The Register

Buy now! Buy now! Buy now! Or commit to the firm for a decade Life is about to get a lot more expensive for some customers of Fasthosts with domain renewal price hikes as high as 160 per cent coming into effect late next month – unless of course they buy early.…

Security, compatibility, control... we enter another world of pain I have a confession: I've fallen out of love with Bring Your Own Device.…

Larry Ellison is keen on ‘Anything we can possibly do to reduce human intervention’ OPENWORLD 2017 Oracle has kicked off its annual OpenWorld conference with a pledge to automate in the company's “autonomous” database, plus plenty of snark directed at Amazon Web Services.…

US financial watchdog drags four into court A US SanDisk manager and his family have been accused of insider trading after profiting from the biz's acquisition of Fusion-io.…

Cloudflare Workers offered to customize content Bit caching biz Cloudflare on Friday teased website publishers with the prospect of being able to run JavaScript at the edge of its content delivery network, a capability that promises performance, security, and reliability improvements.…

It could hint at the possibilities of life on other planets early on in their development Scientists claim to have found the oldest evidence of life on Earth – contained in Canadian rocks 3.95 billion years ago, when our planet had no oxygen and was being pelted by asteroids.…

Sorenson dinged after cockup blocked emergency calls A US telco will cough up $3m after a web domain screwup caused it to drop potentially emergency and other essential video calls from deaf and hearing-impaired people.…

By 2024. Possibly. SpaceX isn't very good at deadlines Elon Musk thinks he can get humans onto Mars within the next seven years. On Friday, he told the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Adelaide, Australia, how he intends to do it.…

Senate draft law finds careful balance, opens doors to mass production A law proposed in the US Senate would pave the way for hundreds of thousands of autonomous vehicles on America's streets in the next few years.…

Boffins bash stale Stack Overflow fixes and lazy developers Relying on search engines to find answers to coding problems has become so common that two years ago it was suggested computer programming be renamed "googling Stack Overflow," in reference to the oft-visited coding community website.…

Iceball K2 is already active despite being far from the Sun The Hubble Space Telescope has snapped a picture of the farthest-away inbound comet, at a whopping 1.5 billion miles from Earth.…

Cutting-edge tattoo checks your blood sugar, still disappoints your mother Researchers at Harvard and MIT have developed a subdermal ink capable of monitoring vitals such as hydration and blood sugar.…

But Ajit Pai still expected to clear US Senate hurdle next week For a man who repeatedly criticized his predecessor at the Federal Communications Commission for dragging the US watchdog in a bi-partisan direction, in his eight months as FCC chairman Ajit Pai has done more than anyone to infect it with Washington politics.…

Advises US citizens to avoid Castroland The US State Department on Friday announced that it is pulling all non-essential staff and their families out of its embassy in Cuba following reports of a secret weapon being deployed against employees there.…

Oh, and there's no such thing as a 'gun tree' Gumtree has taken ownership of the Guntree web domain after dot-UK registry Nominet ruled that the classified ads webite for guns and ammunition was similar enough to Gumtree to constitute an “abusive registration”.…

Good Q2 news for Cisco, NetApp and a few others. Yep, just them IDC's latest Worldwide Quarterly Converged Systems Tracker shows a flight to the top vendors, away from HPE, Hitachi and the Others' category, with the hyperconverged sector being the only growth area.…

'Technology still has a long way to go' Karma no longer seems to be the main factor in improving gender diversity at Microsoft, with CEO Microsoft Satya Nadella saying the compensation of the senior team is now anchored to making progress on the issue.…

Fully up to date for OS and apps, but there's a hidden hack threat Pre-boot software on Macs is often outdated, leaving Apple fans at a greater risk of malware attack as a result, according to new research.…

You'll still have your own room A disturbance was noted in the reselling channel today when the parent of Bytes UK slurped rival Microsoft licensing solution partner Phoenix Software for £35.9m.…

You've heard of wardriving – say hello to screwdriving Security researchers have figured out how to locate and exploit smart adult toys.…

Network failure forces punters' websites offline The domain name server "OpenSRS" crashed and burned during the dead of night following a network failure, taking down scores of customers' portals with it. Normal service has yet to resume.…

Golly Tosh, so much flash biz dosh Analysis The Bain consortium buying Toshiba's flash memory business includes Toshiba itself and is setting up "Pangea" to hold its bought assets. Yes, named for a super-continent that split apart 175 million years ago – not a good augury.…

Big brains, big questions There’s just over a week left till we open the doors at MCubed, our machine learning, AI and analytics extravaganza, and if you want to sure of getting in, act now as tickets are getting scarce.…

Pot legalisation prep under way in maple syrup land Canada is preparing to remove drunk canoeing as an impaired driving offence, ahead of its plans to legalize marijuana.…

F-f-f-f-forty per cent... Former EDS employees at DXC Technologies that look set to lose the final salary pension plan will need to funnel 40 per cent of monthly earnings into the replacement scheme to maintain their current retirement pot.…

There may be trouble ahead – but you can help If you want to sleep rough to raise money to tackle youth homelessness, you’ve got till midnight today (29/9/2017) to register for Byte Night.…

Let a multi-limbed Meccano monster touch me? I'm crushed Something for the Weekend, Sir? The future is a six-handed massage.…

The good, the bad and the weird from this week Roundup As ever, it has been a busy week on the security front with good news, some very bad reports, corporate failings all round and troubling signs ahead for those worried about government intrusion in the online world.…

All-night vigil discovered the dirty deeds behind constant re-boots On-Call If it's Friday - and absent some weird time/space slippage we're pretty sure that's the case – that means it is time for another instalment of On-Call, The Register's Friday column in which readers recount their stories of the ups and downs of doing tech support.…

And is this the beginning of the end for System Center? Ignite What’s new for Azure at Microsoft Ignite? The key point is not so much the list of new features, but the direction the company is taking with its cloud platform, which is to make it pervasive even for customers working mainly on premises.…

'Unable to process planning applications and land searches' A ransomware assault late last month is continuing to affect the operations of Copeland Borough Council in the northwest of England.…

Streams of gas slammed into cloud of baffling cosmic material – new theory The largest and oldest supermassive black holes were created from a giant clump of dark matter and gas after the Big Bang, according to a supercomputer simulation.…

Liberal MPs say FTTN is fine, the rest call for FTTP or FTTC from now on Australia's Joint Standing Committee on the National Broadband Network has released its first report [PDF] of the new Parliament, with a majority of members urging that the rest of the network be built with either fibre-to-the-curb or fibre-to-the-premises instead of fibre-to-the-node.…

Computerized consort goes back to the shop for repairs NSFW In a public showing of Samantha, a sex doll with built-in computing power to make her more realistic, the love droid suffered a terrible fate.…

Financial regulator worries about speculative investments going bad, fraud and crime South Korea has banned initial coin offerings (ICOs), the practice of taking cash for Blockchain-powered services.…

Startup slurped to provide allen-keying-as-a-service IKEA's finally acknowledged what plenty of us have learned the hard way: it's stuff can be so wretchedly frustrating to assemble that outsourcing the job is sometimes the kindest and fastest option.…

Not just for Inception fans: this is how you cloudify tricky-to-migrate workloads In late August 2017 THe Reg's virtualization desk learned that Google was working hard to make KVM better at nested virtualization. And now we know why, as the advertising giant's cloud has just revealed a nested virtualization beta.…

1.8 refurbishment is the third one this year Kubernetes, the popular open-source software for managing containerized applications, is scheduled for a feature infusion on Thursday, in accordance with its bump to version 1.8.…

What's 'Kerr-ching!' in Russian? Like Facebook before it, Twitter has acknowledged that, during the US presidential elections, it collected hundreds of thousands of dollars for ads supporting Russian media messaging, and that it has identified Twitter accounts tied to Facebook profiles known for promoting pro-Russia views.…

Policy hastily cobbled together using woolly advice, lacked clear objectives, measurements Australia's National Audit Office has published a rather unflattering assessment of prime minister Malcolm Turnbull's signature policy, the “National Innovation and Science Agenda”.…

ICANN delays KSK rollover after new data derails plans A multi-year effort to update the internet's overall security has been put on hold just days before it was due to be introduced, over fears that as many as 60 million people could be forced offline.…

Transcript reveals leaker's motivations Reality Winner smuggled a top-secret NSA dossier out of her office at a US government IT contractor by hiding it in her pantyhose, she told special agents.…

Attempt to lure more diverse workers backfires spectacularly In its effort to attract a more diverse workforce, Amazon is sending mixed messages.…

But what of criticism of FCC boss over hurricanes? Updated FCC boss Ajit Pai has publicly criticized Apple for not turning on the FM radio receivers in every iPhone – calling it a public safety issue.…

How about you try winning an election first, folks The Democratic party has asked for an amazingly naive ambitious $40bn investment in broadband internet for broke low-income Americans out in the sticks.…

Overseas cash piles get 'once-in-a-generation' break – again US President Donald Trump has vowed to cut corporations some slack in the form of a tax break that may give Silicon Valley something to celebrate.…

On-premises to Google Cloud platform 2-way interchange speedway Scale Computing has replicated its HC3 hyper-converged platform in Google's cloud and provided app and data interchange between the on-premises and public cloud worlds in its very own data fabric.…

Announces licensing scheme for smartphone features Freed of making phones, BlackBerry continues to "Dolby-ise" its brand, and again recorded a slim profit for the most recent financial quarter.…

Another day, another shot fired at American e-megacorps The EU Commission has fired a shot across Facebook and Twitter's bows, having issued a proclamation decreeing that "social media platforms" must do more to remove "illegal content inciting hatred, violence and terrorism online".…

CTO: Engineers spend half their time on this, customers need educating on the ingredient list Cloudera has become the latest company to offer up a set of tools to unify data management, with its SDX framework, which it describes as the platform's "secret sauce".…