The Register

Live long by transporting what you know to a virtual environment Server farm deployment used to be a simple enough process. Sometimes it was manual, sometimes it was automated. The odd shell script here or there, or some basic file manipulation was the order of the day along with PXE and other automation tools. It was workable at best.…

More ways to win with witty ... er, witticisms We're into week three of the Western Digital caption competition – so we tested your sense of mirth with a cute critter.…

Cops chalk one up to undercover sting operation A “Walter Mitty” IT manager from Milton Keynes who bought a gun on the dark web has pleaded guilty to firearms offences.…

Browsium fronts Win 10 and IE11 campaign Mighty Hewlett Packard has tapped a tiny browser startup spun up by ex-Microsofties to shift customers off the legacy Internet Explorer browser.…

Mushroom munching pipe bender gets ooold Antique Code Show This Sunday is 30 years since the release of Super Mario Bros for Nintendo’s Famicom, or NES to those of us outside Japan. Nintendo is busy celebrating and over on its website, a competition has been running to see who can make the best Mario-themed video – with a zillion and one re-interpretations of the infamous background tunes, as one might expect.…

City of London splashed £4.40 per belt, Derbyshire £1.25 The UK police are wasting millions on radios and other items such as belts thanks to wildly varying procurement spends between the 43 forces, an analysis by The Register has revealed.…

‘Spammy’ locale gets its wings clipped Symantec-owned certificate authority GeoTrust has revoked some SSL certificates for a small number of (unspecified) .pw TLDs.…

MD5 links in bcrypt chain mean Cheater Castle's crypto is not what it's cracked up to be A group of 16 researchers operating under the name "CynoSure Prime" claim to have cracked 11 million of the 26 million leaked passwords contained in the Ashley Madison data dumps.…

Two new Euro-satnav birds go aloft without incident Not one but two of the European Space Agency's Galileo satellite navigation craft were successfully launched in the small hours of Europe's Friday morning.…

Sea of woes laps at market High-end storage system sales in EMEA dived in the second quarter, but flash-based systems showed double digit growth, as enterprises latched onto the falling prices for the technology.…

NASA releases new batch of New Horizons snaps reveals not-quite-planet is COMPLICATED NASA's downloaded and processed a new batch of images the New Horizons probe captured as it zipped past Pluto on July 14th. The new photo album is the first release since late July and NASA says the pics inside show “a bewildering variety of surface features that have scientists reeling because of their range and complexity.”…

Pickup cockup cock box bugout takeout by California's finest Why did the chicken cross the road? The owner, Ken Houston, a former Oakland mayoral candidate, has stepped forward and revealed the answer to the Associated Press.…

iOS 9 imminent, but they'd rather run 8.3 Duo Labs researcher Mike Hanley says one in two iPhones connected to corporate networks are running outdated versions of iOS.…

Enough already with the strength meters and frequent changes says security agency Britain's spy agency the GCHQ has changed its password security guidance in a new document offering sensible advice that, if followed, should harden systems and make life easier for admins and users.…

Local peripherals driving hosted apps and desktops, for artists and security purposes Citrix is working on something it calls “ USB redirection to cloud” that will allow input devices on local devices to work on virtual desktops.…

VMware also throws updates and cloudy partners and users of penguin-powered guests VMware's released the various bits of software that together add up to the first update to vSphere 6.0 that we foreshadowed last week.…

Super Cali's Governor Brown something, something ... ah screw it A law proposed in California that would have banned drones from flying below 350ft over private property without permission has been vetoed by the state's governor.…

Prepare to ride the upgrade treadmill as security updates won't be supported for long Automatically-downloaded upgrades to Microsoft Office will enjoy security updates for just eight months under Microsoft's new Office update plan.…

Red planet to become glowing red planet under speedy terraforming plan Billionaire electric car, battery and rocketry tycoon Elon Musk has suggested that humanity should nuke mars before we try to move there.…

Cupertino caves to the motherland, it's claimed Apple has agreed to store Russians' iCloud accounts in a data center in Russia, it is reported.…

Feds not happy with potentially criminal traffic running through public-funded network A New England library is calling off its plan to host a Tor exit node after cops, tipped off by the US Department of Homeland Security, paid a visit.…

Microsoft now pushing upgrade files via Windows Update Microsoft would really, really, really like you to upgrade to Windows 10. So much so that even if you've opted not to request the upgrade, you'll get it anyway, even if you never intend to install it.…

Mislabeling your employees was something quite atrocious Add California's Employment Development Department (EDD) to the list of groups that think Uber drivers are employees and not independent contractors, as the ride-sharer suggests.…

Chancellor not impressed with social network's response German chancellor Angela Merkel has laid into Facebook for not doing more to tackle racism on the social network.…

Miscreants infiltrated network in 2013 ... discovered last month Health insurance company Excellus said hackers broke into its servers and may have made off with the personal details of 10.5 million people.…

Sometimes ordinary hardware won't cut it – and array makers are relying on that Comment Last week at Tech Field Day during VMworld, I met Violin Memory. A company that has been a pioneer in flash storage, but now struggles because, I believe, it has lost some of its credibility due to the lack of a decent feature set.…

Like Wallet and Apple Pay but with less hype Google has finally rolled out its new mobile payment system for phones running Android in the US.…

That padlock on your bag? Easy to open by anyone now The integrity of more than 300 million travel locks has been compromised after 3D printing files for a range of master keys were posted online.…

'Most' 'advanced' iPhone 'ever' … when it has power, at least The new advanced pressure-sensitive touchscreen features in the iPhone 6S have come at a cost: a smaller battery pack.…

Giant monopoly moans giant monopoly has no right to moan about giant monopoly US telco giant AT&T has slammed BT's efforts to get the US Federal Communications Commission regulator to give it access to AT&T's networks – describing the move as "staggering hypocrisy".…

No more low-hanging fruit, but the company’s still harvesting new biz Cloud storage provider Box easily beat its estimated revenue target for its second quarter, with double-digit growth over the year, and lifted its estimated full-year revenue number.…

No mention of Skynet or WOPR as yet Admiral Michael S. Rogers, commander of the United States' Cyber Command, has released his vision statement for the US's warfighting arm in cyberspace, coincidentally advocating a much larger role for his command and agencies in the national defence apparatus.…

App Cloud rolls Salesforce is floating one big developer cloud to woo code jockeys.…

It seemeth that the beak that biteth could returneth Storagebod I intend to start updating here again occasionally as the itches begin to build up, and I feel the need to scratch. There’s a lot going in the industry and there’s a massive amount of confusion about where it’s going at the moment.…

Departing the ISS, Gennady Padalka will have spent 879 days in space International Space Station Expedition 44 commander Gennady Padalka is due to depart the orbiting outpost tomorrow, when he'll have clocked up a record total of 879 days in space.…

No use whining about the Cupertino Tax – rivals need to up their game Analysis Remember "Peak Apple"? It looked vaguely plausible a couple of years ago.…

Spinning off excess bods to lower costs Disk drive maker Seagate has two per cent of its workforce destined for the exit door.…

You get infected, it’s a factory reset, sorry Android PIN-locking ransomware, which – unbeknown to the user – changes a device's login code, is targeting mobile phone users in North America, leaving victims with a locked screen and a demand for $500.…

Sales up double digits in Blighty – but chief warns of bumps ahead Dixons Carphone is still shaking its booty on the graves of fallen rivals as it once again reported growing sales.…

Duo soak up quarter of the market HP sells more cloud infrastructure equipment than anyone else, including Cisco, which was shunted into second place for the first time in Q2, 2015.…

If the company's cost claims are true, other suppliers are in for a tough time Interview Atlantis, the VM-accelerating DRAM cacher that’s moved into hyperconverged storage, has its eye on CrossPoint memory – the 3D XPoint stuff 1,000 times faster than NAND – as a way of cementing disk into a data centre coffin.…

How future proof are your IT systems? Temperature Check Many IT professionals believe their IT infrastructures are coping pretty well with current business requirements, but they are also aware that new and changing needs will lead to future capability gaps, if they are not doing so already. They also know that doing more of the same is not the answer in many areas. New architectures and delivery models will be necessary to effectively keep pace with evolving demands.…

Don't wait for 2016 – vote now! Poll Now that paranoid playboy John McAfee has personally confirmed to El Reg that he is running for US president, it's time to ask a key question. No, not where his campaign stands on inequality, America's simmering racial tensions, the fate of the middle class, and stuff like that.…

Not our fault, say Met Police, absolutely not A criminal investigation into computer hacking has been ended by the UK's Crown Prosecution Service, which dropped all charges after realising they had been time-barred for four years.…

Briefly indie startup's ability to cook with Chef put it on the menu AWS consulting startup DualSpark has been schlurped by mega-host Datapipe to shovel cloud newbies onto Amazon.…

Mysterious bright spots were probably ice after all NASA has released an improved image of mysterious bright spots on Ceres which appears to rule out the presence of an alien base on the asteroid belt dwarf planet.…

HP Ventures climbs on board Chef, the IT automation software vendor, has secured $40m and three new investors in the latest round of funding. The valuation of the company is undisclosed.…

Toshiba, Panasonic get TV and computer screen fines reduced The European Union's General Court has upheld a €1.4bn (£1bn) fine against Samsung, Philips, LG Electronics and Technicolor for cartel-like behaviour, while reducing fines imposed on Toshiba and Panasonic.…

Turning it into a ‘globally distributed file system’ apparently VMware's vCloud Air now has a file system layered on top of it, courtesy of cloud storage and data protection specialist Panzura.…