The Register

Expect some wow factor in our newer phones, says company chief LG was at one point a major player in the handset market, pumping out phones like the Nexus 5 that sold like hotcakes. Since then, its fortunes have waned, with its mobile division reporting an operating loss of $135m (KRW 161.2bn) in the third quarter of 2019.…

Malware loaded onto more than 5k cash tills but pre-GDPR screw-up means retailer dodged bigger financial bullet Dixons Retail is facing a £500,000 penalty from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) after a hacker installed malware that infected thousands of point of sale tills and scooped up 5.6 million payment card details.…

Why Rust? 'It works and usually does what you wanted it to do,' says dev Interview Rust developer Denys Séguret, from Lyon, France, wanted a better way to view and search directories, so he coded his own, sparking interest from others with similar frustrations.…

Not a good look if camera hits you from the wrong angle CES Honor, the youth-focused subsidiary of the embattled Chinese tech giant Huawei, today unveiled its latest MagicBook laptops at CES.…

Fast retrieval and 'Bucket lock' security, but not the cheapest for cloud storage Google has opened the freezer on general availability of its Archive class cloud storage, designed for data that is stored for more than a year and accessed less than once every 12 months.…

$33bn 'significantly undervalue' the stock, your move again copier giant The board at HP has yet again rejected advances from Xerox, telling the hard pressed copier giant that it needs to increase the tabled bid of $33bn before it considers mutual due diligence and then putting the offer to shareholders.…

Ghost of Windows Future takes a bow while the Ghost of Windows Past spots XP in the wild Happily for those still reacting negatively to sunlight after New Year's festivities, the new version of Windows 10 Microsoft has flung at Fast Ring fanboys and girls was a tad on the muted side.…

Moving to America after being swallowed by Insight Partners, which already chucked $500m at it last year Insight Partners – the same private equity house that pumped half a billion dollars into data protection powerhouse Veeam Software earlier this year – is acquiring the firm for an estimated $5bn.…

This 'Droid won't break speed records, but battery lasts ages and you've got 2 years of updates Review Released halfway through last year, the Nokia 3.2 ain't no spring chicken but you should pay that no mind, because, despite being on the market for a while, this budget blower is not a waste of money.…

Should you believe the hype? Well, yes and no Column Just before Christmas, Google claimed quantum supremacy. The company had configured a quantum computer to produce results that would take conventional computers some 10,000 years to replicate - a landmark event.…

Businesses have many options, but with 25% of Windows users still on 7, security is a worry It is remarkable that Windows 7 is reaching end of support on January 14 2020 while maintaining something approaching 27 per cent market share among Windows users, according to Statcounter.…

ICANN, ISOC, PIR and Ethos still refusing to provide details Comment The controversial proposed sale of the .org internet registry to an unknown private equity firm will hit a critical decision point this week, and all the organizations in charge are refusing to talk about it.…

The Radcliffe is totally radical The Milky Way's spiral arm that's home to our Solar System has been found to cradle the largest gaseous structure in the galaxy – a long, thin strip of jumbled star-forming matter measuring 9,000 light-years long and 400 light-years wide.…

El Reg speaks to ex-AT&T boffin who previously probed weird effect Video Netizens this week rediscovered and documented in viral videos an electrical interference problem known to researchers for years: standing up from your chair can cause your PC monitors to blank.…

This Internet of Things in the cloud is working out so well, so, so well, so well Amazon's Ring home security camera biz says it has fired multiple employees caught covertly watching video feeds from customer devices.…

Vinod Khosla sued by Golden State for refusing to allow folks to access shoreline After years of negotiations, arbitration, pleas, and Supreme Court challenges, the US state of California has finally had enough of beach-blocking billionaire Vinod Khosla – and sued the Sun Microsystems co-founder.…

And the techies are almost universally very happy about it There are still corners of the internet that function like the old days, and US regional internet registry ARIN has just proved it – much to the joy of network engineers.…

Unsafe hashing algorithm really is unsafe SHA-1 stands for Secure Hash Algorithm but version 1, developed in 1995, isn't secure at all. It has been vulnerable in theory since 2004 though it took until 2017 for researchers at CWI Amsterdam and Google to demonstrate a practical if somewhat costly collision attack.…

If you're thinking of riding one of those things, wear a helmet There were nearly 40,000 electric scooter injuries in the United States between 2014 and 2018, according to a study published in the journal JAMA Surgery on Wednesday.…

Nork cash grab nasty gets stealthier Malware hunters are sounding the alarm over a new, more effective version of the North Korean "Apple Jeus" macOS software nasty.…

Uploads, deletions, private-to-public switcharoos, all bad stuff TikTok, a mobile video app popular with teens, was vulnerable to SMS spoofing attacks that could have led to the extraction of private information, according to infosec researchers.…

Better LTE than ever, cos you'll prise my perfectly serviceable old mobe from my cold, dead hands, say respondents A flurry of 5G-capable handsets have hit the shelves, giving punters an opportunity to transcend the limits of LTE data. But will they take the bait? According to the latest edition of the GSMA's The Future of Devices, probably not.…

He could have nicked £7m if he hadn't been caught A civil servant who stole £1.7m from the UK's Ministry of Justice through a fake "IT services contract" has been jailed for three-and-a-half years.…

Yearly review promises FTTP for rural bods, price check on network wholesaler Openreach Ofcom today published new proposals that aim to see fibre-to-the-premises broadband become more ubiquitous, particularly for users in rural areas and finally kill off the old copper network.…

Beefy Firefox release despite new 4-weekly release cycle, but users stick stubbornly to Google Chrome Updated Mozilla has aired a bunch of new features aimed at making web 2020 a little less unpleasant in its release of Firefox 72.…

'Unsubstantiated' ad must never be seen again, growls adland watchdog A group of Luddites who think 5G causes everything from cancer to lack to sleep have had an advert promoting their views banned from public display.…

Odd thing haunts Next Generation airliner family (not the infamous Max) Boeing's 737 Next Generation airliners have been struck by a peculiar software flaw that blanks the airliners' cockpit screens if pilots dare attempt a westwards landing at specific airports.…

Plus: Top QC deplores courtroom use of 'Americanisms' Autonomy Trial Former Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch's barrister has branded HPE's $5bn fraud trial against his client "a case study in buyer's remorse" as the legal battle being heard at London's High Court begins drawing to a close.…

Privacy is nearly dead, but we're not even close to getting over it Column Sitting quietly in the upper corner of my browser's address bar, a counter rises as Disconnect thwarts requests to track me. Visiting well-behaved sites (such as El Reg), those numbers tick up more slowly.…

System-on-a-chip IP partnership seeks to create more smart home, automobile, robotics, IoT, and industrial applications, among others On Tuesday, RISC-V CPU fixer SiFive announced it's working with CEVA, which licenses technology for deep learning, audio, and computer vision, to simplify the creation of processors capable of handling machine learning code without demanding too much power.…

Svelte beast, pretty on the inside CES Amidst the stifling heat and ever-present body odour of the annual CES trade show, Samsung lifted the lid on its latest top-tier 2-in-1 Chromebook – the Galaxy Chromebook.…

Redmond's open-source code editor is not the equal of heavyweight Java IDEs but still has attractions Microsoft has announced several improvements to Java support in Visual Studio Code, its popular open source editor.…

Want a pretty mobe? Tough CES Tired of breaking your phone on nights out? Happy to walk around with a handset that looks as though it was stolen from a construction yard? If so, you'll want to check out the new Cat S32 mobe, announced at CES in Las Vegas.…

We can rebuild him, we have the backups... er, right? More than a week after its website and online services were taken offline by malware, foreign currency super-exchange Travelex continues to battle through what has become an increasingly damaging outage that may have unpatched VPN servers at its heart.…

TESS also spots Tatooine-alike Vid NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has stumbled across its first Earth-sized planet that lies within the habitable zone of a star.…

Officials deny claims of families being singled out for hours A Microsoft techie and his family are among those saying Uncle Sam is unfairly singling out Iranian-Americans for interrogation at US border crossings in the wake of the Soleimani assassination.…

FBI, open up! Comment The FBI has asked Apple to unlock two iPhones belonging to a murderer, potentially reviving a tense battle over encryption and the rights of law enforcement to digital devices.…

Search engine monster sued by rival smart-speakers maker in scrap over intellectual property Sonos has decided to take on Google, suing the monster tech company for allegedly infringing on its sound-sharing patents, and throwing itself into what will almost certainly be a brutal and very expensive legal battle.…

All that other made-up crap? That's still fine, it seems Facebook has vowed to delete at least some fake videos that appear to have been manipulated by machine-learning algorithms to crack down on the spread of disinformation.…

Plug this security bypass... if you can even find the boxes running it Hackers are taking advantage of unpatched enterprise VPN setups ‒ specifically, a long-known bug in Pulse Secure's code ‒ to spread ransomware and other nasties.…

This top-end Ryzen costs four thousand bucks, mind CES AMD this week touted a bunch of new laptop and desktop silicon that put main rival Intel to shame.…

The Chocolate Factory's bug hunters revise 90-day disclosure rules Patting itself on its back for motivating software makers to fix 97.7 per cent of the vulnerabilities it identifies within its 90-day disclosure deadline, Google's bug-hunting unit Project Zero has decided to ease up on those racing to patch their flawed products.…

Hold onto your hats, people: HMRC to run webinars, workshops... introduction date still set for 6 April, though The British government has met its election pledge to review new off-payroll working rules for contractors in the UK private sector – though it largely appears to be a fruitless exercise as the roll-out date is seemingly immovable.…

Price tag undisclosed but we're guessing it won't have made seller rich Symantec’s parent Broadcom has offloaded its Cyber Security Services (CSS) operation to Accenture for an undisclosed sum.…

AMD Ryzen 4000 and Intel configs both available CES Lenovo has always been a bit of an aberration, as far as PC manufacturers go. While its rivals have pushed consumers towards one-size-fits-all boxes, Lenovo has steadfastly offered punters a choice of configurations. The new Lenovo Yoga Slim 7, just unveiled at the CES trade show in Las Vegas, embodies that philosophy, touting both Intel Ice-Lake and AMD Ryzen 4000 variants.…

You wouldn't want to 'upend the computer software industry', eh? Google last night strode into the last-chance saloon of the US Supreme Court, warning judges (PDF) that if they did not overturn a Federal Circuit ruling in Oracle's favour over its use of Java code in the Android mobile operating system, this could "upend ... the computer software industry."…

Infrastructure protector looks to defend people and devices Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, like his colleagues, has come to hate his company's virtual private network, used to connect securely to corporate servers from afar.…

CEO confirms servers, software locked by perps German cycle-maker Canyon Bicycles GmbG has confirmed it was the victim of a security break-in over the holiday period that has all the hallmarks of a ransomware attack with parts of the infrastructure padlocked by the perpetrators.…

Samsung demos keyboardless keyboard in Vegas CES Despite roughly 15 years of innovation, virtual keyboards – like those found on a tablet or smartphone – are still truly hateful to write on, particularly when it comes to penning lengthy passages of text. Samsung's solution is something called SelfieType, which sees you type upon an invisible keyboard, with your phone's camera tracking your movements and turning it into text.…

Run sqlmap, edit online statutes, gain immunity for life? Exclusive A SQL injection vulnerability on the Government of Gibraltar's website paved the way for any old Joe to rewrite official web versions of the British Overseas Territory's laws.…