The Register

But $490m lower expenses paved way for profits ... real profits this time Leaky outsourcing tanker CSC saw sales growth drift off on the horizon for yet another quarter – the first of its fiscal 2016 – but the services slinger is back in the black, without the help of tax benefits.…

Security firm needs to Caesar the opportunity to grow the business Symantec’s latest results, published on the day of the Veritas sell-off announcement, show a 14 per cent revenue decline and 49 per cent profit fall on the annual compare.…

190 pence per share undervalues the business? Not on your nelly, mate Reluctant telco Colt is edging closer to private ownership again, after a bunch of shareholders approved a 190-pence-per-share offer from private equity firm Fidelity to flee the loss-making biz.…

'EVERYTHING FINE' insists Zuck's ad empire Hackers and other miscreants are able to access names, telephone numbers, images and location data in bulk from Facebook, using only a mobile phone number.…

Corbyn camp urges us to ‘get registering’ – we couldn’t agree more, Jeremy The interminable registration process for voters for the new Labour Party leader's election did not terminate this noon, as was planned, due to the party website dropping offline, following an effective, if accidental, DDoS attack from a flood of well-meaning visits generated by eager, if incredibly tardy, new supporters.…

Why aren't you, personally, stopping the moronocalypse? Sysadmin blog Information security and privacy are important. Stop being Oracle-class short-termist assholes. Stop waffling, dodging and procrastinating. Get your heads out of your asses and start doing something to improve things for everyone.…

Window-rattling Space Launch System burn scheduled for tomorrow NASA will tomorrow broadcast live a test firing of its RS-25 powerplant, "one of four engines that will power the core stage of NASA’s new Space Launch System (SLS), and carry the agency’s Orion crew capsule as part of the journey to Mars and other deep-space destinations".…

Meanwhile, Nutanix refuses to play, takes ball home

Ostriches, alligators, snakes and even sharks are fair game The Register can reveal that beautiful animals are being cut down in their prime to make Apple Watch straps.…

This week's edition tightens screw on dodgy add-ons – and Windows 10 Mozilla has released Firefox 40, featuring a new look for Windows 10, better protection against uncertified add-ons, and an attempt to resist Microsoft’s effort to make Edge the default browser.…

Flashing their goods at the Flash Memory Summit crowd The Flash Memory Summit has seen a fresh crop of SSDs and PCIe flash cards appear from NAND fans BiTMICRO, Seagate and Toshiba as they try to wow delegates and get sales momentum started.…

100,000 start lampooning poor, criticised politicians A bunch of young Spanish app developers have stumbled onto an unlikely hit after taking a pop at shady political shenanigans.…

The invention of backspace made us all better off. Right? Worstall on Wednesday One of the things we greybeards have a seriously difficult time getting over to the youngsters is quite how much life sucked back in the old days. It's easy enough to look at the bald economic statistics and see that incomes haven't moved up much (for the UK) or even at all (for the US) in recent decades.…

REM had the answer in 1992, Google Android users face a triple patching headache with the recent discovery of a collection of serious vulnerabilities affecting smartphones and tablets running Google's mobile operating system.…

Correlate all the things. Threat intelligence firm RecordedFuture says popular web blacklists are missing thousands of IP addresses linked to malware data theft.…

Baffling reality TV babe dishes out medical tips on Instagram – much to regulator's fury Robert Dean may be questioning his career decisions. The division director of US drug regulator the FDA has had to warning the public that Kim Kardashian's social network pages are not a particularly reliable source for medical advice.…

Ill-informed state PR campaign to kill encryption continues Children are being raped, citizens murdered, and lost souls trafficked for sex and the police can't do anything about it thanks to Apple and Google, senior government lawyers and a top cop have claimed.…

Parallels brings remote desktop access to your wristjob with Access v. 3.0 Parallels has issued version 3.0 of its Access app, software that lets you access PCs or Macs from Android or iOS devices.…

Patent lawyers and developers craft royalty-free video codec Cisco is sick of the state of patent licensing for video codecs, so has decided to set a royalty-free of its own loose on the world.…

Simple retail theft ends in full-blown political protest An Illinois man cuffed for suspected theft of a sex toy, and who told cops he had "no idea" how a pink Euphoria G-Spot Delight vibrator came to be in his boxer shorts, later recalled quite clearly that he didn't much like the US prez when he "stripped completely naked" in his cell, making "derogatory comments about President Obama", and signing his Miranda Rights consent form with the phrase "Obama is a criminal".…

Online Trust Alliance calls on gadget vendors to stop acting like clowns A vendor group whose membership includes Microsoft, Symantec, Verisign, ADT and TRUSTe reckons the Internet of Things (IoT) market is being pushed with no regard to either security or consumer privacy.…

Redmi2 Prime – first out the gate With the world of mobile phones fragmenting into local markets, both Taiwanese maker-of-everything Foxconn and China's rising dragon Xiaomi are keen to find a route into the Indian market.…

Better the control freak you know as you hybridise, suggests HotLink Corp Server virtualization management tool maker HotLink has enhanced the cloudy capabilities of VMware's vCenter by giving it the power to manage multiple public clouds.…

ODNI would like to tell you things without having to kill you The problem for a spook trying to keep up with technology is he or she knows there are all sorts of new sources of intelligence worth knowing, but also knows they're not allowed to know what's in those sources. And that knowledge gap is something America's Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) wants to change.…

Project Zero makes mince meat of wretched runtime Adobe has patched 35 security vulnerabilities in its Flash Player, all of one of which could lead to unexpected code execution.…

NG-PON2 passes test, Verizon preps for RFPs by year-end Verizon has upped the ante in the fibre-to-the-home business, plugging some test kit into its network to show off 10Gbps.…

Researchers pop telematic controls to drive gas, brakes and locks from afar Four University of California researchers have popped aftermarket vehicle tracking devices used by insurance companies to hijack the brakes, steering, and locks of a Corvette with little more than a text message.…

'Hacking Division' dumps 'data' on 1,500 US govt workers – and a woman in Stockport, UK Islamic State's frothing fanatics have leaked online what they claim to be the email addresses and plaintext passwords of 1,500 American military personnel – including CIA staff.…

Telcos speak with one voice on telco security 'reforms' Australia's telecommunications industry has spoken with one voice: George Brandis Attorney-General-as-Sysadmin legislation is a mess.…

Hello? Is your email working asks Russian telco regulator Russia's telecommunications regulator, Roskomnadzor has taken to social media to ask Reddit to stop offering advice on how to grow drugs.…

The Republicans think they've found their smoking gun Hillary Clinton's personal email server and personal thumb drive held emails containing classified and top-secret information, according to a note by the US Intelligence Community Inspector General.…

Begs court for 'mercy,' but says the answer is no Relations between Chinese telecoms vendor ZTE and the US federal government remain as tense as ever, with ZTE claiming it won't allow one of its executives to testify in a New York court over fears he will be detained if he enters the US.…

No one's impressed, love At the heart of every large galaxy resides a supermassive black hole, and astroboffins have found the smallest one yet – about 340 million light years away.…

Browser grabs requests, reroutes them on Windows 10 Mozilla has upped the stakes in its squabble with Microsoft over user choice, having released a new version of Firefox that can sneakily subvert internet searches fed to Windows 10's Cortana personal assistant.…

Largest-ever fine handed out by FCC to US biz for hated calls US broadband watchdog the FCC has issued the largest robocalling fine in its history to a Florida company accused of repeatedly harassing people.…

DEF CON is hopefully never going to change Analysis When Jeff Moss sold the Black Hat security conference to CMP a decade ago for around $13m (£8.3m), he faced a barrage of abuse from some members of the hacker community as a sellout. They were a little bit right, and a lot wrong, as this year's cons have shown.…

Hint: Sorry, Americans Customers worldwide are now able to buy smartphones running the mobile version of Ubuntu Linux, even though many won't be able to get full value out of them.…

Update Windows, Office, IE, Edge and Adobe Flash – plus OpenSSH Patch Tuesday Microsoft has released 14 sets of software patches to address critical security vulnerabilities in Windows, Office, Internet Explorer, and Edge. Yes, even Edge: Microsoft's supposedly whizzbang super-secure web browser.…

Bemoans lack of faith in plan with zero chance of success Harvard law professor and author of internet bible Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace Lawrence Lessig is considering a run for US President on a single issue: getting big money out of America's politics.…

Why so glum? Oh yeah, public cloud. Ha ha ha The gods of tech sales finally smiled on Rackspace in calendar Q2 of 2015. But the biz isn't celebrating just yet, because it's public cloud arm is stuck in first gear.…

Micron, SanDisk, Tosh are so far behind the sweet 16 layers The top dog in the flash industry has just barked out loud and strong; emphasising its 3D flash process lead, Samsung is mass-producing 48-layer, 256Gbit 3D NAND chips, essentially tech SanDisk/Toshiba is hopeful of shipping next year.…

Six-fingered WikiLeaker-in-chief eyes freedom in 2020 Julian Assange can set his alarm clock to wake him up in roughly five years' time, when he will be able to walk out of the Ecuadorian Embassy a free man – well, once he settles the matter of breaching his bail conditions with Scotland Yard, that is.…

Stock price shifts anticipated by pinching corporate releases from newswires The FBI says it has cracked open an insider trading ring which employed Ukrainian hackers to pinch corporate announcements from news wires and then traded stocks based on the unreleased information.…

Alphabet Show is diddly-squat to Commish. For now Brussels confirmed late on Tuesday that Google's radical corporate shape-shifting that spawned parent company Alphabet would not "insulate" the Chocolate Factory from the EU's competition probes.…

Firm harassed the elderly into signing up for 'Stop the Calls' service The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has fined a company that blocks nuisance calls for making nuisance calls.…

Update KB3081424 reboots half way through the install Microsoft’s first update to Windows 10 is bricking some users’ PCs.…

Dump the junk and shape up, soldier We've written extensively on the whys and wherefores of moving some or all of your infrastructure into a data centre. But what about when you need to do the opposite and move out of a data centre? Sometimes this will be because you're downsizing, but often it'll be because you need to consolidate two or more data centres into one – as the result of a corporate acquisition, for instance.…

'One giant leaf for mankind' quips puntastic NASA VID As promised, astronauts aboard the International Space Station have eaten the first ever "fresh food grown in the microgravity environment of space" - "Outredgeous" red romaine lettuce.…

Cambridge graduate Andy Ozment teams up with one-time HP gros fromage The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has appointed Andy Ozment, currently the Assistant Secretary of the Office of Cybersecurity and Communications – the DHS's main processing center for threat information sharing – as leader of its cybersecurity centre.…