The Register

Open-source suite defies doomsayers with millions of downloads Analysis Last year Brett Porter, then chairman of the Apache Software Foundation, contemplated whether a proposed official blog post on the state of Apache OpenOffice (AOO) might discourage people from downloading the software due to lack of activity in the project.…

Hack to thaw account freezes reported, fixed, hopefully never exploited Experian's website exposed to world-plus-dog the PINs needed to unlock frozen accounts, allowing crooks to potentially apply for loans and credit cards as their victims.…

Likely state hackers make do with 'living off the land' and going after tardy Office patchers A newly discovered spy gang is eschewing boutique attack tools to instead use publicly available exploits against unpatched systems.…

But Oracle shot first IBM has officially griped to a top US government watchdog about JEDI – the Pentagon's proposed 10-year $10bn single-vendor IT system for America’s Green Machine.…

350-year monkish mystery could be down to a merger Astrophysicists have finally solved a mystery lasting almost 350 years to uncover the first documented merger between a white and brown dwarf star.…

Finally, Jeff Bezos can sleep easy on his cash pillow Canalys Channels Forum 2018 The billions of dollars in ad revenue that Amazon is turning over each quarter will bankroll the capital expenditure of new data centre builds at AWS for years to come, sustaining the business model.…

Membership of WD's OpenFlex club has its perks Western Digital has invested in all-flash array supplier Kaminario, which supports WD's composable systems technology.…

That 60,000 patents in your pocket or are you just pleased to see us? Who would have thought it? Not content with signing with LOT Network, Microsoft has taken the next step in patent cuddling and joined the Open Innovation Network.…

That 60,000 patents in your pocket or are you just pleased to see us? Who would have thought it? Not content with signing with LOT Network, Microsoft has taken the next step in patent cuddling and joined the Open Invention Network.…

Hopes to lure new cloud-sniffers with location lockdown feature Google Cloud Next At the Google Cloud Next conference in London today the adtech company's enterprise tech arm declared that business clients would soon enjoy location restriction policies and other new tools of control freakery on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).…

Microsoft tweaks firmware for kiosks and users that love the power cord In news that will make Surface Pro 3 owners twitch involuntarily, Microsoft is fiddling with Surface battery settings yet again.…

Comparing Middle Kingdom's hacker forums to Russia's? Apples and pears Underground hacker forums in China and Russia are as different as each country's regular shopping bazaars, according to research from Recorded Future.…

RIP Verify. Finally It's official: the UK state's expensive-but-comatose digital identity system Verify has been taken off life support.…

Choosing your platform is just the first step If you're considering moving to a serverless architecture you might think the first step is easy, but the real challenges come with ensuring enterprise-grade discipline once you move into production.…

Choosing your platform is just the first step Event If you're considering moving to a serverless architecture you might think the first step is easy, but the real challenges come with ensuring enterprise-grade discipline once you move into production.…

UK information commish is investigating Employee benefits firm Sodexo has suffered a data breach exposing personal info believed to include names, email addresses and home addresses after its UK Engage unit’s internal IT systems were hit by malware.…

If it's not one DRAM thing, it's another As Intel battles to get on top of CPU shortages that have plagued its business in recent times, the world's largest computer makers are hunkering down for six months of tight supply.…

And Brussels sprout... Give it a chai, says Sainsbury's It's common knowledge that the British are a nation of tea drinkers but – yikes – Sainsbury's launch of pigs in blankets and Brussels sprout-flavoured teas ahead of the Christmas mania are a little beyond the pale brown water.…

Two Redmond wranglers sitting in a tree... Switzerland-based flinger of Microsoft licences SoftwareONE has announced plans to snap up IT services provider Comparex in a deal that will create a licensing giant.…

Sysdig's container runtime security project gets solid foundation Falco, Sysdig's open source project for monitoring container runtimes, is slated to join the Cloud Native Computing Foundation on Wednesday, becoming the first runtime security tool to be added to the Cloud Native Sandbox project, a home for early stage projects.…

Internet Engineering Task Force doc examines how to better protect authentication tokens Google and Microsoft engineers have pooled their efforts to propose a protection against what are known as "replay attacks".…

IT shifts from a back office to core of operations, says survey Half of senior IT bods across Europe agree that their departments are struggling to cope with new tech while keeping core gear running, according a recent survey.…

Sick burn, bro: attacker only managed to torch a window-sill Russian media is reporting that someone has tried to torch the notorious St Petersberg “troll factory,” linked with trolling Western social media sites, sparking a police investigation.…

Let's try that one again, says Redmond, after last week's operating system build misread timestamps The world now knows why last week's Microsoft Windows 10 upgrade deleted unlucky users' files: the software treated the default user directory as ripe for destruction, because it thought the files were elsewhere. The upgrade has since been pulled.…

Signs up NetApp as a reseller Commvault started its GO user conference in Nashville, TN, by telling attendees it had signed up NetApp as a reseller, made its main backup and recovery product available as a service, introduced bigger and smaller backup appliances, and said it has a complete new system management product coming, with AI helping it continuously improve.…

And how might this be done? Backgrounder Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) is a popular way to deal with complex server, SAN storage, and virtualization requirements with integrated, scale-out nodes that converge server compute, storage, and hypervisor technology in all-in-one clusterable elements.…

GAO report finds more holes than a Swiss cheese, and very little hope for improvement If you were worried about the state of US military security systems you might not want to read the latest audit. with such frequency, there was no reason to suspect an attack.…

Xiongmai's cloud portal opens sneaky backdoor into servers Yet another IoT device vendor has been found to be exposing their products to attackers with basic security lapses.…

Remember the days when you didn't have to charge your phone several times a day? AI can help developers design mobile phone apps that drain less battery, according to new research.…

Remember the days when you didn't have to charge your phone several times a day? Artificial intelligence can help developers design mobile phone apps that drain less battery, according to new research.…

Memory corruption flaw present in Android, iOS builds. Aaand it's been fixed WhatsApp has patched a vulnerability it its smartphone code that could have been exploited by miscreants to crash victims' chat app simply by placing a call.…

Code automation biz waves its big data yardstick DevOps biz Puppet held a stage show in San Francisco on Tuesday, because that's how IT vendors get attention these days. It's a rite of passage for Silicon Valley companies of a certain size.…

Redmond goes retro in latest Patch Tuesday bundle Microsoft has released the October edition of its monthly security update, addressing a total of 49 CVE-listed bugs.…

New Hub device continues to pull AI, Nest, YouTube closer together Analysis Google has joined the battle to create a single-supplier smart-home with the release of a new product called the Home Hub.…

Customer ratings plugin treated to a malicious rewrite to swipe entered banking info The payment-card-skimming malware operation dubbed Magecart has turned up again, this time in Shopper Approved, a customer rating plugin for websites.…

Bloomberg puts out related story while security experts cast doubt on research and quotes The veracity of a bombshell yarn claiming Chinese agents managed to sneak spy chips into Super Micro servers used by Amazon, Apple and the US government is still being fiercely argued over five days after publication.…

Pricey kit from the Google Pixel hardware team The day after it confessed to exposing the personal data of millions of Google+ accounts, Google formally unveiled the the most-exposed phone of all time.…

Plus a Home Hub unit for the really die-hard fans who trust Google over Amazon The day after Google confessed to almost exposing the private data of hundreds of thousands of Google+ accounts to app developers, the ad giant unveiled perhaps the most-leaked phone in recent memory.…

Bloody SSL...it's the final countdown Hundreds of high-profile websites are still unprepared for the total disavowal of legacy Symantec-issued digital certificates that will kick in with the release of Chrome 70 next week.…

Want to know if all that cash you spent on consultants is paying off? DevOps heavyweight Puppet took the opportunity afforded by its Puppetize Live shindig to fling out a new product to measure DevOps performance.…

We'll just take our time here Google will appeal the €4.34bn fine imposed in July by the European Commission, according to a report.…

Appeal beaks ponder first-of-a-kind data protection case Lawyers for supermarket chain Morrisons today urged the UK Court of Appeal to overturn an earlier judgment that made the company partly liable for a criminal data breach that saw 100,000 people’s payroll details published via Tor.…

What a time to be alive From the department of "just because you can doesn't mean you should" comes news that Indiegogo has put the kibosh on an attempt to crowdsource a portable pervscanner.…

Feeling lucky? Readers cry out for more diversity in the phone world, but few alternatives are as striking as Punkt's take on Android.…

Weekend failure could reduce 'scope's scope Space-watchers have been nervously watching that bit of space occupied by the Hubble Space Telescope as NASA tries to diagnose a problem with its gyroscopes.…

Microsoft's social-media-for-suits platform snaps up employee engagement startup Microsoft-owned LinkedIn has announced it is acquiring Glint, a Human Resources outfit, which produces software to tell employers why workers keep leaving.…

Also: Internet Australia blasts crypto-busting bill Australia's communications minister Mitch Fifield has hinted at further regulation of the internet, in a speech delivered last night to the Sydney Institute.…

'Compliance' is a corporate value isn't it? Google has withdrawn from bidding on a multi-billion US military cloud contract, citing corporate values. And a lack of certification.…

Project Zero would have been all over this – yet it remained under wraps Google has surprised Google+ users – all two of them – by vowing to shutter the service over the next ten months in the wake of a potential data leak.…

Is there a difference and does it matter? Comment In a little more than 20 years, what quaintly used to be called "network security" has gone from simple firewalling and VLANs to talk of analytics driven by self-learning machine intelligence and AI. How should we make sense of such a dramatic jump?…