The Register

It's just not funny when you tell the FBI your mates are holding hostages A loophole in US law could make it harder for criminal hackers to call in false high-profile threats to police if an anti-swatting Bill introduced this week gains traction.…

Building company decides electronic sweatband can stop workers overcooking Microsoft has shown off an internet helmet built by a customer.…

Even factory reset cannot smite the foulness that is Shedun Michael Bentley of security-through-analytics outfit Lookout has found android malware that does not require user permission to install.…

Rubbish robots need better software for space It can put Man on the Moon, but NASA has turned to universities to get its clumsy humanoid robot Valkyrie up to scratch.…

Godfrey Sullivan steps down, effective immediately, leaving a profitable loss behind Splunk CEO and president Godfrey Sullivan has retired.…

Can't consolidate until we stop discovering lost ones US government agencies are being called out by Congress after it was revealed that they are falling woefully short in data center consolidation efforts.…

Near-ultrasonic sound system drives pets, and users, crazy Earlier this week the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) warned that an Indian firm called SilverPush has technology that allows adverts to ping inaudible commands to smartphones and tablets.…

Massacre accompanied by political backdoor push Tech giants claim they are standing firm in their refusal to allow government agencies to backdoor their cryptography – or to weaken encryption in their products.…

She's already on the Board, but Google's slurping her latest startup anyway VMware cofounder and CEO Diane Greene is to head all of Google's cloud efforts.…

Under pressure, DNS supremo publishes political expenses Domain name overseer ICANN has spent $2.5m in the past year lobbying the US government, putting the small non-profit on a par with multi-national corporations.…

Smartwatch should be able to use 90 per cent of wireless chargers, but… Apple is now selling a wireless charging pad for its smartwatch. The $79 plate not only demonstrates Cupertino's commitment to design, it also confirms its habit of ripping off people.…

Cupertino says it's working on a fix for mysterious stall Apple has confirmed its iPad Pro tablets sometimes freeze while recharging.…

IPO price set late and set low Analysis Silicon Valley is going to see just how much of its own hype has transferred to Wall Street Thursday with a rare IPO of one of its "unicorns" – companies that venture capitalists have valued at over $1 billion.…

What have they been doing for the last month? Red Hat has uncapped Ansible Tower 2.4, its first update to the IT automation platform since hoovering up the DevOps darling last month.…

Stifel: All-Flash storage array market will hit $6.9bn by 2019 Comment Stifel MD Aaron Rakers has taken a deep dive look at the SanDisk technology Western Digital is aiming to buy, and his report brings out cost-savings derived from HGST escaping payment of an Intel tax, 3D NAND timescales, and possibilities for future planar NAND node shrinks.…

Chip vendor snaps back: 'Device level licensing is worldwide industry norm' Mobile chipmaker Qualcomm disclosed on Wednesday that it has been accused of violating South Korea's competition law.…

A UK startup rides the Shenzhen wave Review Wileyfox is the first new British phone brand in over a decade, and it’s hoping to cash in on the Shenzhen economic miracle.…

Big boys route around the fail. Small fry customers? Bad news, folks... Telecity cancelled its plans for a second shot at fixing the stricken power supply in its Docklands internet hub at Sovereign House.…

How dare they demand we do exactly what we demand of them! The foreign rotters A report laid before the US Congress yesterday encouraged lawmakers to allow American companies responding to Chinese miscreants pilfering their data to hack those companies back to save their info.…

Chairman Weiguo: Buying a majority stake unlikely however China's Tsinghua Unigroup, which is set on building China's first flash chip foundry, is talking to a US chip technology concern about a stake, according to reports.…

Institute of Coding will teach, er, secure coding. Got it? Security vendors and training organisations have welcomed plans by the UK government to open a £20m competition along with a new “Institute of Coding”.…

'Disturbed to learn our service used by group to spread propaganda' Telegram is – following bad publicity about its messaging app – on a whack-a-mole mission against channels understood to have been set up on the service by ISIS.…

Hopes to bring this into practical use during mid 2017 Fujitsu Labs has had in-memory database software directly talk to an SSD, optimising data positioning for faster access, and boosting database performance threefold over standard SSD use.…

Then create 'virtuous' 007, to local net wags' delight Indian James Bond fans have been making merry with the Central Board Of Film Certification's decision to cut a couple of Spectre snogging scenes by 50 per cent.…

Turns from Diablo litigation hell to Samsung heaven Flash DIMM technology developer Netlist has signed a five-year joint development deal with global memory leader Samsung to produce non-volatile DIMMs, giving it a lifeline from years of litigation hell against Diablo Technologies over memory channel storage IP.…

Ofcom decision comes one day after Sky Q set top box reveal BT has attacked Ofcom's decision to lift a five-year-long obligation on Sky to offer its sports channels to competitors in the market.…

But it's moving forward with clarity and speed in the data-powered digital era... Despite its CEO saying NetApp was moving forward with clarity and speed in the data-powered digital era, NetApp recorded lower revenues and profits on the annual compare for its second fiscal 2016 quarter, ended October 20. Same old, same old.…

If the US govt wants iMessages, well, tough Comment Anti-encryption sentiment among politicians is rising following the Paris terror attacks, but Silicon Valley firms are so far resisting attempts to weaken crypto systems to allow easier access to private communications for law enforcement and intel agencies.…

Op Resilient Shield wasn't a live test, though The UK teamed up with US authorities to run a banking industry resilience exercise, dubbed Operation Resilient Shield, last week.…

Stylish French sub-brand wants to steal Audi’s lunch money Vulture @ the Wheel Oh, how car-makers like to mine their archive in the name of style. BMW’s Mini, VW’s Beetle, Fiat’s 500 ... all doff their caps to the style and nomenclature of an imaginary post-war automotive utopia. Citroën got in on the act back in 2010 with the resurrection of the DS marque.…

On-prem heavyweight floats to cloudy Analytics Microsoft’s head of its CRM business apps division will front up Salesforce's analytics cloud, just as Microsoft prepares to release its Dynamics CRM 2016 suite.…

Bezos cloud flinger challenges Ellison deal factor Amazon has pressed the AWS new-service release stream to persuade enterprises against being tempted by tasty deals from cloud weakling Oracle.…

Samsung S6 Edge +, Galaxy Tab S2 and much more up for grabs The Register and Samsung SEAP have teamed up to create our developer competition, where you can win some great prizes, including the Samsung S6 Edge+ and Galaxy Tab S2.…

Bank-plundering code now hunts Windows 10 and its Edge browser VXers have cooked up Windows 10 and Edge support for the nasty Dyre or Dyreza banking trojan.…

Australian study finds lowest-ever digital literacy scores coincide with the iPad age The growing prevalence of smartphones and tablets in homes and schools may be retarding kids' development of IT skills, according to an Australian study.…

Web scum build command and control mountain; bods mulls pending large-scale attacks. Exploit kits are dominating the criminal hacking industry, but even though code fiends prefer colour-by-numbers cracking kits that isn't stopping them from assembling a vast command and control army domain name servers linked to popular kits are up 75 percent in the third quarter compared to 2014, according to a report.…

Alien world forming 450 light years away Scientist have long postulated that planets are formed by accretion of matter in giant discs of matter around stars, and now an inventive researcher has found a way to spot a far-away world being born.…

But Macs don't get viruses ... Oh they do, and increasingly often says Google infosec unit Google's VirusTotal will begin executing Mac apps to test for malicious activity following an uptick in reports of malware targeting Apple's desktop operating system.…

Your roving eye will find prettier targets in the 79 GHz band The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has allocated the 79 GHz spectrum for use in motor vehicle applications.…

801.11ac second wave will speed WiFi, so you need kit that can cope Broadcom is getting ready for the arrival of 802.11ac Wave 2 in 2016, announcing a pair of chipsets for its OEMs.…

Justin Soyke aka 'Juzzy' sentenced The sentencing of a hacker claiming Anonymous affiliations passed with little notice in mid-October.…

Finnish line in sight Nokia's acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent has entered the home straight, with the Finnish company publishing its offer for all outstanding shares in the target.…

Web scum foiled in Win 10 net ship. Microsoft has nixed the ability for its Edge browser to run unsigned dynamic link libraries (DLLs) in a move that will make life hard for dodgy extensions and ad injector merchants.…

Here's a reason to bite the bullet upgrade to vCenter 6.0 VMware has warned users of its vCenter, vCloud Director and Horizon products that they need to patch a flaw in Flex BlazeDS.…

Online configurator offers a sliding scale to let you scale cloudy servers Google's just done something interesting with its cloud by adding a configurator that lets you roll your own servers.…

nginx forks Yunjiasu and Tengine are on the rise along with Chinese clouds Netcraft has issued an update to its regular rating of the world's most-used web servers and found two Chinese nginx forks on the rise.…

Billions of dollars in machine learning R&D concludes that kids like Legos Remember when IBM's Watson was touted as a revolutionary machine learning platform that would help revolutionize the medical, science and business intelligence fields?…

University has broken its silence, but will that quell the critics? Carnegie-Mellon University has fired back in the TOR war, saying that it wasn't paid by the FBI to reveal its de-anonymisation research outputs.…

Intel's Galileo scratched off Windows 10 'thing' list A little over a year after Intel's Galileo development board got its first taste of Microsoft Windows, Redmond has decided to pull the project.…