The Register

Mobile calls cost more. Check operator's rates before calling There are now more SIMs than people in the world, with the former surpassing the latter a little earlier this year, or so says mobile network supplier Ericsson, with that particular factoid – and many others – found in its annual Christmas Pudding of traffic stats and forecasts, the 2015 Mobility Report.…

Contain your Linux, folks Debian daddy Ian Murdock has joined Linux container shop Docker.…

Allegedly asked for records of whistleblower, journalists Cleveland Police in the north east of England allegedly used counter-terrorism powers to hunt down a whistleblower within its ranks. That's according to a complaint filed to the UK's cop watchdog, the IPCC.…

IME14K has a client driver, and an out-of-band and open API. No word on price WolfCreek, Data Direct Network’s burst buffer caching system, has arrived in the shape of the IME14K product – apparently ready to leap burning buildings, solve climate change, and make a $5m HPC cluster perform like a $100m one.…

Just rejigging where they sit Fujitsu is the latest bit part PC player to state its commitment to the product line, as it prepares to spin off the computer and mobile businesses into two separate subsidiaries.…

Already has AWS and Google virtual edge filer support Microsoft's Azure has joined AWS and Google as a virtual filer accelerator host for Avere’s vFXT filter caching software.…

LINX reports sudden sharp traffic drop, Amazon Direct Connect goes TITSUP Update 2 Telecity has suffered a major outage at one of its London data centres this afternoon, which knocked out a whole host of VoIP firms' services, made Amazon wobble and borked its Direct Connect service.…

Major updates for C# developers targeting iOS and Android Xamarin has released version 4.0 of its cross-platform mobile suite for iOS, Android and Windows.…

Top folk want to run public firms ECTA Regulatory Conf '15 TalkTalk boss Dido Harding has described the departure of BT Openreach’s chief Joe Garner as a big headache for the former state monopoly – which is in the midst of battling to retain the infrastructure wing of its business.…

Runs anything on anything, apparently Docker flew from the cloud into on-premise computing with the unwrapping of its Universal Control Plane 1.0, which it promised would allow real companies to deploy real containerized apps in real data centres.…

‘We know they want it’ chimes George during GCHQ speech Following Prime Minister David Cameron's re-announcement of funding increases for UK security personnel, Chancellor George Osborne delivered a speech today to GCHQ workers explaining that the increase is necessary as ISIL is seeking to "develop the capability" to launch deadly cyber attacks against British infrastructure.…

Tripped on cable on way out? Yes, it'll take 3 days to fix Updated Less than 24 hours after BT Openreach chief Joe Garner quit the telco's troubled infrastructure division, BT customers all over the UK are saying they can't get online – with the apparent network outage possibly taking up to three days to fix.…

Online disk archive for HPC and Big Data Seagate has three new ClusterStor HPC arrays: the A200, G200 and L300. The A200 is a cold data archive array. The G200 is loaded with IBM’s Spectrum Scale parallel file system software, GPFS that was, while the L300 is an equivalent array running Lustre parallel file system software.…

Big beef with big telcos, naturally enough ECTA Regulatory Conf '15 "We’re not going to pilot the first generation of VR games because the infrastructure isn’t good enough," according to the European Commission's head of broadband, Anna Krzyzanowska, who added: "That might be one of the greatest opportunities lost in the current time."…

Thousands of boxes lifted from lorry We at El Reg's Playmobil department would like to categorically deny any involvement in a heist last week which saw thousands of boxes of miniature fun lifted from a lorry in southeastern France.…

Rawhide! Liberty Global – the owner of UK telco Virgin Media – has agreed to buy Caribbean-based operator Cable & Wireless Communications for £3.5bn ($5.3bn).…

Acquisition of UShareSoft to be 'core' of cloud stuff ... get down Fujitsu Forum 2015 Fujitsu has outlined a timetable for its hybrid IT digital platform after inking a deal to acquire French-based fluffy white services outfit UShareSoft.…

Prison term unrelated to forums posts, we believe Those of you who've been knocking around the El Reg forums for a while will know that we have a badge system designed to honour invaluable commentard contributions to the site, or at least acknowledge a certain degree of commitment to giving forth.…

The Linux distro that doesn't stop Review OK, it was a slight delay – one week – but the latest Fedora, number 23, represents a significant update that was worth waiting for.…

It’ll improve competition as it can 'facilitate entry and/or expansion' The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has paved the way for banks, insurers and other financial services companies to take advantage of cloud computing services, so long as "appropriate safeguards" are in place, said one commentator.…

19,000 criminal pic hashes given to Facebook, Google The Internet Watch Foundation, Blighty's voluntary body for policing and filtering the 'net for child abuse images, has announced nearly 19,000 hashes of "category A" abuse images have already been stored in its new Hash List and distributed to major web firms.…

CTB ransomware blasts 60 high-traffic sites hosted by Rustelekom Cyphort Labs researcher Nick Bilogorskiy says ransomware authors have infected some 60 Russian websites that collectively attract more than 20 million visitors a month.…

Fixes promised for man-in-the-middle diddle Popular Chinese Tinder clone TanTan is sending user details in cleartext and sports an API that allows users locations' to be triangulated.…

New CEO Mike Brown outlines security product mashup plan Symantec divested Veritas because it never quite convinced anyone that an integrated security and data management company made sense, and its security business has struggled in part because it's not linked its protection products. But the company's new CEO Michael Brown nonetheless thinks that integrating the company's range is the key to turning around Symantec's fortunes.…

HAVOC tool rips out keys stored inside apps. Blackhat Europe And still we fail to learn: a quintet of researchers has found that the bad practice of writing keys into code persists among some of the world's most popular Android and iOS applications.…

No sign yet of tragic, philosophical infant Prince chatting with odd mates “In a galaxy far, far away” you don't see much, it seems.…

Virtzilla wants you to fork it up as best you can VMware's pursuit of the container caper has taken another turn, with the open-sourcing of its Photon Controller.…

Help teach Cortana to say 'Sorry, Dave' Microsoft's decided that it, too, wants to open source some of its machine learning space, publishing its Distributed Machine Learning Toolkit (DMTK) on Github.…

Microsoft squashes offline logic flaw that makes lost laptops dynamite Blackhat Europe Synopsys security boffin Ian Haken says un-patched PCs in enterprises are at risk of having user accounts popped and Bitlocker bypassed, in an attack he describes as "trivial" to perform.…

Continuous delivery across AWS, Google Cloud and CloudFoundry Netflix has released Spinnaker, an open-source tool for testing and rolling out software updates in the cloud.…

OpenHPC group to take programmers to the highest heights SC15 Supercomputers are going to get their own common software stack, courtesy of a new group of elite computer users.…

One in ten FBI Cyber Task Force teams don't have a techie American federal investigators are having a hard time hiring computer-savvy staff, according to a memo from the Inspector General for the US Department of Justice.…

Researchers and writers blur lines, cause problems Analysis It's something every journalist learns: if you hit on an important story, make sure every part of it is accurate. One small error is all that is needed to undermine the entire piece.…

Scalable System Framework promises cheaper, denser, cooler networks SC15 Intel's putative InfiniBand-killer Omni-Path has been revealed as the centrepiece of the enhanced Scalable System Framework (SSF) announced at the Supercomputer 15 conference (SC15) in Texas.…

Reg staff stunned – some Cupertino news we can get behind Apple CEO Tim Cook is telling customers not to expect a Mac answer to the Microsoft Surface Pro any time soon.…

Same name, very different results If you held back on installing November's Patch Tuesday updates last week after Microsoft fumbled an Outlook patch, it's apparently safe to go back in the water.…

Terrorists get their wish – they really will be screwed by 72 virgins As world powers prepare to bomb barbaric ISIS into the medieval age it so dearly craves in the wake of the Paris attacks, Anonymous too has declared war on the terror group.…

Real reasons behind Middle Kingdom's rise SC15 The number of Chinese supercomputers among the world's top 500 most powerful number-crunching machines has tripled to 109.…

Grab some popcorn and watch Netflix justify its data deluge Network neutrality has never been the flame-bait topic in Australia that it is in America, but that could be about to change, courtesy of the “Netflix effect”.…

Machine open to all fields of data-crunching Germany has officially powered up its new 2.2 petaflop JURECA supercomputer.…

Disk backup hardware and software families reshuffled Hewlett Packard Enterprise has refreshed its deduplicating backup-to-disk products with new hardware and software.…

Applied Micro promises TSMC-fabbed CPUs In-brief Applied Micro has vowed to unleash upon the world the X-Gene 3, a 64-bit ARM-compatible server processor made using FinFET gates.…

Move of its tools kit illustrates interest in the tech HP Enterprise jumped into the Docker ecosystem with both feet today, running the container technology right through its Helion cloud portfolio.…

Yeah, never mind sluggish uptake and reduction in funds Digital hairdressers and beardy, Web2.0 purveyors of boxes of cereal chomped down on more than 1,000 broadband vouchers that were dished out to small businesses by the UK government.…

Walled gardens are 'scintillating proposition' for ex-spy Sir Iain Lobban, the former chief of GCHQ, has joined a British company's advisory council and has said he finds the prospect of a hands-on role "a scintillating propostion".…

Enlists Xilinx for data centre 'solution stacks' SC15 For 50 years, Moore’s Law held good.…

iPhones are good and Android's terrible, says NCC Group Black Hat Europe Full-disk encryption on mobile devices is nowhere near as secure as commonly believed and Android offers less granular control than iOS, according to security researchers from NCC Group.…

Think crisis, not Crysis Uncle Sam's weather forecasters are going to use graphics processors to hopefully better predict the course of catastrophic storms.…

Increase announced days before Paris attacks Despite the timing of the UK Prime Minister's emissions following the terrorist attacks in Paris last Friday, increases in intelligence personnel were already in place and had been announced by the Treasury some days before.…

Free gifts to customers don't count as deals, Larry At Oracle’s recent OpenWorld conference, Larry Ellison asserted: “We never, ever see IBM” or SAP in the cloud.…