The Register

No Christmas cheer amid scrap over toll-free streaming and net neutrality YouTube has waded into the row over T-Mobile US's Binge On service.…

We offer u an 'exe.' file The Raspberry Pi Foundation was offered cash to smuggle malware onto its bargain-basement credit-card-size computers, we're told.…

More eggnog, please The Oxford English Dictionary selected an emoji as the Word of the Year for 2015. Not the word "emoji" but an actual emoji.…

Old bull spins up US presence in Silicon-steer state Oracle has unveiled plans for what looks like the first-of-its kind “next-generation technology” campus inside the US.…

Joins Active Archive Alliance ... which might now actually get activated Western Digital corporation, or WDC as we must get used to now, has joined the Active Archive Alliance to help promote the disk archive idea.…

Greater power to oust directors and influence strategy Apple has introduced new rules to allow shareholders to nominate new board members, making it the latest company to cede greater control to investors.…

'Future' of developing add-ons getting real Code from a project billed as “the future of developing add-ons” in Firefox will debut in early 2016.…

To InfiniFlash and beyond with Quanta Cloud Technology? A white boxer is working with SanDisk to flog flash arrays, making SanDisk even more desirable to WDC.…

Why Jeff Bezos should shut up Analysis Monday's historic landing of the first stage of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket is possibly the most significant event in rocketry since Apollo 8 showed we could get humans to the Moon and back safely.…

They all feature in the BIG BIG 2016 Predictions Show

Windows Management Framework 5.0 now available for Windows Server Microsoft has released Windows Management Framework (WMF) 5.0, a major update to its PowerShell scripting and automation platform.…

Businesses say they are 'committed' to working with HMRC on this issue Amazon and eBay have been accused of "collaborating with hundreds of overseas retailers to defraud the taxman of millions of pounds every day," during a House of Lords debate on the question of VAT evasion by overseas online retailers.…

Recursive manufacturing: it's a thing Spoiler alert Mild spoiler alert: This article includes minor details of the plot of Star Wars: The Force Awakens…

NFC tech needs regulator approval first Apple and UnionPay have agreed a partnership to bring Apple Pay, which allows payments from Apple products using near-field communication technology, to the Chinese market in early 2016 after "tests and certification" by Chinese regulators.…

Boss who 'couldn't hear pager' coded problem that threatened steel mill shut-down On-Call It's Christmas Eve Eve, which means we're assuming you don't particularly want to read industry news right now and so we're instead offering an extra instalment of On-Call, our regular reader-contributed tales of nasty jobs at nasty times in nasty places.…

And the winner is … NetApp? Yup, when you look at the market one way Revenue for converged systems has cracked the US$10 billion dollar barrier over the last 12 months, according to the box-and-cash-counting experts at analyst firm IDC.…

Patch published Cisco’s latest operating system update ships with a vulnerability that could let hackers seize control of network devices.…

Malicious guest could eat your virtual rigs from the inside The Xen Project has reported a new bug, XSA-169, that means “A malicious guest could cause repeated logging to the hypervisor console, leading to a Denial of Service attack.”…

Oracle gives itself six more months to get the job done right Oracle has delayed the release of Java 9 by six months.…

If you let in the Feds, you'll let in anyone Juniper's security nightmare gets worse and worse as experts comb the ScreenOS firmware in its old NetScreen firewalls.…

Not even a stapler malfunction can stop the march of justice, or Kim's planned appeal A prima facie case can be made for the extradition of Kim Dotcom and others associated with the download site Mega, according to a New Zealand district court judge.…

Hopes to raise $200m in 2016 stock-market debut Some big news in the hyper-converged storage world today amid the pre-Christmas lull. How can we say this?…

Brit suffers from GPS accuracy An IT manager in Manchester, England, says thieves stole his bikes after a smartphone cycling app pinpointed the location of his garage.…

No holes in our code, we promise, but we'll check anyway In the wake of the Juniper firewall backdoor scandal, Cisco is reviewing its source code to make sure there are no similar nasty surprises lurking within.…

Um, not sure you thought this one through The Australian government is urging its citizens to turn off two-factor authentication while abroad.…

(In one home. In Philadelphia.) Everyone's favorite ISP Comcast says it has switched on its first live gigabit internet service without having to lay a single inch of new cable.…

Go on, enjoy yourself this holiday season Comment NetApp’s SolidFire acquisition is necessary – but not enough on its own. There is still a hole, a hyper-converged infrastructure appliance shaped hole, in NetApp’s storage market coverage.…

2015 was a big year for Windows - so what's next for Redmond... What comes next for Windows 10? If 2015 was a year of revolution, 2016 promises to be a year of consolidation for Microsoft's operating system.…

NINo and consent UK government policy towards the wider use of the National Insurance Number (NINo) as a general identifier appears to have changed again. This ever-shifting policy now illustrates that well-known saying “What goes around comes around”.…

Readers win prizes for witty captions We spent so long chortling at your entries to our WD "Caption This" competitions, we forgot to tell you who the winners were.…

A Clarion call Comment NetApp has finally bitten the bullet and bought an AFA vendor, plumping for the technology-driven SolidFire as opposed to some of the marketing-driven competitors in the space.…

Great design, good hardware… shame about the software Review Against all predictions, Microsoft has made a profitable multi-billion dollar business out of a boutique tablet. It has also turned a bog standard commodity Thing - a Windows laptop - into something desirable. And it has done it all without fully answering the question “Why should I have one?”…

Go on, Facebook, speak up... Silicon Valley is expected to launch an attack on the UK's Investigatory Powers Bill, following reports that Apple has submitted evidence that it claims puts at risk the “personal data of millions of law-abiding citizens".…

Hoovers up StackEngine Oracle bounced back from a disappointing Q2 with a cunning plan to ease its way into the containers/DevOps space - by quietly taking over a five person Austin-based startup called StackEngine.…

That pay-as-you-grow pricing model could be a winner Analysis No one single thing stands out. When looking over Tegile there is no one special sauce ingredient. It just aims to be a better all-round business than its competitors, which means developing, selling and supporting a mixed media tier, external storage array for business users.…

Ads writers must shape up by March 2016 Microsoft is placing the onus on browser-based security architectures to shield users from malware-laden ads.…

Graveyards are full of IT pros once thought irreplaceable CIO Manifesto We gathered 14 of the UK’s finest IT leaders in a secure bunker (elegant room in the Soho Hotel -Ed.) for the last Register Round Table of 2015 to hear their tales of when good IT goes bad.…

Blighty Cloud Foundry players swallowed by US biz EMC and VMware-backed Pivotal has snapped up London-based based start-up CloudCredo for an undisclosed sum.…

Great products, but good luck buying them Analysis Investors looking to make long term bets in technology companies are often faced with a conundrum. Is the company exaggerating its assets? Or does it have great assets, but isn't selling them as well as it should? BlackBerry might be a textbook example of the latter.…

High Court OKs Cornwall Council's move to ditch outsourcing deal The High Court has ruled in favour of Cornwall Council's decision to ditch its 10-year £160m outsourcing deal with BT, following moves by the telco provider to stop the authority canning the deal.…

'I will survive' UK's sing-a-long community screeches The City of London Police will spend the festive period wading through 1000s of karaoke classics after it “dismantled a gang” suspected of uploading tens of thousands of voiceless backing tracks from the likes of Beyonce, Gaga, Kanye and Kylie.…

Sysadmin's choice - help a sales drone plug in a PC, or make sure SQL server upgrades properly? On-Call If it's nearly Christmas and there's not much news about, it must be time for some extra inbox-clearing On-Call columns, in which we share tales of the things readers are asked to do at unpleasant times and/or out-of-the-way places.…

SpaceX celebrates successful return mission Elon Musk's SpaceX has successfully landed a rocket on Earth, after first using it to launch satellites.…

Family filters will be on for all new broadband subscribers UK internet service provider (ISP) Sky Broadband will turn on family filters by default for all new subscribers as of 2016.…

Upstart punts competing flash accelerator software FlashGrid provides open storage software for Oracle clusters, using standard NVMe PCIe SSDs inside the database servers, and turning it into scalable shared storage, a virtual flash SAN for the database. There can be 0.4TB to 50 TB per node, and between two and 100 clustered nodes.…

If this preview configuration holds, Redmond's hybrids will be rather slim Microsoft has revealed the hardware required to run the preview of Azure Stack, its on-premises and ever-so-hybrid version of the cloud Azure operating environment.…

Alphabet subsidiary names Jan 1st, 2017, but hopes it can move it to July 1, 2016 Google has outlined its approach to deprecating the compromised SHA-1 hash in its Chrome browser.…

And the winner is … Android: Microsoft's pulled 'Hey Cortana' from Android apps Microsoft's removed the “Hey Cortana” voice activation feature from its Cortana Android app.…

Database giant settles out of court with US regulator over 'patch lies' Oracle bungled the security updates of its Java SE software so badly it must publish a groveling letter prominently on its website for the next two years.…

Downhill from there There are just under a billion web domains registered in the world today, and over four billion webpages, by some estimates.…