The Register

Birgit Sippel says 'Brexit ate my homework' isn't an excuse for delays Interview European Union nations are holding up discussions on the hotly debated new ePrivacy law, risking unnecessary regulatory confusion, the MEP leading the wrangling through the European Parliament has said.…

Not your average Silicon Valley startup kid Analysis HPC storage array maker Panasas has been talking about the new architecture for its scale out, parallel filesystem array, involving separate and scale-out director nodes talking to scale-out storage nodes.…

Stalingrad's erstwhile twin will take the reins from Hull in 2021 Coventry – the city that was flattened by the Luftwaffe and later inspired The Specials' urban decay anthem "Ghost Town" – has been named the UK City of Culture 2021.…

Almost 1,900 jobs 'at risk' in the UK Updated Almost 1,900 front line services personnel at IBM UK are at risk of redundancy and more than 500 of those will leave the company as part of the latest cost purge, multiple insiders have told The Register.…

And Hawk training aircraft as well. Just don't say 'despite Br-' Qatar has agreed its long-awaited order for 24 British-built Eurofighter Typhoon fighter jets and a billion pounds' worth of missiles assembled in the UK to go with them.…

Certificate pinning unpicked Security researchers from the University of Birmingham last week went public about security shortcomings in mobile banking apps that leave millions of users at a heightened risk of hacking.…

That's a lot of money just to blast U2 at it British music ID service Shazam is to be bought by Apple, in a deal reported to be worth £300m ($401m).…

Yes, it's the week in storage Backup, cloud, convergence, GDPR, malware and server SANs are flavours of the storage week as we approach midwinter. These market areas are growing strongly while traditional SANs and hybrid arrays fall back.…

Users report issues establishing secure connection Updated Barclaycard has admitted it is experiencing technical issues, with users complaining they can’t log in online or on their apps.…

Northants comms station architects nicked pic from site that uncovers secrets. Fail! An upgrade to a major US signals intelligence centre in Northamptonshire has been struck by controversy after architects acting on behalf of the US Air Force and the Ministry of Defence nicked a photo of it – from a website devoted to uncovering secret military bases in Britain.…

Disappearing into the on-premises wall Analysis Object storage has failed to to make it big time and is becoming just another way of storing files and a public cloud on-ramp.…

Doing stuff quickly is only scratching the surface What if I were to tell you that we knew all the best practices for software development? That they've been proven by actual industry use over the past 25 years? But that, oddly, these practices are not widely done? Well, if you read these pages, you'd probably say: "Sound about right."…

And you worked so hard to make it secure Developers working in secure development guidelines can still be bitten by upstream bugs in the languages they use.…

Developers may get out of a bind Google seems to be taking a softer stance on its “accessibility crackdown”, pausing the program for a review.…

HP first to patch, expect others For the second time this year, HP has had to patch its laptops after a security researcher found a driver-level keylogger – and this time, other laptop makers might have to check their own products.…

'Technical limitations' hobbled copper-based services Optus has become the second Australian carrier to announce refunds for customers unable to get decent National Broadband Network connections.…

Hey Microsoft, is this your private key? Another day, another credential found wandering without a leash: Microsoft accidentally left a Dynamics 365 TLS certificate and private key where they could leak, and according to the discoverer, took 100 days to fix the bungle.…

Report fast-tracked to Q1 2018 Australia's attorney-general George Brandis won't get his critical infrastructure register kicked off this year: the legislation was introduced late last week, but immediately sent off to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security.…

They earned how much?! For doing what?! It's a reality of life that some people have a lot of money and some very little.…

Eager to cut ISP regulation, the agency shows concern for privacy of comment forgers After supposedly reversing course to assist New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman's investigation into fake comments submitted during the net neutrality comment process, the Federal Communications Commission has doubled back on itself.…

Launch delayed until Tuesday In a first for the company, SpaceX is planning to launch a supply mission to the International Space Station using both a pre-flown first stage rocket and a Dragon capsule that has already been in orbit.…

Drone to tell drones not to drone on with their droning A Japanese company is using a quadcopter drone to help its employees know when to pack it in for the day.…

Janus bug leaves APKs vulnerable to poisoning Researchers say a recently-patched vulnerability in Android could leave users vulnerable to attack from signed apps.…

But it's not yet ready to rethink its professional licensing rules Mats Järlström, a Swedish electronics engineer living in Oregon, who was fined last year for referring to himself as an engineer and doing math without a license has tentatively won the right to use the term in communications with the state.…

And yet again black has become white, and left, right Proving that nothing is what it seems when it comes to mass surveillance, the hard deadline of December 31 for the controversial section 702 spying program has been moved overnight to April 26.…

Winning bids mean prizes Promo Commercial IT vendor Lenovo is celebrating the 25th birthday of its ThinkPad brand with some alluring offers for IT resellers.…

Opening salvos Oracle's long-running legal battle to get what it believes is it's fair share from Google's Android reopened this week – the second time an Appeals Court on Federal Circuit has examined the issue. The first hour overran with a bumpy ride for Google.…

It's a small world after all Animation goliath Disney has added Oracle's co-CEO Safra Catz to its growing list of senior tech exec board members.…

Peers table amendment to switch responsibility for drafting guidance from state to ICO A set of clauses the government slipped into the Data Protection Bill "go beyond" their stated ambition and "create different risks", the information commissioner has said.…

Tight lips at both firms but whispers suggest a brewing bromance +Comment Suppressed hints and whispers suggest that Toshiba and WDC are finally about to agree a deal ending their dispute over Toshiba's right to sell its flash fab joint-venture stake and the way it's being done.…

Mother of all bunfights beckons Exclusive European policy makers are considering the unthinkable and reopening the EU's e-commerce directive, according to multiple sources. UK industries have been invited to contribute their thoughts, on the basis that the directive will be amended in the lifetime of this Parliament.…

There's a lot more to life than being really, really, ridiculously good looking – yep, it's AI An AI researcher has taken time out of his busy schedule to appear in an ad for Yves Saint Laurent's scent for men called Y.…

justice.gov.uk website SSL certificate expires The SSL certificate on the criminal justice and court listing site justice.gov.uk expired yesterday, causing browsers to now warn users that their information is at risk.…

Sandhurst personnel short of vital info on officer trainees who start in January Updated Capita's infamous Recruitment Partnership Project (RPP) for the Ministry of Defence has finally gone live, five years after the first deal was signed – and, surprise, surprise, it is riddled with bugs and missing critical functionality.…

IS Delivery gets the memo now too, 1,000+ heads at risk – sources It wasn't only staff in IBM's Technical Services Support (TSS) unit that this week received the memo urging volunteers to come forward to toss themselves on the redundancy heap, folk in IS Delivery (ISD) got it too.…

Infosec boffins raise flags Some of the well-known weaknesses of SS7 Roaming Networks have been replicated in the next-gen telco protocol, Diameter.…

You can't buy or hire a mindset To everyone with DevOps in their job title (and a quick LinkedIn search turned up 45,597 of you just in my network): folks, you're doing it wrong.…

Suffering residents have an 8-hour wait for 45 minutes of telly A street in Suffolk has been revealed as the slowest area in Blighty for broadband, where residents have to wait a painful eight hours to download just 45 minutes of telly.…

Passed data to loss adjusters, who shared it with insurer client Staff at a firm of loss adjusters and two rogue private investigators the biz hired have been found guilty of data protection offences.…

Don't forget to like, subscribe and send a chisel to my PO box A YouTube stunt imbecile was rescued by firefighters yesterday after cementing his head inside a microwave.…

And it's a whopper Toshiba has joined the ranks of helium-filled disk drive makers with a 14TB drive that is not shingled.…

*Cough* Cobol, .NET *cough* Poorly written code is leaving banks at greater risk of attack and poorly prepared for big changes in the financial sector due to come into effect early next year.…

Qumulo and the tree-walking problem Analysis If you ask your notebook's filesystem how many MP3 files it is storing that haven’t been opened in 30 days, you can find the answer reasonably quickly. But ask an enterprise’s file system when it holds a million files and you have a big problem.…

Whitehall's head stuck in sand about upgrading crap IT The UK border could be left exposed after Brexit as departments have failed to plan for new IT systems, according to a damning report by MPs released today.…

Microsoft updates pointer events for Precision Touch Pads to make scrolling great again Microsoft says it will fix "scroll jank" because Edge needs it and Chrome sorted it ages ago.…

And this was after he avoided losing some fingers On-Call The working week's winding down once again and that means it's time for another edition of On-Call, The Register's Friday tech support tale recounted by readers.…

And gives us the news that god-like machines will take over within a decade Elon Musk has revealed that Tesla, his electric automobile company, is developing its own custom chips for its driverless cars.…

Plans to infuse CloudCenter with workload-hopping tech Stop us if you've heard this one before, but Cisco's just made an acquisition.…

Virtzilla's App Defence and CB's endpoint protection combine for whitelist-fest VMware and Carbon Black have joined forces to enhance each other's security wares.…

Server business screamed ahead in Q3, PCs grew, storage stalled and debt is down Dell's posted third quarter results that suggest it is on track to deliver its first profit since acquiring EMC.…