The Register

Time to dab your wrists with a little eau de flash It took a globally and organically sourced supplier base to create the perfume de storage we set before you, distilled from everything worth knowing over the past seven days on this tech news beat.…

Trade secrets are trumping personal liberty DEF CON American police and the judiciary are increasingly relying on software to catch, prosecute and sentence criminal suspects, but the code is untested, unavailable to suspects' defense teams, and in some cases provably biased.…

Sign up and start raising wonga now If you want to help some of the most vulnerable people in the country and bed down with some of the smartest, you’ve got seven weeks to sign up for the 2018 Byte Night sleepout.…

Staffer learns hard way: boss jokes don't mix well with infosec demos Who, Me? Welcome again to Who, Me?, where we invite Reg readers to begin the week crossing their fingers it will be better than those of our featured techies.…

Carefully omits to mention the Land of the Free DEF CON Rob Joyce, the former head of the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations hacking team, has spilled the beans on which nations are getting up to mischief online.…

So what are we going to do about it? Anything? Reg Lectures Trolls, fake news, Russian bots, radicals – there's plenty to put you off going online.…

Police seek mentor-like techies to help talented kids UK police are looking to cybersecurity firms to help implement a strategy of steering youngsters away from a life in online crime.…

How does that work for reinforcement learning? +1 for shrinking tumor, -1 for death? Machine-learning software has been trained to suggest the frequency and dosage of chemotherapy for patients suffering from glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer.…

Pension fund cries fraud over database giant's boasts about its off-prem biz performance Oracle has been sued by a pension fund that claims the database giant exaggerated its cloud business revenue.…

Sick of kid spit, flying stripy sexless scum drink your cider, pick fight Britain's booze hooligans are back – and more obnoxious than possibly imagined.…

You just pass a law, apparently The Australian government has scheduled its “not-a-backdoor” crypto-busting bill to land in parliament in the spring session, and we still don't know what will be in it.…

Your quick summary of AI news from this week Roundup Hello, here are a few bits of AI news for the weekend. You don't always need a ton of cash to buy a wad of GPUs to train your models super quickly. You can do it pretty cheaply on cloud platforms. There's also a robot that can play Where's Waldo (Wally in the UK), and Microsoft's computer that is trying to tell if you've found a joke funny.…

New zero-day vendor opens up shop, and more in infosec this week Roundup This week, the infosec world descended on Las Vegas for BlackHat and DEF CON to share stories of bug hunting, malware neural nets, hefty payout offers, and more.…

Hard-partying tech baron (no, not that one) cuffed Broadcom billionaire cofounder Henry Nicholas was this week cuffed on suspicion of drug trafficking – after cops allegedly seized a huge stash of narcotics in his Las Vegas hotel suite.…

Hard-partying tech baron (no, not that one) cuffed Broadcom billionaire cofounder Henry Nicholas was this week cuffed on suspicion of drug trafficking – after cops allegedly seized a huge stash of narcotics in his Las Vegas hotel suite.…

Pentagon tech trial went so well, it's now a full-time op The Pentagon has upgraded to permanent status a previously temporary and experimental program that bankrolls technology startups.…

Dive into a weird and wonderful 'feature' of Via's embedded hardware chips Black Hat A forgotten family of x86-compatible processors still used in specialist hardware, and touted for "military-grade security features," has a backdoor that malware and rogue users can exploit to completely hijack systems.…

And revs up those daft Apple Car rumors Dan Field, Tesla's VP of engineering, and the man in charge of the Tesla Model 3 until May, is to rejoin Apple, the tech titan confirmed this week.…

Something to do with ripping you off and treating you like an a-hole while doing so You almost have to admire the US cable industry's absolute disregard for its own paying subscribers.…

Microsoft software-defined data centre coming, NVMe-oF kit, play Mist for me and more Microsoft has said it'll be bringing "software-defined" capabilities to Windows Server in 2019.…

Revenues, clients up in Q2 2018 Software support biz Rimini Street said it planned an "aggressive" investment in sales and marketing as it posted a 20 per cent boost in both revenues and client numbers.…

Misses Wall Street numbers by circa $1m Extreme Networks’ share price almost halved after its Q4 financials hit the wires on Wednesday, in spite of the US network infrastrucutre kit-maker reporting a double-digit bounce in turnover. It serves as a timely reminder that tech companies miss Wall Street forecasts at their peril.…

Says modular approach will bring new business to market The NHS plans to offer £450,000 to a firm that can replace the outdated contractural framework used to supply IT systems and services to GP practices with a new, modular IT framework.…

Service Provider gros fromage and marketer leave biz A former Brocade marketer turned Cisco veep is leaving the networking kinpin, along with another veep who ran the service provider division.…

Staff opened phishing email Updated Holiday camp and British institution Butlin's has admitted 34,000 visitor records have been compromised.…

Leaked roadmap emerges, still full of holes +Comment Intel has ceremonially "shipped" its first Optane DIMM to Google, despite no Xeon CPU support.…

Reps probe Rex's wrecking ball job on crucial Cyber Issues office US House Democrats are asking Republicans to subpoena the State Department over its decision to shut down a key government cybersecurity office.…

Head of education letter littered with mistakes, blames 'IT printers' for bad spelling Devon County Council has pointed the finger of blame at a "new IT printing system" for a letter littered with spelling mistakes that informed a father he was being fined for taking his son out of school in term time.…

Pre-Brexit bargain to be used as UK hub Munich-headquartered integrator CANCOM has confirmed to the German stock exchange that it is buying British enterprise tech supplier OCSL for £29m in cash and shares.…

Maybe the audience needed the teleprompter? Comment When Samsung's veep of artificial intelligence strategy, the enigmatic Ji Soo Yi, demonstrated Bixby 2.0 at the chaebol's Galaxy event yesterday, he had to prompt the audience for applause. "You can clap," he urged the attendees after stunned silence met another new feature.…

Last year Hutchins, now Linton targeted Black Hat/DEF CON At midnight on Thursday Matt Linton, a senior Google engineer who was one of the key players in sorting out the Spectre security hole mess, went to his hotel room in Caesars Palace and found his room key no longer worked.…

Status-checking tool isn't fit for purpose, and then there's Brexit The UK's taxman, HMRC, is under pressure to rethink "short-sighted" plans to extend IR35 tax reforms to the private sector and scrap its "unfit" assessment tool as a consultation on the matter closes today.…

Strange things indeed happen in Californian courts A former VMware veep who claimed tens of millions of dollars from the virtualization company over whistleblower victimisation has lost his legal attempt (PDF) to throw out a $1.5m arbitration award made in his favour.…

Planes, ships, military equipment at risk says IOActive's Santamarta Black Hat Four years ago, IOActive security researcher Ruben Santamarta came to Black Hat USA to warn about insecurities in aircraft satellite-communication (SATCOM) systems. Now he’s back with more doom and gloom.…

In server rooms, neat doesn't trump functionality On-Call Welcome again to On-Call, El Reg's weekly column that offers readers the chance to vent about their co-workers' ineptitude.…

Why we hardly have to sniff the packet to know you play tennis with an IoT racket You don't need to sniff clear-text Internet of Things traffic to comprehensively compromise a gadget-fan's home privacy: mere traffic profiles will do the job nicely, a group of researchers has found.…

You-hoo, Pythonistas and Rsters Julia, the open-source programming language with a taste for science, turned 1.0 on Thursday, six years after its public debut in 2012. The occasion was presented on YouTube, live from JuliaCon 2018 in London.…

Fun and frolics at the 2018 Pwnie Awards Black Hat The whizz kids who uncovered the Spectre and Meltdown data-leaking flaws in modern processors have scooped two Pwnie Awards – often referred to as the information security industry’s Oscars.…

Use this to match profiles to names of people at an organization. Nothing could possibly go wrong here Finding people's social media profiles can be a slow and manual business – so why not get facial recognition to help?…

Remote management a double-edged sword, IT admins warned at hacking conference Black Hat Data centers are vital in this cloudy world – yet little-understood management chips potentially give hackers easy access to their servers in ways sysadmins may not have imagined.…

Miller, Valasek discuss today and tomorrow's robo-ride defenses Black Hat Car hacking wizards Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek have turned their attention to autonomous vehicles – and reckon the security is surprisingly good.…

Why are we eternal pessimists? And why's that such a bad thing, eh? Eh? Eh? Is your morning coffee half empty? Do you feel it's always darkest before it goes pitch black?…

Join the Mobile Infantry and save the Galaxy. Service guarantees citizenship. Would you like to know more? Mike Pence, the Vice President of the United States, on Thursday formally announced that his administration hopes to bankroll, no, not universal healthcare for all Americans. Not better support for armed forces veterans. Not improved public education.…

Tech needs to mature a little more, perhaps Black Hat Those gadgets and apps used by small shops and traders to turn their smartphones and tablets into handheld sales terminals? Quite possibly insecure, you'll no doubt be shocked to discover.…

DNS leak flaws are outside of bug-bounty scope Kaspersky's Android VPN app whispered the names of websites its 1,000,000-plus users visited along with their public IP addresses to the world's DNS servers, it is claimed.…

You listening, Cressida Dick? Analysis America's largest manufacturer of body cameras – and the biggest supplier to police forces across the United States – says today's facial recognition technology is not safe for making serious decisions.…

Decision to join Google-y Internet-of-Things-ish Thread Group intrigues Analysis Apple may have finally concluded that its attempt to force people to use only its technology to control their smart-home automation equipment is doomed to failure.…

Thousands of mobes allegedly slurped, fenced via phishing, etc A dozen people have been indicted in America for allegedly fencing more than $1m in smartphones and other kit obtained via hacking and fraud.…

Even worse: contains Bixby – you've been warned Pics Samsung is allegedly mulling ending its Galaxy Note line, now that almost every smartphone on the planet is larger than the original Note – which was so absurdly large at launch it was dubbed the first “phablet."…

That's rough, bet they were well teed off – crooks want Bitcoin The Professional Golfers' Association of America (PGA) was hit by ransomware just before one of the sport's biggest pro events, which teed off on Thursday.…