The Register

Sign up, tune in, expand your knowledge, and compete in hacking contests Promo On December 9, SANS will launch its second annual KringleCon virtual conference followed shortly thereafter by its 13th Holiday Hack Challenge.…

OpenVPN, WireGuard, IKEv2/IPSec also vulnerable to tampering flaw, we're told A bug in the way Unix-flavored systems handle TCP connections could put VPN users at risk of having their encrypted traffic hijacked, it is claimed.…

Presidential 'disdain' may have been a factor in awarding mega-contract to Microsoft, says cloud supremo re:Invent Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy faced the press yesterday at Amazon's re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, and there was one thing above all else that journos wanted to discuss.…

App detection interface sparks privacy worries Comment A nascent web API called getInstalledRelatedApps offers a glimpse of why online privacy remains such an uncertain proposition.…

Images beamed back from NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft leave scientists baffled Pic A closeup image of Bennu snapped by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft reveals that the asteroid’s surface is surprisingly volatile, randomly spitting out shards of debris into space.…

Who needs an elevator pitch when you have man-in-the-middle attack? A group of hackers used a compromised email account to steal a start-up's $1m venture capital payment.…

Boffins ride the memory bus past Intel's SGX to your data Computer scientists from UC Berkeley, Texas A&M, and semiconductor biz SK Hynix have found a way to defeat secure enclave protections by observing memory requests from a CPU to off-chip DRAM through the memory bus.…

Documentary filmmakers lob sue ball to halt practice The US State Department is being sued over its policy of crawling the social media accounts of people applying for entry visas.…

Looking forward to seeing these in, well, anything would be nice Qualcomm will today expand its range of Snapdragon system-on-chips for always-connected Arm-based Windows 10 tablet-laptops from one to three.…

Highest-ranked front shooter yet for the poser in your life The middle ground of the smartphone market is a bit of a battleground. Manufacturers of all stripes – except Apple – keep flinging devices at punters with fairly high-end specs, but price tags under the £500 mark. The latest salvo comes from embattled Chinese comms giant Huawei, which today announced the launch of its Nova 6 handset.…

What happens when you throw your lot in with crypto-coin types Collaboration site Keybase, once touted for its encrypted meetup channels and robust developer features, is struggling to ward off an epidemic of harassment and spam brought about by its shift toward cryptocurrency.…

Claims it's unconstitutional Huawei Technologies today filed a fresh lawsuit against the US Federal Communications Commission over its decision to ban rural carriers from buying the company's mobile hardware with Universal Service Fund (USF) cash.…

Account-draining malware masterminds charged but remain in motherland US prosecutors have slapped a $5m bounty on the heads of two Russian nationals they claim are part of the malware gang behind the banking trojans ZeuS and Dridex.…

Learning points, not an instruction manual Black Hat Europe Faking digital evidence during a cyber attack – planting a false flag – is simple if you know how, as noted infosec veteran Jake Williams told London's Black Hat Europe conference.…

Comms provider switched 118 people to its services without their consent Updated Imagine a telco kicking down your front door, yelling "all your bills are belong to us" then leaving. In the industry parlance, it's known as "slamming" and Ofcom has fined Onestream £35,000 for the practice.…

Another $0.51 dividend for shareholders, exec pay OK'd, but no say for employees Updated There was good news for investors and perhaps bad news for employees during Microsoft's annual shareholder meeting.…

You say 20H1, they say 2004, let's call the whole thing off Microsoft has emitted a fresh build of next year's Windows 10 to both the Slow and Fast rings of the Windows Insider programme and goodness, those guinea pigs weren't keen on Notepad-In-The-Store.…

Billionaire accuses execs of running scared for jobs amid $33.5bn bid Corporate raider Carl Icahn isn't quietly accepting HP's rejection of Xerox's hostile $33.5bn takeover bid – he has accused the board of using delay tactics to keep their jobs and warning it can be done in a nice or not-so-nice way.…

ZeroCleare wipes up where Shamoon left off An Iran-based hacking crew long known to target energy facilities in neighboring Middle Eastern countries is believed to be launching new attacks.…

What's that when it's at home? Oh, they mean pixel binning Motorola has updated its mid-range lineup with the announcement of the Android 10-powered One Hyper.…

Ready to go, but beware 'unfortunate breaking change' in Windows Forms Microsoft has released .NET Core 3.1 – a significant milestone as, unlike version 3.0, it is a long-term support (LTS) release, suggesting that the company believes it's fit for extended use. It is accompanied by Visual Studio 16.4, also an LTS release.…

What now? A pre-election porky? Heaven forfend… Conservative Party claims they may review the extension of IR35 tax rules to the UK private sector have been called into question by a tax expert.…

Pretty fly for a Wi-Fi... The long-awaited future of super-fast wireless is here, with the Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) claiming speeds of 700Mbps in a real-world environment using the Wi-Fi 6 standard.…

Distributed acoustic sensing turns old glass cabling into seismic sensors Old, unused fiber optic cables buried underground can be refashioned into seismometers, helping scientists monitor earthquakes, according to new research.…

Advice based on feedback from Register readers and insights from Box Webcast Financial institutions across the board are wrestling with how to engage more closely with customers and work better across internal teams. Too often, the cause is ill-fitting content and document management systems, designed for another time. Meanwhile, cloud-based platforms can both help and hinder, delivering short-term benefit but adding complexity and fragmentation.…

The great .uk foist is still rumbling along Two months after promising customers that its past practices of automatically registering, and charging, customers for .uk domains was all a big misunderstanding, pushy registrar 123-Reg is at it again, charging at least one punter for .uk domains they never ordered and don’t want.…

Collaborating with other companies is such a drag re:Invent AWS CEO Andy Jassy, asked about the future role of Kubernetes (K8s) in cloud infrastructure, told The Register that "I don’t believe in one tool to rule the world."…

Exposed private cert key may also be an issue for IBM Aspera Updated Twitter security celeb SwiftOnSecurity on Tuesday inadvertently disclosed a zero-day vulnerability affecting enterprise software biz Atlassian, a flaw that may be echoed in IBM's Aspera software.…

In-memory malware a first for suspected Nork hacking crew The Lazarus group, which has been named as one of North Korea's state-sponsored hacking teams, has been found to be using new tactics to infect macOS machines.…

Hey, no looking, that paperwork's private, says network operator Angry AT&T customers have asked a judge to force America's trade watchdog, the FTC, to hand over the information it used to reach a $60m settlement with the cellular network for throttling “unlimited data” plans.…

Sighting suggests future of our own Solar System A giant planet orbiting a hot white dwarf star has been discovered for the first time. This sighting is significant because it is first evidence of a world surviving its star's transformation into a white dwarf.…

But how is it $1,000 cheaper? So, as reported yesterday, the younger brother of Colombia's favourite son Pablo Escobar plans to launch a foldable phone, the Escobar Fold 1. Alarm bells started ringing, not least because the entry-level model has an MSRP of $349 – about $1,000 less than what you'd expect.…

Database giant insists that ain't so, will fight lawsuit A former Oracle employee filed a lawsuit against the database giant on Tuesday claiming that he was forced out for refusing to lie about the functionality of the company's software.…

Only took seven years of consumer hell to get this far US Congress has finally acted on the scourge of robocalls, with the House of Representative passing the TRACED Act on Wednesday morning by 417 votes to 3 (with 11 not voting).…

While supremo predicts mmWave deployments by 2021, everyone moving to the cloud Why is it that Qualcomm is never far from drama?…

Listen to the wind blow, watch the sun rise Intel has said it wants to make its punters more confident about what happens to its chips on the journey from fab to rack to recycler.…

Distinctly odd TalkTalk-using readers have contacted The Reg to say they are suffering decidedly odd bandwidth issues shutting off, or severely slowing, access to certain sites while leaving others working as normal.…

High-rez screen or going all day without a charge: Pick one The fourth-generation ThinkPad Yoga X1 has swapped the finish of yesteryear for something a little more metallic.…

Only in India for the time being Amazon today announced a new battery-powered version of its ubiquitous Echo speakers.…

Eh, at least it doesn't need to renegotiate patent deals Qualcomm is to appeal against the decision of a South Korean court to fine the US chip giant $873m for unfairly using patent licensing to stymie rivals' sales.…

Users doubtful 5 years enough to get everyone moved in time German enterprise software giant SAP is in a "standoff" with customers over the 2025 deadline for withdrawing support for its SAP Business Suite range.…

Getting giddy over CI/CD with Anthos and Kubernetes DevOps World Lisbon CloudBees joined the SaaS club today with a preview of its Jenkins X CI/CD product running atop Google's cloud.…

Yes, in all-caps The Council of the European Union has warned member states that the introduction of 5G networks poses increased security risks while also bringing economic and infrastructure benefits.…

Add-ons accused of slurping every URL netizens visit The Firefox extensions built by Avast have been pulled from the open-source browser's online add-on store over privacy fears.…

AWS subscribers, you can forget GPUs (unless you need to train your models) re:Invent Amazon Web Services has made Inf1, its cloud instance for running machine-learning software on its custom-designed AI chip Inferentia, available to all.…

Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Netflix accused of ducking dues Fair Tax Mark, a UK-based civic advocacy group, has accused Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Netflix of depriving public coffers of more than $100bn in taxes since 2010 through aggressive tax avoidance schemes.…

Mozilla continues exploring privacy as a source of revenue Patting itself on the back for blocking more than one trillion web tracking requests through its Enhanced Tracking Protection tech, Mozilla on Tuesday continued its privacy push with a further test of its Firefox Private Network service, an update to Firefox Preview Beta for Android, and the debut of its latest desktop browser, Firefox 71.…

Garbage in, garbage out US Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Cory Booker (D-NJ) are examining how federal agencies and healthcare companies are tackling algorithmic biases – after a recent study found that black patients were less likely to be referred to care programs by software than white patients, despite being sicker.…

Fired four threaten to file complaint with National Labor Relations Board The four engineers fired by Google just before Thanksgiving for allegedly e-stalking co-workers have said they will file a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board claiming they were subject to an illegal intimidation campaign.…

We sat through a three-hour AWS lecture so that you didn't have to re:Invent In a three-hour keynote at the re:Invent conference under way in Las Vegas, AWS CEO Andy Jassy took pops at competitors (especially Microsoft) and announced a wide range of new services, spanning compute, database, storage and machine learning.…