The Register

Some like it hot As the Northern hemisphere languishes in summer temperatures, a new study has shown that office climate control systems are giving women the cold shoulder.…

Translation from Russian hack-slang: Credit card, PayPal and secure server Gaining an invite to the best of the nearly 60 websites powering the cybercrime underground is only half the fight for researchers; they also need to know that credit cards are called 'cartons', PayPal a 'stick', and bulletproof servers 'watermelons'.…

Con-artist activities unlikely to temper Islamist misogyny Chechen rozzers have reportedly arrested a trio of jihadi-baiting women who flirted with ISIS fighters online before conning them out of money they sent to pay for a non-existent rendezvous in Syria.…

Agile PaaS Kool Aid Klubs coming to Sydney and Tokyo EMC Federation member Pivotal will brings its “Labs” consultancy services to Australia and Japan.…

Acted 'in bad faith' over WiFi, H.264 patents A US appeals court has said that yes, Motorola/Google had chased Microsoft in bad faith over WiFi patents and that the Chocolate Factory still owes Redmond US$14 million.…

'Anisotropy': look it up, use it, wear it out Solid state memory is already a viable technology at a decent scale, but it's hard to make it small enough to replace hard drives.…

Version 3.0 gets Flash. The authors of the RIG exploit kit have bounced back after a source code leak and are now again happily infecting computers at the rate of around 27,000 machines a day.…

HARPS-N search finds rocky planets just 21 light years away Just a couple of weeks after NASA announced the “Earth twin” (that might not be), astronomers working at the Italian-operated HARPS-N spectrograph have turned up four exoplanets just 21 light-years distant.…

Five guest-host escalation SNAFUs might be stretching the virtual friendship The Xen project has revealed another two bugs in the QEMU hypervisor and is now wondering whether the extent to which it should support the buggy code.…

Thunderstrike 2 hack liberated of need for physical access. BlackHat video Researchers Trammel Hudson and Xeno Kovah have built a self-replicating Apple firmware malware that can infect peripherals to spread to new computers.…

Tardy on the patch? GET BUSY Security bods are nagging anyone running BIND to install last week's patch, as active exploits have started to appear in the wild.…

Blame HTML5's battery API – yes, you can read someone's battery status via JavaScript Website owners keen on tracking netizen, but thwarted by the kind of militant user who installs AdBlock or similar, could instead look at someone's battery charge information to identify them.…

Whole-of-government data analytics centre will fight crime and expanding waistlines The Australian State of New South Wales has created a whole-of-government data analytics centre.…

When even the DHS thinks it's a bad idea then it must be time for a rethink The US Department of Homeland Security is hardly what you'd think of as a bunch of whining lefties, but even this agency has come out against the proposed Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act.…

Use domain names to keep email contents safe from prying eyes. Except the NSA of course A group of researchers from the US government and dot-com operator VeriSign are working on a new system for secure email: using domain names.…

No need to mix your nutri-glorp yourself ever again Soylent, the startup dedicated to conquering the universally hated ritual of eating food, now offers a version of its protein-rich nutrient gloop in ready-to-drink bottles.…

Donkey, meet carrot – and stick Microsoft has gobbled up FantasySalesTeam-maker Incent Games, and will bake the software into its Dynamics CRM product.…

Mobile is the way to go if you hate auto-calls The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has clarified its stance on how members of congress can use autodialers. The verdict? Get rid of your landline if you don't want politicians to robo-call you.…

...Bad when it comes to privacy Debate is raging over the discovery that simple web browser extensions can defeat behavior-based biometric technologies.…

How to not hand everything over to Microsoft Here's a quick FYI: if you installed Windows 10, and in a rush to try out Microsoft's new operating system, you clicked through the default settings without looking, you may want to look again.…

Did you hear the one about mass murder and a technology news article? Apple blog Re/code has pulled, and apologized for, a tasteless tweet about the Holocaust. The unfunny gag was cracked after a consortium of German car manufacturers has bought Nokia's maps business.…

Just this once? Can't we let it drop and go after the real Bad People? Sysadmin Blog American politics are something of a national sport in Canada. No matter who runs for either side, Canadians throw popcorn at the screen and try to pretend our choices are any better.…

EMC is ahead overall with HDS mounting an IoT catch-up Comment HDS storage revenues are declining, but not as much as EMC's core storage business. Joe Tucci's business is doing better in its move to add business outside its trad arrays and HDS is mounting an Internet of Things catch-up, looking to store and analyse the hoped-for IoT data deluge.…

Drinks conglomerate attempts to bottle elusive mellowness in zero-g Japanese whisky maker Suntory is to distill its firewater on the International Space Station, as part of an experiment to discover how liquor develops a mellow taste.…

An end to some of the self-licking lollipop's madness? Pff, that we should be so lucky The head of the Government Digital Service, Mike Bracken, has stepped down after five years in the role.…

Or how to lose the muppetosaurus label As many readers know I live in the Channel Islands. A while back someone started a very popular Facebook group called “Bad or Good Jersey Businesses”, and the locals are not backward in coming forward with both bouquets and brickbats for businesses they've recently dealt with.…

Wildfire-esque functionality to be added to Siri Siri will soon answer your phone calls, adding a functionality that Orange killed in 2005 when it shut down the still-lamented Wildfire service.…

Pacific Research Platform will perform the internet's original purpose on own fat pipes A "hypernet" to be known as the Pacific Research Platform, shuffling data at up to 100Gb/s, will be established between US West Coast laboratories and several supercomputers thanks to a $5m grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF).…

Lube up your censorship-dodging dongles and get to work The Indian government has got a grip on the Asian nation's masturbation issues and dished out an order to ISPs to block access to a staggering 857 pornography websites.…

Ditching GSM-R will help the trains run on time, says Deutsche Bahn German choo-choo chaps Deutsche Bahn are replacing their GSM-R communications technology and has commissioned a consortium of Siemens Convergence Creators and Huawei to sort out the migration of the system across northern Germany's railway lines.…

Why horrible reality hobbles the gleaming, solid-state future Analysis The all-flash data centre: does it exist? Will it ever?…

The ‘business value of IoT’ after this deal remains to be seen Cloud-based IoT player Jasper has announced a strategic partnership with Microsoft, which will see Jasper’s platform integrated with the tech giant's Azure cloud suite.…

It provokes the desire and makes the performance BIGGER AND HARDER China's Liuzhou Food and Drug Administration has warned that distilleries in Liunan District are producing booze contaminated with chemicals used in the production of erectile dysfunction treatment Viagra.…

Viennese beak orders ISP to shiver timbers of copyright-infringing sites An Austrian court has ordered local internet service provider (ISP) A1 Telekom to block access to The Pirate Bay.…

'Celebrating the first openly Asshole Presidential Candidate' Canadian hacktivists TelecomixCanada have defaced Donald Trump's website. The message, entitled "Your Moment of Zen, Mr Stewart" is a shoutout to Jon Stewart of the Daily Show for his steady criticism of Donald Trump.…

Biz in its third age after first tape, and then deduped D2D Quantum swung into loss-making territory with its latest quarterly results as reduced revenues couldn't cover existing costs. The StorNext ejector seat, as tape revenues crash and burn, maybe didn't operate fast enough.…

Origins of automated surveillance Special Report Duncan Campbell has spent decades unmasking Britain's super-secretive GCHQ, its spying programmes, and its cosy relationship with America's NSA. Today, he retells his life's work exposing the government's over-reaching surveillance, and reveals documents from the leaked Snowden files confirming the history of the fearsome ECHELON intercept project. This story is also published simultaneously today by The Intercept, and later today we'll have video of Duncan describing ECHELON and related surveillance matters.…

American gov contractor goes rogue? We've heard this before A US Air Force contractor has been sentenced to 10 years in prison and three years of supervised release for stealing classified documents, in addition to conspiracy to commit naturalisation fraud.…

Pretty soon a small crack can become a gaping chasm Comment Nexenta CEO and evangelist Tarkan Maner has talked about potentially displacing double-digit petabytes of NetApp storage at a global net giant.…

Recognising the problem of ignorance Mobile security is becoming more of a headache as the crossover between business and personal activity continues to increase, and employees generally expect more freedom. Research suggests, however, that you can only push technology-based protection so far before users rebel and try to find ways around it. To manage risks effectively, you therefore need to address the human factor.…

Solid state-of-the-art 2.4GB/s consumer storage Review Although SSDs have a huge performance advantage over the good, old-fashioned clattering mechanical drive, they have (up till now) been held back because of their reliance on AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface) architecture, developed in 2004 for standard disks and, in particular, SATA interfaced disks.…

Poor pay, invasive hiring process sees over a third of posts unfilled The Federal Bureau of Investigation is struggling to hire computer scientists, according to a Department of Justice audit of the feeb's attempts to implement its Next Generation Cyber Initiative.…

Road ends in Philadelphia for friendly tin hitcher hitchBOT, the small robot that hitch-hiked across Canada last year, has been decapitated in Philadelphia.…

Boss explains lousy Q1 results As expected from its earlier warning shot, QLogic's first quarter fiscal 2016 results were pretty bad. Revenues of $113.4 million were 5 per cent lower than a year ago, with net income of $2.6 million being 57 per cent down on last year's Q1.…

HERE today, gone tomorrow, in an autonomous car reliant on crowd-slurped cloud maps Nokia has announced that a consortium comprising AUDI AG, BMW Group and Daimler AG will drive off into the sunset as joint and owners of its HERE maps unit.…

Eggfaced Serbian idiot-tax man heads for the door Aleksandar Vulovic, czar of the Serbian state lottery, has resigned from his position after winning numbers were mysteriously broadcast on television before they had been drawn.…

Nowt 'disastrous', but current kernel candidate is in 'fairly annoying' state Linus Torvalds' regular Sunday night missive on the state of kernel development has labelled version 4.2 as a bit of a problem child and warned he “might not react politely” to some developer requests.…