The Register

'Deferred revenues' up sharply at the Data Communications Company The Capita-owned monopoly that runs Britain's smart meter infrastructure made an operating profit of £390,000 last year – but paid no tax and is owed £42m by the wider smart meter industry.…

Cash thought to have 'gone through a mixer' More than $140,000 (£105,000) in Bitcoin has been paid out by victims of the global WannaCrypt ransomware outbreak from May.…

Opt-in at your own risk Some Office 365 customers can't use Office, thanks to a login portal redesign.…

No decision yet on challenging Ofcom's spectrum cap Mobile operator Three posted a drop in operating income of 15 per cent to £197m in its first-half results, due to costs associated with network and IT infrastructure investment.…

That's gotta sting, huh, HPE? Rubrik is a winner and HPE a loser in Gartner's latest beauty contest for data centre backup and recovery suppliers.…

IM app QQ 'adjusting' bots that revealed unpatriotic sentiments Two chatbots have reportedly been removed from Chinese messaging app QQ after issuing distinctly unpatriotic answers.…

... and shrinking cells. So, how about a double string-stacked 64-layer 3D with cheese? Backgrounder The flash foundry folk took on 3D NAND because it provided an escape hatch from the NAND scaling trap of ever-decreasing cell sizes eventually to non-functioning flash.…

First reading to be squeezed into short September term The UK's new legislation on data protection is to get its first airing in Parliament next month, the government has said.…

Folk neglecting work, chores, family to catch up on Thrones Online streaming has freed consumers from the tyranny of gawping at the crap telly other family members insist on watching, with one-third regularly sitting together in the same room to watch different programmes – according to a major report by Ofcom.…

Reports solid Q1 and makes spats with Google and Mozilla someone else's problem Symantec sold its Website Security and related PKI solutions to DigiCert, effectively making its spat with Mozilla and Google someone else's problem.…

Boffins crack ultimate riddle of stinging agent formation We’re all familiar with the burning, eye-watering sensation felt when chopping onions, and now we know exactly why.…

Q2 numbers beat the street, but the transition to SaaS-y cash flows will be tricky When Citrix suddenly appointed a new CEO in early July, the company promised incoming leader David J Henshall would soon detail “a series of strategic initiatives” to improve the company's performance.…

And not by the cops – but by pushy company reps If you thought American or British copyright fights were petty, consider the case of Canadian Adam Lackman – who had a bailiff, lawyers, and computer experts burst into his home, seize his gear, and grill him for hours.…

It's got an end-of-life date, though: next Tuesday An e-mail has gone out from IBM about its Bluemix cloud: after next Tuesday, the SoftLayer APIs will no longer accept connections encrypted with the ancient TLS 1.0.…

If you said yes, you may be in luck: NASA needs a Planetary Protection Officer Here’s a job title you can dazzle people with at boring dinner parties: Planetary Protection Officer.…

Gravity waves reveal our star rotates four times faster on the inside than the outside Our Sun's core is rotating four times faster than its surface.…

Now you can shave a few milliseconds from real-time apps and, er, batch processing Microsoft has spun up families of virtual machines packed with GPUs and beefy compute muscle for Azure UK customers.…

200 million more to come online in 2017 as 30 million ditch the landline The world has more mobile phone subscriptions than people, according to the International Telecommunications Union's Facts and Figures for 2017.…

Proposals shake up visas, rules for families seeking a better life Having decided to move on from healthcare, the Trump administration has backed proposed legislation that would markedly overhaul America's immigration process.…

Only the smile remained Pretty much the last bits of Brocade have been sold, with the news that Mavenir Systems has slurped the networking company's virtual Evolved Packet Core (vEPC) product range, intellectual property, and development lab.…

Judge goes easy on bloke on web brothel rap, citing work with LGBTQ community A US judge has sentenced the owner of male escort marketplace Rentboy.com to six months behind bars.…

Lookalike npm packages grabbed stored credentials A two-week-old campaign to steal developers' credentials using malicious code distributed through npm, the Node.js package management registry, has been halted with the removal of 39 malicious npm packages.…

Lawyers on both sides choosing their next luxury cars TechnologyOne and the Brisbane City Council could settle their differences for nothing, but that's probably not going to happen.…

No reason given for Fowler's exit, no new exec named and no sign of continuous delivery Oracle has revealed that John Fowler, a Sun veteran who stayed to serve as Oracle's executive veep for systems, has left the company.…

Proposed US law to shore up key piece of online protection hits web opposition An effort to redefine key legal protections in America, in order to prosecute those aiding child sex traffickers, has hit opposition from internet giants.…

App cabbies push back against controlling black-box computers Uber drivers are resisting Uber's algorithmic management to raise their wages and to push back against uncompromising computer control.…

Suit seeks damages for alleged snooping during split-up A fella in the US is suing his ex‑wife, alleging she broke federal wiretapping and privacy laws by snooping on his email during their divorce.…

Toolmaker phished, Google account pwned, malicious code pushed out – and now fixed A popular Chrome extension was hijacked earlier today to inject ads into browsers, and potentially run malicious JavaScript, after the plugin's creator was hacked.…

Wait, Wales has digital billboards now? Shoppers in Cardiff got an eyeful this week when mystery hackers took control of an electronic billboard overlooking the main shopping street and broadcasted a string of images, including Nazi swastikas.…

Despite Pai on face, US federal regulator keeps digging DDoS BS hole America's broadband watchdog, the FCC, has continued digging an ever-deeper hole over its claims it was subject to a distributed denial-of-service attack.…

Data management. It's so hot right now. Data management +Comment Primary Data has rolled up $40mn in new funding as the data management space becomes white hot.…

Acquisition marks move away from snail mail to broadband The Post Office has today completed its acquisition of ISP Fuel Broadband, adding 60,000 customers to its UK network.…

Beta tech on Insider builds now Goodbye, keyboard. Goodbye, mouse. To use Windows, soon all you'll need is your vision.…

Plus, Black Hat, Meg quitting, Uber damage control, tech TV shows

🎶 It's the circle of life 🎶 PayPal has invested in e-commerce tech firm Cloud IQ as part of the upstart's latest £4m funding round.…

Granddaddy celebrates one score and 15 years of inbox-filling antics This month marks the 35th anniversary of the sign-off of RFC 821, the first definition of the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, that everyday staple of email comms.…

Situation is 'very different' to San Bernadino case Apple boss Tim Cook has said that his company would "rather not" remove apps from its store – but has to comply with the law in China.…

Online anyway The Telegraph newspaper accidentally published an obit of the Duke of Edinburgh, instead of reporting his retirement from official duty today.…

No word where he's headed yet Bill Lipsin, NetApp's VP for global channels, is leaving the company.…

Behind the scenes of infosec's cat-and-mouse game Feature The magic AI wand has been waved over language translation, and voice and image recognition, and now: computer security.…

Flying from London? Add a few hours on for good measure British Airways is getting its grovelling in early after a systems crash caused chaos at Heathrow and Gatwick airports earlier this morning.…

'Just switch it on and watch it connect.' Yeah, right The great thing about standards is that there are always so many to choose from. We've seen the standards forest grow countless times before. The Internet of Things is a vast digital petri dish for them, and they just keep growing.…

Yes, again. Sony - thank you for the tape you gave to me IBM has claimed its fifth-in-succession world tape density record with a 330TB raw capacity technology using Sony tape media tech.…

Kids Pass tries to explain why it gave folks reporting the security hole the virtual middle finger A UK web biz has been slammed for blocking people on Twitter just for reporting a security vulnerability that potentially leaked people's contact details.…

Mozilla spins share 'n' synch as Google spins its own virtues Google and Mozilla have each revealed significant new features in their respective browsers.…

In Germany, at least, you're gonna have to get your jollies some other way Installing keylogging software on your employees' computers and using what you find to fire them is not OK, a German court has decided.…

It's cold outside, there's no kind of atmosphere ... I'm all alone NASA scientists have dashed hopes that Proxima Centauri b, an Earth-ish-like planet orbiting the closest star to the Sun, could be habitable.…

You'll be blinded by science, literally, if you put on fake glasses, boffins warn The American Astronomical Society has warned that knockoff viewing glasses for this month's total solar eclipse will blind people if they wear them while looking up at the spectacle.…

Top tip: Don't fetch and install dodgy Flash updates from random websites A new breed of Android malware is picking off mobile banking customers, particularly those in the UK and Germany, we're told.…

Optane's great as memory, says Big Blue, but we can't do that yet IBM's made good on its promise to fire up a cloud packing Intel's Optane non-volatile memory “in the second half of 2017.” But Big Blue has fallen short of the “broad services suite” it foreshadowed and can't even put Optane to work as memory.…