The Register

Kit-Kat API whacked, don't give hackers your phone. This WebView came rolling home Smartphones and other gadgets running Android 4.4 or later contain a bug that can be exploited by rogue apps to steal website login tokens and spy on owners' browsing histories.…

'We can replace it but we have no idea what the config is on the device' An IT department is pulling its hair out this month after realizing a coworker who died last year was the only person who could log into a crucial network switch.…

The Last Emporium Chinese tat bazaar Xiaomi isn't all scooters, knickers and formaldehyde-free mattresses. It also makes smartphones, and sales of those in Europe helped grow international revenues by 118 per cent year-on-year, booking almost ¥174.9bn overall, or £20bn in calendar 2018.…

In-house or in the cloud? Right Mix Advisor will tell you HPE has pulled the sheets off a service designed to advise punters on the bits of their IT infrastructure to keep in-house, and the workloads to offload to public cloud data centres.…

Bloke hit delete on £500,000 of 'business-critical data' after he was let go for 'poor' performance An irate sacked techie who rampaged through his former employer's AWS accounts with a purloined login, nuking 23 servers and triggering a wave of redundancies, has been jailed.…

Play fair, chaps The European Commission has concluded its third probe into Google's business practices by whacking it with a €1.49bn fine. The third investigation dealt with advertising broker services that Brussels said foreclosed competition and raised prices for website operators.…

Merger so fresh, gabfest freebies had old logo Logowatch Now that star-crossed Hadoop-flinging lovers Cloudera and Hortonworks have ended their years-long competition-cum-courtship with a merger, what better way to seal the deal than visiting the Strategy Boutique?…

Cloud Foundation makes debut on Dell EMC VxRail systems VMware's Cloud Foundation hybrid cloud stack has hit version 3.7 and is available from April as a component of a pre-built private cloud appliance running on Dell EMC VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) kit.…

Trump's exec order 'doesn't go nearly far enough', though GTC The US government needs to strengthen its commitment to AI with concrete funding, favourable immigration policies and better education if it's serious about remaining competitive, Democrat Congressman Jerry McNerney said on Tuesday.…

There's no place like Chrome, but... here are the other guys Google has offered to remind Android users in Europe that Chrome isn't the only game in town – similar to the "Web Browser Ballot" measure imposed on Microsoft a decade ago as part of a competition remedy.…

Go off-cluster if you wanna, plus 'batteries-included' Kubernetes containers Cloudera, fresh from the uneven merger with former Hadoop distro competitor Hortonworks, used its first major public event to thrust a new data platform hard at the enterprise.…

Customers spared from buying an iPhone while credit scoring system had a lie-down UK phone-slinger The Carphone Warehouse has received a slap on the wrist from the Brit advertising watchdog after an offer proved a tad too popular.…

Offsite specialists offer to take the strain Promo End-users often judge the efficiency of your IT by their first contact with your service desk. Do you have the resources to keep them happy and provide the fast and reliable support they need?…

Users unchuffed, devs pulling bricked wares off Google Play Android looks a little less open now that Google has begun to enforce draconian new rules on accessing a phone's call and text logs.…

You'll have £140m to play with – and be paid 0.1% of that Do you like drinking from poisoned chalices? Enjoy being paid below average for your skills? Britain's court service has just the job for you and, boy, it's a doozy.…

Pro features trickle down to the rest of us Analysis Apple's stealthy, unexpected refresh of its iPad range means it's serious about bringing professional features to a wider market. And so it jolly well should be.…

Facebook convos used to train chat dopey doppelganger A machine-learning software engineer has trained OpenAI’s too-dangerous-to-release language model on personal Facebook messages to show how easy it is to create a bot that can attempt to impersonate you.…

Good news for all – whoa, not so fast, Visual Studioers Lambda lovers, rejoice! You can now, from this week, write your cloudy functions in pretty much any version of .NET Core you like.…

Claims ForsaOS can engorge server memory by up to 24x Formulus Black has proposed a way to make x86 servers run faster, using a data-reduction method.…

The v10.15 will bring tighter security, the escape hatch should remain open for now Imagine for a moment the possibility that macOS 10.15, due to arrive later this year, will run only apps signed with a valid Apple developer certificate, with no option to white-list unsigned apps via the company's Gatekeeper security mechanism.…

Training wheels for… wheels GTC This week at Nvidia's GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in Silicon Valley, the chip slinger claimed its Drive Constellation – a server and software combo designed to give self-driving cars a virtual world where they can play without harming any of those squishy humans – is now available.…

Fed bust of massive attack network caused traffic loads to plummet in Q4 The FBI's takedown of a group of prolific DDoS-for-hire websites has single-handedly helped to drop attack levels globally.…

Ad targeting system overhaul to stop landlords from discriminating based on race Facebook will overhaul its ad system to prevent landlords, employers and money-lenders from bypassing anti-discrimination laws.…

Now, witness the power of this eventually operational game star Challenging Amazon and Microsoft for the attention of gamers and for the billing of game industry customers, Google announced a planned game streaming service called Stadia at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco on Tuesday.…

US state joins others mulling laws allowing folks to freely fix their kit California has joined other US states mulling granting folks a right to repair – which would allow people to freely fix their electronic devices, and require manufacturers to provide the tools and manuals to do so.…

Norway the power and metals wrangler could have seen this one coming Norwegian power and metals giant Norsk Hydro is battling an extensive ransomware outbreak on its computers.…

We were OK to contact all those people, says Brexiteer biz – but it deleted all evidence to prove it Vote Leave Ltd, the company behind a cross-party campaign to bring the UK out of the EU, must cough up a £40,000 fine for spamming hundreds of thousands of text messages to Brits in the run up to the national referendum.…

'We remain confident that we are well prepared for different scenarios,' reckons boss man With Brexit possibly just around the corner, reselling machine Softcat says it has made all the preparations it can to minimise the impact on the supply chain and sales.…

But it'll be cooler, faster and just all-round betterer! Honest! Sure enough, with the annual Games Developers Conference upon us, the outfit behind the nostalgia-baiting Atari VCS has recommended backers don't hold their breath waiting for the thing to arrive.…

Cisco is touting analytics, automation for that very challenge Promo With an estimated 63 million new devices attaching to enterprise networks per second by 2020, will your infrastructure team be able cope with its growing scale and complexity?…

Oh, and Flash! Arrrrrggghhh Eight out of the ten most exploited vulnerabilities tracked by threat intelligence biz Recorded Future in 2018 targeted Microsoft products – though number two on its list was, surprise surprise, a Flash flaw.…

And adds FlashStack to AI portfolio Pure Storage has updated its AIRI platform for accelerating artificial intelligence workloads with a hyperscale configuration that includes Nvidia's DGX-1 and DGX-2 GPU boxes and Mellanox networking.…

And an extension for those who prefer Visual Studio Code – but all very preview at the mo Microsoft has booted out a Postgres GUI for those moments when the command line is just too scary.…

It might actually be able to run Crysis this time... maybe Nvidia used this week's GPU Technology Conference in San Jose to reveal the most powerful GPU box that its R&D labs have cooked up.…

Airline maker accused of not realising what controversial MCAS system could do Boeing chief exec Dennis Muilenberg has repeated earlier promises that a software update for the troubled Boeing 737 Max airliners is coming "soon".…

166 million reasons to keep tabs on all those agile projects Atlassian has acquired AgileCraft - the Texas-based outfit intent on inflicting agile practices on enterprises - for $166m.…

London, Birmingham forced to wear survey's dunce cap London has again finished towards the bottom of a mobile network performance league of 16 urban areas in the UK – only Birmingham did worse overall.…

Croydon, schools, Brexit, the Queen, poo – hey, it's a royal flush of terrible news items A high school in the picturesque London borough of Croydon has been gratefully lumped with a lifetime supply of loo roll after Her Majesty the Queen turned down a donation from a cheeky German company.…

Panto season comes early as the commercial threat focuses the minds of managers As NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) continued to cry out for its own variant of the "Distracted Boyfriend" meme, Russia showed the US space agency how to do delays properly.…

Z refresh cycles slows, bruises Big Blue's server revenue IBM's worldwide server sales took a turn for the worse in Q4, declining by almost a third as the dust settled on the Z mainframe refresh rush.…

Bunch of bugs stomped with version 0.71 Venerable SSH client PuTTY has received a pile of security patches, with its lead maintainer admitting to the The Register that one fixed a "'game over' level vulnerability".…

Notorious code puts on suit and tie, goes after business kit A strain of the botnet malware Mirai has emerged focused on a wider set of embedded internet-connected devices.…

Interactive entertainment tells on itself despite encryption Boffins have found a side channel to observe the choices netizens make when viewing interactive streaming videos.…

It only took three fscking hours of keynote to announce it – where's the GPU optimization for that? GTC 2019 It's that time of year again. Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s CEO, paraded a range of goodies for GPU nerds, including a forthcoming credit-card sized AI computer board and software updates for its CUDA platform, during his company's annual GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in Silicon Valley on Monday.…

Congresscritter seeks $250m for 'defamation, neglience' A US congressman is getting a crash course in the Streisand Effect after filing a lawsuit this week against Twitter and a handful of his harshest critics on the antisocial network.…

Residents claim net-connected, app-controlled system is harassment, surveillance A group of Manhattan residents are suing their landlord for installing a smart lock on their apartment front door, requiring them to use a phone app to get into their homes.…

Time to revisit the idea of patent portfolio as nuclear deterrence? Analysis Qualcomm has won a $31m judgment against Apple in the US after the iGiant infringed three of Qualy's mobile phone battery patents – the latest ruling in a long series of intellectual property spats between the two companies.…

Worst brew than that time El Reg went on a road trip and stopped at a Denny's IBM has issued a security alert over five vulnerabilities in its golden boy Watson analytics system.…

Vast storage savings...er, tragic loss attributed to a data migration gone awry MySpace, the Norma Desmond of social networking platforms, appears to have lost all the music uploaded to the site since its founding in 2003 through 2015, a blunder the company reportedly attributes to a failed server migration.…

Well, that Knights Hill 2018 dream didn't work out, so let's shoot for 2021 instead Intel will, as expected, provide the processors for the US government's exascale-grade Aurora supercomputer, due to be deployed in 2021.…