The Register

Traditional RDBMS vs NoSQL fitness Live webcast How relevant is NoSQL in the Enterprise? Join us live on 17 December at 11:00 GMT to find out.…

Space agency seeks quieter spot for Oz launch tracking ops Urban sprawl and interference from TV broadcast vans have obliged the European Space Agency (ESA) to shutter its Perth station in Western Australia, which until now has been handling initial tracking of spacecraft soaring aloft from Kourou, French Guiana.…

It’s that, or ‘stagnate as competition improves’ Fontdeck, a service which provided fonts to websites, is to close. Fonts can no longer be purchased, and existing fonts will no longer be served after 1 December 2016.…

Max Schrems' bomb just keeps going off Europe is being hypocritical by derailing the Safe Harbour data protection agreement - because its own protections for citizens against indiscriminate surveillance are worse than the USA’s.…

Nice little open source reboot for a quarter of the web's sites Blog web hosting service provider WordPress.com is embracing JavaScript and open-sourcing its code base, in what the platform’s chief reckons is a big, risky and controversial bet.…

Striking peloton-leading style available now at Cash'n'Carrion We're certain that some of you - in common with Vulture South's own Simon Sharwood - do occasionally rise from your PCs and mount mighty two-wheeled steeds for a bit of healthy outdoor exercise.…

Web comic author talks procrastination, illustration and the Thing Explainer In just over a decade Randall Munroe has become firmly established and it’s safe to say adored as the author of xkcd.…

Dutch cyber company acquired as NCC dreams of glorious tomorrow Fox-IT, a Dutch cyber security firm, has been acquired for €133.25m (£93.5m) by NCC, which is declaring its intention to become a big dog in the global cyberpack.…

The Mechanics of Genius lands in London next year London's Science Museum is trumpeting its forthcoming exhibition Leonardo da Vinci: The Mechanics of Genius, which opens its doors on 10 February next year.…

Yes, again. Department on track to become IT basketcase The rollout of the Ministry of Justice's troubled £250m National Offender Management IT system was restarted again earlier this year - The Register can reveal.…

Too many companies, too few projects.... right? Interview IBM buying Cleversafe could mark the start of the endgame for independent object storage suppliers. We talked to Philippe Nicolas, who was Scality’s Director of Product Strategy until earlier this year and is now a storage industry advisor. We asked him questions about the state of the object market and its suppliers.…

More than '1,000' jobs thought to be for the chop in worldwide downsizing Exclusive Oracle has admitted it is axing its UK software support centre – in a move sources say will shift all European support work to Romania and cut "more than 1,000" support staff.…

PART 2 – It looked like a training exercise anyway Sysadmin Blog Researchers think they have figured out how Sony was hacked. Long story short: the hackers knew what they were doing and covered their tracks with some clever, but really basic, tricks. I'm not particularly surprised by this, but I am surprised that others are surprised by it.…

Faster, prettier Android Studio dev tool preview debuts Google has launched a preview of version 2.0 of Android Studio, the Alphabet subsidiary's development tool for Android apps.…

Back to Windows Update like everyone else, IT pros A funny thing happened over the weekend: Microsoft made its latest Windows 10 download – billed as its first major update – disappear. And it hasn't come back.…

District attorney and encrypted chat app dev sound off on privacy Special report The debate over encryption has become particularly intense following the deadly attacks in Paris.…

VMware promised patch a week ago, backup vendors offer workarounds VMware has reported a nasty bug that means virtual machine backups may not work.…

Add some M2M into the mix... and trouble's coming Currently, there are as many mobile subscriptions as people in the world, and every second, 20 new mobile broadband subscriptions are activated. This, and the increased video consumption on mobile devices, is pushing data consumption to new heights - mobile data traffic in Q3 2015 was 65 per cent higher than the previous year, according to Ericsson’s latest version of its bi-annual Mobility Report.…

Customers freak, yell :Time to DBAN!" Two British suspects have been arrested accused of running the refud.me encryption site VXers use to evade antivirus.…

Clare Foges' outburst pulled apart by law prof, infosec expert An article by the UK Prime Minister's chief speechwriter suggests Silicon Valley is happily aiding "tech-savvy jihadists."…

'ModPos' kernel monster threatens haul during festive shopping blitz The world's most complex sales till malware has been discovered ... after it ripped millions of bank cards from US retailers on the eve of post-Thanksgiving shopping frenzies.…

To update a CSL DualCom rig rip off the glue, unscrew the box, manually flash each unit British penetration tester Andrew Tierney says he has found dangerous vulnerabilities in network-connected alarm systems sold by the UK's self-proclaimed market leader CSL DualCom.…

And Adobe's cloud's gone, and Seagate's cloud's gone, another one bites the dust Adobe's announced it will close Revel, its Flickr-like cloudy photo storage service.…

ID number per person, tiny gadgets exempted, personal info optional, etc A task force assembled by the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has revealed its suggestions for personal drone registration in the US.…

Or how I learned to combat the effect of disruptions on job performance Promo Sign up right now to watch this Citrix sponsored webinar and learn how to connect and collaborate in an always-on world without killing your day.…

Long term discount deals coming to make AWS different from hosting how exactly? This is different from hosting how exactly? Amazon Web Services has flicked the switch on “EC2 Dedicated Hosts” - a new cloud service that offers “physical servers fully dedicated for your use.”…

No threat of ban yet, but it can't be far off on past form Russia has again pointed out, pointedly, that Wikipedia contains content it doesn't want its citizens to see.…

And we promise we'll tell you how to remove it Dell says it will publish a guide to remove the web security backdoor it installed in its Windows laptops and desktop PCs.…

David Goulden pledges support stays the same, innovation for current products EMC Information Infrastructure CEO David Goulden has written to customers promising “minimal disruption to existing product lines” as EMC and Dell become one.…

And now here's how you can really destroy it Updated The rogue root certificate in new Dell computers – a certificate that allows people to be spied on when banking and shopping online – will magically reinstall itself even when deleted.…

Cloudy medical image library is bad news for big storage Australia's dominant telco, Telstra, has waded into one of the storage industry's favourite markets, medical imaging, with a cloud service that may not make it a lot of friends.…

Root CA certificate opens up folks to banking, shopping snooping, etc Dell ships computers with all the tools necessary for crooks to spy on the owners' online banking, shopping, webmail, and more.…

Takeup will be ‘significantly more rapid than seen with Windows 7’ The first six months of 2016 will see an upsurge in pilot rollouts of Windows 10, Gartner has predicted.…

More than 65m requests flood into Choc Factory in past month Google received more than 65 million removal requests for search results containing alleged copyright violations in the space of the past month.…

Syphilis was around before his New World jaunt, Austrian skeleton suggests The skeleton of a six-year-old infant unearthed in Austria is challenging the theory that syphilis was imported into Europe from the New World by the ship's crew of Christopher Columbus.…

Pr0n software actually leads to pwnage A brace of supposed porn apps for Android actually push ransomware or steal personal data from mobile device, cloud security firm Zscaler warns.…

'Handful of customers' told to wait until Tuesday for a fix An unknown number of TalkTalk Business customers have been unable to access their email messages for days, after the budget telco's servers went down on Friday.…

Get your 2016 predictions here Analyst outfit CCS Insight's annual crystal ball gazing exercise is always informative and occasionally uncanny, such as when it predicted Three would buy O2, and BT would respond by snapping up EE.…

Operator mulls controls for 27m subscribers, chief says it's not about blocking EE may have a pretty pathetic customer service record, but the company is hoping to cheer up its 27-million-strong subscriber base by potentially allowing them to block ads on their mobile phones.…

More fines, totalling £250,000, to be doled out this week The Information Commissioner's Office has served up penalty of £80,000 to a PPI claims company that sent more than 1.3 million spam texts.…

'Jihadi favourite' cooked up by Vkontakte's Durov Bros Security experts have poured scorn on claims by developers of the Telegram messaging app – said to be popular amongst the cadres of the so-called Islamic State – that it’s more secure than its rivals.…

PART 1 – Can't keep them out, so catch them while they’re in Sysadmin Blog If you want to hack someone's network then learn your target. This starts with recon. What does your target run? What information can you find out about them? Remote scanning will tell you lots about a target system ... unless their sysadmins are good and have changed all the banners to throw you off.…

1000s of privacy gripes deserve to be heard, says complainant Austria's highest court is poised to consider whether the Schrems vs Facebook case should be granted class-action status.…

Unregistered 'occupant' receives disconnection notice Those readers who believe that death will finally deliver them from the attentions of utility companies are advised not to pop their clogs in Ireland, or at least not in County Kerry.…

Pearson VUE says credentials manager product affected Cisco, IBM, Oracle and Microsoft's certification management provider, Pearson VUE, has copped to a data breach following a malware compromise of its Credential Manager System.…

By law, the BBFC must suffer every single minute of it A cheeky Brit has agreeably decided that if the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) is going to charge filmmakers to submit their work for certification, he's going to make the longest possible film of paint drying ever to hit the silver screen, and oblige the censors sit through every minute of it.…

Brit video conferencing and collaboration biz to be assimilated by the borg Cisco is to hoover up London-based video conferencing and collaboration tech outfit Acano for $700m.…

... and who's liable for all the money lost? Feature The exploitation of online advertising networks by malware-flingers is expected to cause up to $1bn in damages by the end of this year, but despite ongoing regulatory efforts, it is not clear to whom the liability for these enormous losses will fall.…

Yep, it's complicated. Our man Trev unravels one new firm's tech Sysadmin Blog Two months ago hyper-converged infrastructure appliance startup SimpliVity sued its rival Springpath. I know next to nothing about the lawsuit – nor do I want to – but the whole thing has caused commentators and armchair analysts everywhere to ask what exactly SimpliVity does that is unique.…