The Register

They wish. Backdooring, encryption, and governments Analysis Not since the days of the US Clipper chip in the early 1990s, have backdoors put there by government decree to bypass encryption been this fashionable with governments.…

They wish. Backdooring, encryption, and governments Analysis Not since the days of the US Clipper chip in the early 1990s, have backdoors put there by government decree to bypass encryption been this fashionable with governments.…

Then exploited pix to demand more X-rated snaps, Feds claim A former NASA contractor was arrested and charged on Wednesday for allegedly sextorting women.…

No official patch for under-attack ALPC vuln – so grab these mitigations instead The Windows ALPC security hole that emerged early last week remains unpatched, even though it is being actively exploited by hackers to gain total control over PCs.…

If they fall for this social-engineering trick, of course Vid Beware using your web browser's autofill feature to log into your broadband router via Wi-Fi and unprotected HTTP. A nearby attacker can attempt to retrieve the username and password.…

It's always a good idea to know who you're talking to A proposal for securing BGP – the protocol that lays out the traffic pathways of the internet – has a another backer: NIST, aka America's National Institute for Standards and Technology.…

Cover-up – or just admins following usual upgrade cycle? Health-insurance biz Premera Blue Cross has been accused of deliberately knackering one of its computers to cover up details of a cyber-break-in. The organization denies any wrongdoing.…

ShapeCloud scheme to build bit barns on demand At Huawei's Operations Transformation Forum 2018 gabfest in Munich, Germany, this week, the Chinese giant teased "ShapeCloud" – a concept designed to help telcos build bit barns for government customers.…

Tables did not turn but rotated a little for Facebook, Twitter at senate hearing Comment It takes time for society, and the law, to catch up with technological advances. But based on this morning's hearing at the US Senate Intelligence Committee, the law is rapidly catching up with the main purveyors of what we have all come to call "social media."…

Open up your eyes and look around: It's just an illusion A recently observed neutron star collision was so violent it sprayed jets of radio signals that appeared to travel faster than light, it has just emerged.…

Google slammed for no-show Facebook and Twitter executives faced pointed questions from American lawmakers this morning over what they were doing to prevent foreign agents manipulating their sprawling online estates.…

Online ad giant returns fire in bid to use IP freely Facebook is suing BlackBerry for alleged patent infringement six months after BlackBerry sued Facebook for alleged patent infringement.…

Weird error message triggered by Azure update blunder Folks around the planet are today unable to use Microsoft Skype and Office 365's Outlook due to a baffling "Throttled" error message.…

So is that a yes or a no? Huawei has addressed the issue of tweaking a phone's performance to improve its benchmark scores, after being caught redhanded.…

Code of conduct will guide tech firms' work with health sector The UK government has said the NHS should be "fairly rewarded" by private firms that slurp patients' data.…

Will hire 100 heads, add NVMe to line DDN is forking out more than $60m for Tintri's business and will begin supporting the trembling, sweaty owners of the bankrupted firm's arrays this week, it confirmed today.…

Tax 'em 3%, say some. Noooo! cry Luxembourg, Ireland Warring European governments have been urged to quickly come to an interim agreement on a levy on tech giants’ revenues – and could drop plans to tax the sale of users’ data to get there.…

Except that one. Nobody wants that kept for posterity Call recording is coming to the consumer version of Skype, although users of the Windows 10 UWP incarnation will have a bit longer to wait.…

Northern Ireland capital is tops for just about everything mobile As if you needed another reason to love Belfast, residents of the Northern Ireland capital enjoy the fastest and most reliable mobile network performance in the UK, while Londoners are stuck in the slow lane.…

Sent 1.42 million mailers to unconsenting folk in a year A scurrilous marketing agency that fired 1.42 million emails at prospective customers was today saddled with a £60,000 fine by the UK’s data watchdog.…

Office 2019 users need not apply Microsoft's incoming updates to Outlook on Windows and web aim to strip away the cruft that has built up in the interface over the years.…

One does dev, the other ops, and they're believed to be former white hats A pair of cybercrooks who may have started out as legit infosec pros have expanded their operations outside Russia and begun attacking banks across the world.…

Hate leads to... a single vendor The Pentagon has pushed back the deadline for its $10bn cloud services contract by three weeks.…

Ungrateful! We've already given staffers mobiles, now they want patches too! Small businesses are dopey about the importance of regular patches and updates for their employees’ smartphones. And larger ones aren’t much better.…

Pour an aquavit, pour a gin, take a deeeep breath ... Juniper and Ericsson are extending a long-standing love-in to cover 5G network tech.…

Twitter account using 19-year-old's online alias also taunted law enforcement A British teenager has pleaded guilty in court to making hoax bomb threats to schools and airports while posing online as part of a hacker crew, a police agency has alleged.…

Email fraud skyrockets and ransomware is back, baby! Cybercrims are ramping up their efforts to target employees through fraudulent email and social media scams, according to a new study by email security firm Proofpoint.…

Toddler-level interruptions and todo lists. Guys, try harder IFA I didn't see a blockchain toothbrush at IFA in Berlin last week, but I'm sure there was one lurking about somewhere. With 30 vast halls to cover, I didn't look too hard for it. But I did see many things almost as tragic that no one could miss – AI being squeezed into almost every conceivable bit of consumer electronics.…

*By which we mean missed bin collections, fly-tipping etc. A local politician has launched his own chatbot, in what El Reg can only imagine is a bid to one-up health secretary Matt Hancock.…

Machine-learning medic beats fleshy docs' diagnoses, according to study AI can predict when you’ll keel over and die clutching at your chest from a heart attack better than doctors can, apparently.…

Search giant complains of misrepresentation, database titan raises an eyebrow An advocacy group funded in part by Oracle posed as a Russian internet troll farm to call attention to what it claims is Google's failure to police online political ad sales.…

Behind scheule, over budget ... stop us if you've heard this one New Zealand's government has decided to stop sending good money after bad by suspending an Oracle implementation that's so far cost the country NZ$100 million (£51m/ $65.4m).…

First light for Australia-Singapore Cable In response to another – yet another – failure on the SeaMeWe-3 submarine cable, Australian telco Vocus has lit up its ASC submarine cable ahead of schedule.…

Pumpers and dumpers, flash crashers and other miscreants under the SEC's spotlight The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has put out a call for proposals on a new system that would be able to identify possible stock scams posted on Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks.…

Free sessions for Reg to readers explore cloud platform’s main components Promo Microsoft has launched a series of free on-demand webinars to help businesses make the best use of the varied resources that are looking to make Azure cloud services the platform of choice for building and deploying the next generation of modern applications.…

Boffins program quadcopters to clock and record humans, cars and bikes Video Cameras on drones have helped make aerial photography more accessible – and with machine-learning software, they may be able to assist budding filmmakers in the future, too.…

When the bottom line gets bashed, priorities change For years, internet engineers have predicted that the cost of an ever-smaller pool of IPv4 addresses would cause people to shift to the internet's new IPv6 protocol. Well, it finally appears to be happening.…

Researchers uncover botnet malware pouncing on security holes More than 7,500 Mikrotik routers have been compromised with malware that logs and transmits network traffic data to an unknown control server.…

Devs can deal with pull requests from Chrome Developers who uses GitHub – 28 million at last count – now have the option to edit code with the click of a button using Gitpod, an integrated development environment (IDE) that can be launched directly from the social code hosting site.…

Lightning storm Shook Texas facility All Night Long Microsoft is blaming bad weather for the massive outage that knocked a number of Azure cloud and Visual Studio Teams services offline Tuesday.…

Big thumbs up to Internet Archive for now Analysis The Wayback Machine's archive of webpages is legitimate evidence that may be used in litigation, a US appeals court has decided.…

Big Blue deal with MayaData brings OpenEBS to platform MayaData has linked arms with IBM to make OpenEBS storage available to IBM Cloud Private users, giving Big Blue an answer for those that want containerised storage.…

$295m will buy you a lot of IT incident management Collaboration specialist Atlassian has snapped up IT incident-monitoring outfit OpsGenie in a deal worth $295m in cash and shares.…

All driller and lots of filler aboard the ISS The boss of Russian space agency Roskosmos has confirmed that last week's air leak aboard the International Space Station (ISS) was the result of engineers getting handy with a drill.…

Subcontinent agrees to bolster web infrastructure India's ISPs have agreed as a bloc to join The Internet Society's MANRS route integrity programme.…

Ah, the old bcc blunder, classic Data breaches at organisations that 'fess up to the UK's data protection watchdog are about seven times more likely to be caused by human error than hackers.…

US customers wake up to sleepy cloud service Updated Microsoft has warned that a "subset of customers in South Central US" may experience Azure problems today after cooling issues sent the servers scurrying for the shutdown button.…

£50m connectivity tech trial announcement marred by Panopticon-style horror The West Midlands is to become the first UK urban 5G testbed area at a cost of up to £50m – with one use for the new tech being China-style AI-powered CCTV cameras with automated facial recognition, according to the government.…

Party poppers in Mountain View, party poopers in Redmond Birthday cake makers, rejoice! There's a trio of tech industry milestones to celebrate or maybe commiserate.…

Frankfurt, Berlin regions to launch end of 2019, T-Systems 'trustee' deal to be retired Microsoft's Frankfurt and Berlin data centres will start shipping bits from the fourth quarter of 2019.…