The Register

Microsoft and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day Updated In a touching show of solidarity with its Exchange Online cousin, Microsoft’s Azure Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) service has fallen over and is struggling to get back up. Again.…

Two foundations find common cause promoting in populist processor plan The Linux Foundation, the non-profit funded by for-profit tech firms to promote the open source operating system, has begun working with the RISC-V Foundation, another non-profit backed by well-heeled companies, to encourage adoption of the open source RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA).…

Switchzilla has a second go at fixing videoconferencing app's 'I'm the captain, now' hole Cisco will take a second crack at addressing a vulnerability in WebEx that can be exploited to execute malicious code on a vulnerable installation.…

Also: Transit Gateways and big bandwidth for C5 instances re:Invent Earlier this month we covered ThousandEyes' report into cloud networking performance, in which the metrics outfit observed that Amazon offloads cloud traffic from its network at the first opportunity, compared to competitors like Google.…

Issue addressed for the many, but what of the few and their precious Outlook inboxes? Microsoft's on-again, off-again relationship with the Outlook clients of UK Office 365 subscribers has entered its second day, and some users found themselves still unable to access their email.…

It's only Media Player this time. Oh, and file associations. Oops The "days without a Windows 10 incident" clock has been reset to zero once again as a tired Microsoft engineer updated the "known issues" page to reflect that, well, there are some.…

Edgeline boxen bang operational tech and IT heads together HPE Discover 2018 Don't want a full blown data centre? Not a problem, said HPE today as it lifted the curtain on a fresh clutch of edge networking products – including a software platform – under its Edgeline brand.…

They don't make them like her any more Obit Baroness Trumpington, a wartime Bletchley Park transcriber who was part of the push to posthumously pardon Alan Turing, has died aged 96.…

2.7 million Brits caught up in 'serious failure of data security' says UK data watchdog The UK’s data watchdog has slapped a £385,000 penalty on app-not-driving-service baddie Uber for security weak spots that attackers exploited to expose the details of millions of customers.…

Outgoing head congratulated for role in division's transformation Capita is looking for a new networks chief.…

Then took her employers to the Employment Tribunal An NCC Group graduate trainee who emailed 300 coworkers to ask for help with what she deemed to be "unusual" behaviour from her Kali Linux VM; contacted the firm’s incident response team to complain about a faulty laptop; and said the machine had been "deliberately sabotaged", has had her victimisation claim thrown out by an employment tribunal.…

On the side of a bus #F_AI_L An Artificial Intelligence system in China publicly shamed one of the country’s most prominent business executive for jaywalking - after spotting their mug going past on the side of a bus.…

Plus anonymous email and all personal info to be redacted The long-standing but outdated "admin" role associated with every internet domain name will be killed off under new recommendations designed to update the Whois registry and make it complaint with European data privacy rules.…

A1 'Graviton' instances available right now, can work out cheaper than x86 virtual machines re:Invent Amazon has designed its own 64-bit Arm server processors, dubbed Graviton, and is right now renting them out on AWS.…

Competition needs come first Australia's competition watchdog has announced the regime that regulates Telstra's copper network should remain in place until at least 2024.…

Is your IT department full of monsters? HPE seems to think so HPE Discover 2018 HPE is updating its wares to reduce the skill level needed to deploy its so-called composable infrastructure.…

Mark Dreyfus offers to rubber-stamp legislation if only counter-terror agencies get decryption Mark Dreyfus, the Labor opposition's shadow Attorney General, has offered a compromise on Australia's controversial encryption backdooring bill that could see it passed, but with its operation restricted to counter-terrorism agencies.…

Cupertino getting little love from the Supremes so far Apple may soon find itself at the center of a monopoly probe before the United States Supreme Court, based on opening arguments heard on Monday.…

Breakdown in MFA's cache, response, and event handling all contributed to TITSUP Microsoft has delivered its postmortem report detailing the failures that led to unlucky folks being unable to log into its cloud services for 14 hours last week.…

Once solar panels are deployed, spacecraft can begin studying Martian underground Vid NASA’s InSight lander today successfully fell through the atmosphere of Mars to touchdown in seemingly one piece on the planet's surface.…

Node.js package tried to plunder Bitcoin wallets A widely used Node.js code library listed in NPM's warehouse of repositories was altered to include crypto-coin-stealing malware. The lib in question, event-stream, is downloaded roughly two million times a week by application programmers.…

Officials take steps to get off the e-currency's rollercoaster ride Ohio has become the first US state to accept Bitcoin as formal payment for business taxes – everything from sales and vehicle levies to employee tax and electricity costs.…

How do we make mobes take better snaps? Throw a buttload of sensors at 'em, judging from this patent In a move that wouldn't seem out of place in The Onion, LG has invented a 16-lens camera for use in phones.…

Take a look up the railtrack, from Barking to Faversham UK fibre flinger Openreach has announced plans to bring its ultrafast broadband service to another 81 locations, thanks in part to the joy of Gfast.…

Yep, back to the past again for unimaginative sheeple It's been clear for decades that Hollywood is almost completely out of ideas and nothing is sacred when mining the past for inspiration.…

Just five years after it paid a £90k penalty for dodgy dialling A Glaswegian business has been fined £160,000 for making 1.6 million nuisance calls to people on the UK's opt-out database – five years after it received a £90,000 fine which was also for dodgy dialling.…

Cache allegedly indicates long-term knowledge of data hose used by Cambridge Analytica British MPs have made unprecedented use of Parliamentary powers to send a serjeant at arms to the hotel where the boss of a US software biz was staying to seize potentially damaging documents on Facebook.…

Microsoft has a post-weekend problem Happy Monday, everyone! Microsoft is apparently celebrating this made-up Cyber Monday "holiday" by giving Office 365 users a break from all that pesky email, with Exchange services currently still out of whack.…

Recommends bringing finance and HR in-house next year Barnet Council has confirmed it is expecting outsourcing outfit Capita to hand it £4.12m due to services, including IT improvements, delivered under a 10-year mega deal being "not up to scratch".…

The Fuchsia is bright. The Fuchsia is red Comment Fearing China's growing economic might, the United States is reportedly leaning on foreign companies not to buy Huawei gear.…

Ten intensive courses cover all the cyber security skills you need Promo Defending organisations against security attacks is an ongoing challenge, with new threats constantly emerging to test the beleaguered security professional.…

No stress test? Then prepare for a potential TSB-like mess You can't hack the code and manage the project forever: at some point you must go live.…

Matt Neisler gets a brief goodbye in company memo Another senior exec at DXC Technology's Americas operation has left the organisation: chief finance officer Matthew Neisler split on Friday, according to an internal memo.…

Propositions from 3 startups then... yeah, fluffy stuff Roundup There was action at opposite ends of the spectrum this week – we learnt about three Israeli storage startups aiming to get data closer to compute while while world+dog stuffs it in the cloud.…

Then it's time to penetrate the Martian surface for science NASA's Mars InSight lander is due to arrive on the Red Planet on Monday, giving scientists their first in-depth look at the martian interior.…

As your dad used to say: RTFM, the WHOLE effin' manual Who, Me? Another Monday has landed with a thud – no doubt even more so for those of you in the States coming down from a weekend of Thanksgiving revelry.…

And that means smartphones will need to get smarter Ofcom's top tech bod, Mansoor Hanif, recently gave the Wi-Fi industry a roasting, telling them to shape up to 5G or face sliding into irrelevance. New network data from around the world shows that slide has already begun.…

Nope, not from now – from whenever politicos make up their minds With just two years to go until the end of the Brexit transition period, HMRC has said its preparations for a Northern Ireland backstop could take up to 30 months – once Whitehall has said how the mechanism will work.…

Damn, that mask is stuck fast Comment A recent New York Times profile portrayed Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg as the megacorp's human side – in contrast to reptilian boy emperor Mark Zuckerberg.…

Minister confirms how much UK spunked on system it can't use There were heated exchanges at the UK's Defence and European Scrutiny Committee this week as members attempted to get the Minister for Defence Procurement, Stuart Andrew, to put a figure on the cost of the Galileo project.…

Cash-only Thursday as soap seller's tills go TITSUP* Soapnotes Lush, high street peddler of lotions and potions for the pampered, lost the ability to perform card transactions yesterday due to a bath bomb dropped in the server room.…

Plus: PC, notebook hard drive ships set to be eclipsed by flash SSD market stats for calendar Q3 from DRAMeXchange, IDC and TrendForce and Wells Fargo have highlighted three things: Samsung remains the global undisputed sales heavyweight; the PC industry will suck up more SSDs than disk drives next year; and NVME is the enterprise SSD interface of choice.…

PLAIN TEXT passwords showed up on file-hosting site German chat platform Knuddels.de ("Cuddles") has been fined €20,000 for storing user passwords in plain text (no hash at all? Come on, people, it's 2018).…

Christmas soon, probably best you don't look anyway UK customers of HSBC hoping to check their balances before heading to the pub for a Friday beverage or eight found themselves out of luck today.…

*Terrible IT Threatens Services, Users, Pound MPs have stuck a probe in banking IT crises after an "astonishing" number of failures, saying "measly apologies and hollow words" aren't good enough.…

National Audit Office now says estimated saving for you and I is, er, just £18 a year Parliamentarians are set to haul civil servants in for a grilling after the National Audit Office (NAO) confirmed the UK will miss its 2020 smart meter rollout target, piling an extra £500m onto the cost of the £11bn project.…

Loose .zips sink chips 2: Electric Boogaloo The "Zip Slip" vulnerability that first emerged in June has claimed another victim – the Apache Hadoop YARN NodeManager daemon.…

Judging by all the emails I'm getting, I think it is already Something for the Weekend, Sir? This may come as a total surprise to you but today is Black Friday. Yes! It crept up on us unawares without anyone mentioning it once.…

Blighty's metrology experts define terms The National Physical Laboratory has quantified many fundamentals during its lifetime – SI units for the second and the metre, for example.…

As a sneaky fix flummoxes n00b Burroughs engineer On Call Black Friday Giveaway! We don't want you to think El Reg isn't jumping on the internet bandwagon as the frenzied hunt for "bargains" continues apace.…