The Register

STEM the tide of science-illiteracy With national action on a science, technology, engineering, and maths (STEM) curriculum moving slowly, the Australian State of New South Wales (NSW) is taking the plunge by suggesting STEM-targeted extensions in its High School Certificate.…

And now there's sensitive files in kid's hands – and all over the internet A teenager claims to have hacked the CIA director's AOL email account and laid his hands on sensitive government files within.…

Terror as millions of expats suddenly silenced The BBC is trying to block access to iPlayer from UK VPNs, crushing the spirits of those overseas hoping to get a fix of Doctor Who and other British telly.…

Feds want to track and identify delinquent robo-copters The US Department of Transportation (DoT) and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) are drawing up rules requiring people to register their drones.…

Letter comes as organization meets to decide changes Two leading US senators have warned domain name overseer ICANN to stop resisting accountability changes in return for control over the internet's DNS.…

The hacks go on...but are they state-sponsored? Security intelligence firm CrowdStrike has released a report alleging that Chinese hacking crews which they claim are likely state-sponsored are still attacking the US despite a anti-economic espionage pact agreed just a month ago when the Chinese president visited the US.…

'Logjam' crypto bug researchers expand on theory in talk Even before the leaks by former NSA sysadmin Edward Snowden, rumours had circulated for years that the agency could decrypt a significant fraction of encrypted internet traffic.…

Untangle your infrastructure and service spaghetti Tomorrow’s computing systems will extend from legacy hardware and applications inside the company, through to virtualized, API-friendly applications still on-premise in the data centre, and further out to cloud-based systems off-premise. These in turn will divide down still further into dedicated, single-tenant cloud-based services and multi-tenant public ones.…

Cash transaction 'coin rounding' targets euro shrapnel Ireland is moving to eliminate diminutive 1 and 2 euro cent coins with the introduction of "coin rounding", which will see cash transactions rounded up or down to the nearest 5 cents.…

Single-shot weapon is not a medical device, we're told In good news for US "seniors, disabled or others with grip limitations due to hand strength, manual dexterity or phalangeal amputions" wishing to pop the odd cap, the Palm Pistol .38 Special is finally available for their shooting pleasure.…

Concerns that software backdoors planted on plants UK spies will go through the blueprints of computer systems of nuclear plants due to be built by Chinese firms in the UK in a bid to allay security concerns, The Times reports.…

It's all about customer biz needs, apparently Huawei plans to pump $1bn into support for developers over the next five years.…

Decline in mega deals points to crisis (of sorts) for system integrators Spare a thought for those poor multinational outsourcers, who continued to work a lot harder just to maintain the same level of business seen in the last quarter, due to the worldwide trend away from mega deals.…

Getting creative in the conservative cold data market Spectra Summit Tape vendors are very few in number now: Oracle (StorageTek), IBM and Spectra Logic. The market is quite static and the only thing that actually happens each year is a new tape generation (just more space and throughput) ... and that’s it.…

Opts for Wall Street over the City... Fancy Mimecast filed for an initial public offering on Wall Street on Friday and said it hoped to raise up to $100m (£64m).…

Slider, slider burning bright, using Android day and night BlackBerry's has offered more glimpses of its first Android phone, Priv, and the device's specs have also leaked into public gaze.…

But sales, brands must extend betrothal 2 more years +Comment MOFCOM, the Chinese trade regulator which has been holding up the integration of WD and HGST, is relaxing its "hold separate" restriction and integration can start now. But the two brands and sales forces must stay separate for two more years.…

Nitrogen ice strangeness on 'weird' dwarf planet NASA's New Horizons mission has returned an intriguing photo of Pluto's Sputnik Planum plains, showing an "enigmatic cellular pattern" and "unusual clusters of small pits and troughs".…

Ericsson and Huawei better watch their backs Dell/EMC deal As carriers race towards virtualisation, software-defined networking and increasingly complex back office IT platforms, they will increasingly bump into suppliers from the data centre world.…

Flatter hierachies, fewer hops: Rockport and the Torus interconnect The hierarchy of adapters, switches, routers and directors involved in storage networking is unwieldy, complex and costly and needs replacing with a flatter scheme of direct connections between servers and storage devices. That’s the networking message from start-up Rockport Networks.…

Company has customer base of 11,400 SMBs, public sector and large enterprises Tech reseller Softcat has confirmed it intends to float on the London Stock Exchange from next month, as it rolled out another set of healthy financials for fiscal ’15.…

Western science + Chinese herbal remedies = win This year’s Nobel Prize award has its roots in Chairman Mao’s secret plan to systematise Chinese medicine.…

If you're going for Android, go to the source Review Google’s latest Nexus smartphones, the 5X and the 6P, were announced last week and after going over the new devices there's a lot to be said for the upgrades, but also some unfortunate omissions.…

Humanity's nano-sat swarm is taking shape in mere months The European Space Agency is congratulating itself for getting a satellite off the drawing board an into a space in a single year.…

Spatial muxing inside optic fibre should give the net's backbone a boost Boffins on the eternal hunt for more capacity for the Internet's backbones have hit on the idea of combining MIMO-like techniques with the more exotic trick of “twisting” light signals.…

South Korea's target is smartphones and other kit that currently requires human hands Samsung and South Korea are taking aim at electronics manufacturing costs with a new investment in robots it's hoped will make mechanical men cheaper to operate even in jobs that currently need flexible human fingers.…

Pen-tester's killer cuppas made in cracked iKettle A security man has mapped and hacked insecure connected kettles across London, proving they can leak WiFi passwords.…

Go ahead and change your password anyway, but not to "correct horse battery staple" Electronic Arts has poured cold water on claims its users' accounts have been breached.…

Oh great. Now that Facebook's done this, so does every other online service provider Facebook has decided it will warn its data-generating, ad-clicking sheeple members when it thinks they are under attack by “state-sponsored actors”.…

Code review: it works Code reviewers looking over a mail daemon have turned up a couple of reasonably serious bugs in the Libre SSL code base – and along the way provided a handy illustration of the deep interdependencies between software.…

Good luck, ISOC, you'll need it given some thing-makers still haven't discovered IPv6 The Internet Society (ISOC) has added its name to the growing list of groups concerned that insecurity and a cavalier attitude to privacy pose a risk to the Internet of Things (IoT).…

'Death to passwords', cries Purple Palace Yahoo! has launched a password-free method of logging into its mail and online services that prompts users to approve access through a mobile push notification.…

What could go wrong with plan to fine carriers when punters call from a lead-lined hole? India's mobile operators are doing battle against the country's telecommunications regulator over plans to refund customers for dropped calls.…

Splash screen bug squashed Canonical has issued a security advisory to all fifteen people who installed a particular Ubuntu Phone app.…

Might it have been Defence's new combat radios? Help us out here, readers A few weeks ago The Register noticed that Australia Bureau of Statistics (ABS) removed the value of networking kit imports from official statistics.…

Founder offers a little ditty to get party started OpenBSD's source tree just turned 20 years old. Today the project has 322,000 commits and contributions from more than 350 hackers since 1995.…

Put the f**king lotion in the basket! Apple has finally agreed to swap out "stained" Retina displays, months after ugly blobs of anti-reflective coating began peeling off of affected MacBooks that had cost fanbois more than $2,000 a pop.…

Beijing officials get quick peek at IBM software in hunt for backdoor spying IBM has reportedly granted Beijing controlled looking rights to its proprietary source code to allow government officials to scrutinise the software for spook backdoors.…

Know-it-all boss knows nothing On-Call This week's instalment of On-Call, our regular reader-contributed tale of things that go pear-shaped in the small hours, comes from Carl who tells us that “a couple of years ago I had just been made redundant”.…

First we had agriculture, then the scientific method, now … Worstall @ the Weekend So here's a fun little game for a Sunday morning: what was, or is, the third great invention of all time? I have a candidate for it and it's very much to do with what youse guys do all day. But I'm not entirely sure that it is the proper winner of third place: certainly, most economists wouldn't rate it there at all.…

And yet another alien hybrid emerges ... TV Review Readers please note: THIS IS A POST-UK BROADCAST REVIEW – THERE WILL BE SPOILERS!…

There's no limit. Except when there is a limit. 23GB, actually Sprint has confirmed plans to once again throttle data usage of customers who go over a 23GB limit each month.…

Ex-Microsoft chief now big shareholder in profitless firm Erstwhile Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer revealed on Friday that he had recently acquired a 4 per cent stake in troubled micro-blurting site Twitter.…

And yes, Stateside fanbois – your Apple gear is worth more Microsoft has, for a limited period only, offered to pay up to £100 to convince UK consumers to part with their old computers in exchange for a Windows 10 device.…

Das Fastfood mit Currysoße, meine Damen und Herren This week's foray into the wonderful world of post-pub nosh examines a street food classic from the undisputed masters of pig-in-a-tube products - the Germans.…

Blinged up audio a must FEATURE The TV has been the centre of most living rooms for over half a century now, and it's been through various incarnations. Disguised as a sideboard, proudly displayed as a piece of shining high tech, and now slimmed down to look almost like a piece of art.…

Liability going into reverse Something for the Weekend, Sir? I enjoy travel but I do not fly well – especially if the aeroplane’s wings are rusted, the tail has been attached with vinegar and brown paper, and the undercarriage is still sitting in the ditch it fell into at the end of the departure airport’s runway some 300 miles away.…