The Register

'Good will' gesture, but WON'T waive contract breakage fee TalkTalk is trying and failing to mend its broken customer relationships following the recent mega breach, in one case offering an individual who had £3,500 stolen from his personal bank account £30.20 as a “good will gesture [and] final settlement” by way of compensation when he tried to get out of his contract.…

Contract comes hot on heels of Sopra Steria mega deal The Metropolitan Police has signed up Atos as its service integration manager to oversee an overhaul of the force's creaking ICT infrastructure.…

Customer growth affected by customer care? Shurely not... TalkTalk is likely to deliver bad news to investors next week, as analysts suggested it has managed to halve its customer growth forecast after spaffing the sensitive data of more than a million existing and former customers.…

Seeks next generations of 'nauts NASA has put out a call for the next generation of astronaut candidates, in anticipation of regaining the ability to put people aloft space aboard US-built spacecraft.…

Using blog site and Twitter to issue updates Secure webmail outfit ProtonMail is still fighting against a sustained DDoS attack that has left its service largely unavailable since Tuesday.…

Attention: This vehicle is reversing BlackBerry is touting security and privacy as the new Priv's key differentiators. But wait, isn't it an Android? And isn't that like putting an arsonist in charge of the Fire Brigade?…

Tangled procurement, systems web needs 'iterative' approach Coppers' IT is so complex and varied across the 43 different forces, a complete "big bang" overhaul of systems to force consolidation is not practical - the head of the Police ICT company Martin Wyke has said.…

Dominant now, but Fossil and Tag Heuer are coming Apple has shipped nearly seven million of its Watches since Cupertino launched the device in April this year.…

But beware the small print, source says Salesforce is offering substantial discounts to customers who sign up early and commit to its full business suite plus services.…

Leaky cell leads to potentially excellent new tech In the quest for smaller, longer-lasting, more powerful batteries, scientists have tried many alternative approaches to battery chemistry. One may have just produced the breakthrough we’re waiting for.…

5 times as much of it... though cyberthugs unsophisticated There’s been an unprecedented rise in Mac OS X malware this year, according to security researchers at Bit9 + Carbon Black, with the number of samples found in 2015 being five times that seen in the previous five years combined.…

Microsoft's next crack at an app store for the enterprise has landed Microsoft's wanted an enterprise app store for ages, but hasn't been able to get one going because one the many messes in Windows 8.x was “side-loading”, a strange Microsoft's method for allowing businesses to install Windows apps en masse to their PC fleets.…

Step up, LocalScope, you're the winner (not in a good way) Android app developers are more promiscuous with your personal data than iOS devs, according to research that examined more than 100 popular apps to sniff the way they handed data to third parties.…

Why send one big probe when you can send lots of little ones? The European Space Agency (ESA) has decided to include cubesats in the design of its planned Asteroid Impact Mission (AIM).…

Worried insurers and others don't bother with securo probes A mock exercise will take place this month to test how major banks respond to a major cyber attack, according to a newspaper report.…

'You can't just uninvent encryption' IPB The encryption bothering parts of the UK's Investigatory Powers Bill have left IT security experts flabbergasted.…

Snooping left hand, meet keen-on-crypto right hand While the world was distracted by the UK Pry Minister's ban-working-encryption, log-everything-online Investigatory Powers Bill, the civil service was urging government and enterprises to adopt better cryptography for voice calls.…

Wins AU$115m contract with Department of Immigration and Border Protection Singtel's Australian arm, Optus, has won a three-year, AU$115-million deal to provide “end-to-end telecommunications and managed IT services” to Australia's Department of Immigration and Border Protection.” Upon receiving news of the contract win, Vulture South asked Optus if it Australia's offshore immigration detention centres and have been told that the company “... provides connectivity to the centres, however we do not provide services within the centres.”…

Long-time contributor John Wiegley steps into the chair Long-time contributor to Emacs and author of Emacs Muse John Wiegley has assumed the role of maintainer of the project.…

AWS promises new (South) Korean region for early 2016 Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced it will create a (South) Korean region in 2016.…

Crooked cookies can cook Commvault and allow arbitrary OS command execution Commvault's Edge Server offers users the chance to view and access their backups from mobile devices, a trick it enables in part by using a web server.…

OS install by proxy moves on to Windows XP The Twitch in the Shell project has successfully installed Arch Linux using hundreds of people simultaneously hammering keys in a terminal. One of the organizers has explained to The Reg how it was done.…

Hands up if you don't think SHA-1 is completely past its prime? None of you? Hmm ... Microsoft has decided to follow Mozilla down the path to better security, bringing forward the end-of-life date for SHA-1 hashing.…

Chip designer hopes for better days as China drama lingers Mobile chip blueprint scribbler Qualcomm reported big losses to close out its 2015 fiscal year, though the hits were less severe than the California company initially feared.…

Who watches the Watchmen? The metadata retention scheme dreamed up by Australia's federal government may be stalled and in a shambles, but the Inspector General of Intelligence and Security isn't waiting for things to go wrong: it's recruiting specialists to watch over the scheme.…

Microsoft's personal assistant emerges as iOS beta app Microsoft is preparing for the rollout of its Siri alternative, Cortana, on Apple devices.…

Silicon Valley has lost its mind. Episode 22: Marc Andreessen Analysis Those concerned that Silicon Valley is inside a tech bubble fit to burst, have no fear – because according to true disruptive thinking, the opposite is true.…

Vection vexing VR IGCS The biggest brake now on virtual reality isn't the hardware or the software, but the wetware, a panel of experts told the Intel Global Capital Summit this week.…

Smart telly promised iPhone support then Sammy taketh away Samsung is taking heat after an update to its iPhone app removed remote-control features for many smart TV owners.…

Snap costs Oz lass $600 in winnings Photo An Australian woman says she lost out on AU$900 (US$643) after someone lifted her winning race ticket from a Facebook photo.…

ISPs express concern over web activity monitoring system A secret database of citizens' personal lives and habits isn't explicitly spelled out in the UK's latest surveillance law. No, instead, it's described as a set of "request filters."…

Crucial SSD offers TLC for slow disk drives Micron is targeting consumers and SMBs with a disk-replacing three bit Crucial-brand SSD.…

Microsoft announces limited unlimited storage

Dun-dun-dun! Ransomware-peddling cybercrooks have come up with a sinister twist to their increasingly well-worn scam – online publishing.…

Contents included questioning of sex attack victims The Crown Prosecution Service has been slapped with a £200,000 fine by the Information Commissioner's Office for negligence that led to the theft of laptops containing police interviews regarding violent and sexual cases.…

Blighty's competition regulator gives permission for major boot filling Cloudy hosting company Interoute has Wednesday been given the green light by Blighty's competition watchdog to snap up networks outfit Easynet for £402m.…

Pics reveal 'pronounced concavities' and 'other complex features' NASA has served up some radar images of the so-called "Halloween Asteroid" - a 600 metre diameter ball of rock that whisked past Earth on 31 October.…

Red Hat Linux to be reference operating system for .NET Core Microsoft has announced a partnership with Red Hat to support Red Hat Linux in the Azure cloud.…

Wants partners with hungry look in eye Hewlett Packard Inc is turning to partners to help drive business among the enterprise and small and mid-markets in the UK and Ireland.…

'No worse than an itemised phone bill', says Home Sec Home Secretary Theresa May revealed today that British spooks have, for years, been using section 94 of the 1984 Telecommunications Act to intercept bulk communications data of people based in the UK.…

Deal gives hyperconverged upstart PRC creds Nutanix has scored Lenovo as a hardware manufacturer for its hyperconverged system software, effectively wedging its foot in China's front door.…

Investigatory Powers tribunal was misled by 'horsesh*t' Protecting members of Parliament from mass surveillance by bulk collection is “exceedingly simple”, according to the US co-inventor of the high technology devices and programs now used by GCHQ to intercept optical fibre cables carrying Internet data in and out of Britain.…

Parliamentary inquiry to gather evidence until 23 November Executives at TalkTalk, including CEO Dido Harding herself, may face a grilling from Members of Parliament over the shoddy security practices which led to the theft of than a million Britons' data from her company.…

Net registry hums gentle whalesong , intersects with community LOGOWATCH The magnificent era of corporate rebranding excess have long passed - heady days in which brainstorming strategy boutiques would crank the whalesong up to 11 and give forth on the empowering effects of emotionally compelling and strategically grounded brand frontage paradigms.…

Top silk says challenging time ahead on investigatory powers Sir Stanley Burnton has been unveiled as the UK's new Interception of Communications Commissioner, just minutes before the Home Secretary is set to deliver her draft Investigatory Powers Bill to the House of Commons.…

Swift conclusion on revised agreement needed The move to strike down Safe Harbour has created worrying uncertainty for companies, the Conservative minister for intellectual property, Baroness Neville-Rolfe, has said.…

Supposedly five times faster than XtremIO Huawei is updating its dual-controller OceanStor Dorado all-flash array by adding NVMe-accessed SSDs, reportedly boosting IOPS performance by up to 30 per cent.…

Getting on with work in the digital office space On demand Nirvana can be hard to define, but actually creating it can be infinitely harder – especially when the nirvana in question is the Digital Workplace Vision.…