The Register

Redmond can't bear to be without Lotus Notes creator Lotus Notes daddy Ray Ozzie quit Microsoft five years ago – but Redmond just won’t let its former CTO go.…

Panamanian bungs backfired A former regional director of SAP has been sentenced to 22 months in jail – plus three years of supervised release – for greasing the palms of government IT buyers.…

Is it sabotage, lack of maintenance, bad policy or cheap equipment? Analysis More than one in ten dashboard cameras and 80 per cent of microphones don't work on any given day, according to a review of the Chicago Police's recording equipment.…

I just want you for my own, more than you could ever know. Make my wish come true ... NetApp is buying Solidfire to get scale-out all-flash arrays for cloud provider-like use cases – the sort of use cases that are closed to NetApp's all-flash E-Series and ONTAP systems.…

Did the NSA knacker ScreenOS? Probably not The access-all-areas backdoor password hidden in some Juniper Networks' Netscreen firewalls has been published.…

Will help catalogue attempts to limit information After a three-year campaign, the IETF has cleared the way for a new HTTP status code to reflect online censorship.…

One lump sum or ongoing royalties, vicar? Both! Apple will pay Ericsson to use patented networking technologies employed by its iPhones and iPads, ending a year-long spat between the pair.…

Public sector apparently suffers most from idle P2Pers There’s high degree of correlation between organisations with P2P activity and system compromises via malware infections, according to a new study by BitSight Technologies.…

US has highest number of industrial-control systems online, says security bods Iranian hackers penetrated the online control system of a New York dam in 2013, according to reports, and poked around inside the system.…

Database and Cortana Analytics injection Microsoft has bought VC-funded big-data SQL start up Metanautix, building what it’s called a data compute engine.…

Users left exposed on community site Up to 3.3 million Hello Kitty users have had their personal data exposed due to a database breach at the brand's online community SanrioTown.com, a security researcher has discovered.…

Farethee well, my macros A cumulative Windows 10 update is pranging customised copies of Word.…

CST-100 Starliner to lift more 'nauts to ISS NASA reckons it's well on the way to restoring US human spaceflight capabilities with confirmation of the second booking for Boeing's CST-100 Starliner.…

Forecasts huge loss, accounting scandal still looms Giant Japanese conglomerate Toshiba, currently restructuring in the wake of a huge accounting scandal, has denied media reports that it intends to pursue a flash foundry spin-off.…

More patient apps, that's what failing hospitals need The NHS is apparently being given an early Christmas present of £1bn for free Wi-Fi across all hospitals, health secretary Jeremy Hunt has said today.…

Watch out for scammers taking advantage, though Reforms to EU trade mark laws finalised soon could open the way for non-conventional trade marks to be registered, like smells, noises and even music, an expert has said.…

Smart speakers, smart readers The Register Lectures The Register is looking for speakers who are as fascinating and knowledgeable as our audience and as good at story-telling as our writers.…

We'd 'like to regain the trust of stakeholders, and transform ourselves'. Right you are Scandal-hit Toshiba has today warned that it expects an annual loss of Y550bn ($4.5bn) and plans to shed nearly 7,000 jobs in its personal computer and television consumer electronics businesses.…

App repatriation – it's for winners Comment A few weeks ago I attended the Italian VMUG user conference. One of the most interesting sessions at the event was “Strategic Private Cloud”, presented by Alan Civita of Sky UK, who confirmed what is now a common trend in very large IT organisations: a strategy based on two different private clouds.…

Why, I'd just love membership in your mouse-pad-knitting eco-collective On-Call If it's Monday it must be time for … for what exactly? Why for seasonal On-Call, of course, in which we pad out the site during the pre-Christmas news drought and clear the backlog of reader contributions at the same time bring you seasonally gluttonous extra helpings of readers' tales from their odd out-of-hours encounters…

'Very close contest' with Tsuru sees GDS promise government-as-a-platform in early 2016 The UK's Government Digital Service (GDS) has named Cloud Foundry as its preferred platform-as-a-service.…

OTT services must overcome hideous churn rates to find success Premium video content is a must have for the Christmas period and to avoid missing out consumers are signing up to a multitude of OTT services, but this will only be a festive fling for a large proportion.…

Foxconnn, Schmoxconn - it's tool and die makers that get Apple excited Skilled workers, not lower salaries, were the lure that brought Apple to China, according to Tim Cook.…

The Social Network bins Adobe's malware-magnet for video, adopts HTML5 Facebook has hammered another nail in to the coffin of Adobe Flash, by switching from the bug-ridden plug-in to HTML5 for all videos on the site.…

It's going to be a virtual Christmas for virtualisation admins VMware has let it be known that its vRealize Orchestrator, vRealize Operations, vCenter Operations and vCenter Application Discovery Manager products all need fixing to harden them against “a critical deserialization vulnerability”.…

PCI Council delays SSL abandonment date to 2018, so cruddy credit crypto continues The Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI SSC) has decided to delay the deadline for migration from Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) to Transport Layer Security (SSL).…

Optus in on the act, too, with deal to build and maintain HFC network sold to nbn You can't make this stuff up: after selling its copper hybrid fibre-coax (HFC) networks to nbn, Telstra has won contracts to maintain those networks and to re-design the latter to carry the DOCSIS 3.1 data transmission standard.…

Calls for 'Manhattan Project' to blow up animosity between tech industry and spookhauses Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton has waded deeper in to the debate on encryption with the observation that “maybe the back door is the wrong door”.…

Peering into the future through a crystal beer glass ... and finding a 'perfect' NBN rollout December is the time when vendors' Australian outposts try to position their managing directors as sages and oracles, and rain down predictions on El Reg's antipodean outpost.…

Networking company silent on China dev centre as source of crooked code UPDATE Juniper Networks has offered a more detailed description of the security issues resulting from its find of ” “unauthorised code” in ScreenOS, the software that powers its firewalls.…

New and improved boosters need a careful touch UPDATED Elon's Musketeers at SpaceX have been on tenterhooks on Friday as the team tried to static fire its improved Falcon 9 rocket ahead of the firm's first commercial launch in months.…

IT security snafu leads to two tribes going to war A hacking row is splitting the Democratic Party's presidential campaign after an incident with the party's database provider.…

Congress to consider SEC filing add-on A new bill introduced to Congress on Thursday would require US publicly listed companies to disclose who on their Board has cybersecurity expertise.…

You're all just too damn crazy In a sign that the internet is indeed the end of all good and rational thoughts, The Washington Post has thrown in the towel on its "What was fake on the Internet this week" column.…

Zuck's CSO denies bullying charges, confirms bounty payout A security researcher who found a critical flaw in Instagram is claiming that Facebook's chief security officer Alex Stamos tried to get him fired over the discovery.…

Welcome to the Chinese NetMundial Initiative ICANN's exiting CEO has stunned internet governance experts by fronting a new Chinese government initiative to expand its view of how the internet should be run.…

Moz shop chops for in-browser Netflix viewing Firefox has joined the Netflix community on Windows with the addition of HTML5 video extensions.…

First end-to-end database virtualisation test is also here After steady pre-release publicity, the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) has released new Big Data and virtualisation benchmarks.…

Repeat test throws up improved results from 2013 but problems remain The security of mobile banking apps has improved over the last two years but there’s still scope for improvement.…

'Cloud natives' include two-year-old Docker, 104-year-old IBM A flurry of the tech world’s great and good signed up the Cloud Native Computing Foundation yesterday, and kicked off a technical board to review submissions – which will be tested and fattened up on a vast Intel-based “computer farm”.…

If it had been a company it would have been much higher An HIV support group responsible for inadvertently revealing patient identities via an email blunder has been slapped with a £250 fine by the Information Commissioner's Office.…

Anders Sandberg tackles transhumanism for the rest of us Reg Lecture It’s the time of year where we stop to think about how we could make ourselves better people. Well, if you spare around 50 minutes of your time to watch our first 2015 Reg Winter Lecture vid, you’ll find out how to be better not just next year, but for centuries.…

Asset calculator error over-inflated folks' incomes A software glitch on the government's online divorce settlement form, present since April 2014, could lead to thousands of couples having to tear up their financial agreements and re-open negotiations.…

Meh, it's only taxpayers' money, it's not like anyone will notice. Right? Attempts by North Wales Police (NWP) to rationalise IT spending have backfired after a project aimed at saving them money by moving towards a single supplier went seriously over-budget.…

Watch and find out On Demand Watch our on-demand webcast where we look into whether NoSQL is a suitable fit for the enterprise.…

Want to initially raise $100m for working cap, acquisitions and other stuff Dell security subsidiary SecureWorks is trying to raise funds for working capital and acquisitions, according to a filing with the SEC.…

First nosh aboard ISS European Space Agency astronaut Tim Peake has pushed the orbital nosh envelope by enjoying a bacon sarnie as his first meal aboard the International Space Station.…

Well, we can build them now, just about ... but can they socially interact? The Star Wars universe is full of droids. Everywhere you turn, there are medical droids, exploration droids, labour droids, pilot droids, even battle droids. They carry out clearly defined tasks, often with a degree of independence, without needing to interact with people.…