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Old Lady grumbles about new thingy The Bank of England is loosening up on IT delivery and recruitment, but not its resistance to public cloud.…

Automation for the Common (Sysadmin) People Could converged systems change the way that IT admins spend their time? Figures suggest that mundane tasks such as backups and restores and system patches take between two and ten hours a week for around a third of those responsible for administering systems.…

Convincing people to give money to other people is a lucrative business Online hat-passer GoFundMe has sold off a controlling stake of its business to investors who value it at roughly $600m.…

It's lobby central as the Chocolate Factory leans on the lawmakers Google tops the list of companies lobbying in Brussels, according to a report published on Wednesday by Transparency International (TI).…

16-bit showcase game that was just too tough to be fun Antique Code Show Let’s state one fact clearly from the start: for all its virtues, Shadow of the Beast did not play especially well. Its often half-baked platform action appeared promising at first, but was let down ultimately by having no game-save positions, a frustratingly high difficulty level and a general lack of fair and progressive gameplay.…

All-flash array pusher is agin' retainin' rusty rotators Comment Fresh from a big product and business model launch, Pure Storage was undestandably reticent about future technologies at a briefing in Mountain View. However, interesting tidbits did drop from speakers' lips.…

Scarlet globe was covered in water 500,000 years ago Just 500,000 years ago water was sloshing all over Mars, despite the planet having lost its atmosphere four billion years ago, astroboffins have discovered.…

Hard-working scum maintain 285 command and control servers Nobody can accuse trojan coders of being lazy; the masterminds behind the Dyre banking malware are putting in full five-day working weeks to maintain some 285 command and control servers handling stolen banking credentials.…

US says remote access trojan had thousands of victims Swedish BlackShades co-creator Alex Yucel has been sentenced to nearly five years in a US cooler for selling and distributing the remote access trojan (RAT).…

Your TV is your enemy, says Eugene Kaspersky As US lawmakers call on the Government Accountability Office to assess the world of the Internet of Things, Eugene Kaspersky has unloaded on the thingification of home appliances.…

Well, at least they’re not alligators, eh Goldfish popped doon Canadian toilets have been found to be not only surviving, but positively thriving in their new underworld, so much so that Alberta's government has launched a campaign to prevent people flushing away their aquarium-dwellers.…

It's just my atmosphere, boiling away into space Thirty-three light years away from us – quite close by astronomical standards – Hubble has found a surprisingly large gas cloud near an exoplanet.…

Unscramble your systems The promise of IT service management is to deliver services that make sense to their business users. To do that, though, IT departments must be able to untangle their own internal resources.…

Fruits of the WhatsApp acquisition Online ad network Facebook has made it possible for new users to sign up for its Messenger chat service without the need to first be a member of its social network. All that’s required is a phone number.…

1k-qubit chip late, still controversial The 1,000-qubit chip promised by D-Wave last year has landed.…

We need UPLOADS if we're not just watching TV From the day I arrived in Australia, I’ve had a high-speed broadband connection. The owner of the ISP came over to my flat to set it up, attaching a point-to-point wireless link to my terrace, then aiming it at his offices.…

But only at the peak, our average mobe download is only so-so The most recent Akamai State of the Internet report has found Australia has the fastest mobile download speeds in the Asia Pacific region, peaking at an astonishing 149.3 Mbps.…

New private cloud offerings go all-in for Docker and Kubernetes Red Hat Summit Docker wasn't the only firm blabbing away about containers this week. On Wednesday, top Linux vendor Red Hat unveiled two new offerings at its Red Hat Summit conference in Boston, and both had containers at their cores.…

ESET spits patch in three days. Google Project Zero bod Tavis Ormandy has disclosed a 'trivial' means to remote hack the ESET NOD32 antivirus platform.…

Productivity Commission blasts TPP-style negotiations while US passes 'fast-track' bill Opponents of the Trans Pacific Partnership have had a key defeat in America, with the Senate passing crucial “fast track” legislation that lets President Barack Obama push ahead with the deal.…

Look, ma, we're a real business now DockerCon 2015 The themes of Docker's past conferences has been increasing adoption of the container tech, but the theme of this year's DockerCon was moving beyond experimentation and into production deployment.…

Aruba? Never heard of 'em Juniper Networks is moving to fill out footprint in enterprise wireless access, signing a deal to integrate kit from Ruckus Wireless into its Ethernet switch range.…

Word, Excel, and PowerPoint up for grabs Redmond's plan to get its code running everywhere took another step forward on Wednesday when it released free versions of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for Android phones.…

Redmond demos cross-platform containerized apps DockerCon 2015 Microsoft has doubled down on its support for Docker, further integrating the software container tech with Azure and Visual Studio Online and demoing the first-ever containerized application spanning both Windows and Linux systems.…

Public comment period swamped over "commercial" site rules A proposal to force domain name owners to reveals their true identity and address if their website is deemed "commercial" has set off a privacy storm.…

Who cares about your security? There's hardware to coddle Samsung computer users could find themselves wide open to attack because the software the Korean giant bundles on its systems disables Windows Update.…

2016 becomes 2017 becomes 2018 The planned Tesla model for plebs – the Model 3 – has been delayed to 2018 from an original planned shipping date of early 2017.…

We knew Apple's mobe was hot in Asia, but this is ridiculous A man in India says his iPhone 6 burst into flames just two days after he purchased the handset.…

Negotiations rule out dropping personal data protection below mid-1990s level. Phew! Things can only get better. That’s the message from all parties negotiating the new EU Data Protection Regulation.…

Snowflake's Muglia hopes to storm the cloud SQL Server, with Windows and Office, helped make Microsoft. The database sits in a $13bn business unit and while Microsoft’s server products grew 11 per cent – $1.7bn last year – that was driven primarily by sales of SQL Server.…

A giant step for data protection, says Trevor Pott Most infrastructure verticals within the datacenter are undergoing rapid evolution today, but you could be entirely forgiven if you thought data protection stopped evolving some time ago. That's a shame because Copy Data Management (CDM) is the next evolution of this space, and it's worth taking some time to learn about this area.…

Good times in spookland as biz gains $20bn valuation for latest funding round CIA-backed Big Data analytics outfit Palantir is about to embark on a fundraising round that will value the biz at $20bn (£13bn), according to reports.…

You won't believe No.8 (OK, you will) Despite my apparently youthful good looks, I've been in the IT industry since 1989. Which means I've been around the block a bit, and have learned rather a lot of lessons – some of them the hard way. To avoid you having to find them out yourself, here are ten to be going on with.…

And the phone outage means you can't even connect to 911! Imagine that All of US carrier Verizon's services have been struck down by an outage across Delaware, New Jersey, and New York since 5:27am EDT.…

Shake off your sluggishness and learn to live with shadow IT Your users are probably using cloud-based services that you’re not even aware of to organise their files and collaborate with each other. What are you going to do about it?…

Integration of technology and cloudy moves prompt action IBM and Box are hopping into bed together, a move intended to satisfy their respective desires for cloud and scale.…

Belfast blaze takes down public transport, police ombudsman's sites Update A fire on the fourth floor of Belfast's Telephone House tore through a BT data centre, burning the customers of affected ISPs, as well as those seeking to access several government websites.…

And while we’re at it, why do music labels still even exist?

While Walter White tops TV rankings... Reg reader movie buffs will doubtless have an opinion on the news that Indiana Jones has been voted "greatest movie character of all time".…

Poor security practices and lack of 2FA responsible for leakiness, says report A threat intelligence report into the availability of login credentials for US government agencies has identified 47 agencies across 89 unique domains may be compromised.…

Also, shill scientists refuse to research whether jet fuel can melt steel beams The Illuminati have revealed themselves once again, this time through their "intelligent personal assistant" Siri, which immediately reports device owners to the police when they ask about 9/11.…

Innovation meets the law, comes a distant second Worstall on Wednesday Matt Levine tells us the story of the Sand Hill Bitcoin Exchange, another one of those bright ideas that turned out not to be so bright and ended in a $20,000 fine from the SEC.…

Mystery shoppers find "life events" a challenge on the move Sick of repeating the same information every time you need the authorities to help you out? So is the European Commission.…

Photo-sharing service comes up smelling of Zuck, seeking ad cash Facebook has beefed up Instagram's search functions to pull the photo-sharing service into line with the rest of Mark Zuckerberg's siloed empire.…

Hopeful Actifio also receives kind words in Magic Quadrant Data virtualiser Delphix has had a Gartner boost by appearing in the leaders’ box of its Magic Quadrant report for Structured Data Archiving and Application Retirement.…

Parliamentary lower house pushes it through, no worries The lower house of the Russian‬ Parliament has given its approval to a new law which will resemble the European Union's controversial "Right to be Forgotten" legislation, but which critics have warned is stricter, arbitrary, and open to abuse.…

Latest boardroom trophy hire brings AFA vendor more corporate cachet Pure Storage is at it again: the all flash array startup has raided bitter rival EMC's reservation and made off with chief marketing officer Jonathan Martin, who will fulfil the same function at his new paymaster.…

Nice devices, now speak 'enterprise' to me A decade of “consumerisation” of IT has, according to Gartner, succeeded in shifting the balance of power within organisations — across departments and from hierarchies to individuals.…