The Register

It was indeed just 'comedy wallpaper in a techie's lappie' Britain's new Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers will be Windows XP-free zones, the Ministry of Defence has confirmed to The Register.…

Indian PM Modi expresses industry ire in chat with president Obama The United States is set to pass a bill named the “9/11 Health and Compensation Act” and Indian IT companies are mad as hell about it.…

No documentation. Crusty code. Christmas Eve. Will our reader make it home? On-Call Welcome again to On-Call, our Friday column in which readers tell their tales of being asked to get stuff done under awkward circumstances.…

Left customers unable to pay with cards online Lloyds Bank has apologised for problems with its ClickSafe verification system that left customers unable to complete purchases online earlier this week.…

Banks, vendors, team to build open-source, enterprise-grade distributed ledger The Linux Foundation has decided the time is right to apply its special brand of collaboration to the Blockchain, the distributed ledger technology behind Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.…

Executive shuffle sees fruity firm re-instate the post of COO, Tim Cook's gig before elevation Apple has re-instated the position of chief operating officer (COO), a post last held by current CEO Tim Cook.…

Christmas is ruined. Just ruined. For about one in fifty smartmobe owners Microsoft has decided to delay delivery of Windows 10 for phones running Windows 8 or 8.1.…

Expect the show to be even more painful than usual The annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is renowned for being crowded – 170,000 people attended last year – but new security restrictions will mean that the traditional lines to get in are going to be exponentially worse.…

It has to be accepted but fears can be mitigated The rolling debate over encryption has been joined by BlackBerry's CEO and a range of former national security officials.…

Cleanup in aisle 4, we've been pwned US grocery chain Safeway has confirmed that registers at several stores in California and Colorado had somehow been fitted with "skimmer" hardware to collect payment card information.…

And it may have been there since 2008, making this a late contender for FAIL of the year Juniper Networks has admitted that “unauthorized code” has been found in ScreenOS, the operating system for its NetScreen firewalls.…

FTC exacts its pound of flesh from ID theft preventer The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has agreed to a $100m settlement in its deceptive advertising case with LifeLock.…

Artists less happy with 17 cents for 100 plays Pandora is pleased with a 15 per cent increase in the royalty rate it will have to pay to stream music, with its CEO calling the hike "a rate we can work with."…

Imposed without agreement; measured suspiciously More than 13,000 people have complained about Comcast's imposition of a new 300GB monthly data cap, a Freedom of Information Act request has revealed.…

Service taken offline because of one case; country erupts Analysis An extraordinary conglomeration of technology, politics, and law took place Wednesday night and Thursday morning when the WhatsApp service suddenly disappeared for millions of users in Brazil, Argentina, and Chile.…

Redmond goes 'yoink!' on twenty CAs Microsoft is cutting the ranks of its Trusted Root Certificate partners in hopes of improving the security of Windows applications.…

Companies face 4 per cent global turnover hit if found in breach Strict new rules forcing companies to pay four per cent of their global turnover in fines if they breach the European Union's data protection regulations have today been formally agreed.…

'Business at the council has ground to a halt' The catastrophic service outage at Glasgow City Council's data centre, caused after its IT systems servers were taken down by a fire suppressant accidentally going off, is continuing to cause widespread havoc for staff and the public.…

Hydrophobic coating targets al fresco piss-takers London's Hackney council is targeting male revellers' time-honoured practice of necking a skinful, and then relieving themselves against walls, with a hydrophobic coating designed to send steaming streams straight back to the piss-taker.…

'Some 80 per cent of £1.1bn project has been written off' MPs have questioned the value of terminating the Home Office's £500m e-borders contract with its supplier Raytheon, with questions remaining as to whether the £303m spent on its in-house successor programme will deliver.…

Cloudy storage meets cloudy CRM Salesforce and Box have announced new integration features, including an SDK for developers.…

It's a privacy issue The unregulated and growing market for spyware poses an increasing risk to privacy, an EU regulator warns.…

Small print said you'd pay if you didn't give it back EE has confirmed it will not apply extra charges to customers who don't return their Power Bars, despite the mass recall announced this morning.…

Two new satellites blast off, eight now in orbit Europe is now two satellites closer to firing up its Galileo satnav system following the launch today of Galileos 11 and 12.…

Final Call: Deadline 18:00 GMT today! Promo There are but a few hours remaining for those of you who'd like to bag some mighty fine goodies, including a Samsung S6 Edge+ and a Gear S2 Smartwatch, from our developer competition.…

Covering itself with glory – or constantly meddling? So Seagate has offloaded its EVault cloud backup service for a mere $14m, virtually giving away what it originally bought for $185m. How did this train wreck happen?…

Hackers reveal plans to make children cry Last Christmas LizardSquad played Grinch with the holiday fun of gamers by knocking out XBox Live and smacking the PlayStation Network offline with a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.…

Is contributor doing it for the LULs Y/N? Input = Y Wikipedia is to put artificial intelligence to the enormous task of keeping the free, editable online encyclopaedia up-to-date, spam-free and legal.…

Plus: Rumour has it Dell's putting Perot Systems on the market

Do you know where your data is? Max Schrems has a lot to answer for. The Austrian is single-handedly responsible for bringing down a key transnational data agreement that has left cloud service providers scrabbling for legal counsel. This is either a good thing, if you’re a privacy activist concerned about intrusive US surveillance policies, or a confusing and worrying one, if you’re a provider or customer of cloud services.…

Sorry, but this is George’s vision, not ours Star Wars special I had just turned ten when Star Wars was released in the US in May 1977, but I had to wait almost a year before I got to see it – at the ABC Torquay in April 1978, since you ask. The movie didn’t premiere in Britain until December 1977, and in those days movies took a while to make it out of London and into the sticks.…

Shared storage, converged systems, flashy all-flash: it's all on the table NetApp’s ex-CTO Jay Kidd has joined object storage supplier SwiftStack’s board and we had the opportunity to ask him some questions about his views on various technologies. We wondered how much his views now might differ from NetApp norms.…

Time for a pint at the Meaningless Green Rectangle POLL The moment has arrived for you, our beloved readers, to name Hewlett Packard Enterprise's private London drinking club - a members-only establishment in the computer outfit's new HQ at 1 Aldermanbury Square.…

Ancient windowing system can be yours in all its pixellated glory A Google chap named Christian Stefansen has created an Amiga 500 emulator that runs inside the Alphabet subsidiary's Chrome browser.…

PaaS portability promise is signed, sealed, delivered The Cloud Foundry Foundation has created what amounts to a good cloudkeeping seal of approval.…

Credentials copied to new storage, but software looked for the old storage Google's 'fessed up to another bungle that browned-out its cloud.…

Never mind the app, it's integrating with data that counts IDC and Appcelerator have published a survey of 5,778 mobile developers which highlights integrating with back-end data as the biggest challenge in app development.…

Stop using danger dongles now, then claim £20 voucher to spend on other EE accessories British carrier EE has issued a recall for all “Power Bars”, the company's name for external USB batteries.…

Integer underflow fault means you can get into rescue mode and rummage around A pair of researchers from the University of Valencia's Cybersecurity research group have found that if you press backspace 28 times, it's possible to bypass authentication during boot-up on some Linux machines.…

Australian court tires of Dallas Buyers Club's litigation over payment demands Australia's Federal Court has told Big Content to stop pfaffing around and make reasonable demands of those accused of illegally downloading The Dallas Buyers Club (DBC).…

Alpha gov.au design adapts to users' circumstances EXCLUSIVE PIC Australia's Digital Transformation Office (DTO) says it has hit its self-imposed nine-week deadline for the creation of a prototype new gov.au website.…

On this of all days, the Universe just gave the storage industry a Star Wars angle Cloud backup outfit Carbonite has acquired Seagate's EVault cloud backup service.…

Let a thousand third-party bulbs glow Dutch electronics giant Philips has been forced into an embarrassing U-turn over its plans to lock out third-party suppliers of light bulbs for its Hue smart lighting system.…

Hurd n' Catz blame the dollar... again. Talk up cloud numbers… again Oracle is pointing to continued growth for its cloud business as the bright side in a quarter that saw the enterprise giant drop revenues slightly, but still top Wall Street expectations.…

You knew routing was odd, but did you know how odd? Researchers at the University of Toronto have created a mapping tool that shows how internet data moves around and how the NSA can use just a few surveillance sites to scoop up online traffic.…

James Reinders explains why Intel's Xeon Phi is now a processor Interview The Intel Software Development Conference was on in London last week, and we took the opportunity to catch up with James Reinders, director and evangelist for parallel programming and HPC tools.…

Local broadband carriers let off regulation The FCC has extended a rule that will exempt small broadband carriers from portions of its 2015 Open Internet rules.…

Butchered law almost certain to pass on Friday The little-loved Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) will likely become law this week, and in a form far worse than first thought.…

Online ad giant seeks new blood Google has launched its own start-up accelerator program, adding to the well-established Y Combinator, 500 Startups, and Techstars.…