The Register

Boffins pry in protocols, find some surprises Popular apps like Facebook and WhatsApp, combined with weaknesses in LTE protocols, could help spooks or attackers locate users, a group of German and Finnish researchers have found.…

NASA goes bug-hunting on the ISS and finds microbes a-plenty where there should be few Everything that goes to the International Space Station gets clean-roomed to within an inch of its life, but humans are leaving behind a considerable microbial footprint.…

Big Red finds more ways to satisfy hybrid hopefuls Oracle and Equinix have thrown the switch on the latter's Cloud Exchange in six new cities: Amsterdam, Chicago, London, Singapore, Sydney, and Washington, D.C.…

Still way behind Apple's US$999.99 ceiling, but good news for developers anyway Google has lifted the maximum price developers can charge for their wares on its Play store.…

Brillo edges closer as Choc Fac opens early access program MIPS specialist Imagination has thrown its lot in with Google's Brillo Internet of Things (IoT) operating system, with the company prepping a development kit for the stripped-down Android derivative.…

Middle Kingdom set to bin one-child policy in new five year plan spruiked by weird video China's has issued strong advice to local cloud storage operators that they need to stop hosting copyrighted material.…

Enemies of freedom? Launch your minuteman-in-the-middle attacks now! America, your military fails at security. That's the message from Netcraft security expert Paul Mutton, who has found a bunch of Department of Defence (DoD) agencies issuing SHA-1 certificates.…

Librarian legalizes more tinkering in triennial The Librarian of Congress in America has updated the list of technologies that hackers can tinker with without breaking the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.…

Updated: Telstra responds with clarification “Read the terms and conditions” is good advice for anybody, but especially if you're participating in a hackathon. Otherwise, as participants in a Telstra hackathon are finding, you might be giving up more than you intend.…

Your 60-second guide to iGiant's full year and Q4 figures Apple says it hopes to haul in anywhere from $75bn to $77bn (£48bn to £50bn) over the upcoming holiday shopping season.…

That's just about it for safe harbor with the EU The US Senate has passed the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) by 74 to 21 votes, with five abstentions.…

Scammers hit NSW, VIC money men, change account deposit details The Australian Federal Police is investigating phishing attacks against accountants that some say has seen thousands lifted from bank accounts.…

Elastic VMs, containers, storage unveiled OpenWorld Earlier this month, Amazon tweaked Oracle's nose at its re:Invent conference. On Tuesday this week, Oracle fired back with a raft of cloud announcements.…

Just another day in public sector technology, really The Audit Office in the Australian State of South Australia has run the rule over the region's IT and graded it as “4/10, must try harder”.…

The latest loss of love from new gTLDs Verisign, operator of the .com and .gov registries as well as two of the internet's 13 root servers, has warned that the "unprecedented" introduction of hundreds of new dot-word domains may make the internet unstable.…

Share price tumbles as Big Blue confirms SEC accounting investigation IBM's stock price has taken a hit after the tech titan revealed it is under investigation by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).…

And too many people stuck on dead-end software or just simply not applying patches Apple's Windows apps have leapfrogged Oracle Java as the biggest security risk to PCs in the US, according to a study by vulnerability management outfit Secunia (now a Flexera Software company).…

Expect a decade of fights Analysis Efforts to pass a range of amendments that would have strengthened net neutrality legislation failed on Tuesday in the European Parliament, leading to the question: what now for Europe?…

Judge rules Kentucky bloke had the right to down gizmo A father who shot down a drone that was hovering over his family home in Kentucky has been cleared of all charges.…

Shouldn't that have been considered before you set up the auction? Staff at the FCC, America's communications watchdog, have been accused of not doing enough to prevent TV broadcasts from interfering with mobile broadband signals.…

Who's hot and who's not in the Land of the Rising Sun The OpenStack roadshow landed in Tokyo this week, hoping to show that it too is bathed in the rays of a rising sun.…

But it will get better, Bob says, as he puts his hammer down CommVault's second quarter saw a deepening loss and continued revenue decline, putting the pressure to perform on its new software.…

Gee, thanks for encouraging criminals, Mr Fed Firms that fall victim to infection from file encrypting ransomware should simply pay the ransom, Joseph Bonavolonta, an assistant special agent with the FBI, told delegates to Boston's Cyber Security Summit 2015, adding that developments such as CryptoWall are essentially unbreakable.…

No more rack after rack of ‘poorly utilised servers’? Virtual SAN storage and data management software supplier DataCore thinks it has the answer to slow IO problems in virtualised multi-core servers – put the cores to work.…

Not just number 1 in China any more Huawei saw year-on-year smartphone shipments spike 63 per cent in its third quarter.…

We've run with these kids before and they're good for us, says Savagno Cisco has announced its intention to acquire netsec firm Lancope for more than $452m in cash.…

Company ‘positive about the cloud computing business’ Alibaba's cloud ambitions and investments began to pay off during the Chinese tat purveyor's third quarter, with revenue attributed to the fluffy white stuff up 138 per cent, to $102m (£67m).…

We were 'too tightly coupled' to Stubby Google's gRPC project has reached beta status, according to a post by product manager Mugur Marculescu, who adds that it "opens the door for gRPC use in production environments".…

Biometric payments may 'irretrievably compromise' online identities Research house Juniper has stared into its crystal ball and discovered that the number of biometrically authenticated payment transactions will reach nearly five billion by 2019, up from a mere 130 million currently.…

Teutonic finance firm is Cryan over tech woes Deutsche Bank is the latest financial institution to announce plans to rip out its creaking IT, according to reports.…

New legislation kicks in from April next year MEPs voted against changes to net neutrality rules in the European Union on Tuesday lunchtime.…

No clarification on charges, as of yet The 15-year-old boy arrested in connection with the investigation into the alleged data theft from the TalkTalk website has been bailed until a date in November.…

Foolishly suggests kitemark to, er, reassure customers The UK's digital minister Ed Vaizey has floated the idea of adding kitemarks to websites that have strong security measures in place, following the attack on TalkTalk's business last week.…

Popular chat app collects and transmits data, warns paper Users of WhatsApp need be aware that the popular messaging service collects phone numbers, call duration and other information, according to new research.…

World View to welcome paying punters aboard in 2017 US space flight outfit World View has successfully test flown a 1/10 scale model of its balloon-lofted passenger podule, and reckons it'll be ready to welcome paying customers aboard the full-fat version in 2017.…

It's not really sure when or where taxpayers' money will go Innovate UK has published a "roadmap" of future technological development to encourage commercial investment in quantum research.…

Multi-tier, multi-access file-handler gets fast Xcellis engine Quantum has given its StorNext file and data management product a hardware makeover, with faster Xcellis hardware taking up less rackspace than existing components.…

Let's waft away the spin and take a hard look Timeline Contradictory statements issued by TalkTalk regarding the third data breach the company has experienced this year have provided inadequate information to the telco's customers about their data, while effectively insulating the company from questions regarding its security practices with insubstantive, and at times incoherent, PR emissions.…

Founder likes what he found when poking around EMC's labs, he tells El Reg Walking around Dell World 15 with former Dell hyperconvergence guru Jimmy Pike was a bit like being with a rock star. As we strolled the corridors Pike, now a consultant and commentator at tech analyst firm Moor Insights & Strategy, fell into old colleagues who greeted him like a long lost friend.…

James Bond on a lilo couldn’t match this relaxation agent It's often the case than when people talk of wonder drugs in cancer they most often think of the latest exquisitely engineered molecules that closely target very specific biochemical pathways. Think high cost, think high science, and think high hopes.…

Establish facts before making broadband regulations? Might be an idea Guest Opinion There are real issue of power, fairness, justice and market transparency in today’s internet. There are real uncertainties over which market structures maximise social and economic benefits. There are real questions about the practicality of different traffic management and charging mechanisms.…

Xbox gets Win 10 on November 12th. You have the skills to handle it and the office, right? Microsoft has named the day for the next wave of Windows 10 upgrades: on November 12th, Redmond's latest creation will land on Xbox.…

EU body wants to pen test smarter devices The European Union Agency for Network and Information Security (ENISA) responsible for researching computing threats to the continent has widened its remit to include checking out car and smart building hacking.…

Dogfooding study finds Big Data delivers … if you build a business to work around it Microsoft Research and a researcher from North Carolina State University have studied Redmond's internal use of Big Data tools and found that the company needs to change in order to put data to work. And so, probably, does yours.…

Intel Dalian flash fab viewed as simply good news Intel’s Dalian flash fab news was taken to mean bad things for the Intel Micron flash partnership and XPoint activities. Well, not necessarily so, according to a Micron insider to whom we spoke.…

Army academics recommend proper patching, pen tests, and bug bounties The US Army has gaping holes in its information security infrastructure and operates an environment of vulnerability reporting fear, according to current and former members of the department's cyber wing.…

Shanghai's Pangu Team explain how they work to loosen Apple's iron grip Ruxcon A team of seven Chinese hackers are forgoing big bucks and instead pursuing their effort to open Apple to the security research field and thereby allow users to modify their devices.…

Signals should not roam across Spectrum, says Google. That's where our Loon balloons go America's National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA) has recruited a bunch of high-profile supporters in its attempt to fend off the Federal Communications Commision's interest in LTE-U.…

NSA Regin trojan hit German Chancellery chief's laptop Powerful malware with speculative National Security Agency (NSA) links has infected the private laptop of Germany's secretary of state in the Federal Chancellery, according to reports by national news digger Der Spiegel.…

Lots of grunt, video recognition, default passwords, high-speed comms, what could go wrong? If you take the vision stuff at face value, the latest company to announce its vision of hell on Earth is Qualcomm, which some of the more breathless of the tech press reckons wants to create the “conscious” camera.…