The Register

What comes in a box, but doesn’t rhyme with tragic squad plant? Research firm IDC has rated and ranked the all-flash array players, placing Pure Storage in the lead of its Marketscape, ahead of Dell, HPE, NetApp and IBM.…

The speech recogniser that coulda Analysis Somewhat harshly, Microsoft's Cortana was pronounced dead this week.…

This is not just cost-cutting, this is M&S cost-cutting Middle-class nirvana Marks & Spencer – the British purveyor of classy date-night grub and frumpy clothes – is slashing its tech supplier base and sending 250 staff to Tata Consultancy Services under an IT outsourcing accord.…

Good luck with that one, internet dwellers A petition calling for "an end to hate speech laws" has passed 10,000 signatures – requiring a formal response from the UK government.…

Also: UK viewers like to take a break for Bake Off and Strictly PornHub's annual deep dive into user stats and searches has revealed that, in 2017, people decided to take the fidget spinner trend to new levels.…

The European regulator cometh I’ve spent many hundreds of hours listening to sales pitches from technology vendors but it’s only during the last year I’ve started to find them rather depressing. That’s been thanks to the arrival in 2018 of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation.…

Responsibilities unclear amid leadership shake-up Responsibility for broadband delivery in the UK has been handed to Margot James following Matt Hancock's promotion to Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport in prime minister Theresa May's reshuffle of the top jobs this week.…

Storage layer issues slow code access Atlassian's code version control system Bitbucket has been suffering an ongoing failure in its storage layer, affecting developers across the globe.…

Details of HMRC deal remain behind closed doors Apple has agreed to cough up £136m in back taxes to HMRC following an "extensive audit" by the tax man.…

Employment Tribunal hears sex discrimination and wrongful dismissal case A sacked former Intel senior sales head has accused the company’s global IoT partner director of perjury – and was told to “not put the spin on” by the judge.…

Don't mention not mentioning the war A pub in County Durham has been rapped by the Advertising Standards Agency after three complaints about its "German Night" advert were upheld.…

ICO: Seriously insecure system allowed unauthorised access to DB Carphone Warehouse has been handed one of the largest ever fines – a whopping £400,000 – from the UK’s data protection watchdog after exposing the details of millions of its customers.…

Austrian activist on funding his privacy NGO and retiring from the front line Interview "The problem we have in the privacy bubble is that we're great at saying how evil and bad everything is... but we're not that great at getting shit done."…

No need to Nikola cables, though The inductive charging standards battle of the past few years is formally over, only weeks after Apple entered the fray. But don't be thinking the wireless charging war is over. Things might be just hotting up.…

When instrumentation goes too far Good developers instrument their applications. Good ops teams monitor everything. This near-fetishisation of telemetry has been extended to DevOps, where it now risks becoming something of a problem.…

Exoplanets are neat and uniform. In our 'hood Jupiter and Saturn messed things up Our solar system may be a cosmic misfit, say astroboffins who've analysed systems where we've spotted exoplanets.…

Re-identification of data will not be a crime, as long as you warn the authorities The United Kingdom has revealed amendments to its Data Protection Bill to de-criminalise research into whether anonymised data sets are sufficiently anonymous.…

What was second prize? We think we'd rather have that Winners of a security quiz staged by Taiwan's Criminal Investigation Bureau may be wondering why they tried so hard to do well after some of the USB drives handed out as prizes turned out to be wretched hives of malware and villainy.…

13 explosively armed but cobbled-together drones swarmed airbase The Russian Defense Ministry has reported that its forces in Syria have been attacked by a swarm of GPS-guided drones carrying improvised explosives.…

5,000 officials blocked from accessing billion-plus-records Aadhaar systen The government authority in charge of India's billion-records-and-counting Aadhaar biometric identity database, the Unique Identity Authority of India (UIDAI), has suspended 5,000 officials from accessing the system.…

POWER CPU patches available now or next week, AIX and i OS fixes are more than a month off IBM’s started to release its own patches for the Meltdown mess and the Spectre SNAFU, which it’s half-confirmed impact its hardware and operating systems, but won’t have a complete fix until mid-February.…

It's getting hard to deny all the new and sluggish benchmarks Analysis After spending last week insisting that the performance impact of fixing the Meltdown and Spectre CPU vulnerabilities "should not be significant," Intel on Tuesday tried to maintain that stance even as it acknowledged SYSmark tests assessing post-patch slowdowns ranging from two per cent to 14 per cent.…

Secrets dealer may be nearing end of asylum stay, on humane grounds The Ecuadorian government has reportedly sought a plan to end Julian Assange's world's longest couch surfing stint record attempt at its London embassy.…

Governments hate encrypted chat tools on social media, so brace for outrage in 3 ... 2 ... Facebook has responded to governments' criticism of cryptography by giving the world an open source encrypted group chat tool.…

You're fondling our kernel wrong, grumbles Microsoft Microsoft's workaround to protect Windows computers from the Intel processor security flaw dubbed Meltdown has revealed the rootkit-like nature of modern security tools.…

Sigh, 2018. Sigh Camera film relic Kodak is trying to reinvent itself in the most 2018 way possible: by launching its own cryptocurrency.…

It's 2018 and a Word doc can still pwn your Windows computer Patch Tuesday In case you've been hiding under a rock for the entirety of this new year (and we don't blame you if you have) there are a handful of major security flaws that have been dominating the news, and feature prominently in this month's Patch Tuesday update load.…

Govt also worried about IPv6's impact on online security The US Department of Commerce (DoC) and Department of Homeland Security have put out a draft cybersecurity report that recommends, among other things, that the American government fund a public awareness campaign on IoT security, and make cybersecurity a compulsory part of future engineering degrees.…

Careless cloud customers neglect patch, allowing crypto miners to move in An Oracle WebLogic vulnerability fixed in October last year is being exploited on unpatched machines to mine Monero, a cryptocurrency, and other lesser-known imaginary coins.…

Where there's a will, there's a Wray FBI Director Christopher Wray has picked up where he left off last year with a new call for backdoors in encryption exclusively for law enforcement.…

Is there anything Senators won't try to turn into votes? The number of US senators supporting an effort to overturn the repeal of America net neutrality rules has jumped to 40, setting up a Congressional vote on the issue in early spring.…

There's always a bigger phish Backup and security biz Barracuda made the largest profit it has seen in more than three and a half years in its third fiscal 2018 quarter, its last as a public company.…

ERP giant overstated cloudy SuccessFactor's success SAP has revealed it is working on a new on-premises human capital management system, admitting that many of its customers are still not ready for the cloud.…

The future is cloudy... Greg Hughes has been hired as head honcho at the private equity-owned storage spin-off from Symantec, Veritas.…

Jesus, you're not relying on government tech, are you? MPs have slammed government's approach of touting tech "as its magic solution to customs post Brexit" in a Parliamentary debate.…

BB's QNX already used by Ford, Apple and Aptiv Chinese web search emperor Baidu is to join forces with deposed king of phones BlackBerry, adding its embedded QNX operating system to the Chinese firm's open-source self-driving platform.…

Don't worry, Chipzilla is 'working tirelessly' to resolve the issue Intel's boss has finally admitted software fixes to address the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities in most modern CPUs will incur a performance hit.…

Oracle missed off yearly survey, staffer claims 'malicious bias' The latest Stack Overflow developer survey has invoked ire from Oracle fans after failing to include Big Red in its list of database technologies.…

Bumps out new array and brags about quarterly results The number-two disk drive supplier is starting 2018 at a gallop with a dense, ClusterStor-like array, a raft of consumer drives at CES and upgraded estimates for its first-quarter results.…

Private equity owner waves goodbye Japanese multinational NEC has splashed £475m on UK-based IT provider Northgate Public Services.…

It's a mystery how they found out. Call Sherlock A Sky subscriber who illegally streamed a pay-per-view boxing match to Facebook has copped a plea with the broadcaster.…

How the era's films keep their enduring charm ... 2017 saw two major cinematic milestones of different extremes. One was the mega release of Blade Runner 2049, the originally unplanned sequel to, yes, Blade Runner. The other was the more overlooked anniversary of the vastly smaller Tron.…

*Gulp* Another year, another round of Windows 10 updates – most likely 1803 in March, and 1809 in September or thereabouts.…

Faster access, data management and HCI Analysis All the main storage system players face three large challenges in 2018 – new technologies providing faster data access, data management suppliers aiming to wrap a commoditising abstraction layer around them, and public cloud and public cloud-like vertical stack suppliers aiming to make them irrelevant.…

Google.com URLs for stories published elsewhere are on the way out Google’s come up with a way to kick itself out of URLs served to mobile devices from its cache, an effort that will mean pages from around the web no longer score an unwanted google.com address.…

If at first you don't succeed, try (WEP) try (WPA) try (WPA2)... Wi-Fi security should become a bit less laughable with the pending introduction of the WPA3 protocol this year.…

RHEL servers croaking, reporting in Excel, customer docs in signoff limbo IBM has scrambled to fix the Meltdown and Spectre bugs, but has struggled to develop processes, reporting tools or reliable patches to get the job done for itself or its clients.…

Database giant happy as Larry that copyright infringement ruling allowed to stand, though A US appeals court has knocked $50m off Oracle's $124m winnings in its 2016 copyright case against Rimini Street.…

Delivery promised some time in 2018, as Big Red says Solaris updates prove it can do continuous integration Much of the world tunes out between Christmas and New Year, and The Register shuts down. But Oracle decided that was the perfect time to reveal a little more about the future of its Solaris operating system.…

Personal assistant that needed human help gets the boot Facebook is axing M, the wobbly digital personal assistant tacked onto its Messenger chat app.…