The Register

Don't stick your head in the sand, patch QEMU The Xen Project has reported another guest/host escape bug, its third for the year including the VENOM vuln and the XSA-135 SNAFU.…

Ultrabooks, tablets, all-in-one PCs ... these are still selling, right? Right? The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.…

Risk management chap explains how to stop users dozing when you talk infosec Risk management bod Kris French Junior has offered 10 tips to help security teams bin their boring, technical, and uniformed education schemes…

NASA boffins get the transceiver out of the smartwatch By using absorption and reflection to indicate data states, NASA reckons it's created a Wi-Fi device for the wearable market that uses just 0.1 per cent of the power of ordinary transceivers.…

Breathe new Oxygen into ecosystem in a stylish case First look Last April, OnePlus put their first handset on the market with an invite-only system that has been highly praised by some Android enthusiasts and panned by the major manufacturers who scoff at the unusual model.…

No need to shave your head just yet, but poseur gamers might do it anyway Brain-to-Machine Interface (BMI) products will become a US$200m market by 2020, and the action will kick off this Christmas season according to analyst outfit ABI research.…

I could have sworn I locked the house when I went to work this morning ... Honeywell has issued an urgent firmware update for its three-year-old Tuxedo Touch home automation controller to patch vulnerabilities that could, among other things, let an attacker unlock users' deadlocks.…

'We are disclosing the maximum amount allowed by law' says WordPress developer Automattic, the company behind content management and blogging platform WordPress, has complained that it can't reveal the full extent of state intelligence agencies' requests to probe users' accounts.…

What's the big deal about a little crash here and there? The Windows 10 launch is just two days off, but Microsoft is still beavering away trying to patch over the remaining bugs in its hastily assembled new OS.…

Krebs says at least one tormentor already facing justice One of the individuals who swatted the home of investigative journalist Brian Krebs has pleaded guilty to a felony criminal charge.…

Um, neither? Doesn't matter. Just shut up and start yelling Analysis The trinity of trans-Atlantic trade deals that have been under negotiation for two years appear to be heading toward some kind of initial conclusion.…

Save us from declining demand, electricity suppliers cry Australia's energy industry, overwhelmingly dominated by the burning of dinosaurs, has decided the country needs more electric vehicles (EVs).…

That's not a bug, it's a feature Some of Australia's major banks' databases don't distinguish between loans to housing investors and owner-occupiers, meaning they're missing out on the chance to charge differential interest rates.…

November 29 set as cutoff data for further collection The NSA has said it will delete its mountain of private telephone records belonging to millions of Americans – just as soon as people stop suing it for having done so.…

No more support for bedridden Sun hardware going forward Following years of waning popularity, the Debian GNU/Linux Project has dropped support for the Sparc architecture, effective immediately.…

US Congress to probe new rules on net neutrality, the internet and spectrum auctions A US Congressional hearing this week will ask two heads of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) some pointed questions about its recent spate of decisions, in particular auction rule changes and why it thinks it's the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).…

Thanks for all that Kickstarter cash – upstart gobbled by Razer Ouya has been purchased by games house Razer in a move that likely signals the end of the road for its self-titled Android gaming console.…

Good luck getting it patched on non-Nexus kit any time soon – may as well just buy a new one Android smartphones can be secretly infected by malware hidden in text messages, allowing criminals to slip inside as many as 950 million devices.…

Methods get wrong parameters, claim Stack Overflow dev A critical bug in the optimizer in the just-released .NET 4.6 runtime could break and crash production applications, we're warned.…

Hmm, what's that smell? Yes, Google+, it's death Google will subtract Google+ from YouTube and other websites, following mounting public pressure.…

It seems Astoria will allow Windows 10 to run unmodified droid binaries Windows will run Android binaries "unchanged", according to a Microsoft job posting.…

Good news for Schipol's Tesla-tastic taxi drivers The Netherlands is to fork out nearly €33m in public funds for electric car chargers after the European Commission gave its permission for the plan to go ahead on Monday.…

One-time HP and IBM chap takes reins at Borging firm Cisco has swapped one high-profile chief technology officer for another as incoming CEO Chuck Robbins expands his collection of new top brass.…

Trust us: Don't trust us The Home Office has sent unsolicited emails to the public, warning that the Home Office will never send unsolicited emails to the public, and will not ask for personal information or passwords in an email.…

Hey, these tiny nuns REALLY like their fish! Wait a minute ... The Catholic Church is abandoning Antarctica as a faithless wasteland of pr0n-guzzling irredeemables – or, as the rest of the world knows them, scientists.…

'The Kalashnikovs of tomorrow'. Crikey +Comment Professor Stephen Hawking, SpaceX supremo Elon Musk, Atari alumnus Steve Wozniak, and, er, actress Talulah Riley have urged the world to ban "autonomous weapons" – aka killer robots.…

Fake handset factory raked in $19m/yr, say plods Police in Beijing have closed down a counterfeit iPhone manufacturing operation which employed hundreds of workers to produce more than 41,000 fake handsets in 2015 alone.…

Never mind Betteridge's Law, you cynical mob The UK government's Science and Technology Committee has today opened an inquiry tasked with "examining the opportunities and risks of big data."…

Get into the groove and win a Smart TV Calling all you programmers out there, we have a simple challenge and if you win you bag yourself a rather smart Smart TV.…

Well, it sure ain't a VSAN offering Comment It's all about speed; the faster apps run the better, which means they can access and process data faster. In that vein, Plexistor, born in Israel's tech startup hot-house, claims it can turn commodity servers into data munchers running at incandescent speed.…

Solar's even worse. No matter how you slice it, it ain't working The colossal, hugely expensive windfarms that are spread across huge areas of Europe's land and sea, which are projected to drive up household energy bills by more than 50 per cent in coming years, have achieved ... almost nothing in terms of reducing EU carbon emissions.…

Qi is more than just a neat word for Scrabble Samsung's latest SE370 monitor will have a wireless charging pad built into its plinth. This aims to de-clutter office drones' desks, or at least provide more space for other forms of clutter.…

How quickly can Microsoft patch the bugs? So what's Windows 10 like on a small slablet? Just days ahead of launch, we put Microsoft’s new OS on a cheap Linx 8 device, less than £100 to you at any supermarket.…

The Register zooms in to where the Web giants are Ever wondered what happened after you clicked on ‘Like’ or did a search on Google? Well wonder no more because here’s five data centres that run your life.…

Nokia is the biggest write-off yet, but it wasn't the first Analysis Less than two years into Satya Nadella's tenure as CEO of Microsoft, he's already had to report a lossmaking quarter. It's only the second time that's happened in the software giant's three decades as a public company, and the $8.44bn write-off Redmond posted earlier this week is the largest in its history.…

Storage firm feels the Love and gets Procter and Gamble-ised Comment The Grateful Dead concert was only the start to a sustained, brand-led marketing effort by Violin Memory, which aims to rewrite the rules of tech product marketing.…

Neat-looking convertible - not spectacular but does the business Review What happens when you lock a group of product engineers from a major PC manufacturer and a team software developers from a separate company together in a room? HP's Spectre x360 does. It's the result of some serious conversations between the lads and lasses at Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft; put simply, if Microsoft made a Surface laptop, it would be a lot like this.…

When is a door not a door? When slapdash coding turns it into a glorified 'off' switch Internet Igors have stitched together a new Linux backdoor. Fortunately for internet hygiene the botnet agent – which packs a variety of powerful features – is faulty and only partially functional.…

Password reset hole patched, but company stays mum Over the weekend, game publisher Valve patched a vulnerability that let user accounts have their passwords reset without proper validation.…

Open-sourcery tries to take down commercial AV frameworks Security researcher Robert Simmons has released a tool that offers a new level of stealth to the malware cat-and-mouse skirmish by shrouding binary analysis.…

Yule bee … you'll bee … you'll be butter off … better off without it, says ad giant Google has decided the autocomplete API it informally offers will no longer be available for “unauthorised” users as of August 10th.…

It's just simple mathematics, apparently A new study into causes of the scarcity of women in technical and scientific fields says that it is not discrimination by men in the field keeping the ladies away. Nor is it a repugnance felt by women for possibly dishevelled or unhygienic male nerds.…

The cold winds of disruption start to whistle through telco-tin-land In news that will chill purveyors of big networking iron, AT&T last week told its earnings call it reckons its software-defined network (SDN) rollout will cut its capital expenditure.…

Borg betting big that some networks can't be white-boxed any time soon Cisco's taking up arms against a sea of white-box vendors, touting US$150 million worth of silicon in the form of an ASIC.…

Big Red warns of 'unresponsive' ZFS boxen when you delve too greedily and too deep Oracle has warned that the analytics features of its ZFS storage appliances can result in “unresponsive” systems.…

Boffins say ad industry to be fleeced ONE BEELLION DOLLARS this year. Invisible rogue mobile apps are wasting petabytes of data a day through an advertising hijacking technique researchers say could inflict US$1 billion in damages this year.…

Telcos told to switch off BES-as-a-service in December Pakistan has reportedly ordered the nation's carriers to cease offering services that route email through BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), a product that among other things encrypts email.…

You want me to do what? And remember it? On how many apps? Fuggedaboutit At the end of 2012, working hard on my own connected lighting startup, MooresCloud, I got very excited to find out that Philips planned to launch Hue, the company's own full-spectrum connected lights. I bought a ‘starter pack’ of three soon after release, and played with them for weeks.…

Jeff Bezos, will you please collect the tax for us? We've got our hands full of metadata Australia's treasurer Joe Hockey has hinted that the mooted changes to the way the country's Goods and Services Tax (GST) is collected may apply to anything purchased from overseas, regardless of value.…

Utopic Unicorn gets another gallop to leap security rainbow Ubuntu has changed its mind on an end-of-life announcement, giving Version 14.10 one last kernel patch to cover off some big vulns.…