The Register

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.…

El Reg hack seeks storage solution for permanent relationship Since I've been at El Reg since it was all fields round here, readers can imagine I've accumulated quite a photo/video/misc rubbish collection over the years, and the time has arrived to address the issue of a proper permanent archive.…

Look at our mutual friend Imation. It had a nice board too +Comment Back in July last year activist investor the Clinton Group expressed its feelings about Violin Memory, saying: "If the Company's sales execution does not materially improve and our voice continues to remain unheard, we will have to seriously consider seeking the election of replacements to the Company's Board of Directors at the next annual meeting."…

'Octarine', surely, Pratchett petition proposes Campaigning Terry Pratchett aficionados have followed the lead of Lemmy fans in demanding that one of the four new elements recently admitted to the periodic table be named in honour of their hero.…

Miles Ward trashes Amazon's pricing as 'unpleasant surprise' Not to be outbid by AWS's latest price cut, Google has announced that it too is slashing the costs of its cloudy services.…

Memorex brand goes for $9.4m, corporate HQ for $11.5m +Comment Imation, now run by activist investor Clinton Group people, is selling the Memorex trademark – and two trademark licences associated with it – for $9.4m, while also disposing of its corporate headquarter facility in Oakdale, Minnesota, for $11.5m.…

One-time state monopoly promotes internal candidate Clive Selley is to become the new chief executive of BT Openreach, replacing incumbent Joe Garner, who is set to become chief exec of the Nationwide Building Society.…

Ding, ding – last call for loopholes To its credit the draft Investigatory Powers Bill seeks to substantially increase transparency around the powers that the authorities have to intercept our communications and hoover up everyone’s private data. To some extent, the current draft of the Bill achieves that laudable goal.…

More change ONTAP at NetApp NetApp in Europe has seen the resignation of its northern region head, Dave Allen.…

10 years of smartphone dominance is over Analysis Looking for a radical change in culture and product mix is Samsung, which has ridden high on the smartphone boom but is now refocusing its growth efforts on the IoT, chips and displays.…

Evilware rivals race to exploit the flaws stoopid folks don't fix Criminals behind some of the most potent exploit kits, Neutrino and RIG, are ramping up attacks slinging the latest ransomware and hosing users who have not applied recent Adobe Flash patches.…

Europe opens new internet arbitration service A new online platform that will resolve problems between European consumers and online retailers will open Saturday.…

NASA launches Planetary Defense Coordination Office to find near-Earth objects Criticised in 2014 for lax control over how it spent its asteroid-detection dollars, NASA has formalised its response, announcing last week the launch of a Planetary Defense Coordination Office.…

This year, next year, when? Containers are great. Without them, the cost of shipping materials and goods around the world would no doubt be considerably higher.…

US government data shows weekends are when Win 10 shines Our monthly look at desktop operating system market share has turned up something interesting: Windows 10 looks to be a hit at home but a laggard at work.…

Lightweight token-passing protocol suggested to deliver single sign-on OAuth is a standard, but like so many standards, there's a lot of implementations to choose from and that can make it hard to pass around tokens.…

Diablo black loading screen swapped out for flesh-fest Canadian student hacker Evan Andersen says NVIDIA graphics cards retain content users would rather not be preserved, such as the material appearing in web pages viewed in the supposedly-private "incognito mode" offered by Google's Chrome browser.…

New bits mean it really might be the year of Linux on the (virtual) desktop Version 4.4 of the Linux kernel has been finalised and released into the wild.…

Chipzilla promises BIOS patch for really hard maths bug Intel has confirmed it's pushing out a BIOS fix for a bug that can freeze its Skylake processors.…

With a zillion suppliers under the hood of most cars, this could get interesting General Motors (GM) has opened a bug bounty program to allow hackers to report vulnerabilities in its vehicles.…

When 'turn it off and turn it back on again' won't do Volkswagen has bowed to the inevitable and proposed fitting catalytic converters to some US vehicles affected by its emissions-test-cheating engine management software scandal.…

If this didn't work, the plucky lander is days away from bricking Deutsches Zentrum für Luft-und Raumfahrt e.V, better known as the German Aeropsace Center (DLR) yesterday made what it says is probably its all-but final attempt to wake the Philae lander on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.…

Proclaims Junos OS clean, takes out the trash by killing off Dual_EC in Screen OS anyway Juniper Networks has announced its own investigations have found none of the "oops ... how did that code get there" trouble in Junos OS and that it will kill off Dual Elliptic Curve (Dual_EC) encryption in ScreenOS.…

Reviewing the informative Turing’s Cathedral Book review It's a full four years since it was published, but Reg contributor Geoffrey G Rochat has finally gotten around to reading George Dyson's worthy tome Turing’s Cathedral. He finds it's not just a Best Book list lurker, but something actually worth reading.…

Apple closes out week with patches for Windows Apple has posted an update to its QuickTime media plugin, addressing multiple remote code execution flaws for Windows 7 and Windows Vista users,…

Blade Runner got robotics so wrong Comment In the Blade Runner universe the Nexus 6 replicant calling itself Roy Batty rolled off the production lines of the Tyrell Corporation today. Sadly, or some might say luckily, the tech industry hasn't yet caught up with Hollywood.…

And it's root, root, root all their files... The former scouting director of the St Louis Cardinals baseball club has admitted he illegally poked around in the player database of a Major League Baseball rival.…

Uncle Sam wants to cut these Daesh-bags off from social networks, encryption Senior US government executives and Silicon Valley's tech captains are sitting down together in San Jose, California, on Friday to try and sort out a way to combat terrorism online.…

It's 2016 – open relationships and fluid genders are its thing It can be tough to differentiate yourself in the increasingly crowded dating app market. Which means niches. And OkCupid believes it has found one.…

Early investors join former board chairman and CEO in suing NoSQL database biz Basho Technologies is being sued by its cofounding ex-CEO, who alleges a major investor caused a disastrous fall in the company's finances.…

Because why make things easy? Elon Musk's SpaceX team is going to make another attempt at landing a Falcon rocket at sea, despite already proving their point on land.…

Sure, NOW they figure out how to hide their records… The US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) – which handles sensitive files on millions of government workers and was thoroughly ransacked by hackers – is withholding thousands of documents from Congress, which is probing the cyber-attack.…

Cynical exercise or uncomfortable truths? A big fight has broken out between ISPs and their regulator, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), in the US.…

Something, something, something … exploiting a connection A Star Wars BB-8 internet of things toy comes with a vulnerability that leaves it open to malevolent influences of the Dark Side.…

Trolling, harassment frowned up. Passing port to the right is OK Jenkins has warned its more boisterous contributors that they face banishment from the automation server community if they fall foul of the code of conduct it finally got round to publishing this week.…

Former Tory adviser said the scheme is a 'ghastly mess' Claims by a former Conservative Party energy adviser that the government's £11bn smart meter project will be “a ghastly mess” have been dismissed by current energy secretary Amber Rudd.…

The SMB rush, the net loss not slight Barracuda's revenue streams are up slightly, both annually and sequentially, and the storage and cloud-connected security company's net loss also shrank sequentially as William "BJ" Jenkins's team got to grips with the business.…

Show us your science. What? You mean you don’t have any? The government’s chief advisor on health ignored more than 80 studies to produce her new Puritanical guidelines on booze – which asks Britons to forego their Friday drink.…

Power duo follow software supremo Mills Two more senior executives – one with veteran status - have exited IBM’s $16bn software business.…

Where's my bloody flying car? Here it is, sort of The "where's my bloody flying car?" protesters among you should take heart that the world may be a 23-minute autonomous flight closer to the reality of personal airborne transport with the unveiling of the EHang 184 "autonomous aerial vehicle".…

Sources whisper that it could go on for another week Juniper Networks' partners have complained about a planned systems upgrade at the company which created a number of difficulties over the last week.…

Fate of infraco might not be decided until 2017 says Ofcom UK comms regulator Ofcom's much-awaited digital communications review, which will determine whether to break BT's broadband monopoly by forcing a spin-off of Openreach, will not be released until late February at the earliest.…

Passport-sized portrait of King Felipe VI adorns council chamber Representatives of a Catalan town hall have been ordered to appear before a judge after fulfilling their legal obligation to display a portrait of the reigning monarch ... using a passport-sized portrait of King Felipe VI.…

Lenovo confirms batwings are still very much in evidence Reports of Motorola's death (well, of the iconic brand at least) are looking premature, so calm down guys, you'll still get to see your batwings.…

Tyupkin nasty said to have been used by alleged miscreants Romanian cops have taken down a suspected ATM gang that used malware to trick machines into disgorging their cash contents.…

3G/LTE connectivity via partnership with French MVNO Microsoft will include its own SIM card in some Windows 10 devices, thanks to a partnership with French mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) Transatel.…

PowerUp FPV tin-rattles its way to $460k For an example of just how far paper plane and drone tech have come since the historic launch of our Vulture 1 aircraft back in 2010, look no further than the PowerUp FPV - described as the "first ever paper airplane drone with a live streaming camera".…

Poor old Atos and Capita now doing manual admin A delayed IT system developed by the Department for Work and Pensions for its controversial benefits assessment contracts has cost the taxpayer £76m due to benefits assessments having to be done manually, according to a report by the National Audit Office.…

EZCast password susceptible to brute-force attack – report Vulnerabilities in the EZCast TV streaming stick can allow a hacker to take full control of home networks, steal data and plant bots, researchers at security firm Check Point have warned, with the TV device's flaws effectively handing over root shell control over networks in users’ homes or offices.…

Slurped alongside VoctalIQ and Perceptio Apple has acquired Emotient, a startup whose technology automates the analysis of facial expressions to measure the reaction of groups, and individuals, to events.…