In an effort to demonstrate there are actual uses for blockchain technology, global professional services biz EY and Microsoft have teamed up to offer companies a way to manage rights and royalties. Though the system is designed to serve any industry that deals with intellectual property licensing and royalty payments, the …

One of Canada's largest utilities is planning to make blockchain companies bid for access to electricity. Hydro Quebec says it will set aside a 500MW block of power that will be reserved for companies that are "using cryptography as applied to blockchain technology." Access to that block will be subject to a bidding process …

All aboard the blockchain hypewagon – Microsoft announced today that it has begun using the technology to deal with royalty and digital rights contracts. While the shiny toy, which runs on Azure (of course), is interesting, lurking within the excited ramblings was an admission of how Xbox game publishers used to get their …

VMware’s published the content catalogues for its VMworld gabfests in Las Vegas (August) and Barcelona (November) and as usual has leaked a few insights into what it’s working on. Attendees at VMworld USA will have a chance to attend a session titled “VMware enterprise blockchain – getting started” and a workshop of the same …

BSides Tel Aviv Blockchain technologies might be abused to create a takedown-resistant infrastructure for botnets. During a presentation at BSides Tel Aviv on Tuesday, security researcher Omer Zohar demonstrated proof-of-concept code for a fully functional command-and-control infrastructure built on top of the Ethereum network. Zohar was …

SAP has used its annual conference to announce plans to release a private cloud deployment with IBM Cloud, offer up blockchain-as-a-service and bolster its Leonardo tool kit. The gabfest, held in Florida, US, this week, has seen the German ERP giant shift its focus to creating what it terms the "intelligent enterprise", while …

Comment In the same way it has become de rigueur to slag off Facebook for its many privacy sins while billions still dump their data into the service, it's also pretty trendy to pretend that blockchain, a digital ledger that records transactions publicly and permanently, offers answers to a new and improved decentralised web that leaves …

Roundup What happened in networking this week? Well, for starters, Nokia acquired analytics company SpaceTime Insight, and will roll its capabilities into its Internet of Things business. SpaceTime Insight provides IoT analytics and applications for the transport, energy, and utilities sectors. Its focus was predicting asset failure, …

Australia’s government has tabled its proposed budget for financial year 2018/19 and as usual there’s lots of technology-related spending to contemplate. Welfare payments agency Centrelink gets AU$316.2m to spend over the next four years on the third tranche of its Welfare Payment Infrastructure Transformation project. The …

Blockchain is overhyped, CIOs aren't using it and many don't plan to either, according to the latest research from Gartner. In its annual survey of IT leaders, the analyst firm found that just 1 per cent are already using blockchain and only 8 per cent plan to experiment with it in the short term. In contrast, a third of the …

Episode 7 BOFH logo telephone with devil's horns "I've got two words for you," the Boss says excitedly. "Block Chain!" "That's one word," the PFY shoots back. "Unless you're talking about old fashioned lifting apparatus," I say. "And it's usually said as 'Chain block'. Was that what you were talking about?" "No, I mean the new …

Too many cryptocurrency people are trying to force-fit blockchain technology into identity solutions, when ID needs its own solutions. That's the opinion of Steve Wilson of Lockstep Consulting, who this month co-authored a paper on identity for the Internet Society: Do Blockchains Have Anything to Offer Identity? with Steve …

Blockchain enthusiasts may be a little deflated today, after the nation of Sierra Leone took to Twitter to debunk claims it had conducted “the world’s first blockchain election.” But it’s not all bad news for blockheads, because distributed ledgers were used during the poll and performed well, just not in an official capacity …

Bitcoin's blockchain can be loaded with sensitive, unlawful or malicious data, raising potential legal problems in most of the world, according to boffins based in Germany. In a paper [PDF] presented at the Financial Cryptography and Data Security conference on the Dutch Caribbean island of Curaçao – "A Quantitative Analysis …

Analysis At the Open Source Leadership Summit in Sonoma, California, last week, The Register caught up with Brian Behlendorf, executive director of The Hyperledger Project, and had a chance to chat about the state of open source blockchain technology. Behlendorf took over the organization in May 2016 after the Linux Foundation …

Hot on the heels of Bitcoin’s dramatic rise and fall - and rise, British parliamentarians have decided to launch an inquiry into digital currencies. The Treasury Committee, one of the more influential of the House of Commons’ talking shops, today confirmed it will investigate the impact of cryptocurrencies and how they can be …

Microsoft's wanted a really good federated identity scheme ever since the early 2000s, when it gave the world Project Hailstorm, aka ".Net My Services", to let a web of online services know a little about you and the information you are happy to share with others. Hailstorm passed, swept back years later as Geneva Server and …

Updated India has vowed to ban the use of cryptocurrencies within its borders, it appears. News of the clampdown was delivered by finance minister Arun Jaitley in his annual budget speech (PDF) delivered on Thursday. “The government does not consider crypto-currencies legal tender or coin and will take all measures to eliminate use …