The Register

Cross-border cybersecurity certification scheme planned The European Commission has proposed an expansion in the role of ENISA, the EU's cybersecurity agency.…

It's stylish, but the stylus doesn't add a lot FIRST FONDLE Samsung's Galaxy Note 8 is everything you'd expect in a premium handset, but the stylus doesn't appear to add huge value.…

Boffins find search quality unaffected no matter how much information web giant amasses Data, it has been argued, is the new oil – the fuel for the information economy – but its importance to search engines may be overstated.…

Whither the rapid file transfer app Aspera that Big Blue acquired in 2014? IBM's decided to join AW and Google in the appliances-to-haul-data-into-the-cloud market, by launching an appliance called “IBM Cloud Mass Data Migration”.…

Would you trade your CPU time and electricity bill for pirated content? Bittorrent search engine and mortal enemy of intellectual property lawyers, The Pirate Bay, has upset the one group of people that actually likes it: its users.…

'Tez' targets India, where cash is now a dirty word, will soon hit other emerging economies Google's launched a payments service called “Tez” for India and plans to take it to other nations soon.…

And possibly beyond With little fanfare, Oracle formally tore the wraps off its SPARC M8 data-center-class processors and servers on Monday.…

Screens-on-a-stalk and replaceable HDD and RAM may not a revolution make All-in-one PCs look pretty and make for tidy desks but don't often feature in business settings because bonding a monitor and a computer reduces maintenance options.…

Servers-by-the-second is now a thing, but you pay for the whole first minute! Amazon Web Services has switched on per-second billing for EC2 Instances and elastic block store volumes.…

Youngsters tricked into performing sex acts for pervs Four men have joined their two accomplices behind bars for tricking young girls into performing sex acts online so they could film them.…

Two-factor authentication by SMS? More like SOS Once again, it's been demonstrated that vulnerabilities in cellphone networks can be exploited to intercept one-time two-factor authentication tokens in text messages.…

'Hang on, Trump has done what??!?' Video Six would-be Mars colonists have emerged from eight months of isolation on top of a Hawaiian volcano as part of preparations for an eventual manned mission to the Red Planet.…

Jewelry exec faces up to five years in the clink for SEO backfire It may have seemed like a good idea at the time – treating a judge's takedown order as a Photoshop template that could be modified as needed to demand that Google remove any unwanted information.…

Does someone need to take the handbrake off this thing? Microsoft on Sunday bragged its artificial intelligence technology is behind the, er, success of a massively underperforming Renault Formula One team.…

Quiet hero faded to relative obscurity Obit Stanislav Petrov, one of the unsung heroes of the Cold War without whose guts and intelligence you wouldn't be reading this, has died at the age of 77, his son has confirmed.…

W3C lays out the case for anti-piracy, anti-copying defenses Anti-piracy and anti-copying protections are now formally part of the World Wide Web after an effort to vote down content controls at the WWW's standards body failed.…

'Fact that they're even talking about it is quite significant' The Swiss-based bank for the world's central banks has argued that there's a lot to gain if they offer decentralised cryptocurrency to consumers.…

Trump administration’s views on privacy to come under scrutiny Transatlantic data-transfer agreement Privacy Shield is facing its first major political hurdle as the inaugural joint review kicks off this week.…

Southern belle to fly off into the sunset on the back of a drone Cisco's exec chair and former CEO of ten-years, John Chambers, will not stand for re-election to the board of directors in December.…

Soothe your boobs, Microsoft is, er, on the case Microsoft's email services got hit with not one but two bugs today: in addition to an earlier blip with Exchange Online, Microsoft confirmed it is now probing "issues" with "some" Outlook.com users in Europe.…

In audiobook form at least Square-jawed chunk of hunk Jon Hamm of Mad Men fame is to play everyone's favourite bounty botherer from a galaxy far, far away – Boba Fett.…

German joins growing list of blokes saved by a saw A German chap is in recovery mode after firefighters battled tirelessly for three hours to free his member from a dumbbell weight.…

It'll break the internet, cries Madison Ave Fear of the Adpocalypse has died down in recent months - but new platform Apple releases have revived it.…

OK, OK, well the 2.27 million victims were not Reg readers Antivirus firm Avast has admitted inadvertently distributing a trojanised version of CCleaner, a popular PC tune-up tool, for nearly a month, infecting an estimated 2.27 million users.…

Analytics is about the journey AND destination Sponsored If software is eating the world, then hackathons are its fast-food restaurants. Groups of developers come together for short periods to try to solve pressing problems. This happens in sectors from healthcare to retail, and now it's happening in transportation too.…

...We import two-thirds of our digital. That! is! a! disgrace! In a desperate attempt to improve our international trade prospects, UK digital minister Matt Hancock has jetted off on a "cyber trade mission" to "tap huge markets in Singapore and promote UK fintech sector in Tokyo."…

Elizabeth Baron found genuine use for virtual reality in the design process Interview In an era defined by Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Apple and Samsung, it's understandable, easy even, to become complacent and look only to Silicon Valley for tech innovation and leadership. Smartphones, touchscreen, mega search, the app economy... if all these things and more didn't come from a handful of US tech firms, they were certainly popularised and monetised by them.…

Expect problems and delays Updated Microsoft customers across Europe are reporting problems connecting to Exchange Online, including an inability to connect as well as time lags.…

Old McDonald had a server farm, EA, EA, Oh! One of the more wizened roles in IT is the enterprise architect, or, “EA” for those in a hurry. Meanwhile, those cowpokes over in the wide open office plans of DevOps country have little regard for these EA types.…

UK taxman's CDIO Jacky Wright currently on 'sabbatical' Exclusive The incoming Chief Digital Information Officer of HMRC is to recuse herself from making any decisions regarding Microsoft, as she is on sabbatical from the company under a two-year placement with the taxman.…

No, not redundos or cost cutting... bonuses for the 'top performing' little people Repeated redundancy programmes and the imposition of penny pinching measures can make a workforce glum, no matter how many fancy dress days a company offers: DXC Technologies might have realised this.…

Plans hiring too, but the 'We closed Sydney because of real estate costs' line looks thin “Veritas” is the Latin word for truth, a fact we mention because data management software vendor Veritas has offered The Register a revised explanation for the closure of its Sydney support desk after we received information that told a different story.…

Automattic is willing to delay an update and rewrite code if it means legal certainty Automattic, the developer of the popular content management system WordPress, has decided to stop using Facebook's React.js library, citing legal concerns.…

Project 'Honolulu' gives some PowerShell-only jobs a GUI and hyperconverges Windows Microsoft's Ignite gabfest kicks off in a fortnight and Redmond will use it to show off a shiny new Windows Server admin GUI that includes tools previously only available in PowerShell.…

Jabra's Evolve 80 will hush your office, but the red warning ring is mere bling EARS-ON TEST The Register's Sydney eyrie will soon be demolished, so Vulture South needs a new office and we're probably going to nestle into a shared workspace.…

Memory management wonks, this release is for you. And also you Hyper-V admins Linus Torvalds has unsentimentally loosed release candidate one of Linux 4.14 a day before the 26th anniversary of the Linux-0.01 release, and told penguinistas to expect a few big changes this time around.…

Disappearance of anti-Nutanix buttons becomes 'happened in Vegas, stays in Vegas' thing The alleged theft of marketing material uncomplimentary to hyperconverged heavyweight Nutanix appears to have become a cold case.…

Company tried to find and patch vulnerable systems, but we know what happened next Equifax's chief information officer and chief security officer “are retiring” and the company has admitted it knew Apache Struts needed patching in March, but looks to have fluffed attempts to secure the software.…

After lightning fundraising round, Cosmos puts Ethereum high on dev roadmap In April, the Cosmos project raised about $17m in half an hour on the promise to someday let users freely share tokens among Bitcoin, Ethereum and other popular blockchain protocols.…

No further penalties for ride-sharing giant, however The city of Portland, Oregon has released its full report on illegal operations by ride-sharing company Uber in 2014.…

Horse, meet stable door Two US senators on Friday introduced legislation to set up the National Commission on the Cybersecurity of the United States Election Systems, to examine the possibility that people tried to hack the 2016 election.…

A hidden British engineering gem: The Hovercraft Museum Geeks' Guide to Britain Did you know that the word “hovercraft” was once patented? And did you know that Great Britain is a world leader in the design and manufacture of the floaty transporters, and has been for half a century?…

Electrophorus electricus is not something to be messed with One man has calculated the power of electric shocks emitted from electric eels on the human arm - his in fact - all in the name of science.…

'Free speech' Twitter alternative alleges antitrust foul A social network that fancies itself a "free speech" competitor to Twitter is suing Google after its app was removed from the Play Store.…

And *clunk* – cyrptocurrency value drops 20 per cent China has ordered all Bitcoin and cryptocurrency exchanges to cease trading by the end of Friday, causing a massive drop in its value worldwide.…

Sorta, kinda, well not really Google has promised to end the infuriating autoplay of videos in its Chrome browser – but with a heap of exceptions that may actually make the problem worse.…

All options on the table, and Apple, Facebook, Google ain't gonna like any of 'em A proposed plan to make sure that digital giants like Apple, Google and Facebook pay more in tax within Europe has moved forward with remarkable speed and a paper will be put to European governments at the end of the month.…

UK dedicated systems not affected Equifax UK has surfaced to say that British systems were not affected by a recently disclosed megahack, however 400,000 UK people were affected due to a “process failure.”…

IN ALL CAPS, no less It has long been a frustrating marketing ploy pushed by mobile phone operators: claiming that they offer better network coverage and speeds than their competitors.…

Typosquatting attack hits the PyPI registry The Slovakian National Security Authority on Thursday warned that PyPI, the repository for Python software packages, has been hosting malicious software libraries.…