The Register

Subterranean 'baccy microbe guzzles down nicotine 'like Pac-Man' Help may soon be at hand for those who have tried and failed to quit smoking, thanks to a bacterium that guzzles down nicotine.…

Goodwill impairment clobbers profits as customers delay purchases Teradata lost $265m in its second quarter 2015 as a $340m goodwill impairment charge hammered profits, along with continued deferrals of large transactions and longer sales cycles.…

Don't drink and derive, kids Sysadmin blog A raft of potential vulnerabilities was found in whitebox Software Defined Networking (SDN) equipment. This is the beginning of the saga, not the end. The issues with the Internet of Things promise to be far, far worse.…

HP's Helion needs to drive the code it creates It's hard to understand OpenStack's role in the data centres of the future without understanding HP's approach. HP's cloud strategy is named "Helion" and it includes public, private and hybrid elements. HP bought and has incorporated Eucalyptus into Helion, but the core of its cloud bets are on OpenStack.…

Ursi contra vulpes Firefox users have been urged to update to browser version 39.0.3, following the discovery of a vulnerability which allows an attacker to read and steal sensitive local files on the victim's computer via the browser's PDF reader.…

Bracken falls, but the fight for Agile Digital Transformation must go on ¡Bong! For Digital Millennials it was an epoch-defining event. Like the assassination of Kennedy, or the fall of Thatcher, everyone will remember what they were doing the moment they heard the shock news.…

Losses from Mt Gox incident can't be claimed back, Tokyo beak tells miffed plaintiff A man seeking repayment for Bitcoin lost in the Mt Gox incident has seen his lawsuit dismissed in a Tokyo District Court, with the judge ruling that the gumblecash is "not subject to ownership" claims.…

Big Blue buys more to feed its IBM Watson health monster IBM is splashing $1bn (£644m) to buy medical image handling and processing biz Merge, part of plans to beef up its Watson Health division unveiled in April.…

The Ford Pinto of phone charger bricks Exclusive EE management was warned that its popular "Power Bar" phone charging devices had serious safety risks before they were given to customers, the Register has learned. A Power Bar subsequently exploded, injuring a young woman badly enough that she required hospital treatment, and some Power Bars have since been recalled.…

Feel the download, just don't mind the bandwidth Windows 7 PCs are being force fed a diet of Windows 10, breaking a promise made by Microsoft.…

Google-backed privacy org promises browser add-on will nix naughty snoopers The Electronic Frontier Foundation has launched a browser add-on to impede snooping efforts of advertisers and other third-party web trackers.…

Playing catch-up with Samsung 32 layers is so yesterday, man. SanDisk has a 48-layer 3D NAND chip in pilot production. Yeah, you heard me, the big four-eight.…

Reg reader denied Sophos protection by US export laws Exclusive Software export controls are being applied to blacklisted people as well as countries: and these controls apply to routine security packages such as freebie antivirus scanning software, as well as more sensitive technologies, El Reg has concluded.…

Hard for everyone in this (no) testing time Comment Nutanix has dug itself into a hole by trying to occupy the moral high ground with regard to performance testing of hyperconverged systems, saying it's in favour of transparency, yet pulling out of an independent StorageReview test of its product following poor results.…

Fun-packed thrills for couch potatoes ... or something like that Game Theory Missed all the news, announcements and hype that’s been pouring out of Gamescom over the last few days? Worry not, as we carve a path through the hype to bring you all the stories that matter from the Germany-based games show.…

Build a better mousetrap … you know the rest Microsoft's joined the growing list of vendors trying to compete with black-hat and spook vulnerability-buyers by doubling some of its reward offerings to $100,000.…

Mac Pro users are fleeing Cupertino for mobile workstations, says IDC Things are so bad in the PC market that students of economics and physics are both probably keen to figure out just what's going on.…

Ruskie hack team might have cash, but you just need GITHUB. A sextet of security students have released a tool that spins social media networks into stealthy data siphons, a technique already in use by an elite Russian hacking group.…

No one's taking Oculus seriously for a while Pics Oculus boss Palmer Luckey became the butt of countless jokes Thursday when a cringeworthy photo of him showed up the cover of Time magazine.…

Destruction for destruction's sake. Blackhat 2015: Trend Micro researchers Kyle Wilhoit and Stephen Hilt believe they've found attackers actively seeking to hack and shut down petrol stations.…

Vexed hackers find win in PsExec, man-in-the-middle Blackhat 2015: Microsoft has bungled Windows Server Update Services (WSUS), according to hackers Paul Stone and Alex Chapman, with insecure defaults that let them hijack OS updates.…

We've lost a lot of what it takes to get along SGI has pleased financial markets by losing significantly less for Q4 2015 than prognosticators had seen in their crystal balls.…

How to make virty networks keep pace with containers When tens of seconds is too slow: Fujitsu is getting ready to launch a technology it says can create virtual networks for Linux containers in a second.…

Perihelion approaches on rendezvous anniversary More than a decade after its launch, the spacecraft Rosetta reached Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, and as it approaches perihelion with the Sun, the ESA is celebrating a year since Rosetta reached its target.…

Put down the club, you don't need to get a password Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, and Box can be turned into men-in-the-middle without an attacker needing access to users' plaintext credentials, according to security bods at Imperva.…

$5.3bn deal sees data firm leaving Nasdaq Data management outfit Informatica became a private company on Thursday, in a multibillion-dollar leveraged buyout that included investment from Microsoft and Salesforce.com's venture wing.…

All that marketing, all those billions in the bank, and Spotify has Cupertino crushed The 11 million people who signed up for Apple Music have two months to cancel their subscriptions or start paying. The streaming service went live in early July, is free for the first three months, and completely dwarfed by Spotify.…

Kicking a government when it's down Black Hat 2015 For the past nine years Black Hat has staged its Pwnie Awards, devoted to recognizing the best and worst aspects of computer security, and this year's winner of the least welcome award is the US government's Office of Personnel Management.…

And how the US government is screwing the pooch with Wassenaar Black Hat 2015 When Middle Eastern governments fell in the Arab Spring uprisings, one of the side effects was that hard evidence of dodgy practices by commercial spyware vendors was made public. Unfortunately, the result is putting us all at risk.…

Message system for Joint Chiefs of Stafff has been down for 11 days and counting A chunk of the US Department of Defense's email system has been down for 11 days, following what appears to have been a successful attempt to hack it.…

Nvidia shifts nearly $1bn in GPUs, eyes up cars and data centers, shrugs off profit dive Graphics and mobile chip kingpin Nvidia posted unexpectedly solid results for the second quarter of its fiscal 2016 on Thursday and said it projected next quarter's numbers to be strong, as well.…

Also wants 'pornographer' removed from case centered on pornography Adult content company Malibu Media has asked a court to ban the terms "copyright troll" and "pornographer" in an upcoming trial that revolves around the fact that the company repeatedly demands thousands of dollars from people that have downloaded its pornographic content.…

Wang prepares to stiff staff HTC has warned staff there will be mass layoffs after the biz lost more a quarter of a billion dollars in three months.…

Because for some folks it's Objective-C or nothing Microsoft has made available an early preview version of the Windows Bridge for iOS, the set of developer tools previously known as "Project Islandwood."…

If that lights a bulb above your head ... you've already been hacked Black Hat 2015 Security researchers have exposed new flaws in ZigBee, one of the most popular wireless communication standards used by Internet of Things (IoT) devices.…

Should have fixed this remote-control vulnerability last year, peeps Black Hat 2015 Fiat Chrysler is facing a class-action lawsuit in the US after researchers proved they could wirelessly snatch control of the engine management systems in some of its vehicles.…

Turn off your brain for a sec and enjoy Video Tesla may be more bluster than business, but you can't help but admire the fact that it is constantly pushing car engineering.…

‘Certifi-gate’ vuln could allow unrestricted device access Hours after Google and smartphone makers promised an imminent patch for the infamous Stagefright vulnerability another critical flaw in Android is being outed.…

Desktop, traditional notebooks and tabs all drop in bloodbath Q2 In what could be seen by some as a slightly hollow victory, Lenovo knocked Apple off the top spot in the global PC race by declining more slowly than its rival.…

Federation fissiparousness to form co-ordinated divisions Comment Look guys, the options are pretty limited. If VMware can't leave the EMC Federation and the Federation somehow has to upvalue itself for investors and find shares priced high enough to pay off Elliott Management, then one bit of the Federation has to buy the rest or the Federation has to be acquired/merge with a white knight.…

Although, 12 per cent of population just don't want web access Ofcom has published its twelfth annual Communications Market report, featuring a modest analysis of how British society is accommodating technology by declaring that "the UK is now a smartphone society".…

Samsung? Pah. More like Spam-sung, amirite? Samsung is launching an investigation into British customers receiving spam ads in their smart TVs.…

More issues with computer on wheels Security researchers have uncovered six fresh vulnerabilities with the Tesla S.…

The ‘Consumerisation of IT’ – but without all the cool Consumer stuff Opinion A funny thing happened while I was reinstalling Windows 8 over Windows 10 yesterday morning. There in front of me, halfway through the installation process, were two full, clear pages of privacy toggles. Every toggle was set to not send private information to Microsoft, or anyone else.…

Fruity firm wins suit over message system Apple has dealt a legal blow to a woman who claimed the iGiant's iMessage system prevented her from receiving texts when she switched from an iPhone to an Android-based smartphone.…

CPU and RAM boost will take the fight to Nutanix and SimpliVity Days after running its EVO: Rail product off its rails, HP has landed a new hyperconverged system, updating the CS-240 product to the CS-250 by doubling RAM and using Intel Haswell CPUs to add performance punch.…