The Register

'Imploding' says Brian Krebs Security startup Norse Corp has gone ominously dark.…

Japan's laptop-makers mulling combined last stand say Taiwanese sources From Taiwan, an advance on a tantalising rumour: Toshiba, Fujitsu and Vaio look to be seriously considering a merger of their laptop-making operations.…

Cisco's pedalling hard to prepare patches too Corrected LibreSSL sysadmins should keep an eye on their mirrors for a soon-to-land update.…

Australian Prime Minister hails app as just the kind of problem-solver the nation needs An app for homeless people hailed by Australian prime minster Malcolm Turnbull as an example of technology done right asks users to walk across several hundred kilometres of water to find services.…

Trademark filing, jobs, Tweets and an undeniable X-factor point to an EVO:RAIL evolution EMC and VMware are making more noise about a hyper-converged launch next week, and The Register's virtualisation desk is willing to go out on a limb and say that among the announcements will be a hardware product called VxRail.…

Parliamentary committee says bill would otherwise undermine the tech sector IPB The first Parliamentary report into the UK's draft Investigatory Powers Bill, commonly referred to as the "Snoopers' Charter", says it has great potential to damage the nation's technology sector and the public should therefore pick up the tab for the £2bn (US$2.85bn) or so it will require to implement the data-harvesting legislation.…

RS-232 is still enough of a thing there are people who turn a quid ripping off chipsets Semiconductor company Future Technology Devices International (FTDI), which in 2014 was caught out bricking products built using knock-off chips, has again been accused of fooling around with device drivers.…

National Institute for Science and Technology seeks comment on random bit generator proposal America's National Institute for Science and Technology (NIST) is looking for public input into its long-running project to improve cryptography.…

Flawed solution in search of a problem Falling out of the sky may well be most passengers' worst fear when they board a plane. With this mind, a Ukrainian inventor has proposed building airliners with detachable passenger cabins that could separate from the rest of the plane and parachute safely to the ground in the event of an emergency.…

Barrier to financial inclusion for world's 2bn unbanked Most people in the world are still dependent on using cash for making basic payments, meaning that benefits such as reduced costs and greater speed of transactions are being missed out on, according to new research.…

Didn't you notice? Peak disk came and went three years ago Peak disk has passed and Seagate has a triple problem set: disk build numbers; costs and pricing; and what to do about flash.…

Didn't you notice? Peak disk came and went three years ago Peak disk has passed and Seagate has a triple problem set: disk build numbers; costs and pricing; and what to do about flash.…

Original model of starship ready for public viewing Researchers at the Smithsonian Institute are preparing to show off every Trekkie's dream: the original model of the USS Enterprise.…

Timing is everything The US State Department is to release another 1,000 emails from the 55,000 found on Hillary Clinton’s private (and insecure) email server, saying that 22 contain material that is classified, but wasn’t at the time the messages were sent.…

How to repurpose an old server and tools biz Microsoft’s second fiscal quarter showed a company at a dangerous stage in its transition. It also revealed a firm that is unable to rely on the certainties of old.…

Company rewards three years of failure What do you get if you preside over 15 straight quarters of shrinking sales, evaporating profit and a sliding share price? A seven figure bonus if you are Ginni Rometty, the chief exec at IBM.…

Microwaves in the sky Large balloons firing data are nothing to worry about, Google has told the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in its latest license application.…

Ha! Ha! You said 'cookie' As legal arguments go, this may not be the strongest.…

Virginia is for lovers...as long as you don't love patent cases Suing a company for patent infringement just got a lot tougher in the state of Virginia.…

Monday morning blues This Damn War I was the senior systems administrator (in fact I was the only IT person, but not the IT "manager" as that would entail a whole new level of paperwork for the client) and had been tasked with moving our central office to an office one kilometre away.…

Snowden docs reveal Project Anarchist The NSA and Britain’s GCHQ have access to the video feeds of Israel’s fleet of drones and aircraft, according to new documents.…

Fraternal Order of the Police not feeling very fraternal A data dump covering hundreds of police contracts and thousands of private forum posts by US law enforcement officers has been posted online.…

Sky blue, oceans wet, code sharer unstable GitHub has issued a mea culpa for the latest outage that left users unable to access the code-sharing site.…

What do you think? Micron wasn't super-clear Does 3D XPoint memory use phase change memory (PCM) technology or not?…

Popular video thing may be 'illegal'. And looks like a witch. Analysis T-Mobil'e BingeOn gamble of removing video consumption from its subscribers data bundles, appears to be defying its critics, with large increases in mobile video viewing.…

Denial of service woes continue as service staggers to feet HSBC has admitted it still facing a sustained denial of service attack, after the incident which began this morning left customers unable to use their online banking services.…

Terrible Theresa's evidence is 'full of holes' IPB The Home Secretary has given a written statement to a Parliamentary committee explaining why she believes GCHQ's bulk surveillance activities are needed.…

'Serious near misses' prompt safety concerns The British Airline Pilots Association (BALPA) has demanded action to control the use of drones following "a spate of serious near misses" over UK airports.…

From Asimov to Blade Runner and beyond – for the humans Stephen Hawking is scared. "The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race," Hawking has said.…

CFO takes a hike while overall revenues fall Quantum unsurprisingly saw declining revenues in its third quarter, hit by general storage market weakness and tape pricing falls which offset scale-out storage revenue increases.…

Nested virtualisation to shielded virtual machines: Lots to chew on here Microsoft is busy reshaping Windows server for the cloud era, and the Hyper-V hypervisor is changing accordingly.…

Tottering 286s, creaking Vaxes, and 'the Wang that wouldn't die' When Simon Sharwood revealed that an Aussie operator has just retired a server that been running flawlesssly since 1997, we figured it would prompt a slew of one-upmanship comments, and we were right.…

Always something else you can throw in the pot Chef pushed version 12.4.0 of its Server out the door this week, and plugged a number of security vulns in the process.…

Four canopies to land one vehicle - impressive stuff A couple of days ago, SpaceX successfully tested its Crew Dragon capsule parachute system, as it advances towards manned vehicle certification as part of NASA's Commercial Crew Program.…

Also banks on services, public cloud boost Cloudbees is looking to build out its services partner lineup as it banks on further growth in the enterprise space this year, when the Jenkins platform it bases its business on finally hits version 2.0.…

Crooks want you to pay up on pain of severe embarrassment – and more Miscreants have put together an especially pernicious strain of Android ransomware that threatens to bare your browsing history.…

It's sad 'cos u care SO much about issues, you even tweet about them Years ago, we were told that mass democratic participation was was going to be revolutionised by the web. One click was all it would take to affect change - if only enough people clicked. We would tweet truth to power. Instead of arranging to see an elected representative, we could fill in a handy web form. The future belonged to the web savvy, and their “swarm intelligence”. Against this, The Man wouldn’t stand a chance!…

Blighty's AK-47 laid low by dastardly Continentals The iconic Land Rover Defender is to cease production today after 33 years in continuous production.…

Oh no - not again! Updated HSBC customers were once again locked out of online banking this morning, following an apparent DDoS attack on the bank.…

Desktop decline and flash substitution adds to disk output gloom WD revenues and profits are declining as it finds disks and SSDs a hard sell in what its CEO calls “an increasingly challenging global economic environment”.…

Terrible Theresa's department caught making worst security blunder of all The Home Office has admitted to The Register that among its data breach incidents last year was one in which security vetting documents disappeared from within secured government premises.…

State broadcaster opts for former state monopoly The BBC has picked BT to provide its internal network, in a £100m deal that will run for the next seven years.…

Reg columnist snorts suspicious powder Something for the Weekend, Sir? Whirr whirr click. Oh come on, print, dammit. Bzzzzt. Whirr click [silence] brrrrrrrrrrr [silence].…

First orbiting 'SpaceDataHighway' component launches tonight The first orbiting component of the European Data Relay System (EDRS) is due to blast off at 22:20 GMT tonight from Baikonur Cosmodrome atop a Russian Proton rocket.…

Emergency Services Network deal mired in confusion as Airwave flings sueball The government's contentious Emergency Services Network deal, intended to provide 4G coverage and devices for all blue light services, will be able to run on the London Underground, the man in charge of the scheme has insisted.…

AV outfit finds new ways to banish low level malware to the .bin VirusTotal can now analyse firmware for known malware, prying inside almost-hard-coded code for hidden executables.…

Worker was in the dark about this thing called 'electricity' that makes stuff work On-Call How do you people survive at work? We're asking because in this week's edition of On-Call, our weekly reader-contributed column sharing tales of IT support, reader “Chilli” brings us a very frustrating story.…