The Register

Not OK Google: Android, Siri sink in SurfingAttack Video Voice commands encoded in ultrasonic waves can, best case scenario, silently activate a phone's digital assistant, and order it to do stuff like read out text messages and make phone calls, we're told.…

Big names drop out of GDC, HP axes partner event, stock markets in free fall Growing concern over the spread of the novel Wuhan coronavirus has prompted Epic Games, Microsoft, and Unity to announce on Thursday that they are withdrawing from the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco next month. Facebook has also cancelled the meet-and-greet part of its F8 developer conference in May.…

D-list cinematic eye-gouger catches heat for million-dollar funbucks bung Improbable Hollywood ninja Steven Seagal has been fined by America's financial watchdog for hiding details about a paid promotion he did for a crypto-coin investment upstart.…

Google-funded think tanks need to sit back and, er, have a think Campaigners have reacted angrily to Oracle's decision to fund the Internet Accountability Project (IAP), a lobby group which has – surprisingly enough – supported Oracle's claim against Google in the US Supreme Court.…

Soz contractors In a move that will surprise absolutely no one, Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs (HMRC) will push ahead with controversial IR35 tax reforms to the disappointment of contractors that hoped the regulation would be halted.…

Hey – there's always Visual SourceSafe, right? Source shack GitHub has taken a tumble today with many users finding pretty much all of its services either degraded or borked beyond belief.…

Boring! Where are teh 1337 h4x? We want 1337 h4x The Iranian cybercrime group that was expected to spearhead the rogue Middle East nation's revenge for the US assassination of General Qasem Soleimani has quite the arsenal at its digital fingertips.…

Mission Extension Vehicle to the rescue Northrop Grumman's zombie satellite-slaying Mission Extension Vehicle (MEV) has docked to the Intelsat 901 satellite, potentially affording the latter a life extension.…

That US investment would sound pretty good right about now Nokia is reportedly exploring the possibility of a merger or acquisition in the face of intense pressures on profitability.…

Wishing there was something new in the Fast Ring? How about a blocking bug? There was good news and bad news for Windows Insiders last night. The good? IT admins can now distribute 20H1 via Microsoft's Windows Server Update Services. The bad? No build for Fast Ringers.…

Upvote or Like if 40 days of peace and quiet sounds good to you Pope Francis is calling on the faithful to log off for Lent – eschewing mobile phones and idle chit-chat for a nice quiet commune with God.…

Big shiny's little sis sports Apple Pro Max-esque camera placement There are still several weeks until Huawei formally announces its upcoming P40 and P40 Pro flagship smartphones. As a taste of what's to come, the embattled Chinese tech giant has quietly revealed the first device in the lineup: the P40 Lite.…

200 or more to go as both get 45-day consultations... GTS's will kick off on 4 March IBMers carving out a living in its Services arm are again preparing to enter a 45-day consultation process – meaning at least 100 UK heads will roll at Global Technology Services and a minimum of 100 will leave Global Business Services.…

Due dil 101 Today was meant to be Brit security biz Sophos's last day on the London Stock Exchange following its £3bn purchase by a US venture capital company.…

It's Amazon how much some people are making off cloud... about Jeffin' $40bn Google will pump more than $10bn into offices and data centres across the US this year as it gears up for a fight with rival clouds Amazon Web Service and Microsoft Azure.…

Redmond no longer expects to meet quarter guidance for personal computing unit In response to the effect of the coronavirus outbreak on Chinese suppliers, Microsoft has cut its sales forecast for Surface tablets and Windows OEM licences.…

Firm must pay HMRC's legal costs, rules judge The Court of Appeal has thrown out Aria Technology's efforts to squeeze out of a £300k tax bill after HMRC found £750k of the firm's input tax was not creditable*. Top judges have ordered the company to pay the UK tax collector's legal bills in the case.…

Merging search and address bar means more data for the tech giants Microsoft Edge and Yandex are "much more worrisome" compared to Brave, Chrome, Firefox and Safari, according to a paper on browser privacy (PDF) published this week.…

Last chance to save £100s on DevOps, containers, and CI/CD extravaganza Event If you want to join us at our Continuous Lifecycle London conference in May, and save a packet now, don't hang around – our early-bird ticket offer finishes this weekend.…

Elon Musk confirms car-sized space rock isn't his Tesla Roadster Vid Earth has a mini-moon: a space rock close enough to be a near-Earth asteroid spotted this month orbiting our planet.…

Driver gets a-weigh with Chromebook thefts and doesn't get away with it Gevorg Kevliyan, a resident of Decatur, Alabama, was sentenced earlier this month to a year in prison and three years of supervised release – for stealing 900 Acer Chromebook laptops from a truck he'd been hired to drive.…

Encryption keys forced to zero by chip-level KrØØk flaw A billion-plus computers, phones, and other devices are said to suffer a chip-level security vulnerability that can be exploited by nearby miscreants to snoop on victims' encrypted Wi-Fi traffic.…

Fintech biz's financials hit a high note... as in bank notes Those who remember Opera for its freeware browser may be saddened to note its ever-increasing dependency on fintech revenues, judging from financial figures it shared last night.…

Section 215 more useless than we suspected yet they still want to keep it The controversial surveillance program that gave the NSA access to the phone call records of millions of Americans has cost US taxpayers $100m – and resulted in just one useful lead over four years.…

It's 2020 and pre-auth, superuser command injection is still a thing Zyxel's network storage boxes, business VPN gateways, firewalls, and, er, security scanners can be remotely hijacked by any miscreant, due to a devastating security hole in the firmware.…

AI biz tells clients miscreant 'gained unauthorized access', tells us 'servers were never accessed, flaw patched' A hacker stole the customer list of Clearview, the controversial startup that scraped three billion photos from the public internet to train a population-scale facial-recognition system sold to police and government agents.…

Idiot faces up to 20 years in the clink after peddling digital tokens A former Microsoft software engineer who screwed over his bosses to pocket $10m was found guilty of fraud yesterday.…

Plus: World Tour Sydney event goes online only over coronavirus Lose a chief executive officer, promote a chairman and buy a company: that's how they roll at cloud-based CRM monster Salesforce.com.…

We couldn't have anyone upsetting the Android monopoly, could we? As Huawei takes the initiative to create its own homegrown alternative to the Play Store, Google has reportedly pleaded with the White House to offer it an exemption to again work with the Chinese tech giant.…

Sir Andrew Parker also claims UK spies are not doing bulk surveillance British spies are once again stipulating that tech companies break their encryption so life is made easier for state-sponsored eavesdroppers.…

Usage of The-Update-That-Must-Not-Be-Named continues to tumble as May day approaches A fresh set of usage figures has the notorious Windows 10 October 2018 Update withering on the Redmond vine as uptake of November's jumped-up patchfest climbs.…

There's light at the end of the tunnel Squirrelled away in Brit defence group BAE Systems' preliminary financial results for 2019 (PDF) is the end of a crumb trail leading back seven years to ambitious plans to replace seven legacy ERP systems with one.…

Soothsayer-general Ming Chi Kuo says 5nm-made chips on their way For years, Apple has been said to be working on its own in-house Arm architecture to replace Chipzilla's silicon. And, while nothing is confirmed, famously reliable analyst Ming-Chi Kuo reckons they'll come in the first half of 2021.…

Basic authentication will be OFF for Exchange Online email and other services from October 2020 Microsoft has doled out more details on forthcoming changes to the way mail clients authenticate to Exchange Online, the email service used by Office 365.…

Push to get punters inhaling one cloudy product Cisco has belatedly crashed the integrated security party with SecureX – a platform that slaps together Switchzilla's network, endpoint cloud and application security stuff.…

Plus birth certificates, job interview data and more A leak of 10,000 records at a Leicestershire care home provider exposed elderly patients' wishes not to be resuscitated, detailed care plans and precisely how much councils paid for individual patients' care.…

How'd you kids meet? Oh, we were helping control an imaginary disease outbreak in a landlocked country Data science platform Dataiku is teaming up with military alliance NATO to create a system to help it build and "deploy" AI projects.…

Plus or minus a few caveats A California judge has given the go-ahead for a $240m lawsuit against AT&T for porting a subscriber's phone number to a hacker, allowing the criminal to steal $24m in cryptocurrency.…

Management software for smart devices to ease entry into ecosystem This week, Amazon announced a software layer to help Internet-of-Things makers integrate Amazon Device SDKs with their IoT gear, further complicating the already confusing technical landscape of dubiously secured, privacy-challenged network-ready appliances.…

High-speed hedgehog pr0n ahoy The Register's very own "Got Brexit Done" tea towel finally arrived this week and brought with it important news for Blighty's hedge dwellers.…

Biz bags fat funding round Revolut, the British-based mobile banking app, has raised $500m (£385m) in fourth-round funding which gives it a theoretical value of $5.5bn (£4.3bn).…

Wrap your assets up well before you send them on their journey Promo Like those in most organisations, you are probably savvy enough by now to have put in place strong security measures that keep your data safe from thieves and prying eyes wherever it is stored.…

Expert panel sesh turns heated on infosec conference's opening day RSA As they do every year, the names behind the RSA crypto-system took the stage in San Francisco for the RSA Conference's crypto panel, sharing their thoughts on the pressing issues facing the information security world.…

'It's time to stop pretending they have driverless cars. Because they don't' The deadly crash of an Apple engineer's Tesla was down to the victim being overly trusting of the car's Autopilot software while distracted by his phone, America's National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) concluded this week.…

Probe raises serious questions about private v public web management Updated A bug in software pushed out by Cloudflare resulted in failures at the heart of the web's infrastructure, according to a report published this week by the Internet Systems Consortium (ISC).…

Google so sorry after devices fly the coop in multi-hour outage Google has apologized for 16 hours of downtime for countless Nest cameras that left angry owners unable to watch live video streams from their gizmos.…

Pair engineer malicious code from public source tweak before official binary releases Google has updated Chrome for Linux, Mac, and Windows to address three security vulnerabilities – and exploit code for one of them is already public, so get patching.…

Digital transformation? Pah, pass the tins of beans and firelighters The top level of IT management is preparing for a recession in 2020 while getting poor results from the industry’s most hyped technologies, a study by the Hackett Group found.…

Good for privacy – or an alarming move towards further internet centralisation? Mozilla has started rolling out encrypted DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) by default for US users of the nonprofit's Firefox browser.…

Chinese tat bazaar's latest smartphone effort will set you back £459 Xiaomi's Mi Note 10 phablet – first introduced last November – has hit UK shores with the entry-level model retailing at £459.…