The Register

What’s Lewis’s shtick? A daft stick it seems Omnifone and Silicon.com founder Rob Lewis is back with another music venture – this time bundling funky sounds with hardware.…

Windows 10 only is not a universal solution Microsoft introduced the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) this year: applications that run across many device types, provided that they all run Windows 10.…

It works, but do I really want a gadget that emails me begging for a recharge? Review We were quite taken with the Ring doorbell earlier this year. For $200, and after some very basic DIY, you get a high-tech security device.…

'We'll go wherever our customers are' - exec There is only one destination for companies that fail with their own mobile operating system, and it's called Android. Last month, BlackBerry acknowledged defeat by announcing PRIV, an Android device with a focus on security.…

Also packing two chargers. Ouch A Brazilian prisoner allowed out of jail for a national holiday returned to captivity with a mobile phone and two chargers shoved where the sun don't shine, O Globo reports.…

Metasploit maker goes deeper into compliance Rapid7 has bought cloud-based machine data search and log company Logentries for $68m in cash and equity, allowing Rapid7 to add that functionality to its widely used penetration testing tool Metasploit.…

We’re still in the ‘early innings’ of this game Mark Hurd, joint chief exec at Oracle, has come out as predictably bullish on the company's cloud prospects, stating in an interview that customers can't get enough of its fluffy white stuff.…

'I know it when I see it' Reg Events Strategy is supposed to be what a top tech exec is paid for, so it’s not surprising our recent roundtable on the subject was rather over-subscribed, giving us a mix of financial services, leisure, startups, national government and a couple of sizeable charities. What we explored was how to actually go about building a strategy rather than simply a plan.…

Projected all-flash range topper due later this year IBM has a new high-end array, the DS8880, sporting a faster processing complex which can double sequential data access speed over the previous (DS8870) generation through new Power8 controllers.…

Radio 4 translates Jack Dorsey coder kiss-off mail Radio 4 showed why it’s the guardian of all that is good, sensible and British this morning by collapsing into laughter while reviewing Jack Dorsey’s rambling farewell to 8 per cent of Twitter staff.…

Firm unveils guarantees + Data Fabric kits in Vegas, baby NetApp, the soon-to-be undisputed leading stand-alone storage company, has announced all-flash array guarantees nicely timed to resonate with the uncertainties now affecting EMC and Dell storage array products.…

What about protection for whistleblowers? - MP The Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) has ruled that GCHQ is allowed to collect the communications of MPs.…

Keep spares in your hand luggage, airline passengers told The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has warned US airline passengers not to pack spare lithium batteries in their checked baggage.…

Take open source. Enlist Euro carriers. How hard was that? Analysis This really wasn’t in the script. All conquering, “disruptive” Silicon Valley companies were more powerful than any nation state, we were told, and governments and nations would submit to their norms. But now the dam that Max Schrems cracked last week has burst open as European companies seek to nail down local alternatives to Google, Dropbox and other Californian over-the-top players.…

'Consumer simple, enterprise secure,' slogan banal VMware has announced plans to acquire Boxer, "doubling down" to further integrate a broader range of easy-to-use applications within its secure data management platform.…

In fact, they might halve everyone's marketing budget There's worry out there that the spread of ad blockers will kill off the internet. Or at least, the idea that people are paid to create stuff for it but that people aren't charged to look at it. You know, like, umm, El Reg.…

Still a lack of support from app vendors? Storagebod My friend Enrico Signoretti is a massive fan of object storage, whereas for a long time I’ve had the reputation of being somewhat sceptical.…

Destination speculation sparks flash fire SanDisk has hired a bank to explore selling itself, according to reports citing confidential sources.…

3,500 of the one per cent get a nasty in the mail after three-year breach A bunch of high-net-worth individuals and stock traders are opening letters with the unwelcome message “we were breached” under the Dow Jones letterhead.…

'Confusing' yellow security triangle binned on imperfectly-secured pages Google has stepped up its effort to make Web site security a little more comprehensible to ordinary users, farewelling the yellow triangle nobody understands.…

Net boffins to FCC: spread the love, don't fear spectrum spread The Internet Architecture Board (IAB) has gently suggested to the United States' Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that locking WiFi kit to manufacturers' firmware forever might not be a good idea.…

Ad-driven site for UK and US cities of Cambridge keeps its domain at a canter The University of Cambridge has lost an attempt to win control of the domain Cambridge.com from its owners.…

Police nearly missed arrest thanks to standard operating environment Video US woman Whitney Beall has been arrested by Florida police after live-streaming herself drunk driving.…

Overbuild of copper is inevitable and offensive says shadow comms minister Australia's shadow communications minister Jason Clare has promised to deploy more fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) connections on Australia's national broadband network (NBN) should the opposition Labor party (ALP) of which he is a member win the nation's next election.…

Virtzilla issues new version of vRealize Automation at VMworld Europe VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger insists the Dell cash deluge and changed ownership structure changes nothing for the company, and Virtzilla's certainly carrying on with automation as usual at its VMworld Europe gabfest in Barcelona this week.…

Flaw flings phish Pawn Storm gang tried to get past the great and the good Don't ignore the next emergency Flash Player update you receive: it might be trying to fix yet another vulnerability in the chronically-insecure plug-in.…

Spookhaus helped to implement virtual trusted platform module version 2.0 The Xen Project has released version 4.6 of its eponymous hypervisor.…

Flat, firewall-free network was a walk in the park, boffins say. Cyber Defence Summit An un-named Casino with next-to-no security has lost 150,000 credit cards after being raided by a new hacking group.…

Phil Rogers was president of HSA Foundation – ARM and AMD's anti-Intel army AMD guru Phil Rogers has joined rival Nvidia.…

Damages is a huge chunk of indie vendor's finances Rimini Street, which touts bargain-basement software support for apps from Oracle and others, must pay US$50m to the database giant after losing a five-year legal fight.…

So what are all those hack groups in China doing? Cyber Defence Summit The China-US treaty will do next to nothing to slow or stymie espionage attacks, says FireEye boss Kevin Mandia.…

If you find Leonardo Di Caprio down there in a nested VM, please let us know Microsoft has added nested virtualisation to Windows 10 as a prelude to revealing its Hyper-V Containers technology.…

Presidential candidate's email server wasn't very private after all ... Not only did Democratic Party presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton run her own e-mail server while at the State Department: someone, presumably her friendly local sysadmin, decided it needed remote desktop protocol (RDP) and desktop sharing code virtual network computing (VNC) exposed to the Internet.…

Hardware? We're mostly over that and zooming away on a cloud EMC/Dell deal IBM's CEO Ginni Rometty has offered a guarded-but-mostly-negative opinion on Dell's acquisition of EMC.…

Profit down, sales down, stock down, data center growth down Intel's latest financial report shows profits hit by the downturn in the personal computer market, but Chipzilla's growing presence in the cloud is helping make up some of the shortfall.…

So long and thanks for all the contracts, says nbn™ CEO Morrow nbn™, the entity building Australia's national broadband network (NBN), has announced that chief operating officer Greg Adcock has departed the company.…

Judge Cote: iPhone giant has learned its lesson, put away the bright lights and gloves The watchdog assigned to keep close tabs on Apple after it inflated ebook prices has been told to go home by a US court.…

Hacker fingered for heroin stunt takes the stand A Ukrainian man extradited from Italy has gone on trial in New Jersey accused of running a botnet and dealing in stolen credit cards.…

Some design improvements but WTF is going on with the function keys Hands-on Sometimes Apple's timing is just right.…

Six months left before end-of-life, warns Redmond Microsoft is once again warning administrators that the end-of-life date for SQL Server 2005 is now just six months away.…

Patch your Microsoft and Adobe software today – like, right now Microsoft and Adobe have pushed out their scheduled monthly security updates, with familiar names like IE and Flash once again getting critical fixes.…

Raspberry Pi at the center of court case Fresh from tearing up the safe harbor framework, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) will take a look at the complex issue of online video streaming.…

Early builds unbootable on PCs this week, warns Microsoft Those who downloaded many Windows 10 preview editions will have to upgrade by Thursday or face an unbootable PC.…

Disruption but not in a good way Big business has sent an open letter to Europe's politicians asking for urgent action on a replacement to the Safe Harbor framework.…

Dell survey findings will not surprise you Dell has taken a digital leaders vs. digital laggards angle for its second Global Technology Adoption survey, which finds companies that buy and use new stuff - cloud, big data and mobility - grow faster than slow-spending sluggards.…

HP might well become a key partner Interview With IBM buying Cleversafe, one of the two leading object storage startups, and the other being Scality, we asked Scality CEO Jerome Lecat half a dozen questions about the potential impact of this acquisition.…

Break-in by Eastern European cybercriminals garners attention of US Secret Service A malware-driven break-in and breach at the charity America's Thrift Stores may have compromised all sales transactions at the company between 1 September and 27 September, its CEO has admitted.…

Buying your way to oblivion A trouble shared is a trouble doubled. Thus spake Frank Spencer, sales director of DataCenter, and thus goes the marriage of two legacy enterprise tech vendors.…

Making the terrorists’ job easier? ‘Yes’, say the cops Messaging app LINE has introduced end-to-end encryption, with secure chat messaging available on all version of the software, including the desktop version, and turned on by default on Android.…