The Register

Don’t get scalded by this scam, you canny folk Miscreants are slinging fraudulent Chrome extension trojans at gamers that, if installed, will empty victims’ Steam inventory.…

Just the thing for those pesky noisy networks Feature Bridgeworks has found way to improve wide area TCP/IP transmission of large, streamed files that compensates for packet loss, radically improving the performance of NetApp SnapMirror and SnapVault which are hobbled by packet loss.…

The (social) world is not enough, for Zuckerberg Facebook started 2016 with the bold claim that it intends to eradicate phone numbers and replace web browsing, but the Social Network has a mountain to climb before Facebook Messenger becomes the centre of our online world.…

Highway to the danger zone Nine out of 10 enterprise mobile devices are using out-of-date operating systems, according to a new study, with upgrade issues increasing users' exposure to breaches, Duo Security warns.…

It's a postcode lottery and we're not winning anything Opinion Government technology promotion agency Innovate UK, the former Technology Strategy Board (TSB), surprised many last year when it agreed to spend no less than £800,000 on a piece of software that would “minimise building waste” sent to landfill by construction companies.…

Exploit takes a long time to cook Windows, but gives hackers a menu of evil options Shmoocon Foxglove Security bod Stephen Breen has strung together dusty unpatched Windows vulnerabilities to gain local system-level access on Windows versions up to 8.1.…

Password? All you need is your phone, fingerprint, PIN, mother's maiden name ... Analysis Intel has baked multi-factor authentication defenses into its sixth-generation Core processors.…

Could it be bots that fall for for those 'One Weird Trick' ads? Here's hoping! Botnets will inflict a massive US$7.2 billion in damages against online advertisers this year according to research by ad security company White Ops.…

Can VR, console GPUs, Zen desktop paydays keep mini-Chipzilla in the game? Analysis AMD claims there is light at the end of its tunnel, but the beleaguered chip maker is having a hard time pointing it out.…

Big Red helpfully (?) only reveals the reasons for patches to those with support deals Oracle has just pushed out its quarterly batch of critical patches, so sysadmins had best get busy.…

HBM2 interface means you'll get data in and out at 256GBps, in lovely 4GB slabs Samsung says it has started making a new and faster form of DRAM.…

Readers share tales of 20-year-old Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet on PC-XT, DR-DOS and aged NT box used on live DR site Last week we brought you news of a server decommissioned after eighteen years and ten months of continuous operation.…

Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn will all be visible this week, in a neat line Go buy a lottery ticket, dear readers, because for the next month the planets really will be in alignment.…

Hardware is so 2013, especially when it ties you to MPLS Riverbed has announced its first acquisition since 2013: German-based software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) outfit Ocedo.…

Blasphemy ban-hammer placed in the hands of local authorities Pakistan has allowed YouTube to traverse its digital borders again, after Google agreed to oversight by the nation's telecoms regulators.…

FBI memo warns of high-tech attacks in Silicon Valley A security memo from the FBI and Department of Homeland Security has warned of the dangers from a high-tech attack against crowds flocking to Silicon Valley for this year's Super Bowl jamboree.…

Malformed HTTP methods blamed Cisco has patched a vulnerability in its Web Security Appliance that allows unauthenticated remote attackers to bypass security controls.…

Entropy, it's still a thing The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and CableLabs are worried that network function virtualisation (NFV) could fracture, and have hosted a confab in Louisville, Colorado this week designed to keep everybody marching more or less in step.…

A BITI of good news Juniper Networks has snagged a share of US$24m being spent to upgrade the US Air Force's networks.…

Decision may kill off UK government spying law The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled that mass surveillance is illegal, in a little-noticed case in Hungary.…

Big Blue continues exciting transformation into a new, less profitable company IBM continues to take a beating as it struggles to transition its business to a focus on cloud and analytics products.…

Your photoframe watches you back, and is a snitch to boot Princeton boffins have looked at the networking behavior of a bunch of Internet of Things kit and found – stop me if you've heard this one – device makers aren't paying attention.…

Don’t die without a digital will A Canadian widow won't have to go through the courts to get the password to her dead husband's iPad after Apple, in the face of media pressure, withdrew its insistence on legal action.…

Apple addresses fresh crop of remote code execution holes Apple has posted an update for iOS, including patches for 13 CVE-listed security flaws.…

Well, what did you expect? The UK government's official voice encryption protocol, around which it is hoping to build an ecosystem of products, has a massive backdoor that would enable the security services to intercept and listen to all past and present calls, a researcher has discovered.…

Step 2: ??? Step 3: /# Oh look, it's another Linux kernel bug that allows a local user to escalate themselves to root.…

White House pardons him for good measure An Iranian hacker who attempted to steal military secrets from an American company has been sent back to the Islamic republic with a pardon, as part of a prisoner exchange program.…

Tens of millions in legal fees to stop sales of 4-year old phones, hope it was worth it A US district court has formally banned the sale of nine Samsung devices, found to have infringed on Apple's patents, in America.…

Old kit, poor patching and supply chain vulns. opening the door to attack Only half (54 per cent) of businesses are confident in their ability to verify and defend against an attack, according to a study by networking giant Cisco.…

People, please 'do not wind, twist or pinch your cords. Here's a free replacement' Microsoft is initiating a global voluntary recall of Surface Pro power cords amid concerns of over-heating.…

No, really. That's exactly what his latest report argues The British government's Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir Mark Walport, has done a Dilbert and declared that the UK needs a blockchain.…

The draft Investigatory Powers Bill debate goes on IPB The UK government has restated it has no desire to ban strong encryption, nor will it require surreptitious access to communications, in a response to several accusations levelled against it.…

As endorsements go, this is pretty neat NASA’s Ames Research Centre is moving many files into Amazon’s S3 cloud using Avere’s gateway tech.…

HFS means HDS is taking on Pure and EMC XtremIO directly Hitachi Data Systems is taking its marketing attack direct to XtremIO and Pure Storage with a brand new, entry-level, all-flash array storage line, the HFS A series, separate from its existing VSP and HUS arrays.…

Irish forum goes away with the fairies for a while Productivity in the Emerald Isle may have peaked on Tuesday with an outage of popular forum boards.ie coming on top of Twitter's TITSUP moment.…

It's enterprise-tastic, says Tosh Toshiba has fashioned a fifth enterprise SSD variant by cutting the entry-level PX04’s endurance in half, and fitting it for another read-intensive market niche.…

European Court sat on the levy and moaned EU governments don’t have to impose a levy on blank media to compensate copyright holders for losses from private copies, the European Court of Justice has decreed. It’s actually perfectly lawful to compensate them from a general fund, as Spain and Finland do, the Court clarified today.…

Andrew Tridgell to discuss 'craziest' ArduPilot project Our Oz readers attending the forthcoming linux.conf.au 2016 shindig in Geelong might like to catch Andrew Tridgell's presentation on "Helicopters and Rocket-Planes", which will include a look at our Low Orbit Helium Assisted Navigator (LOHAN) Vulture 2 spaceplane.…

People in (chalcogenide) glass houses shouldn’t throw stones Comment So, is XPoint memory phase-change memory ... or not? An IM Flash Technologies co-CEO just gave a strong signal it might be phase-change, but doubt remains as Intel and Micron have kept their secret process ingredient hidden.…

Top judge: Key part of Terrorism Act breaks human rights law The Court of Appeal has dismissed a case brought by the partner of journalist Glenn Greenwald against his detention at Heathrow Airport – while stating that a key part of the Terrorism Act breaches European human rights law.…

It's like pulling a smoking car off the road... Oh, hang on Last December, Microsoft intercepted traffic on users’ PCs and helped break up a botnet. And nobody complained. So the company very tentatively asked at a session on ethics and policy in Brussels this week whether it should do more.…

Cloud, data, analytics, database and sales changes The ever-exciting SAP, Europe’s largest software maker, has kicked off 2016 with a management reshuffle.…

First job: join up our networks to EE's BT has appointed Howard Watson as its group chief information officer - in a game of internal musical chairs that will see incumbent CIO Clive Selley head up Openreach.…

Could allow online tat firm to sell directly from Chinese factories to the U.S. Amazon China has registered to provide ocean freight services to the US, according to an online database seen by freight forwarding company Flexport.…

Walmart-owned store patches hole, but it was open for nearly 2 years Updated Retailer Asda dragged its heels for nearly two years before finally this week tackling a set of security vulnerabilities reported to it by a UK consultant. Asda has acknowledged the flaws - which Paul Moore, who discovered them, argues offer up an account hijack risk - but played down their significance.…

RoCE road to banishing storage array network access latency Comment Mangstor and its NVMe fabric-accessed array has been mentioned a couple of times in The Register, with claims that is pretty much the fastest external array available in terms of data access speed.…