The Register

Pair partly responsible for largest bank-card theft ring in American history Two Russian criminals have been sent down in America after pleading guilty to helping run the largest credit-card hacking scam in US history.…

Swipe-a-shag tool gets the dreaded sternly-worded-letter treatment from Wyden Cyber-senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) is asking execs from the parent company of Tinder to please use protection when spreading the love around.…

Says sorry for 'poor experience', vows to pay back missing cash Digital currency exchange Coinbase said it inadvertently charged punters for transactions they never made, effectively draining money from their bank accounts. It has promised to refund the money taken.…

Fine line between free market and favors for pals Analysis The chairman of America's broadband watchdog – the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) – is under investigation by the regulator's inspector general following a series of decisions that appear to favor one of the country's largest media owners.…

While kicking folks out of 'Murica, Raphael A. Sanchez committed fraud in their names Yet again an insider has been caught misusing a workplace computer system to conduct identity theft and fraud.…

Pick another 2FA method: Social network is having a What The Zuck moment Forget fake news, Russian trolls and the gradual cruel destruction of journalism – now Facebook is taking heat for spamming a netizen's phone with text messages after he signed up for SMS-based two-factor authentication.…

Passport scans, drivers licenses, etc, exposed online Another day, another unsecured Amazon Web Services S3 storage bucket spilling secrets onto the public internet.…

Watch out for text bomb that crashes apps and devices over and over and... Apple last month fixed a flaw in macOS and iOS that allowed a text message to crash its chat software (CVE-2018-4100) – and now it has the opportunity to do so again.…

Oh yeah, we patched that in October, Windows giant yawns Microsoft has poured a bucket of cold water on people freaking out over a supposedly unfixable security flaw in Skype.…

Buy price not revealed Oracle is to gobble security outfit Zenedge for likely less than CTO Larry Ellison spends on tanning lotion each year an unspecified sum.…

Now can you remove it from every Start Menu? Readers with good memories may recall that when Windows NT was launched, it came in Workstation and Advanced Server editions, with the former fulfilling most duties of a server. There were no limits on TCP/IP connections, for example. Just as its developer Dave Cutler intended.…

vApp Manager contained undocumented default account Dell EMC has patched two serious flaws in the management interface for its VMAX enterprise storage systems, one of which could potentially allow a remote attacker to gain unauthorised access to systems.…

Yep, it's another case of the unchecked filing cabinet A counselling charity has been accused of breaching Blighty's data protection law after confidential files were discovered in an old office building.…

Goncalo Esteves sobbed as he was sentenced A 24-year-old Essex man behind the reFUD.me antivirus evasion site, who made an estimated half a million pounds from Bitcoin, has been jailed for two years.…

Just kidding – vague definitions, confounding factors mean you probably shouldn't panic... yet A study has suggested a link between diets high in ultra-processed foods and an increased risk of cancer – but academics have warned against over-interpreting the results.…

IT contractors warned to get house in order A BBC presenter must pay £419,151 in taxes after a tribunal ruled her contract should have been subject to IR35 legislation – a judgment that has been described as a wake-up call for IT freelancers.…

London Assembly report shines light on UK.gov's auto auto plans The London Assembly has lashed out at driverless cars, declaring that autonomous vehicles could cause "significant job losses" – while figures from the UK's driverless car industry told it that they don't expect Level 4 or 5 (fully autonomous) tech to hit the streets for another decade or more.…

Not so strategic now Nokia appears to be revising its ambition to be the data kingpin of the digital health industry. The Finnish telecomms giant has put its Digital Health business up for “strategic review”.…

Did somebody say VAT fraud? Yes, the Insolvency Service did The boss of an Oxford-based mobile phone dealer who used a carousel scam to defraud the British tax collector from hundreds of thousands of pounds was today banned from holding directorships for 12 years.…

It's not David Icke, it's Ayatollah Khamenei's former top general Iran has gone full David Icke and accused lizards that "attract atomic waves" of spying for the West.…

Want high speeds? Go to Latvia The UK is performing so poorly in fibre penetration that it isn't even included in a European study.…

CLL18 delivers reports from the front line Talk about DevOps, Containers or Agile all you want, but sometimes you’ve just got to zip up your hoodie and do it.…

But they're trying, bless 'em, says IHS Markit report Data centre operators are going green because renewable energy costs less, receives tax subsidies and customers like the idea, according to a report by analysts at IHS Markit.…

English translation of probe into Finnish phone giant's twilight makes for interesting reading The first English translation of Operation Elop, an examination by Finnish journalists into the final years of Nokia phones, has reignited debate about the fate of what was Europe's largest and most admired technology company.…

Inside Porthcurno's world-spanning telegraphy web Geek's Guide to Britain I'm sitting on a perfect sandy beach in dazzling winter sunshine which makes it feel two months warmer than it really is. The beach is nearly empty, although a couple of dogs are enjoying the surf. The nearest road peters out a few hundred yards up a steep valley – the only way here is to walk. Porthcurno beach, just a few miles from Land's End in Cornwall, feels pleasantly like it is a long way from anywhere.…

'Almost certain' assessment enough for official blast from Foreign Office The United Kingdon's Foreign and Commonwealth Office has formally "attributed the NotPetya cyber-attack to the Russian Government", specifically the nation's military.…

Rony keeps feeding the hype machine! Wow! Woo! Yay! Hoopla! Panowie! Comment Not content with promising the product he has been hyping for six years, this week the CEO of Magic Leap revealed that his yet-to-ship virtual-reality headset technology will be even better than the previous gibberish he spouted.…

One PIN to rule them all, one PIN to find them, one PIN to rule them all and in the darkness bind them The PCI Security Standards Council (PCI SSC) and financial services standards outfit the Accredited Standards Committee X9 have decided to combine forces on personal-identification-number-handling-rules.…

Er, well, ish. Text summarization is still pretty tricky for non-humans, though A team within Google Brain – the web giant's crack machine-learning research lab – has taught software to generate Wikipedia-style articles by summarizing information on web pages... to varying degrees of success.…

Borg attack incoming as M&A crew eye repatriated $67bn The flagship of Cisco's “intent-based networking” push, the Catalyst 9000 switch, is leaping out the door, and Switchzilla delivered other good news on it FY2018 Q2 earnings call.…

Frank Dickman is a hell of a super hero name, we gotta say A fella in the United States is taking Microsoft to court to get Windows 7 put back on his PC.…

Never again shall an MPEG-2 encoder be chased out of a Linux distro It's almost of historical interest only, but everywhere except the Philippines and Malaysia, the last MPEG-2 video encodeer/decoder patents have expired.…

Tax charge kills GAAP net income but underlying numbers are strongly positive George Kurian’s NetApp reported strong third quarter numbers all-flash arrays leading the way to set NetApp up for its first full year annual growth since 2015.…

Astroboffins calculate MuskMobile will only last millions of years, has decent chance of bonking Earth, Venus Explaining why he used his Tesla roadster as the test mass on his Falcon Heavy launch, Elon Musk remarked that he liked the idea of it orbiting for a billion years.…

Musketeers to launch first internet satellites this weekend SpaceX's plans to become a global ISP took a big step forward after Ajit Pai – the boss of America's comms watchdog, the FCC – gave his blessing for Elon Musk's biz to pop broadband-beaming satellites into orbit.…

Incumbent rolling in slightly fewer billions this half year Telstra has no inside information on when nbn™ will end its moratorium on new HFC conections.…

And upcoming hardware changes may not be enough to kill off these security bugs When details of the Meltdown and Spectre CPU security vulnerabilities emerged last month, the researchers involved hinted that further exploits may be developed beyond the early proof-of-concept examples.…

As in on the regular, not... oh never mind Employees of US government agencies are largely ignoring basic security measures.…

No probs, says Huawei: It's a big world, we don't need America Don't trust the Chinese – that seemed to be the theme at Tuesday's open US Senate Intelligence Committee hearings on Capitol Hill.…

Roses are red, your countertop's ruined, Cupertino has more trouble a-brewin' Apple HomePod owners say the $349 smart-speaker is prone to damaging wood surfaces.…

Brilliant boffins back bullsh*tting bureau bollocking Four cryptography experts have backed a US Senator's campaign to force the FBI to explain how exactly a Feds-only backdoor can be added to strong and secure encryption.…

Roses are red, spy agencies are black, US g-men don't fsck around when under attack Three people are in hospital after a car rammed a barrier at the NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, today at around 0655 ET (0355 PT, 1155 UTC).…

Flash! A-aaaah! King of the Impossible! Flash storage was once a plaything for moneyed-up, high-performance tech elite. No more. Now, it’s finding its way into Joe Average’s enterprise architecture. Here’s where it came from, where it is today, and where it might be going.…

Raid on 75-year-old's home yields over a thousand pills Silver surfers are known to rattle from the numerous pills foisted on them by doctors as their health fails, but one Tennessee veteran stands accused of possessing drugs with an altogether different purpose.…

Online backup biz slurped by Carbonite Dell Technologies has agreed to offload cloud backup subsidiary Mozy to web-based storage outfit Carbonite for $145.8m.…

Swansea firm carries on direct marketing, lands extra fine A Welsh home improvement firm has been fined after ignoring a warning to stop contacting people who had opted out of marketing calls.…

Handset division headless Chialin Chang, president of smartphones at HTC, has resigned. No successor has been announced.…

New front opens in Russian firm's legal fight with US gov Kaspersky Lab, the antivirus house, now claims that the US government's ban on its products amounts to punishment without trial.…

Fighting the Xeon SP tide IBM is bashing out a set of go-faster POWER9 servers in the face of mounting competition from Xeon SP systems.…

NY court rules pics can be accessed if relevant to litigation Privacy settings on Facebook do not protect users from handing over photos, posts or metadata that is relevant to a court case, a New York judge has ruled.…