The Register

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.…

What started as a joke slowly blends into potential fiber reality CES It started out as a joke, a way to repeat the hype-success of “5G” mobile technology for the cable industry. And yet “10G” – standing for 10 gigabit-a-second broadband fiber speeds – may be here to stay.…

Sorry, meant to say Verisign contributes to 'security threat' education Comment Operator of the dot-com registry, Verisign, has decided to pay DNS overseer ICANN $4m a year for the next five years in order to “educate the wider ICANN community about security threats.”…

But... but... I have Preferred Status! CES Annual trade shindig the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is a big deal. For one insane week, nearly 200,000 nerds and industry hotshots flock to the neon-lit tundra of Las Vegas to gawk upon tech that might end up being picked apart for precious metals by a West African child labourer. And most of those passengers likely had an utterly miserable flight.…

MIT eggheads devise a better way to predict application performance MIT boffins have devised a software-based tool for predicting how processors will perform when executing code for specific applications.…

Apps spotted abusing use-after-free() bug seven months before patch At least three malicious apps with device-hijacking exploits have made it onto the Google Play Store in recent weeks.…

Infinite diversity in infinite combinations... symbolizing the elements that create truth and beauty. Astronomers have discovered the most-distant cluster of galaxies yet seen – and, separately, what could be the largest galaxy in the observable universe yet.…

Platform makeover declared a 'total joke' by internet activists CES With criticism mounting, Amazon's Ring revealed a web dashboard of privacy controls it hopes will slash the number of horror stories coming from customers.…

Vendors will have to apply for permission to sell tools to customers outside of the US and Canada The US government has placed software designed to train neural networks to analyse satellite images under new export controls in a bid to prevent foreign adversaries using said code.…

Employers should de-emphasize face-to-face interviews, research suggests Age discrimination is a top topic in Silicon Valley, and now there's more proof that age may hinder hiring chances.…

Byron Reed, Javon Lee in court in Oakland over Shuo Zeng’s death Two men have been charged over the death of IBM engineer Shuo Zeng, who died on his birthday, on New Year's Eve, after his laptop was snatched while in a cafe.…