The Register

Yes, turns out people still use this voucher biz – who knew? We have a new twist on the "researchers find unprotected public-facing cloud-hosted database" story, as one recently uncovered archive turned out to be at the heart of a years-long fraud operation.…

Go on, we're listening The House of Commons' Science and Technology Committee has called on UK government to publish its long-overdue plans for upping investment in research and development.…

Plus: Baidu's 92% growth closes gap on AWS Despite all the talk among Western tech vendors of an economic slowdown in the Middle Kingdon, spending on cloud infrastructure services in China is comfortably outpacing that of the global average.…

From thwarting phishing to boosting infosec awareness, we've got it covered Webcast Security professionals like you have a tough job.…

UK govt releases contingency doc and everything thing is [fine/a living nightmare] (delete as appropriate) Analysis Cloud providers, social media platforms, and e-commerce companies are going to be hit hard in the event of a no-deal Brexit, according to official UK government correspondence.…

Red Dwarf solar system too far away for a jaunt on Starbug Scientists have detected water vapor wafting from the atmosphere of an exoplanet orbiting around its star within the habitable zone for the first time, according to a paper published in Nature Astronomy.…

Board member Salvino to lead CSC-HPE-Enterprise-Services mutant starting Thursday Beleaguered IT outsourcing specialist DXC will open business Thursday minus the only CEO it has, to date, ever known, as Mike Lawrie is stepping down effective immediately.…

Also-CEO Safra Catz will take over share his responsibilities with some guy who co-founded the biz On Wednesday, Oracle said co-CEO Mark Hurd will take a leave of absence to deal with undisclosed health issues, an announcement that coincided with the publication of the tech titan's fiscal 2020 Q1 numbers.…

AI'm Lovin' It McDonald’s has wolfed down Apprente, an AI startup focused on voice recognition, seemingly in a bid to replace its Drive Thru human servers with computers.…

One step forward, er, one step back. Nobody gets too far like that Microsoft's build 18362.356 (KB4515384​​​​​) for its Windows 10 May 2019 Update (version 1903) rolled out on Tuesday with security improvements for Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, networking tech and input devices – and a CPU usage fix that, for some, has broken desktop search.…

Rules may blow up bug bounty upstarts, too Analysis The California Senate has passed a new gig-economy law that may force app companies like Uber and Lyft to treat certain workers as employees rather than independent contractors.…

Manufacturing rises by double digits ahead of December D-Day Notebook original design manufacturers ramped production in Q2 as the big brands upped their orders to swerve a US imposed trade tariff that, from December, will directly hit mobile PCs exported from China to America.…

Totally sane John McAfee up there with Walder Frey, says cybersecurity celeb list Despite billing himself as "the world's most famous hacker", Kevin Mitnick isn't the infosec personality your grandma is most interested in learning more about.…

Self-regulation has failed, says NSPCC The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) is calling on the British government to force social media companies to use AI to detect suspicious grooming behaviour.…

Engineers nervously check their personal ride-sharing ratings A number of Uber employees found their rating a little lower than they thought as the company laid off 435 staffers this week.…

At least that's what the org would have you believe CF Summit "The Kubernetes community is reaching out and asking for our help on the developer experience," claimed Cloud Foundry exec director Abby Kearns at the outfit's Netherlands-based Euro Summit.…

Ahoy me maties, now we must find another mast to climb The UK's largest internet service providers must block access to websites that enable people to pirate Nintendo Switch games, the High Court has ruled.…

Storage types pretty excited about getting at arrays over Ethernet via NVMe-oF Western Digital has swallowed Kazan Networks to get a taste of its sweet NVMe over Fabrics Ethernet connectivity kit.…

Take note, mobe makers Amsterdam-based Fairphone describes its devices as sustainable. iFixit took its selection of tools to one and found that, hey, you can make phones that are at once not rubbish and also repairable.…

It's ripe up your street In the UK, there are a number of things you can do about potholes: a) report it to the council; b) call the local newspaper, which will photograph you squatting angrily by the hole while you squawk "it's an accident waiting to happen!"; or c) nothing.…

iOS 13, macOS Catalina and calling C code in Mountain View's bundle of joy Flutter, Google's crack at a platform for mobile, desktop and web apps, has hit version 1.9 as the company targets Apple's upcoming iOS 13 and macOS Catalina. Its Dart language also got a tickle.…

Top beancounter 'never said anything', court hears Autonomy Trial A top Deloitte auditor "never said anything" at meetings of Autonomy's internal audit committee, its chairman – a one-time CEO of the Prudential insurance group – has testified to London's High Court.…

Manufacturers seem not to care – some routers still awaiting patches DSL modems and Wi-Fi routers from D-Link and Comba have been found to be leaving owners' passwords out in the open.…

From Spaceborne to Aitken and on to the Moon Interview Not content with stashing an Apollo-based supercomputer aboard the ISS, HPE will also be slinging the petaFLOPS for NASA's Ames Research Center.…

Prototype tries to offer help, advice to people uncomfortable discussing abuse with others Academics in the Netherlands have built a prototype machine-learning-powered Telegram chatbot that attempts to listen to victims of sexual harassment and assault, and offer them advice and help.…

Frictionless machine learning? Yes, it's possible – we can't wait to show you how Event We’ll be opening the doors at MCubed, our three-day dive into machine learning and analytics, in just a couple of weeks – and if you haven’t snapped up your place yet, our latest speaker additions may just tip the balance.…

Japanese cargo spaceship launch scrubbed after premature deflagration The launch of a cargo spacecraft packed with supplies for the International Space Station was cancelled after a fire erupted on or near the launch pad at Tanegashima Space Center in Japan on Tuesday.…

Alleged whaling crooks cuffed in global crime crackdown US prosecutors say 281 suspected criminal hackers around the world have been arrested as part of a massive takedown operation against so-called business email compromise operations. That's the type of caper in which crooks hijack executives' email accounts, or impersonate the staffers, to trick colleagues into wiring funds to fraudsters' accounts.…

Freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, privacy is sharing On Tuesday, fifty-one CEOs of major data-using companies urged US lawmakers to pass a national data privacy law, insisting that they're committed to protecting consumer privacy.…

Flagship smartmobe aimed squarely at the selfie generation As is traditional at this time of year, Apple on Tuesday showed off the shiny iThings it wants you to buy over the coming year. After sitting through the big launch, here's your humble Register vulture's complete rundown of what's new from Cook & Co.…

Microsoft joins Adobe and SAP in cleaning up security bugs, two of which are under active attack Patch Tuesday Microsoft, Adobe, and SAP today delivered a load of security updates for this month's Patch Tuesday.…

Google promises it won't override your choice of DNS provider Only days after Mozilla said it plans to make DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) available by default gradually for Firefox users in the US, Google announced its intention to test DoH in Chrome 78, due for beta release in the next two weeks.…

Super-harvester of private info forced to confront new iOS, Android safeguards Analysis Facebook has been caught bending the truth again – only this time it has been forced to out itself.…

Pre-approved services list aims to make choice easier for public sector orgs NHS Shared Business Services - the UK health service's back-office IT provider - has launched a list of pre-approved cloud services suppliers for public sector orgs.…

Cunning data-snooping side-channel technique is tough to exploit, Chipzilla warns Video It is possible to discern someone's SSH password as they type it into a terminal over the network by exploiting an interesting side-channel vulnerability in Intel's networking technology, say infosec gurus.…

Dataproc service will run Apache Spark on K8s, now in alpha Google Cloud Platform will soon emit the alpha release of its Dataproc service, specifically for Apache Spark jobs, running on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) clusters.…

Not to worry, UK.gov has put a few pennies into faster 'leccy car chargers The UK Treasury is making £70m available to fund an additional 3,000 rapid charging points for electric vehicles, doubling the UK total to 5,000.…

Now you too can re-enact the diving scenes from Das Boot As the world's arms sales folk and protestors alike gather in London's Docklands for the Defence and Security Expo International, one small business has what appears to be the perfect accessory for your Bond-villainesque lair: namely, a mini submarine.…

Also: A billion lucky smartphone owners can make use of Galileo Roundup It was a busy last week for space fans as drill-wielding humanoid robot Fedor returned from space, India's Vikram lunar lander failed to return signals from the Moon and the Vega launcher inched closer to a return to flight.…

It's a performance upgrade Dell EMC has injected FC-NVMe and Optane storage-class memory (SCM) into its high-end PowerMax arrays with the aim of ramping performance.…

Guess we'll drop that lawsuit now then Huawei has dropped a lawsuit against the US government after the Department of Commerce returned hardware it seized from the company back in September 2017.…

Oops, hope we haven't blown Java EE 8's cover Enterprise Java, known as Java Enterprise Edition 8 (Java EE 8) under Oracle's implementation of the platform specification, has finally packed up and moved out of Big Red's basement under a new name, so it won't bear the burden of its heritage.…

A farewell to merchant services arm? Shape-shifting accounting software outfit Sage has confirmed it is seeking to offload the Sage Pay division.…

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy At 55 years old, Jack Ma, boss of Chinese tech giant Alibaba, is stepping down from day-to-day management of the company he founded – with a $38.6bn fortune in his pocket.…

We chat to Genting UK and Scale Computing on next-gen infrastructure Webcast It feels as though everyone's talking about edge computing, and yet, once you've torn through all the hype and bluster, what are you left with? What actually is it?…

The Lexus of speakers does it again. This time, no audio at all Hoity-toity hi-fi purveyor Bose has inadvertently silenced a bunch of its own soundbars with a recent firmware update.…

Still, Chipzilla's almost everywhere when it comes to Microsoft devices IFA2019 Is Windows on Arm a thing? Yes, both Samsung and Lenovo had models on display at IFA in Berlin. But it has yet to take off with the great majority of laptops running Intel or AMD chipsets.…

Sounds like normal life in the Shetland Islands Geologists believe they have found rocks that filled the impact crater of the gigantic asteroid that pummeled Earth and killed off the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago.…

Content management giant invites Register readers to hobnob in the capital Promo Attendees at the annual Sibos financial services exhibition are invited to relax and rest their weary feet at an afternoon reception hosted by Box at the end of the first day of the event, in London, on 23 September.…

Talk about tit for tat We've all seen some wild bugs, but this one is just baffling.…