The Register

Four times slower than EMC’s XtremIO Oracle blogs it’s sold more than a billion dollars’ worth of its ZFS appliance, with almost 15,000 systems installed by more than 5,000 customers.…

Sweat the details The Safe Harbor agreement this week suddenly became of interest to a lot more IT managers than had previously given a stuff about it.…

Fast times in Newcastle BT customers in Gosforth, Newcastle, are being given a chance to test copper's last hurrah, G.fast.…

US mum up in arms over neck-shackled figurine A California mother is less than impressed with a Playmobil pirate ship set which includes a dark-skinned figurine with a shackle around his neck.…

Peter Moore delivers final Reg lecture of 2015 Reg events If you’ve ever wondered how you’d cope under the sort of pressure that can crack the hardest of military nuts you’ll want to get along to our final lecture of 2015 on December 1.…

But what should Ofcom do? Here’s a suggestion. Analysis The mergers of O2 and Three, and BT and EE, could drive prices up for consumers and be A Bad Thing.…

Cupertino claims it is working with the developers to get the apps back in the App Store Apple has confirmed having removed "a few apps" from the App Store, including Been® Choice - which blocked advertisements even within the native Apple News app - over what it claims are privacy concerns.…

Customer base growing, but staff still outnumber punters Hadoop-pusher Hortonworks has dismissed reports by analyst house Gartner that the big data market is "yet to take off".…

42 negotiations mean MS, Oracle costs differ wildly Coppers are wasting millions on negotiated software licences, with some forces paying more than four times more than other constabularies of a similar size for Oracle and Microsoft licences, The Register can reveal.…

Enter hosted voice and UC-as-a-service space Rigby Group, the parent of Midlands-based tech dynasty SCC, has acquired a minority stake in hosted voice and unified comms-as-a-service outfit SIPCOM.…

We live in interesting times – especially if you've got $51bn going spare The rumour mill about a Dell-EMC deal is going hyper, with a $51bn takeover by Dell being mentioned. Is Elliott Management holding a gun to EMC's head?…

Bang, crash, wallop Game Theory It's the noughties all over again as two franchises from very different genres, Uncharted and Rock Band, are repackaged and re-released for a new generation of console.…

Wot, never heard of thin clients? Study Readers are usually pretty quick to tell us when we use jargon in our surveys that we haven’t defined, and quite rightly so. We work in an industry that is riddled with language abuse, and marketeers who take liberties by redefining long-established terms and inventing buzzwords to make old stuff sound new.…

I have the answer. But no profits. Buy my IPO!! Oracle and SAP have badly let down customers by charging them through the nose, while leaving them with nothing more than Excel spreadsheets to plan budgets, claims Frederic Layulaux, the chief executive of software-as-a-service outfit Anaplan.…

Newbies boast of growth, quiet about actual numbers though Comment Three storage startups claim they are still experiencing strong growth, even while mainstream vendors' revenue expansion remains disappointing.…

No visible attacks yet, but bet your creative tendencies there will be Adobe will be brick over eight holes in a patch run next week.…

Redmond pays $25k to hacker who spotted flaw allowing anyone to own your email Synack senior security researcher Wesley Wineberg has received US$25,000 from Microsoft for quietly disclosing a bug that allows any Hotmail account to be hijacked.…

More New Horizons snaps space bods just can't explain Pluto's skies are a lovely blue, NASA says, after releasing new data and colour-corrected images from the New Horizons mission's swing-past the former planet.…

116-year-old living testament to the power of sliced pork The world's oldest person is living proof of the awesome power of bacon, having achieved supercentenarian status on a daily dose of sliced pork goodness.…

In a city where most people live in apartments, this t-shirt landed on open ground Video Singapore's postal service has trialled delivery-by-drone.…

Plans to retire cipher in 2017 may need to be brought forward A crypto cadre has busted the SHA-1 security standard after using $US75,000 of cloud computing resources, handily undercutting conservative crypto cracking estimates and putting such an attack within reach of well-resourced groups.…

Is this really what Meg Whitman meant by 'innovative new computing experiences'? HP will soon release a special Star Wars edition laptop it says will allow you to “Unleash your inner Sith”.…

NPAPI plugins get death date of Christmas 2016 The Mozilla Foundation has revealed that some future versions of its flagship Firefox browser will ship without support for plugins of any sort.…

Businesses are spending on mobile transformations, not boring old computers The world's personal computer factories could only shove just over 70 million machines out the door during 2015's third quarter, according to box-watchers IDC and Gartner.…

Super Cali: Be realistic, get a wa– ah, screw it California has passed a law requiring police to obtain a warrant before searching phones, tablets, and other electronic devices, and accounts in cloud services, too.…

Any hacker capable of sinking a tinnie of Fosters will be trying to crack it as you read Australia's newly minted prime minister Malcolm Turnbull has admitted to running a private email server.…

Exec's IP address used to eyeball leaked security key, but not the addy used to snatch info Uber's sleuthing to find out who hacked its database of drivers has turned up an interesting snippet regarding its chief competitor, Lyft.…

Samsung-made mobe brains chomp through battery charges faster than TSMC chips Apple has confessed that some iPhone 6Ses have worse battery life than others because their processors are made by two different chip bakers.…

Cunning plan calls for EMC to go private, VMware stay public as cash cow Dell is figuring out how to borrow the US$40 billion it would need to acquire EMC, according to reports quoting the usual folks familiar with the deal.…

'Yay'? 'Sad'? C'mon, this is what we really need Pic + vid Facebook has announced a range of new buttons intended to give its users the ability to express a wider range of emotions – certainly wider than today's basic "Like."…

EMC highlights the problems all face Comment The days of the massive standalone storage company are coming to a close, as the public cloud and myriad storage startups drive cumulatively fatal wounds deep into the heart of the one-supplier-does-all-your-storage business model.…

Anyone ever heard of encryption? UK doctors and nurses routinely share sensitive patient information via their smartphones, we're told.…

IoT, mobile, and containers highlight day 2 at Vegas summit Amazon Web Services (AWS) has unleashed a handful of new service options on the second day of its re:Invent conference in Las Vegas.…

CEO reshuffles management team, outsources production Troubled 3D printer manufacturer Makerbot has announced a second round of layoffs, cutting a further 20 per cent of its staff as part of a major restructuring.…

Governments and registries tool up for next week's meeting European governments and internet registries have sent a stinging message to the board of domain name overseer ICANN warning it to stop trying to avoid limits on its absolute authority.…

Prototype has 24 cores, in the hands of techies to test drive Qualcomm, the maker of processors for Nexus smartphones and other mobes and tablets, has revealed early specifications for its upcoming server chips.…

Campaign for Clear Licensing forms Brussels pincer with Free ICT Europe EU lawmakers will be pressed for clearer rules on software licensing, support contracts from IT vendors, and intellectual property by the Campaign for Clear Licensing (CCL).…

Meanwhile Volkswagen's American head is in Congress' sights As European officials dither about new emissions rules, German prosecutors got real and raided Volkswagen's headquarters on Thursday.…

And no, I can't beat the NSA or GCHQ for you IP EXPO 2015 Delivering a keynote in London today, the famous inventor of PGP complained that consumers want privacy for free, forcing his company Silent Circle to focus on selling secure telephony to enterprises - while he would like to see it more widely employed.…

Do what we say or the UN will take over, techies walk away, cats and dogs living together Domain system overseer ICANN has embarked on a campaign of fear and fuzzy logic in its latest bid to seize control of the internet from the US government without agreeing to limits on its power.…

Hyperconverged hybrids snare the g-men The FBI is spending $28m on hyper-converged Dell systems, running Nutanix software, for 55,000 virtual desktop users.…

Real world still won't meet laboratory limits Despite the Volkswagen emissions cheating scandal and a pledge as far back as 2010, the European Commission will not impose real world emissions limits on car makers until 2017.…

Nabbed in operation targeting 'low-skilled' crooks A UK voyeur who hacked webcams to spy on victims has avoided going to prison for his crimes.…

We do hybrid too, insists senior VP Andy Jassy AWS Reinvent "This is not intended to be a sales and marketing conference, it’s really intended to be an education and training conference," said Amazon Web Services (AWS) Senior VP Andy Jassy at the keynote for Reinvent under way in Las Vegas. Yet marketing dominated his keynote as he jabbed at competitors.…

Tin foil VXer wraps new Trojan in cloak and evasion tricks Malware man Yotam Gottesman has found a somewhat mysterious remote access Trojan on a corporate network that sports highly capable evasion techniques.…

Sky and TalkTalk also expected to beg for spin-out +Comment The political ding-dong over prising broadband biz Openreach out of BT’s hands entered another round today with the release of a Vodafone-commissioned report on the £6.5bn in “excessive profits” BT has been making from the UK broadband market.…

A legal, er, brief 'Safe Harbor' is now defunct because the European Court of Justice found the following:…

Sales force did well – but too late for the beancounters Quantum says it will make lower revenues than expected this quarter because it sold too many products and its supply chain couldn't keep up.…

US cloud businesses face 'legislative buzzsaw' Both small and large US data centre companies are walking "headlong into a legislative buzzsaw" following a landmark 'Safe Harbor' ruling this week, the founder of data centre startup NuoDB, Barry Morris, has said.…