The Register

Edge browser's 's rendering engine will hit Github in January <pMicrosoft's wheel of change has seen it further abandon closed-source dogma to open its Chakra, thereby improving its karma. ®…

It's obese on the inside TV Review Readers please note: THIS IS A POST-UK BROADCAST REVIEW – THERE WILL BE SPOILERS!…

Visit evil webpage – lose control of your computer In brief Lenovo laptops and PCs can be hijacked by visiting a malicious website – and Dell and Toshiba machines suffer vulnerabilities, too, we're told.…

Court not interested in excuses any more One of the key players in Prenda Law, a troll group that seeded smutty films onto file-sharing networks and then harassed the downloaders for payment, has been told he must sell his home and possessions to cover his creditors' bills.…

Committee asks for full details on government's handling of extortionist malware The US Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs wants to know how secured government PCs are against ransomware, and whether any agencies have paid off hackers to unlock their files.…

Bodes well for the Internet of Things A security hole that has been known and patched for the last three years remains vulnerable in over 6.1 million connected devices.…

Watch out for third-party heavy heat sinks In brief Beware if you're fitting third-party coolers to your Intel Skylake processors: it's reported that the chips and their sockets can be damaged by the weight of the heat sinks.…

Hawaii Supreme Court blocks Thirty Meter Telescope Building work on the world's largest telescope has stopped after the Hawaiian Supreme Court sided with local groups and withdrew construction permits.…

It's all semantics Comment "Software-defined storage" is something end users love, and the industry is going precisely in that direction. The only problem I have with it is that, as happens with other buzzwords, the term is being over-abused, and generalization leads to confusion.…

Dump data partition, removable memory card, developer mode – all possible Toymaker VTech – already under heavy fire for a massive security breach and insecure apps – faces fresh security criticism: researchers have discovered it was possible to easily lift data from its Innotab tablet.…

But continues challenging validity of patents Samsung says it will pay Apple the $548m it was told to cough up for infringing the iPhone's round corners among other patented designs.…

Hyper-converged software brewster brewing big changes Springpath, the hyper-converged software startup, has cancelled two US briefing events with journalists and industry types. It's also canned its global PR agency, and calls to its contact phone number are not answered.…

It's like glasnost all over again. Actually, it's nothing like glasnost Russia's mass surveillance of all its citizens' telephone communications has been found to be a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights, which the country ratified in 1998.…

Poor Herman Wimmer gets the short straw Teradata has axed its co-president for data and analytics, meaning Herman Wimmer is out of a job.…

When patches stop being issued for your switch, for one Working with small businesses is a master's degree in the real lifespan of IT infrastructure. Companies with real budgets replace everything regularly; refresh cycles are two or three years apart, rarely five. The same doesn't necessarily apply to SMBs, and there are very real lessons to be learned.…

Intriguing tidbits fished out from SEC filing Atlassian could hit Nasdaq as early as next week, opening up the possibility of an acquisition frenzy as the Aussie turned British-based software firm reels in the cash - then starts spending it.…

All internal system to run on cloudy software Exclusive Fujitsu EMEA’s chief techie has dismissed the naysayers as the organisation embarks on a five-year project to migrate all of its internal systems to OpenStack.…

Galaxy S6 Edge+, a Galaxy Tab S2 and more up for grabs The Register and Samsung SEAP have teamed up to create a splendid developer competition that should be perfect for the Android developers among you.…

Your four-year reign of terror is (temporarily) over Operations of the Dorkbot botnet have been disrupted following an operation that brought together law enforcement agencies led by the FBI, Interpol and Europol, and various infosec firms.…

Will a quarter of big companies really go DevOps next year? Codeship has snagged another round of cash from investors banking on the furore around DevOps.…

Sale halted while Brussels eyes merger plan Ofcom has halted its 4G spectrum auction, following threats of legal action from Telefónica UK and Hutchison.…

Flaws found on mobile app and client-side servers Mattel's Hello Barbie doll, the Wi-Fi-equipped playmate that talks to its owner and reports back on the conversations to mummy and daddy, has more security problems than first thought – this time on the software side.…

Branches into emergency services walkie talkie tech Motorola has snapped up Airwave, the walkie-talkie biz used by Blighty's emergency services, for £817.5m.…

ICO looking into the breach Pub chain JD Wetherspoon has confessed to a data breach in which a third party managed to snag the personal data of 650,000 customers, together with some financial data, through a hack on its old website.…

An object lesson Storagebod I was hoping that one of the things that I might be able to write about after HPE Discover was that HPE finally had a great solution for scale-out storage, either NAS or object.…

Give me something to break! Something for the Weekend, Sir? My underwear smells of bacon. The idea, I think, is to make carnivorous members of society salivate in the unlikely event that they should ever bring their faces into close proximity of my shreddies.…

Reader marched without an exit interview had no chance to explain the big savings around the corner On-Call Here we are again on a bright British Friday morning, which means it's time for On-Call, in which readers recollect their ramblings into the real world to fix things up.…

The aim is to become a 'world leader' in smart city technology Manchester has been given £10m in order to become a world leader in "smart city" technology.…

Web scripting languages offer XSSive flaws Java applications have been found to have many fewer common vulnerabilities than those coded using web scripting language. Less than a quarter of Java apps sport sporting SQL injection vulnerabilities, compared to more than three quarters of those written in PHP.…

Disk vault Bitlocker snubs self-encrypting drives – when's the fix? We know Microsoft can be pretty secretive about its spyware-as-a-service Windows 10, but Redmond has now taken its furtiveness to a whole new level.…

Virgin Galactic chooses 747 as satellite-slinging platform for LauncherOne Sir Richard “Beardy” Branson's space company Virgin Galactic has decided to use a 747- 400 formerly used to ferry passengers as a satellite launch platform.…

Windows 10 IoT Core Pro lets thing-makers opt-out of security updates Microsoft's released a new flavour of Windows 10.…

And why the mysterious Texas biz filed a sudden rush of infringement complaints In late November, patent-holding biz CryptoPeak Solutions filed dozens of lawsuits against major US resorts, retailers, and financial service providers, among others.…

World's worst password-stealer + world's worst exploit kit + world's worst ransomware. Virus slingers who find themselves unsatisfied by merely ruining computers with ransomware are now first stealing a victim's admin passwords to enslave their websites into attack campaigns.…

App Engine task queue tasks sloo...ooww for ~10% of instances Google is suffering a cloud cockup, and hasn't been able to fix it for more than 24 hours.…

Automated routing, DPI at scale and so much more for open networking wonks With twelve months of version iterations behind it, the ONOS Foundation is now declaring itself ready for carrier-scale deployment, following the release of its Emu version.…

We've back-of-the-enveloped Trendfocus' data to come up with 500+ exabytes a year The world bought 143 exabytes of storage in 2015's third quarter, according to analyst outfit Trendfocus, and looks to be on track for a 500 exabyte year.…

He got off light The so-called "King of revenge porn" has been sentenced to 2.5 years in jail and fined US$2,000.…

$10.5bn buyout in three US states clears final hurdle US telco Frontier Communications has cleared its final hurdle towards a $10.54bn deal that will see it take over Verizon's landline phone, TV, and ISP business in California, Texas, and Florida.…

We put in more, so you'll pay by the core Microsoft looks to be moving to per-core licences, rather than per-CPU licences, for Windows Server 2016.…

Apps for Education won't follow your offspring, says ad giant Google has fired back at allegations that Chromebooks running its education software spy on children in classrooms and push adverts.…

Android satellites will have to wait at least a day before leaving Earth Pics Strong winds over the launch site and thick cloud cover have led NASA to delay its planned resupply mission to the International Space Station.…

Just as well considering all the new OSs it's putting out there Apple has open-sourced its Swift programming language, used to write apps for its ecosystem of products.…

Come on, guys. Don't go giving the Russians any ideas Kazakhstan may be about to intercept and decrypt its citizens' internet traffic – by ordering them to install rogue security certificates.…

More features, more security, more expensive Microsoft's new high-end Office 365 plan, E5, has gone live with pricing around 50 per cent higher than the existing E3 plan, which remains available. E3 costs $20 (£14.70) per user per month, whereas E5 is $35.00 (£21.80), a bigger price differential for US users.…

And it's pretty easy to install via a command line How-to The Let's Encrypt project has opened to the public, allowing anyone to obtain free TLS certificates and set up HTTPS websites in a few simple steps.…

Hey secondary storage vendors – you're toast Comment Startups are always someone's enemy; that's the nature of being disruptive. The disrupted status quo hates you. Rarely though does a small biz face more enemies than Cohesity. Every supplier selling secondary storage hardware, software, or applications faces being killed or grievously wounded by Cohesity. Mohit Aron's startup is basically hated and feared by everybody outside the pure primary storage space, or should be.…

Great time to be a customer, but what about the vendors? Storagebod So I was sitting in my hotel room on day 2 of HPE Discover thinking about some of the discussions that happened on the previous days/evenings. It seems that even vendors are now coming round to the idea that enterprise storage is pretty much dead – at least in its current form.…

I see a Friday and I want it painted black Retail giant Target has agreed to shell out $39.4m to banks and credit unions who had pursued the company following losses suffered after an enormous data breach.…