The Register

The buck stops... somewhere in Ukraine, Turkey, Japan? As the dust settles from Tuesday's Bad Rabbit ransomware outbreak, it's already clear that it is far less severe than the WannaCrypt and NotPetya infections from earlier this year.…

Is Amazon the only one who can handle its cloudy needs? No, there is one other... HMRC's Permanent Secretary has defended the department's decision to ditch a local cloud slinger in favour of tax-efficient multinational Amazon, citing bumper savings.…

How to avoid that hook at the end of a fraudster’s line Research While messaging apps, social media, fake websites and phone calls can all be used to carry out phishing attacks, in the business world, fake emails are the most common and dangerous method.…

Products beyond ITSM speed up, SkyGiraffe acquisition should make users 'appy ServiceNow has beaten estimates of revenue and earnings for its third quarter, and outlined a new mobile strategy.…

Data regulator taskforce formed to look into firm's data slurp WhatsApp's privacy policies have come under fresh scrutiny from the European Union's data protection regulators, who say the Facebook-owned business has failed to smarten up its act.…

2017 employee survey asks workers to describe IBM in three words If an IBMer of your acquaintance appears to have shed some stress, we've discovered the reason why: the company is circulating its annual “Engagement Pulse” survey of employees' attitudes towards the company.…

Encrypting domain queries with TLS Android users might get better protection for their browsing records, if a Google experiment takes off.…

Days later it served malware, but the only visible damage was to Dell's reputation Dell forgot to re-register a domain name that many PCs it has sold use to do fresh installs of their operating systems. The act of omission was spotted by a third-party who stands accused of using it to spread malware.…

Claims Cambridge Analytica got in touch before election Fugitive couch-surfer and angry leaker Julian Assange has made the explosive claim that Cambridge Analytica asked WikiLeaks for something before last year's US presidential election.…

HyperFlex learns to talk Kubernetes for consistent hybrid cloud merriment Cisco and Google have struck a partnership to stretch Kubernetes from on-prem to the cloud and back again.…

Also reveals Big Red's 'ugly' five-year project to replace 12PB of NetApp with ZFS Oracle storage architect has called for Oracle to make the ZFS filesystem a first class part of Linux and says conversations have taken place within Big Red to consider the possibility.…

Retrial over amount of patent-pinch damages okayed by Californian judge Samsung has won a retrial to reconsider damages in its patent suit against Apple.…

Don't expect ads giant to stop all software nasties for you – it certainly can't Last month, German software testing laboratory AV-Test threw malware at 20 Android antivirus systems – and now the results aren't particularly great for Google.…

Wanna fly over a music concert? Now maybe you can The US Department of Transportation is toying with allowing regional governments to set rules for drone owners that are otherwise incompatible with federal law.…

Both promise to implement mandatory controls real soon now At least two Australian government departments, the Department of Immigration and Border Protection (DIPB) and the Australian Tax Office (ATO), have inadequate security, according to a parliamentary committee report published yesterday.…

And you'll never guess what happened next – or perhaps, depressingly, you can Comment If you have cause to hire a lawyer, it is usually worthwhile listening to what they have to say.…

Phisher faces up to five years in the clink for raiding 550 accounts for private snaps More than three years after miscreants splashed hundreds of stolen intimate photographs of celebrities online, a third man has been charged regarding the mass hack.…

Researcher pushes Apple to add temporary permissions, indicator lights A top iOS security researcher has uncovered yet another privacy loophole in Apple's mobile firmware.…

Ooh, IT just got real Analysis The NSA staffer who took home top-secret US government spyware installed a backdoored key generator for a pirated copy of Microsoft Office on his PC – exposing the confidential cyber-weapons on the computer to hackers.…

1-Click king's one-click entry To keep thieves from stealing packages, Amazon wants to open your front door so it can drop off stuff inside.…

Motion-tracking bar production halted, gives way to headsets Microsoft has ended production of Kinect, its motion-tracking games controller.…

When Irish eyes are stockpiling Google has been ordered to pay business taxes on 14,570m rupees ($224m) of profit to the Indian government after losing a six-year legal battle.…

Elastic Search and Lucene underlie freemium web text search and analysis tool Webhose.io turns the undrinkable torrent of web text data into sippable glasses filtered just for you.…

Data-nom from stream, lake and warehouse, they chirp Apache Spark-wrangling biz Databricks has added a third pillar to its Unified Analytics Platform aimed at unifying data management.…

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.…