The Register

Users opening PDFs on public machines at risk. The Australian Tax Office (ATO) has crushed a cookie-related flaw in which sessions failed to close allowing the next user of a public computer to access tax records.…

That whirring sound is William Shockley spinning in his grave Fairchild Semiconductor, a company synonymous with the rise of Silicon Valley, has agreed to a $2.4bn acquisition offer.…

Government claims online blockade was a misunderstanding The government of Bangladesh shut down its internet for an hour earlier today in response to the announcement of the death penalty in a high-profile war crime trial.…

Microsoft reports phishers getting busy on high-value systems There's a new hacking team out there that's proving surprisingly good at getting into government systems using social engineering tactics coupled with zero-day attacks in assaults that can last as long as a year.…

What's good for the syndicate is good for everybody The Netherlands is the natural place for Uber to bill its Australian customers, Airbnb only lives in Ireland because it's got the best skills pool, and Bermuda is beloved of Chevron merely because it has a good maritime safety record.…

We've got a plan to get you wet and excited … about hyperconverged infrastructure Christmas is nearly upon us, and Vulture South has a little party planned in concert with SimpliVity.…

No worries – if you're legitimate you'd never need to use those, says government The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has issued new restrictions on how marketers can accept payments, in hopes of curbing the most popular ways scammers collect cash from victims.…

Optus and Telstra would flip them the bird. But small ISPs ... Australian law firm Moray & Agnew has written to internet service providers (ISPs) in an attempt to have them block a site hosted in India, citing the new provisions of Australia's Copyright Act that target pirate websites as justifying the ban.…

And allows app 'streaming' to test services out Google has expanded its search feelers into content stored inside apps.…

Plug pulled, Kickstarter backers furious The company behind the troubled ZANO nano-drone project has pulled the plug, leaving thousands of Kickstarter backers in the lurch.…

There will be pwnage Black Hat Europe Hackers might be able to bridge the gap between supposedly air-gapped systems in oil and gas production by pivoting from enterprise planning onto production systems.…

Netflix goes open source with multi-cloud tools

Also a flurry of announcements on mobile and open source offerings Microsoft has announced new developers tools and services at its Connect event under way in New York. The forked, open source version of the .NET platform, called .NET Core, is now at Release Candidate status, as is ASP.NET 5.0, Microsoft's web application framework.…

He might get 20 years to boast about that one A cybercriminal who ran a mere eBay scam became a more significant collar for the US Department of Justice after he successfully stole the identity of the special agent investigating him.…

Around 55 per cent of DevOps engineers make $100,000 or more, says report Getting DevOps onto your business card can make a serious difference to your standard of living, if a salary report from Puppet Labs is anything to go by.…

Eyeing the future of transformative technology The UK Robotics and Autonomous Systems Network (UK-RAS Network) tentacle of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) is inviting humans to get involved in the first UK Robotics Week, scheduled to run from 25 June - 1 July 2016.…

Hanging out at the beach with your digital friends... Regcast after hours What does the digital workplace transformation really mean? Will we still go to work, or will our work travel with us? How will we learn to be creative in an age of automation, and how will we be collaborate if we don’t see each other regularly?…

And all its customers are waiting for (a non-VoIP) call Updated Telecity engineers will tonight made a second attempt to fix broken power systems at its critical Sovereign House internet facility.…

Analysis reveals attack was put together using leaked source The seemingly long-defunct Blackhole Exploit Kit has resurfaced in a fresh run of drive-by download attacks, according to research carried out by security firm Malwarebytes.…

Data centre forecast: Expect cloud-busting winds from the Amazon basin Cumulo Hopkintus is forming new product shapes as cloud winds strengthen in the data centre. There’s no bending with these gales, and EMC is having to go with the flow, enabling data movement off its arrays and into the public cloud.…

It did more than just survive a two-week test – it flourished Comment I seem to have spent my life getting through, testing, and handling a lot of phones. A lot. But I hate phones. I hate all the hundreds of them I have lying around my house and the countless thousands of pounds I have spent on them.…

How long can it survive? Comment Overland Storage ... sorry, Sphere 3D these days after the acquisition, continues on its merry way with no appreciable change in its progress – revenues are still falling and losses are deepening.…

IT pros, hold your breath IPB The UK government published a draft Investigatory Powers Bill earlier this month in a bid to close gaps it has said exist in the surveillance powers available to the UK's intelligence and security services.…

Spinning up thousands of servers in minutes. Yeah, yeah, yeah Comment Cloud computing has elements of a fool’s paradise. We’re told it’s elastic, infinitely elastic even, with thousands of virtual servers spun up in minutes. But there's just one problem ... this is palpable nonsense, short-term excess capacity being mopped up by early entrants to a large resource.…

Early version for the 'adventurous', but not quite 'crazy'. Dogged developer and open source champion Eric S Raymond has announced a beta of a refined version of the network time protocol code as open source following financial backing.…

Our experts explain how they work together Webcast at 11:00 GMT Some of the most important developments in IT are taking place around DevOps and hybrid-cloud. So what do these two topics have to do with each other?…

Two-cubit operations possible thanks to working single-atom transistor in silicon Entanglement is easy to generate, but if you want to prove you have entanglement - and that's one of the many holy grails of quantum computing - you have to pass what's called "Bell's inequality test". Doing it in silicon is even better, and that combination has the corks popping at the University of New South Wales.…

Independent research suggests cash splash coming ... if Dell keep its paws off VCE Dell and EMC customers like the idea of a Dell/EMC merger and largely plan to spend more with the combined companies, according to analyst outfit the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG).…

Who needs a USB drive or small NAS when you can sync 'n' share? Small networked storage systems are in trouble: kit-tallyer IDC says sales declined in Q3 2015 and now sit at under 334,000 a quarter.…

Time to switch your poisons, swingbellies! If your liver's packing it in after a lifetime of boozing, changing your poison may yet keep you alive a little longer.…

Researchers find ways to p0wn industrial control systems Blackhat Europe Security boffins Andrew Polyakov and Mathieu Geli say SAP platforms can be used as bridges to cause physical damage by attacking industrial control systems.…

Who needs CTRL-C, ALT-TAB, CTRL-V when Cortana can do it for you? MS Ignite AU It's a way off yet, but one of the endpoints for Cortana, Microsoft's take on the digital assistant you can fall in love with, is to be a primary interface between multiple applications.…

Things are getting more interesting, long-time dev tells Reg hack MS Ignite AU Windows CE might seem like a bad dream from this distance, but a IoT developer speaking at Microsoft's Ignite gabfest in Australia have told The Register it represents a starting point that now positions Redmond well to response to the Internet of Things.…

It's not going to happen – redesign or not Google+ has been a lot of things in its four years on our computers – a sort-of social network, an identity manager for other Google platforms, and something of an industry joke. Now Google is trying again with the portal that wouldn't die.…

Lasers used to chill water. You read that right: chill, not heat Laser refrigeration, that counter-intuitive application of the technology, has taken an important step towards reality, with scientists from the University of Washington chilling water by 36°F (20°C).…

Joe Barton is angry about Paris killings. Also has no idea what he's talking about Analysis US Congressmen have called on America's broadband regulator to figure out how to shut down websites and social media accounts used by the Islamic State.…

Anons are our customers, and we don't censor them either, says Prince Matthew Prince, CloudFlare's cofounder and CEO, has hit back at Anonymous, which claimed his firm backs ISIS by keeping terror websites up and running.…

If true, NBC may have identified an actual BOFH Radical group ISIS is running a help desk to assist jihadists to use encrypted communications, NBC reports.…

Digital rights group takes down Pawn Storm base The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has been awarded control of its namesake domain, which was being used to install malware on people's computers.…

Productivity gains without performance hits SC15 Everyone loves Docker, including Cray, which today announced the addition of container-based virtualization to its official software stack.…

Fanbois fret following freaky phantom fondleslab freezes Some Apple iPad Pro owners claim their new jumbo tablets freeze when being recharged.…

ColdFusion, LiveCycle and Premiere get fixed Today, Adobe released important patches for some of its other products – people still using Flash can stand down, however.…

Using SocPsy to get you team doing, as well as knowing Promo It’s a thorny organisational issue: teams know what to do, they are committed to doing it, and then they fail to do what they set out to do.…

Spin-offs and layoffs abound in corporate blood-letting Citrix has announced plans to lay off 1,000 employees as part of a corporate reshuffling that will also include spinning off its GoTo brand.…

And tries to out-Nimble’s Infosight to handle customer probs via analytics Pure Storage wants to be its flash array customers’ best friend forever with announcements lowering flash storage cost and improving its availability.…

Fair Standards Alliance attracts heavyweights to FRAND cause Did you know that about $60 of the cost of a $400 smartphone goes to holders of something called "standards-essential patents" (SEPs)?…

S is for security, but what about privacy? Microsoft claims it really does care about privacy and securing the cloud and Windows 10, promising to build cybersecurity teams and investing in the area.…

Tell us your message horrors, readers "Burrito" chain Chipotle has been using an internet domain for its HR emails that it has no control over.…