The Register

The presidential debate did not score highly on accuracy or sense. Ever since Senator Ted Stevens famously referred to the internet as a "series of tubes" in 2006, we have became sadly accustomed to the fact that legislators have little or no understanding of how the internet actually works.…

LTE data-only option opens doors for iOS and Galaxy Tab S Google has extended its Fi wireless service to support LTE-equipped tablets.…

Compressing the space-time continuum. No flux capacitors here, though Experiments to examine the possibility of making a real-life warp drive may fail, but they teach us a lot more about the limits of the universe and the physics that describes it.…

And 90 per cent of all industries have lost people's sensitive med info Stolen medical information is a prevalent problem across multiple industries, according to a new study by Verizon.…

Laying the foundations to build your own Visual Studio Code is a lightweight, cross-platform and open source code editor that you can download for free at http://visualstudio.com.…

Our Australian team went out at midnight so you don't have to Spoilers The core problem with Star Wars Episodes I through III was that everybody knew how the trilogy ended and that bad things awaited the characters you were supposed to care about. The result was three films that were all back-filler to explain the genesis of a killer. Numerous satellite problems – Jar-Jar, dialog no actor could rescue, poor casting – made the films largely tedious.…

Is this a sign of object(ive) maturity? IBM Cleversafe has announced a software-only offering with certified hardware platforms and central management to take away some of the pain of commodity hardware sourcing and management.…

On-premises storage management added to cloud option Exablox is adding variable-length deduplication to its fixed-length, inline data reduction functions to make its object-based NAS arrays more efficient. An on-premises management facility is also available.…

All because of that damn Google ditching Gmail support for ISPs Virgin Media has admitted its new spam filters are continuing to block the legitimate emails of various people and companies, and says it is working with individual businesses to unblock their comms.…

Elected MPs were deliberately misled by Brit spy agencies The "Big Brother" comprehensive national database system feared by many MPs has been built behind their backs over the last decade, and even has a name for its most intrusive component: a central London national phone and internet tapping centre called PRESTON.…

CyberInt: This is a 'significant' and growing problem The reward schemes of at least 10 leading retailers have been compromised by hackers, with numerous fraudulent loyalty point accounts available on the dark web in exchange for Bitcoin, according to security experts.…

Come in public cloud storage service testers, you know you want to Everybody’s darling cloud backup service startup, Backblaze, has opened up a public beta test for its coming B2 Cloud Storage.…

At least on paper - and that's assuming it gets here Apple and Samsung can start worrying now. Huawei has unveiled its IoT strategy and the extent of its ambitions. Amongst the highlights are a TV kit that provides latest-generation Apple TV functionality, with Siri-like voice navigation through content.…

The gritty reality of ops, according to sandbox vendor IT operations remain completely out of touch with the needs of developers, with CIOs duped into believing a dusting of VMware magic will allow them to construct the sort of whitebox data factories that power the likes of Google, sandbox vendor QualiSystems has declared.…

We wanted to tell customers sooner, but cops wouldn't let us The chief executive of TalkTalk, Dido Harding, has told MPs that she alone is responsible for cyber security at the company, but that the operator does not yet know if the major hack it experienced in October was avoidable.…

Yuri Malenchenko's serious demeanour expained European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Tim Peake, NASA 'naut Tim Kopra and cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko safely boarded the International Space Station yesterday following a tense manual docking of their Soyuz TMA-19M spacecraft with the orbiting outpost.…

No authentication was needed, says security researcher A database of 13 million MacKeeper users has been easily accessed online, potentially exposing personal details but not payment information.…

Have X-wings, lightsabers, stormtrooper kits moved on? Star Wars special Despite the quasi-disaster of The Phantom Menace run of films, expectations are high for Star Wars: The Force Awakens.…

Costliness shouldn't become 'barrier to entry' Rules designed to enable consumers to move their data from one platform to another should not be so costly to comply with that they serve as a "barrier to entry" into markets, the UK's parliamentary under-secretary of state for the Department for Business, Innovation has said.…

Sales bundles suit you, not us, CCL finds Microsoft must simplify its licensing by putting sales targets second.…

Investors toss in more cash to encourage third-party apps “Team messaging” company Slack has decided it's time to play nice with others by encouraging developers to pipe their applications into the company's chat app.…

Bugs bashed, trackers torpedoed, fragging made more fantastic Mozilla has released version 43 of its Firefox web browser, introducing a 64-bit version for Windows and crushing four critical and seven serious vulnerabilities.…

Upgraded Large Hadron Collider produced tantalising excess' photons last June The Higgs Boson will remain a big deal for plugging gaps in the unified theory, but may not be the biggest Boson in the universe.…

Adds trendy predictive monitoring stuff Analysis Networked storage system workload tester Load DynamiX has added analytics to its product in a v5.0 release, and aims to transform itself from a one-off array test facility to more of a dynamic, real-time array monitor.…

Disney omitted an API for The Force Awakens' star droid. The Force of the internet decided that wasn't good enough When I was fourteen, the Personal Computer didn’t exist. Even the famed ‘microcomputer’ only existed in the hands of a few hobbyists who laboriously soldered chips onto boards communicating over an S-100 bus. But a friend’s father ran a data centre and when he went in on Saturdays to run the backups he brought us along. We spent hours playing the interactive ‘Startrek’ game, pecking our commands into DECWriter II line printers. That’s where I fell in love with computers, and knew I’d spent the rest of my life playing with them.…

Struggling to do containers at scale? Struggling company thinks it has the answer Citrix has decided the time is right to containerise its NetScaler application delivery controllers.…

Google's Project Zero finds flaw, patch arrives to plug gaping information maw Researchers at the Google's Project Zero security research team have found a brutal hole in FireEye kit that allows attackers to lay waste to corporate networks with a single email.…

Streamer now assessing individual files and changing resolution to fit networks and devices Netflix has revealed a new plan for ensuring its videos arrive in your device looking their best, which can sometimes mean streaming them in lower resolution.…

Santa game gets on Play Store, stuffs SMS, contacts into sleigh and doesn't leave pressies CloudSek security bod Rahul Sasi says an Asian software development company is stealing sensitive defence software source code from air-gapped computers while also using a malicious Christmas app to hose thousands of Android handsets.…

No faster that WiFi but looks easier to use Panasonic company AeroMobile Communications Limited claims to have launched the first in-flight 3G service.…

Sure, it ripped off the iPhone but let's be realistic here Samsung has appealed to the Supreme Court to hear its patent case against Apple.…

And it only took six months Facebook has announced a revised, and some would say commonsense, version of its "real names" policy that introduces a little grey into its previous black-and-white efforts.…

Leave your coders to coding for $50k a year Red Hat has launched a dedicated cloud platform for companies that want their developers to focus on coding.…

Slow tape gets to streaming drives faster Spectra Logic's High Performance Transporter is a six-times-faster tape cartridge-transfer robot that can drop tape slot-to-drive transfer time from six to 1.5 seconds.…

You upgrading now or tonight? Hey, let's do it now Fire up any computer running Windows 7 or 8 and you'll be used to a message or three inviting you to upgrade to Windows 10. But the latest pop-up screen doesn't even give you a choice.…

Object storage wars; may the force be with you After quite a lengthy search, Scality has appointed ex-Cisco man Syed Hoda as its chief marketing officer.…

Carriers, meanwhile, will feel the squeeze from lost charges Mobile carriers are poised to see a significant hit to their bottom lines with the looming rollout of new rules on roaming charges.…

Shareholder letter spills golden beans Days after Scality and HPE storage announced a reselling deal, adding to the existing HPE Server-Scality reselling deal, it has emerged that HPE has invested $10 million into the object storage startup.…

Thailand and social media do not get along A Thai man faces up to 37 years in jail for publishing a "sarcastic" Facebook post about the king's dog.…

Brave crusaders stand up for billion-dollar cable monopolies A group of US Senators is asking the FCC to dial back its support for local governments that wish to set up municipal ISPs.…

Who are companies A, B, C and D? We have a guess... Comment Three other potential buyers were circling around SanDisk when it was being bought by Western Digital Corporation.…

Men get 21 months in the slammer Nearly three million data records worth tens of thousands of pounds have were stolen by four men from their employer, York Crown Court has heard.…

Not to worry, it was all 'for the lulz'. And Christmas Elements of Anonymous have taken time off from fighting adherents of Daesh (the so-called Islamic State) and trolling Donald Trump to attack the European Space Agency.…

1,000 staffers In its latest efforts to put Watson at the centre of its business offering, Big Blue has today announced a new German head quarters for the ex Jeopardy contestant and added a suite of new APIs to its cognitive analytics.…

Vasudevan prophesies fatal supplier all-flash array mayhem Comment Nimble Storage CEO Suresh Vasudevan told an investor conference he expects six all-flash array (AFA) suppliers to dominate the business, with Dell/EMC, HP and IBM being three of them.…

'Three times worse in greenhouse gas emissions than eating bacon' In most agreeable news for those of us who prefer wrapping our laughing gear round a solid bacon sarnie to nibbling a light salad, US boffins have concluded that switching to a vegetarian diet might actually increase "energy use, water use and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions".…

In an automation hub far, far away Ansible has unveiled an update of its Galaxy App store, kicking off a beta release of the hub for pre-packaged automation modules for its configuration platform.…

Move follows 45-minute attack last Thursday Web host Moonfruit last night began putting its systems back online after taking down customers’ sites in order to upgrade defences in the face of a threatened DDoS attack, with the firm blaming a recent assault (which prompted the self-takedown) on the Armada Collective crew.…