The Register

Good intentions dashed by weary admin's ad hoc Wi-Fi, hotel's wack-ass data storage Nearly half of global organisations fail to comply with the security standards laid out by the Payment Cards Industry (PCI) to ensure customer payment data is protected, according to a new report.…

New web crawler from TSignal doesn't care who you are Developers are working on a privacy-focused search engine that goes beyond the likes of DuckDuckGo.…

Crap software may be caused by poor requirements and test case design Study Keeping up with time pressures is hard enough if you are in the software development game. Delivering quickly while meeting requirements and maintaining quality has never been easy.…

Project wants to make ISPs accountable for cybercrime A new project aims to mitigate cybercrime by making it in the economic and business interests of ISPs and telcos to clean up the internet.…

CEO Milligan has reshaped firm upwards and outwards Analysis Western Digital Corporation under CEO Steve Milligan's rule is becoming an aggressively expanding chips, disks, systems and cloud storage business. It's trying to buy Toshiba's flash foundry joint-venture interest and has just announced it's buying storage array-maker Tegile and personal cloud storage provider Upthere. What is Milligan up to?…

But if it's genuinely anonymised, heck, go crazy The world – well, Europe at least – is going potty about the impending new General Data Protection Regulation. If I signed up to every data protection seminar invitation in my inbox I'd have no hours left in the day to work... or drink or sleep, for that matter. So it's easy to forget that data protection legislation has existed for donkeys' years already – as hinted at by the existence of legislation such as the UK's Data Protection Act 1984. Yes, GDPR has some interesting new stuff in it, but the core principles of giving legal protection to people's Personally Identifiable Information (PII) have existed for some considerable time already.…

Industry fears more pie in face over new It film The imminent release of a new film adaptation of Stephen King's horror novel It has caused upset in the world of professional clowning.…

Now just $169 if you're willing to lose the hi-tech look Nest has launched a low-cost version of its famous smart thermostat aimed at the mid-market and priced at $169.…

AV company forces litigator to pay to drop its own case Security house Kaspersky Lab scored an impressive legal win that saw it not only beat a patent troll, but actually collect money from the plaintiff in the process.…

Says biggest surprise is lack of surprises, and PCs won't surprise again VMWORLD 2017 Michael Dell has declared himself better-than-satisfied with the performance of Dell Technologies, a week out from the first anniversary of the acquisition of EMC.…

IoT security helper is vulnerable to attacks by malicious peers ARM's "mbed TLS" software can be tricked into an authentication bypass and needs a patch.…

Due to expire in 2017, subsidy gets two-year reprieve It's not quite a “robot tax”, but South Korea appears to be sufficiently worried about the impact of automation on its workforce to consider withdrawing tax breaks for manufacturers that buy “robots”.…

VMs across US, Europe and Asia all unable to “connect to backends” Google Cloud's load balancers have suffered a lengthy connectivity problem.…

This could be how Justin Bieber's bare butt popped out Instagram is blaming a bug in its API for the partial breach of verified users' accounts.…

LOGO owners on alert Siemens has plugged a man-in-the-middle vulnerability in its LOGO!8 BM FS-05 industrial automation hardware – but a second remains unpatched.…

At least it doesn't require a bleeding-edge PC and costly goggles Google on Tuesday released a preview of its augmented reality toolkit, although the company acknowledged that only a small portion of Android's installed base will be able to use the software.…

Ex-cop in child abuse case approaching 2 years in the clink The US government is fighting to keep a former police officer in prison because he claims not to be able to remember the code to decrypt two hard drives under investigation.…

Fast method gives researchers more time to answer bigger questions about our Universe A group of physicists has trained an artificial neural network to analyze gravitational lensing images ten million times faster than normal computational methods.…

Welcome to the new America at the New America Foundation The firing of a high-profile academic has spun a spotlight onto one of the public policy world's best-known dirty secrets: Google's use of donations to stymie criticism of its business.…

Can't we all just be Uber-alles? A Florida cloud computing provider named Uber Operations is suing its dial-a-ride namesake for trademark infringement.…

Amazon, Microsoft agree to complete each other Analysis To encourage people to demand more of their software-based assistants, Amazon and Microsoft plan to link their respective voice-based helpers – Alexa and Cortana – so they can talk to one another.…

Gazer opens Windows onto diplomatic secrets A highly advanced piece of malware, dubbed Gazer, has been found in embassies and consulates across Eastern Europe.…

Rival hyperconverged vendor Maxta says someone pinched its pins and silenced its stand Scandal has struck VMworld 2017 this week: hyperconverged software vendor Maxta says someone stole marketing material in which it was less than kind to Nutanix.…

But, but, but they gave them to us for free, says tech boss The woman responsible for a catastrophic decision to equip New York police officers with Windows smartphones, all of which are now being dumped, has doubled-down on her idiocy.…

L-ion kings to cough up profits – it's the circuit, er, circle of life Three battery manufacturers agreed to settle a lawsuit that claimed they conspired to fix the price of lithium-ion battery cells for more than a decade.…

Wherever VMware's customers go, we shall also go Veeam now backs up VMware Cloud data on Amazon Web Services (AWS).…

Many duplicates in River City-rivalling data spill A spambot operation has leaked 711 million email addresses in a massive data breach.…

Sounds smelly – but it's a signpost to what they're hoping to achieve Comment China has claimed it is developing a gas turbine-powered long-range delivery drone that can carry loads of up to 200kg.…

Or stop using Internet Explorer 11, of course If Internet Explorer 11 users exist, they may have noticed missing graphics in web apps. Now Microsoft has some free, helpful advice that might restore them: disable your antivirus.…

Show the board some graphs, boards love graphs Every year in living memory I’ve sat in the obligatory “how to complete your annual goals in the HR system” meeting, and each time I’ve been told: make sure you make your objectives “SMART” – Specific, Measurable, Achievable and so on.…

Media and entertainment businesses get free object storage offer Object storage software shipper Caringo is offering free 100TB licences to media and entertainment companies.…

Hitchin man tried to have company-issued laptop taken off store's domain A former Harrods IT worker has pleaded guilty to a charge under the Computer Misuse Act of trying to get a computer repair shop to take his company-issued laptop off the Harrods domain.…

Anonymous trolls censured force's management The Police Service of Northern Ireland reportedly hired a private cybersecurity firm to unmask anonymous Twitter accounts of officers and staff allegedly involved in online racist abuse.…

Lights the afterburners with NVMe flash and Optane drives, plus VM direct storage access Scale Computing has run lab tests showing hyperconverged virtual machine IO performance using NVM express (NVMe), achieving mean IO latencies as low as 20μs delivered to a guest virtual machine.…

Trickbot variant adds Coinbase exchange to monitored sites Researchers have discovered a new variant of banking trojan that targets cryptocurrency wallets instead of traditional accounts.…

Why Google's gift of TensorFlow is not what it seems Machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) are extraordinarily hard to pull off in the real world, so of course the solution must be open source. From Google’s TensorFlow to Microsoft’s Cognitive Toolkit, the world is awash in open source ML/AI code... none of which seems to be solving the gaping void between AI hype and production deployment reality. By Gartner’s estimates a mere 15 per cent of organisations actually get into production with ML/AI.…

Hard drive crushed ahead of exhibition opening A hard drive containing the unfinished books of Terry Pratchett has been destroyed by a steamroller, in fulfilment of the late author's last wishes.…

Submits to regulators with a comfy three hours to spare About three hours before the deadline on a 60-day compliance period, Google has submitted its plans for meeting a European Union antitrust order.…

Just toss it on the massive money pile Apple chief exec Tim Cook has been handed $89m (£69m) in shares after exceeding his performance target.…

Norks planning more raids to cover sanction losses, say intel boffins North Korea has emerged as the prime suspect in recent Bitcoin exchange hacks in South Korea, with threat intel experts warning that more attacks on digital currency services and even mainstream banks are likely to follow.…

Ad watchdog: Correct, you're not. *slap* "World leaders in 100 per cent electric since 2010," Nissan boasted about itself in a recent advert. But does that mean the world leader (as in number one) or a world leader (nowhere near number one)? According to Nissan, it's the latter.…

Smelly computers, SDDC, blockchain, all the other buzzwords (and mic noise)

Something may happen soon™ Some details have leaked about the bid consortium negotiating to buy Toshiba's interest in the flash foundry joint-venture it owns with WDC.…

Local ISP claims it's seen ABBA-solutley horrific consultation documents Sweden may be about to adopt increased surveillance of the internet, with new proposals about data retention and network rules leaked to local ISP Bahnhof.…

Ransomeware asked for 50+ Bitcoin, but analysts say files can't be decrypted anyway The ransomware that infected computers at the National Health Service's Lanarkshire outpost, causing an outage that lasted most of the weekend, has been tagged as a ransomware that demanded 53 Bitcoin for files to be decrypted.…

The Doctor will see you now to re-program your St Jude implant It's probably the most crucial patch of the year: Abbott Laboratories' reworked firmware for its St Jude pacemakers has won Food and Drug Administration approval to ship.…

HPC and Big Data types get one too, and you're all getting non-disruptive upgrades soon VMWORLD 2017 VMware's created a special cut of vSphere just for the Chinese market, and another for scale-out applications.…

So long as you stay silent and put it on a sign you're clever and not criminal At a time when far-right websites are being denied domain names, debate about the limits of free speech may never have been more fierce. And now an Australian court has weighed in with a decision that it is okay to call the nation's former Prime Minister Tony Abbott a c*nt.…

Apparently some of you want to cuddle containers VMWORLD 2017 Google, VMware and Pivotal have teamed to let you run Kubernetes in the safety of your own data centre.…

What's a good day look like, wonders new CEO Khosrowshahi Uber's new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi better have his caffeine on a drip, because a brand-new crisis has just landed in his lap: a US investigation into whether managers have breached foreign bribery laws.…