting WordPress sites, injecting backdoors and constantly re-infecting sites.…

Arista violated three Borg patents, unless someone else decides it didn't The International Trade Commission has handed Cisco another gun to fire at antagonist Arista, finding that the latter violated three Cisco software patents.…

Year-old bug ruined crypto Popular admin tool Socat has issued a patch for an error that's been in the code for 12 months and is so egregious some fear it could be a backdoor.…

15 per cent of staff axed, bits likely to be sold off, $4bn loss for the year Yahoo! is seeing matters go from bad to worse this week as the Purple Palace says it will be cutting 15 per cent of its staff and looking at possible sell-offs, all while writing off $4.4bn of business value.…

At Sydney's VMware User Group conference, users choose the content and speak your language Dozens of conferences ask you to take a day out of your busy schedule, then don't do much more than bore you with derivative disruption-speak delivered by suits.…

Stuttering AU$4m video edit platform pulled from user acceptance testing A project to replace storage underpinning edit suites and video storage at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) is not going smoothly, with newly-acquired storage systems shelved before user acceptability testing.…

Good news, seeing as they're already flogging the hardware Intel and Qualcomm say they have gotten their respective 802.11ad (WiGig) chips and antennas to successfully link up.…

Installed it for free? Costs the same to uninstall it Google security boffins have thrown the book at Comodo for turning off Chrome security.…

Uncle Sam promises not to spy on Europeans en masse European and US legislators have hammered out a last-minute deal to allow data flows across the Atlantic to continue without breaking the law.…

Software biz races to fix bugs everyone now knows Malwarebytes is rushing to plug security flaws in its software that allow miscreants to sling malware at its customers.…

Get it together, IoT makers Researchers with arguably too much time on their hands have discovered security blunders surrounding Fisher-Price Smart Toys and hereO GPS watches for children.…

Black boxes and botnet armies ravage aging ad biz Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has made the front page with its latest financials – overtaking Apple as the world’s most valuable public company. But size isn’t everything.…

Direct support of object storage by parallel file system IBM's Spectrum Scale parallel file system offering is going to support direct integration of Cleversafe, SoftLayer cloud, and Amazon S3 object storage.…

Read this and weep, fellow storage upstarts You've got to have sympathy for Veeam's competitors. Ratmir Timashev's storage upstart pulled off another slam dunk quarter to close 2015.…

Can you help your fellow commentard? Readers' corner Not a mainstream request this one perhaps, but over at El Reg Forums, 1980s coder is seeking some advice. Guys, what do you reckon?…

Big Blue takes storage biz's hand, gallops into the sunset Catalogic has finally managed to get IBM on board its in-place ECX copy data management train.…

Total Inability To Shift Usual Packets Updated UK telco BT is suffering a major broadband outage: it appears the comms giant is caught up in a nationwide blackout, with more than 12,000 reports of service problems on the web monitor Down Detector.…

Vendor survey: High adoption rate A SUSE survey landing on our desk reveals some 80 per cent of senior IT pros in the UK plan to move or have already move their private cloud to OpenStack. The finding is based on interviews with 110 respondents in the UK and 813 across the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, France, Italy and the Nordics.…

Spacious Northern Ireland pad, handy for emergencies Readers looking for a spacious pad with plenty of accommodation, plus "male and female WCs, commercial kitchen facilities, BBC audio visual broadcasting facility, conference facilities, air filtration systems, conference rooms, decontamination chambers, plant rooms and oil storage", are directed to the sale of a former nuclear bunker in Northern Ireland's County Antrim.…

New owners focus on undefined 'next stage' of growth Perforce Software’s founder has given up the reins of the company - and its privately held status - and sold the firm to group Summit Partners.…

Well, not exactly... Our report yesterday that a water rocket formed from "2 x 2l fizzy drink bottles" may have ripped past an Airbus A321 departing Birmingham airport last year prompted some readers to mull the possibility of having a pop at the water rocket world altitude record.…

Infosec bods warn of problem – and so far there's no reaction A vulnerability in eBay’s online sales platform creates a mechanism for crooks to sling malware or run phishing campaigns.…

Except for that Amazon cloud character - obviously Comment Object storage startup Cloudian says it's the most S3-compliant of all object-storage vendors, and this really, really, really matters.…

Chasing the marketing dollar One for the record: IBM is buying an online creative ad agency – the second in a week – for an undisclosed sum.…

SMB backup and protection business sees customers heading to the cloud Barracuda Networks, with its back against the wall after a string of poor quarters and collapsing stock price, is reportedly looking for a buyer.…

Confusion over UK rapper’s apparent foray into business continuity services The UK’s Hip Hop and soul scene was left bereft today when it appeared that Brit award winning artist Plan B had coughed up an undisclosed sum to take over New Zealand-based ISP and hosting provider ICONZ.…

Funding round for growth for Hyper-V HCIA startup Gridstore, the Hyper-V-focused hyper-converged appliance startup, has snagged a $19m funding C-round.…

Disturbance in the peace in far-flung Jutland The Vulture Central Star Wars Saddometer maxxed out at 10 today at the news that Danish police rushed to a house in Jutland over the weekend to break up a heated argument between two teenage lads regarding the exact strength of the Galactic Republic.…

Hoping to hook pissed-off Barracuda users Hear that siren? It's an ambulance chaser. Seagate is facing a class-action lawsuit from lawyers representing one pissed-off Barracuda disk drive user – and they want more people to join in.…

But now we, er, actually need some of those skills in-house The chief executive of the civil service, John Manzoni, has defended the government's decision to outsource everything 15 years ago, telling MPs it was "what everyone did at the time".…

Honestly devoid of cant? GCHQ’s Christmas puzzle has stumped the nation.…

Careful, Europe. You might ruin 'very innovative business model' The UK government has warned that EU proposals to extend consumer protection rules to businesses that supply digital content for free in return for access to consumers' data could "unduly inhibit" that "very innovative business model".…

All those ads promising free stuff, yet they still fled TalkTalk has reported a loss of £60m related to its major hack in October, attributing the write-off to IT costs and shedding 101,000 customers during its third quarter.…

Is Big Data still a Big Legal Problem? Last year, I highlighted five legal issues for cloud firms and consumers to watch out for in 2015. Here’s a quick recap of how those topics developed during the year.…