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Don’t want Bulgarian military police taking your banknotes? Tough! The United Kingdom has joined the European Union's new Schengen Information System II (SIS II), a multinational database-sharing platform for member states' authorities to access each others' databases in real time.…

Behold, data centre bods, the magical power of three Comment The arrival of a flash dead-end is being delayed by two technologies, both involving the number three – three-level cell (TLC) flash and three-dimensional (3D) flash – with the combination promising much higher flash chip capacities.…

Chairman forced to show hand on gTLD piggybank's fate The chairman of ICANN has finally been pushed into revealing his plans for the $60m the domain-name overseer has banked from auctioning off the rights to dot-words.…

Company once valued at a mere $1.2bn Workplace chat app Slack has confirmed it has raised $160m (£106m), valuing the company at $2.8bn (£1.9bn), according to reports.…

Deeper than training, knowing yourself Systems administrators are system administrators, right? Not really. Once upon a time systems admins were jack of all trades and (perhaps) master of them all. Most of the IT-related functions were performed by an administrator and if some new technology came along they adapted and learnt the new package or system.…

Quick, implement a HTTPS-Only standard Responding to the recent proposal for a "HTTPS-Only Standard", the American Civil Liberties Union has stressed the value of a more thorough and timely implementation of functional transport encryption.…

Cali woman accuses ad giant of, well, a lot of things A California woman is suing Google, alleging hackers exploited the ad giant's inadequate security to run up thousands of dollars in charges on her Play Store account.…

Fewer police complaints, quicker convictions, say plods The Metropolitan Police is to begin buying up to 30,000 body cameras, as part of its ambition to become "the most transparent police force in the world", The Register has learned.…

Cooling data centres without landing in hot water Going Green: Strategy (Part 1) How much energy is required to power the ever-expanding online world? With data centres the factories of the 21st Century, this may be a conundrum high on the environmentalist’s agenda, but what about those building the new Satanic mills?…

Mobe firm enters into licensing agreement with data centre gros fromages Mobile security provider Good Technology has resolved its legal brawl over a patent dispute with VMware.…

Big ol' beasts of burden with bang aplenty Product Roundup Gaming laptops have a reputation for being big and heavy and providing battery life that is counted in minutes rather than hours. Slowly, though, increased power efficiency in both CPU and GPU designs has given rise to a new generation of gaming laptops that are at least semi-portable.…

Bletchley-baiting three-rotor code box sold for six-figure sum A three-rotor Engima machine was sold for a record $269,000 at a Bonhams auction earlier this week. The machine is in complete working condition and was manufactured for the German military in Berlin in July 1944.…

AND put links to three competitors on your homepage – or we'll pout Google’s European woes continued on Thursday as the French senate voted to force the search monster to expose its algorithm and highlight rivals on its welcome page.…

But does 20nm sales slump spell trouble? Chip-baking industry heavyweight Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) emerged from another quarter of gangbusters year-on-year growth on Thursday, even as it reported flat revenue from the previous sequential quarter and it warned that the next quarter might be somewhat less spectacular.…

Fewer than 100 incidents actually reported to Google, however French data protection authority CNIL received 260 complaints last year related to the so-called 'right to be forgotten' ruling.…

Veep backtracks on figure – and here's why Comment Google has been forced to retract a claim that it only delivers 10 per cent of traffic to news websites after one of those cited – The Guardian – said the figure was "nonsense."…

USS Independence may still have aircraft in its hangars The United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) says it has found the final resting place of the USS Independence, a World War Two aircraft carrier.…

Crash, bang, wallop, what a spacecraft – read our pre-obit +Vid NASA has announced that on April 30, a 16-metre wide crater will be formed on the surface of Mercury by the hand of Man.…

How to stop hackers letting the gas flow in your connected oven? Bitcoin has the answer A few months ago I had a chat about the Internet of Things with the design head of a well-known home appliance manufacturer. Gartner had just published 2014’s hype chart,, and with the Internet of Things sitting at the very peak of the hype cycle, he reckoned it might be an interesting way to differentiate his firm’s products in a market filled with cheap Chinese appliances.…

Pledges closure of coal-fired plants without carbon capture Australian energy generator AGL has published a new Greenhouse Gas Policy (PDF) in which outlines “a pathway to decarbonisation of its electricity generation by 2050.”…

Emulating CPU virtualisation extensions in the cloud for home or training lab fun Ravello Systems, a purveyor of cloud hypervisors, has created a way to run VMware's ESXi in clouds from Amazon Web Services or Google.…

'Influential multinational corporation at centre of a geo-political conflict' deserves it says AssangeWikileaks has decided Sony Pictures is worthy of its attention by releasing 30,000 documents it says were lifted from the company's servers during the infamous 2014 attack.…

Crypto overheads could have cost video attic 'hundreds of millions' of dollars Netflix will this year roll out HTTPS to keep customer's viewing habits secret.…

Москва got the three it wanted, but code bucket binned plenty of other access requests Law enforcement agencies find Github geeks so boring they submitted a paltry ten subpoenas last year to gain information on 40 of the site's eight million active accounts.…

Hacker claims Mojang ignored disclosures for two years A huffy hacker has published detailed steps for anyone to pull off an 'easy' Minecraft exploit capable of causing servers to crash.…

Virginia axes un-patched WinXP-powered ballot boxes Authorities in Virginia have moved to decommission a long-serving electronic voting system after discovering gaping security holes.…

Which is accelerating faster: its APUs or its revenue decline? Tattered AMD says it's done with its SeaMicro server division, following a grim quarter that saw the ailing chipmaker weather losses beyond the expectations of even the gloomiest of Wall Street analysts.…

Patch Tuesday bug reverse engineered by Thursday The SANS Institute has warned Windows IIS web server admins to get patching as miscreants are now exploiting a flaw in the software to crash websites.…

US trade watchdog ITC needs reform to end $bn blackmail A consortium of tech giants have written to senior US politicians demanding a reform of the International Trade Commission, one of America's key federal watchdogs.…

Support deadline extended for upgrade stragglers Even though Microsoft quit supporting the wildly popular Windows XP last year, Google has decided to give XP users a break by promising to ship updates and security fixes for its Chrome browser on the aging operating system for a few more months.…

KERR-CHING! Yahoo! is rubbing its hands at the thought of extracting more ad revenue from people using its Bing-powered search engine – after tweaking its 10-year deal with Microsoft.…

Top court strikes down previous order to unmask users Top judges in Virginia have ruled that Yelp can keep the identities of its anonymous reviewers a secret from Hadeed Carpet Cleaning Inc – a cleaning business that wanted to sue the armchair critics for defamation.…

Preview builds pulled after reports of bricked devices Microsoft has temporarily pulled builds of Windows 10 for certain Lumia phones from the Windows Insider program, after some customers reported that trying to roll back to Windows Phone 8.1 killed their mobes.…

SAN biz in Automatics gear SAN maker Dot Hill is lifting its revenue forecast for the quarter. Why’s that interesting?…

Never Mind Other Malware, Here's the Hex Pistols Security researchers have identified a new strain of point-of-sale (POS) malware during an investigation led by the US Secret Service.…

Two-tier distribution and two new hires to get sales of kit moving All-flash array start-up and IPO’er-in-waiting (we think) Pure Storage has got itself a new channel programme and two channel-focused exec hires, to get partners selling more tier-1 storage replacing Pure product.…

It's not just politicians and PRs who are powered by spin Wonder material graphene could provide the basis for the future of circuitry, by using the technique known as spintronics.…

Consumer apps and enterprise apps, that is As perverse as it might seem for the mighty Microsoft to be courting geek-niche Android developer Cyanogen, the inclusion of Microsoft Apps on future distributions of the Cyanogen flavour of Android is an important win for Microsoft.…

Hour-long guzzle sesh costs just $165,000 - and counting Tim Cook, Apple CEO, is auctioning off an opportunity to join him for lunch at Apple Headquarters in Cupertino, along with a pair of VIP passes to an Apple keynote.…

$1.3bn of locked-down Apple tech issued to school kids. Success was surely inevitable The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) has informed Apple that it will not accept continued deliveries of iPads to students, and will be seeking a multi-million-dollar refund from the company.…

173 UK law firms found hackers had their fingers in briefs last year UK data privacy watchdogs at the ICO investigated 173 UK law firms for reported breaches of the Data Protection Act (DPA) last year.…

Taking ‘aggressive measures to regain excellence’. Better hurry Comment SanDisk said its Q1 numbers were going to be bad, and bad they were, with revenue and profits drops due to an embedded component material screw-up and execs not seeing where the market was going. Job cuts are coming.…

Doesn’t look like anyone’s been Scouting for Data The Scout Association will not have its troubled Compass database — which holds the details of 450,000 young people and volunteer adults — restored to operation until early autumn.…

All-black outfit to explain it ain't just about the white boxen Ask Amazon about its AWS data centres and you’ll get get this response: Amazon doesn’t talk about its data centres. Until its chief technology officer pitches in, that is.…

So heartwarming, it makes you want to blubber The habits and movements of three highly evolved creatures have been tracked by scientists using sophisticated technology for more than five months, The Register can reveal.…

Lots of angry biz folk gleefully stick the knife in Although EU competition commissioner (and Borgen inspiration) Margrethe Vestager made clear that her decision to slap Google with a statement of objections is about consumers, that hasn't stopped the US firm's Euro detractors queuing up to cheer her decision.…

'Advanced sleep'. You’ve unlocked a new level: Snoring After deciding you deserve a cappuccino — earned following a particularly good workout — you can now use your Jawbone UP4 bracelet to pay for it.…

New multi-channel sound technology loves the speakers you already have Breaking Fad In a move that could have far-reaching implications for home audio, multi-channel goliath DTS has announced an object-based sound system to rival Dolby Atmos (and the largely ignored Auro-3D). Dubbed DTS:X, the technology is somewhat different in that there’s no prescribed number of audio channels or speaker configuration to accommodate, and it offers content makers some cool new functionality.…