The Register

We really mean it this time, says Bill Hilf Both of HP Helion public cloud customers have until January 31, 2016 to find another home for their off-site software and data.…

Letters, memos, personal info, all dumped online Days after a teenage stoner hacked the AOL email account of CIA director John Brennan, WikiLeaks has published highly sensitive files from the spymaster's inbox.…

Don't bet the ranch on this long-distance, low-penetration standard The new 802.11ah Wi-Fi standard has yet to hit the market in full, and some fear it never will.…

Quick, turn it into a lava cake or something Revenues of $1.45bn in SanDisk's third calendar 2015 quarter were 17 per cent down on the annual compare, although that number beat Wall Street's estimate of $1.4bn. They were comfortably higher than the second quarter's $1.23bn, in fact 17 per cent higher – neat.…

$500 to $15,000 for eligible submissions Microsoft has launched a bug bounty program for ASP.NET and .NET Core, its open-source web application framework for Windows, Linux, and OS X.…

Capacity counts – with platter layers and planar NAND layers It's all about layering, as hairdressers, disk drive and flash foundry folk would say. Toshiba has added a platter to a 10.5K disk drive to bump up capacity, and is converting a flash fab to pump out 3D flash chips with layers of planar NAND inside them.…

Let down by legacy array revenues fall EMC just managed to scratch out a one per cent annual revenue rise in its third calendar 2015 quarter's results, beating its own estimates.…

Improvement in cross-platform code is the aim Microsoft will integrate the Clang open source C and C++ compiler with Visual C++ in an update expected in November 2015, according to presentations given at the recent CPPCon 2015 event in Bellevue, near Seattle.…

Bunch of online resellers hit by serious issues this week British e-tailers are trying to manage website disruption after they were systematically targeted this week by DDoS extortionists.…

Exec roundabout goes full circle Hyperconverged startup Maxta has appointed Andrew Perry to be its SVP for sales.…

Azure floats for the other 99% Dell is putting Microsoft’s cloud in a smaller box for everybody outside the web-tier super league.…

Provider's website knocked offline. Again Updated Internet provider TalkTalk has once again been hit by an outage, which has brought its own website down and is reportedly affecting a number of broadband customers.…

Security for connected cars We are often lectured not to talk or text while driving, yet increasingly, our cars are doing it all the time. The connected car is finally here, and it is the ultimate distracted driver.…

Object storage firm hooks up with big regional reseller British Telecom is setting up a cloud storage service using Caringo's Swarm object storage technology.…

And yes, economics is a science Worstall on Wednesday The Observer treats us to another one of those give us more money pieces. This time it's a call from Athene Donald, a professor of experimental physics at Cambridge, telling us all how neither the government nor private companies spend enough money on research and development.…

Plastic brick shortage warning - start panic buying now Parents who've been eyeing Lego as a Xmas gift for their wide-eyed kiddies had better get down to their nearest toy shop sharpish, fill a trolley with as many plastic bricks as they can and fight their way to the check-out before the full effects of a predicted pre-Yule Legogeddon begin to bite.…

All change at Dell as the dust settles

Infosec firm doesn't fit with the upcoming HP split Trend Micro has agreed to pay $300m to acquire HP TippingPoint, a provider of intrusion prevention systems and related network security kit.…

Pity the 'clueless' inhabitants of as-yet-unborn Earth-like worlds Scientists have estimated that a whopping 92 per cent of "Earth-like" planets have yet to be born, and inhabitants of such worlds in the far-distant future will be "largely clueless as to how or if the universe began and evolved".…

Bird of prey processor aimed at gambling machines. How apt AMD will today unveil Merlin Falcon, its latest R-series processor aimed at industrial systems, medical devices, gambling machines, digital signs, military hardware, and so on.…

Deal will, er, 'complement' existing licences The government has signed a deal for open source Libre Office to be made available across the public sector, in what looks like an attempt to "nudge" mandarins off Microsoft Office.…

19 billion smackeroos wing their way to SanDisk shareholders Consolidation in the storage industry is speeding up. One week after Dell decides to buy EMC for $67bn, Western Digital is using Unisplendour money to buy SanDisk for $19bn to create an enterprise and consumer flash powerhouse.…

Will it float? Altitude Angel calls itself “The Internet of Flying Things”, but it’s more “Facebook for drones”. It’s a database of "things" which unmanned aircraft might worry about.…

Simpana? Never heard of it Loss-making Commvault has released details and comments about version 11 of the Commvault Data Platform (CDP) and solutions portfolio, while being careful not to mention Simpana, the previous brand name for its mainstream backup, archive and data management product suite.…

... humans still have several million years in the bank Expect scientists to start arguing about whether there's a match in the long (very long) term between mass extinctions and rising number of comet/asteroid impacts, which, at least according to a new paper, both appear to occur around every 26 million years.…

Silicon Valley is the world's privacy pariah Menlo Park Road’s VCs at first sniffed at the consequences of the Schrems v Facebook case on Silicon Valley’s global ambitions, but they should seriously be looking at how their investments conduct business. The global Silicon Valley freeze-out continues to spread, with Israel’s data protection authority ILITA declaring transfers of personal data to the US as unsafe for its citizens.…

Fancy winning a flux capacitor watch? Click here COMPETITION In case you hadn't noticed, today is Back to the Future Day, being the date on which – in Back to the Future II – Doc Brown, Marty McFly and his girlfriend Jennifer arrive from 1985 to save the couple's future son from ending up in jail.…

More fingers being placed in various technology pies Chip designer ARM has posted another period of growth, with revenue up 17 per cent to $375.5m (£243m) for the third quarter, when compared with the previous year.…

But it's OK, penalised operator to focus on 'customer service' EE reported flat third-quarter revenues to the City this morning and tried to ease investors by promising – once again – that it would do a better job on customer service.…

Home Secretary: Er, we could spy on you anyway Parliamentarians have hit out against a ruling by the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) that GCHQ is allowed to collect the communications of MPs, a move which seemingly ends the so-called Wilson Doctrine. Or does it?…

Cohesity to converge secondary storage into its platform Comment Cohesity has launched its all-embracing secondary storage offering on what looks like an embedded hyper-converged infrastructure appliance platform.…

Operator promises El Reg it'll all be fixed before browsers deep-six support It turns out that Virgin Media isn't the only telco still using the weak RC4 stream cipher on the more sensitive areas of its website. Step forward O2, which is also stuck on the broken SSL system.…

Euro court verdict meant it couldn't say no any longer Facebook crusader Max Schrems returned to the Irish courts today to hear the nation’s Data Protection Commissioner (the DPC) solemnly promise that yes, it would investigate data flows out of Europe.…

VMware beats the street, flings vCloud Air into new joint venture VMware has revealed its full Q3 2015 results, and they're pretty: US$1.7bn revenue and net income of $1.02 per share were both a tick over the guidance the company has offered to markets.…

WPA2 with 20-character passwords? Ja! No firmware updates and CSRF? Nein. The German Government is mulling an assessment of the security chops of consumer routers in a bid to lift current abysmal standards and help inform buyers.…

Internet faces 'digital dark ages' if nothing is done, we're told Microsoft president and chief legal officer Brad Smith has presented a new safe harbor pact to replace the agreement struck down earlier this month by the European Court of Justice (ECJ).…

A few million dollars to be paid out in Interview fallout Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) has agreed to pay up to $8m (£5.18m) to settle a lawsuit stemming from its 2014 IT security meltdown.…

Join us at 11am to discuss turning vision into reality You’re familiar with the general idea of the Digital Workplace: extreme personal productivity, seamless and frictionless collaboration, and "anywhere, any network, any device" access to everything.…

To avoid viral stains, go jogging alone or with Bluetooth binned A vulnerability in FitBit fitness trackers first reported to the vendor in March could still be exploited by the person you sit next to on a park bench while catching your breath.…

NASA warns cosmic rock travelling at ludicrous velocity Halloween is traditionally a time for scares and the universe hasn't disappointed, sending a fast-moving asteroid down our way for a close encounter on October 31 at 1712 UTC (1012 PDT).…

Spook-busting IETF work gets nod from Federal Office of Information Security It's not so often that the dense and often dull documents that are our Internet standards attract the endorsement of governments, but that's what has happened with RFC 7672.…

Akamai, Redmond link arms in bit-farms Microsoft has inked a deal with Akamai to integrate its content delivery network (CDN) into the Azure cloud platform.…

Talks at OpenWorld will explore global expansion for Australian collaboration The Australian limb of NEC has cooked up an application-specific bundle based on Oracle database appliances and hopes to expand the concept and take it global.…

Cross-signatures in hand, free cert authority is ready to roll Let's Encrypt has announced that it's received cross-signatures from IdenTrust.…

Pawn Storm's 'ingenious' click-to-own Java 0day neutered Oracle has crushed a critical click-to-play vulnerability attackers used in the NATO-busting hacking operation known as Pawn Storm, Trend Micro threat analyst Jack Tang says.…

One ring to bind all hypervisors is Virtzilla's next network virty goal VMware considered, but rejected, the idea of creating a range of network virtualisation products by breaking out subsets of functionality from its flagship NSX product.…