The Register

Oh, the weather outside is frightful and the signal's not delightful On Call Welcome to On Call, The Register's weekly foray into the bag of disasters averted, or sometimes caused, by those brave readers on the other end of the phone.…

Mistake, phishing expedition, or an attempt to hold a company liable for its customers? Merula Limited, a UK-based network service provider, recently received a bill from Oracle for $12,200 for using the company's proprietary VirtualBox Extension Pack, which provides extra capabilities for the free GPL-licensed VirtualBox hypervisor.…

Just use automated filters, how hard can that be? The European Court of Justice (CJEU) on Thursday ruled that Facebook update its filters and allow member states to remove content that's been deemed illegal, not only for Facebook users in the plaintiff's country but everywhere.…

Intelligence services developed system, says security outfit The Egyptian government has been targeting and tracking citizens in a sophisticated spying program that allows it to read emails, log contacts and record their location, according to a new report by Check Point.…

Switchzilla closes off 18 CVE-listed holes, get to work Cisco has issued an update to address security flaws in three of its networking and security offerings.…

Data was pulled from 2016 credentials hack Comment One of the key arguments behind the Federal Communications Commission's decision to repeal net neutrality was the number of supportive emails it had received for its proposals. But an investigation has shown that a huge number of these were faked by lobbyists.…

Feds OK that some companies are opening the checkbook The FBI is easing up a bit on its hardline stance against paying ransomware demands.…

Infection manipulates browsers to snoop on TLS comms Kaspersky says it has uncovered a new malware infection that is able to decode encrypted TLS traffic without the need to intercept or manipulate it.…

Pixel 4 facial recognition tests go beyond the pale Google hired a temp agency to record people’s faces, especially those with darker skin, to collect data for a facial recognition system and offered them $5 gift vouchers in return.…

And an Android device – confusing or what? Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, speaking before the launch of new Surface devices in New York, told glossy tech rag Wired the operating system is "no longer the most important layer for us".…

'I nearly had a heart attack!' Emphasis on 'nearly' It's no secret that the UK's smart meter rollout has been a bit, well, shit – whether it's the buggers befuddling Saxons by deciding to start speaking Welsh or simply the fact that the project is perennially delayed and over budget.…

Alright job for some, innit An RAF Typhoon pilot has been posted to Virgin Orbit as part of the UK government's previously declared plan to grow Blighty's space industry.…

New Mike's first senior hire Updated The HR head at DXC Technology, who according to a ex-senior staffer once cut up former CEO Mike Lawrie's steak during a business dinner, is leaving the business.…

Wonderbar: Compatibility issues ahoy Microsoft has gone public on a new range of Surface hardware, the most intriguing being two foldable devices – one an Android phone and the other running a new variant of Windows, Windows 10X. The devices are prototypes, with general availability planned for late 2020.…

It's another encouraging sign that Saturn's most interesting moon could be habitable Hydrothermal vents on Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons, are blasting out organic compounds that could provide the right ingredients to make amino acids, the building blocks of life as we know it.…

God bless America panic buying Shipments of gaming rigs staged something of a comeback in the second quarter of 2019 as retailers sought to avoid potential trade tariffs on machines bought in China and imported to the US.…

Machine learning in spaaaaaace! Neural networks have helped scientists monitor the Sun’s extreme ultraviolet outbursts after an instrument on NASA’s Solar Dynamic Observatory suffered an electrical malfunction, making it difficult for scientists to monitor a portion of extreme ultraviolet energy (EUV) being spewed by our star.…

Cops also Cruyff cloggy couple Dutch police said in a translated news release that they have busted a local 'bulletproof' server hosting operation in a major takedown that also nabbed a pair of Mirai botnet operators.…

Call for papers closes soon: We'd love to hear from you Event Our Continuous Lifecycle event's call for papers closes this month, and we want to hear from you.…

Groundhog Day comes to online source-code silo, with little in the way of explanation Bitbucket, Atlassian's hosted software version control service, has been afflicted by a series of service disruptions over the past three days, to the predictable consternation of programmers.…

'West Virginia, mobile ballots, country votes, nearly pwned' The state of West Virginia says someone attempted to hack its citizens' votes during the 2018 mid-term elections.…

Location data is likely to remain accessible to web ads giant, network service providers, apps After last year acknowledging that Google Maps stores location data even when told not to, the Chocolate Factory plans to give Maps the same misunderstood form of privacy offered by its Chrome browser, otherwise known as Incognito mode.…

Trying to avoid cops, live rounds, tear gas? Oh no, you don't, say Cook & Co Apple has banned an app that allows people in Hong Kong to keep track of protests and police activity in the city state, claiming such information is illegal.…

If at first you don't succeed, there's always Linux, eh? Microsoft beat the leaks, and today announced a forthcoming Android Surface Phone Duo at its annual hardware event, among other dual-screen Qualcomm and AMD-powered goodies.…

Meanwhile ransomware forces Alabama doctors to turn away non-urgent patients The US Food and Drug Administration is warning hospital IT admins to keep a close eye on their networks following the discovery of security vulnerabilities in a relatively obscure and dated TCP/IP stack – IPnet – used in embedded devices.…

Helpdesk firm admits TLS certs also affected Zendesk has admitted to suffering a data snafu – but while it affects 10,000 customers, it only applies to those who were using the firm's helpdesk products before 1 November 2016.…

For a fee, of course Recognising that not everyone has climbed aboard the Windows 10 train, Microsoft has thrown a Window 7 Extended Support lifeline to more businesses... for a price.…

Warning shot at big tech firms, says one-time Which? director Google has lost its attempt to squash a High Court lawsuit that could see the firm stung for £3bn over its exploitation of a loophole in Apple's Safari browser.…

Tune in this month to get the latest strategies for ease of use and efficiency Webcast Whether you are running your business in the cloud or on your own premises, you probably wish you could deploy and manage new applications without your administrators and developers having to learn different environments and APIs every time.…

We had a tinkle on the virtual ivories Future Decoded The Register got its claws on both the recently released Surface Hub 2S and the still-waiting-in-the-wings HoloLens 2 at Microsoft's Future Decoded event. The question is, are the pricey collaborative gizmos any good?…

It's not like it was particularly time-sensitive anyway Heart-attack-in-a-bun purveyor Burger King has been given a stern talking to by the UK's Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) for supposedly encouraging antisocial behaviour.…

Teamwork, collaboration and not a lot of Windows Future Decoded The future is AI, if Microsoft is to be believed.…

Bed, board and flights of fancy as fraudsters register scam websites Thomas Cook's former breach detection contractor has warned of a sharp spike in scammers setting up fake websites to lure ex-staff and customers alike.…

A bit like a dodgy Fast Ring build Comment Come gather one and all to celebrate the fifth anniversary of Microsoft's Windows Insider programme and its army of volunteer testers.…

Community dismayed as key Kubernetes project to remain in Chocolate Factory hands The Knative framework, which enables serverless applications to be deployed and auto-scaled on Kubernetes, will not be donated to any foundation such as the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.…

Increased costs of running the registry business? Or more money for failed expansion? The business in charge of the UK’s internet registry has decided to raise the price of all .uk domains, sparking fury among domain owners who accuse the non-profit of milking the registry to fund executive pay rises and unrelated business expansions.…

Filling out a checkbox in advance to encourage acceptance won't cut it Websites may not present visitors with a pre-checked box that signals consent to the storage of HTTP cookies on their devices, according to a ruling [PDF] handed down on Tuesday by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU).…

Please no, we don't need a machine learning troll farm As if the internet isn’t already a complicated cesspool full of trolls, AI engineers have gone one step further to build a machine learning model that can generate fake comments for news articles.…

NASA's InSight lander data hears 'dinks and donks' from the Red Planet NASA has released audio clips of marsquake recordings taken by its InSight lander currently resident about on the Red Planet.…

Close the window and put back the fishing net, it's only for hospitals right now UPS is boasting of a deal with the Federal Aviation Administration which the shipping giant says will dramatically expand its drone delivery operation.…

iAdmins steaming over handling of 'critical' patch rollout MacOS network admins are being advised to update their copies of the Jamf Pro management software following the disclosure of a critical security flaw.…

IT giant agrees to payout package that settles cases with Department of Labor The US Department of Labor says it has struck a deal with Dell that will see the end to 20 different wage discrimination claims against the technology biz.…

After brief hiatus, it’s back to fighting over internet access The Washington DC appeals court has upheld the decision by federal regulator FCC to reverse net neutrality rules but said it does not have the right to stop US states from adopting their own rules.…

Yahooligan accessed about 6,000 accounts to hunt for revealing photos and videos Former Yahoo! software engineer Reyes Daniel Ruiz has pleaded guilty in a California federal court to one count of computer intrusion after breaking into customers' Yahoo! emails and accounts at other service providers to obtain private data, mainly sexual images and videos of account holders.…

We told you! We told you to patch! Did you listen? Security plaftorm vendor Comodo has 'fessed up to a digital break-in affecting 245,000 users – after it ignored line one in the first chapter of the "How to do Basic Security" book about timely patching of software.…

Vitis toolkit for the rest of us, coming soon, allegedly If you hate writing Verilog, VHDL, and other hardware design languages, used to craft computer chips and configure FPGAs, you're far from the only one.…

Hell hath no fury like a licence payer scorned The BBC has once again drawn ire from the loyal TV licence-paying public by pulling its live radio streams from third-party services.…

No bailout for tech freelancers. Bank moves to avoid potential liability for tax, NI contributions UK bank Barclays is to call time on all off-payroll working and shift its entire contractor base to the Pay As You Earn (PAYE) system to swerve potential financial implications of private-sector IR35 legislation.…

C-suite bods quietly 'fess up to oopsies in survey Nearly seven in eight CTOs and CIOs have admitted to their businesses suffering a data breach, according to a survey.…

Old meets new in WinRT API Packs Microsoft has released "WinRT API Packs" for Windows desktop developers, letting you call on platform functions previously restricted to UWP apps, as well as a preview Windows Forms designer for .NET Core 3.0 desktop applications.…