The Register

Complainers take to... er... Microbabble platform Twitter is suffering a global outage due to an unknown service disruption.…

The great unwashed wander with wonder at exec's private shower and loo Now that Viglen boss Bordan Tkachuk has split, some of his underlings have marked his passing with some passings and markings of their own at the previously off-limits C-suite shower block.…

Food and Drug Admin wants medical device-makers to get better at infosec The US Food and Drug Administration has issued draft guidance requiring medical device manufacturers to up their security game and report major incidents to the agency.…

'Punting us won't make online ads suck less', chime miffed content killers Content crasher Adblock says it has been uninvited from an advertising industry confab after paying a pricey entrance fee.…

Very nasty mines in Democratic Republic of the Congo may be source of your smartmobe Amnesty International says children as young as seven are mining for Cobalt in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), with their efforts helping to create Lithium-ion batteries that may well end up in products offered by top-tier technology companies.…

Better drink up that bubbly guys, the good times are coming to an end IT outsourcing spend in Europe will continue its downward spiral this year, as cloud infrastructure purveyors gain a stronger foothold in the market and further push down mega deals, according to research.…

Fifth Tinba iteration 'Tinbapore' found and flagged The infamous Tinba financial trojan has been updated and is now targeting banks in the Asia Pacific region.…

Open letter calls on site to be more responsive and accelerate own development More than 1,100 maintainers of GitHub projects have put their names to an open letter expressing frustration that the famous software hub is ignoring them.…

Finnish fellow scores $10k bug bounty for reporting malformed HTML mess Video A stored XSS vuln in Yahoo! Mail has netted Finnish researcher Jouko Pynnönen of Klikki a US$10,000 bug bounty.…

Turnbull goes to Washington, calls for Coalition of the Blogging to defeat ISIL Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull has visited Washington, DC, and called for internet governance to be made independent of governments and a global no-hack pact.…

Also ponders punishment tax for those who dare to offshore manufacturing US Presidential Candidate Donald Trump has once again waded into matters technological, this time sketching an industry policy that would heavily tax US companies that don't manufacture on US soil.…

Revives ancient SYSmark dispute AMD has revived one of the oldest feuds in the industry, once again accusing Intel of fudging benchmark results and comparing Chipzilla's practices to VW's falsified diesel engine emissions tests.…

Windows XP shocker is 'willful negligence', OWASP boffin chimes. The pathology wing of the Royal Melbourne Hospital in the Australian state of Victoria is suffering from an virus infection on its Windows XP PCs.…

Industrial gateways also carry a debugging backdoor Advantech's EKI series of Modbus-to-TCP/IP gateways have a critical authentication bug, according to HD Moore of Rapid7.…

150 megawatt wind farm comes online in Indiana Amazon Web Services' aspiration to power its clouds with not much more than hot air are closer to fruition, after the company flicked the switch on its first wind farm.…

US National Science Foundation flings US$5 million at scientific computing infosec America's National Science Foundation is slinging US$5 million to help improve the security of scientific high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure.…

WRC 2015 failed, says FCC's O'Reilly America is threatening to “go it alone” on spectrum policy, again.…

Dept of Labor butts out, now all you need to do is get a job and move The United States has made a small-but-important change to the E-3 visa, an instrument that allows skilled Australians to work in the nation.…

Look, there's Wildfly as well ... Red Hat has kicked open the beta program for its Jboss Enterprise Application Application Platform 7, and planted containers right at the heart.…

You won't be climbing walls with those sticky pads, mate A team of scientists from the University of Cambridge has disagreeably grounded Spider-Man after concluding that were the archnohuman crimefighter to use gecko-style sticky pads to scale buildings, they'd need to measure 40 per cent of his body surface.*…

All your stuff is readable by Uncle Sam. Worldwide Europeans should sit up and take more notice of Microsoft’s lawsuit against the US government over secret access to their data.…

Social networking site's founder finally pulls the plug Friends Reunited is finally shutting shop - news that will surprise most people by the fact that it still exists today.…

Disrobed performance artist rumpus at Paris's Musée d'Orsay A Luxembourg performance artist earned herself a cuffing over the weekend after she stripped off in front of Edouard Manet's Olympia at Paris's Musée d'Orsay.…

No Scope for problems after this. Right? Scopes, the controversial feature in Ubuntu, is being “gracefully retired”, says Canonical.…

Apply now to earn megabux, free accom in Manchester Hey, teenage hackers, do you want to infilitrate GCHQ to become the next Edward Snowden? The spooks are offering £250 a week - money you'll need to save for when you're subsequently awarded accommodation at Her Majesty's luxury resort at Belmarsh.…

Cabbie's wife tries to put Uber genie back in bottle A group has launched a campaign to raise funds for a judicial review of TfL's decision to grant Uber a licence in 2012.…

No prizes for guessing who the prime suspect is IT systems at Kiev's main airport were floored over the weekend, sparking a renewed warning from Ukraine's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-UA) about further BlackEnergy malware-based attacks.…

World Economic Forum scariness Robot overlords will cause a net loss of over five million human jobs by 2020, according to analysis by the World Economic Forum (WEF) from Switzerland's Davos ski resort.…

Did you scoop the goodies? Late last year The Register teamed up with Samsung SEAP to run a competition especially for Android developers. We think this was a resounding success, with several hundred entries and a proverbial sackful of fabulous apps for the perusal of the judges.…

However, Garda says no army bomb disposal team called Apple's European headquarters in Cork, Ireland were evacuated this morning after threatening emails were received by the company.…

Join the discussion at ISE 2016 in Amsterdam Promo Need to keep abreast of the latest IT developments in AV? Make sure you sign up for Integrated Systems Europe, four days of conference, seminars and exhibitions at Amsterdam’s RAI (9-12 February 2016).…

But don't think I'm not watching you, data-slurper tech firms... Speaking at a digital innovation conference in Munich on Sunday, the European Union's competition commissioner warned of her interest in internet companies' big data slurpage.…

What Wales doesn't want you to know Comment Wikipedia's 15th birthday has brought its predictable spate of news coverage, some of it thoughtful, some of it filled with the inevitable barrage of spin and half-truths issuing from Wikimedia HQ.…

London mayor says 3-year delay could run on longer A major delay to the Metropolitan Police's new command-and-control system responsible for handling 999 calls will cost the tax payer £25m, it has emerged.…

Also learns a few new languages Dashlane last week unveiled a cross-platform redesign and support for five new languages with a redesign of its password management tool.…

Vulturebot death machine? A lovely idea The news this week that the BBC is to reboot its celebrated robo-deathmatch series Robot Wars prompted much comment from our beloved readers, and amid the excitement, Sleepypete posed the provocative question: "Anyone else hoping that SPB turn their talents to making an all conquering, all destroying, punyhuman enslaving Vulturebot?"…

Why would India reject it? Here's why... Comment Who could possibly be against free internet access? This is the question Mark Zuckerberg asks in a piece for the Times of India in which he claims Facebook’s Free Basics service “protects net neutrality”.…

Smartphone photo of lock keyways enough to produce ready-to-print CAD drawings 32c3 Hackers have been gifted with an online web service that can produce blueprints for 3D printed keys from nothing more than a photograph of a lock.…

First stage's dicky knee folds on touchdown

ARM-based servers, from the Guizhou Province to you! Qualcomm has struck a US$280 million joint venture with the government of China's Guizhou Province that will see the two organisations design server chips in China.…

Yes, you can run Windows 7, but only on hardware fit for Windows 10 In a stunning example of consensus-building, Microsoft has somehow persuaded the big names of silicon that it would be better for all concerned if they quietly euthanize Windows 7 and 8.1.…

Investors want to know vendors are cloudy but fine, so bean-counters paint a pretty picture There's no way to tell just how successful your suppliers are in the cloud, because nobody's counting cloud cash consistently.…

Password vault-plundering phishing bait lands on Github Shmoocon Cloud castle for passwords LastPass has introduced mandatory sign in requirements for all new devices after security researcher Sean Cassidy dropped code allowing criminals to plunder vaults with mirror-perfect phishing attacks.…

Support for version X to X+2 upgrades coming in Fedora 24 Red Hat senior quality assurance engineer Adam Williamson has revealed that the Fedora community is trying to deliver what it's calling “N-1” upgrades whereby it becomes possible upgrade from version X of Fedora to version X+2 without having to first install version X+1.…

Unconditional call forwarding and silent mode means potent pwning. Malware-makers are stepping up the assault on Android handsets and are now quietly redirecting phone calls to steal voice-based two factor authentication details.…

700,000 comets seems like an awful lot. So what is going on around Tabby's Star? It's still not an alien megastructure, but the strangely-dimming sun known as Tabby's Star isn't being occasionally occluded by comets.…

And the price is … whatever the cloud says you'll pay. And maybe more IBM has introduced a new cloud service it calls “dynamic pricing” that says a lot about where online retailing, IBM and its relationship with partners is going.…

Deutscheland flack for Facebook's Friend Finder feature The long-running dispute between Facebook and Germany's consumer watchdogs is all over bar the shouting.…

Five search APIs to die in mid-February after June 2011 death notice Google has followed through on its 2011 promise to kill of some search APIs.…