The Register

Refreeze the poles... giant magnifying glass... What shall we do? The Paris climate talks hope to set out how we can reduce the amount of carbon we’re pumping into the atmosphere. But emissions cuts alone may not be enough. Atmospheric CO is the blanket that keeps our planet warm and any further emissions will mean more global warming. Observations in recent years show that warming is accelerating, that polar ice and glaciers are all melting, that sea level is rising … it all looks rather bleak.…

Insurance industry insider tells all A couple of weeks ago El Reg carried an article by Mark Pesce about the likely evolution of Cyber Insurance. Reg reader and insurance industry veteran Tom Whipp agreed with most of his sentiments, but wasn’t so keen on his conclusions and demanded his stint on the Reg soapbox. So, take it away Tom.…

Half of covert packets are about analytics, half are a mystery Four researchers have found two thirds of the most popular Android apps indulge in seemingly-useless covert chatter with remote servers.…

Network admins: Go buy a tie and some kool-aid, diluted to 10 per cent of your marks Cisco has announced a major refresh of its certification programs, all of which will henceforth include material on cloud, the internet of things, cloud, “network programmability” and “business transformation”.…

Venkata Renduchintala to run Chipzilla's re-organised client and IoT efforts File this one under "if you can't beat 'rm, hire 'em": Intel has hired Doctor Venkata “Murthy” Renduchintala.…

'Inappropriate', mutters Ofcom Telecoms giant BT has been rebuked by the UK's industry regulator for attributing some of the "acquisition costs" associated with its takeover of EE to all of its UK business divisions, including Openreach.…

Twenty pro hackers grease Russia's best crime groups. Kaspersky investigation unit boss Ruslan Stoyanov says a Russian cyber scum group of just 20 professional hackers have have made a tidy US$790 million in three years by emptying the world's bank accounts.…

It's got holes, but she'll be right. Ten auditors from the lauded Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology have given TrueCrypt a security tick after completing a comprehensive six-month audit under contract from the German Government.…

By all means start rummaging, but expect breakage in this very early code The native OpenBSD hypervisor promised in September has emerged.…

Guys? You might want to look up some recent election results before tweeting at world leaders Persons using the name and iconography of online activist collective “Anonymous” (PUTNAIOOACA) are appealing to recently-dethroned world leaders to help them in a fight against Japan's dolphin slaughter program.…

Nmap for XP and Wireshark for Mac put a smile on the face of security-loving girls and boys Security types impatient for gifts under the Christmas tree may find that major upgrades to the popular Nmap and Wireshark infosec tools sate their appetite for new toys.…

Researcher says airline failed to fix critical bug for five months United Airlines' frequent flier points for bugs plan has come in for criticism from a researcher who says the airline didn't respond to news of a critical bug report for five months, and then only after he threatened to go public.…

Log wipers, timestompers may have helped hackers stay quiet in terabyte raids Damballa researchers Willis McDonald and Loucif Kharouni say the attackers who flayed Sony Pictures with disk-cleansing malware may have stayed hidden using newly-uncovered anti-forensics tools.…

How hot, or not, is Windows 10 when Redmond has no plans to retire some Windows 7 tests? Microsoft may be hustling the world onto Windows 10 just as fast as it can, but it seems there's residual demand out there for Windows 8.1 and Windows 7.…

Ministerial meeting calls for accelerated data-sharing among Europe's governments The European Commission's Justice and Home Affairs Council met last Friday to consider responses to the terrorist attack on Paris and among the actions the meeting decided are now necessary is a look at how to crimp virtual currencies.…

Time lords postpone final decision on extra seconds until 2023 conference The International Telecommunications Union's (ITU's) debate on the future of leap seconds has decided a decision on the matter can wait for 252,288,000 seconds.…

Clara will she/won't she die weariness kicks in TV Review Readers please note: THIS IS A POST-UK BROADCAST REVIEW – THERE WILL BE SPOILERS!…

Just wanted to prove it has enough users to pull off an A/B test Yahoo! says it is testing a feature that prevents some users of the Adblock extension from accessing their webmail accounts.…

Just don't mention the last rocket There'll be champagne corks popping in Hawthorne, California, as NASA has finally given SpaceX clearance to carry astronauts to the International Space Station.…

Irony alert The US Department of Homeland Security is running dozens of unpatched databases, some of which are rated "secret" and even "top secret," according to an audit.…

Sheraton, Westin, W chains in US, Canada pwned Add Starwood – owner of the Sheraton, Westin, W hotel chains – to the ranks of resorts infiltrated by credit card-stealing malware.…

90,000 motors hauled in for checks If you are fortunate (and rich) enough to own a Tesla Model S, then you'll have to take it in for a checkup, as the automaker has recalled all 90,000 cars because of a problem with the seatbelts.…

Prez hopeful wants tech giants to stop treating govt as adversary Hillary Clinton has joined a growing number of politicians using the Paris attacks earlier this month to argue for a weaker encryption.…

Backbone carrier looks to be grappling with cut cable headaches Network carrier Level3 says a severed cable is to blame for an outage that hit portions of the US Friday morning.…

Files show agency just moved surveillance offshore Newly revealed documents (not from Snowden this time) show that the NSA has continued to collect Americans' email traffic en masse using overseas offices to get around curbs introduced domestically.…

Surprising finding among Bolivian ethnic group Scientists have – slightly improbably – discovered that infection by the roundworm Ascaris lumbricoides increases fertility in women belonging to Bolivia's Tsimane ethnic group.…

Poor rating due to out-of-date SSLv2 protocol UK crime tip-off service Crimestoppers has revamped its weak website crypto after months of running a system that relied upon obsolete protocols.…

As well as ‘abc123’ and ‘123456’, would you believe Many of the UK’s most popular ecommerce sites have unsafe password practices, according to a new study, with four in five not requiring the use of a capital letter and a number/symbol.…

Finland's last phone company hits cash flow trouble Finnish phone company Jolla has confirmed it has put half of its 100-odd staff on gardening leave, after hitting financial problems.…

Microsoft is betting on open source fork of .NET Framework to draw cloud customers Analysis It is just over a year since Microsoft announced the open sourcing of .NET Core, a cross-platform fork of the Windows-only .NET Framework.…

Taking a pick axe to your application strategy Explaining containerisation can be tricky, so Docker has turned to a medium it reckons everyone can understand. Minecraft.…

Supports 3.8TB SSDs NetApp has updated its Clustered Data ONTAP OS to support in-line deduplication and 3.8TB SSDs.…

Undercutting on maintenance deals to keep S4/HANA on track? Exclusive SAP is understood to be aggressively discounting the price it charges for maintenance to retain customers.…

Our handy cut-out-and-keep comparison guide Our recent piece examining the extreme weather on exoplanet HD 189733b prompted some readers to suggest that conditions on the distant hot Jupiter are in fact more benign than those enjoyed by visitors to British seaside resort Skegness.…

Larger enterprise sales fall flat It's been a dire third quarter for Nimble, whose latest results fell short of market expectations. Shares dropped by a hefty 31 per cent to $14.15 as the news was absorbed by investors. Despite year-on-year growth was still positive.…

Breakout? I don’t want to live like that Something for the Weekend, Sir? Shutupshutupshutup. There’s a man with an extraordinarily annoying voice on this floor and I wish he would take his fulsomely resonating gob somewhere else. Blah blah market synchronisation blah blah invested intelligence blah blah cooperative disruption arse bollocks.…

Survey finds strong parental support for smut-blockers Ofcom’s annual survey of digital literacy amongst children reveals strong support from parents for tools to limit or block net access - and some gullibility amongst children.…

You have 12 days to get your proposals in... There's less than two weeks to submit your proposals for papers and workshops at Continuous Lifecycle London.…

BCC email oopsie An e-tempest is brewing in the beautiful northern metropolis of Sheffield after a City Council staffer forgot to BCC locals due to renew their Housing Register status.…

Are you what the boffs are looking for? Competition It's 2015, the cyber attacks keep on coming, and the bad guys appear to be winning – some may argue this is because devastating data breaches are more newsworthy than businesses upping their security defences. We see a relentless battle between businesses trying to protect themselves and those with malicious intent attacking corporate systems to cause damage or steal information.…

Constitutional amendment has already passed lower lawmakers Following last week's Paris attacks, the French National Assembly has today voted to extend the nation's state of emergency for a further three months. It will also amend powers established in the original 1955 legislation in light of technological developments.…

But could the Hillary Clinton email issues rain on its parade? Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV) has led a $75m B-round for cloud backup and biz continuity service/product supplier Datto, as it looks to expand its presence in the EMEA and APAC regions.…

Money for *distributing* (nearly free) jam is a terrible idea Analysis The “digital music economy” now resembles three bald men fighting over the same hairbrush.…

How many pub owners does it take to change a light bulb? On-Call Welcome again to On-Call, our weekly look at readers' trials and tribulations when asked to go out and fix stuff for clients.…

Brazilian whacks Arris for easy-t-o-guess default password, fix promised fast Security bod Bernardo Rodrigues has found a backdoor-within-a-backdoor affecting some 600,000 Arris cable modems.…

Microsoft's cash cow celebrates three decades of PC dominance On November 20, 1985, Microsoft unveiled its graphical operating system.…

Hyper-V containers debut along with erasure codes, live VM migration and other goodies Microsoft's popped out the fourth Technical Previews of Windows Server 2016 and System Centre 2016.…

Coming soon: Dog rewrites Linux kernel It's a tip of the open source hat today to a cat belonging to one Christoph Reiter, which recently discovered a bug in Linux desktop GNOME.…

New version of open source CMS debuts, but migrations may be tricky The 8th version of open source content management system (CMS) Drupal is upon us.…