The Register

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Fully up to date for OS and apps, but there's a hidden hack threat Pre-boot software on Macs is often outdated, leaving Apple fans at a greater risk of malware attack as a result, according to new research.…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

Looks like WDC is scuppered apart from legal blocks +Comment Big flash chip buyer Apple and Korean flash fabber SK Hynix have agreed terms and committed to their Bain-led consortium's buy of Toshiba's flash chip interests.…

Fighting the instinct vs analytics wars Sponsored In business, should you trust your gut, or go by the numbers? Business mythology and Hollywood favour the gut. Both cite stories about maverick geniuses that ignored everyone’s advice and won big.…

Preconfigured single SKU box to skewer ROBO sales Skynet's T-1000 is an advanced cyborg assassin prototype with a liquid molecular brain inside a mimetic poly-alloy body. Tintri's T1000 is a storage array for small and medium-sized businesses. Ho hum. Let's talk about the latter.…

Firm won't explain network failure Final update A network failure affecting the Amadeus online booking platform is continuing to delay check-ins for passengers around the world, although the firm won't disclose the cause.…

No, we're not switching focus to Nimble, spokesman says Hewlett Packard Enterprise is to shutter its 3PAR engineering office in Belfast, Northern Ireland, but the firm emphasised the move does not mean it is shifting focus from 3PAR to Nimble storage.…

Urgent security triage needed A flaw has been found in the way the Linux kernel loads ELF files.…

Have you seen how dependent our armed forces are on them? Analysis The British government is publicly threatening to stop giving defence contracts to American aerospace firm Boeing – even though this is laughably unrealistic.…

But elsewhere experiences contract delays Broadband pusher CityFibre has posted a sales increase of 36 per cent for its half-year results, but has also reported delays to a number of its public sector contracts.…

Azure Stack and Hyper-V support ignition for MS Orlando's Microsoft Ignite conference saw Dell EMC and Veeam worshipping at the cloudy on-premises Azure Stack shrine with protection support offerings and more.…

Easy Access to some small-but-snazzy UK military ideas British military boffins are letting world+dog use bright ideas they devised for, among other things, compact antennas, military bouncy castles and a dog-training programme.…

Says you'd hafta click through a *boatload* of warnings Security researchers have uncovered what they believe is a vulnerability that allows malware to completely bypass Windows Defender. Microsoft dismissed the report as of "limited practical applicability" in practice (i.e. a low-risk threat).…

Now with 3G Only one phone from the "New Nokia" (aka HMD Global) has made any impact so far, and sadly for the startup's ambitions of returning the brand to market leadership, it's the remodelled classic, the 3310.…

A moment of silence, please, for the godfather of the jazz mag As all unabashed masturbators love to point out, pornography has historically driven technological uptake. But before the internet, Playboy was the most famous source in the world. Yesterday its founder, Hugh Hefner, died peacefully at home of natural causes aged 91.…

You did WHAT? WHY! The US government's mighty DARPA last year kicked off a research project designed to make systems controlled by artificial intelligence more accountable to their human users.…