The Register

AWS Cloud to spin up video formatting services Amazon Web Services has acquired “software-defined video” player Elemental for an undisclosed sum.…

No workaround, so it's 'patch or chuck it in the bin' Cisco has patched a denial of service vulnerability in its unified computing platform.…

Ye olde networking giants still deliver for this big bit-shipper Global data operator Equinix has sniffed around the white box networking scene, but found traditional suppliers are innovating more quickly and still have an edge.…

Or not, if you look at the numbers Australia has won the dubious honour of being named in the global top-10 DDoS sources, and in its quarterly State of the Internet report, Akamai reckons our tiny number of high-speed fibre broadband users are the cause.…

Cities get a trim, rural links to take a haircut In a move that Vulture South's crystal ball suggests will be hotly resisted by Telstra, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is proposing that rural backhaul costs be slashed.…

Unless this really is the year of the Linux desktop ... Windows 10 looks to have grabbed about five and a half per cent of the desktop operating system market in August, its first full month of release.…

Dying to chat to a 'Fembot'? Not on our network, dude The Australian public service has weighed in on the Ashley Madison hack, warning government staff not to register with their work e-mails or use office 'net connections.…

DoJ bends a little with new cell-site simulator policy The US Department of Justice has moved to quell the ongoing row over the use of IMSI-catchers like Stingray, with a new policy that requires a warrant before they're deployed.…

Sponsor HP stumped by Wassenaar Arrangement cluster-fsck The Cold War has reached out a long-dead hand to stifle the Pwn2Own hackfest in Tokyo, with the Wassenaar Arrangement blamed for the event's cancelation.…

It's true that's there's a rumour. And that's a FACT Apple is reportedly planning to unveil its long-awaited large screen tablet designed for enterprise users.…

Rumbled in the tech jungle Pic A friend of The Reg today spotted something rather interesting in downtown San Francisco: an empty van bearing a sign reading “Google VW Group Summit.”…

Video network agrees to settlement in pay-for-praise case The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has struck a settlement with video network Machinima over allegations that influential YouTube broadcasters were improperly paid to endorse Microsoft's Xbox One.…

L-Koh gives O-K to settlement payout Apple, Google, Adobe, and Intel's $415m settlement with Silicon Valley techies over wage-fixing accusations has been formally approved by a judge.…

Big names decide they DO want a say in copying levies Three years after stomping out, big tech manufacturers have returned to talk to the French government about private copying levies.…

Can't give it away: Only two-thirds of original £100m target to be met The government has admitted to falling substantially short of its original target to hand small businesses £100m in broadband vouchers.…

Fat solid state flash drive for the masses? IFA 2015 "By 2018, SSD technology including 3D Flash could reach up to 128TB", Toshiba storage product manager Paul Han Lin told The Register today at IFA in Berlin.…

Well, it's a success compared with Android Wear, anyway IFA 2015 Last year, TomTom shipped half a million fitness and sports watches, more than any Wear smartwatch vendor can boast – but short of the 10 million fitness bands Fitbit shifted. Today at IFA it launched a new range of sporty watches.…

Blackmail campaign unmasked through Bitcoin blockchain Some blackmail attempts against victims of the ongoing Ashley Madison saga resulted in several – albeit modest – pay outs, according to new research.…

'Misleading' animation takes a swing at new regs, and misses A strange new video designed to turn the so-called “Generation D” – generation digital, and the millennials in particular to you, chief – away from the EU's new data protection rules has met with criticism.…

D-range storage drops its pants Microsoft has increased the size of its compute-and storage-centric cloud VM instances while cutting prices by up to 27 per cent.…

So, just like everyone else's, in fact IFA Sketch While the business side of the Internet of Things looks in good nick, and isn’t actually anything new, the consumer prospects look remote. Samsung is one of the few global companies that’s able to project a vision of consumer IoT: it does technology as well as consumer electronics and white goods.…

35,043m drop finally breaks PARIS Vulture 1 record PICS+VID It's official: El Reg has finally relinquished its highest-altitude paper plane launch Guinness World Record, almost five years since the Paper Aircraft Released Into Space (PARIS) Vulture 1 triumphantly swooped to earth from 27,310m.…

Outage domino effect as network's customers' customers also hit Web hosting provider Servint has been hit by a network outage, reportedly due to a DDoS attack.…

Infected ads threaten lonely hearts' romantic pursuits Update Security researchers have uncovered a malvertising attack run over ad networks and aimed at users of dating site Match.com.…

Want to know if your nemesis is applying for the same job? You're in luck HMRC is spewing job applicants' email addresses to potential rivals in mass circular responses it has blamed on "a technical glitch".…

The hacker that rocks the cradle Internet-connected baby monitors are riddled with security flaws that could broadcast live footage of your sleeping children to the world and his dog, according to new research.…

Man cleared of charges ranted a bit too much in online vid The leader of notorious 'hacktivist' group Anonymous UK has been fined £400 for identifying the woman who accused him of rape.…

You can also scrabble for Cu, Al, Fe, Ta, Tn, Si, Nd, OK? All these servers that we pack into the data centres have a limited life span, they're made of metal, metals even, and scrap metal has a value. So, what's the stuff that's in there and how much is it worth? As metal that is, once it's done its job of pumping the electrons around?…

'There will be more attacks today,' attacker proudly tells El Reg The website for Greater Manchester Police was targeted by two Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks yesterday, which rendered the site unavailable for more than two hours. The operators of two Twitter accounts have claimed responsibility.…

You've got more chance getting a f**k out of Ashley Madison than the Chocolate Factory NSFW Google's turned on speech recognition for Google Docs users, but only if you're polite.…

Watch out, performance hogs. This is NOT a contention-based model Review The Tintri T850 is Tintri's mid-line offering. It is a great example of the current line of Tintri products. Reviewing it has been something of a challenge, though that is the fault of your reviewer, not the storage array.…

Create your own car, crack on with combat collisions Game Theory Having watched Mad Max: Fury Road I’ve been gagging to get my hands on my Magnum Opus car in the new Mad Max game. Up until the game’s release, all I have had to entertain myself has been news of the controversially rapey Furiosa comic and, joy of joys, a baking friend’s discovery for instant War Boy: silver spray icing.…

Large number are also sharing that data willy-nilly with third parties A large proportion of websites aimed at children are slurping a concerning amount of personal info, research from cross-border privacy authorities has revealed.…

But can the stables be cleaned? And does anyone actually want to clean them? Analysis “It’s the wisdom of the crowd that gives you the best results in the long-term.” Rory Cellan-Jones, BBC…

Sleepy Puppy latest in Open Source security love Netflix has continued its contribution to the open source security community with the release of a tool to better help developers and admins identify cross-site scripting.…

Google, Mozilla and Microsoft say 'enough is enough' One of the security set's most intractable problems is the stubborn endurance of old standards – the kind of thing that left SSLv3 hanging around so that people didn't have to weed out “fallback” code, for example.…

.work, .party equally dangerous. Almost every one of the hundreds of thousands of websites in 10 top level domains including all under .review and .zip are malicious, according to research.…

Effects like 'having smoked something illegal', officers complain Cops in the Catalan town of Olot are feeling the effects of 2,000 confiscated marijuana plants dumped in their station's basement garage, which they reckon are seriously affecting their law enforcement performance.…

'Hey it's Mike, open this thing would ya?' Researchers investigating an active online espionage group have themselves been targeted in persistent social engineering attacks.…

Want your open-source NetOps? Here it is The collaborative open-source CloudRouter project has come out of beta.…

'You got the warranty card?' 'I thought you had it!' The “spinning lasso” antenna attached to NASA's SMAP satellite, launched in January, has stopped functioning and can't be recovered.…

'Real code is being written' says NSX Daddy Martin Casado Late in 2014, VMware's network virtualisation guru Martin Casado suggested that his next move after getting network virtualisation up and running as a business might be to try a new approach to enterprise security.…

Government kicked for seeking free ride on power poles Stop us if you've heard this one before: the federal government has managed to alienate important stakeholders in the telecommunications industry, and they're pushing back.…

vSphere 6 gets its first refresh this month, cloud on-ramp coming soon VMworld 2015 Brace yourself, vAdmins: the first major update for vSphere 6.0 is coming, probably in late September, and a more major update is in the works.…

Will you still tape me tomorrow? Whether it’s unstructured rich media, traditional business documents and files, or the audiovisual library of a media company, there is more data about than ever before. And more than ever, it has potential value – whether that is to build new content, to improve customer relationships, to answer the demands of regulators, or even to protect your organisation and its intellectual property in court.…

What fresh hell is this? Your smartphone will become even more of a pest, if researchers from Telefonica and the University of Stuttgart have their way: they want to detect when you're bored, and get the phone to push content at you.…

DSC, WSUS modules give the Win admin *nix-like automation, apparently Puppet Labs has noticed the deep, dark secret of enterprise IT: that there's still lots of Microsoft Windows out there that could do with a bit of automation.…

Net luminary unloads on data retention One of the individuals who first brought the Internet to Australia, Geoff Huston, has unloaded on the federal government's chaotic attempt to introduce its data retention regime.…

High-res audio too, but will users care? IFA2015 Sony announced the Xperia Z5 series mobile phones at the IFA consumer electronics event in Berlin, including the first smartphone with 4K video playback and capture.…