The Register

Services Provider Licensing Agreements to jump 10% in 2018 Exclusive Microsoft has something that will compound customers' New Year hangovers for 2018 – a double-digit price hike.…

Imagine a future where we all plug into John Hayes MP The minister in charge of Blighty's latest driverless car law has suggested that public charging points be named after him.…

Folk with no prior care experience to be handed £1k The NHS has been criticised over plans for an "Airbnb"-style scheme in which homeowners will be paid £1,000 a month to host patients in their spare rooms.…

Cue incredibly wealthy people calling their PRs A major offshore law firm admitted it had been hacked on Tuesday, prompting fears of a Panama Papers-style exposé into the tax affairs of the super rich.…

Experts weigh in With its new open data licensing framework, announced on Tuesday, the Linux Foundation has created legal frameworks around sharing raw, unorganised data to tempt generous companies, nonprofits, government agencies and researchers to do so.…

Plus they're super-vague about where they store them The privacy notices used by websites and apps to tell users what data they collect and how it will be used fail to offer the necessary specifics, an international study has found.…

Thinking of the children so you don't have to The British government's Science and Technology Committee has launched an inquiry into the impact of e-cigarettes on health, along with regulations guiding their use, and the financial implications on business and the NHS.…

Complex system leaves big suppliers pushing back hard, watchdog finds Ministry of Defence plans to cut costs on “non-competitive procurement” look nice but won’t work unless the cash-strapped ministry keeps a close eye on its contracts, the public sector spending watchdog said today.…

'Once it was the hot, new model. Not any more' A Sky ad featuring beefcake Tom Hardy has been banned by the Advertising Standards Authority for misleadingly suggesting punters could swap their old phone for the latest one every 12 months "free of charge".…

Unpicking Redmond's strategy for devs following the launch of an updated Visual Studio Remember when Microsoft first hyped the Windows 10 development platform? "One Windows" was the theme. "Just one API and one package to reach all Windows 10 devices – PC, tablet, phone and more," said Windows developer corporate VP Kevin Gallo at the time.…

Thing is, Oracle 'n' pals are not only ones pushing an agenda... Analysis Remember The Big Switch – the book by Nicholas Carr which said that IT would become a utility-like service delivered through a socket in the office wall?…

Business partner says he saw him drunk, stoned, but never groping Robert Scoble has resigned from Transformation Group LLC, the mixed reality company in which he was a partner.…

Hawaii really is paradise now The city of Honolulu has put into practice a law that fines people who “cross a street or highway while viewing a mobile electronic device.”…

Starting with: TensorFlow M³ The hype around AI promises interesting work and fat paychecks, so no wonder everyone wants in. But the scarcity in talent means that researchers, engineers and developers are looking for ways to pick up new skills to get ahead.…

Proposal to extend Error 451 After a long campaign, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has decided that users deserve to know why pages were blocked and created HTML error 451. Now the body will consider a proposal to extend it to give users more information.…

Canadians will have to smuggle in their milky goop after ban The Canadian Food Inspection Agency has banned the importation of Soylent on the grounds that it isn't a proper meal substitute.…

Is Putin's Russia a sensible place to develop secure messaging? While secure messaging app Telegram has been in the headlines for its losing battle with Russia's FSB intelligence agency, it's also been battling an ex-staffer in a little-reported lawsuit that sheds light on the secretive organisation.…

Boffins explore personal items as 2FA tokens using computer vision code Computer researchers at Florida International University and Bloomberg have come up with an alternative to crypto baubles like YubiKeys for two-factor authentication.…

Hard-coded keys and pseudorandom numbers flay Fortinet first, other vendors probably also in play Crypto researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, working with Johns Hopkins cryptographer Matthew Green, have found a serious security issue and branded it DUHK, which stands for Don't Use Hardcoded Keys.…

Services prevents bloodbath, product sales suffering Having a big deal go on hold doesn't just spoil your day, it can upend a whole quarter, as Juniper Networks has found.…

280GB and 480GB beasts on PCIE 4.0, apparently Sharp-eyed storage-watchers have noticed some new Intel solid state disks with Chipzilla's Optane 3D Xpoint memory/storage aboard popping up on web stores.…

Virtzilla's turning the continuous integration crank for vSphere on AWS VMware has announced a new vSphere beta, but unlike its previous such efforts it's not asking you to test a new big bang release.…

Intel's antitrust shield even loses when it wins AMD revenues were up, an actual proper profit was banked, and its future looking brighter than ever in the past financial quarter... meanwhile investors are selling off shares fearing a downturn looming for the chip designer.…

Judge gives victim's relatives two weeks to come up with new claims or give up A lawsuit accusing YouTube of playing a key role in the November 2015 Paris terror attacks has been all but thrown out of court.…

Budget cuts lead bureau to wield the axe The Australian Bureau of Statistics might discontinue the country's only authoritative survey about Internet users in Australia, as the cash-starved organisation prepares for another round of layoffs.…

Congress mulls S702 reauth law and USA Rights Act Analysis A battle has broken out in US Congress over a controversial spying program.…

Team Zuck lays down journalism commandments Stung by accusations that it allowed its platform to be hijacked by Russian propagandists, and facing looming regulatory crackdowns, Facebook has decided to shift the spotlight onto journalists and lecture scribes on how not to write "fake news."…

Credential leaked from Kickstarter hack used to hijack Cloudflare DNS Monero miner maker Coin Hive was hacked so that websites using its code inadvertently redirected their generated cryptocurrency to miscreants – after the outfit forgot to change an old password.…

Spend a little bribe, er, time with me... American tech giants have ramped up the amount of cash they spend on lobbying US lawmakers to get their own way, yet again. As congressmen consider regulating organizations from Facebook to Google, and mull antitrust crackdowns against Amazon, said corporations have responded by flinging more dosh at the problem.…

Off-roadmap announcement precedes debut of business kit and is weird about FTTN nbn™, the company building and operating Australia's national broadband network (NBN), has announced it will start using G.fast in 2018 and will eventually use it in fibre-to-the-node installations.…

Ransomware breeds through Windows networks via SMB, fake Flash Updated Computers at Russian media outlets and Ukraine's transport hubs were among Windows PCs infected and shut down today by another fast-spreading strain of ransomware.…

Matching staff contributions? Not from next year Exclusive DXC Technologies Canada will match only half the pension contributions made by former HPE Enterprise Services staff in yet another dramatic expenses purge.…

Watchdog could ban firm from operating in the country UK financial service regulators have launched an investigation into Equifax over its handling of the recent mega-breach.…

CEO: Are we scared of Oracle moving in on our space? Nope Graph database-flinger Neo4j has released a platform that adds analytics, data import and visualisation on top of its database.…

Remote-control flying toys are most beloved of men aged 45+ Most British drone fliers are old men knocking on for retirement, reckons a drone retailer that carried out a survey.…

'The Dark Overlord' threatening to distribute patient images A plastic surgery clinic frequented by celebrities such as Katie Price has been targeted by hackers.…

Redmond wants to warn netizens when Feds demand their personal information The US Department of Justice has limited its gagging policy that bans companies from alerting customers when their personal information is accessed by the Feds.…

Report shows they're ripe targets for hackers Traffic analysis on 375 industrial networks worldwide has confirmed the extent to which hackers target industrial control systems (ICS).…

Plus: Magic stuff to spot people sniffing secrets from chips TechCon Kicking off its TechCon engineering conference today in Silicon Valley, Arm announced a couple of things: Internet-of-Things gateway wrangling code, and some security measures to potentially prevent secrets leaking electrically from chips.…

QBE walks away, others reduce lines amid worries for high street Exclusive Credit insurers are cutting their exposure to geek emporium Maplin Electronics amid some reports of declining profit and wider concerns about old-school retailing.…

W3C, are you listening? +Comment The W3C introduces API standards that end up mostly unused, doing nothing more than loading up the code base with vulnerabilities.…

Party told to 'get it right next time' after calls crossed line into unlawful direct marketing Phone calls made on behalf of the Conservatives in the run-up to the UK general election "crossed the line" into unlawful direct marketing – but the party has escaped regulatory action.…

Flash? Anybody? No? Seagate's first quarter 2018 revenues sank 7 per cent year-on-year to $2.6bn, but the drive biz expects growth and is convinced its heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) tech will help that.…

Anonymity crucial for discussion of software asset management in a cloudy world The UK’s Oracle user group is meeting today to discuss the murky world of licensing and software asset management.…

Firm denies sour grapes charge after rival gets licence tweaks Comment Satellite broadband operator Viasat is telling the world it will sue Ofcom over recent changes to rival firm Inmarsat's licence allowing that company to build a vital part of a planned EU in-flight Wi-Fi network.…

If you live fully in the cloud, keep walking Analysis Reduxio's roadmap has it taking its HX/TimeOS array deeper into the hybrid cloud world, supporting application recoveries as well as VM ones, and adding faster array and data access.…

Questions raised over supplier lock-in, tax avoidance, SME agenda Exclusive UK cloud minnow DataCentred went under after HMRC - its largest customer - pulled the plug on a services contract in favour of a deal with Amazon, the corporation recently accused by MPs of tax avoidance.…

OpenIO flexes Arm muscle, inhales funds Five million dollars has just been stumped up to grow a startup making object storage drive-based servers.…

What if you log an incident that AI helped you to avoid? PLUS: Kingston release details Artificial Intelligence might just make IT organisations look for new measures of their success and lead to a rethink of ITIL, according to ServiceNow's chief strategy officer Dave Wright.…

We smoothed the world for cars, but assume robots will have eyes and ears We redesigned the world for automobiles and now it's time to redesign it for robots.…