The Register

Meaningless league table sparks silly schadenfreude A count of the number of CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) issued on different platforms in 2015 has concluded that Apple was the most-advisoried operating system of the year, leading to gloating headlines that OS X is the “most vulnerable” of the lot.…

Booter bot becomes modular malware. Malware writers are wiping hard drives of Ukraine media outlets and energy companies using a cocktail of backdoors.…

Geo-blocks half the world to stop the DoS Linode reckons its long outage has come to an end, although its most-current message says there may be “intermittent” issues for users, mostly of its Atlanta facility.…

JavaScript-ed nasty only spotted on Windows, so far A security researcher reckons he's spotted the first example of JavaScript-based ransomware-as-a-service, dubbing it Ransom32.…

Campus net tech didn't infringe Commil's IP While most of the world was sleeping off its Christmas food-fest, appeals judges in the US killed off a long-running lawsuit against Cisco.…

Hopes and fears, ecstasy and tears Storage year in review, part 3 Winners, losers, refugees, death, near-death, and a miraculous recovery ... all these were things that characterised the year for storage suppliers in 2015. They experienced earthquake-level changes as the movement of tectonic storage plates like flash, the cloud, server-based storage and activist investors shook old assumptions to the core.…

The Reg on the rise of Shenzhen generics, the fall of wearables and other coming trends One trend overshadowed all others in 2015: there's tons and tons of everything. You probably know why.…

Ten of the best from your favourite tech site (and ours) The last 365 days (give or take) have produced more than 36,000 articles on The Register. We covered the biggest tech purchase in history (Dell/EMC for $67bn), the trashing of the US-European Union safe harbour data export deal by European judges, the Ashley Madison hack, and, well, so much more.…

Object storage ready to make it big Storagebod blog Predictions are a mug’s game ... the trick is to keep them as non-specific as possible and not name names ... so here are mine!…

Trailblazers and icons who passed on this year As with every year, 2015 brought with it the departure of a number of beloved and respected figures in the world of technology, science and popular culture.…

There’s also cats, badgers, pandas and Joseph Kony. And someone called ‘PSY’ YouTube’s top 10 most watched non-music videos of 2015 feature a rapper from Atlanta (Silento #WatchMeDanceOn), Liam Neeson's spot in a US Superbowl ad, the Star Wars Episode Seven (or is it VII?) trailer, and a US law enforcement official busting some rhymes from behind the wheel (carefully captured on his dash cam).…

Plaintiffs say upgrade was never meant for 4S Lawyers in New York have filed a class action lawsuit against Apple, saying that the iOS 9 operating system upgrade slowed their older iPhone 4S handsets into uselessness.…

Resistance coders, malware writers, and copyright infringers take note 32c3 Anonymous programmers, from malware writers to copyright infringers and those baiting governments with censorship-foiling software, may all be unveiled using stylistic programming traits which survive into the compiled binaries – regardless of common obfuscation methods.…

Surveillance is fin..what! They are spying on us! An outrage! After two years of doing little about the mass surveillance revealed by Edward Snowden, the US Congress has sprung into action in less than two days – with investigations into the NSA spying on some the legislature's members.…

Primary Data opens its tech kimono wider Analysis + Comment DataSphere is Primary Data's product and it provides a storage abstraction layer presenting a single interface to multiple individual storage silos. Primary Data told us more about it at a Silicon Valley IT Press Tour event in early December.…

ARM isn't the answer either, adds Joanna Rutkowska 32c3 Security concerns around Intel's x86 processors – such as the company's decision to force the secretive Management Engine microcontroller onto its silicon – have raised fundamental questions about trust in personal computers, whatever architectures they may be based upon.…

Claims connecting smart home remote app causes issues Security shortcomings in an internet-connected burglar alarm system from UK firm Texecom leave it open to hack attacks, an engineer turned security researcher warns.…

Do flash fabrics beckon? Chinese flash-card startup Memblaze has raised tens of millions of dollars in a C-round of funding, giving it the wherewithal to further develop its PCIe flash tech.…

With customer backing, the tech minnow is trying something rather different Sysadmin's 2015 review part 3 With 2015 drawing to a close and 2016 about to begin, it's time to reflect on the fact that the world never stops changing. The tech industry certainly constantly changes, and so here's one sysadmin's final view of the industry's movers and shakers.…

With great hardware comes great power... or not Dixons Carphone retailers Currys and PC World are flogging a high-end ready-made gaming desktop complete with Nvidia's flagship Geforce GTX 980 Ti processor. Unfortunately, the listed power supply unit on the HP ENVY Phoenix won't do the job for that card.…

CodeClub founder also gets a nod Former Bletchley Park board member Dr Sue Black is among just a handful of IT folk on the UK's 2016 New Year honours list.…

Chinese whispers Microsoft will warn email and OneDrive users if it detects apparent attempts by governments to hack into their accounts.…

Are they all telling it to zuck off? Facebook's “Free Basics” service - which bundles together the Social Network's pick of news, weather and health apps and delivers it via UAE telecoms giant Etisalat to millions of Egyptians - has been shuttered in the land of pyramids.…

Auntie hasn't confirmed, says Beeb The BBC has reported that the BBC has tweeted that all the BBC's websites were knocked offline this morning due to "technical issues" now confirmed to be down to a "large web attack".…

Public Accounts Committee asks: Have you learned nothing? MPs have today slammed "the severe failures" of an IT system designed to allow the extraction of data from all GP practice computer systems in England.…

Platform for small webcasters holds out begging bowl Internet radio network Live365 has laid off a "significant" portion of its staff and may have to shut shop in the New Year if it fails to get funding.…

Error 500, but normal service now restored Updated The BBC News website evidently decided earlier today that it'd had enough of 2015, and took a New Year's Eve break which extended to several hours.…

Primus interplanetary The International Space Station is the longest-running continuously inhabited human outpost in space, and this year it celebrated its 15th anniversary. As the ISS orbits the Earth it is essentially in a state of free fall, counteracting the Earth’s gravity and providing an ideal platform for science in space.…

Inventor of the internet lagging behind developed world Average internet speeds have increased in the US over the last year, but America is still falling behind many other developed economies when it comes to data speeds and latency.…

Northern Lights coming down as far as California after G3 eruption A major eruption from the surface of the Sun could give a spectacular display of the aurora borealis in time for New Year's festivities.…

Lid blown on web riddle PC gaming biz Valve has explained why its Steam software store blurted people's personal details to strangers on Christmas Day.…

Hyperscalers rejoice; toroidal doughnut fabrics open the door to 10,000 node and beyond networking Hyperscale IT is threatened by suicidally expensive networking costs. As node counts head into the thousands and tens of thousands, network infrastructure costs rocket upwards because a combination of individual node connections, network complexity, and bandwidth in a traditional (leaf-and-spine) design has a toxic effect on costs.…

And Redmond's using it to ask for all profits from Corel's Home Office Microsoft has capped off a bumper year of epic patent stupidity all round with an award from the EFF for claiming ownership of a simple slider bar design.…

Judge rejects website's plea to deal with plaintiffs one by one A judge has certified two class actions against Facebook in relation to growth forecasts given by the ad flinger before it floated on the stock market back in 2012.…

Arrivederci Apple will fork out $350m (318 million euros) to make up for five years of missing tax payments in Italy.…

Tributes pour in for open-source pioneer who had threatened to kill himself on Twitter Debian GNU/Linux founder Ian Murdock has died. He was 42.…

Much delayed tech in renewed funding drive Infosec wild man John McAfee has taken time off from his US presidential campaign to launch a fresh funding drive for a password replacement product.…

Spotted with stiffy in city centre Manchester cops swooped on a city centre tram stop on Tuesday after a concerned woman reported a man sporting both Lycra cycling shorts and an erection, the Manchester Evening News reports.…

10 years, billions of vids, no actual business I may not be the best person to write this. I am, after all, a YouTube refugee. Or renegade. Or reject.…

Newshound’s account hit twice on Christmas Eve Enemies of investigative reporter Brian Krebs took over his PayPal account twice on Christmas Eve, but were foiled on both occasions in their attempts to transfer funds to an account associated with an assassinated jihadist hacker, he said.…

140 characters leaves you hungry? Try this for 12 months Year in review So, was US Central Command (CENTCOM) hacked, were a LOT of Polish Airlines aircraft cyber breached, and did China block imports of products from Apple and others? The answer in all three cases was a simple “no”.…

Four consecutive falling quarterly revenue numbers confirm trend It was not a happy Christmas for Micron, as the numbers confirm it is suffering in the solid state memory and storage business with a fourth consecutive decline in revenues and fifth in profits.…

One year of wobbly dining neckfiller delights We trust that readers have recovered from the annual Yule Orgy of Excess, where faces are stuffed with mince pies and turkey, all washed down with prodigious quantities of booze.…

Spy camera boss raises questions over ANPR slurp The legality of a police Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) database in the UK has been called into question by the Surveillance Camera Commissioner. The National ANPR data centre now holds 22 billion car journeys, he said.…

Let's have a chat about that Water cooler El Reg, some friends of mine have been showing me blog posts about Microsoft keeping secret copies of all our encryption keys. What's going on?…

Achtung! 32c3 Vulnerabilities in two widely deployed payment system protocols can be exploited to steal PINs, spoof transactions, and secretly reroute cash into other accounts.…

How the tech and music industries come together in 2015 One of the world's oldest and most successful "standards" – so standard in fact that western musical notation is simply called standard notation – does not yet have a standard way to be displayed on the web.…

Just let that settle in Google appears to be lining up OpenJDK – an open-source implementation of the Java platform – for future Android builds.…

If you can read this in Western Australia, congrats – your broadband has been fixed Engineers at ISP iiNet are still battling to restore connectivity to subscribers left for days without internet access in Western Australia.…

Screw this, where did we park the DeLorean? Vid While record numbers of people around the world are picking up injuries from wheeled "hoverboards" this Christmas season, aerospace company Arca Space thinks it has got the real deal.…