The Register

Just another week at Microsoft then Roundup Windows 10 19H1 has joined 20H1 in being Otterly (Ouch – Ed) fabulous while the Microsoft Health Dashboard puts a brave face on things in this week's roundup of the Redmond news you might have missed.…

Take a bow, Serco. Agilisys, hang thy head in shame A month ahead of the deadline for reporting gender pay gap figures, just 16 of 100 major IT suppliers, contractors, telcos and other tech businesses in the UK have submitted their data.…

Did we say break? We meant test its 'survivability' Who, Me? Hello, dear readers. We see you've come for your weekly dose of Who, Me? to shake off this serious case of the Mondays.…

PS: Update Adobe ColdFusion, Cisco WebEx Meetings, Nvidia drivers with security fixes Roundup Here's your weekend rapid-fire roundup of infosec news, ahead of next week's RSA Conference, beyond what we've already covered.…

Dozens of brake lights broken by chemicals in smells Japanese automaker Subaru has told the US National Highway Transportation Safety Administration that it plans to recall some 1.3 million vehicles in the US because of emissions problems. It plans to do the same elsewhere in North America and in Japan, bringing the recall total to around 2.2 million.…

'40 per cent' of purchases are automated – but do gig organizers care when a sale is a sale? If you have attempted to buy concert or sports tickets online in the past few years, chances are that it was an enormously frustrating experience thanks to automated bots.…

When it said 5 per cent of banned slurp app users were kids, it actually meant much, much more than that Analysis In just the latest in a seemingly endless stream of half-truths, Facebook has admitted it misled the public when it claimed that only five per cent of the users of its banned tracking app were teenagers.…

Despite fried RAID and deleted hard drives, Federal News Agency calls US Cyber Command attack a failure A Russian news service is claiming that US attacks on it and an organisation accused of state-sponsored trolling has left storage systems damaged and international servers wiped after multiple malware attacks.…

Q4 revenues up 24% anually, but all-flasher missed guidance Pure Storage's Q4 fiscal '19 revenues of $422m missed its own guidance by around $20m due to a manufacturing balls-up and customers preferring subscription to license deals.…

RV110W, RV130W, RV215W need patching to close remote hijacking bug Cisco has patched three of its RV-series routers after Pen Test Partners (PTP) found them using hoary old C function strcpy insecurely in login authentication function. The programming blunder can be exploited to potentially hijack the devices.…

Marketing, sales underspend bites HCI vendor on the bum Nutanix is staring down the barrel of virtually no growth for the next quarter, an admission that sent its share price into a tailspin as analysts grilled the HCI vendor over inadequate marketing spend and sales hires.…

Greener than growing green, Berkeley biologists claim Synthetic biology boffins at Berkeley have taken their research to new highs by rigging up yeast so it produces cannabis compounds – not beer.…

Near double-digit top line bounce for fiscal '19 but less expected for current year The lumbering giant Dell Technologies has highlighted numerous hurdles in the year ahead including the ongoing trade tariff war with China as it warned sales will slow.…

Support due in Microk8s and Charmed Kubernetes Canonical has announced support for Containerd in its upcoming 1.14 releases of Charmed Kubernetes and Microk8s on the same day that the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) stamped "Graduated" on the container tech.…

Latest diversity push welcome amid fears the infosec circuit is 'moving backwards' RSA As San Francisco gets ready for its annual RSA gabfest Conference, taking place next week, organisers appear to have got the message over inclusivity following last year's fiasco.…

Click your heels together three times and say 'there's no OS maker like Microsoft' Having finally inflicted a 19H1 build of Windows 10 upon Windows Insiders on the Slow Ring, Microsoft has admitted that the minty-fresh test code has some problems.…

El Reg takes a trip to TNMoC to swot up on the tech history of Premium Bonds For computing history nerds, the names Tommy Flowers and Harry Fensom likely conjure up images of the code-breaking Colossus. But after the war, they also had a hand in creating a dearly loved, much-anthropomorphised, millionaire-making machine: ERNIE.…

But things are getting better, insists notorious outsourcer Angry MPs have labelled the British Army "naive" for signing up to an "abysmal" outsourcing deal with Capita for military recruiting and associated IT systems.…

If I had my way, I'd have sparks flying from your underwear Something for the Weekend, Sir? "No, it's not going in. It's a couple of inches too short."…

Big Blue 'in discussions with suppliers to ensure that any vulnerabilities are managed' IBM is battening down the hatches in preparation for a potential no-deal Brexit next month, warning of implications for the movement of data and delays to products landing in the UK.…

The line cards, that is... which ISP has fingered for selective download slowness Vodafone has admitted that a "technical issue" is to blame for some broadband customers being unable to stream video from popular sites for months.…

Go on, join us by the watercooler: we could use a laugh In 2012 a shaky hand placed a flash drive into a brown paper envelope and addressed it to The Register's London HQ in felt-tip pen. Once we'd shoved the thing into a non-production lappie to ensure it wasn't Anonymous*, vultures kept striding past, mugs in hand, to take a peek.…

Techies spend 12 hours of Christmas Eve in the workhouse when everything that can go wrong, does On Call Good Friday morning, and welcome to our weekly installment of On Call, where Reg readers share the tech support moments that made them want to rip their hair out in despair.…

Learn attackers’ ways to keep your systems safe Webcast Today's cyber-miscreants get smarter all the time, constantly learning from each other and finding new ways to hack into organisations' IT systems.…

Maybe it'll make its way to humans in the army one day... Did you know that a simple injection can give mice the power to see in infrared? Yeah, well us neither, until a research paper documenting the results of a bizarre experiment were published in Cell on Thursday.…

Chinese phone, telco kit maker pleads not guilty in row over vanished T-Mob Tappy robot Chinese hardware maker Huawei pleaded not guilty to charges of conspiracy to steal trade secrets, attempted theft of trade secrets, wire fraud, and obstruction of justice, in the US on Thursday.…

None of that tiny space rubble to sweep away, judging by snaps of Pluto's acne spots The Solar System's Kuiper belt, a donut-shaped pile up of debris extending beyond Neptune, contains a surprisingly lack of small objects, judging from images of Pluto and its moon Charon.…

But this moneybags web giant is not a publisher, got that? YouTube has disabled comments on millions of videos because they were being used by pedophiles to communicate with one another and, allegedly, even link to child abuse videos.…

It's up to you to stop fake stuff going on sale in our cyber-bazaar, says multibillion-dollar biz Analysis Amazon is rolling out Project Zero, a system the online souk is touting to deal with the problem of counterfeit goods in its storefront.…

All that glitters ain't gold, as they say The founder of now-dead cryptocurrency My Big Coin has been arrested and charged with seven counts of fraud and unlawful money transfers for what is allegedly an extraordinarily blatant scam, even in the shady world of cyber-cash schemes.…

And 'ask a Redmond security bod' panic button for Windows Defender ATP customers RSA Microsoft has wheeled out two new enterprise security tools – Azure Sentinel, a cloud-based SIEM, and Microsoft Threat Experts, an infosec advice-as-a-service bundled with a panic button.…

Director applied to dissolve his companies to skip ICO penalty A rogue company director branded one of the worst perpetrators in the nuisance calling game has been banned from running companies in the UK for eight years.…

We've said it once, we've said it a thousand times. Don't open weird attachments, kids A new version of the decade-old banking credential-stealing Qbot malware is doing the rounds, according to infosec firm Varonis.…

A flashy fix for the latency intolerant Sponsored Applications and databases are increasingly latency intolerant. For a while it seemed that the latency problem was solved with mainstream adoption of AFA as a primary storage platform, but scale and new demands have presented fresh challenges and meant the initial flash fix was temporary.…

EVERYTHING IS FINE Six of the eight border IT systems viewed as critical for a no-deal Brexit are at risk of failure, compounded by their reliance on each other and the fact delivery partners aren't ready.…

ID verification biz: Most Brits don't know smut checks are coming, 60% approve More than half of Brits surveyed by an age-verification vendor did not know about the UK's impending smut-block.…

Act now: Continuous Lifecycle early bird tickets are about to expire Events You’ve got till midnight tonight to save £100s on conference and workshop tickets for Continuous Lifecycle, our three day dive into DevOps, Containers, Serverless, and Continuous Delivery.…

£120,000 literally slurped from council coffers over past year The Toff-tastic West London borough of Kensington and Chelsea has recommended that Hugo and Caggie stop paying to park their Bentleys with cash – because hoover-hauling hoodlums are sucking coins out of the meters.…

Comms company 'seems incapable of communicating coherently to its workforce' A Vodafone exec was plastered on the telco's intranet dressed in a "See You Jimmy"* hat and clasping a bottle of Irn-Bru ahead of a meeting to confirm the redundancy dates for 312 Glasgow call centre staff.…

Concerns about data requests, job role confusion discussed at town hall talking tour – reports The US Department of Labor has insisted it isn't targeting the national tech industry as it presses ahead with its discrimination suit against Oracle.…

Lol, don't worry – if you were – cuz toners still a licence to print spondulix Forget Intel's chip drought: an unforeseen collapse in demand for print supplies in EMEA is the bigger issue keeping HP Inc's management on their toes.…

Un-gadgeting the gadget MWC Analysis Until a week ago, many people were sceptical that foldable smartphones would be anything more than a gimmick. I was probably one of them.…

New flash wine in old drive bottle Micron has rejigged its 1100 SATA SSD with denser NAND to produce the new 1300 model.…

Road rage against the machines Autonomous vehicles have been given the green light – according to HM Government – which confidently expects they'll be pounding Britain's potholed highways by 2021.…

Java meanwhile manages to be both the third-most-loved and second-most-hated programming language The most in-demand software developer role at the moment is blockchain engineer, or so says recruitment biz Hired.…

Where is that elusive super-Earth hiding? There is no sign of the Solar System's hypothetical “Planet Nine” yet – however, astronomers in America aren’t giving up, as they continue to find bits and pieces of evidence for its existence.…

Fetal alcohol spectrum disorder diagnosed by code, eventually, maybe, if accuracy improves Machine-learning algorithms can help doctors diagnose children affected by fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, according to fresh research.…

Blocking ads, analytics code gives browser an edge over, well, Edge, Chrome, etc Brave ran some benchmark tests on the Android version of its browser, and – funnily enough – found it to be less power-hungry than a handful of competitors.…

By contrast, Russian hack-treason trial ends with 22-year sentence and accusations of foul play A US judge this week sentenced website hacker Billy Anderson to three months behind bars, refusing his lawyer's request not to put him in jail, in order to "send a message" to others.…

Chipzilla rips sticker off its graphics accelerator, switches off GPU – now you're a security wizard, Harry! RSA Intel is touting a PCIe card packed with SGX tech to plug into servers in time for next week's RSA conference in San Francisco.…