The Register

The week's other security news In Brief It looks like the Egregor crew is at it again, and this time the ransomware-flingers have caught venerable but struggling US retail biz Kmart.…

Big screen fondleslab action for 20H2 slides into 2021 Microsoft has applied the brakes to the roll-out of the latest Windows 10 to the Surface Hub 2S after customers reported problems following installation.…

Arriving from a listed at-risk nation? New rules in place mid-December IT pros have joined the elite of high-flying biz execs, sports stars, and celebrity actors in qualifying for UK.gov's exemptions to two-week Covid-19 self-isolation rules when returning to England from listed at-risk nations.…

Agrees to acquire UK outfit IMImobile for $730m US networking giant Cisco has agreed to buy London-based cloud comms business IMImobile in a $730m (roughly £550m) all-cash deal.…

Not sure what it's supposed be saying but it probably isn't 0x00000050 Bork!Bork!Bork! Bork is on wheels yet again as we visit Ireland and a very unhappy bit of mobile signage.…

On the other hand, they're not going anywhere, so it's win-win for Big Red Thoughts of future projects and upgrade paths have given way to more pressing business-wide concerns about Brexit and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, according to the UK Oracle User Group.…

It's just Apple doing what Apple does best. Making loads of money by tending to its Walled Garden Apple Silicon has been the autumn’s hottest news in cool chips. Giving Intel two years’ notice, the first laptop and desktop with the new Arm-based M1 chip have shipped and the benchmarks run. If you believe some of the more febrile headlines, Apple has upended the industry, sparked a revolution and changed the face of computing forever.…

Who is the debugger that took down my mainframe? Who, Me? Take a step back half a century with a cautionary tale of mainframes, student enthusiasm, and a shrinking deck of cards. Welcome to Who, Me?…

Bad design bites as Flight Centre's policy of no credit card or passport numbers in app's free text field was not enforced, therefore ignored Be careful what you wish for when running a hackathon, because one in Australia turned up a data breach in the trove of sample data offered to hackers. And it was probably developers’ fault.…

Catch up on these Intel webinars and learn what AI and 5G mean for you Promo The last 12 months have seen technology leaders grapple with unprecedented change – but only the most naïve would expect things to slow down in 2021.…

Plus: US President signs a new executive order on AI and how JAX is becoming more popular at DeepMind In brief A Canadian security company apparently lied to officials at New York’s Lockport City School District about the accuracy of its facial recognition cameras, when the technology was installed across schools last year.…

Probe now sets sail for further adventures VIDS ‘N’ PICS Japanese and Australian astroboffins have successfully recovered samples taken from Asteroid Ryugu by the Hayabusa2 probe.…

Grab grabs a license and so did China’s Ant Group Uber is poised to become the owner of a decent chunk of a new bank in Singapore.…

The possible plan to create a parallel financial system also adds bump-to-pay in new domestic trial China has found the first jurisdiction willing to entertain the idea of using its digital currency for cross-border payments: Hong Kong.…

Well now you can. Here’s how… Promo If you’re on the front line of cyber security, this has been a year like no other, with new threats emerging even as the great shift to home working has exposed long ignored weaknesses in existing infrastructure.…

Two and a half decades on, JavaScript is everywhere JavaScript turned twenty-five years old on Friday, if you count from December 4, 1995, when Netscape Communications and Sun Microsystems first announced the technology.…

Light-based quantum system bests classical supercomputer Boffins from China say that they have managed to detect as many as 76 photons using a quantum computer, a result said to be the second demonstration of "quantum supremacy" or "quantum primacy" – solving a problem that a quantum computer can do far better than a classical computer.…

Attempting to save aquatic life trapped in old fishing nets, divers uncover a hidden treasure Divers clearing out a sprawl of abandoned fishing nets stuck in the Baltic Sea discovered more than they bargained for when they spotted an Enigma Machine, a device that encrypted secret messages used by the Germans in World War II.…

So here's LAMBDA to make custom functions out of those formulas Microsoft will let users create custom functions in Excel using the number wrangler's own formula language.…

Sitting comfortably? It's an Azure Purview Preview Microsoft has teased Azure Purview, a tech built to deal with customers' data compliance and governance requirements by verifiyng the presence of sensitive information without users having to eyeball the stuff first.…

Expert advice on how to combat one of the most dangerous online threats Promo With the COVID-19 pandemic leading us all to depend on online services like we never have before, a DDoS attack that takes operations offline can have very serious and long-term consequences for a business. Add to this the huge surge in DDoS attacks this year, with assaults getting bigger, more powerful and disruptive, and it’s clear security leaders need to urgently get to grips with how to deal with them.…

Deferred prosecution agreement offered to Meng Wanzhou US prosecutors have reportedly offered Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou a deferred prosecution agreement. If accepted, the deal will have charges deferred and eventually dismissed, but will require Meng to admit to wrongdoing.…

Good to see the youth being productive Well, that escalated quickly. In a scene not unlike the opening minutes of 2001, a group of angry young men stole up Pine Mountain, expressed distaste for Mexicans and aliens, then proceeded to tear down the latest instalment of 2020's favourite meme.…

Should we be worried? The undead have telepathic powers if Microsoft's latest Windows 10 Insider emission is to be believed.…

Plan is to get public sector buying services straight from suppliers The UK government has launched a £750m procurement looking for platform and infrastructure services direct from public cloud providers - the latest in a bewildering array of UK.gov frameworks for the fluffy white stuff.…

I'd plug it back in but the cable's not long enough for a jog Something for the Weekend, Sir? It's a pain in the neck, that's what it is.…

Software sales for Christmas Job Alert We're doing our bit to keep techies teching with free job listings for anyone looking to hire such skills in the midst of this pandemic.…

Digging into the tech and strategy with compute services veep Deepak Singh Interview At its virtual re:Invent conference this week, AWS CEO Andy Jassy announced Amazon EKS and ECS Anywhere, a move Canonical said enables EKS to run "anywhere you can get Ubuntu."…

At last, a chance for a random phone-toting passer-by to show their quality Bork!Bork!Bork! An opportunity presents itself in today's column of bork to inject some honesty into a local estate agency thanks to a screen that is begging for a bit of casting.…

Machine programming and other future technology touted at Chipzilla shindig Intel on Thursday trotted out its research scientists to talk up technology initiatives that aim to make computation faster and developers less of a liability.…

Panto season arrives at Vulture Central On Call Welcome back to On Call, this week with some pantomime-like japes. 'Tis the season after all.…

Learn over one week, two weeks, or even two days – the choice is yours Promo As the nights get darker, and the holiday season begins, thoughts naturally turn to… how am I am going to sharpen up my cyber-security skills in 2021? And how am I going to find the time to do it? After all, miscreants are showing no sign of deskilling or taking a day off any time soon.…

SMIC says the smackdown won’t hurt, is based on fake news The US government's Department of Defense has added China’s top chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC) to the list of “Communist Chinese military companies” in which US investors are not permitted to hold or trade shares.…

Services spend lands on your AWS bill. Is that enough to get you buying with a click? Amazon Web Services has added the chance to purchase third-party professional services to its online software Marketplace.…

And don’t you dare try to get a fax machine into the Middle Kingdom China has restricted export of encryption technologies in the first list on new items published under new export control laws.…

Everyone has an off day, er, year, er, make that four years... Videos Hours after Chinese state media showed the nation's Chang'e-5 probe successfully leaving the Moon, with lunar samples safely tucked away inside, US officials released the first footage of America's Arecibo telescope collapsing.…

Web giant could be dragged in front of a judge to justify its actions Google unlawfully spied on and interrogated staff to prevent them from organizing a union, and fired two employees in the process, it is claimed.…

Ad biz supposedly barely advertised jobs to staff if a visa worker applied The US Department of Justice on Thursday filed a lawsuit against Facebook for allegedly unlawfully discriminating against US workers.…

New project allows connection to PostgreSQL using SQL Server drivers Re:invent Coming in 2021, Babelfish is an AWS project which provides an endpoint for PostgreSQL that is compatible with Microsoft SQL Server, the idea being to enable porting an application without having to change the code.…

Medical fridge firm finagling carries hallmarks of state-sponsored hack dogs An unidentified group of malicious sorts impersonated a so-called "cold chain" company involved in COVID-19 vaccine distribution networks then targeted an EU governmental agency, according to IBM.…

Undereaction a sign of investor 'confidence/insanity' in the Snowflake sales engine, says analyst Snowflake has reported its first financials since becoming a multi-billion dollar stock market darling, showing triple digit but slowing revenue growth in its Q3, and a near-doubling of losses. The response from Wall Street? Thumbs down.…

An event we will never forget, says dreamweaver-in-chief Marc Benioff Wishing "happy holidays" to any of those sharing his winter-wonderland stage, Marc Benioff presented an outwardly jolly figure as he rattled through the world-domination plan of Salesforce, the SaaS biz he co-founded.…

You should have done that in April anyway, says Check Point, but lots of you haven't. *Cough* Cisco Teams Updated Infosec bods from Check Point have discovered that popular apps are still running outdated versions of Google’s Play Core library for Android – versions that contained a remote file inclusion vulnerability.…

Alternative networks have Ofcom on speed-dial BT-owned Openreach has slapped a "massive" price increase on connections used by alternative networks for FTTP aggregation, with critics claiming it will "revert the country to a BT monopoly".…

'Cos that would be against the Fourth Amendment, legal team says The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has sued the US government, claiming Homeland Security agents trampled over people's constitutional rights – by buying phone location data from commercial brokers rather than getting necessary search warrants.…

Maybe this might work after all Loon, known for its giant billowing broadband-beaming balloons, says it has figured out how to use machine-learning algorithms to keep its lofty vehicles hovering in place autonomously in the stratosphere.…

Admins have until late 2021 to move away, but Windows containers need caution "Docker support is being deprecated in Kubernetes. You need to pay attention to this and plan for it. THIS WILL BREAK YOUR CLUSTERS," said CNCF Ambassador Ian Coldwater on Twitter.…

Is this some kind of sick game of alien whack-a-mole? This is getting out of hand. Mere days after the metal "monolith" found out in the boondocks of Utah vanished, a similar structure has popped up on a Californian mountaintop.…

Somebody get this project more investment The LibreOffice team has published the first beta of version 7.1, with general availability planned for February 2021.…

Has anyone really ever seen someone else use either of these in the wild? Samsung hasn't given up on Bixby. No, the South Korean electronics giant has confirmed a major update to its voice assistant platform, introducing support for the DeX desktop computing mode while taking design cues from Apple's latest Siri refresh.…