The Register

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.…

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.…