The Register

Your lock-in problems are nothing compared to prisoners gouged for phone calls The United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has slashed phone call prices for prisoners.…

A 90-second guide to Amazon's latest financial quarter Dictionary editors are crossing out their definitions for "cloud" and "money" and replacing it with "n. Amazon."…

How the Windows 10 biz performed in the past quarter Microsoft has published its figures for the first quarter of the 2016 financial year (its accounting department shuns calendars) and reports that profits are up, even though revenues fell.…

MOFCOM gives the nod The Chinese Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) has said Seagate can finally start integrating Samsung's disk drive business into its mainstream operations.…

Your 30-second guide to ad giant's third quarter financials Internet advertising giant Google is still banking boatloads of ad cash, and plans to buy back billions in stock.…

Meanwhile customers lawyer up Volkswagen has warned that the figure of 11 million cars that cheated in air-pollution tests may be larger than first thought.…

Names, addresses, DoBs, bank details, and more at risk, confesses ISP CEO Talk Talk is in the process of telling its four million subscribers that it has fallen victim to a “sustained cyberattack” – and it is possible that personal information including bank details have been pilfered.…

Pawn Storm gang set sights on crash investigators The Pawn Storm hackers who tried to infiltrate NATO and White House networks have been spotted bothering another sensitive target: the team investigating the downed Malaysia Airlines MH17 flight.…

Is destruction a certainty – or merely highly probable? NASA and the US Geological Survey (USGS) experts are arguing over the likelihood of a major earthquake hitting southern California in the near future.…

Rand Paul spoiler amendment shot down in flames On Thursday morning the proposed Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) moved a step closer to reality when the US Senate voted 83 to 14 to end debate on a package of amendments.…

But organization succeeds in retaining absolute authority The internet community has published the key details of its plan to improve accountability at the domain-name overseer ICANN when it takes control of the critical IANA contract next year.…

Robot zombies found lurking around stores Crooks are hijacking CCTV cameras in shopping malls to launch denial-of-service attacks, datacenter security firm Imperva warns.…

Adds to the pageantry of Xi Jinping’s visit, if nothing else Contrary to several trigger-happy reports, China's president Xi Jinping has not signed a formal agreement with the UK prime minister David Cameron on cyber security.…

Just look after ... er ... you know ... stuff Seagate has moved CFO Pat O'Malley to an undefined exec role and promoted Dave Morton to CFO.…

Elon Musk likes to work hard A class action lawsuit has been filed against SpaceX by a former "structures technician" at the company, who alleges that between June 2013 and February 2015 he was not paid for the regular overtime hours he was asked to put in.…

Ads attack users through Angler, Neutrino Exploit Kits German surfers are under attack from multiple directions this week because of a widespread malvertising campaign.…

Chipzilla's erstwhile mates Micron ain't gonna be happy +Comment Intel has dropped a flash bombshell by announcing it's going to make 3D NAND chips in China, implying it will add 3D XPoint chips to the mix later and raising doubts about its Micron partnership.…

We have Apple staff in blue T-shirts and everything Support scammers who have been targeting Windows users for years and, more recently, users of Apple’s mobile devices and Android tablets and smartphones, have moved on to targeting desktop Macs more aggressively than ever before.…

Elliot Management are in the building Citrix – currently locked in the vice-like grip of activist investor Elliott Management – has confirmed exec chairman Robert Calderoni will move into the care-taking CEO position.…

Plans to save the conglomerate as much money as gov.uk Former head of the Government Digital Service Mike Bracken has assembled the ex GDS top brass to work on the Co-Op's digital team.…

Bastian Schweinsteiger none too happy with WWII lookalike figure German football hero Bastian Schweinsteiger is none too happy with a Chinese-made Wehrmacht action figure which bears both his name and an uncanny resemblance to the Manchester United midfielder.…

Talk to me Pebble has strayed further away from its hobbyist DIY roots, with the release of a new firmware that supports Nuance's voice SDK.…

Rebate time for exchanges leaves crypto-currency nerds salivating Transactions of and for Bitcoin are not subject to value-added tax (VAT) the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has ruled today.…

Herding video-makers into a new pasture Google says most of its video creators have signed up to new subscription contracts for its pay-to-view YouTube Red service, rather than have their videos pulled from public display at YouTube.…

Limitless beta service due in production, erm, well, last month Docker has hoovered up container hosting outfit Tutum, creating what the cash-packed buyer claims will be a complete platform to build, ship and run distributed applications.…

Decline chalked up to licence renewal instability Mainframe maker Unisys posted yet more disappointing results for, recording a net loss of $9.6m (£6m) for its third quarter results. Revenue was $739m (£477m), down 16 per cent on last year.…

Wouldn't fit in a basket of figs, that's for sure A pair of expert debunkers have concluded that Cleopatra's legendary asp was too small to be a plausible killer, the BBC reports.…

Customers rant as woes continue Internet provider Talk Talk is in the second day of its outage woes, with its website still on its knees and customers continuing to report connectivity issues.…

Time to get serious with LXD Canonical has kicked out its container management architecture for the suits with Ubuntu 15.10.…

We're the landfill Analysis We’ve heard much this week about China dumping steel, but less so about China dumping smartphones onto the rest of the world. But the latter accusation is actually far closer to truth.…

Don't open virus-riddled emails purporting to be from your local friendly bobby Lancashire Police are warning ordinary folk not to open phishing email purporting to be from the plod.…

As would you be after this deal from SunTrust Banks Some HR person at Atlanta's SunTrust Banks has come up with what they genuinely believe is a clever idea – after dumping 100 of its IT staff, the billion-dollar financial institution is requiring them to remain available to help out for free for two years.…

Flipper heck! Hacktivist collective Anonymous knocked offline two of Japan's busiest websites in a protest against dolphin killings.…

Cross-platform mobile development business now pitches to Java developers Xamarin, the company co-founded by Mono inventor Miguel de Icaza to enable cross-platform mobile development with C#, has acquired RoboVM.…

Academics deported, harassed, have contracts and clearances shredded after spookwork Researchers tasked with revealing attacks by intelligence agencies are being harassed, locked out of tenders, and in some cases deported, Kaspersky researcher Juan Andrés Guerrero-Saade says.…

Kepler K2 mission spots distant planetary death throes Pity the latest planet spotted by NASA's K2 (the re-birthed Kepler) mission: boiled by starlight from its host, WD 1145+017, and racked by gravity, it's only got a million years left.…

Old Azure storage APIs stay. So what happened to the 'one codebase for every user' idea? Microsoft has extended the time it will support some of Azure's early cloud storage APIs.…

Interxion struggles to turn City of Light into City of Byte Interxion will have to launch an appeal in France if it's to save a €130m-plus data centre in Paris.…

"Tap" can follow the workload with very low latency Brocade has announced a network monitoring and management solution it hopes will attract the eye of LTE network operators.…

Virtzilla's shares dip 20 per cent in one day on fears of future cloudtastrophe VMware yesterday posted a pretty set of numbers. And today its share price fell by twenty per cent, from Tuesday's US$68.97 to a Wednesday close of $55.38 after grazing $52.91.…

Cracking research shakes up browser baron. Every time someone asks "how bad is the SHA-1 cipher?" the answer is "easier to crack than you thought", so Mozilla's considering killing it off six months ahead of schedule, on 1 July 2016.…

Think of this as an evil TARDIS dropping servers into a time rift Get busy, sysadmins, there's a bunch of network time protocol (NTP) bugs to squash.…

Open Compute Project designs picked for day-to-day simulations of warheads Linux clusters built from Facebook's blueprints will help crunch numbers for the US government's hydrogen bomb scientists.…

Great Scott, MARTY! Vid Stanford University researchers have built an electric-powered self-driving DeLorean just in time for Back to the Future II day.…

OS X, iOS, watchOS, iTunes for Windows all get bug fixes Apple has posted security updates and feature improvements for its desktop, mobile, and developer gear.…

Test shows tethering to VPN-on-smartphone is no magic data-erasing rainbow With the kind-of-launch of the Australian government's telecommunications data retention regime, there's been a plethora of advice everywhere – from “lad mags” to the tech press to political parties – with one theme: “get a virtual private network” (VPN).…

Blowup over efforts to limit DNS overlord's power during crucial talks The CEO of ICANN got his facts wrong during high-level talks on limiting the power of the domain-name overseer, it is claimed.…

23andMe reveals four law enforcement requests +Comment Not content with snooping on your emails, whereabouts and telephone calls, it appears the Feds now want your DNA results.…