The Register

Readership turns to Microsoft as one and asks 'what are you DOING?' Mailbag “Clearly the first year of ‘free’ is really beta testing – what should a sensible IT manager do?” asks one Reg reader Down Under. I’ve heard this from a few of you and collected your thoughts.…

'Just do what the EU wants and no-one will get hurt' suggests Mountain View Google has warned its AdSense and DoubleClick customers to sort out their cookie tracking policies before the European Commission gets pissy with them.…

Author Joe Hildebrand explains why a dead-end effort to reinvent networks isn't futile It's not often that someone crafts a protocol expecting to destroy it, but that's what Cisco distinguished engineer Joe Hildebrand and a bunch of other Internet architecture boffins are doing right now.…

Thanks for the top tip, now where's the patch for this bug? Video Trend Micro peeps say they have discovered a security bug that miscreants can exploit to seemingly murder millions of Android smartphones.…

Top-tier clouds invited into information-sharing club to speed defence deployment Rackspace is leading an effort to create a new group of top-tier cloud companies that it hopes will share information about security in close to real time.…

Possible inspiration for character of Roger the Shrubber revealed SFW An 81-year-old man from Stratford, Connecticut, has been charged with public indecency after performing a sex act with a shrubbery.…

If this works, your light bulbs will deliver hundreds of gigabits per second Arizona State University researchers have crafted a white laser – a neat trick since “white” isn't a colour, but a mix of colours.…

Sharpshooter exercises Second Amendment rights A father of two young girls didn't take too kindly to a camera-equipped quadrocopter hovering over his family's home – so he blasted it out of the sky.…

Easy to hack universal remote BIND DoS hole leaves DNS open to attack Gird your loins internet: Attackers now have the ability to disrupt large swathes of the web through a remote denial of service vulnerability found in the most widely used software for DNS servers.…

Big dish will need top-100-sized iron China is planning another petaflop supercomputer, this time to support what will by next year become the world's largest radiotelescope.…

Fixes how the daemon triggers error messages for packets it can't reassemble Bad error message handling has opened up Cisco's IOS-XE versions prior to 3.13S to a remote denial-of-service (DoS) attack.…

Market fragmenting as Apple and Samsung lose dominance, say new IDC numbers Box-counter IDC's latest Quarterly tablet tracker has more bad news for fondleslab fans: sales are down and the market is fragmenting.…

Competitive intel docs leak to forums, reveal NetApp beaten by SolidFire for Cisco sale NetApp has inadvertently leaked competitive intelligence documents to a community newsfeed, and the contents reveal it worries that IBM and Cisco's VersaStack will threaten its FlexPod business and that SolidFire has emerged as a threat.…

Investors pump yet more millions of dollars into online source-code silo GitHub has received a $250m infusion of venture-capital cash that values the code-sharing website at $2bn.…

AG Dept offers rollout extension Australian telcos' complaints about the government's rushed data retention implementation schedule have borne fruit, with the Attorney General's Department offering a deadline extension.…

Second draft of Wassenaar to take public comments under advisory Proposed changes to the US government's export controls on hacking tools will likely be scaled back following widespread criticism from the infosec community, a government spokesman has said.…

If you want more multimillion-dollar toys, make 'em dance President Obama has signed an executive order that will pump US government money into supercomputers just like before but in a more coherent fashion.…

What's it aiming for with all that R&D dosh? Facebook beat estimates on both revenue and earnings for the second quarter of its fiscal 2015, but investors seemed taken aback by the social network's soaring spending.…

Digital Transformation Office moots federated digital identity model in alpha services guide Australia's new Digital Transformation Office (DTO), the digital disruption brainchild of communications minister Malcolm Turnbull, has outlined plans for an ambitious new government-led digital identification plan that will meld government and business data on individuals to create a single digital ID.…

Shutterbug sues social network A photographer is suing Twitter, claiming it refused to remove unauthorized copies of her copyrighted snaps from its social network.…

Hint: Many of them look like this old fogey Analysis According to the most recent survey of online usage by Americans, 15 per cent of adults are still not online.…

But you'll need an Office 365 subscription to edit with them Now that Windows 10 has begun shipping to customers who reserved their free upgrades, Microsoft has also announced general availability of the touch-centric Office Mobile apps for the new OS.…

Crew's nationality revealed by strict adherence to Moscow office hours Security researchers have blown the lid on another Russian cyberspy crew, rated as the most sophisticated yet by security firm FireEye.…

One step closer to cracking riddle of light metal's origins Pic For the first time, astronomers have detected lithium spread across space at high speed by an exploding star. The eggheads hope this discovery will solve one of the chemical riddles of the universe.…

Meanwhile, HP ties its excessively casual developers down

One little catch: you need to infect the computer first Israeli academics have demonstrated how feature-phones can use GSM radio frequencies to wirelessly siphon data from infected "air-gapped" computers.…

We'll give these financial figures one star out of five Yelp is in full crisis mode as the upstart's chairman is out – and its stock continues to free fall.…

Unser Pech, unsere Regeln. Verstehen? Johannes Caspar, Germany’s Hamburg Commissioner for Data Protection, has told Facebook to allow users to use pseudonyms on the free content ad network.…

Lawmakers shocked to learn the rules apply to them too FCC chairman Tom Wheeler caught the members of the US House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology off guard Tuesday when he told them that one of their favorite campaign tools is against the law to use.…

Where the beer, food and gifts are on offer around the world and how to enter Sysadmin Blog Friday, July 31 is 2015's Systems Administrator Appreciation Day, better known as Sysadmin Day. It is a day during which sysadmins feel sad that nobody remembers there is a day dedicated to them, and they go on being as unappreciated as every other day of the year. The exception being vendors and other sysadmins; they remember to care.…

Proposes 200-ft-thick layer of sky only for robot planes Amazon has outlined a futuristic plan that would give drones their own 200-foot-thick piece of sky to zoom around in – and deliver packages in super-fast times.…

New release of its flagship Simpana product just got way more important Data management specialist CommVault could be open to activist investor activity, said an analyst, after reporting a loss and seeing yearly revenues down on Americas sales inadequacies and foreign currency headwinds.…

Chinese tat bazaar ramps up anti-Amazon efforts in global cloud domination fight Chinese Amazon equivalent Alibaba is pumping $1bn (£637m) into its cloudy arm Aliyun, thereby injecting cold, hard cash into its global domination plans.…

Magic Quadrant starts to lose its sparkle Comment Gartner recently released its Magic Quadrant for x86 Server Virtualisation Infrastructure. In it, the mega analyst lumps together hypervisor-based virtualisation and containers. This is wrong, and as I've discussed before virtualisation and containerisation are different.…

For nothing is secret that shall not be made manifest Boffins from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have demonstrated a vulnerability in Tor which, if exploited, could lead to hidden services being identified with up to 88 per cent accuracy.…

A memory crossing point, yes – but a Rubicon? Analysis Asking what we know about Intel/Micron's XPoint memory announced yesterday is maybe the wrong question. What don't we know about it?…

Auntie shakes off pay TV shackles. Careful, someone might see Analysis BBC please take note: Sky’s decision to play Netflix at its own game seems to be paying off.…

Euro nation makes Declaration of Internet Rights, with caps and everything. Bless 'em Access to the internet is a fundamental right of all persons. So says a new Italian Declaration of Internet Rights, which incorporates a 14-point manifesto drawn up by a parliamentary committee following a public consultation.…

Frenchy rival Atos also celebrates big growth despite DWP contract boot This year's huge Capita spending spree boosted the company's sales by 10 per cent to £2.28bn, according to the outsourcing giant's first-half results for 2015.…

And three per cent of employees would consider offers as low as £100 A third of employees would sell information on company patents, financial records and customer credit card details if the price was right.…

CEO talks to El Reg about peering inside those mystery containers Interview With Apcera's new chief architect for security Jim Reno, formerly of CA Technologies, bedded down in his role, the company's taking aim at one of Docker's in-room elephants. The Register talks to CEO Jim Collison about how IT shops can trust what's in Docker containers.…

Supreme Court appeal permission could let Chocolate Factory shut the floodgates The UK's Supreme Court has granted Google permission to appeal against a ruling giving Apple Safari users the right to sue the Chocolate Factory over its adbot tracking.…

Average Joe will be happy with it. So long as he hasn't used Windows 7 Sysadmin blog It's Windows 10 day. That means it's time for a completely biased and in-no-way-even-remotely-objective assessment of Windows 10.…

Psst. Oculus. Google. Are you listening? Always looking for a new angle, Nokia has launched itself into the movie equipment business with a 360-degree camera called OZO, capturing stereoscopic 3D video through eight synchronised global shutter sensors as well as spatial audio through eight integrated microphones.…

F# developers asked to avoid it until a complete fix is ready Microsoft has published a workaround for a critical bug in the .NET Framework 4.6 that can result in incorrect parameters being passed, with unpredictable results.…

Worst outcome ever for clueless online admen The World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Do Not Track (DNT) proposal, to give users a way to tell web sites not to track them, recently reached its "Last Call" stage.…

It may possibly encourage feckless disloyalty, who knows UK regulator Ofcom has started a consultation aimed at consumers to find out how hard it is to switch mobile phone networks, and eventually put in place processes which reduce the pain of switching, while also eliminating “slamming” where a company fraudulently migrates a customer.…

Enough of the cheesy comments from Le Grand Storage Fromage Moshe Yanai's Infinidat startup, which came out of stealth in April with its InfiniBox array, is bragging about its growth.…

Microsoft's 'working on a fix to this issue' – or you can go third party instead An issue with the new Windows 10 Start menu means that those with more than 512 application shortcuts will have missing entries.…

Will we see a return of the Medallion Man? Worstall on Wednesday There's a certain, perhaps too cynical strain in economics, best exemplified by Mancur Olson, who was prone to pointing out that all governments are just bandits living off the population they oppress.…