The Register

Senators: Um, no. The NSA was unable to give a single example of how one of its most controversial spying programs has been useful in the fight against terrorism in a Congressional hearing on Wednesday morning.…

Insider sold 120,000 customer records to scammers Trend Micro today revealed one of its staff went rogue and illegally sold the personal information of roughly 120,000 of its customers.…

So you can work on something while you work on something Google has added virtual desktops to its Chrome OS, used in Chromebooks, enabling users to create multiple workspaces and switch between them.…

Oh dear, HMRC – that's two defeats in a week UK TV presenter Helen Fospero has claimed the latest victory against Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs (HMRC) over its off-payroll tax clampdown, winning her appeal against an £80,000 payout under IR35 rules.…

737 NG and 787 Dreamliner hit with safety flaw allegations Ailing Boeing has been hit with a double whammy of recent controversies alleging safety flaws with its 737 NG (not the fatally flawed Max) and the 787 Dreamliner.…

Software survivor celebrates middle age with facelift File transfer veteran Laplink has taken advantage of the impending demise of Windows 7 to remind those faced with a migration challenge that it still exists.…

27-year-old 'fessed up to 8 offences Exclusive A man has pleaded guilty to hacking low-cost airline Jet2, including an attempt to compromise the CEO's email account.…

Melanie Dawes will fill Sharon White's £500k shoes – report Brit regulator Ofcom has appointed internal director Jonathan Oxley as interim chief exec, with the permanent position to be announced after the UK general election.…

Latest in the great will-they-won't-they corporate love story Updated Broadband and cable business Virgin Media has inked a five-year deal with Vodafone UK to provide its network to more than three million customers.…

Reports indicate faded ink tech heavyweights mull arm linkage Xerox is reportedly mulling a daring multibillion-dollar bid to take over hard-pressed HP Inc – a company that has three times its market capitalisation.…

Plus: SpaceX to end Florida Falcon drought and more from the realm of rockets Roundup This week Boeing unveiled its lunar lander ambitions after a sort-of successful commercial crew test, Virgin Orbit revealed plans to shoot smallsats as far as Mars, and SpaceX dried off fairing recovered from the ocean for use in a static fire test.…

But analyst reckons that's 'ambitious' given dependence on Chinese punters Huawei is bullish about seeing a 20 per cent uptick in smartphone sales next year despite the escalating US-China trade war – a prediction branded by analyst Canalys as "ambitious".…

Appeals court hears why they should be allowed to collectively sue for $100m Analysis More than 8,000 female Microsoft employees have appealed a decision not to grant them a collective legal right to sue the software giant for pay discrimination, claiming that top management knew it was a problem but failed to fix it.…

War stories wanted: Tell us what's really happening in your world Reader survey If data is the fuel powering the modern British financial industry, where are the refineries, oil wells, and storage tanks for these bits and bytes? Any self-respecting IT pro knows the answer: it's complicated.…

Like a particular module? You're one command away from being able to donate some dosh for it NPM Inc, maintainer of the widely used JavaScript package manager npm, has taken a step toward fulfilling a promise made in August to help open-source developers seek compensation for their labor.…

Do your worst, terrifying neural network OpenAI’s massive text-generating language model, which was whispered to be too dangerous to release, has finally been published in full after the research lab concluded it has “seen no strong evidence of misuse so far.”…

The last thing we need right now is a rise in ignorant cyber-Judge Dredds The self-driving Uber car that hit and killed a woman walking her bike across a street wasn’t designed to detect “jaywalking pedestrians.”…

Katie Moussouris speaks out on modern-day flaw finding and infosec jobs Disclosure Bug-bounty pioneer Katie Moussouris has urged companies to hire the necessary staff to handle vulnerability disclosures before diving headlong into handing out rewards.…

'We want to break down barriers, move ideas seamlessly across applications, across people, across devices' Ignite Microsoft is previewing its Fluid Framework, first announced at its Build developer event in May, and presenting it as a key technology for content-based collaboration.…

How IT titan's 'Incentive Plan Letter' anti-contract is starting to unravel Analysis A 17-year veteran of IBM is suing the American giant claiming it failed to pay him promised sales commissions – a charge made by other Big Blue salespeople in at least two dozen similar lawsuits over the past fifteen years.…

Regulator OKs Sprint-T-Mobile US merger because... 5G? Higher prices? Analysis The FCC today ushered in a new era of reduced competition in America's mobile market by approving a merger between the third and fourth largest operators, T-Mobile US and Sprint.…

Watchdog agrees one day of profit ought to be enough after 5 years of arguing Comment Toothless American consumer watchdog the Federal Trade Commission today agreed to let AT&T settle a five-year battle over phony “unlimited data” promises for just $60m. That's $40m less than expected, and less than one day of annual profit for the telco giant.…

The BOFH's secret command centre discovered? Buying a house is a major ordeal. You go from door to door, months zip past and something's never quite right... then you find it, "the one". A five-bedroom home in Pinner, Harrow, northwest London.…

MoD offshoot names winners who dipped into £2m anti-drone ideas pot o' gold The British government has funded 18 anti-drone projects as part of its £2m push to stop a repeat of the Gatwick drone fiasco of 2018 – including a friendly drone swarm that will employ "peregrine falcon attack strategies" to down errant unmanned flying things.…

RISC-V-based blueprints available for all to freely use OpenTitan – an open-source blueprint for a Root of Trust (RoT) system-on-chip based on RISC-V and managed by a team in Cambridge, UK – was teased by Google along with several partners today.…

Plans to aggregate it with other databases should be discussed, says ethics group Updated An independent ethical advice group has raised concerns about the UK Home Office's £842m Biometrics programme, which will store millions of people's highly sensitive biometric data, due to go live next year.…

It's like an automatic knowledgebase creator for enterprise intranet Ignite Having unleashed Teams on the world, Microsoft has been pondering what else it can do with all the data lurking in Microsoft 365. The answer, it seems, is Project Cortex.…

Once is an unfortunate cockup. Twice needs stamping on British telco Three UK has once again let random people viewing its homepage view its customers' account details as if they were logged in, exposing personal and billing data to casual browsing.…

You better make arrangements for missing deadlines, says Public Accounts Committee Another week, another damning report about Her Majesty's Courts & Tribunals Service's (HMCTS) modernisation programme – this time from UK government spending watchdog the Public Accounts Committee.…

Buyer being sought London-based events and training business Skills Matter has gone into administration.…

Poor things! Data, data everywhere but not a drop to drink The vast majority of technology, media and telecom (TMT) companies want to monetise customer data, but are concerned about regulations such as Europe's GDPR, according to research from law firm Simmons & Simmons.…

Programmers who reoffend risk permanent exile from the fondleslab empire Developers of apps built with the cross-platform Electron framework say that Apple has started rejecting their applications during its Mac App Store review process, and has threatened cancellation of Apple Developer Accounts for repeated rules violations.…

Transform your IT to lighten the load on developers Webcast Skilled developers are a precious asset, so organisations are understandably anxious to make the most of their valuable time in the face of competing requests and projects.…

Microsoft seems a bit hazy on what 'disable' actually means A security hole in Office for Mac can be exploited by miscreants to potentially run malicious code on victims' shiny computers without anyone noticing.…

Probe predicted to outlive Earth on five-billion-year galactic trip NASA's Voyager 2, launched to study the Solar System's outer planets, has had its first readings from interstellar space, collected after travelling more than 11 billion miles over forty years, analyzed by scientists.…

Alexa! Turn off my lights. Alexa! Alexa? Oh FFS FYI: US mega-retailer Best Buy will switch off the "smart" portion of its Insignia-branded smart home gadgets this coming Wednesday, rendering them just plain old dumb gear.…

Legal eagle denies criminally laundering hundreds of millions of dollars The trial of an American lawyer accused of moving hundreds of millions of dollars from a cryptocurrency scheme to offshore accounts kicked off on Monday this week in New York. He denies any wrongdoing.…

Plus summary of everything else announced at Windows titan's Florida shindig Ignite Microsoft has announced Azure Arc, which extends the Azure management portal to embrace services running on-premises or on other clouds.…

As US picks up its game, scumbags seek new targets A malware infection has crippled the IT operations in the remote Canadian territory of Nunavut.…

Will Amazon finally get hold of its internet namesake? Analysis Enough’s enough. That was the message from the US government this weekend at an international meeting where the creation of a new internet space – .amazon – was again the subject of heated debate.…

Register readers confirm unseen hardware took bank cards on a joyride Last week, we spoke to an Amazon customer who was for months plagued by unauthorized purchases from their account. It appeared a fraudster's smart TV had been quietly linked to the victim's profile – a gizmo not visible in the usual account settings and could not be removed by even Amazon's own support team.…

Resistance to DNS-over-HTTPS deserves investigation into info-gobbling habits Mozilla has asked American politicians to probe the data-collecting policies of US broadband giants, claiming the ISPs made false statements to derail DNS-over-HTTPS so that they can continue to snoop on subscribers' internet activities.…

How a close-knit hero-worshiping culture can make reporting abusers difficult – and how help is at hand Cassie was studying for the computer security industry qualification CISSP when the harassment started.…

Did Uncle Sam put you up to this? observers wonder GitLab is considering a ban on hiring any Russian or Chinese support staff in order to improve security.…

Microsoft revamps suite as single application Ignite Microsoft has released a public preview of a new Office for mobile devices, combining Excel, Word and PowerPoint into a single application and adding new features for quick actions such as converting images to text or creating and signing PDFs.…

Has collective amnesia about stance on end-to-end encryption The British government wants your bright ideas for improving the nation's cybersecurity because it wants to "understand the apparent lack of strong commercial rationale for investment" in locking down your shizz.…

Day after termination of Windows 7 support. Plus: First Release Candidate arrives Ignite Less than a year after it emerged that EdgeHTML was for the chop, Microsoft has delivered a Release Candidate of its shiny new Chromium-based browser.…

Join us and fellow tech pros for a morning briefing on November 20 Promo Reading about the impact of voice-powered systems is one thing, but talking through the reality with a roomful of your fellow tech pros is quite another.…

Bumps up engineer total for UK & Ireland to 4k - but is that enough? Sky's broadband and TV arm will hire 1,000 new staff members, half of whom will be engineers.…

HMRC vows to appeal IT contractor Richard Alcock has won an appeal against HMRC after the UK taxman said he owed more than £200,000 in national insurance contributions (NICs) and income tax under off-payroll rules.…