The Register

SATA's shunted sideways. Move over for NVMe M.2 A new, thinner and faster SSD from Samsung, using the M.2 form factor, is hitting the retail market next month.…

Reg reader compiles handy checklist for SMEs Readers' corner Dave Cartwright, an IT operations manager for a telecom company, recently compiled a list of dos and don’t for IT infrastructure buyers for El Reg.…

Popularity sees it clogged by congestion, just like the real thing Just hours after it was launched yesterday, TfL’s new interactive digital collision map went down for about an hour, as excited Londoners zoomed in to find out where accidents had happened.…

Hapless network receives yet another roasting from angry Ofcom EE's dreadful record drags on, with the mobile carrier once again bagging the top spot for the most broadband customer complaints in the UK.…

The affordable Android thingy you can watch every which way Review The phrase “this now the best smartphone below so-and-so quid” is going to get worn out at this rate.…

Can’t pair, won’t pair, says iZettle Mobile merchant terminal company iZettle has warned its users that the Bluetooth issues within Apple's operating system could seriously affect payment processes, and has strongly warned merchants using its kit not to upgrade to iOS9 until it says so.…

Thumbs-down suggestion leads to the roll-out of all the old familiar scams Survey scammers have already capitalised on Facebook's tentative plans to develop a "Dislike" button.…

eHospital system at centre of trust's financial blackhole Cambridge University Hospitals has been placed under special measures by the NHS regulator, after a failed £200m IT project plunged its finances into the red and left it unable to deliver key services.…

Telco giant fires opening salvo in high-stakes battle to prevent Openreach divorce BT chief Gavin Patterson has promised to back the government's desire to gift Blighty with universal minimum broadband speeds of 5 to 10Mbps, with the caveat that the company needs support from Ofcom.…

New look, new features, same old issues, but quietly impressive nonetheless First Look Microsoft has released Office 2016 for Windows, over two and half years after the launch of Office 2013 in January of that year.…

The ‘mobile app gap’ is still a problem, says Forrester Apple’s Maxi Pad is no laptop or Surface Pro killer – even though it holds up comparatively well for general workforce usage.…

Firstly, the family dining table ISN’T an office Working from home is often seen as the Holy Grail of the IT worker. No more getting up early to get ready for work. No more spending thousands of pounds a year for a season pass only to get squished in a carriage like a sardine.…

Unicorn handlers cross fingers, hope Pure Storage IPO will open floodgates It’s got to be a bubble, don’t you think? How is it sustainable that we have 145 startups, each valued at over a billion dollars? Nine of them are storage startups, by the way.…

If at first you don’t succeed, complain, complain and complain again As the European Commission puts the screws on Google, the Commish itself is to be probed by the European Ombudsman over its handling of the long-running anti-trust case.…

WiFi men prefer blog-snuffing to patching. LinkedIn application Security Luca Carettoni has proffered a homebrew patch to close off a dangerous zero day hole that allows remote attackers to hijack home automation Ubiquiti mFi controllers.…

Revenues up 13 per cent Red Hat rode on the back of rising cloud subscriptons to turn in a good Q2.…

Burning dinosaurs for fun and profit Move over, mega-miners: an Andreessen-backed venture is going to beat off your data-centre rigs with $400 worth of Raspberry Pi-powered brick.…

How to exorcise the XcodeGhost haunting your iThing Security outfit Lookout is watching iThing users' backs, with a rolling list of apps affected by the XCodeGhost bug.…

Painter has only got one ball, but it could almost fill the Albert Hall Some men are born great, some have greatness thrust upon them and others achieve greatness by painting a baseball every day for four decades until it weighs 5,000 pounds.…

Cisco and Shadowserver root out rooted routers Cisco's moved to sweep up routers compromised by the firmware vulnerability that first emerged in August and which FireEye/Mandiant last week found in the wild.…

Ohh, LoRa! French cellular operator Orange has settled on LoRa (Long Range) technology to build a dedicated machine-to-machine network covering all of metropolitan France. It says the network will supplement the company's existing cellular network and will roll out progressively starting early in 2016.…

Sweethearts cops sour deal Cryptowall attackers are smashing businesses in the Australian state of Queensland, according to the owner of a Townsville sex shop which has paid $1,058 to ransomware attackers to have its files unlocked.…

FalconStor software to pump up all-flash array boxes in China Huawei is using FalconStor's FreeStor software to enhance the appeal of its Dorado all-flash arrays in China.…

Sixteen code execution holes closed. Adobe has patched nearly two dozen vulnerabilities in its Flash player including 16 that lead to code execution but is still serving flawed versions with hundreds of holes as part of its Shockwave bundle.…

'As far as I know, this effectively never happens' The bloke who created and then withdrew the Peace ad-blocking tool for iOS 9 said Apple has now decided to refund all purchases of the app.…

Buzz, buzz: RTFM, people Oh dear: Cisco is warning that screws in a couple of its compact Catalyst switches may be poking into wires carrying live voltages.…

Pirate-hunter George Brandis marooned, but retains metadata New prime minister Malcolm Turnbull has decided that copyright, piracy, and censorship issues should be overseen by the Department of Communications rather than the Attorney-General's Department.…

Five-year project is five years late, no sign of any ported apps Michigan is suing HP after the state government grew tired of waiting for the tech biz to fulfill an IT contract signed a decade ago.…

Howls of pain still echo across the internet Microsoft's Skype is slowly righting itself after spending most of the day offline.…

Facebook's just like the NSA, regulator says Facebook's long-anticipated privacy case in Belgium has begun, with lawyers for the country's privacy regulator asking the judge not to be “intimidated” by The Social Network.…

60,000 homes per month by January 2016, company says The kinds of people that watch the weekly data releases about Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN) will be watching like hawks between now and January.…

What's Korean for 'Won't someone think of the children?' In April, the South Korean government insisted that smartphones owned by children must have software that protects the innocent little snowflakes from looking at stuff online that might harm them or steal their personal information.…

Problem causing random loss of connectivity, crashes VMware's found, and is trying hard to fix, a nasty bug in ESXi 6.0.…

Your secrets sold to advertisers Changes in the privacy policy of AVG's antivirus doodad will allow it to collect your web browsing and search history – and sell it to advertisers to bankroll its freemium security software products.…

At last – and he's got a special ergonomic chair! After three years of legal delays, Kim Dotcom finally appeared in court in Auckland, New Zealand, on Monday to start his extradition hearing to the United States.…

It's not the future we wanted Five days after delaying the release of watchOS 2, Apple has posted an update for its smartwatch operating system.…

Internet Association joins bloated FCC legal battle Internet companies have jumped into the lawsuit brought by Big Telco against America's net neutrality rules.…

Companies must hand over crypto systems for scrutiny The Indian government has published a draft of its latest plans for encryption. The proposals spell bad news for domestic software developers and will make other companies looking to do business in the subcontinent very nervous indeed.…

When your business is built on making secret numbers, don't make it look too easy Symantec has fired some employees after Google engineers noticed rogue SSL certificates issued in the web goliath's name.…

Hurray for hate free speech The owner of notorious message board 4chan has sold the forum to the former owner of its Japanese "inspiration," 2channel.…

Exploit-broker sets bounty for iPhone, iPad OS zero-day Exploit traders Zerodium will pay a million dollars to anyone who finds an unpatched bug in iOS 9 that can be exploited to jailbreak iThings – or compromise them.…

Effective immediately In comes a new chief technology officer; out goes a chief marketing officer: it looks like the Kurian effect is starting to show at NetApp.…

Problem of multiple incompatible chargers to be solved with... another charger How would you like to charge your phone much faster? That’s the promise of Qualcomm Quick Charge 3.0 and the first charger has been caught in the wild.…

Holy Zuck: ITU says interwebulator usage 'slowed sharply' Mark Zuckerberg has finally ticked off a mammoth item on his bucket list: Facebook usage – his company reckons – has eclipsed internet growth, and the UN Broadband Commission parroted those claims on Monday.…

George Kurian stepping upstairs means bye-bye Jay Kidd, hello Mark Bregman NetApp has recruited an ex-Symantec CTO to be its new CTO, replacing the retired Jay Kidd.…

Presence in mobile phone and IoT markets boosted UK-based chipmaker Dialog Semiconductor is to acquire US chip firm Atmel for $4.6bn (£3bn) in a cash and stocks deal.…

IT people start on their journeys through infrastructure provision lacking one fundamental thing: experience. You emerge from school, college or university knowing something about technology (unless of course you did one of those nancy IT degrees that doesn't teach you anything about proper IT, in which case your usefulness to me is carrying things and making tea) but with none of the experience that us old farts have learned over the years by finding stuff out ourselves and by learning from our peers.…

Crash of the Titans unlikely – there's actually a DRIVER in there The “is Apple building a car?” rumour mill has received added grist with the news that Apple execs have been meeting Californian legislators responsible for self-driving cars.…

Should have been pulped. Weren’t They were supposed to be destroyed, but up to 10 workers at an Arizona computer recycling firm instead sold 70,000 copies of Office 2010 on the black market.…