The Register

I like a party with 78% N and 21% O Something for the Weekend, Sir? Welcome back. Just think, it’s been a week already since glum users began reluctantly re-occupying seats that had been blissfully empty during most of Christmas and New Year.…

Semi-seasonal stocking filler was caught up in Oracle's Android fight Comment While you were starting to think Christmas thoughts in November, Google quietly slipped out a pre-seasonal gift of its own: OpenJDK for Android N – the next edition of its smartphone operating system.…

The ordinary heroine turned cultural and computing icon A few of computing’s most vivid characters have become cultural icons. Most are from the last few decades, such as Steve Jobs and Alan Turing, but last month the University of Oxford held an academic symposium to mark the 200th birthday of one of the first: Ada, Countess of Lovelace, born on 10 December, 1815.…

H. Moser & Cie poke fun at Sir Jony's precious arm candy A Swiss watchmaker is poking fun at Apple, and getting quite a bit of publicity, with a US$25,000 mechanical tribute to the Apple Watch.…

Security bods laugh at fear-monger failure Video Eye-watering claims that video games are secure communications hubs for terrorists have been shot down in a demonstration by security wonks who tested claims nation-states could not intercept chatter and that messages can be written in bullet holes.…

Data model should take account of biases Businesses should take steps to avoid causing "harmful exclusion or discrimination" when using aggregated consumer data that they have analysed, a US regulator has said.…

Bought a shiny IP KVM? Uh-oh 32c3 Checkpoint malware men Yaniv Balmas and Lior Oppenheim have developed an air gap-hopping malware system that can quietly infect, plunder, and maintain persistence on networked and physically separated computers.…

Growing like Topsy Global cloud revenues jumped 28 per cent year-on-year to reach $110bn (£75bn) in the 12 months to September 2015.…

Boffins turn up a couple of protocol vulns in Facebook's login standard German boffins believe there are protocol flaws in Facebook's ubiquitous OAuth protocol that render it vulnerable to attack.…

Modders at risk Google has punted from its Play Store 13 apps, including one installed a million times and capable of gaining persistent root, downloading additional apps, and leaving fake positive reviews.…

Network outage froze updates Australia's Bureau of Meteorology seems to be returning to normal, after an unspecified network failure downed much of its operations this morning.…

And only 7 per cent of antivirus packages can block it IBM's X-Force security team is warning of new malware preying on Japanese bank customers. The software nasty is stealthy enough to evade the vast majority of antivirus packages, we're told.…

$128 million up for grabs Australia's Department of Industry, Innovation and Science is taking applications from the telco and ISP sectors for grants to help them cope with data retention.…

ESXi, Fusion, Player and Workstation have in-guest privilege escalation bug VMware sysadmins, get patching: the virtualisation outfit has released updates to its ESXi, Fusion, Player and Workstation software to block out a privilege-escalation vulnerability.…

Choose your adventure: Windows 10 or Linux Intel's lifted the lid on a refresh of its PC-in-your-pocket Compute Sticks, with new Atom and Skylake Core m-based models.…

Fun fact of the day, we think you'll find AT&T says it has replaced nearly half of the software in its vast operations with open-source software-defined networking (SDN) code.…

Official from the Redmond horse's mouth If you're using a PC running Windows 7 or 8 you may be getting a little sick of endless popup screens telling you to upgrade to version 10, and worried about inadvertently installing the upgrade as part of a security update.…

Nothing like a good game of sueball to get the migraines pounding Timeline A US judge has just made a ruling that will somewhat simplify the saga of graphics chip patent-infringement allegations between Nvidia and Samsung.…

65.7% of the performance of a NetApp box for 2.9% of the cost +Comment DataCore's SANsymphony-V software with a parallel IO feature has produced a radical advance in price/performance on the SPC-1 benchmark.…

Row-level security, web app data integrity lead the list PostgreSQL has pitched its latest release with a cheeky dig at MySQL as a "legacy" database.…

Federal case filed after flying machine blasted Analysis A lawsuit filed against a man who shot down his neighbor's drone might define for the first time who owns the skies.…

Form a queue people, no pushing The US Copyright Office is asking the tech industry and members of the public to comment about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and in particular the rules governing copyright infringement.…

Tech foundation publishes gentle guide A 101 introduction to designing secure Internet-of-Things devices and similar systems has been published today by the MIPS-cheerleading Prpl Foundation.…

More like phished, it seems Watercooler Word is spreading that some 320,000 Time Warner Cable (TWC) customers have had their account information accessed by crooks.…

Unfortunately, pink-tracksuit-wearing potty mouth also wrong T-Mobile US CEO John Legere has called BS – literally – on claims that his company's video service is throttling streaming speeds and hence quality.…

Flash taking over the mission-critical space and spinning disk out Comment Gartner gnomes think revenues from enterprise sales of SSDs will exceed those from HDDs in 2017. Well, let's look into that claim.…

HackerOne squares up to critics Backers of a private bug bounty for Tor have defended the project in the face of criticism from a leading security researcher.…

Hoping EVault opens the door to revenue riches SMB backer-upper Carbonite has gone on an exec hiring spree. The company offers on-premises and cloud backup and is looking for a big boost in growth.…

And has $985m backed up in stock options. It's tough at the top Apple CEO and Paul O’Grady lookalike Tim Cook's package swelled to more than $10m in 2015 – but he still can’t take family members on work trips unless he coughs up himself.…

But wait a minute, Sir Jezza. How did you work that out? Cheer up, Britain. Your government may not be able to control either its borders or its rivers, and it may have sent its farmers back to using pen and paper and telephone hotlines. But there's one way it still leads the world, according to the Head of the British Civil Service.…

Trevor Pott blasts through buzzword bingo, reveals cool efficient thing HPE, or Hewlett Packard Enterprise to you and me, has announced Synergy, rich with new buzzwords for existing concepts and the promise of brand new hardware to woo and wow.…

Careful of flakiness when perusing this box of delights The Git community was obviously working hard over the festive break, and slipped out version 2.7.0 of the control system earlier this week.…

Companies weigh in on Investigatory Powers Bill IPB Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter and Yahoo have called on the UK government to explicitly state it does not intend to weaken encryption in the forthcoming Investigatory Powers Bill, in a jointly submitted statement published today.…

Resting data in iglu and ISE encrypted with no speed bump Hybrid and all-flash storage supplier X-IO is storing data in encrypted form to increase security.…

Luckily, it's ‘working diligently to get website up and running’ Folk attempting to confirm and reschedule exam appointments on the Microsoft Training and Certification site have been left with an error message when attempting to log on.…

And that could change soon.... Worldwide semiconductor sales slid last year, as chipmakers were hit by sliding currencies, slumping PC shipments, and supply gluts in key markets.…

Primo supports Continuum, but what's the demand for PC phones? CES Two Windows 10 Mobile smartphones have been shown at the CES event under way this week in Las Vegas.…

URL in your tweet, sir? Fortune 500 companies are increasingly the target of social media phishing attacks, with nearly two per cent of all tweets containing URLs being directed at firms with the intention of stealing customer data, according to research.…

Direct stimulation coming soon to a womb near you Mums to be who subscribe to the idea that a few choice tunes have a positive effect on their unborn nippers*, and who don't mind having a bit of Mozart piped directly into their vaginas, should check out Babypod – described as "the only device that has demonstrated to stimulate vocalisation of babies before birth with music".…

Jeffrey Bergmann to step in temporarily + Comment NetApp’s finance boss, Nick Noviello, has resigned to become CFO at Blue Coat Systems, with an interim CFO, Jeffrey Bergmann, appointed while guidance for the next quarter remains the same.…

TalkTalk has also moaned that the rules don't go far enough Blighty's competition watchdog is to review an appeal by BT against new rules designed to prevent the telco from setting unfair wholesale fibre prices for its rivals.…

Joe Arnold on Ethernet accessed object drives and more Interview Open source OpenStack-focused, object storage startup SwiftStack has has early involvement with Seagate’s object storage-focussed Kinetic disk drives, the ones needing server-resident software to manage their IO.…

Do new spring 2016 rules consider YOU to be a 'digital service provider'? New cyber security laws agreed on by EU law makers in early December are set to impact on a large number of businesses.…

HaLow somewhat less than saintly CES A new standard for Wi-Fi for IoT devices may create yet more ways to attack vulnerable kit, according to a security consultancy with a storied history of hacking into internet-connected gizmos.…

World's most determined VXers can't get a break Probably the world's most tragically determined blackhat developers have had their revitalised Linux.Encoder ransomware pwned again by meddling BitDefender whitehats.…

Just Cause 3 will be popped, but it's getting hard, chirps Bird Sister. A top video game cracker says cryptographic anti-reverse engineering technology could put an end to the prolific rate of game piracy.…

Gozi '76 Service' hacker handed time served after 21 months. A hacker partly responsible for creating the highly sophisticated Gozi trojan that ripped tens of millions of dollars from victims has walked away with 21 months time served.…

V404 Cygni can be spotted by telescope Video The next time astro-boffins announce a burst of activity in V404 Cygni, grab a telescope, head somewhere dark, look at Cygnus, and you could get a treat.…

Next Drupalgeddon is really gunna sting Drupal installations could be out of date and open to attack thanks to a borked update process that flags unpatched platforms as current.…

'Welcome all my staff – not so fast you lot' It's all change at the top of VCE, the converged data center infrastructure subsidiary of EMC, with Chad Sakac taking the president's job.…