The Register

Not only did we not infringe, you're (allegedly) breaking the laws yourself, claims biz Arista Networks has countersued Cisco, accusing the network giant of unfair competition practices.…

Worried about privacy, security? McSweeny has an answer FTC Commissioner Terrell McSweeny supports the idea of giving people access to the source code to stuff to ensure better security and privacy in the era of the internet of things.…

Bonkers bluegrass broadband backbone battle brings bundled bluster, boisterous bickering Yet another US state is weighing up the idea of laying thousands of miles of cable to create its own broadband network.…

End-of-month deadline looms for vital data sharing pact United States and European Commission officials have promised they are doing everything possible to reach agreement over transatlantic data-sharing before a critical deadline at the end of this week.…

Dell-EMC combo to be top dog in 2017 enterprise on-premises spend In its inaugural Voice of the Enterprise: Storage Study, 451 Research forecasts public cloud storage spend to double in two years – with NetApp, HPE and IBM falling down the supplier rankings as Amazon's AWS and Microsoft's Azure bulldoze their way in.…

Spinning out disk business ... or shrinking it, maybe Toshiba, recovering from a self-caused $1.3bn accounting scandal, could exit peripheral chip businesses while concentrating on its NAND core – with exit from the disk business a possibility too.…

White House creates new agency for security clearances The US government is creating a new agency to process background checks for federal employees and contractors seeking security clearance.…

Medicine is world's worst industry for data security, it seems Usenix Enigma When it comes to IT security, the medical world is by far the most inept at data security. So say top researchers at the first Usenix Enigma security conference, held this week in San Francisco.…

All you need is that 300 qubit computer in your back drawer Big Data? Check! Machine Learning? Check! Quantum computers? Check! Seth Lloyd, the self-dubbed "Quantum Mechanic", has ticked every box with a new (entirely theoretical) paper announcing a potential solution to problems unfeasible even before "the most powerful modern supercomputers".…

Migrating to CDOT might not be the best option for you. Just saying The Wikibon consultancy, in what amounts to a sustained analytical assault on NetApp’s product strategy, claims NetApp 7-Mode array users shouldn’t update to CDOT (Clustered DataONTAP), its latest FAS array operating system, and should think seriously about moving workloads to other suppliers’ systems.…

Seven days is a long time in cloud Microsoft engineers are struggling to fix a seven-day-old, self-inflicted Office 365 IMAP outage.…

Impressive camouflage ability baffles boffins Aegean wall lizards have demonstrated the impressive ability to hide from avian predators by camouflaging themselves against rocks "that best match the colour of their backs".…

Now you can only be a 'supporter' with no voting rights The Linux Foundation has quietly amended its bylaws so that individual members, now called "supporters", no longer have the right to elect board members.…

They grow up so fast these days Repository manager GitLab has spat out version 50 of its platform, showing how the release numbers pile up fast these days.…

Does its name rhyme with Threeple's Besmublic of Diner? Security researchers have lifted the lid on an apparently Chinese government-sponsored hacking group which has progressed from targeting activists to setting its sights on foreign government organisations gathering intelligence on the same targets.…

Puts fire under taxman's 'sweetheart' settlement with Alphabet Inc British politicians will tackle Google parent Alphabet Inc and the taxman over an official £130m back tax settlement.…

Just 24 people signed up to poorly advertised scheme Poor advertising and expensiveness have been blamed for the woeful uptake of the government's subsided satellite broadband scheme, with just 24 people having so far signed up.…

Davos talk reveals Middle Kingdom plans to break Western tech hegemony China is making more moves as it tries to set up an indigenous and patent-protected semi-conductor chip capability.…

Is this really the way we want to do our politics now? Comment “Google will shrug off this week's tax woes with a flick of its robotic tail, and politicians and tax campaigners will declare 'success'," or so I predicted here not two years ago. The ad giant would make a symbolic gesture on paying UK corporation tax, and we’d all be told to go home. For once, I’m afraid, I was almost completely correct.…

Hmm, wonder why it chose Emerald Isle location? Facebook is to open its second data centre in Europe, this time in the corporation tax-lite Republic of Ireland.…

Add it to the list, under overcrowding and lateness Commuters in the south east of England, already angry about recent timetable changes and delays, have been further incensed by basic security blunders by rail operator c2c as it tried to placate passenger disquiet with a new compensation form on its website.…

Jack Dorsey shows importance of being earnest Jack Dorsey waved goodbye to five senior Twitter execs over the weekend, and didn’t disappoint avid company-watchers when he issued yet another memo worthy of Oscar Wilde.…

Erle Robotics to develop 'Hardware Robot Operating System' Spanish firm Erle Robotics has secured funding from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as part of the Robotics Fast Track (RFT) programme.…

Biz slurps £1.7bn, leaves 5.7 million without proper broadband - report BT has dismissed calls by more than 100 MPs to separate broadband arm Openreach as "wrong-headed", in response to a damning report that found that despite the telco having received £1.7bn in subsidies to get Britain online, 5.7 million people still cannot access the internet.…

Cooking the books? Not us! Apple chief executive Tim Cook met European competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager in Brussels last week, apparently to discuss the European Commission's investigation into the company's tax affairs.…

'Reset' deadline kicks the problem into the long grass Analysis Universal Credit feels like it has been around since time immemorial. If the programme ever arrives, its implementation will have spanned three Parliaments - outlasting the careers of many MPs.…

'Someone there should be beaten to a pulp with a keyboard' Update Sainsbury's Bank website still relies on insecure cryptography protocols that more security conscious organisations have abandoned as obsolete.…

The two best motorbike Bluetooth headsets Review Riding the twisties on a motorbike is the great escape for some of us; the scent of the air, the rush of wind, the push through the corners, and the sound of the engine.…

That works out at £13m a year Google is to pay £130m to settle a tax dispute with the British Government over how it account for revenues booked in the UK.…

Robots wars, encryption battles, bitcoin skirmishes Sketch It used to be that the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in the Swiss ski resort of Davos was all about finance and politics.…

Generators, power supplies, and contingency plans all around With a major snowstorm set to hit the East Coast of the US tonight, datacenter facilities in the hardest hit areas are hunkering down for what looks to be a rough weekend.…

More devices are dodgy and hackers are cruising for targets Fortinet has admitted that many more of its networking boxes have the SSH backdoor that was found hardcoded into FortiOS – with FortiSwitch, FortiAnalyzer and FortiCache all vulnerable.…

The hills are alive with the sound of cursing An Austrian engineering firm is counting the cost of poor IT security after admitting €50m ($54m) has gone missing from its accounts following a "cyber fraud."…

Cable companies react exactly how you'd expect, too The US state of West Virginia is debating whether it should get into the ISP business, thanks to a new bill calling for a state-run fiber broadband network.…

CEO confirms app hosting service will shut down at end of February Platform-as-a-service upstart dotCloud will shut down next month after its parent Cloud Control filed for bankruptcy.…

Mobile market is 'still very early' says founder Appcelerator, a company that provides tools for mobile software development, has been acquired by Axway, a provider of data integration tools and services based in San Jose, California.…

Minister slurped undisclosed gifts from biz, claim journos Japan's chief negotiator in the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal has been accused of taking bribes worth $100,000 from a construction company.…

Blubber-burning battleship is moo-ving with the times The USS Stockdale, a guided-missile-launching destroyer, has set sail powered by an unusual fuel – waste beef fat.…

Huge policy U-turn has ISP up in arms The Swedish government is considering overturning its long-held opposition to internet filtering – so says one of the country's most high-profile ISPs.…

File sharing app arrives on Microsoft's tricky new OS Microsoft Windows 10 users are about to get more done with Dropbox on their PCs, notebooks and tablets.…

Ping ping ping ping ping ping ping – banana node In some offices, you have to ask around for the Wi-Fi password, or find it written down on a bit of paper. In others, you do it by poking a banana.…

Which came first: information or the need to compute it? Big Data and All That In attempting any technological history, one of the traditional difficulties is to know where to begin. This difficulty follows from a flawed assumption that there is a story that is linear and began in one place at one time.…

Banks currently banned from 'Bitcoin-related risks' The People's Bank of China (PBOC), China's central bank, hopes to launch its own virtual currency to cut the cost of handling paper money and to give the government more control of the country's money supply.…

Disclosing minor silliness no longer required, say judges Mandatory pre-employment criminal record checks have been ruled unlawful in the UK, following a ruling today in the High Court.…

On-prem software business up SAP has reported a drop in net profits for its most recent quarter and for 2015 despite an accelerating cloud business.…

First they came for the forums. Then the lottery. Now... A number of Irish government-related and public sector websites were knocked offline by an apparent DDoS attack on Friday morning.…

A world without buffer overflows is what our children shall inherit The latest release of Rust, the secure systems programming language which will hopefully do away with buffer overflows, features a stabilised core library which should encourage developers' confidence in adopting it – at least for some smaller projects at the time being..…