The Register

It's like a turducken of screw-ups Roundup As America prepares for Thursday's Thanksgiving rituals of turkey, football, and awkward conversations with extended family, three organisations are going to have admins working overtime to clean up security messes.…

Dutton busts out the ol' razzle-dazzle of terrorists, encrypted chat and hand-wringing Australia's home affairs minister Peter Dutton wants the parliamentary inquiry into his proposed crypto-busting law to wind up its work, and send the draft rules back to legislators to approve, stat.…

Net income seems to be the hardest words for storage biz Pure Storage has reported quarterly results that beat Wall Street estimates and caused it to upgrade full-year guidance – but one thing still evades the all-flash array maker, and that is profit.…

Online sleuths dig into the case, with surprising success It's every sysadmin's worst nightmare: discovering that someone has planted a device in your network, among all your servers, and you have no idea where it came from nor what it does. What do you do?…

Data centre lost connectivity, now restored LastPass's cloud service suffered a five-hour outage today that left some people unable to use the password manager to log into their internet accounts.…

Women harassed, driven out while worse performing men keep jobs, lawsuit claims A former Oracle application sales rep is suing the database giant, alleging gender and age discrimination, sexual harassment, and violations of US labor laws after being fired.…

The internet's screen door strikes again – so get patching Adobe has emitted software updates to address a critical vulnerability in Flash Player for Windows, Mac, and Linux.…

Arm TrustZone now a thing for Azure IoT Edge devs Microsoft's Azure IoT team has made available a cross-platform version its Open Enclave SDK with an eye to securing devices at that mysterious entity, the Edge.…

Sorry Matt, looks like the app revolution takes a backseat to quality health care The public wants the NHS's £20.5bn cash boost to be spent on cancer care, mental health and recruiting and retaining staff – not digital services.…

Data ownership is so yesterday. Give us all you've got... ethically Comment In a refreshing change, the government yesterday appointed an NHS technology advisory panel with almost no medics or tech experts on board. Today, it announced the names of expert advisors to the nebulous "Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation", one of two new bodies set up this year. This one is intended to assure the public that they can trust AI companies with slurping their data.…

♪We built this rocket on debt and bull*♪ Elon Musk took to Twitter last night to announce the Big Falcon Rocket (BFR) will henceforth have the considerably more ambitious moniker Starship.…

'Living wills' part of politician and contractor bid to engender confidence in outsourcing Capita, Serco and Sopra Steria are drafting "living wills" with the government in case they collapse – a measure agreed to after the Carillion debacle.…

Cash splashed for clever Cache Microsoft has joined the throngs of excited Black Friday shoppers to snap up desktop virtualization specialist FSLogix.…

Automated mercy for those knobbly pointers SAP has snaffled automation minnow Contextor, claiming it will automate half the business processes supported by its ERP software in the next three years.…

Hacker coalition wants device support timeline clarified, free firmware mandates Last week, in a attempt to address broadband router security, the German government published its suggestions for minimum standards – and came under immediate criticism that its proposals didn't go far enough.…

Tech issues and rivalries can slow this down Analysis 5G has the potential to make cable and DSL as antiquated and pointless as using a horse and a cart to drive to the supermarket. And it's already here.…

Don't worry, it was just cargo, not 'nauts Roundup Russia, China and India all flung rockets into space this week and SpaceX managed to get a secondhand Falcon 9 off the historic pad 39A at Cape Canaveral.…

Emergency services need Tetra devices for at least three more years thanks to 4G delays Motorola Solutions and Sepura are to build a centrally managed procurement framework for the UK's radio network, Airwave.…

Plus: Battery-powered Azure Sphere, Razor support in Visual Studio Core Roundup This week Microsoft saw the light in Windows 10 and returned to the realm of chatbots, among plenty of other things notwithstanding the flashing of a surprise ad in an Insider build.…

Disk to disk to tape? Nah, it should be flash to flash to cloud +Comment Pure Storage is going to make hybrid public-private cloud data services available to customers, allowing them to, among other things, restore snapshots to either on-prem kit or AWS silos.…

Matthew Hanley, Connor Allsopp get 12 and 8 months in the clink, respectively Two miscreants were sent down by the Old Bailey yesterday for their role in the 2015 hacking of UK ISP TalkTalk.…

TL-R600VPN owners, grab and install firmware fixes now Bug-hunters have this week disclosed details of four security vulnerabilities in a family of TP-Link 1GbE VPN routers.…

Oz broadband network-builder quarterly revenue bests half-billion mark The outfit building Australia's National Broadband Network has outlined how it plans to achieve the per-user revenue mix that underpins its eventual profitability.…

This is on by default? 'Yikes' says Chipzilla techie Linux supremo Linus Torvalds has voiced support for a kernel patch that limits a previously deployed defense against Spectre Variant 2, a data-leaking vulnerability in modern processors.…

Redmond battles TITSUP multi-factor auth logins (yes, that's Total Inability To Support Users' Passcodes) Microsoft is recovering somewhat from a bad case of the Mondays that left some of its subscribers unable to use multi-factor authentication to log into their cloud services.…

We don't think so either, but config file format is getting harder to avoid The world's most popular programming language, according to devops biz Datree.io at least, it not Java, JavaScript, nor Python. Rather, it's YAML, a recursive acronym for "YAML Ain't Markup Language."…

Security biz hit with class-action fraud sueball after probe smashes stock price A Symantec shareholder is suing the infosec biz, alleging its top brass fraudulently massaged the company's financial figures.…

Majority of sketchy apps can be traced to China, study finds Many popular free VPN apps are sketchy Chinese operations with dubious privacy policies, according to research.…

Expert panel hopes to make dreams of improvement reality Health secretary Matt Hancock's tech brains trust met for the first time today as the UK government revealed the people it hopes will come up with workable ideas to fix the NHS's creaking IT systems.…

We'll thrust it even deeper into chipmakers, vow investigators China has claimed to have gathered "massive evidence" in its ongoing investigation into Korean chip giants Samsung and SK Hynix and the US's Micron for alleged violations of its antitrust laws.…

And those utility price controls? Er, not helpful Britain's critical national infrastructure is vulnerable to hackers and neither UK.gov nor privatised operators are doing enough to tighten things up, a Parliamentary committee has warned.…

Disgruntled investor says shareholders are being 'misled' on finances Hortonworks is facing a sueball over its uneven merger with competitor Cloudera, as a proposed class action takes aim at the company's claims to shareholders.…

All you need to do this at home is a party balloon and roadkill The year is 2018 and planet Earth is on the edge. Tensions between the great powers are at boiling point, fires ravage the western United States, and the European Union is in disarray. But yesterday in Atlanta, Georgia, the world's finest minds gathered to answer the question on everyone's lips.…

Data including CVV numbers slurped up as customers submitted it to website Vision Direct has admitted customers' personal and financial data was leaked earlier this month after hackers compromised the company's website.…

He was there when Bill Gates tried to carve up tech Obit We're sorry to bring news that John Wharton, a popular and influential figure in Silicon Valley, died last week.…

Do they accept Monero in Hell? One or more completely feckless scumbags have loaded the Make-A-Wish foundation's international website with crypto-mining malware scripts.…

Halt – who goes there? No one, from now on As if its financial woes weren't bad enough, IBM is suffering the further indignity of having a Scottish rail operator halting services to a station named after everyone's favourite mainframe maker.…

I've heard so much about the team, she burbles. Yes, us too TSB has named Debbie Crosbie as the chief exec to clear up its tech mess and persuade customers they can still trust the meltdown bank.…

Microsoft's cloudy service finds Mondays just as hard as the rest of us Update Happy Monday, everyone! Azure Multi-Factor Authentication is struggling, meaning that some users with the functionality enabled are now super secure. And, er, locked out.…

Discover the latest attacks, learn the best defence tactics Promo No matter how sophisticated your security precautions are, you can never assume your computer systems are impenetrable. Only the most alert and highly skilled defenders can fight off determined cybercriminals who know how to circumvent today’s advanced security and monitoring tools.…

UK watchdog waves fist in paper’s general direction, asks it to stop forcing people to accept tracking The Washington Post newspaper's online subscription options don't comply with European Union data protection rules – but the UK's privacy watchdog can only issue it with a firm telling off.…

Like Ubuntu, hate upgrading? Canonical founder has good news. And a mighty, mighty beard Interview Mark Shuttleworth delivered an unashamed plug for Ubuntu while cheerfully throwing a little shade on the competition at the OpenStack Berlin 2018 summit last week.…

Embellished CV almost spells disaster Who, Me? Roll up, roll up, for another instalment of Who, Me?, the weekly column in which El Reg tries to cure the very worst cases of Monday blues with fist-biting tales from readers of tech jobs gone wrong.…

Boffins find those who know about phishing more likely to be duped than the less informed Phishing works more frequently on those who understand what social engineering is than on those who live in blissful ignorance, or so a study of students at University of Maryland, Baltimore County suggests.…

Silicon Valley legend dies in firestorm that has killed scores while more than 1,000 are missing Obituary Bill Godbout, a maverick techie who played a pivotal role in getting computers into the hands of the masses, was killed this week in California's wildfires. He was aged 79.…

Plus, why is Kaspersky Lab getting into chess? Roundup What a week it has been: we had the creation of a new government agency, a meltdown flashback, and of course, Patch Tuesday.…

Measurement nerds enter the 21st century As incredible as it may seem, until this week the definitive measurement of a kilogram was a cylinder made of an alloy comprising 90 per cent platinum and 10 per cent iridium sat under a glass dome in a room in Paris.…

We never meant to make that widely public which is why we made a public FAQ for it Microsoft was, and maybe still is, considering injecting targeted adverts into the Windows 10 Mail app.…

El Reg drills into banned technology with Freedom-of-Info request The US Department of Defense's "do not buy" list of foreign software and equipment turns out to be about as long as the list of bug-free Windows releases or privacy-focused Facebook apps.…

AWS comes up with blanket policies to smother public-facing cloud silos Amazon Web Services is taking steps to halt the epidemic of data leaks caused by the S3 cloud buckets it hosts from being accidentally left wide open to the internet by customers.…