The Register

Big Blue is all for rules cracking down on ads, social media Add IBM to the list of tech companies putting their support behind America's Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA).…

Memcache attacks are going to be this year's thing What's purported to be the world's largest distributed denial of service attack to date – measuring 1.35Tbps – knocked GitHub offline for a few minutes yesterday.…

Details of secretive direction have been under wraps for years The government has finally made public a secretive direction that requires snoop oversight bodies to monitor spies’ potential participation in criminality.…

Integral part of VxRack FLEX hyperconverged kit henceforth Dell will only sell its hugely scalable ScaleIO virtual SAN software product inside its VxRAck FLEX hyperconverged system from now on – the software-only version has been canned.…

It's OK, it was only partial driving licence information Embattled credit-reporting company Equifax has done some data crunching and discovered another 2.4 million people that had their information slurped by hackers.…

Tectonic shifts in CSPs and hyperscalar buying Server shipments boomed in 2017's fourth quarter, with total revenues bouncing 26.4 per cent on the prior year and unit sales stepping up 11 per cent. Hyperscalar and cloud service provider customer buying patterns are causing tectonic shifts in the market.…

Break 'em up, nothing else works Google's vertical search tormentors in Europe have called for Alphabet's cash cow to be broken up, arguing that Google's solution hasn't improved competition.…

The China Syndrome Intel is discussing selling 3D NAND wafers to China's Tsinghua Unigroup, the same company US government barred from buying Intel's flash partner Micron in 2015.…

UK-made bird forms first of 5-strong planned constellation The RAF has acquired a satellite that can beam live video footage from space, the head of the air force told an industry gathering in Surrey today.…

Or customers can... walk to a new provider without penalty Ofcom is tightening the screws – sort of – on broadband providers that play fast and loose with speed promises by imposing a deadline to meet service obligations or allow customers to walk away without a penalty.…

Thames Valley Police a hive of activity after the a-pollen crime The cops have been called in to investigate a major bee heist after 40 hives were reported stolen from an Oxfordshire farm.…

It's a massacre on the wrist Analysis Did you notice anything else missing from Mobile World Congress this year? Apart from any interesting phones?…

Considerable embiggenment at dust cleaner firm British sucker-tech biz Dyson’s pivot to electric cars continues as the company announced today that it is creating 300 new jobs in its ‘leccy vehicle division.…

Duller than a Dull Thing Comment No, dear reader. You didn't forget to set the alarm, and you haven't just slept through Mobile World Congress. If 2018 feels different, it may be because the phone industry's biggest annual get-together failed to produce any interesting new phones.…

Get the data out of memory faster Analysis Getting data into and out of memory is like getting books into and out of bookshelves. The more books you can hold at once, the faster you can do the job. Someone able to hold only one book at a time is going to be far slower than another person capable of holding a stack of eight at a time or, with high-bandwidth memory (HBM) in mind, 1,024.…

Software developers Kant duck their responsibilities any more This March I'll be co-running the first ethics track for the tech conference QCon London. We've had so much enthusiasm that QCon New York has added ethics too (Americans are notoriously behind the curve).…

Rivalries intensify in what is now a two-horse race Analysis Both Scality and Cloudian have received fresh funding as they race towards an IPO, acquisition or startup trash can – the three outcomes of the object storage endgame.…

The number of successful UK spinouts is waning The number of university spinouts is falling since the glory days of the late 1990s onwards.…

And there's worse to come between now and 2022 for all client devices bar typoslabs Desktop PC shipments dipped below 100 million in 2017 and there's worse to come across the personal computing device market according to analyst firm IDC.…

And no, you're not supposed to be able to do that Vid The Spectre design flaws in modern CPUs can be exploited to punch holes through the walls of Intel's SGX secure environments, researchers claim.…

CFO's biggest hassle is keeping up with sales commissions now that it's back in black Salesforce has reported a cracking quarter and financial year, but also revealed growth is slowing.…

Council of Europe and trade bosses have had enough of King Battistelli Pressure is continuing to build on the European Patent Office (EPO) over its treatment of staff and continued refusal to accept the results of an independent tribunal.…

And loads up the migration cannon to aim at VMware Microsoft's revealed a plan to make Ubuntu 18.04 a "first-class" guest under Hyper-V.…

Probably-Russian Fancy Bear team fingered for attack The German Interior ministry has confirmed that it has identified a serious attack against its servers, amidst reports that the culprits were the Russian APT28 – aka Fancy Bear – hacking group.…

Harvard bods warn: if you want to avoid a big outage, use more than one DNS provider The world's top eight DNS providers now control 59 per cent of name resolution for the biggest Websites - and that puts the Web at risk, according to a group of Harvard University researchers.…

World's largest aircraft goes for a very gentle trundle The world's largest aircraft, designed to one day fling rockets into space, has tested out its taxiing capabilities at the Mojave Air and Space Port in New Mexico.…

Allegations aren't just grim, they're Uber-bad A former Google engineer is suing the US advertising giant after undergoing what she says was years of sexual harassment and retaliation from coworkers.…

And they're way too loud ... unless dark matter is involved A group of US researchers working at a remote site in north-west Australia have identified signals from the oldest stars ever observed, born roughly 180 million years after the Big Bang.…

Straight Path veered off promises of 5G coverage Verizon's $3.1bn Straight Path gobble got a little more expensive this week, thanks to a $614m fine dished out by America's broadband watchdog, the Federal Communications Commission.…

Trustico, DigiCert come to blows as browsers prepare to snub Symantec-brand SSL Customers of HTTPS certificate reseller Trustico are reeling after being told their website security certs – as many as 23,000 – will be rendered useless within the next 24 hours.…

Chocolate fac crack a whack at Slack pack with yak yak stack Google has moved its Slack rival out of beta and into general availability.…

It's a dog's dinner that could cripple websites Analysis The US House of Representatives has overwhelmingly passed a bill aimed at tackling online sex traffickers, but which critics warn will have little effect on curbing the vile trade and could instead undermine free speech on the internet.…

US tech hotbed steps up with strictest traffic protections yet The US state of Washington is on the verge of passing a sweeping new set of net neutrality safeguards that would apply to all carriers within its borders.…

We report, you don't decide you can distribute, telly giant asserts in NY appeals court A US appeals court has backed Fox News in the broadcaster's copyright-infringement battle against online telly streamer TVEyes.…

NHS Digital boss suggests public concern has caused 'lack of balanced debate' The NHS has said it will continue sharing data with the Home Office for immigration enforcement, despite MPs calling for the government to put an immediate stop to the transfer.…

But disk shipped 10X more exabytes than flash Customer spending on SSDs finally ruled the storage roost in 2017 but vendors still shipped more than ten times as much disk capacity as flash.…

Privacy International cross-examine GCHQ's star witness over section 94 directions Privacy International has slammed the UK's spy agencies for failing to keep a proper paper trail over what data telcos were asked to provide under snooping laws, following its first ever cross-examination of a GCHQ witness.…

The aliens are coming! Just add water... Maybe Demonstrating that scientists can extrapolate with the best of them, researchers have speculated that long dormant microbes on the Red Planet might reawaken with the introduction of liquid water.…

Annual report reveals boost in complaints, breach notifications The Irish Data Protection Commissioner received 79 per cent more complaints last year than in 2016, while data breach notifications rose 26 per cent.…

Claw back your stuff without paying asshat for pricey cracker White hats have released a free decryption tool for GandCrab ransomware, preventing the nasty spreaders of the DIY malware from asking their victims for money.…

The Streisand effect: Diva double-duplicates dead dog In the ultimate barking mad diva act, Barbara Streisand has revealed she cloned her beloved dead dog Samantha, creating two more replicant canines.…

High Court hears hair-raising claim from ads behemoth Google is claiming that journalistic exemptions from data protection laws should apply to its search results, in the first ever trial of the so-called Right To Be Forgotten in the High Court of England and Wales.…

Cut red tape to revive stalling e-cig revolution, medics tell MPs Experts told Parliament that a post-Brexit Britain should think about axing the most draconian EU-wide e-cigarette regulations to encourage people to quit smoking tobacco.…

Business as we know it almost certain to be broken up Updated Maplin has slipped into administration after PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PWC) failed to find a buyer for the hard-pressed gadget emporium.…

Handy with a blood draw? Medics' jobs up for grabs Faulty Apple units can now be taken in for repair, with Cupertino having reportedly opened a care service dedicated to fixing staff.…

Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink. Or fuel a rocket. Yet... Boffins at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center have announced that water on the Moon may be actually be more widespread over the surface than first thought, and less prone to moving about.…

Earlybird ticket offer due to fall off perch tonight You’ve got just hours left to save upto £100s on up to four days of the best of DevOps, Continuous Delivery, serverless, microservices and containers.…

That 49,000-vehicle fleet won't be going green any time soon Royal Mail considered shifting its fleet of small vans in London to electric vehicles but concluded that doing so would lead to a power meltdown at its central hub in the capital.…

They're bots, not freakin' Skynet It’s almost impossible to talk about Agile software development without mentioning bots. If you think that's a bit of a stretch, maybe try and talk about DevOps without some sort of collaboration tool. Then realise that the two are beautifully linked.…

Last time Big Blue tried to bin TLS 1.0 and 1.1 it turned them back on two days later IBM's cloud faces a big test this week: turning something off without botching the job.…