The Register

When 'they' say the cloud changes everything, 'they' might be right Microsoft's decided it needs to offer a Linux certification.…

Net menaces show warped sense of humour in attack on Grauniad story Hackers have hosed an article published by The Guardian using the world's nastiest exploit kit Angler to pop the machines of exposed readers.…

Object storage for everyone One of the most interesting meetings I had this week (during an IT press tour of Silicon Valley) was with Minio. I also heard from the founder of the company, AB Periasamy, who has some really interesting ideas, and outlined his vision of “object storage for everyone”.…

Kiwi hacker finds brutal holes in location, tracking units Kiwicon Kiwi hacker Lachlan Temple has found holes in a popular cheap car tracking and immobilisation gadget that can allow remote attackers to locate, eavesdrop, and in some cases cut the fuel intake to hundreds of thousands of vehicles, some while in motion.…

Patch to Container Engine needed just one more item of shift key action Google has admitted that incorrectly typing the name of a case-sensitive variable cooked its cloud.…

Depart orbiting outpost this morning, next stop Kazakhstan NASA TV will this morning offer live coverage of the departure from the International Space Station of astronaut Kjell Lindgren of NASA, cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko, and Kimiya Yui of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.…

Qatar Airways flight took off from wrong spot, hit lights, made it home without alarm A Qatar Airways Boeing 777 travelling from Miami to Doha struck airport lights during takeoff and suffered a 46 cm tear in the fuselage, thanks in part to a pilot zooming in too far on a tablet computer.…

Meet Dell's super-duper, learning, loving, sharing, talking hyper-scaling team Dell's created a new Extreme Scale Infrastructure (ESI) umbrella unit for all its data centre efforts.…

Safe browsing mode extended to fool phishing without increasing boosting batteries Google has extended its anti-social engineering Chrome tool to Android, making big efforts to reduce blacklists bandwidth costs along the way.…

Stop crooks, not 100 cross-border collaboration during crises Kiwicon Additional exemptions to the much-feared Wassenaar Arrangement will do nothing to protect far-flung security professionals critical to crushing dangerous Heartbleed-esque bugs, according to infosec policy-buff Katie Moussouris.…

Online blackmailer faces lengthy stretch inside A former US State Department official has pled guilty to breaking into the email accounts of young women and blackmailing them into committing crimes.…

Browser support will be running out for most users on January 12 Microsoft is advising Windows users to update their browsers ahead of a new policy that will see some versions of Internet Explorer no longer supported.…

Small deal with US Army expanded, and set alarms ringing VMware's foes have again protested its attempts to strike a new deal with much of the US military.…

Opens door for more plaintiffs in class action case A US judge has issued a ruling that will expand the pool of drivers who can take part in a class action lawsuit against dial-a-ride giant Uber.…

Hoping to avoid rocket roasting on an open fire SpaceX is back in the orbital delivery game, with the first launch since its explosive mishap in June.…

Companies told to watch customers for terrorist tendencies A new bill introduced by Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein and Republican senator Richard Burr would oblige social media companies to report "terrorist activity" to the authorities.…

And those old programs don't have a great track record When Vulture South read the Australian government's new National Innovation and Science Agenda, especially ”Embracing The Digital Age section on school education's contribution to innovation, we were struck by how some of its tactics seemed familiar.…

Another telco signs on for net neutrality end-run Verizon is reportedly looking to roll out a controversial data plan some believe violates net neutrality principles.…

FBI chief and deputy CTO bring issue back to the table Just a few weeks after the US government effectively conceded defeat in its efforts to force tech companies to introduce backdoors into their software, the issue is being pulled back onto the table.…

Deep learning mindgrab war hots up Four years after Facebook open sourced its data center hardware with the Open Compute Project, the company has done it again with a server built for deep learning neural networks.…

Branding nightmare if UK actually withdraws from EU HP Enterprise Hewlett Packard Enterprise has cut the ribbons on its EU-wide tech-as-a-service market stall Cloud28 - let’s hope the UK doesn’t vote to pull itself out of the union, necessitating a name change.…

Server-side JavaScript giant pitches in Its business future might be uncertain, but Yahoo! has committed (technologically at least) to a project pushing server-side JavaScript.…

Grant Caley to play Babelfish between users, sales teams The chief-techie-shaped hole at the top of NetApp’s UK ops is no more: the hard-pressed storage giant has plucked veteran engineer Grant Caley and pinned the Principal Technology Officer’s badge to his lapel.…

Open Container Initiative gets formalised An open-source project for vendor-neutral containers has come to life.…

We’re ‘proactively taking security measures’ - WP Engine WordPress hosting outfit WP Engine has confessed to a security breach, prompting it to reset 30,000 customers' passwords.…

Bogus propaganda websites punt malware to likely marks Security researchers have uncovered a seven year-long malware campaign against Latin America.…

Operator's Dutch wing wants €115m from a perplexed KPN Vodafone has initiated legal proceedings against Netherlands-based telco KPN, with the claim that the latter's business practices have affected competition and consumer choice in the country.…

Future channel for firm's SSDs and HDDs Seagate is pushing out OEM products from its eyrie atop Dot Hill.…

Platform plays aren't taken lightly SAP’s all-or-nothing HANA is experiencing a Hadoop moment in the enterprise, with adoption of the business giant’s in-memory database layer being held back because customers either can't afford it or can't establish a business case for it.…

A Starr idea: Faster access to files Comment The idea of a hybrid flash tape cartridge was floated by SpectraLogic CTO Matt Starr in a conversation yesterday.…

Narrowcasting and the battle of the robots Comment Rejoice! The BBC boffins can customise their broadcasts to suit your prejudices.…

Not really a good idea Pirate music wannabe Aurous has shut down, barely three months after first surfacing. Billed in Vice as “BitTorrent Music for your Dad”, and described as a “Popcorn Time for music”, the outfit, whose sole proprietor was Andrew Sampson, has agreed to pay damages of $3m.…

GDS had all the power, none of the responsibility, says PAC Senior UK government officials were hauled in front of MPs yesterday to defend their deeply "dysfunctional" and "childish" behaviour, which contributed to the botched £215m Common Agricultural Policy IT system, and up to £180m in EU fines.…

You get what you pay for Analysis I usually tend to look at technology from a technical point of view, but when in the field talking to end users it often turns out they bought it for the same reason it was pitched ... only to realise later that actually they like it for totally different reasons.…

Azure management move One-time server foes Microsoft and Red Hat have come a step closer on the emerging platform of cloud.…

Number of new problems rising, says Symantec The number of iOS threats discovered this year has more than doubled, from three in 2014 to seven so far in 2015, according to Symantec, with jailbroken devices being the focus of the majority of threats.…

Festive puzzler promises cryptographic and charity payload The Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), Britain's signals intelligence organisation, has revealed its Christmas card.…

Ransomware targets old Flash versions, says Trend Micro The Independent has become the latest big-name publisher to serve malware.…

Much coming and going aboard orbiting outpost Crew aboard the International Space Station are preparing for a busy run-up to Christmas, with a Cygnus space truck to unload, three new residents due to arrive next week, followed by a Russian resupply mission slated to launch to the orbiting outpost shortly after.…

Graceful migration would help the other three billion Facebook has broken ranks with the world's major browser vendors, asking that the ancient SHA-1 has algorithm go out with a whimper rather than a bang.…

Dawn's happy snaps also hint at underground water ice When the Dawn mission's first photographs arrived from Ceres, everyone from scientist to conspiracist got excited about the bright spots. Now, scientists say the spots are a kind of salt that hint at subsurface water ice on the object.…

MAC/PHY specs released, plugfest in the pipeline A year after its launch, the NBase-T 2.5 / 5 Gbps Ethernet alliance's 802.3bz IEEE specification is drawing closer to reality.…

Huge number of vulnerable products November's high-profile Java deserialisation bug has bitten Cisco, with the company announcing vulnerabilities across the board in its huge product line.…

Craig Wright, the model of the Aussie 'entrepreneur' It's more than a little odd seeing the world hail their libertarian hero, mourn that he was "arrested for inventing Bitcoin” (as is being claimed on Twitter), and find that he ate government money like a horse.…

Half-baked code a feast for attackers because Thing-builders are hopeless Kiwicon American hardware hackers have ruined Christmas cooks ups across Australia, revealing gaping and pwnable vulnerabilities in Internet-connected barbecues.…

Researchers watch the watchmen Some of the biggest names in the security software business have been compromised by a serious flaw that could allow a hacker to use the commercial security code to infiltrate computers.…

Resort chain promises to lock down customer info Hotel chain Wyndham Resorts has agreed to settle its long-running case with the FTC over its handling of customer data.…

Shoddy authentication checks let stolen, expired credit cards be loaded on payment gadgets Kiwicon Criminals can empty stolen credit cards with new-found stealth using payment gadget Coin, thanks to the device's weak and pwnable authentication checks.…