Simon Sharwood

VMware's popped out the first update to vSphere 6.5 and it's unusually interesting for this sort of minor release. Scale is the headline-grabber. You can now run 50,000 VMs in a powered-on vSphere Domain, up from 30,000. That Domain can now register 70,000 VMs, up from 50,000. To wrangle all those VMs, you can now run 15 …

On-Call The end of the week is nigh and to ease your passage into the next phase of existence – the blessed weekend - El Reg brings you On-Call, our Friday column chronicling readers’ stories of jobs with strange beginnings and sticky endings. This week, meet “Tom” who “back in the halcyon days of Windows for Workgroups” found himself …

Ransomware scum are investing in customer service processes to get more people paying, according to McAfee's lead scientist and principal engineer Christiaan Beek. Speaking at the RSA Pacific and Japan conference in Singapore today, Beek said that ransomware victims share stories of their experiences handing over bitcoin. If …

Apple has exited the standalone music player business by discontinuing the iPod Nano and iPod Shuffle. In an unusual move, an Apple representative responded to a Reg request to confirm multiple reports of the devices disappearing for good from its website. An Apple operative told us those reports are accurate. Those of you …

Security buyers: Dell's got you surrounded. Come out with a purchase order, buy security software, and we can bring this to a peaceful ending. That appears to be the plan for integrating RSA and Dell, based on interviews The Register has conducted with RSA execs at the company's Asian conference in Singapore. We wanted to …

Domestic air passengers within the USA will be required to remove any electronic device larger than a smartphone from their carry-on bags for screening before boarding. A Transport Security Agency (TSA) announcement names “tablets, e-readers and handheld game consoles” as the target of the new rules, which “require travelers …

Samsung Electronics has reported a record second quarter in which it hauled US$54.8bn through the door, $12.86bn of that profit. The company found good news to share across most of its business units. The company’s memory business revelled in strong demand for RAM and solid state disks destined for servers. That same strong …

Microsoft has extended its bug bounty program for Windows Insider to include the whole of the OS, extended its operation indefinitely and added Windows Server Insider to the eligibility list. Redmond’s previously offered bounties for specific Windows features only. Now you can score sweet Seattle-sourced dollars for finding a …

Dan Tehan, Australia's minister assisting the prime minister for Cyber Security, says south-east Asian nations are beginning to discuss a joint regional approach to best practise cyber-security, and perhaps even also a new set of rules of engagement for online conflict. Tehan yesterday delivered a keynote address to the RSA …

Machine learning and artificial intelligence will improve security technologies and outcomes, but “won’t move the needle as much as people think”, according to RSA chief technology officer Zulfikar Ramzan. Speaking to The Register at the company’s Asian conference in Singapore today, Ramzan said that while AI and ML will …

We all know cloud is evolving fast, but IBM's just given us the downside of that speed: a service it switched on in February 2015 will be switched off in August 2017. That service is the first iteration of Bluemix's Swift-based Object Storage for Spark as a Service users. IBM's now on version 3 of the service and that's where …

Fact-checking web site Snopes.com says it is “in danger of shuttering” due to a commercial dispute that has starved it of revenue. A new savesnopes site says Snopes is in dispute with a company that “will not relinquish the site’s hosting to our control, so we cannot modify the site, develop it, or — most crucially — place …

The soon-to-die Cassini probe has captured tiny fragments of Saturn’s rings. Cassini’s was launched in 1997, made it to Saturn in 2004 and has been there ever since. But the probe is running out of fuel and will be crashed into the gas giant in September 2017, in order to avoid possible contamination of potentially-life-bearing …

Pics TEPCO, the operator of Japan's stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant, has revealed photos of the facility's flooded interior. The company sent an aqua-bot into the Reactor Containment Container of Fukushima's Unit 3 last week, revealing grainy images such as the one below. Unit 3 Reactor Containment Container CRD Housing …

Fairphone, the effort to build a smartphone that “puts social values first” by using exploitation-free factories, conflict-free minerals and being gentle to the planet by being easy to repair, has ended support for its first phone. The first Fairphone debuted in December 2013, offering a 4.3-inch display and Android 4.2.2. 60, …

Satya Nadella had us all fooled but good with his kinder, gentler, people-empowering Microsoft act. But now we can see the company's reverted to type by threatening to kill venerable graphics app Paint after the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update. A new list of “Features that are removed or deprecated in Windows 10 Fall Creators …

GoDaddy is killing its clouds. The company announced an OpenStack-powered public cloud in March 2016. Now it has emailed customers to let them know their servers won't be there after December 31st, 2017, while support of the Bitnami app provisioning service expires on November 15th. Early last week, GoDaddy announced it had …

Kill something, find a leader, stop thinking about apps and start thinking about products, get seriously good at agile development and realise there is no finish line. Those are just some of the things organisations aspiring to become digital businesses need to achieve if they're to succeed according to Gartner's veep and …

On-Call Hey, hey, it's Friday! Which means frolicsome weekend fun is just a day away … if you can survive work and this week's instalment of On-Call, The Register's weekly column in which we recount readers' stories of jobs gone weird. This week, meet “Wayne”, who has an different sort of story because – unusually for On-Call - it …

Microsoft's dispensed with a licensing oddity that saw it prohibit hosted virtual desktops running on multi-tenanted hardware. Redmond's allowed virtual Windows desktops hosted in the cloud or by service providers for ages, but only if they run on dedicated hardware for each client. The effect of that policy has been service …

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group has released the spec for Bluetooth Mesh, a many-to-many extension of the technology. Readers are doubtless familiar with Bluetooth's point-to-point connectivity features that enable you to do things like pair a wireless keyboard with a computer. Bluetooth's second application is …

ServiceNow's Jakarta release went live on Thursday, bringing with it plenty of new toys for IT departments and hints of artificially intelligent things to come. Among the big additions to Jakarta are a redesigned Cloud Management Portal that lets IT teams provision resources into multiple public clouds, with the workflow you'd …

Disney has revealed plans to create a wretched hive of scum and villainy adjacent to one of its theme parks. If the “wretched …” phrase sounds familiar, it's probably because you remember it from Star Wars Episode IV - A New Hope. The phrase was used by Obi-Wan Kenobi to describe Mos Eisley, a spaceport on the planet Tatooine …

Google's started a Snowball fight with Amazon Web Services by announcing a “Transfer Appliance” to get data out of your data centre and into its cloud. AWS already has just such a machine: its Snowball is a ruggedised storage appliance with 80TB capacity that the cloud colossus sends to your premises so you can load it up full …

Geoscience Australia, the nation's agency for recording and sharing geographic and geological data, has released the first tranche of data captured during the search for missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370. The search for MH370 saw 120,000km2 of the sea floor subjected to a bathymetric survey. Geoscience Australia (GA) …