The Register

Er, time for a Korea change, Bezos? Amazon Web Services has opened new bit barns in Seoul, South Korea – a day after nearby psychotic hermit nation North Korea tested an underground atomic bomb.…

Protection mechanism screws other protection mechanisms. What a tangled web we weave Mozilla has warned Firefox users they may be cut off from more of the web than expected – now that the browser rejects new HTTPS certificates that use the weak SHA-1 algorithm.…

Go, little business unit, be free like a startup Fabless semiconductor design house MediaTek is continuing its "focus on the core business" strategy, with reports in Asia suggesting it plans to spin off its Ethernet chip operations this year.…

Data centers reportedly on the block in $2.5bn sell-off Verizon is reportedly looking to sell off some of its data center facilities, in what would be a continuation of the telecom giant's move away from its non-wireless business.…

Angler kit served via compromised HTTPS websites Updated It was inevitable. Trend Micro says it has spotted crooks abusing the free Let's Encrypt certificate system to smuggle malware onto computers.…

Don't say we didn't warn ya ... because we did In less than one week, Microsoft will end support for several versions of its Internet Explorer web browser.…

Big bang in Little China Analysis At 0130 UTC on Wednesday, the United States Geological Survey recorded a magnitude 5.1 seismic event in North Korea, and shortly afterwards the Nork state media delivered the message that the country had exploded its first thermonuclear device. An H-bomb, in other words.…

Software interface left open, so make sure you're patched It's emerged that a software update for Silent Circle's Blackphone that shipped in December included a fix for a pretty egregious bug: the developers had left a modem interface open and accessible to code on the Android-based smartphone.…

Researchers point to lingering hash function The outdated and crackable MD5 hash function is still lingering in critical parts of the internet's infrastructure and could undermine security, researchers have warned.…

Web bazaar's SoC subsidiary expands networking line Amazon is readying its own ARM-compatible processors to power home routers, Wi-Fi hotspots, and network-attached storage boxes.…

Uncle Sam finally gets his teeth into terrible technology The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has struck a $250,000 settlement package in its case accusing a medical software developer of lying about its data encryption capabilities.…

Snippy open letter to US giant over Free Basics in India A group of 30 non-profits and net neutrality advocates have posted a snippy open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg complaining about his "attacks" on Indian internet users.…

Manual compo system gets junked for modern tech Kaminario’s sales reps will now be able to know how and why they are being paid because a manual system to work out their compensation has been junked.…

No word on when they'll connect the hub to the smart beer fridge Blighty's universities have teamed up to today unveil a £28m "Internet of Things" research hub in a bid to make the UK a "world leader" in the much-hyped technology.…

Richard Sapper also worked for Alessi and Fiat The ThinkPad’s answer to Johny Ive has died. Richard Sapper, a German industrial designer who orchestrated the look of the iconic laptop for IBM, was 83 years old.…

How do you move a 500lb gorilla? Gingerly Sooner or later, you’re going to have to move some of your data. Perhaps you’re moving to a hybrid cloud model, and need to move some offsite. Maybe it’s already out there in a third-party’s infrastructure, and the contract isn’t working out as you’d planned. Or perchance you’re being smart and replicating between two infrastructure-as-a-service providers for increased resilience. Whatever the reason, you’ve got some planning to do.…

Starboard adds voice to growing number of angry moneymen Updated Activist investors Starboard have joined calls for a management overhaul at Yahoo!, arguing the company is hemorrhaging cash under its leadership.…

What's Chinese for Scorchio? Hands On Huawei can today boast the fastest smartphone in the world - besting even the iPhone 6s in key benchmarks. We got a decent idea of what the new Mate 8 feels like having had a preview at Huawei's Shenzhen HQ at the tail end of last year.…

Get your 2FA on, slackers A new attack on supposedly secure communication streams raises questions over the resilience of passwords, security researchers warn.…

And Terrible Theresa accused of deceit over comms data definition IPB The Internet Services Providers' Association (ISPA) today told a Parliamentary committee that the government should bear the full cost of extra infrastructure needed to support the snooping databases authorised by the Investigatory Powers Bill.…

Trevor Pott holds forth on HPE's cloud in a box HPE and Microsoft have teamed up to give everyone else a right good kicking. The product of the now is the "HPE Hyper Converged 250 for Microsoft CPS Standard”. This is a very long name and so I propose instead that we shall think of it as "Azure in a can 250". Sticking to the Azure-in-a-can theme, HPE's new gizmo does exactly what it says on the tin, and it changes everything.…

New heavy metal to honour Motörhead frontman? Inevitably, and agreeably, an online petition is demanding that one of the four heavy metal elements coming soon to an engorged periodic table near you be named "Lemmium", in honour of recently departed Motörhead frontman Ian Fraser Kilmister, aka Lemmy.…

GEGL has landed Review Despite its relatively obscure version number, GIMP 2.9.2, released recently, represents a major leap forward for the popular image editing suite.…

Alliance@IBM 'suspends campaigns', claiming job cuts 'took their toll' The sole unionised outpost trying to give a voice to IBM workers Stateside has frozen campaigns, citing sustained job cuts and a resulting drop in membership as the reasons.…

Plus: 'Me and the Atari 2600, we had good times'

The people have spoken. Pints all round It's official: Hewlett Packard Enterprise's private London drinking club has been dubbed the "Hewlett You Inn?" in a reader poll which saw the name pip "The DrinkJet" to the post by a single vote.…

Not if Brussels can help it Analysis So far 2016 looks to be the year of mega telecoms deals in Europe, with the soon-to-complete £12.5bn EE/BT deal in the UK set to have a major impact on the market.…

An explainer for broad-minded architects Mention cloud, mention DevOps and it won’t be long before microservices enters the discussion.…

Lack of IT knowhow highlighted by public sector beancounters Blighty's spending watchdog has warned that one third of the government's major projects due to be delivered over the next five years are on track to fail.…

Code should be published as draft before bill becomes law IPB Today the Information Commissioner will give his views on the draft Investigatory Powers Bill to a cross party Parliamentary Committee examining it.…

Put the pedal to the metalization layer Qualcomm and Nvidia have attempted to wow the world with new electronics aimed at making driving a bit less of a chore.…

Too hard? Just use CloudFlare Docker security bod Diogo Monica is offering a guide to help system administrators flip their security header report card marks from a Fs to As.…

Whistleblower Binney to bend ear of MPs scrutinizing Blighty's draft super-snooper law Plans by the UK's Conservative government to legitimize the mass surveillance of Brits won't work, and will cause lives to be lost to terrorism.…

Exploit men set sights on Adobe heap isolation, proffer fat cheque for those who wreck Hackers can score US$100,000 from exploit arbitrage outfit Zerodium if they bypass Adobe's latest Flash heap isolation defence.…

4K-ing hell, what took you so long? The UHD Alliance has delivered its promised spec setting down minimum standards for what constitutes 4K. While 4K of some kind has been around for a decade, it was only in 2015 that the industry decided standards were needed.…

Playful hackers send message to world + dog Sysadmins have woken up to an odd message in their server logs that told them to "delete their installations" and "join us."…

Jeep-hack attack-vector buys auto infosec biz Harman, whose in-car UConnect wireless system helped Chris Valasek and Charlie Miller take control of a Jeep Cherokee last year, has announced it's buying TowerSec.…

Prez calls for plans from three agencies President Obama is looking to increase funding for research and development of new technologies that could help to cut gun violence.…

Or better yet, realize the hammer is the best option Art students – or at least those at the University of Northern Iowa – are the most likely to know how to permanently delete data from USB drives, while business or humanities students don't even try.…

Consumer apathy hurls companies in direction of IoT We are all perfectly happy with our existing high-end technologies and aren't planning to upgrade any time soon.…

Mentally challenged Lumosity – the maker of games that supposedly increase your mental agility – has coughed up $2m after being accused of false advertising.…

And they're even willing to pay for them In the constantly divided United States, an unusual consensus has arrived in the form of police body cameras.…

What do you mean you forgot about WorkMail? AWS has flipped the switch on its WorkMail calendar and email service to bring it into general availability.…

DDoS'd virtual server host's hell continues Linode's woes continue: the server hosting biz has just run a system-wide password reset on customer accounts after two Linode.com user credentials were discovered “on an external machine.”…

Going once, going twice ... The sale of Dell's hospital IT consulting arm, Perot Systems, has hit a frenzy of speculation, with Atos reportedly leading the pack of companies with a $4.3bn offer.…

And you thought its cable service was bad … Comcast's wireless home alarm systems can be trivially jammed, rendering them useless and allowing burglars to slip in undetected.…

Life in the VC lane Exclusive One of the more promising security startups of recent years has laid off a sizable chunk of its staff, citing business pressures.…

Like adding go-faster stripes to your Silver Ghost? Compuware is attempting to bring big iron software into the 21st century by allowing developers to use DevOps tools to manage mainframe code.…

Growth and M&A leader has left the building One of IBM’s most powerful executives is reportedly stepping down.…