The Register

If you've got a lazy US$100k to $150k, a piece of history can be yours on Wednesday A replica of Sputnik-1 used to test the real thing's performance goes to auction this week.…

Facebook gives up on share plan that would give Zuck control forever, even if he worked for government Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's personal challenge for 2017 was “to have visited and met people in every state in the US by the end of the year.” He'd already visited 20, so the effort to tick off the other 30 means he's travelled rather a lot in 2017. That Facebook also hired former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe meant that many have observed his travels look like just the sort of thing a political aspirant would do to lay the foundations for a tilt at elected office. The theory was helped by a 2016 proposal to let Zuckerberg retain control of Facebook even if he stepped away from running the company to work in government.…

Heavy-handed tactics during lead up to independence referendum The Spanish government has come under increasing criticism for raiding the offices of the .cat internet registry in the lead-up to a referendum on Catalan's independence.…

Doesn’t stop them trying to put the frighteners, tho DerbyCon Security vendors are inserting language into their products' terms and conditions that attempt to silence critics, folks attending this year's DerbyCon conference were told on Friday.…

Hybrid BSD pact will be replaced by MIT deal for some projects Faced with growing dissatisfaction about licensing requirements for some of its open-source projects, Facebook today said it will move React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js under the MIT license next week.…

...And here's how DerbyCon A sprinkle of code and an understanding of the Windows digital certificate process is all that's needed for a miscreant to sneak malware past Microsoft's application whitelist within a corporate environment.…

See no evil, hear no evil, speak of no evil Analysis No one at Facebook had any idea anyone might use its ad tools to target "Jew haters," said COO Sheryl Sandberg earlier this week.…

Now is a good time to go check your own Amazon settings. It's OK, we'll wait Yet another major company has burned itself by failing to properly secure its cloud storage instances. Yes, it's Verizon.…

Change the name to A-d'oh!-be An absent-minded security staffer just accidentally leaked Adobe's private PGP key onto the internet.…

And who's going to stand up for the Arnold Palmer? In what might well be the most California thing ever, America's golden state has settled a lawsuit against sports drink maker Gatorade for sullying the good name of water.…

And things are looking even worse for the X iFixit’s teardown of the new iPhone 8 confirms that the screen and battery remain relatively replaceable, despite the addition of Qi-compatible wireless charging coils in the unit.…

I don't know which is worse An IoT botnet is making a nuisance of itself online after becoming a conduit for spam distribution.…

Consultation opens on codes of practice for Digital Economy Act The UK government has offered more detail on how public authorities can pass around the data they hold on citizens – a mere five months after the Digital Economy Act passed into law.…

But pen-testers have questioned the figures Security vulnerabilities across the finance sector have increased more than fivefold (418 per cent) in the last four years, according to a study by NCC Group.…

It's getting mighty crowded at MCubed Events In just over a fortnight we'll be gathering some of the brightest minds in AI, ML and data science together – so of course we'd really like to see you there.…

Neighbours, everybody needs good neighbours Microsoft has revealed the location of its flagship UK store – just up the road from Apple's flamboyant, tree-lined Regent Street shop.…

What a carve-up! A kebab shop owner who had sliced off a chunk of his takings and hid it from the taxman has been sent down for 30 months.…

Smart contracts language easy to use and create exploits with An Ethereum-backed contest has revealed a few new tricks for disguising malware as the harmless code the network uses to transfer and manipulate funds: digital smart contracts.…

Inside ITP, Safari's third-party cookie zapper Can the world's biggest tech company tame the Wild West of the digital ad industry as its data slurping becomes ever more intrusive? Since Facebook and Google are essentially colluding with behavioural data collection, and Microsoft has given up the fight for user privacy, few companies have Apple's means or incentive. But for Apple, privacy doesn't hit its bottom line, and might even increase it.…

That could mean 40,000 drivers out of work Uber's application for a new licence in the capital has been rejected, in a shock move by Transport for London today which said the firm is not "fit and proper" to hold a licence.…

All part of CEO Whitman's 'long-term ops and financial blueprint' Hewlett Packard Enterprise is about to release the trap door again with 5,000 employees, or almost 10 per cent of its workforce, expected to fall through it.…

Two other big brands, Sky and BT, also in the naughty corner Beleaguered ISP TalkTalk has once again been named worst ISP in a biannual survey of providers by consumer charity Which?…

Revenues are up, but NoSQL firm still burning through cash Oracle-chaser MongoDB has filed to go public, with its accounts revealing it made a net loss of almost $90m in the year ended January 31, 2017.…

The security week in review Roundup As ever, it's been a doozy of a week for cybersecurity, or lack thereof. The Equifax saga just keeps giving, the SEC admitted it was thoroughly pwned, and Slack doesn't bother to sign its Linux versions. We do spoil you so, Reg readers. And that was only yesterday. Here's the rest of the week's shenanigans we didn't get round to.…

Just install the trial software on 1,000 PCs and I'll be on my way Something for the Weekend, Sir? "I'm sorry, who are you again?"…

In 2018 'MAREA' will move ads and Azure from USA to Spain at 160 terabits per second Construction of Microsoft and Facebook's jointly-funded submarine cable has ended.…

Sysadmin hated making it look so easy, but didn't mind being a hero for saving a payroll run On-Call Can you feel it? The weekend's just over the horizon, so it's time for On-Call, The Register's Friday column in which we share readers' tales of literally incredible jobs that produced improbable feats of sysadminnery.…

Company has trove of 2,000 patents and won't enforce any of them if you licence right Red Hat says it has amassed over 2,000 patents and won't enforce them if the technologies they describe are used in properly-licensed open-source software.…

Surprise – a thumbs up to private info flying over the Pond The much-heralded first review of the EU‑US Privacy Shield Framework that governs the flow of personal information across the Atlantic has concluded – and would you believe it? Representatives of the EU and US think it's doing fine.…

Backup appliance sales go off a cliff, traditional array vendors just aren't growing Sales of purpose-built backup appliances have dropped markedly, with year-on-year dips of 16.2 per cent by revenue and 14.9 per cent by capacity, according to analyst firm IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Purpose-Built Backup Appliance Tracker for 2017's second quarter.…

Bio-boffins urge Red Planet life search to hunt for weird metal Scientists hoping to discover evidence of life on Mars should search for vanadium, a metallic element, according to a paper published in Astrobiology this month.…

Now that all the unpleasantness is behind us, let us code Java SE 9 and Java EE 8 have arrived.…

The Borg assimilates the infrastructure-as-code message Cisco has announced that UCS Director will ascend into the cloud as part of a new infrastructure management service named “Intersight”.…

He's now facing 10 years in prison for act of spite An IT contractor is facing a possible decade behind bars in America for planting a ticking "destructive" time bomb in US military systems.…

US watchdog raps breach-of-contract brats for retracted transacts Defunct mobile app company Pact broke its pact with customers to pay them promised cash incentives, US trade watchdog the FTC said on Thursday.…

DDoS blocker well on its way to nuking Blackbird Tech in patent showdown Cloudflare says its efforts to wipe out a patent troll using prior art have already yielded more than a dozen examples.…

With all their hockey hullabaloo, and that crazy payout too A CA$5.7m IBM contract to update payroll systems for the Canadian government has turned into a CA$185m boondoggle for the Great White North. That's $4.62m and $150m in US currency, respectively.…

Politicians want to know what happened with those fake accounts and advertising dollars They may still view themselves as open purveyors of free speech, but increasingly social media giants are being pulled into the US Senate's investigation of Russian interference in the American presidential elections.…

Image-recognition system posited as reporting tool Mining social networks for every scrap of information about our online lives is now common practice for marketers, academics, government agencies, and so on.…

Kiss your Microsoft email goodbye, for now, if you update Apple's latest version of iOS, namely version 11, struggles or flat-out fails to connect to Microsoft Office and Exchange mailboxes. That's a rather annoying pain for anyone working in a typical Windows-based work environment.…

Or maybe hold money from online transactions. Either way, we're getting our damn cash More details have emerged on the various plans being considered by European governments to force internet giants like Facebook, Google and Amazon to pay more in taxes, including a levy on internet ads and even withholding money for online transactions.…

Builds yanked offline for a week in bug riddle Citrix has temporarily suspended its NetScaler downloads due to an unspecified, and possibly security-related, issue.…

You have to get shafted before you can sue, says court A lawsuit brought against the hacker-ransacked Office of Personnel Management on behalf of US federal employees has been killed.…

EDGAR database a veritable goldmine of financial tips The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has admitted that hackers broke into its corporate filling system last year.…

Some of these buggers are adept at handling the mundane It's the age of the chatbot. The chatbot revolution is coming. Unless it isn't.…

Pair takes aim at $20bn analytics market California-based self-service data biz Trifacta has today launched its Google-friendly data preparation service into public beta.…

Chocolate Factory pushing enterprises' corporate settings right out of the box Google has said it will begin allowing its enterprise customers to purchase pre-configured Android smartphones and other devices that will ship with corporate policies and settings already in place.…

Dictators' favourite spyware is working at the top, says report A surveillance campaign utilising a new variant of FinFisher, the infamous spyware also known as FinSpy, has been tracked by security researchers.…

Intel and Microsoft have been working together to ease the pain Sponsored Windows 10 means a major shift in how IT operations should perceive and manage Windows and their hardware estate. The most significant is the move away from Big Bang version launches in favour of a subscription model with much more frequent updates.…

There is life after the Borg... in social media management platforms apparently Outgoing Cisco executive chairman John Chambers is to join the board of directors on social media management outfit Sprinklr, no doubt the first of many non-exec roles the former Switchzilla boss will hold.…