The Register

Swallows N2WS so it can stick oar deeper in Amazon cloud Veeam has announced the acquisition of N2WS, an IaaS startup, whose board includes Veeam co-founder and President Ratmir Timashev, for $42.5mn cash.…

Company's journey from the heart of IT to the rest of the business continues ServiceNow has slipped into 2018 by slipping out a new release of its platform.…

Needs to make six to eight a year, predicts it can get back to 25 a year once airlines wake up Airbus has reported its most prolific year to date in terms of deliveries, but also warned that it needs a new buyer of its flagship A380 if it is to continue production.…

Boffins figure out when drones are watching, without decrypting the video stream If a drone-creeper is snooping on you, you could catch them by grabbing the video stream – but what if it's encrypted?…

Plans open source revival of XCP, to go places Citrix won’t Moves are afoot to revive Xen Cloud Platform (XCP), the open source version of XenServer that existed independently of Citrix before the company released its code to the Xen Project and made its own efforts open source.…

Tiangong-1 is out of control and can't keep it up any more Predictions are firming up for when China's Tiangong-1 spacecraft will make its final re-entry-crash-and-burn.…

Unlike similar services, this one sold purloined passwords The Royal Canadian Mounted Police has announced it has cuffed and charged a man for selling stolen identities and passwords at LeakedSource.com.…

'Benchmark crimes' under-state the true performance impact of security controls A group of operating systems specialists believes sloppy benchmarking is harming security efforts, by making it hard to assess the likely performance impact of security countermeasures.…

Azure Stack users invited under ‘IP Advantage’ umbrella Microsoft’s extended its “Azure IP Advantage” litigation protection shield to on-premises technology, by applying it to the Azure Stack hybrid-cloud-in-a-box systems.…

A long time ago, in a company far, far away … Lenovo has patched an ancient vulnerability in switches that it acquired along with IBM's hardware businesses and which Big Blue itself acquired when it slurped parts of Nortel.…

Because you need to ‘capitalize on exponential intelligence fueled by pervasive tech’ and only IBM can do that Exclusive IBM is to help its ailing services business with a re-branding exercise that will see its Global Technology Services (GTS) and Global Business Services (GBS) operations emerge as a single entity named “IBM Services”.…

Automation and SCADA-flingers admit fix has affected products Patches for the Meltdown vulnerability are causing stability issues in industrial control systems.…

Watch out Intel, there's a new mini-ruler in town Analysis Super Micro has a supernaturally dense thin server with up to half a petabyte of flash using unannounced Samsung SSDs.…

Detroit giant plans 40 full and hybrid models by 2022 American auto enormity Ford will increase its investment in electric vehicles to $11bn (£7.97bn) in the next five years, it announced yesterday at the North American International Auto Show.…

Panama corporation owns nearly 54,000 dot-UK sites HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) has insisted on having a Panama company trading as the “Whois Foundation” formally stripped of a handful of dodgy web domains, even though the firm instantly offered to hand them over when challenged.…

Battling Zuck for the brain computer interface Microsoft has applied to patent a brain control interface, so you'll be able to "think" your way around a computer device, hands free.…

Debate rages on software, HCI slowdown though Analysis Several SAN suppliers have said their systems don't need patching against the Spectre and Meltdown bugs. We asked Dell and Pure Storage about the impact of fixes and whether their SANs and Dell's hyperconverged (HCI) systems needed patching.…

Part of major shake-up at outsourcer French outsourcer Sopra Steria plans to make 220 folk redundant from its UK government business as part of a major upheaval of its public sector operation.…

Anti-saucy snap programme makes more sense Facebook has settled a case with a 14-year-old girl after the social network hosted revealing pictures of her on a Facebook "shame" page.…

Chinese mobe-flinger probing the issue A large number of OnePlus customers claim to have been hit by fraudulent credit card transactions after making purchases on the phone company's site. And they're unhappy that the company has been slow to address the issue.…

Customers couldn't see sync 'n' share files Business user file sync and sharer Box "sank" for some users late last week, who took to forums and social media complaining they could not see any of their files.…

Thousands still experiencing issues since April launch More than 6,000 parents looking to access financial help with childcare have had difficulties with using HM Revenue and Customs' frequently broken Childcare Choices website.…

Tech bigwigs won't seek re-election to Mickey Mouse board The Walt Disney Company's increasing interest in moving its shows online has forced two Silicon Valley supremos to leave the board.…

Minister says commish is 'free to disregard' framework if it is 'irrelevant' The government has moved to allay fears over amendments to the Data Protection Bill that critics say could undermine both the law and the powers of the UK’s privacy watchdog.…

A view on quad-level cell flash error correction Analysis Error-checking code use is so much easier with 3D NAND than previous planar NAND that capacity-lifting quad-level cell technology becomes more feasible.…

GSM gateway prohibition was way below Sir Philip Rutnam's paygrade Comment Questions have been raised over the Home Office's most senior civil servant's involvement in the banning of GSM gateways, following botched redactions to Freedom of Information responses by Ofcom.…

CPU utilization up, throughput down, but a second fix may have restored normal service Log-sniffing vendor SolarWinds has used its own wares to chronicle the application of Meltdown and Spectre patches on its own Amazon Web Services infrastructure, and the results make for ugly viewing.…

Good news for UPC advocates, bad news for EPO staff The effort to create a single patent court system for Europe has been given a boost with a response from the German Bar Association arguing that a complaint against the Unitary Patent Court (UPC) should be thrown out.…

And warms to a kind of speculative execution for Tabs, too. Really. Mozilla’s announced it will add a “policy engine” to the next extended support (ESR) release of its Firefox browser.…

Transaction costs more than chicken, which would go cold by the time BTC change hands KFC’s Canadian wing has started selling chicken for Bitcoin.…

AI and other tech could go on 'not to be acquired' list France is considering regulating foreign takeovers of businesses in the data protection and artificial intelligence sectors, minister for the economy Bruno Le Maire said on Friday.…

Galaxy can turn itself off, then on again The black hole at the centre of galaxy SDSS J1354+1327 sucked in gases, “burped” – and then repeated the display.…

You'll Pai for this, thunders FCC Bad user interface design has been blamed for Hawaii experiencing a brief spate of nuclear panic over the weekend.…

Router vendors sling firmware to protect users from packet floods Wi-Fi router vendors have started issuing patches to defend their products against Google Chromecast devices.…

Sun ZFS Storage Appliance users: brace for super-critical fix Oracle still has nothing to say about whether the Meltdown or Spectre vulnerabilities are a problem for its hardware.…

Keeping geostationary sats chatting is simple. Low-Earth sats need more brains The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) will next week discuss changes to satellite constellation regulation and fees, an effort needed to keep space useful for communications…

Yup: LKML.org and all its records of the planet's most-used OS were on one disk Spare a thought for Jasper Spaans, who hosts the Linux Kernel Mailing List archive from a single PC that lives in his home. And since things always happen this way the home machine died while he was on holiday.…

A quick catch-up on infosec stuff beyond what we've already reported Roundup The security world is still feeling the aftereffects of last week's CPU design flaw disclosures, which continued to dominate the news this week, even amid the noisy CES jamboree in Las Vegas.…

Shared hosting oversight bites free SSL/TLS certificate org Let's Encrypt – a SSL/TLS certificate authority run by the non-profit Internet Security Research Group (ISRG) to programmatically provide websites with free certs for their HTTPS websites – on Thursday said it is discontinuing TLS-SNI validation because it's insecure in the context of many shared hosting providers.…

House reps approve bill requiring vuln disclosure reports The US House of Representatives this week approved a bill that, given further legislative and executive branch support, will require the American government to account for its handling of software and hardware vulnerabilities.…

US House rep proposes govt ban on Chinese mobile tech A law bill introduced into the US House of Representatives would, if passed, ban Uncle Sam's agencies from using stuff made by Chinese mobile giants ZTE and Huawei.…

Maybe they should have shoved in some AI love-bots to spice things up Comment This week, the tech world has been consumed with intrigue over the details of alleged "sex parties" hosted by Silicon Valley's power brokers.…

Govt CIOs failing to scrutinize techies' spending – watchdog American government agencies are spending billions of tax dollars on IT projects without getting the proper approval or oversight.…

Fake tech support mails used to phish for photo album logins A fourth man has admitted stealing Hollywood stars' private nude photos that eventually leaked online in what became known as Celebgate.…

Make like a virtual machine, and migrate out of here, small percentage of staff told Virtualization kingpin VMware is this month laying off staff again.…

It's not like a recall is possible, says chip security expert Analysis Processor security experts – including one cited in the Meltdown paper – are split on whether the resolution of the Spectre vulnerability may need to involve hardware modifications or the software defences being rolled out are adequate.…

Easy as A, B, CTRL+P Updated Security shortcomings in Intel's Active Management Technology (AMT) can be exploited by miscreants to bypass login prompts on notebook computers.…

It's been a week, hasn't it, storage bods... After multiple, multiple quarters of doing a reverse IBM and growing revenues quarter after quarter after quarter, Veeam has been beaming about having grown revenues some more.…

Become the ruler of all you survey Security people talk of an attack surface to describe exposure to malware and hacking. The bigger the attack surface, the more at risk you are.…

Google’s Play Store fails again Researchers have found a batch of over 60 malware-carrying apps in Google's Play Store designed to rob mobile users or show them pornography, all with a kid-friendly theme.…