The Register

Welcome to the Hotel California security model An Apple macOS security process called System Integrity Protection can prevent certain apps from being easily uninstalled, which isn't ideal when the code may be vulnerable or malware.…

Big Blue is trippin' over 1980s web tech IBM has filed suit against online travel giant Expedia alleging violation of four patents that harken back to the early days of dial-up internet.…

Battle over dodgy click claims heats up Advertising company Fetch says it wants a federal court to hear its challenge to Uber's claims of 'click fraud' in mobile ads.…

And two other security bugs VMware on Tuesday published a security advisory for its vSphere Data Protection (VDP) backup and recovery product.…

Chinese giant snuffs licensing gossip as 3D NAND glut looms Tsinghua Unigroup has denied it is licensing flash IP from SK Hynix as was reported in December, but is developing its own 3D NAND tech.…

Fancy go-faster filer tech destined for Azure Avere Systems and its go-faster filer frontend FXT tech is to be gobbled by Microsoft.…

Touts using software to snaffle seats would face unlimited fine The British government is to ban ticket touts from using automated software to snap up more tickets than allowed by event organisers.…

Upper Tribunal says commish should have viewed materials in drone strike info request herself Judges have slammed the Information Commissioner’s handling of an appeal against a Freedom of Information decision about a Syrian drone strike, saying it “fell well short” of expectations.…

Crowdfunded $107k to find system just needed a Hoover Sorry to burst your bubble, folks, but the mysteriously dimming Tabby's Star isn't due to an "alien megastructure" after all – it's just obscured by dust, according to a paper published today.…

Japan's third-biggest carmaker inks deal with tat bazaar's mapping arm Honda and Alibaba are teaming up to work on connected car services, becoming the latest big companies to leap aboard the smart vehicle technology bandwagon.…

Plan to cut through hassle of security notifications Security researcher Scott Helme is pushing a scheme to make it easier for bug finders to notify companies about problems with their technology.…

US and Irish firms to hang onto unmarried names, markets VoIP companies Blueface and Star2Star have announced a $500m (£368.8m) merger today, which they claim will create one of the world's largest global unified communications providers.…

Three letters: O E M Analysis When IDC published its third 2017 quarter converged and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) numbers, Dell was in the lead.…

Wixen won't back down, claims Spotify failed to get a licence for 10,000-plus tunes Spotify has been accused of rockin' a little too freely by a Californian music company that claims the streaming biz failed to gain proper licences for its artists' songs.…

Plus McAfee Twitter hack & other stuff that happened while you were partying... The festive period was accompanied by the usual security shenanigans including breaches, cybercrime busts and serious security bugs.…

Arrr! Booze brand in Davey Jones' locker with ads watcher Rum peddler Captain Morgan has come under fire from the UK ads watchdog for using a Snapchat lens that could appeal to underage teenagers.…

Four years ago Brit taxpayers spent £65m doing her up The flagship of the Royal Navy, HMS Ocean, has been sold to Brazil for £84m, the South American country’s government has confirmed.…

Nice try, but no, you're gonna have to cough up for these expensive data center chips Nvidia has banned the use of its GeForce and Titan gaming graphics cards in data centers – forcing organizations to fork out for more expensive gear, like its latest Tesla V100 chips.…

For seven months, fashion shop's POSes were real Ps of S Clothing chain Forever 21 has admitted a malware infection on its cash registers swiped customer payment card details for most of last year.…

Google boffins develop tricks to fool machine-learning software Despite dire predictions from tech industry leaders about the risks posed by unfettered artificial intelligence, software-based smarts remain extremely fragile.…

We had the rug pulled from under our front door, says CEO You won't have a $700 smart lock to kick around any more, as Otto (no, not that one) shut down and sacked its staff just before Christmas – without ever delivering a product.…

Software Freedom Law Center claims Software Freedom Conservancy committed fraud A few days before the Christmas holiday, the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) made a peace offering of sorts in an ostensible effort to resolve its trademark dispute with the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC).…

In America, at least The US government's trade watchdog, the FTC, has finalized its settlement deal with Lenovo on charges the PC builder sold Americans machines crammed with intrusive adware.…

Hennessy quits after just four months Cohesity's chief financial officer Seamus Hennessy has resigned after less than four months in post, judging from his LinkedIn profile.…

Other OSes will need an update, performance hits loom A fundamental design flaw in Intel's processor chips has forced a significant redesign of the Linux and Windows kernels to defang the chip-level security bug.…

Spoiler: Social media app was fined last year for not doing that exact thing The owners of Chinese social media app WeChat have denied they are monitoring the service or keeping chat logs for government surveillance – despite evidence to the contrary.…

Tor usage skyrockets as citizens try to bypass blocks Iranian authorities have blocked Instagram and other social media platforms in response to a wave of street protests across the country this week.…

You need to be the bigger supermassive black hole The mass of the supermassive black hole at the centre of galaxies controls star formation and determines how it evolves over time, according to new observations published in Nature.…

Twitter, Facebook boot off far-right politician over racist tweet The grace period for tech firms failing to meet Germany's strict new hate speech law has ended.…

Users can't pay bills or report phones lost in NYE revelry Mobile network EE has had a poor start to 2018 – their customer service data centre has been down since yesterday.…

Plus: GPL row flares again, zapper won't zap people Roundup British drone users will have to take a multiple-guess quiz before using their Christmas toys this year, while drone users appear to have, once again, got around pre-eminent drone maker DJI's software-based flight restrictions.…

Because the state has a great track record of recouping tax from internet giants Tech firms are indirectly costing the UK government millions in "human surveillance" of extremist content and should have a windfall tax levied against them to make up for it, according to security minister Ben Wallace.…

But is anyone actually using it? The Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger project was announced in December 2015. When Apache Web server daddy Brian Behlendorf took the helm five months later, the Foundation’s blockchain baby was still embryonic. He called it “day zero.”…

Predicting a (R)IoT: Maybe it doesn't all need to be processed this instant Software engineer Dave McCrory coined the term "data gravity" in a 2010 blog post. Since then he's come up with equations and otherwise thought hard about how to put numbers on it. He even talks about it today in terms of information theory, network evolution, and similarly heady topics. But it stems from a quite simple idea.…

Sniff... sniff. They can't be far. These animals just ate 1.96 EB! Comment Tech market researcher IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Converged Systems Tracker has found that worldwide converged systems market revenue increased 10.8 per cent year over year to $2.99bn during the third quarter of 2017 (3Q17) – and that the market inhaled a massive 1.96 EB of new storage capacity during the quarter, up 30 per cent on the year.…

Plus: The Christmas kill switch that backfired On-Call Not just the week but The Register's working year has drawn to an end, and that means it's time to wrap things up with the last of our slow-news-week festive editions of On-Call, the column we compile after kind readers send in their stories of support jobs that went south.…

Forget the supernovae, what's this about alien alloys? Our Solar System may have been born from bubbles of material hurled from a colossal Wolf-Rayet-type star, according to a theory published Friday.…

Linux code fortifier is told people are entitled to opinions Linux kernel security biz Grsecurity's defamation lawsuit against open-source stalwart Bruce Perens has been dismissed, although the door remains open for a revised claim.…

Last 2017 roundup: Death Star file protection crap, Samsung DRAM miracles and more Here's a final collection of storage news before Christmas 2017. Imagine you are having Christmas dinner and you get a bunch of crackers. Pull them and, instead of fortune cookie statements and bad jokes, this list of news items tumbles out.…

Will they? Won't they? Liberty Global is rumoured to be near to closing a deal to flog its Austrian biz to Germany's Deutsche Telekom for about $2bn (£1.5bn), which could reopen merger talks with Vodafone in Blighty.…

What's with the sudden boom in latency serial killers? Analysis Storage startup WekaIO has joined a growing crowd of techies making large performance gains and latency lowering file system tech moves.…

Bet they're shaking in their boots Foreign secretary Boris Johnson will warn Russia that the UK will retaliate against cyber attacks in a rare visit to Moscow today.…

A truly AI Christmas to one and all + El Regmas song RoTM "King of toys and hippopotamuses full of the light of that stood at the dear Son of Santa Claus."…

Mass paperwork backlog sets off ICO Final update The UK Ministry of Justice has been slammed for poor handling of requests for personal records made under data protection laws – and told to fix the 700-plus backlog by October.…

Pair pulled over lugging wrong kind of trees The friends and family of an elderly couple from Nebraska may have lost out on their share of almost 30kg of pot this festive season after cops spotted their stash.…

That sliding-doors moment – how Ginni chose the wrong exit The past six years have been unkind to IBM but top brass only have themselves to blame: the firm generated tens of billions of dollars but bought back shares and returned money to investors rather than doing something radical.…

Brit Medical Assoc: 'Urgently' heal these 'ongoing issues' Capita Business Services' shambolic £700m Primary Care Support contract with NHS England will at last be scrutinised by the National Audit Office amid “ongoing issues” with service delivery.…

And the Archangel appeared and said: 'Pssst, someone's making a new Psion' Exclusive Production begins in January on the first new computer form factor since the iPad – Planet Computing's "modern Psion", Gemini.…

NVMe speed meets IoT edge need – analyst Analysis Enterprise flash drive use will surge over the next four years due to price falls, capacity rises, NVMe speed and Internet of Things (IoT) edginess, analysts have agreed.…

Got £3k to burn? You could do worse Hands On You have £3,000 burning a hole in your pocket. You're also an engineer, developer or manipulate visual images. You also absolutely must have a touchscreen portable workstation, preferably with a display that detaches so you can go home and watch Netflix.…