The Register

Watt's all this about cyberspy threat leaks... Analysts weigh in Analysis The energy sector across multiple Western countries is under intensified assault by hackers. Security experts warn that industrial systems are wide open to potential exploit once hackers secure a foothold, the most difficult part of the hacking process, using targeted phishing or similar tactics.…

'Staff in uproar' as relocation suddenly on the cards Exclusive Virgin Media is to consider shuttering more than one-third of its sites across the UK amid a review of its multi-million pound annual spend on facilities, according to a letter to staff seen by The Register.…

Forget Brexit, lets use grease and dead things to heal a gaping political chasm A turf war has broken out among the scribes at Vulture Towers North over the fried delicacies that should and should not be included in the world famous Full English gut buster Breakfast.…

Update 1 for v. 6.5 gets 90% of the way to heaven on the client VMware's popped out the first update to vSphere 6.5 and it's unusually interesting for this sort of minor release.…

Life lesson: don't display messages on screens if you don't know who'll see it! On-Call The end of the week is nigh and to ease your passage into the next phase of existence – the blessed weekend - El Reg brings you On-Call, our Friday column chronicling readers’ stories of jobs with strange beginnings and sticky endings.…

Word of mouth matters when you're taking users' cash Ransomware scum are investing in customer service processes to get more people paying, according to McAfee's lead scientist and principal engineer Christiaan Beek.…

Chrysaor, Lipizzan are state surveillance tools, not Pokemon, surprisingly Black Hat A study into government-grade Android spyware led researchers to a new strain of surveillance malware lurking in the Google Play app store – a strain that has now been unceremoniously booted out of the software marketplace.…

Behind the scenes of a battle to control a ccTLD Analysis A campaign to convince the Slovakian government to halt the sale of the .sk registry has nothing to do with money or politics, it is claimed.…

The iPod Touch is all that remains now and it's had two models axed Apple has exited the standalone music player business by discontinuing the iPod Nano and iPod Shuffle.…

RSA/VMware/Dell pincer movement to sell all the cybers Security buyers: Dell's got you surrounded. Come out with a purchase order, buy security software, and we can bring this to a peaceful ending.…

Ten US airports already do it, the rest will follow soon, foreigners may be spared Domestic air passengers within the USA will be required to remove any electronic device larger than a smartphone from their carry-on bags for screening before boarding.…

Woolworths Australia is off its trolley - points redemption apps accept random card numbers The Register has been alerted that Australian retailer Woolworths' customer loyalty points can be filched thanks to a user enumeration bug.…

Mobes no longer worth stealing, San Francisco DA declares Smartphone thefts have declined by 50 per cent in San Francisco since 2013, and by 22 per cent since last year, a decline that District Attorney George Gascón attributes to the Smartphone Theft Prevention Act.…

The good, the bad, and the Dorsey We may be beyond the halfway point for the calendar year, but in the world of corporate finance we are squarely in the middle, as companies are posting their numbers for the three months to the end of June.…

Community races to keep docs current Node Summit The popularity of Node.js has caught its community by surprise and left its stewards scrambling to find a way to keep developers up to date with the rapidly changing technology.…

You are wrong about internet speeds. Love, NCTA Analysis In a striking example of corporate gaslighting, the US cable industry's trade association, the NCTA, claims that the defining characteristic of the US broadband market is competition.…

Trust us, we never screw anything up Living up to its Windows-as-a-service promise, Microsoft has laid out the schedule it will use to roll out Windows 10 and Office 365 updates in future.…

Yeah, boss, I took care of him. I had him waxed. Literally Black Hat Forget hijacking smart light bulbs. Researchers claim they can hack into internet-connected car wash machines from the other side of the world and potentially turn them into death traps.…

President Broflake won't be happy about it Updated Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos rode a surge in his web giant's stock price to overtake Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates as the richest person in the world.…

Pro tip from the US DoJ: Don’t reuse passwords Black Hat Uncle Sam's lawyers have revealed the catalog of operational security mistakes that led to the cuffing of one of the world’s most prolific credit-card crooks.…

UAV firms and campaigners slam opaque decision-making The Department for Transport has rejected calls from drone makers DJI, Parrot and GoPro to release details of its drone testing methodology on the grounds of "security".…

Big overall profit turnaround in spite of x86 server slump Despite a mild slump in its x86 server sales, Fujitsu revenues increased for its first fiscal 2017 quarter by 2.5 per cent to $8.3bn (¥922.6bn), accompanied by a rebound in profits.…

Up 20%, contributing $15.58bn to networking giant's coffers Huawei shipped 73 million phones in the first half of 2017, up 20.6 per cent year-on-year.…

Firm chips away at debt after Three flog-off squashed Mobile operator Telefonica – AKA O2 – has posted an increase in sales in Blighty of 2.6 per cent to €1.6bn (£1.4bn) for its second quarter, with operating income before depreciation and amortisation (OIBDA) up 3.9 per cent to €433m.…

Claimed 'cognitive dysfunction' to try dodge jail “Dishonest and manipulative” channel veteran Jason Tsai has been sentenced to nine months in the slammer for contempt of court.…

We're looking to extend our collection of brains in a bar We’re planning an ambitious series of Register lectures for next year, and we want to hear from you if you think you’ve got what it takes to fascinate and amaze our audience...or simply know someone who does.…

But others ain't so pleased When Adobe this week announced its intention to kill Flash by 2020, a cheer went up among techies everywhere – not least of which were the browser-makers, who seemed pleased to hasten its death on the web.…

Even worse than France. FRANCE! A third of businesses have suffered a ransomware attack in the last 12 months, according to a new survey sponsored by Malwarebytes.…

Easier containers on MS's cloud – but Linux-only for now Microsoft has released a preview of Azure Container Instances, a new way to deploy containers which emphasises speed and ease of use above scalability and orchestration.…

Reports throw cold water on Amazon buyout rumours Corporate messaging biz Slack is reportedly raising $250m in its latest funding round.…

Meanwhile firm signs up 97k mobile customers Sky's operating profits plunged 14 per cent to £1.3bn in the UK and Ireland, on revenue up 4 per cent to £8.6bn for the Game Of Thrones broadcaster and broadband pusher's full-year results.…

Monetising video... RU serious, Zuck? Analysis Anyone asking why there hasn't been a major new technology company to rival the likes of Facebook for a decade should take a good look at... Facebook.…

An HPC product line is for life, not just for Christmas The incredible shrinking Seagate business is selling its ClusterStor HPC array product line to Cray.…

Building a team to build your machine smarts AI is finding its way into every day business and government. The idea of AI is not a new, but what is different is that today's hardware and software is bringing the various concepts underpinning AI to a mass market.…

All the details on the less cheap-as-chips device Review In a little over three years, the Chinese giant BBK Electronics has made a big impact on the market using OnePlus as a guerilla operation.…

Operating profit up 73 per cent to record US$12.68bn as smartmobe buyers go large Samsung Electronics has reported a record second quarter in which it hauled US$54.8bn through the door, $12.86bn of that profit.…

Packet snooping, certificate slip, and denial-of-service A slip in certificate handling is one of three bugs in Cisco's Autonomic Networking software.…

Third Space Launch System engine controller declared a success Vid If you have a hankering to watch eight minutes of billowing clouds of rocket exhaust, NASA's posted the video of the latest test of its RS-25 engine.…

Behind the scenes of web upstart's shift from Scala to Node.js Node Summit In April, Paul Ford, cofounder of New York-based digital production studio Postlight, told Twitter its web app was crap.…

CowerSnail' opens garden variety backdoors rather than mining BTC Malware authors continue to chip away at Samba bugs similar to those that helped spread WannaCry/WannaCrypt.…

Hyper-V tops the Most Wanted list with $250k price on its head Microsoft has extended its bug bounty program for Windows Insider to include the whole of the OS, extended its operation indefinitely and added Windows Server Insider to the eligibility list.…

'I started an eternal flamewar over code brackets and all I got was this stupid badge' GitHub has added a chunk of features it says will help new users and projects build better communities.…

Russian Alexander Vinnik thought to be handling proceeds of Mt Gox bust Police in Greece have arrested a Russian national they accuse of running the BTC-e Bitcoin exchange to launder more than US$4bn worth of the cryptocurrency.…

'We could consider ourselves space travelers or extragalactic immigrants' Up to half the atoms in the stars, planets, moons – and even in us – could come from distant galaxies beyond the Milky Way, according to a new study.…

Interdependence of nations give the region incentive to go beyond Budapest Convention Dan Tehan, Australia's minister assisting the prime minister for Cyber Security, says south-east Asian nations are beginning to discuss a joint regional approach to best practise cyber-security, and perhaps even also a new set of rules of engagement for online conflict.…

'Whistleblower' IP address leads to dude a few miles away A Silicon Valley investor accused of sexual harassment by an anonymous blogger has sued the mysterious scribe for defamation – only to find the writer appeared to be a business rival in disguise.…

Yes, she's giving up her board seat. What did you think we meant? Meg Whitman has cut her last ties with HP Inc by stepping down as chairwoman of the company's board of directors.…

Need to snoop on chatter? Forget math, just exploit a bug Police in Germany will forego seeking decryption keys for secure messaging apps, like WhatsApp, and instead simply hack devices to snoop on suspects.…

Er, according to these JS framework fans Node Summit As the Node Summit got underway in San Francisco on Wednesday, Charles Beeler, general partner at Rally Ventures, said the Node community has come a long way since 2012, when everyone was talking about Node.js and no one was using it.…

Red faces all round at dotcom after emails, tracking links go TITSUP With a perfect dose of irony, a biz that sells automated marketing software online failed to automatically renew its dotcom.…