The Register

Your opsec slip is showing, Metro Rail Police are now saying that yesterday's Melbourne train-heist-and-wreck was possible because miscreants bought stolen keys online.…

Rules and tools to get the most out of your pizza-replete staff When organisations grind to a halt, weighed down by their own bureaucracy, inertia and politics, they flail about for something to give a short, sharp shock to their vitals. Something to get them moving again.…

How far did the Feds get into Tor? The Tor Project is claiming that researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) were paid a hefty bounty by the FBI to stage an attack last year aiming to unmask the operators of the network's hidden servers.…

Clouds in Europe won't rain data onto US spies Call it “safe harbour” in action: Microsoft has announced it's going to go along with Germany's data privacy concerns and start hosting Azure, Office 365, and Dynamics CRM Online in that country.…

Efforts to protest Internet.org in Brazil falter Efforts to protest Facebook's Internet.org project at the annual Internet Governance Forum (IGF) being held in Brazil this week were shut down by United Nations security staff.…

Chinese researcher burns exploit for ski trip. PacSec: Google's Chrome for Android has been popped in a single exploit that could lead to the compromise of any handset.…

Warship is unmanned and – currently – unarmed Video Early next year a 140-ton warship will slip from its Pacific berth and sail out to patrol US coastal waters for up to three months, all without a single sailor on board.…

MWR debuts automated security evaluation to tidy PoS authentication vulnerabilities Video Blighty-based infosec firm MWR InfoSecurity has created an automated fuzz tester to shore up vulnerabilities which may be affecting any device people are slotting their "Chip and Pin" cards into.…

Upstart buys into 50-50 J/V Nextgen Group's stalled plans to build a submarine cable from Perth to Singapore are moving again, with M2 takeover target Vocus signing a memorandum of understanding to take a half-share in the build.…

Flash hardware upgrade and software too Hitachi Data Systems sees an all-flash on-premises data centre future and is upgrading and extending its big iron Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) array line to help us on the way there, with faster and larger flash modules, in-line compression, and an all-flash VSP F Series.…

Concerted assaults on five providers and counting FastMail has become the latest web services company to get taken down by distributed denial of service (DDoS) raiders who are trying to extort Bitcoins in exchange for internet access.…

ISPs warn huge costs have to be passed on to customers IPB If having the UK government trawl through your internet history and phone calls wasn't enough, it turns out that people will have to pay for the pleasure.…

MS15-115 is one to miss The El Reg inbox has been flooded with reports of a serious cock-up by Microsoft's patching squad, with one of Tuesday's fixes causing killer problems for Outlook.…

It’s an Avere gateway Jim, but not as we know it Avere has won another movie special FX house as a customer. No surprise there, but this one uses Avere in the cloud to suck up data from on-premises Isilon filers to feed EC2 compute instances running the rendering work.…

Ok, that's the legals sorted, let's get digging Asteroid mining operation Planetary Resources is as pleased as punch with those members of the US Congress who've backed "historic legislation" H.R.2262 – aka the "SPACE Act of 2015".…

Hey, Alphabet! How do you get from A to B? The European Commission has reportedly widened the scope of its investigation into Google's alleged anti-competitive Android operating system tactics in the 28-member-state bloc.…

Tax haven? What tax haven! Apple is expanding its Cork, Ireland manufacturing plant - where it builds its iMacs - and will hire up to 1000 more people in the next 18 month.s CEO Tim Cook announced the move today in an address to students at Trinity College Dublin.…

Firm embraces Data Fabric-like idea EMC has announced Gen 8 of its Isilon operating system, providing it in software-only form for small offices, and adding the ability to send less active data to the cloud with the Cloud Pool construct.…

'It's a legit messaging app for the kids...'

Even the air conditioning duct has a grille over it A Faraday cage, originally commissioned and assembled 10 years ago as a means to allow Finnish security firm F-Secure to test Bluetooth-based mobile malware, is still finding productive work even though the type of malware that spawned its creation is long dead.…

IPA, not IPO. One letter, big difference A scammer who pretended to be Britain’s Intellectual Property Office to demand money from IP holders has been fined half a million pounds.…

If it weighs over 1kg, we want the details The Irish Aviation Authority (IAA) has announced that from 21 December, all drones (or Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS), as they're known locally) weighing over 1kg must be registered.…

Recent technology demo proves a big point Huawei's Mobile Broadband Forum While BT and the UK government may think that 10Mbps is plenty of speed, nobody else does it seems, and the mobile world is now gearing up for 1Gbps. In fact, the so-called 4.5G even has an official name, LTE-Advanced Pro.…

Or DO we bulk-slurp citizens' data, trawl whole %^* thing IPB So you're looking to stop a terrorist attack. What do you do?…

Helping kettles and light bulbs toughen up their anti-hacking attitude F-Secure is looking to go that extra mile in consumer security with the launch of an anti-hacker appliance for the Internet of Things.…

New sketches for next-gen platform roadmap SAP is updating its next-generation enterprise resource planning (ERP) suite, SAP S/4HANA. But is it enough to get the company’s huge installed SAP V3 base to bet the farm on an entirely new code base?…

Cable company's bundle customers face bigger bills from early next year Virgin Media will jack up the price tag on its broadband and phone service bundles by up to £3.99 from early next year.…

IBM tried something similar in 2001, and copped a fine Spotted in Shoreditch, London's Hipster Central as well as the beating heart of Tech City, witness the labours of a GCHQ advertising team hoping to go viral. It's working, as you can see.…

Astroboffins grab first image of pulverised asteroid disks Extremely patient astroboffins have put together the first image of debris rings around a white dwarf, obtained over 12 years of Very Large Telescope observations.…

Hauled into Spanish court over sexist adverts A Spanish cement manufacturer has been called to account for its persistent and blatant use of large-breasted women to punt its wares.…

Investors don’t seem to care as shares trade higher and higher Experian has claimed the megahack of its own systems, compromising 15 million T-Mobile US customers' data, has cost it $20m so far, with several class action lawsuits also on the horizon.…

Sales depressed after being offline for three weeks Shares in TalkTalk climbed more than 12 per cent, following the company's first half fiscal report to the City this morning.…

Dell liability? Pick a number between $0 and $9bn Dell could be landed with a $9bn tax bill for buying EMC - a deal-breaker. That’s what Dell insiders are telling the Silicon Valley publication Re/Code.…

Simple and charge? Yes. Features and charge? No MongoDB grabbed headlines last week with the release of version 3.2 of its popular NoSQL database. Consistent with the company’s prescribed messaging, the tech media dutifully inserted “enterprise” into every headline, touting MongoDB’s new storage engines for better data security, among other things.…

It looks like customers will stick around after blip, says telco Budget ISP TalkTalk confirmed this morning that it would be hit with a bill of up to £35m following the attack on its systems last month.…

Newcastle man posts impressively high score on infosec guru course Ross Bradley, who spent the last 15 years processing car parking fines for Newcastle City Council, is set to become one of the UK's top cyber professionals after achieving one of the highest ever scores in the internationally recognised GIAC cyber security qualifications.…

CD Guru: You're doing it all wrong, again and again Most software professionals have never seen a successful software development project, continuous delivery evangelist Dave Farley said, and have “built careers on doing the wrong thing”.…

'I'd have gone further and demanded weblogs' IPB A specially convened, one-off chinwag about the so-called "tech issues" in the UK government's latest draft super-snoop bill failed to get to the nitty-gritty on Tuesday afternoon.…

Ripped and chipped; content creators call on Menlo Park to stop users uploading their videos. Video A sizeable but unknown chunk of the 8 billion hits Facebook this week claimed to have accrued for its video platform are stolen under what content creators call freebooting.…

There's best, and then there's 'best' It's been a quiet year for ISPs being placed on the naughty step by the UK's advertising watchdog. But today, Sky has been admonished for making misleading and unsubstantiated claims about its customer service.…

Update rids backpackers of reliance on ruinous data roaming Google has updated its offline functionality for its Maps application allowing wayward or data-bereft travelers the opportunity to download regional maps at WiFi hotspots and receive turn-by-turn navigation without an internet connection.…

'Wi-FM' listens to FM signals to sync access points Research presented to this week's IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols suggests a fairly simple enhancement to Wi-Fi could help deal with the chronic congestion caused by its popularity.…

Grooves show how moon is cracking up, says NASA Mars' larger moon, Phobos, is already showing signs of the structural failure that will one day mean it breaks up, according to boffins from NASA Goddard.…

What the Internet 'looks like' today CAIDA's expanding network of Archipelago monitors has delivered the organisation's latest Internet maps.…

Sorry, Cisco: America doesn't have enough legal weed for us to find 50 billion devices Gartner's predicting a four-fold increase in the number of Internet of Things devices in the world by 2020, from today's 4.9 billion to nearly 21 billion.…

Glacier slips strand ships One of the thornier problems to beset Antarctic researchers is threading or punching a ship through sea ice, so Australia wants to tap China for better sea ice forecasts.…

Zimbra mail server exploit claimed as source of dump. A hacker has tried to sell 200,000 valid cleartext Comcast credentials he claims he stole in 2013 from the telco's then-vulnerable mailserver.…

CEO wants to be the ultimate helicopter parent Older readers may think of Nvidia as a graphics firm but, according to CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, the firm is now all-in on accelerating computing and machine learning.…

Defeating opsec with a rock Melbourne police are investigating who made off with a train at around 2am this morning, resulting in around AU$2 million worth of damage.…

Tumbril rumbles for Windows XP and pre-Yosemite users Google has given Windows XP and old versions of Apple OS X their marching orders.…