The Register

Alexa! Are you part of a botnet? The US Federal Bureau of Investigation has offered advice on securing Internet of Things devices to prevent "Cyber Actors" using your garage door for nefarious purposes.…

Flashes next-gen unit to compete with FlashBlade box The clash of the million-dollar AI titans resumes. NetApp has designed an ONTAP AI architecture based on its topline A800 flash array and Nvidia DGX-1 to try to win fat-pocketed customers away from Pure and Nvidia's AIRI AI system-in-a-box.…

£1.7m tax on profits of £72.4m thanks to a surging share price Box-slinging cloud botherer Amazon unveiled some impressive results for its UK tentacle last year, and some even more impressive tax efficiencies.…

Investigatory Powers Commissioner urged to act on mobile data extraction tech The UK's snooping watchdog has been urged to investigate whether the country's coppers have a legal basis to suck up mobile phone data – or if it would constitute state hacking.…

Pen and paper brought back into service A ransomware infection has cast the Alaskan borough of Matanuska-Susitna (Mat-Su) back to the dark ages.…

Says support biz invoking 'stale' split, has no other backers Oracle has said support biz Rimini Street is invoking a "shallow and stale" circuit court split that doesn't merit the Supreme Court's attention in a bid to claw back cash it isn't owed.…

There’s an AI cure for the summertime blues We’ve extended our early bird ticket offer for MCubed, so whether you’ve just come back from hols or are about to get off, you can still save big on our AI and machine learning extravaganza.…

Mischievous techie tells of printing woes soothed by kind words On-Call Friday has come around once more, which means we at El Reg get to regale you, dear reader, with tech support tales of the great and good in our weekly On-Call column.…

Nobody knows what these rare speedy electromagnetic spurts really are The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment, a powerful radio telescope, has detected the first low-frequency fast radio burst, a class of rare extragalactic emissions of an unknown origin.…

What the fsck is wrong with people... judging from this study If you want your robot to be abused, do as The Rolling Stones suggest and paint it black. Also, make it female.…

Eta Carinae's Big Eruption might yet go supernova Eta Carinae is one the strangest star systems in space. When it exploded in the 19th century, it became the second brightest star in the sky. Now, scientists studying "light echoes" have found that it was also the fastest non-fatal outburst of any star system.…

Price rises lead to 'difficult discussions' with customers Another network vendor has had its financials dented by component shortages: this time, it's Arris.…

Take heart, readers, this can't go on forever ... can it? Settle in and take you seats, Rocky Nine is about to begin filming, in the form of another round of litigation between Arista and Cisco.…

Hacker slips CoinHive code onto network appliances Researchers have found thousands of MikroTik network routers in Brazil serving up crypto-coin-crafting CoinHive code.…

Hacking conf's Moss heads off HOPE headaches DEF CON The organizers of the DEF CON hacking conference, due to be held in Las Vegas, USA, next week, have put those who intend to spoil the event on warning: such tactics will not be tolerated.…

Darktrace claims to have seen the future – and it's awful Some time in the near future, you may go to a parking kiosk and rather than be presented with a $5 fee request, get confronted with low-res porn images.…

Logins misdirected to wrong boxes by Jira toolkit Exclusive Atlassian has warned users of its Jira Service Desk toolkit to change their helpdesk email account passwords – after a glitch caused the credentials to be sent to strangers' servers.…

Google-backed language seeps into Android apps, improves programming craftmanship Kotlin, which Google blessed last year as an alternative to Java for programming Android apps, has already made its way into almost 12 per cent of open source Android apps, and in so doing has elevated their code quality.…

Exploit contest opened for tykes – meanwhile, Republicans kill new funding for election security DEF CON Last year, the hackers at DEF CON showed how shockingly easy it was to crack into voting machine software and hardware. Next week, the 2018 conference's Vote Hacking Village will let kids have a shot at subverting democracy.…

Legal letters, Whois no longer good for obtaining HTTPS certs Lawyers will no longer be allowed to certify someone's ownership of an internet domain name, and the public Whois no longer represents proof of ownership, when it comes to assigning security certificates to site owners.…

He'll almost certainly get more than a three-hour tour after DDoS strike on medics A self-styled Anonymous hacker who attempted to flee the US in a sailboat has been convicted of two felonies for his role in a 2014 distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on a children's hospital.…

SaaSy Pelion will try to make sense of terabytes of data from anywhere to anywhere Arm – the designer of processors used in billions of gadgets, smartphones, and other devices – has launched a new Internet-ofThings platform that it claims will be able to handle any data from any device on any cloud.…

New Pelion platform will make sense of terabytes of data from anywhere to anywhere Chipmaker AMD has launched a new internet-of-things platform that it claims will be able to handle any data from any device on any cloud.…

Switchzilla slurps trusted access into cloud to make it rain Cisco has announced plans to buy privately held authentication firm Duo Security for $2.35bn (£1.80bn).…

5 lucky readers - and their pals - are off to Great British Beer Festival Competition It’s competition winner time at Vulture Central as we announce the five lucky readers destined to receive free tickets to the CAMRA Great British Beer Festival.…

Plus: Ofcom report reveals demise of the phone-call Communications revenues in the UK reached their lowest point in 2017, falling 2.1 per cent to £54.7bn, while people are ditching calls and texts for over-the-top messaging, according to Ofcom.…

Alex Stamos's replacement not yet announced Facebook chief security officer Alex Stamos is leaving the social network to work on information warfare at Stanford University. The social network has not named any replacement.…

Acquisition-happy services slinger to become inky tentacle of globocorp HP Inc. has announced that is acquiring UK-based managed print and document services slinger Apogee in a $500m (£380m) deal.…

Battle of database rivals fuelled by reports marketplace monster is flying off Big Red Amazon is reportedly planning to stop relying on cloud rival Oracle’s database software entirely by early 2020.…

Hint...buy now, join us in November Whether you’re contemplating a ground-up tech transformation or are looking at how to extend a stretched but essentially sound legacy system, Serverless is going to be on your agenda - whether you realise it right now or not.…

Review sites? Who needs 'em! Fanbois need never leave the App Store again Apple extended a corporate middle finger toward its army of fanbois as it announced the death of apps in the iTunes Affiliate Program yesterday.…

£100m funding for unified IT systems, biometrics, data exploitation The British government has sunk £100m into efforts to link up cops’ IT systems, boost resource-sharing and develop digital forensics.…

Buddy, can you spare a time? When you need parts-per-billion frequency accuracy, “Let's synchronise our watches” doesn't cut it. Take LTE and 5G for example: they need tight synchronisation, both in frequency and phase, and that makes time-signalling an important part of the network.…

If so, then this latest Reg survey is for you Study Dealing with regulated data and applying strict controls to ensure compliance is life as usual in many industries.…

If it's good enough for me... Analysis Intriguing news for anyone who believes that FIDO two-factor authentication keys are the obvious way to stop phishing attacks that not enough people use – Google is launching its own authentication token.…

Secure tunneling tech hopes to move from module to resident The developer of WireGuard has laid the groundwork for pouring his open-source privacy tool directly into the Linux kernel in hope of making secure communications easier to deploy and manage.…

How'd you like those 'robots won't steal your job' headlines now, Reg editors? Muahaha Pedants, imagine how much more relaxed your life would be if artificial intelligence automatically corrected grammar mistake's in online forum and social network posts.…

British civil servants go bonkers with no booze, or too much Here’s a bit of good news: If you like alcohol, then keep drinking, and if you don’t, then you should start drinking. In moderation, of course, unless you want to increase your chances of developing dementia.…

Go on, you know you want to grab these open-source designs and lash them together NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has been quietly working on a way to let students and interested hobbyists build a planet-exploring rover that's a scaled-down version of the American agency's six-wheeled 'droids.…

Fortinet to lock the stable door, horse heads for horizon A Kiwi high school has learned the “don't click on the link” lesson the hard way, with a ransomware attack locking down its student's course work.…

Libre Linux for wireless, embedded kit unforks OpenWRT and LEDE The OpenWRT project has emitted version 18.06, and in doing so, puts to rest the damage done by the March 2016 fork that created the competing project LEDE (Linux Embedded Development Environment).…

Backed by John McAfee so you know it's going to be A+ Pics A crypto-currency wallet heavily promoted as "unhackable" – complete with endorsements from the security industry's loopy old uncle John McAfee and a $350,000 bounty challenge – has, inevitably, been hacked within a week.…

Chocolate Factory kowtows to Middle Kingdom mandarins, according to leaked info Google is said to be preparing to launch a censored version of its search engine in mainland China, restoring a service it launched in 2006 and discontinued in 2010 in response to an attack on its infrastructure.…

Three alleged ringleaders nabbed in EU, indicted in US The FBI has arrested the alleged three leaders of an international crime syndicate that stole huge numbers of credit card numbers – which were subsequently sold on and used to rack up tens of millions of dollars in spending sprees.…

Email addresses, hashed passwords, and other details from mid-2000s era swiped In a Wednesday mea culpa, Reddit – the online chat board that got a little out of hand and became the sixth most-visited website on the internet – has admitted it was raided by hackers unknown.…

But they'll throw in copy of Excel to work out when space'll run out Microsoft is emitting a raft of tweaks to its OneDrive offering this month, but has yet to address the elephant in the room. Or rather, the lack of elephantine storage in the room.…

Hearts bleed for UK.gov's fave outsourcer as revenues, shares dip Capita – the UK government’s top IT and software outsourcer – has reported a 59 per cent fall in pre-tax profits for the first half of 2018.…

Cybercrim either 'hit the jackpot account' or knew which one to target, claims infoseccer British shipping services firm Clarksons has revealed a high profile data breach last year stemmed from a hack on a “single and isolated user account”.…

9-platter capacity drive modified for NAS use Toshiba has developed a high-capacity NAS drive from its 10TB and 14TB helium-filled enterprise capacity spinners.…

Glimmer of hope for Zuck and co to keep pushing data across The Pond The Irish Supreme Court has made the unprecedented decision to hear Facebook’s appeal in its long-running legal battle with privacy activist Max Schrems – and to do so with urgency.…