The Register

But can anyone make VR content? Ask whoever runs your local film school ... Having already lived through one virtual reality hype cycle, I’m surprised to find that 2015 has been punctuated of a number of experiences proving that virtual reality may finally be nearing the mainstream. In February, I experienced some of the new head-mounted displays - and found first-generation Oculus Rift unimpressive. Quick on the heels of that, I got a taste of some ‘immersive video’, footage gathered by an expensive, fancy camera that capture a full sphere around the device.…

Crazy low prices for app 'purchases', or perhaps you'd like a poison PoS unit? Dodgy developers can have their data-stealing iOS applications boosted to the top ranks of Apple's App Store for as little as US$4000 thanks to services on offer by Chinese hackers.…

Top 20 IT suppliers made £10.7bn from gov last year as 'relationship improves' Capita slurped up £1.8bn in public sector spending last year, a 12 per cent increase on the previous year, according to research from analysts TechMarketView.…

Revenue up 4.9 per cent, but browser market share shrinking The Mozilla Foundation has released its 2014 annual report and while revenues are up, the numbers show the outfit is now very dependent on Yahoo! for future income and has declining market share.…

Temp account means God mode for regular users. IOActive security bod Sofiane Talmat has found two since-patched privilege escalation vulnerabilities in Lenovo System Update utility.…

Hewlett Packard Enterprise's green box unleashes green monster at Korean portal with similar logo Logowatch South Korean web portal Naver is considering a legal tilt at Hewlett Packard Enterprise over just who first decided a green rectangle makes a good corporate insignia.…

Mashing up Indian Premier League and CricInfo offers new machine learning approach Indian researchers from Xerox and the International Institute of Information Technology at Hyderabad have used the sport of Cricket to develop a novel approach to interpreting human movement recorded by video.…

SSH logins, server-side HTTPS certs baked in firmware It's what we all assumed, but quietly hoped wasn't quite this bad.…

The truth about camera that seemingly keeps recording even when powered off Alphabet-owned Nest says there is no truth to the allegation that its internet-connected home CCTV cameras continue to record video even when switched off.…

Costs risen considerably, says CEO. Members not persuaded UK registry operator Nominet is planning to increase the cost of .uk domains by 50 per cent starting 1 March 2016, raising questions over its historic nonprofit status.…

Everyone else: Samsung has a network business? Samsung is nipping in the bud talk of selling its mobile network business.…

Microsoft, French bods push for mathematically provable bug-free code Microsoft and French research organization Inria have jointly published the source code for a more secure implementation of TLS – hopefully increasing the security of millions online in the process.…

In the new circuit breaker we trust UK internet hub Telecity on Thursday plans its third shot at fixing a power systems problem that fried customers' servers.…

Software Freedom Conservancy now gets the big tech cold shoulder, it claims The Software Freedom Conservancy is turning to open source citizens to fund its operations and reduce its reliance on big tech. The GPL campaign group is making the change, it claims, because its campaigning has put it at odds with corporate sponsors.…

No regard for human rights, judicial approval An inspection by the Interception of Communications Commissioner's Office (IOCCO) into the targeting by Police Scotland of journalists' sources under anti-terrorism powers without a warrant has concluded the actions were committed with a disregard for human rights regulations, and were "reckless".…

At least we don't email them, says security-shy telco Contrary to password storage security standards, BT-owned Plusnet is still delivering plaintext strings back to forgetful users, and seems to have no plans to tidy itself up any time soon – despite years of warnings from security experts and the advice of GCHQ.…

Sorry investors, we have to sort a Virtustream problem at home The Dell-EMC acquisition was announced on 12 October this year, with Dell buying EMC along with its 80 per cent holding in VMWare.…

Small print says something's afoot ... Autumn Statement Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne failed to mention IR35 even once during his Autumn Statement to MPs on Wednesday at lunchtime – despite the government recently floating new rules to crackdown on freelancers' tax arrangements.…

Pledge for citizens to have option to pay online for every central gov service In a shock announcement, Chancellor George Osborne has today pledged £450m in extra funding to the Government Digital Service.…

Oracle’s Hollis: It’ll happen, but what about the debt?

The connected future of not owning your work space A London furniture design outfit has trousered a £25k Innovate UK grant to prototype "the office desk of the future".…

Latest developer tool also adds GPU profiler, Java to native debugging Google has released Android Studio 2.0 Preview, a major update to its IDE for developing Android applications.…

Who said breakin' up was hard to do? It was an inauspicious start to life as a standalone entity for HP Inc - the breakaway computer and printing business - as it forecast lower than expected profits, based on depressed market demand.…

The SAN growth glory days are well and truly over, so where next? Analysis Brocade has jogged along nice and evenly for four years now, at around $2.25bn annual revenues with steadily rising profits, and its fiscal 2015 added a similar fifth year of pretty decent results.…

Check your bank statements if you paid on plastic Hilton Worldwide has confirmed that malware found its way onto point-of-sale systems and stole payment card information.…

Internet service provider tells us: 'Internet based services' hit Internet provider Eclipse has been hit by a DDoS attack, the second wave of an attack which began on Monday.…

Tourists incapacitated and robbed in chesticular sting NSFW Two Thai women were cuffed yesterday and charged with drugging and robbing two tourists in the beach resort of Pattaya.*…

'Seamless' power transfer borked all the juice supplies Internet hub Telecity has failed to overcome the recent power fault responsible for frying computer hardware and denting UK internet traffic.…

We're just so full of awesomeness even the nerdy kids want to regulate us Google has said it took measures to preempt the lengthy antitrust probes currently being carried out by the European Commission. Oddly, that approach failed.…

Is Satya Redmond's Atatürk? Or พระบาทสมเด็จพระปรมินทรมหาจุฬาลงกรณ์ พระจุลจอมเกล้าเจ้าอยู่หัว ? Analysis Windows anniversaries are a bit like Halloween. You can bring out a Vista or Windows Me to scare the children into bed on time. Microsoft Windows turned 30 this month, and blogs are full of nostalgia.…

Slacktivist setback A district judge last week denied two activist groups the chance to file a supporting motion in a copyright case. In a stinging and derisive rejoinder, he compared their complaints to those of a spoilt boy.…

Update now fixed, we're told Microsoft withdrew downloads for its latest official edition of Windows 10, version 1511, after it meddled with people's privacy settings.…

The more EMC tried to fix it, the worse things became Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, experienced two days of Total Inability To Support Usual Performance (TITSUP) after failures in its EMC equipment.…

Amazing Gumball character 'bypassed storage controller, decrypted disks, accessed ESXi server cluster' Technology on the telly is often made-up rubbish: every CCTV camera in the world is online, progress bars never pause, passwords can be brute-forced in moments and mobile phones never drop out unless faults enhance the dramatic effect. The language used to describe it is worse: the likes of CSI:Cyber routinely make stuff up. And don't get us started on Stephen Fry.…

Redmond's diversity report reveals women bore brunt of 'restructure of phone business' Microsoft's revealed that gutting Nokia has made a dent in its diversity data.…

Easy algorithm and US$10 bork-box mean fun for fraudsters Brainiac hacker Samy Kamkar has developed a US$10 gadget that can predict and store hundreds of American Express credit cards and use them for wireless transactions, even at non-wireless payment terminals.…

Blackhats, head straight to the airport lounge. A second root certificate has been found in new Dell laptops days after the first backdoor was revealed.…

Book baron keeps mum about reason for emergency emails Amazon.com appears to be asking some of its customers to reset passwords after a breach of some sort.…

Privacy network passes around the hat The Tor project is asking its supporters to donate money to help the nonprofit continue to operate.…

How it works Analysis Dell ships Windows computers with software that lets websites slurp up the machine's exact specifications, warranty status, and other details without the user knowing.…

A ydynt yn hyd yn oed yn cael y rhyngrwyd yng Nghymru? Cops probing the TalkTalk mega-hack arrested a teen in south Wales on Tuesday.…

No, go ahead, let's spend billions worrying about an iPearl Harbor Comment The UK Chancellor George Osborne last week announced that the British government plans to double cybersecurity spending and establish a single National Cyber Centre.…

It only took nine weeks The extradition hearing of rotund web baron Kim Dotcom finally ended Tuesday, having taken three times longer than expected.…

Where discrimination comes true, allegedly Ex-Disney IT staffers in Florida have accused the Mickey Mouse outfit of discrimination, and now hope to sue their former bosses.…

Acquisitions finally being developed and put to use Comment NetApp, the company usually known for its FAS appliances, is putting a lot of effort into making its object storage platform, StorageGRID, more competitive. And it’s coming around to what I’ve been saying for a long time now: end users need “Flash & Trash” or, put more professionally, a two-tier storage strategy.…

VTOL win for Blue Origin Pics and vid The was much whooping and popping of champagne corks yesterday at Amazon supremo Jeff Bezos' space outfit Blue Origin: the company's New Shepard rocket successfully performed a VTOL flight – a vertical takeoff and landing.…

Vid crapware issue worse than you thought - researchers A malvertising campaign exploiting online videos to fling poison at netizens actually lasted for two months rather than the 12 hours previously reported, according to new research which suggested the previously unfavoured medium may be ripe for exploitation.…

Taking ‘money from drivers’ pockets’ claims taxi/app firm Uber has indicated that it would seek an intervention from the UK government if Transport for London was to force the controversial taxi/app company to introduce a "five minute wait" rule.…