The Register

Dual-provider strategies are the future Comment Oracle is making hay over last weekend's mega six-hour Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud outage. "You get what you pay for," tweeted Oracle's Phil Dunn, with the caveat that all views are his and don't necessarily reflect those of Oracle. But you get the point.…

What's more likely to happen? Flashy all-flash-array startup Pure Storage wants $450m in cash from its looming stock market debut. This would value the company at $3.1bn, giving its venture-capital backers a notional 6.6x return on their $470m total funding.…

Hello, modern-day Lazarus Kaminario's capacity-rising, price-dropping K2 3D TLC flash array is using Falconstor-sourced replication software. Together with other deals, this looks like FalconStor-Lazarus is coming back to life.…

Outdated IE vulnerable, apparently, I wouldn’t know, I never look at those things An ongoing malvertising campaign that began in August by targeting Yahoo.com, MSN.com and other websites visited by millions of people has expanded to hit smut sites as well.…

Accessible encryption given boot for being too hard, rather than for being morally suspect An Obama administration working group mulled four mechanisms for breaking the encrypted smartphones of terrorist and criminal suspects before rejecting them all as too politically fraught or impractical.…

US outsourcing whale posts bumper results while still digesting the minnows Acquisition-ravenous US outsourcer Accenture posted an increase in sales of five per cent to $30bn (£20bn) for financial year 2015, compared with the previous year.…

Hiatus is not a dirty word. Crevice is a dirty word, but hiatus isn't Peter-Paul Koch, author of The Mobile Web Handbook, published a piece this summer entitled "Stop Pushing the Web Forward".…

Echoes of EU investigation as FTC meets with Google officials Google is being scrutinised by US authorities for potentially blocking rivals' apps and services on Android phones and tablets.…

Best forgotten or time for a renaissance? Study Deploying, maintaining and supporting desktop PCs isn’t cheap, and also represents an ongoing headache for IT. On paper the answer is obvious – at least for some types of user – simply give them a thin client device instead and run their desktop virtually on the server.…

Less best Korea in half-hearted 'crackdown' to clean up nation's corruption problem South Korean courts are doing the best they can to clean the country of corruption, presumably in the face of their uncorrupt and well-behaved best neighbours to the North.…

Game of Thrones-screening 'downstream space' firm Sky posts stellar results Blighty's space industry received a fillip today, with Sky TV reporting bumper results for its full year – Sky accounting for more than half of the UK government's "look, Britain has a thriving space industry" narrative.…

We had fun tittering at this week's captions, but now we're looking for a devine response This week’s caption competition used a picture from the Intel, announcing it had built a bra as the latest in wearable technology.…

Plus: BB10 security updates on the way BlackBerry officially confirmed the release of its first ever Android phone today, and it shall be known as "Priv". It also promised to maintain its BB10 platform with security updates, with a further release 10.3.3 in March next year.…

How I started to stop streaming and love physical media again Breaking Fad It's not every day that I'm torn between the physical and the digital. Usually, I manage to make a firm choice one way or the other, or at least rationalise my equivocation.…

A little too ‘Shenzhen Generic’ for its own good Review Nothing excites young male phone nerds like a phone you can’t buy. It excites them more than the (remote) prospect of sex. Neither is obtainable, but how they want it so. They’ll queue in the sun for hours just to look at something they won’t be able to buy for months.…

Thing happens, scientists blame global warming Humanity may have to live in a terrifying future where bumblebees have shorter tongues unless the menace of global warming can be abated, a new scientific study suggests.…

Cheering and rigidly ordered queueing witnessed at Jesus phone eucharist Interesting images have reached us of the ritual surrounding the dispensing of Apple's new iPhone 6S to the faithful of Scotland.…

Leaked docs show how out-of-control spy agency went full Stasi on innocent surfers New documents revealing GCHQ's mass-surveillance activities have detailed an operation codenamed KARMA POLICE, which slurped up the details of "every visible user on the Internet".…

Software nasty can be planted, operate and wipe itself all without detection Security researchers have lifted the lid on a new ATM malware strain, dubbed GreenDispenser, which gives crooks the ability to walk up to a compromised machine and drain its cash.…

Carbon crusade is literally poisoning us all in order to save us Comment Volkswagen, one of the world's biggest car groups, is in serious trouble this week as it turned out that millions of its diesel engines have been emitting vast, prohibited amounts of polluting nitrogen oxides (NO).…

Join our experts in the Reg studio on 12 Nov Register now to watch our live Regcast, where help your business deal with Data Loss Prevention and Data Theft Prevention issues.…

The weird and wonderful gather at Olympia 100% Design The 100% Design Show is all about innovation. This year there's a strong emphasis on things pretending to be other things, and furniture made out of stuff you wouldn't normally expect it to be made out of. Some of it's even quite comfortable...…

NHS Choices: Er, they’re all clinically safe, just not formally ‘endorsed’ Researchers from Imperial College London have published three studies in the journal BMC Medicine, provoking serious concerns about the mobile health apps approved by the NHS and provided through its Health Apps Library.…

Help us make up our minds with yet another consultation The European Commission is asking for help in drawing up laws to govern the internet. On Thursday it launched yet more public consultations designed to inform bureaucrats attempting to help create the digital single market.…

Crims sold information on attack vectors, potential staff to blackmail. Former members of Israel's Shin Bet intelligence agency have infiltrated a since-scuppered hacking forum that served as a specialist marketplace of targeted attacks.…

Andy Green and Richard Noble using their 30 years of research for good The Bloodhound Super-Sonic Car (SSC) has been shown off to the public for the first time, ahead of its attempt to break the world land-speed record next year.…

Easy-access private keys makes man-in-the-middle diddle. Palo Alto threat bod Claud Xiao says XcodeGhost-infected apps are open to man-in-the-middle attacks and contain a beachhead for other malware writers to attack devices.…

Oh yeah, and there’s that $952k at casinos An investigation is underway as to whether US military personnel tried to get the government to foot the bill for a total of $96,576 (£63,268) spent on strippers in Las Vegas.…

Want to scan a million pages? Here's how Yahoo! has opened the kimono on a project it hopes will make the Web that little bit safer for everyone, Project Gryffin.…

Your SYNs, forgiven Cisco's moved on the “SYNful knock” vulnerability with a free tool letting admins test their routers for fudged firmware.…

TV starlet offers iCloud access, photoshopped nudes, to bait voyeur hackers The chief hacker behind the infamous iCloud celebrity hacks has revealed in a documentary how the group dubbed RipSec shook Hollywood by plundering thousands of naked photos and financial data of Tinsel Town icons.…

Also: keep an eye out for upcoming Kaspersky patches Google troublemaker Tavis Ormandy, whose credits include turning up security vuln in popular antivirus products, reckons he's identified an active market in antivirus exploits.…

HTTPS is secure, but cookies are rubbish, warns CERT A whole lot of work rolling out HTTP security is being undermined by bad browser implementation that facilitates man-in-the-middle attacks.…

Fingerprint mobe locks, however … not so much The Feds can't make suspects give up their company-issued smartphone passcodes because doing so violates the Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution.…

Funding a mystery, discussion falls under ban-hammer Australia's Attorney-General's Department hasn't worked out when money to support telcos' and ISPs' data retention efforts will start to flow.…

Analysts predict install base to drop for first time ever The number of people using touchscreen tablets will decline in the coming year.…

You'll be surprised It's a question that occurs to many of us: if digital security is such a minefield, how do you keep your personal data safe?…

It's as if the black-hat hackageddon doesn't worry ANYONE Australia's celebration of its glorious new leader has been soured by a federal government “anti-radicalisation” education kit that lists alternative music and environmentalism as signs that a youngster is on the way to becoming a danger to society.…

President of Estonia makes interesting point at IT powwow The key to the digital future is about data integrity, not data confidentiality.…

Future master-of-the-web heading down dangerous path Special report When comedian John Oliver dedicated the bulk of his weekly show a year ago to soccer organization FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association), he noted that most Americans had never heard of the organization.…

Private code-signing cert revoked at last Microsoft has finally revoked D-Link's leaked code-signing key, which gave malware the red carpet treatment on millions of Windows PCs.…

Watchdog puts US telco on the expensive naughty step Sprint has been fined over $1m by the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) after it cocked up 911 calls for hearing-impaired citizens.…

Senior VxWorks engineers laid off this week, we're told Exclusive Intel-owned Wind River – the maker of the VxWorks software used in NASA rovers, spacecraft, military computer systems, and industry – has laid off a number of its most experienced staff, sources tell The Register.…

Slide to update … for real this time Apple has released an update to address several bugs spotted in its iOS 9 mobile operating system.…

Graph API fingered for outage As US West Coast workers sat down at their desks for the day's work, the most popular form of slacking off was unavailable as Facebook went offline for a bit.…

How long has this been going on? Sysadmin blog This summer was particularly bad for western Canada, where I live. Electricity costs are soaring and the datacenter air conditioners were going 24 hours a day. There has to be a way to be more efficient.…

Now's the time to move to over to IPv6, ARIN boss tells El Reg North America has officially run dry of new IPv4 addresses, the numbers that computers use to find each other on the internet.…

Spark Streamliner coming at you via GitHub Apache Spark may be the fastest data processing engine around for big data, but unless you are conversant in Scala or Java, this cluster computing framework can be a pain to set up and manage.…

Qu'est-ce que la bombe informatique? The UK's defence secretary Michael Fallon has announced a cyber love-in with the French to offset the threat of the "information bomb" – whatever that is.…

Named individual implicated in coordinating neighbourhood spying Security researchers have blown the lid off another Chinese PLA hacking group. Kunming-based Unit 78020 of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) specialises hacking Southeast Asian military, diplomatic, and economic targets, according to new research by security intelligence firm ThreatConnect.…