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38C+. Blame the beanies and a $15m bit barn spec screw-up On-Call Here is the latest festive instalment of On-Call, the place to be for techies with tales to tell. It might be cold outside but this may just make the blood boil as it goes to show what happens when bean-counters take over the asylum.…

The big picture revealed and the tech explained Supported Public cloud providers increasingly differentiate themselves through the features and services they provide. These run from basic storage or content delivery network up to sophisticated flavours of data analysis and increasingly Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI).…

Don't worry, many of those are now in 'discovery' phase... The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs’ (Defra) poor track record on IT puts the department at high risk in decoupling its systems from Europe, the chair of the government’s spending watchdog has warned today.…

Don't worry, many of those are now in 'discovery' phase... The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs’ (Defra) poor track record on IT puts the department at high risk in decoupling its systems from Europe, the chair of the government’s spending watchdog has warned today.…

Web server misconfiguration lets anyone inject nasties... under certain conditions Researchers have uncovered a vulnerability in the GoAhead web server software – embedded in Internet of Things devices – that can be potentially remotely exploited to hijack gadgets.…

High-energy particles bombard atmosphere to meddle with global temperature Interstellar particles alter Earth's climate by affecting cloud growth, scientists revealed on Tuesday.…

All you need is to, erm, give the computers some nasty training data A group of researchers have inserted a backdoor into a facial-recognition AI system by injecting "poisoning samples" into the training set.…

Privacy Badger grazes on cookies, but DoNotTrack? Nobody cares Looking for browser privacy? A group of researchers in France and Japan say RequestPolicyContinued and NoScript have the toughest policies, while Ghostery and uBlock Origin offer good blocking performance and a better user experience.…

After you update, set it up again from scratch If you've skipped recent Windows 10 Creators Updates, here's a reason to change your mind: its facial recognition security feature, Hello, can be spoofed with a photograph.…

WordFence says a fix has landed The folk at WordFence are warning that the WordPress Captcha plugin, popular enough to get around 300,000 installations, should be replaced with the latest official WordPress version (4.4.5).…

Procedural snafu delays vote until Wednesday – but here's basically what's in it Wealthy individuals and businesses can direct their underlings to ice the Dom Perignon and fuel their private jets in celebration of the US Senate's expected passage of the Republican tax bill on Wednesday.…

America's airspace watchdog sets out rules to green-light skies filled with Amazon bots America's aviation watchdog, the FAA, has put forward a plan for how delivery drones will be governed.…

Packets will route around the damage until January The fragile Sea-Me-We 3 cable that provides one of Australia's primary connections to Asia is out of action and awaiting repair.…

Monopoly watchdog nicht glücklich about Zuck's info suck Germany's competition authority has accused Facebook of abusing its market dominance to "limitlessly amass every kind of data" on people.…

We must have public debate on warrantless snooping, demands bipartisan gang A bipartisan group of US senators have lambasted an effort to force permanent authorization of a controversial warrantless American spying program through Congress by attaching it to an end-of-year spending bill, calling the effort "an end-run around the Constitution."…

Luckily, there's an off switch... to placate lawmakers? Analysis In an effort to make facial recognition technology more appealing to members of its clicky commerce club, social ad network Facebook on Tuesday said it will begin notifying people when they appear in the pictures posted by other people, sometimes.…

Proposed legislation just in the nick of time About a week after weathering a storm of negative headlines for seemingly bungling an allegation of rape against one of its workers, Microsoft has found just the tonic to restore its squeaky clean image.…

Factoid flu Comment When Knowledge Graph – Google's apparently authoritative box at the top of the search results – sneezes, the world catches a factoid flu.…

Remote access tool blocked for second time by Brit ISP TalkTalk customers who need to use remote desktop tools are on the warpath after the UK ISP blocked TeamViewer for the second time this year, ostensibly in an attempt to protect users from potential scammers.…

All Greek Orthodox church halls to me Bizarre happenings are heaping extra controversy on a conference that will discuss the pros, cons and ethical conundrums of sex with robots.…

Regulator questions legality of transferring data to Facebook The French information watchdog has told WhatsApp it has a month to comply with data protection laws, or risk being fined.…

Notorious Lazarus Group said to be behind mass infection UK Foreign Office Minister Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon today claimed North Korea was behind the WannaCry ransomware incident.…

Call us a taxi, uh, a Virgin train um... yep, that's it Virgin founder Richard "Beardy" Branson has been named non-executive chairman of Virgin Hyperloop One, with the superfast tube train company having also won another $50m (£37.39m) in funding.…

Any ideas how we can improve Blighty's infrastructure? The government has opened a consultation to understand what makes investing in full fibre and 5G "attractive".…

200 litres an hour? Fetch the kettle, we could fill it from that New British aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth has sprung a leak. The warship takes on around 200 litres of water per hour thanks to a faulty propeller shaft gland packing, according to reports.…

You pillocks, that was never goin' t'werk in this Lanky town The northern council of Rochdale has scrapped its plan to fine people £100 for swearing in the town.…

You pillocks, that was never goin' t'werk in this Lanky town The northern council of Rochdale has scrapped its plan to fine people £100 for swearing in the town.…

Multi Actuator arms will boost data access as capacities grow Seagate is increasing IO performance in disk drives by separating read-write heads into two separate sets which can operate independently and in parallel.…

New rules to help you break things off within single day. Cold Mobile users will be able to divorce their providers by text within a single working day, thanks to new Ofcom rules announced today.…

Rebel firms have been seduced by the dark side and Darth Reg must bring balance to the force Storage wars are ongoing across the galaxy and of course every supplier claims the force is with them. Here's the latest news overheard from the wretched hive of scum and villainy otherwise known as the storage industry.…

Immature tech still has a bunch of growing up to do 2017 was a big year for containers. One of the biggest container events came from the Linux Foundation, and it was – by its own admission – one of the most boring.…

Join us for a New Year’s brain recharge If you’re worried about hitting 2018 feeling a little jaded and in need of intellectual stimulation, have no fear. We have a series of brain-stretching lectures to see you through to spring time, spanning deception detection, Britain’s WWII underground Spitfire manufacturing programme, and the death of the combustion engine.…

Good heavens, look at the time – it's nearly 2018 Quick 'n' dirty analysis General Data Protection Regulation scare season is in full swing and suppliers are pretty much saying "buy our stuff or risk fines up to 4 per cent of your annual revenues". If you haven't done any preparation yet, is it really that bad and what should you do?…

Good heavens, look at the time – it's nearly 2018 Quick 'n' dirty analysis General Data Protection Regulation scare season is in full swing and suppliers are pretty much saying "buy our stuff or risk fines up to 4 per cent of your annual revenues". If you haven't done any preparation yet, is it really that bad and what should you do?…

A glimpse at the algorithms powering card shark AI The blueprints for Libratus – the poker AI bot that crushed professional players in a Texas hold ’em tournament earlier this year – were published on Monday in a research paper.…

Sparky stories of dim folks succumbing to electrical shockers On-Call Welcome again to festive On-Call, in which we delve into the mailbag of not-quite-worthy-as-standalone contributions to keep the site busy as the world runs out of tech news before Christmas.…

Living off grid, in the woods, away from all tech not such a loony idea after all Analysis A study of 913 pregnant women in the San Francisco Bay Area, California, found those exposed to high levels of magnetic field (MF) non-ionizing radiation had a 2.72x higher risk of miscarriage than those exposed to low MF levels.…

Loapi found in smut apps, fake virus scanners Kaspersky researchers have turned up a strain of malware lurking in adult content and fake virus scanners, and it can run a victim's Android mobe so hard they might suffer physical damage.…

IETF RFC writes-out weak Diffie-Hellman A recent Request for Comment at the Internet Engineering Task Force calls for SSH developers to deprecate 1,024-bit moduli.…

Crawling transparency logs, so you don't need to Facebook has expanded its year-old certificate transparency project to make it easier for developers to watch for dodgy certs.…

Subpoena demands he fly from Florida to Cali by Thursday Former Uber attorney Craig Clark on Monday filed an emergency motion in a Miami, Florida, court to quash a subpoena directing him to testify in Waymo's trade secret lawsuit against Uber on Thursday on the other side of America in California – because he has holiday plans with his family in the Sunshine State.…

Social network says police, government requests for data and takedowns booming Facebook says police and government agents' requests for users' information as well as takedown demands are increasing.…

NCI gets AU$70 million to replace Reijin Australia's National Computational Infrastructure is getting ready to open the wallet and buy AU$70 million worth of new iron.…

Crackdown on hate kicks off, non-racist world celebrates Twitter today started imposing rules designed to reduce hateful and abusive content on its service – to the delight of many, and fury of others.…

Russian biz sues US govt for torpedoing anti-malware tool installations Embattled Russian security software maker Kaspersky Lab has taken the American government to a US federal court to overturn Uncle Sam's ban on its antivirus tools.…

This is the browser maker's Apple U2 moment Updated Mozilla automatically installed a weird add-on to Firefox on people's computers – an add-on that turned out to be a marketing promotion for the hit telly show Mr Robot.…

Kozinski walks out, blames his 'broad sense of humor' for downfall Top US tech judge Alex Kozinski has resigned, effectively immediately, amid claims of sexual misconduct.…

Probe found unfair contracts for sellers The French government is seeking to fine Amazon €10m (£8.8m) for using its market dominance to unfairly treat vendors.…

Filing: Explosive allegations against ride-hailing biz revealed in letter from former staffer Uber has been accused of illegal intelligence gathering, using non-attributable hardware and software, impersonating drivers and bugging private events, in an explosive set of allegations from a former staffer.…

We'll wait for you! cries spurned suitor After turning down a €4.3bn (£3.8bn) buyout offer from Atos last week, Dutch security and chip biz Gemalto announced today that it has accepted a €4.8bn (£4.2bn) deal from French defence group Thales.…