The Register

The road to hell is paved with floppy disks and bad anti-virus software Who, me? Welcome again to “Who, me?”, The Register’s confessional column in which readers reveal their mistakes.…

New Gartner Supernatural Square has AWS and Azure on top, IBM and Alibaba lagging and Oracle on an offensive Analyst firm Gartner’s 2018 Magic Quadrant for infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) has again found that Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure are the most mature clouds, but has omitted more than half of the vendors it covered last year on grounds that customers now demand more than just rented servers and storage.…

SingTel then left them open for a while, because ... well there's no excuse is there? Singaporean broadband users were left vulnerable to attackers after their ISP opened remote access ports on their modems and forgot to close them.…

Bad Vlad won't care, but this puts voting infrastructure on par with DNS and BGP The Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace (GCSC) has called for an end to cyber-attacks on electoral infrastructure.…

Big-in-Japan 'bot offers root access through hard-coded password and worse bugs too Softbank's popular anthropomorphic robot, Pepper, has myriad security holes according to research published by Scandinavian researchers earlier this month.…

Everything's fine! A $1.3 billion fine! Winning! On Friday, United States president Donald Trump Tweeted that ZTE will be allowed to sell into America again, subject to board changes, security controls, and a fine.…

Pong paddle goes dark Atari co-founder and co-creator of the legendary Pong, Ted Dabney, has died aged 81 from esophageal cancer.…

Pong paddle goes dark Atari co-founder and co-creator of the legendary Pong, Ted Dabney, has died aged 81 from esophageal cancer.…

Feds trying to catalogue VPNFilter infections The FBI has reminded the world it wants us to reboot our routers to try and help it identify VPNFilter-affected routers.…

How's that 'self-driving' vision coming along, again? Fiat Chrysler America is recalling 4.8 million vehicles in the US to fix a software bug that could lock the vehicle's cruise control.…

Compensation offer after Total Outage Ends Support for Usual Performance The National Australia Bank has been sharply criticised after a seven-hour outage on Saturday that took down its ATMs, EFTPOS, Internet banking, mobile banking services, and call centre operations.…

Some security bites for the long weekend Roundup While this week was dominated by news of a new Spectre variant, the VPNFilter botnet, and TalkTalk's badbad routersrouters, plenty of other stories popped up.…

Some security bites for the long weekend Roundup While this week was dominated by news of a new Spectre variant, the VPNFilter botnet, and TalkTalk's badbad routersrouters, plenty of other stories popped up.…

And more! Roundup Here’s a quick roundup to keep you updated on what’s been happening in AI, beyond what we've already covered, for your long weekend.…

But applications the iGiant removes on its own won't be included In its latest Transparency Report, covering government demands for customer and device data in the second half of 2017, Apple said that it will soon enumerate government app takedown requests.…

And helps cable industry tackle scourge of streaming boxes US airwaves watchdog the FCC has taken a lot of flak in the past year for its determined effort to roll back its own rules on net neutrality – but that issue aside, the federal regulator has its finger on the pulse of America in the internet era.…

Political ad rules come at a bad time for some politicians In its effort to prevent election meddling in America, Facebook has ended up meddling in an election in America.…

Up to 70% of staff shown the door this week, insiders claim IBM has laid off approximately 50 and 70 per cent of staff this week in its Watson Health division, according to inside sources.…

Evil hypervisors can lift plaintext info out of ciphered memory, it is claimed German researchers reckon they have devised a method to thwart the security mechanisms AMD's Epyc server chips use to automatically encrypt virtual machines in memory.…

SEV attack would let hypervisors lift memory contents A group of German researchers have devised a method to thwart the VM security in AMD's server chips.…

You get $20 Tesla has reached a court settlement over its alleged "essentially unusable and demonstrably dangerous" Autopilot system.…

Who needs navigational aids on a self-driving tanker anyway? The International Maritime Organisation has woken up to the notion of robot boats – and is now pondering whether to regulate them.…

After months of hysteria, firms sure have their work cut out The big day has finally arrived, Europe's General Data Protection Regulation is now in force – but as the calendar flicked over last night, those breathing a sigh of relief will be sorely disappointed.…

NASA hitches a ride on ESA's red planet trundle wagon A team from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center gathered last week to bid farewell to a mass spectrometer as it began its journey to the red planet via an assembly plant in Italy.…

Garmin grabs No.2 smartwatch spot Analysis Whoever predicted that fitness bling-flingers would struggle to survive should take note of the latest numbers on the wearable market from Canalys.…

Only works with HTC's VR headsets and mobes, sadly VR folk who feel they haven't got enough gear strapped to their bodies will be please to know Seagate has developed a strap-on portable drive and battery combo for HTC's Vive Focus virtual reality headset.…

'Forced consent' is no consent, state legal challenges Max Schrems, the thorn in Facebook’s side, has returned to launch the first challenges under the EU’s new data protection laws.…

Can u dig it? If you want to launch a single cubesat, you most certainly will Scottish boffins, along with colleagues in Ukraine, have developed a "self-eating" rocket engine that could affordably fling a cubesat into orbit.…

Going cheap: smartphone startup with big ambitions Andy Rubin's quixotic smartphone startup, Essential Products, has cancelled a handset and is looking for buyers, according to a Bloomberg report – just a month after opening its doors in the UK.…

Keeping innocent mugs on file is unethical – tech committee The UK government's approach to deleting custody images of innocent people – in that it only scraps them on request – is unacceptable and possibly illegal, MPs have said.…

Don't trust consumers with their own data Something for the Weekend, Sir? Hooded eyes are following my keystrokes. Hidden ears are analysing every shuffle.…

Watchdog not happy with Emergency Services Network either Efforts by the UK Home Office to digitise the Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) amount to "a masterclass in incompetence," according to a damning report by the government's spending watchdog.…

Because two years wasn't enough time to prepare Users trying to read the NY Daily News, say, or the Chicago Tribune – the third-biggest US daily newspaper – from a location within the EU have been blocked from visiting their websites due to new data protection laws.…

UK data protection watchdog has a 54% cash recovery rate The UK's data protection watchdog has recovered only about half the value of fines doled out to dodgy data controllers, and those handed to spam marketing firms are the most likely to remain unpaid.…

We speak to the ex-Apple hardware guru taking on banks and PayPal Profile Ever wandered into a bank on weekday morning and marvelled at length of the queue? In a supposedly cashless era, it's the sight of a nation of shopkeepers depositing its cash.…

Sirens blared, roads were blocked, and sheepish grins were eventually grinned On-Call Welcome again to On-Call, The Register's Friday reader-contributed tales of tech support jobs gone wrong.…

Ultrasonic packets of data to and from your handheld killed Boffins in Austria have developed a defense against acoustic cookies, a form of ad tracking by which smartphones can send and receive data using sounds people can't hear.…

Old components brick NCS 6000 cards after OS upgrade Eight Cisco NCS 6000 line cards need firmware upgrades, after Switchzilla learned they could be bricked by an IOS XR upgrade.…

Because everybody wants better tracking, right? Tufts University boffins believe the combination of 5G and the Internet of Things will make it impossible for networks to track the expected tens of billions of connected devices.…

January's fix for software toolkit had blacklist flaw, now fixed In an update last week, the developers of Electron – the toolkit used to craft widely used apps from Skype and Slack to Atom – shipped a patch to their January patch, and now, an infosec researcher has explained why.…

EFAIL furore not over yet, even though it's easy to fix ProtonMail has weighed into 2018's worst branded-bug PR disaster, EFAIL with a simple statement: “PGP is not broken”.…

nbn™'s Norwegian Blue was dead after all Households hoping to one day access 100 Mbps fixed wireless services on the National Broadband Network got a hard let-down last night, when CEO Bill Morrow said the rollout would not proceed.…

It's to avoid 'erratic vehicle behavior', says taxi app maker One of Uber’s self-driving cars killed a pedestrian crossing the road at night because its emergency braking system was turned off, according to an investigation by the US government's National Transport Safety Board.…

정말 짜증난다! A US court has yet again ruled that Samsung copied Apple's smartphone design patents, and this time the Korean electronics giant is on the hook for $539m.…

He hates unions, journalists, regulators, accountability and, apparently, the color yellow Elon Musk is having a bad week.…

When sunlight hits the comet, gas and dust sublime Scientists have found that the jets of ice and dust wafting from comet 67P are down to the way sunlight beams hits its unique rubber ducky shaped surface.…

Three men charged over 2017 hoax hostage situation that had a tragic end Three men were this week indicted for their alleged roles in a fatal police "swatting" of a home in Kansas, USA.…

The horse is a speck on the horizon – but at least the barn door now has a bolt on it Facebook has rolled out its promised disclosure regime for political and issue advertising, heralding a new age of transparency and civic responsibility. Or so Facebook folks suggest.…

Feds warn admins malware is rather tough to destroy The FBI says it is taking steps to stop the spread of the VPNFilter malware and botnet, warning that it's a national security issue.…

US pair's private chat sent to coworker by AI bug Updated It's time to break out your "Alexa, I Told You So" banners – because a Portland, Oregon, couple received a phone call from one of the husband's employees earlier this month, telling them she had just received a recording of them talking privately in their home.…