The Register

You want plain, colourless Lollipops, have them, says Motorola Vodafone UK wants to sell Android phones which are as close to stock (as Google intended) as possible, and the red company's favourite device for this is the Moto G.…

Onyara's NiFi gambit goes to Hadoop spinner Hortonworks is buying dataflow specialist Onyara, making the Hadoop-simplifying tech for use in the Internet of Things (IoT) its third corporate purchase.…

Storing in an undeduplicated form means a faster restore ExaGrid's growth is a reminder that Data Domain is not having everything its own way in the deduping back-up-to-disk market. V4.9 of ExaGrid's appliance software has global deduplication across all NAS shares and appliances in a scale-out GRID, along with parallel Oracle database back-up.…

Huge vat of geek-friendly Factor 50 sun cream on order Web Summit – one of Europe’s biggest tech events, attracting more than 20,000 visitors – is on the lookout for a new home.…

Fraudsters make hay while sun shines and accounts staff go on holiday UK small businesses need to be on heightened alert for fake invoices, following an alarming increase in this type of scam in the first six months of 2015.…

Bute Council belatedly corrects missing Gaelic accent cock-up Visitors disembarking at the ferry terminal on the Scottish Isle of Bute are sadly no longer greeted with a Gaelic sign reading: "Welcome to Rothesay – The doorway to the beauty of Penis Island", after the local council moved swiftly to correct a balls-up and add a missing accent.…

'What a punderful feeling', enthuses laureate Darren Walsh Peterborough funny man Darren Walsh has secured the 2015 "Funniest Joke of The Fringe" title with the splendid: "I just deleted all the German names off my phone. It's Hans free."…

17-hour-long outage clouds cloud provider C4L has been battling a major outage for the best part of a day and customers are becoming increasingly angry about the lengthy downtime.…

Bigger targets for smaller businesses in latest meaningless pledge The government looks set to wave its procurement wand and make one-third of its £45bn per year procurement spend appear to go to SMEs by 2020.…

Sorry lawyers, but the Packet Pixie doesn't really exist Analysis Arts and humanities graduates are schooled for years in metaphor and analogy - and these are very useful skills for understanding the world. But what happens when an approach based on metaphor and analogy meets hard science and engineering reality? And what happens when the chosen metaphor doesn't fit?…

Tele2 CEO position filled by non-exec director of noted pie vendor The new director general of the mobile phone operators organisation is Mats Granryd, who will take up his new role on January 1 2016.…

Silicon Valley 'eats away at our freedom every day' Switzerland's top data cop says Microsoft has “gone too far” in abusing people’s privacy.…

Vote Brexit and keep your telly free of Bulgarian Top 40 Europe’s Digital Commissioner wants to know what you think about copyright rules for satellite broadcasters and cable companies.…

Big Blue argues Australian case over botched payroll project should not proceed IBM is attempting to fend off a potentially colossal damages claim in the Australian State of Queensland.…

Online fea markets a hotbed for cheap travel Scammers have inflicted some AUD$4.2 million in damages of damage to Public Transport Victoria (PTV) by buying and selling MyKi travel cards loaded with cash stolen from credit cards.…

Kill all humans? Take our jobs? No, they just want to work with us On a scale of one to ten on The Reg’s own fear-o-meter, concerns about a future in which humans are mere canon fodder - or even worse - sources of nutrients for robots overlords rank pretty highly, but there’s nothing to be scared about people.…

Hints at converged FlexPod, OnTap-as-a-service and NVMe support at Australian event Newly-appointed NetApp CEO George Kurian today made his first appearance before the press outside the USA and hinted at the directions in which he plans to take the company.…

Ten-year investigation into whether commies used SciFi to put nation into bad mood Among the many things the FBI of the 1950s and 1960s thought was corrupting America's youth and harbouring communism was, apparently, the science fiction scene.…

Dedicated Twitter account ready for your snitching DMs. The much-hacked and hated sexual sin-bin Ashley Madison is offering $500,000 Canadian Dollars (US$377,000) to anyone who can provide information leading to the arrest of the those behind its hacking.…

It's supposed to be automatic, but actually you have to press a button Microsoft's Cortana-on-Android project, first announced in May, has now evolved to the point at which the virtual assistant has been released as a beta.…

Cloud. Hybrid. Compliance. Collaboration. Search. Any device. Touch. HTML5. BINGO! Microsoft has released the first preview of SharePoint Server 2016 and outlined a buzzword-list of new features.…

And we just thought you were busy chasing ambulances Updated Online “Uber for private investigators” outfit Trustify is upset with The Register for not replicating its messaging with sufficient sycophancy.…

Buy more hardware and cross NSX off your list of big VMworld announcements VMware has quietly let NSX 6.2 out the door, so those of you hoping for a big software-defined networking (SDN) announcement at VMworld next week can probably resign yourself to a dull keynote.…

And now the whack-a-mole begins as Russian activists switch on their VPNs Fresh from its victory over Reddit over posts about hallucinogenic psilocybin mushrooms, Russia is now taking on Wikipedia over articles about Marijuana.…

Cameras sow 'lack of trust' within public. Gartner: The Former police commissioner for the Australian state of Victoria, Christine Nixo, says body-worn cameras are a 'Pandora's Box' that cause more problems than they fix.…

Welcome to the 'low power island' Qualcomm has lifted the veil a little further from its upcoming Snapdragon 820 mobile system-on-chip, sharing details of its new digital signal processor (DSP).…

Fibre to a special cabinet somewhere reasonably close to the home The first customers were connected in a BT trial of its 330Mbps "G.fast" ultrafast broadband in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire today. The test, which was announced in July, will later be extended to Swansea, Gosforth and Newcastle.…

Wyndham hotel chain loses appeal case The Third Circuit US Court of Appeals in Philadelphia has ruled that the Federal Trade Commission does have the right to prosecute firms who mishandle their customers' data.…

Sleepwalking into the surveillance state Long-time – and by now somewhat despondent – privacy advocate Roger Clarke says successive Australian governments have ignored the privacy impacts of nearly every national security measure passed by parliament since 2001.…

Reg gets its hands on Big Red's blueprints at Hot Chips 2015 Developing In the next few minutes, Oracle will reveal the details of its new SPARC processor code-named Sonoma. The blueprints will be shown at this year's Hot Chips semiconductor conference in Cupertino, California.…

New server line targets customers with tricky data center needs Dell has launched a new business line of custom servers to companies with unique needs and those that don't quite want the server volume of "hyperscale" data centers.…

Big enough to bury New York City borough under 300m of ice Pic One of Earth's biggest icebergs ever seen has been discovered by orbiting satellites. The huge freeze-blob was just carved from Greenland's Jakobshavn Glacier, and slid into the ocean.…

Apple CEO fires off memo after $75bn wiped off value The Dow Jones Industrial Average shed more than 1,000 points in the first few minutes of trading on Monday, as the effects of China's economic woes spilled over onto Wall Street.…

These are not the Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Appliances you're looking for Coho Data storage arrays will be able to run Docker containers directly on the storage nodes and use Google’s Kubernetes interface for configuring and deploying microservices.…

Chocolate Factory advertisers asked about competition-stifling contracts It’s the anti-trust case that keeps on giving. The European Commission has sent out yet more questionnaires to Google's rivals to ask about the Chocolate Factory’s alleged anti-competitive behaviour.…

Avid Life Media offers $500,000 for hackers' heads The Ashley Madison leak may have driven another two people to suicide, police in Toronto, Canada, fear.…

Upstate steps up in huge step forward, says Cuomo A deal between SUNY Poly (State University New York), the state of New York, GE and Austrian sensor and analog IC company AMS will see an East Coast US chip fab built to research and make nano-scale devices.…

Consciously uncouples from BT, then hops straight into bed with CGI City of Edinburgh Council has walked away from a 15-year outsourcing relationship with BT to jump into bed with CGI in a £186m long-term IT outsourcing agreement.…

Back when you could still get results by inserting a floppy Microsoft released Windows 95 on 24th August 1995, followed a week later by Office 95, and accompanied by a publicity campaign featuring the Rolling Stones song Start Me Up.…

Japan's space truck arrives at orbiting outpost Japan's space truck Kounotori 5 ("White Stork 5") today successfully docked with the International Space Station (ISS), bearing 4.5 tonnes of scientific kit and supplies.…

Distinct lack of gruntlement ahead of VMworld as execs fight over parachutes Enough already, the EMC/VMware exec exodus is getting too long: VMware CTO Ben Fathi has just quit, and that makes seven.…

'Two companies have carved up the country'. Two. Shocking Former state-owned monopoly BT is calling for tough rules to force US telecoms companies to let rivals – such as, err, BT – have access their networks.…

Back-up software killer sharpens its weapon Startup back-up software-killer Rubrik has got itself a second major release of its system, plus a new cloud back-up cloud gateway.…

Nyet to Redmondian probe tentacles up our ass Russian lawyers have filed a complaint calling for an outright ban – or at least tight restrictions – over the sale of Windows 10 in Russia.…

If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear Data centre technology moves at a glacial pace, and haven’t always been considered the sexiest technology in the world. However, recently, thanks to the cloud and Edward Snowden – the patron saint of the data centre – data centres have become a lot more extreme. So here’s just as taste of the data centres at the edge of technology and in some cases the edge of the world.…

Somebody probably called this out-of-the-box thinking Unboxing and teardowns used to be something that fanbois did, but marketing savvy Samsung has hijacked the genre with a video of its own. Calling it an “inboxing”, the video shows the phone being assembled, not by a worker on a production line, but by a well-dressed man in the kind of setting you only see in carefully crafted videos.…

It's the three R's: Restructure, restructure, restructure Interview Lenovo Europe president Eric Cador is banking on a major overhaul of its enterprise supply chain – among other things – to help the x86 business it acquired from IBM “recover” lost ground.…

Break it up, unless for some unlikely reason Ofcom says otherwise Chris Bryant MP has added his support to the lobby which wants to see Openreach split from BT.…

Object storage startup readying itself for a prospective IPO in 2017 Object storage startup Scality has picked up $45m in D-round funding and is heading for a 2017 IPO.…