The Register

Tech giants do urbanism? Of course they're watching you Locals have objected to Apple building a store in Stockholm's Kungsträdgården (Kungsan) park. Protestors said the intrusion of a tasteful glass temple of overpriced consumer electronics encroaches into the public space, ruining the character of the park.…

Firmware security patches hit to fix critical holes in enterprise network access points On Thursday, network equipment makers Aruba, Cisco, and Cisco-owned Meraki plan to patch two flaws in Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) chips made by Texas Instruments (TI) that power their respective enterprise Wi-Fi access points.…

Storage news and views website ready for the coming zettabyte era Several years ago, The Register absorbed the storage-focused Blocks and Files website because storage news was becoming mainstream IT industry news. The bits and bytes making up blocks, files and objects were becoming so large in number that developing storage arrays to hold them was a complex business and getting more so.…

'Internal issue' blamed for morning's outage Clydesdale and Yorkshire bank users have been unable to log in to their accounts or see transactions today, thanks to a non-specific “technical issue”.…

Oh, and look at our lovely figures! No, ignore the cost cutting, sales declines. Shareholders are happy! BT has got Brexit licked, it told the stock market today – the former state telco said it has modelled for the worst outcome and is stockpiling products in case the UK exits with no trade deal in place and supply chains falter.…

Firm plans to stuff a sizeable chunk into AI, naturally Graph database-flinger Neo4J has doubled its total funding after bagging $80m in E-round funding.…

Thales boldly goes where, er, NASA went in the 1960s Thales Alenia Space has bucked the Brexit blues by announcing the first all-electric satellite propulsion module to be designed and built in the UK.…

We'll just take this one away Apple has withdrawn a faulty update that has left Apple Watch 4 owners with bricked bling.…

Kernel-level ICMP buffer overrun quietly fixed as all eyes on this week's launchfest When Apple took to the stage for its latest slew of product announcements, there were a bunch of security fixes disclosed at the same time with far less fanfare.…

And competition regulator sees 5G clouds on the horizon The company building Australia's National Broadband Network turned in what was mostly a dull but worthy set of financials, and it's put something of a squeeze on its executive bonuses.…

Phew, someone didn't get the plug-all-useful-holes memo Analysis The world's fourth biggest PC company sells three desktop PC lines, but it hadn't updated one of those three for four years. Maybe Apple had forgotten that the humble and unassuming Mac mini was there at all. But it fixed that this week.…

Cold-calling home security firms slammed in watchdog's cooler The UK's data watchdog has slapped a £220,000 fine on two firms that collectively made hundreds of thousands of nuisance calls to flog home security services.…

Code to help those managing lots of servers unleashed, designated by jumbles of letters After years of making the world more open and connected – to everyone's delight – Facebook recently moved on to bringing the world closer together.…

Top GOP man threatens retaliation One of the top Republicans in the US House of Representatives had harsh words Wednesday for the UK government's plan to impose additional taxes on tech giants.…

Low power, low latency, backwards-compatible PHY interfaces, all the buzzwords Cisco has made its long-awaited entry into the 400G space, today announcing four switches pitched at webscale, high-end enterprise, and service provider customers.…

Justices question whether money should go to lawyers and their old universities The US Supreme Court is distinctly unimpressed with a cozy deal cooked up by Google's lawyers after the ad giant lost an $8.5m class action lawsuit for violating user privacy.…

Russian space agency schedules ISS crew launch for early December A crew crisis at the International Space Station could be averted, with Russia's Roscosmos saying this month's Soyuz launch incident was caused by a sensor failure.…

Secret API leaves door open for remote commands from other gadgets sharing its Wi-Fi Updated A security researcher says an undocumented API in the Google Home Hub assistant can be exploited to kick the gizmo off its own wireless network.…

Troll preserve's images can be used to distribute code, PDFs and other stuff A picture turns out to be worth much more than a thousand words, at least on Twitter. For security researcher David Buchanan, it amounts at least 884,000, roughly the number words in the complete works of William Shakespeare.…

As it turns out, crime pays incredibly well for some The infamous GandCrab malware infection has netted its operators an estimated nine-figure payout from targeting large, high-value corporate systems.…

China says case is full of hot air The US Justice Department has charged two Chinese spies with stealing jet engine blueprints through a series of online hacks over the course of five years.…

US DoE sees multiple CPU, GPU, interconnect support and snaps one up for $146m Cray has announced Shasta – a near-composable planned supercomputer supporting multiple CPUs, GPUs and interconnects, including its new high-speed Slingshot Ethernet-compatible fabric that fixes the noisy neighbour network congestion problem.…

CTO reveals all in cosy chat with startup founders Oracle staffers were about a week away from not getting paid, founder Larry Ellison has said of the firm's early days.…

CTO reveals all in cosy chat with startup founders Oracle staffers were about a week away from not getting paid, founder Larry Ellison has said of the firm's early days.…

Utilitarian fix leaves minority of users still moaning Microsoft might be patting itself on the back prematurely for wrangling the technical gremlins that downed its Office 365 services for some users in the UK and the US.…

UK and Canadian digital and privacy committees team up to snag star witness British MPs desperate to grill Mark Zuckerberg over misuse of Facebook data have teamed up with their Canadian counterparts in a last-ditch attempt to lure the boss to the first ever international "grand committee".…

North Carolina, but it could happen aaannnyyywherrre An entire block was shut down around the Duke Energy building in uptown Charlotte, North Carolina, on Tuesday after mail room staff reported "a small manila envelope handwritten and addressed from out of state" to police.…

That screeching sound might be the wheels coming off tech reselling in Q3 The wheels came off tech reselling in the UK for Computacenter in calendar Q3 according to a trading update released to the London Stock Exchange this morning, sending the firm’s share price crashing by a fifth.…

Local authority furiously smacking Ctrl+Alt+Delete A cache of keyboards has been dumped in a field in North Yorkshire, leading to speculation that the person responsible for Deleting them from the face of the Earth didn't want to put in another Shift.…

The business appeal is mixed, but it's working Analysis None of the new products Apple announced yesterday – laptops, desktops and tablets – are cheap, and all are more expensive than the models they supersede. But the introduction of a £2,000 iPad is by far the most eye-catching.…

Horn gouges hole in host for Docker guest breakout Google's gVisor sandboxed kernel had a bug that would allow an attacker to escape their container and overwrite files in the host filesystem – according to Google Project Zero's Jann Horn.…

Loyalty card members deets exposed Radisson Hotel Group has told members of its loyalty scheme that their personal details were exposed in a data breach.…

Chipzilla less pale and male – report Intel has hit its target of "full representation" among staffers who toil stateside, and said the diversity push has resulted in a hike in the proportion of its employees who are female or minorities.…

Report slams digital policing and Home Office's leadership Cops' investment in and adoption of technology is "a complete and utter mess", MPs have said in a scathing report on the parlous state of UK policing.…

As for you, Virgin Media... Virgin pipped BT to be the most-moaned-about UK ISP in Whinge Which? magazine's most recent survey of British broadband.…

Eliminate the risks: Uncover the latest security trends here Webcast It has been argued that the future of software development and operations is all about speeding up development and deployment through cloud-based infrastructure and open source software.…

It can only hold millions of cold rubidium atoms for now though The idea of tractor beams, concentrated rays of energy used to trap and move objects at a distance, was first introduced in science fiction.…

FCC reckons 5.9 GHz coexistence can Pai A mostly-unused slice of radio spectrum set aside for connected cars in 1999 could soon be shared with Wi-Fi, with the Federal Communications Commission seeking comment on the future of the 5.9 GHz band.…

Database replication is hard A 43-second loss of connectivity on the US East Coast helped trigger GitHub's 24-hour TITSUP (Total Inability To Support User Pulls) earlier this month.…

Vulnerabilities that expose browsing history yet to be fixed "History sniffing" promises a nose full of dust or, you're talking about web browsers, a whiff of the websites you've visited.…

Nine injured riders and pedestrians say scooters are shoddy and ill-maintained Scooter providers Bird and Lime, and scooter makers Segway and Xiaomi, face a lawsuit in Los Angeles, Calif., claiming that the two-wheeled tech toys are poorly manufactured and maintained.…

DoH or DoT? Punch-up time! Last week, amid some acrimony, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) formally adopted a new encryption standard for the internet naming systems.…

Security updates. What did you think we were referring to? Sneaking in behind the hoopla of Tuesday's MacBook spectacle was a set of security updates for virtually all of Apple's supported products.…

Exoplanet telescope out, and Opportunity in its last rights The Kepler spacecraft has coughed up its last reserves of fuel and is now retired, after helping scientists discover thousands of exoplanets for nearly a decade, NASA announced on Tuesday.…

Come join us all in our lovely walled garden Analysis It may seem counterintuitive to use the launch of a new Apple laptop to argue that the company is trying to kill off laptops altogether but that is exactly what's happening.…

Commissioner doubts ability to carry out data breach rules The Canadian government this week will be enforcing a strict new privacy law, with the term "enforcing" up to interpretation because the regulator says he can't enforce it.…

Bringing home the bacon Comment So we all know by now that IBM is buying Red Hat for $34bn – the largest software acquisition ever. Of course, that includes all Red Hat's storage products.…

Reports of online 'productivity' suite going AWOL Microsoft's Office 365 has been giving some users cold sweats. No matter how hard they try to log in, they simply can't access the service and haven't been able to for hours – others say it has wobbled for days.…

Bring a dongle, though. There are bugger all ports Apple has given the moldering MacBook Air a new lease of life at the company's hardware event in Brooklyn today.…

You shouldn't profit from punishment The lawyer leading the complaints against Alphabet in the EU Android case doesn’t sound impressed by giant ad-slinger’s proposed remedy. Not one bit.…