The Register

Colour-blindness didn't help, but lack of common sense was the real problem On-Call Welcome again to On-Call, in which fellow Reg readers share their experiences of going out into user-land to fix stuff, often under trying circumstances.…

Because getting infected in the after-market is so tedious Amazon is unwittingly acting as the retail channel for thousands of Android devices preloaded with nightmare advertising malware and with operating systems rooted, users and security boffins allege.…

This future architecture still falls into some of the same old traps We are becoming more and more accustomed to reading about losses of online data through malicious hack attacks, accidents, and downright carelessness – it’s almost as if we don’t know how to secure data against the most common form of attack.…

Shonky software casting users to wolves to spruik ads. The public service announcement is simple: only install browsers from their vendors' sites, because software attics are planting malware.…

First shot at parallelisation arrives The open source PostgreSQL database is about to get query parallelisation, starting with just a few processes, and is looking for crash-test dummies to give it a whirl.…

Your moment in the sun, 493 Griseldis Astronomers have announced evidence that a main-belt asteroid called 493 Griseldis took a hit from another object in March of this year.…

Microsoft, Xen, KVM et al need patches Various hypervisors and operating systems are scrambling to patch around an x86 bug that lets an admin-level guest crash the underlying CPU, causing a denial-of-service to anyone else on the same machine.…

Mid year 2015 transparency report published. Yahoo! has received 5,221 government requests for user data in the first six months of this year, and coughed up some sort of information at least 60 percent of the time.…

Los Alamos kicks the quantum tyre The Los Alamos National Laboratory has become the latest organisation to give quantum annealing a whirl, with D-Wave announcing that the facility will take delivery of its thousand-qubit 2X system.…

Customer loyalty in the age of scumware Web scum are offering another ransomware as a service model under which ill-gotten gains are split between VXers and buyers.…

Faster, further, and with mesh networking Crackers and hackers will no longer need to get up close and personal with Bluetooth devices to launch attacks: the next iteration of the standard will get a fourfold increase in range.…

Shocker: internet companies want more people on the internet Count the likes of eBay, Facebook, and Twitter among those who support the FCC's plan to allow municipal governments to become ISPs.…

Borg playing snakes and ladders, but revenues rise Cisco has turned in Q1 revenue and income well ahead of the same-time last year numbers, but has given traders a chill with less-bullish guidance for the future.…

General counsel still waiting for people to leap onto desks Microsoft has published what can only be described as a privacy manifesto.…

Direct message command and control hides in the walla walla rhubarb. London security researcher Paul Amar has built a tool capable of exploiting Twitter's extended direct messaging function for covert botnet command and control.…

Atlassian miffed at missing out, western Sydney furious at bank relocations Software developer Atlassian’s well-and-truly-off-core-mission tilt at property development has failed, with the state government preferring a Mirvac-led proposal for the Australian Technology Park at Redfern to a bid that didn't make the deadline.…

Negotiations on hold until next year: report Telstra has moved to bury rumours that it's in a battle with nbn over the residents of South Brisbane.…

Trade deal will be great for online tat peddlers, promises Prez President Obama is taking his case for the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) online with a spammy pitch to eBay merchants on how the trade deal will benefit them.…

Plans for Rosetta probe to crash land on comet next year Exactly a year ago, mankind's first ever attempt to land on a comet did not go according to plan - and the European Space Agency (ESA) has just released a report explaining why.…

Promises it doesn't want to control software The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has put out a "revision" to its proposed rules for updating wireless equipment, stating that it does not want to control software updates to Wi-Fi routers and smartphones.…

NSA whistleblower talks turkey about personal surveillance If you want to limit how much governments and companies know about you and your private life, then use Tor, download specific apps and plug-ins, encrypt your hard drive, and use a password manager.…

Timing is everything A forgotten security certificate renewal appears to be behind a series of failed downloads from Apple's App Store.…

IT managers get to pick and choose patches Microsoft has released an update it says is the first major release for Windows 10.…

Sets up partner program for existing alliances New Relic joined the race to embed the words "enterprise" and "partners" in its product offering and marketing materials as it kicked off its FutureStack conference in San Francisco, with the software analytics vendor unveiling a slew of new capabilities in its Software Analytics Cloud.…

Advertising oddness and what MS really wants you to know Microsoft wants to rid itself of the image as the default option of lazy corporate IT professionals (like me), even though that is still the core business of the horde of partner, customers and devs it brought to Excel.…

No longer a Kiwi-only plaything for Apple fanbois Mozilla has unwrapped an iOS app version of its Firefox browser for Apple users across the globe.…

Zero-day vulnerability stoppered Jenkins says it has fixed a range of security vulnerabilities in the open source integration tool with a brace of fresh releases.…

Telco behemoth claims support for high system capacity Chinese telecoms equipment behemoth Huawei has a converged system called FusionSphere, which now runs SAP HANA, the in-memory database.…

Plastic podule prison penetration plan A 73-year-old Spanish woman has avoided jail for a failed attempt to smuggle drugs to her incarcerated son by hiding them inside a Kinder egg plastic podule, wrapping that in a condom and inserting the contraband into her vagina.…

Tingbot case with touchscreen – 'a platform for creative applications' A London-based "networked studio of invention" is rattling the tin down at Kickstarter for the net-connected Tingbot – a custom case for the Raspberry Pi with LCD touchscreen which promises to transform the fruity minicomputer into "a platform for creative applications".…

Not a planned hack – but still a massive fail A chance finding by a German security researcher has revealed ATMs run by German Bank Sparkasse leaked potentially sensitive information during a software update.…

Euro upstarts should find it easier to become unicorns Helskini-based Open Ocean has announced a €100m fund to target early-stage investment in European software startups, with 20-year veteran of the European tech entrepreneur scene Richard Muirhead being brought in to recruit and lead its London operations focusing on the UK market.…

IDC bloke grabs vendors, plants kiss of death on half a dozen of them IDC analyst Tom Mainelli put the cat among the pigeons with his prediction last week that two of the top 10 PC vendors – but not the top four – will shutter their operations within the next two years.…

'Unhelpful to be sprung on us like this', says freelancer group Freelance IT workers in the UK have expressed concern about claims that the government plans to force contractors onto the payroll of their clients after just one month of service.…

UCSC becoming part of application developers ecosystem Seagate has given the University of California, Santa Cruz a petabyte of Kinetic drives to store and access genomic data.…

Miscreants learning the lessons of the cyberspies Users of Ammyy Admin may have been unwittingly downloading malware along with their remote desktop software.…

WLTM new partner, GSOH, extra storage space desirable Microsoft is scouting locations across big cities in the UK with a view to rolling out a "store within a store" concept, according to our sources.…

Tintri siren's song helps old order give way to new +Comment Execs come and execs go but some moves seem to illustrate the zeitgeist – and this is one such move. Tony Chang has left his NetApp ONTAP engineering VP role to join Tintri as an executive veep, not as a senior VP but an exec VP for Tintri’s engineering of its VM-aware systems.…

Last stand against infection in UK biz drive RotM Security firm Cylance is using machine learning to fight what many firms regard as the already lost battle of keeping computers free of malware.…

Integration and restructuring costs wipe out profits, sales rise Restructuring costs downed Lenovo’s profits for a second consecutive quarter caused by the ingestion of acquired businesses and previously confirmed job cuts.…

NAND replaces rotating rust in 3-tier box Nexgen has stripped out the 7.2K disks from its hybrid flash/disk N5 hardware box and replaced them with dual-port SSDs to create a 3-tier, all flash array with quality of service features driving data movement across the tiers.…

National ID and police surveillance plans from our friends in the north As debate kicks off at Westminster over the surveillance powers of spies and the police, the 55 Scottish National Party lawmakers look likely to be a restraining influence.…

Traditional storage conflicts a huge issue for distributed organisations If you’ve been paying attention to what's happening all around us, it’s plain to see that as far as cloud computing is concerned we're still in a transitional phase. In most of the conversations, fast provisioning of computer resources and automated deployments take up all the time.…

Join our experts today between 12:00 and 13:00 GMT Live Regcast A quick glance at the mainstream press, never mind the pages of The Reg, will show why data loss and theft are very bad news for your company and your career.…

Get rid of ntpdate, patch ntpd, says security researcher Time-based two-factor authentication tokens, and plug-ins that use them, are only as good as your time signal, and in the right (wrong) circumstances, they can be brute-forced.…

Want a FIPS 140-2 RNG? Look at the universe UK Home Secretary Theresa May will have to revamp the Investigatory Powers Bill to ban astrophysics: the cosmic background radiation bathes Earth in enough random numbers to encrypt everything forever.…

Research duo pop baseband chip in preliminary demo-hack PacSec Modern Samsung devices including the S6, S6 Edge and Note 4 can have phone calls intercepted using malicious base stations, according to initial research findings from two researchers.…

Romanian researchers lay waste to Linux badware, let users out of Cryptowall hell. Ransomware targeting Linux servers has been thwarted by hard working security boffins, with help from the software itself, mere days after its existence was made public.…

Popular password harvester kicked off App Store and Play A popular but malicious fake Instagram “who viewed your profile” app has been pulled from both Apple's App Store and Google Play – but not until after between 500,000 and a million suckers downloaded it.…

Privacy foundation slams 'dangerously naive' Senators Australia's peak privacy body has lambasted the country's Senate for being ignorant about the implications of the country's new e-health records.…