The Register

Blockchain for data integrity and regulatory compliance In a well-timed release Acronis has announced its Backup 12.5 product with automated ransomware protection and data integrity checking via blockchain.…

The Office cloud deconstructed If you were to start a business today, would you bother buying desktop software for productivity and collaboration? Probably not, you'd employ some software option delivered as a service. For enterprises with a history of legacy, the move to online versions of on-prem is trickier but is being done.…

Teams unveiled for student cluster wettbewrb HPC Blog We’re only a few weeks away from the 6th annual ISC Student Cluster Competition, and student cluster aficionados worldwide are gearing up to watch the battle. ISC Cluster Competition Taipan Pak Lui and I shot a video at SC16 where we unveiled the teams for the ISC event, you can watch it below.…

Shame on you for not going back in time Comment WannaCry is Microsoft's fault. Microsoft, of course, blames the victims and system administrators get fired. But every one of us is to blame because we refuse to force our governments to hold software-makers to account.…

It's not cheap, but it is good Nest has restated its position as the poster-child of the smart home with a new indoor camera, the NestCam IQ.…

Chinese and Australian crews peer into the abyss and find weird things looking back Scientific expeditions into the deep, deep ocean are like buses: none for ages, then suddenly along come two at once!…

What a time to be alive: the BSOD has become a useful feature Yes, WannaCrypt can infect all those machines that still run Windows XP, but because XP is so flaky the zombie boxen are unlikely to have contributed much to the spread of the worm.…

Liberté, égalité, connectivité The European Parliament, Council and Commission have all decided that the in-El Reg's-view-inexplicable WiFi4EU project is a fine idea worthy of €120m to ensure “every European village and every city with free wireless internet ac­cess around the main centres of public life by 2020."…

Homegrown tech dumped for trendy native code scheme Google says it will stop supporting Portable Native Client in the first quarter of 2018, with some exceptions, because WebAssembly has become more popular.…

Empty cubicles galore to be had in Silicon Valley Cisco pink slips have started landing, with the company notifying the Californian government of 250 farewells.…

GSLV Mk III to test itself on a 3,136kg sat, plans for 8,000kg payloads real soon now The Indian Space Research Organisation has set June 5 as the next milestone in the country's ambitions to build a heavy-lift rocket.…

Bless me father for I have SYNTAX ERROR A church in Germany has built a robot priest to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation.…

Chipzilla's Compute Card also comes into focus in four models Intel's Core range of CPUs now comes in a new "family" and has a new upper limit.…

If they know where it comes from and how fast it's going: America defends against itself In a show of strength aimed at ever-belligerent North Korea, America has shot down what it calls a “simulated ICBM” with an intercept missile.…

Scalability sucked when multi-core machines got busy, so DB's devs will find another way The developers of MySQL Server have decided its Query Cache feature is a bottleneck and killed it off.…

Enceladus might have been knocked over by an asteroid Enceladus, Saturn’s watery moon, may have been tipped on its axis after being battered with an asteroid, new evidence reveals.…

ISP claims voiceover bloke read without being digitally sped up Plusnet has been rapped over the knuckles by the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority after the regulator ruled the terms and conditions of its radio ads were too garbled to understand.…

More than 36 million users feared infected As many as 36.5 million Android users may have been infected by advertising fraud malware that could have been lurking in Google Play Store for years.…

Self-driving star Anthony Levandowski told to show himself out Uber has fired Anthony Levandowski, the technology exec at the center of Waymo's lawsuit against the ridesharing company that alleges theft of self-driving car secrets and patent infringement.…

Andy Rubin's new project gets specs Android founder Andy Rubin’s new hardware company Essential Products has unveiled the smartphone it hopes will discomfit the rest of the market.…

Einstein's Theory of General Relativity lasts another day Physicists in the US have found evidence that event horizons around black holes do exist, reinforcing Einstein’s theory of General Relativity.…

New GPU’riffic box vies for dominance HPC Blog At trade shows, I’m always attracted by the sight of huge heat sinks bunched together on a system board. Big and powerful hardware is a weakness of mine. The sight of them pulls me to the booth like a giant tractor beam.…

Printer maker can't stop ink cartridge resales with patent claims In a victory for product resellers, the Supreme Court of the United States on Tuesday limited the power of patent holders by reversing a lower court decision that gave printer maker Lexmark control over its ink cartridges after they'd been sold.…

Comms chip designer rolls out latest hardware lines in Taipei Chip designer Qualcomm has rolled out a trio of new products for wireless networking and mobile devices.…

Group-IB IDs Lazarus Group A fresh analysis, from a slightly different perspective, once again fingered North Korea as the likely culprit behind hacks against Sony Pictures and the $81m heist from an account held by the Central Bank of Bangladesh.…

First tranche of M 2017 speakers announced We’re thrilled to announce the first tranche of conference speakers for the Minds Mastering Machines (M) three-day dive into machine learning, AI and advanced analytics this Autumn.…

Guess who's joined the bandwagon... Comment Apple may not be the invincible force it once was in mobile, but it is still unrivalled in its ability to scatter stardust over new technologies – just ask the companies which struggled to push Wi-Fi Calling or wireless charging into the mainstream before the iPhone maker came along. Now it has kindled new sparks of enthusiasm, or perhaps hype, around millimetre wave spectrum by applying for an experimental licence to test high frequency bands in the US.…

Vultures continue circling not-quite-corpse Western Digital may form a consortium to buy up Toshiba’s hotly disputed NAND flash memory unit, according to reports.…

Jetson-powered sprayer turns GPU-flinger into weed-whacker HPC blog While there are always vehicles on the show floor at GTC17, it would seem this is the first time an actual John Deere tractor has been in the mix. But the tractor wasn’t the point, it’s what was attached to the tractor that might be interesting for rural types.…

No crying at the back As "trendy" as ransomware is at the moment, it's a sobering thought when you remind yourself that in this case you're literally having to deal with some miscreant holding your data to ransom.…

Hardware rolling out, new software promised GitHub has tried to reassure users that it is targeting zero downtime with the help of new data centres and infrastructure software – some being open-sourced.…

$21k lucky dip for exploits Shadow Brokers, the group that leaked stolen NSA hacking tools including the vulnerability that proved key to the WannaCrypt outbreak, has launched a new exploit subscription service.…

These are not the sex droids you’re looking for... If you’ve ever wondered what the development of AI and robotics might mean for your sex life, you should have been with us last month for our Register Lecture on Sex, AI, Robots and You.…

Be a love and check if we're a data processor. It should be on the internet somewhere UK businesses are risking damaging fines by ignoring the implications of upcoming data protection rules, according to a new survey.…

Options - you have some ISPs in the US have regained to power to snoop on your internet browsing and sell the results to the highest bidder. Congress has passed news rules under President Donald Trump rolling back earlier restrictions on internet service providers - Verizon, AT&T, Comcast and so on - from selling or otherwise sharing your web browsing history with other companies.…

TV ads banned, but targeted Facebook videos have free rein Britons vote for a new government on June 8 and, until recently, election campaigns have been tightly controlled affairs with limits on how much parties can spend per constituency, the requirement to submit detailed accounts and no political advertising on television.…

No travel or catering for internal meetings, as for external meetings... get the memo? Execs at DXC Technology have imposed a series of penny-pinching measures on staff just two months after the tech outsourcing corpse started trading, and amid a redundancy programme.…

Not a good fit. Apparently IBM has tried to erase the photograph of the Big Blue chopper that CEO, president and chairman Ginny Rometty used to fly to the UK R&D labs recently, because it didn’t fit with the corporate austerity message.…

No more standing on sidelines as ODMs hoover up service provider punters Analysis Dell EMC’s Server business unit is receiving help from Dell’s Client Solutions Group as it aims to take on the original design manufacturers (ODMs) in the Far East, company insiders have told The Reg.…

Well, they need to find that $1.6bn cost saving somewhere, can't be all job cuts DXC Technology is planning to shutter a bunch of sites as part of its mega savings plan, multiple company insiders have told El Reg.…

Short of £180,000? These guys will sort you out Star Wars New Hope @ 40 Two years ago, the helmet of an Empire Strikes Back stormtrooper fetched $120,000 (£92,736) at US auction.…

Oracle Labs plays with an Optane simulator and finds cacheing gets rather tricky Oracle Labs has found that applications will need a bit of work before they can really take advantage of storage-class RAM like Intel's Optane.…

Eric Raymond says it's time 'hallowed artifacts of hacker folklore' were hackable again The classics never die – or so we hope. One classic, Colossal Cave Adventure, is getting a new lease of life on GitHub.…

Says broken bits were never outsourced offshore, offers SFA explanation for lack of backup The catastrophic systems failure that grounded British Airways flights for a day appears to have been caused by networking hardware failing to cope with a power surge and messaging systems failing as a result.…

Sending data home to Putin, puffs president Poroshenko Already under sanctions by the Ukrainian government, Russian search giant Yandex has been raided by the country's security services.…

Taxation Office reveals investigation timeline, defends itself for causing pay delays Australia's taxation commissioner Chris Jordan has given contractors impacted by the alleged fraud at Plutus Payroll hope they may yet receive compulsory superannuation payments.…

HPE settles after findings of badly fitted cables, bugs on disks and backup tools on SAN Oz taxation commissioner Chris Jordan has revealed that the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) has reached a commercial settlement with HPE over the two outages to its online services caused by 3PAR storage arrays.…

C*ck-up not conspiracy – Redmond says 'OCSP stapling' has come undone Microsoft's Azure Portal has become hostile to some clients, especially the Firefox browser.…

'Inner authentication' has bad karma, allows strangers to log in without credentials Sysadmins with FreeRADIUS in their boxen need to run in an upgrade, because there's a bug in its TTLS and PEAP implementations.…

Redmond's out-of-band advisory landed after the bugs were fixed Microsoft has broken out of its usual cycle to patch more Malware Protection Engine bugs notified privately Google Project Zero.…