The agency's announcement is here. At the time of writing, RITA's site was down, but it appears to be staggering to its feet now. Here's a copy in Google's cache just in case. We launched as an email newsletter in 1994, hit the web four years later and are now a multinational media entity operating on three continents. Millions of people read us every month, which is humbling.We may have missed our birthday, but did do some proper “we've turned 21 and that means we're probably quite grown up now” introspection, and resolved to make a few changes.We're not changing the fundamentals. You'll still get a very familiar Reg package complete with cracking headlines, stories written in playful language, plus a mix of business, personal and weird technology. There’ll be plenty of science and bootnotes. Regulars like BOFH aren't going anywhere.But you will see us re-focus our energies on the things we do best: serving IT professionals of all sorts by breaking news and offering insightful analysis on business technology and the policies that shape it.We'll continue to Bite The Hand That Feeds IT, a phrase we understand to mean considering information with studied scepticism informed by long experience, not negativity or cynicism.
It's never been more important to take that stance than it is today, a time when governments and vendors subject you to pervasive surveillance and therefore make deep consideration of policy essential. 2016 is also a year in which suppliers will accelerate their moves to subscription models, an arrangement promoted as flexible and cheap by an army of communications professionals dedicated to putting a ShinyHappyTM sheen on everything.In that and in every other area we cover, The Reg will crunch the numbers, reveal the gotchas and try to keep the wool off your eyes.Among our plans are a new way to treat the news of the day, so that you – and our team – can get across a day's news quickly, then delve into deeper coverage of the things that matter most to you.As an older and wiser publication, we've also come to realise that some of our more adolescent behaviours are starting to look a little inappropriate. Expect less SHOUTINESS, an evolving sense of humour, more modern and global cultural touchstones, science coverage that gives proper prominence to peer-reviewed, evidence-based research and a recognition that attempted self-aware hopefully ironic sexism is almost always indistinguishable from actual sexism.
Forgive us the use of the term “reader experience” but we're going to try to improve it too. We'll revisit the site's design on all devices and for those of you who read through aggregators. We're also conscious that the web can now host any form of content, but we rely heavily on the written word. Indulge us in an experiment or three as we explore how to use the medium.Regular readers have probably noticed that we've already made some changes. A few of our writers have moved on. We've retired the Weekend Edition, which did lovely things for our Saturday and Sunday traffic but turned out not to be the best use of our resources.The Reg team thinks it has given itself a nice set of challenges to chase in 2016. Our overall resolution is to become an even better business tech news publication. We want new regular readers to admire our improvement, former readers to find reasons to return and of course to attract new readers too! Those readers might be career techies, technology managers, a CIO, a CEO or a student. Whatever your role in making IT a part of business, we're aiming to be one of your valued sources for insightful news. And hopefully the number one source.
So there you have it: our resolutions for 2016. We’re also going to do something about that big pile of sweets and doughnuts at the end of the editorial desk, iron shirts more often and stop splitting infinitives once we figure out the rules of grammar and what they have to do with our mother’s mother.From all of us to all of you: all the best for a healthy, prosperous, stimulating and healthy 2016. If we get this right, we plan to be a big part of the prosperity and the stimulation.The last 365 days (give or take) have produced more than 11,000 articles on The Register. We covered the biggest tech purchase in history (Dell/EMC for $67bn), the trashing of the US-European Union safe harbour data export deal by European judges, the Ashley Madison hack, and, well, so much more.Big subjects, but what actually got you reading and clicking? Here's our Top 10 of our most read stories of 2015:1. First, there was Duncan Campbell's account of his life’s work exposing the government’s surveillance programs and disclosure of documents confirming the existence of the mighty ECHELON intercept project. This article appeared in Intercept.2. Then came the creation of Microsoft’s own Linux distro – Azure Cloud Switch (ACS) – which Redmond described as: “Cross-platform modular operating system for data centre networking built on Linux” and “our foray into building our own software for running network devices like switches.
3. At three we revealed why nobody should ever, ever search the data belched online by hackers from the Ashley Madison marital cheater’s website.4. Then came The Reg’s interview with rarely interviewed physicist Freeman Dyson, who looked at the climate system before it became a hot political issue, over 25 years ago, who has campaigned against nuclear weapons proliferation, and who advised Bomber Command during WWII.5. At five we have Lenovo being busted for shipping Windows PCs containing crapware that re-installed itself via the firmware should it be discovered and deleted.6. Along similar lines at six we have automated update in Windows 10 that clashed with Nvidia drivers, forcing PCs to crash.7. Then came Erik Meijer, who has worked on C# and Visual Basic in addition to other critical elements of Microsoft's .NET, and who slammed the exceptionally fashionable Agile as a “cancer, adding that we talk too much about code, we don’t write enough code. Others disagreed.8. At eight, we have our analysis of a 75-byte sequence of Unicode that can be smuggled into text messages and take down your iPhone.9. At nine it was the attendees of Download Festival having their faces captured on CCTV, scanned and fed through facial recognition software and compared with a database of known offenders under a new system from Leicestershire Police.
10. Finally, we saw Microsoft pushing Windows 10 on unsuspecting Windows 7 and 8 user via a seemingly innocuous and rather vaguely worded updated, KB 3035583. 32c3 Security concerns around Intel's x86 processors – such as the company's decision to force the secretive Management Engine microcontroller onto its silicon – have raised fundamental questions about trust in personal computers, whatever architectures they may be based upon.
The founder of Invisible Things Labs, security researcher Joanna Rutkowska, delivered one of the first talks to the 32nd Chaos Communications Congress (32c3) in Hamburg on Sunday, restating the issues she considers make Intel x86 insecure and untrustworthy before explaining how she believed they may be practically solved in her talk, Towards (reasonably) trustworthy x86 laptops.The lecture was based on Rutkowska's October paper (PDF), which asserts that most modern operating systems are too trusting, plus her December recommendations (PDF).That issue is that kernels, drivers, and other low-level code are assumed to be trustworthy even though bugs hidden within them can be exploited to disable whole security mechanisms. Rutkowska added: A successful exploit against one of the thousands of drivers, networking protocols and stacks, filesystem subsystems, graphics and windowing services, or any other OS-provided services, has been considered unlikely by the systems architects.