The Register

Refugees would fill 176 double-decker buses, BBC explains The BBC has published an entertaining analysis of the emissions of a blown-out natural gas well near Los Angeles, which is releasing so much methane that LA county supervisor Mike Antonovich was moved over the weekend to describe the disaster as "a mini-Chernobyl".…

Will v2.0 incompatibilities leave users dazed and confused? Ansible has released version 2.0 of its eponymous automation platform, marking what it claims is its “most ambitious” release to date by switching its code name conventions from Van Halen songs to Led Zeppelin tracks.…

Deciphering the Underground, one paper at a time Promo "It's time for the security community to take a step back and get a fresh perspective on threat assessment and attacks.” So say the organisers of Enigma, a new conference designed for IT security professionals in industry and research.…

Humanity versus GWX: Are we ready for the battle? RoTM Windows 7 and 8 installations are finding new ways to re-enable Microsoft’s intrusive “Get Windows 10” nagware, even when users disable it.…

Zombie master suspects tracked to Bosnia An international police investigation against the DD4BC DDoS extortion gang has led to one suspect being arrested and one detained, Europol said on Tuesday.…

HPE showers 'petabyte-scale' SDN firm Scality in gold As noted before, HPE and Scality have formally announced a partnership, with, according to a source close to the companies, HPE making a $10m investment in Scality.…

Good luck, prisoners The Ministry of Justice has extended yet another chunk of its mega National Offender Management IT contracts, in a further sign the department is struggling to break away from its decade-long big IT agreements.…

An efficient new spin on old school tungsten tech Scientists at MIT have been dabbling with some tech which could see the incandescent lightbulb make a comeback at energy efficiencies far exceeding current LED and compact fluorescent (CFL) alternatives.…

Zombie IEs 8, 9 and 10 limp on A huge chunk of Microsoft users will today be cut off from the computing giant’s security lifeline, for January 12 is the day when Redmond will stop releasing security fixes for a swathe of legacy versions of Internet Explorer.…

Who’s talking what, where Reg Events We’re thrilled to announce the first tranche of speakers and conference sessions for Continuous Lifecycle London – the DevOps, agile, and continuous delivery conference being staged by The Register and Heise from May 3-5.…

And Facebook’s CTO ... AI? The technology world's top executives gathered in New York this week to pay homage to the enormous benefits artificial intelligence will deliver to the world with nary a word from the Google chairman about the obvious and immediate existential threat it poses.…

All you need is a screwdriver and a smartphone Security researchers have discovered a glaring security hole that exposes the home network password of users of a Wi-Fi-enabled video doorbell. The issue – now resolved – underlines how default configurations of IoT components can introduce easy to exploit security holes.…

New hire comes from CIA-funded document management firm Slack has just hired a Chief Security Officer, with former Palantir CISO Geoff Belknap coming in to shore up the security of a cloud-based operation holding an awful lot of sensitive business communications.…

Also appoints former Google exec to another seat The Wikimedia Foundation has ousted a community-elected board trustee, whose seat now lies empty. At the same time, it has also appointed two hand-picked trustees for two other vacant spots: a former Google executive with a controversial record and a Mountain View CFO. These are just two changes that were announced quietly over the Christmas dead period.…

Deal will create 'agile' services, apparently. Erm, ever heard of G-Cloud? Southend-on-Sea Borough Council is the latest local authority to build its own dedicated data centre, with the council ready to splash up to £1.5m housing its own "hybrid cloud" services.…

Storage software startup wth mild XtremIO flavour Israeli high-techers strike again. Elastifile, a startup developing storage software for all-flash arrays, has gained $35m in its second round of funding.…

And we need a 'harmonised framework' for spectrum allocation as well The EU's telecoms market should be regulated by a single authority, two committees at the European Parliament have said.…

Ninja malware in multi-pronged attack A multi-stage attack campaign targeting Asian governments and (perhaps) non-governmental organisations has been uncovered.…

Independent security advice can keep you out of The Register's security section The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) has published the third version of its developer security bible trimming the fat and offering peer-reviewed and tested means of building more secure apps.…

I don't look like 'James Brown on the run' says court-dodger A man wanted by police in Ohio has sent in a selfie to replace the photo authorities have used in a crime alert.…

No more sudo cp -R * /dev/DVD The National Security Agency (NSA) has decided it really needs to catch the next Edward Snowden before he turns whistleblower/traitor (strike one according to your political orientation).…

Odds of revival: tiny. Odds of brick on comet: unbackable Sunday's attempt to make contact with the Philae lander on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko has not succeeded.…

135-years for yanking 11 bank cards, on top of previous 199-year stretch A 26 year-old Turkish carder has received a record 332-year prison sentence for defrauding 54 customers.…

Improved VMware-to-Azure backup service shows, again, the weakness of vCloud Air Microsoft has flicked the switch on an enhanced version of its Azure Site Recovery (ASR) for VMware customers.…

And for good measure gives XenDesktop and XenMobile a tweak or three Citrix has offloaded its CloudPlatform products to Accelerite, bought Comtrade's System Center Operations Manager management packs and tweaked some of its software.…

Don't worry too much about CSRF, security wonks chirp Drupal is switching to secured channels for updating its content management system, after IOActive security bod Fernando Arnaboldi reported it sought patches in the clear.…

SOHOpeless vuln gives attackers free VoIP calls The FRITZ!Box range of home broadband routers, popular in Germany and Australia, needs patching against a variety of remote code execution bugs.…

SGI scores deal for new 'Cheyenne' super SGI and partner DataDirect Networks will spend 2016 beating a path to America's National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), which named them to deliver its next system in 2017.…

No, you're not the worst sysadmin in the world if you can't log on to a new UCS box Someone's palm is digging a hole into their face at Cisco, which has just admitted it shipped a bunch of servers with the wrong default password.…

Well done, thanks for giving PHBs everywhere a great idea for 2016 Staff at one of Britain's oldest national newspapers got a shock on Monday morning when they found monitoring sensors installed under their desks.…

Hm, why could that be? Could it be to run things like Docker? IBM has been spotted bringing the open-source Go programming language to its System z mainframes.…

Vows appeal after collecting IP addresses and listing user's personal details on blog Freelancer.com is “exercising our rights to appeal” a finding by the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) that it displayed “reckless indifference to the privacy rights of the complainant.”…

Future of one of the world's rarest web names under question This time next week, one of the internet's rarest domains – the single-letter X.org – is up for renewal.…

Launches legal probe into who told regulator what, and when Sick of the slings and arrows of antitrust regulators, Qualcomm is demanding to know what its tattling customers have been saying to South Korea's Fair Trade Commission.…

Computers could be easily hijacked or trashed via security holes Updated PCs running Trend Micro's Antivirus on Windows can be hijacked, infected with malware, or wiped clean by any website, thanks to a vulnerability in the security software.…

Research bods tear out hair, argue for new rules and lasers A UK research group has warned that commercial drones represent a terrorist threat and new laws should limit what payload they can carry.…

Plastic covering corrects cockups The explosive side effects of overheated lithium-ion batteries have long been documented, and have caused everything from groin burns to the suspension of Boeing 787 flights.…

No laws, policies or secret agreements with companies, urge crypto-eggheads A group of 200 experts have urged the world's governments not to introduce backdoors into encryption products in an open letter posted Monday.…

It's not called a bribe when the government does it The state of New York has given its blessing to the proposed merger of Time Warner Cable and Charter Communications, winning itself a nice boost in network speeds in the process.…

CEO says board has the right commitment and experience Violin Memory's CEO has given the company's board a public pat on the back, snubbing activist investors as he does so.…

BT cockup believed to be at heart of TITSUP communication Brits using mobile networks EE, O2, Giffgaff, and BT Mobile are unable to make calls this evening, UK time, amid an ongoing network breakdown.…

Pass the pliers for the supplier's testicles, we might need them This Damn War Hello and welcome to a brand-new Register series taken from the front line of high tech and business, encompassing war stories from our readers and writers about clumsy contractors, slippery suppliers, and the machinations of management. It's tales of fail, "I told you so" moments, and of getting away with it.…

The muso was the medium Obituary David Bowie, the iconic rock star, has died aged 69 following an 18-month battle against cancer.…

But here's why that actually means something in the real world +Comment DataCore has recorded the fastest ever SPC-1 microsecond response times, which are three times faster than all-flash EMC VNX. Together with DDN it demonstrates that parallel IO processing using multiple cores is set to become the new norm.…

Chill, the ‘vulnerability' has been fixed, people informed A security breach at European data centre firm Interxion has exposed the contact details of thousands of its customers, although no financial information is thought to be involved.…

Cunning plan to retrieve swallowed gold chain Mumbai cops have chalked up another success for their preferred method of retrieving swallowed stolen goods: obliging the thief to eat bananas until the booty is expelled.…

Only 11% of Brit orgs in advanced stage of deployment UK companies are failing to adopt key requisites for DevOps success, according to a new survey.…

Tooth-poor watchdog points out weakness of court Blighty's data watchdog has moaned that the UK's courts needs greater powers to impose penalties on data thieves after a woman was slapped with a £1,000 for flogging 28,000 customer records for £5,000.…