The Register

Rivals stuck with old Adobe exploits The Angler exploit kit is again sailing the cyber seas and pillaging with impunity, adding one of the more recent machine-hijacking Flash holes to its arsenal.…

Minister puts nation on alert, SANS Institute says move along, nothing to see here ... The SANS Institute has moved to quell reports that Israel's energy grid has been hit by malware, revealing instead that the attacks were ransomware infecting the nation's utility regulatory authority.…

Rare public appearance from Tailored Access Operations leader USENIX ENIGMA The United States National Security Agency (NSA) is a notoriously secretive organization, but the head of its elite Tailored Access Operations (TAO) hacking team has appeared at Usenix’s Enigma conference to tell the assembled security experts how to make his life difficult.…

Core business is in good shape ... for now, so Wall St hits the Gin Palace in the stock price Juniper Networks has managed to disappoint Wall Street with revenue growth, a turnaround from loss to profit and earnings per share better than analyst forecasts. The problem? It doesn't like next year's outlook.…

LTE and IoT tied up in string, these are just two of our favourite things Sony has put US$212 million on the table to buy LTE silicon vendor Altair Semiconductor.…

Isolated attacks can add up to concerted malbot action , say boffins Ben Gurion University researchers have developed a tool capable of predicting future botnet attacks while also distinguishing between human and automated campaigns.…

Kill app and message synch until further notice Microsoft is telling Windows 10 mobile users to shut off automatic updates, because a bug is demolishing people's data allowances.…

A bullet to the brain is too kind an end for Jeeves and the Ask.com toolbar Oracle has announced that it will kill off Java browser plugins once JDK 9 debuts.…

Taste the painbow Updated Popular and widely used source-code hosting service GitHub is, for the moment, no longer a widely used source-code hosting service. It has fallen offline.…

Tough being at the top Analysis EMC is now an ex-growth stock. It pulled out its traditional hard-selling fourth quarter, but it achieved 0.7 per cent less than the year-ago quarter.…

Basslink comms fibre will be cut on purpose during power cable fix Internet service providers in the Australian state of Tasmanian are bracing for a temporary loss of connectivity, as the owner of the Basslink cable connecting the island state to the mainland scrambles to fix a break in its electricity transmission system.…

Forgive us if we're skeptical, Chet, but that last venture didn't go so well The man who started the ill-fated Aereo TV service is back, and this time he wants to start an ISP.…

US federal agency threatens to shut down Silicon Valley upstart's testing facility Controversial blood-testing upstart Theranos has been told to take immediate action at one of its testing facilities – or lose its certification.…

Documents can now be stashed in Box, Dropbox, etc Users of Microsoft Office now have more choice where they keep and work on their documents, and with whom they co-create them.…

Weird payments probed Wendy's – the third largest fast-food chain in the world – has become the latest retail giant to lose customers' credit card numbers to crooks, it appears.…

Onwards, upwards and outwards With a growing number of Earth-like exoplanets discovered in recent years, it is becoming increasingly frustrating that we can’t visit them. After all, our knowledge of the planets in our own solar system would be pretty limited if it weren’t for the space probes we’d sent to explore them.…

It lights you up like a Vegas casino, says compsci boffin Usenix Enigma Although the cops and Feds wont stop banging on and on about encryption – the spies have a different take on the use of crypto.…

FCC proposes blowing open the market to competition The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is trying to kill off one of life's most frustrating rip-offs: the clunky, outdated cable box that you are pressured to "rent" from your cable provider.…

Ride sharer coughs up settlement so cyber-cabbies keep 'contractor' status Lyft has agreed to pay out a $12.25m out-of-court settlement to end the class-action battle between itself and its drivers.…

Revenue rise and return to profits at software biz All the hard work over the past few quarters at Commvault has paid off with a return to profits and increased revenues.…

Dell computer repair guy allegedly held hostage On-call ABDUCTION 151228046, 2700 block of S. Grove Street. At approximately 11:00 a.m. on December 28, a male subject refused to let a computer technician leave the residence until his computer was fixed. The suspect allegedly had a gun in his possession and threatened to kill the victim. Joseph Nestor Mondello, 50, of Arlington VA was arrested and charged with abduction.…

Customer experience done right Analysis “The customer is king” is up there with some of the most overused corporate mantras. But it has now been translated into a new buzzword – Customer Experience, or CX – and a whole industry is evolving on the back of it.…

Justification: Child abuse and terrorism, of course Internet anonymity should be banned and everyone required to carry the equivalent of a license plate when driving around online.…

Take your SaaSy nonsense and shove it, pal. This is the real deal Comment If you are a data centre provider with a new DevOps division that is actually just two blokes sat in a call centre who kind of know what DevOps is, then you're probably not doing DevOps.…

Beta label picked off and flicked in the bin Ansible has peeled the beta label off its revamped Galaxy App store, after giving fans six weeks to play around with it.…

Robo elbows bio Go pro A Google-designed artificial intelligence system has for the first time beaten a top human player at the board game Go.…

Flash as memory: What's not to like? Storage startup Plexistor has a persistent memory software product that enables applications to use storage memory and get 3-digit performance increases, using DRAM, flash and XPoint memory.…

He's our man Tesla’s controversial HR chief has pleaded with Wikipedians for their trust, in a style so unctuous it could make Dickens’ Uriah Heep blush.…

And Russia? That's too convenient A Ukrainian telecoms engineer has raised doubts about the widely reported link between BlackEnergy attacks and power outages in his country.…

Production shifts to Germany, US and Japan Texas Instruments is to shutter its semiconductor plant in Scotland with the ultimate loss of 400 jobs, the company has confirmed.…

Be a shame to waste the 'vast quantities' of lovely citizen data! UK Home Secretary Theresa May has called on police forces to use predictive analytics in crime prevention as a way of mining the "vast quantities of data" the public now generates.…

Press the big red password reset button anyway Website administration firm cPanel told customers that it had been hacked over the weekend, potentially exposing contact information in the process.…

'No flag-waving yet', says top cop, won't say 'it'll be easy' The deputy commissioner of the Met Police, Craig Mackey, has acknowledged that the force's IT strategy, which includes slashing jobs in a mega outsourcing deal with Steria, is not without risk.…

Fix your settings, or refresh your DNS? Give it a go and let us know A bug has struck Apple’s Safari, causing the browser to crash on iPhone, iPad and Mac.…

JSPatch is a time bomb waiting to explode, warns FireEye A system that app developers use to bypass Apple’s time-consuming procedures in order to issue “hot-patching” to App Store apps has inadvertently spawned a serious security risk for iOS app users.…

Coppers beg for info-sharing network at ICT Summit Coppers need a "network of networks" for the 43 police force systems to tackle the shift to "internet enabled crime", the heads of The National Police Chiefs’ Council and Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary have said.…

El Reg talks open with Equinix Facebook's Open Compute Project has staked out its next battlefield: the conservative world of the telco. The OCP Telco Project whichjust launched counts AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, EE, SK Telecom, Verizon, Nexius, Nokia Networks and Equinix as its foundation members.…

Noah Weiss enters, begs world to apply for jobs Noah Weiss, formerly the senior veep of product management at Foursquare, has been snagged by biz-chatter biz Slack to head up its new Search, Learning, and Intelligence group.…

Grabs package from drone, dumps it in your garage Google has been granted a patent for a "mobile delivery receptacle" - a vehicle designed to accept airborne drone deliveries and take them to a "secure location, such as into a garage" at the recipient's address.…

Digital world 'simply no substitute' for mates and booze The Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) has perhaps merely confirmed what all right-minded people already know: that those who have a local boozer in which to quaff ale and chew the fat with mates are "significantly happier" than wretched souls who do not.…

Medical records, addresses, dates of birth, and bank details all exposed according to insider A 0-day security breach at Lincolnshire County Council has exposed locals' medical records, addresses, and bank details, claimed an anonymous tipster, though the council denies any data was stolen.…

Mega grocer throwing rotten tomatoes at Amazon? Walmart has delivered on low-price promise and taken a swipe at soon to be arch enemy – by serving its OneOps platform onto Github.…

For poor old Goebbels, no offers at all… Berlin may be filling up with techie startups and desperate refugees, but one corner of the history-drenched German capital is failing to attract any new comers.…

'Storage focus is important and sustainable' says irate firm Comment The Wikibon consultancy has published an analysis saying that the move from NetApp's ONTAP 7-mode to clustered mode (cDOT) wasn't worth it, and suggesting ONTAP was not a great choice in several application areas.…

Two days to classify protest cinematic masterwork The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) has determined that Charlie Lyne's 10-hour Paint Drying contains "no material likely to offend or harm", and has accordingly awarded it a "suitable for all" U certificate.…

MP: You need 'greater IT expertise' in the boardroom Banks should be set "clear objectives and targets" on improving the performance of their IT systems in light of a number of recent major outages, the chairman of a prominent UK parliamentary committee has said.…

Microsoft also makes ground in councils' dash for digital IT service providers BT, IBM and Mouchel all took a double-digit hit on their share of the local government market over the last year as councils continue to run into the arms of Capita, according to research.…

Legendary director's doc ponders dark and light side of the networks that connect us