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We've got Safe Mode and that's safe enough, vendor tells ~400m users The Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) has gone public with a Foxit PDF Reader vulnerability without a fix, because the vendor resisted patching.…

Open letter to UN warns of 'weapons hacked to behave in undesirable ways' 116 artificial intelligence and robotics experts have put their name to an Open Letter calling for the United Nations to work for a ban on autonomous weapons.…

More software smarts for 'AI you can take with you' Two years after setting up an artificial intelligence research laboratory with the University of Amsterdam, Qualcomm Technology has acquired one of its a spinoffs - an outfit called "Scyfer".…

Chris Wanstrath will lead the search for his replacement, then do product dev and test Chris Wanstrath plans to end his second stint as GitHub CEO by leading the search for his replacement.…

New status puts cyber-ops on same plane as regional commands and global special ops efforts United States president Donald Trump upgraded the U.S. Cyber Command to the status of a “Unified Combatant Command”.…

Merchants share too much tracking information? Colour us un-surprised Bitcoin transactions might be anonymous, but on the Internet, its users aren't – and according to research out of Princeton University, linking the two together is trivial on the modern, much-tracked Internet.…

CEO says he's made 'right decision for the human race' but created 'an existential threat for our company' White supremacist web site The Daily Stormer has been booted off the internet, again.…

Centriq 2400 blueprints revealed this week Hot Chips Qualcomm moved engineers from its flagship Snapdragon chips, used in millions of smartphones and tablets, to its fledgling data center processor family Centriq.…

And how to avoid making the same mistakes BSides Minor blunders in reverse web proxies can result in critical security vulnerabilities on internal networks, the infosec world was warned this week.…

Judges frown upon fishing for incriminating data on phones It's a ruling sending shockwaves through the worlds of privacy, device security, and law enforcement in America.…

And only $230,000 a head out of the public purse! Wisconsin has moved forward a $3bn incentives package to lure manufacturing giant Foxconn to the US state.…

And what finer company than Uber to make that clear You may never read those lengthy terms and conditions attached to every digital download or app but, in America at least, they are legally binding. Sorry.…

Machine learning and code to detect and alert attempts to extract passwords from staff Security researchers from UC Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the US have come up with a way to mitigate the risk of spear-phishing in corporate environments.…

Telco's TV biz accused of false advertising by trade watchdog America's trade watchdog is seeking $3.95bn in damages from AT&T over allegations of dodgy marketing by its DirecTV wing.…

Plus: Steve Bannon fired from White House Updated Tech leaders today resigned from the US government's digital economy advisory board over President Trump's inability to unequivocally condemn racists.…

Big Red seeks open-source foundation to host platform Oracle has revealed plans to shift Java Enterprise Edition to an open-source foundation as it promises delivery of version 8 is "approaching".…

Greenqloud’s QStack becomes gets NetApp-ed NetApp has made one of its relatively rare acquisitions – this time an Icelandic cloud management software house called Greenqloud with its Qstack product.…

Pen-testers face new challenges as defences evolve BSides The opening talk at BSides Manchester on Thursday examined how red team tactics are evolving beyond phishing to include a wider variety of methods.…

But the MoD will happily tell you how many manned jets we're using to do that exact thing The UK's Information Tribunal has rejected an appeal by campaigners trying to find out how many British Reaper drones are being used for warlike missions in the Middle East.…

Gaming star strikes Atari has sued Nestle, accusing it of "blatantly" impinging on its intellectual property by featuring the 1970s video game Breakout in a Kit Kat ad without its permission.…

New CFO too as data protection firm refuses to give in +Comment It's all change at FalconStor, which has a new CEO and CFO just six weeks after the last chief exec was appointed.…

Security researchers pick up angle grinder, drop £2k-plus in B-sides chat BSides Weighing in at 800kg secondhand, freestanding ATMs - a “safe with a computer on top” - are a logistical nightmare to own and research, security boffin Leigh-Anne Galloway warned delegates at the BSides Manchester infosec conference yesterday.…

HMD chiefs explain their cunning comeback plan Interview For over 20 years The Register has covered the rise and fall of Nokia phones. The story took a new turn this week with the arrival of a flagship, the first for three years, from the brand's custodians HMD. We spoke to the top executives behind the venture about their plans.…

Man pulls out replica rifle after frosty treat disappointment An irate McDonald’s drive-thru punter was so pissed that he couldn’t get his Sunday morning ice cream fix due to a broken dispenser that he pulled out a replica AR-15 rifle from his car boot in protest.…

In the land of decline, sustainable growth is king Analysis Like many enterprise tech dinosaurs, Cisco has clutched at new lines of revenue for some time, positioning its security arm as the centrepiece of a long-talked-about reinvention as a software biz.…

Wang wag's Croatian beach art highlighted... again British Airways’ website is displaying a penis carved into a beautiful sandy beach – the same inappropriate erection that was standing over bing.com yesterday.…

And Server 2003. Yep, this is the year 2017 and we're not making this up Freelance IT type? Know about the gubbins of Windows XP, Vista and Server 2003? Don’t care about all that IR35 guff? We’ve got great news – UK.gov wants to hire you.…

What's that, TidalScale? The Big Friendly what? Analysis TidalScale is building a software-defined server product. But how would that work, as it needs to run in a server and you can’t really redefine the server you are running in, can you?…

Former SAP man Vishal Sikka bails but will be interim CEO's boss Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka has resigned, effective immediately, but neither he nor the company's board are happy he's going.…

And had suits savage an utterly innocent sysadmin for his own ignorance Friday m ON-CALL Friday means a few things at El Reg: a new BOFH. A couple of beers. And another instalment of On-Call, our weekly column in which we take reader-contributed tales of being asked to do horrible things for horrible people, scrub them up and hope you click.…

NVIDIA reckons engineering types do, so it's cut a new GPU and software to carve it up NVIDIA's cranked up the virtual workstation caper by giving the world a new GPU that slots into blade servers, plus software to let it run multiple workstation-grade VMs.…

For now the company is just happy with growth for the first time since buying IBM's servers Lenovo has reported flat quarter-on-quarter revenue, but is content to have achieved that as it reflects stabilisation in its data centre and mobile businesses.…

Phablets sent to AT&T customers with batteries from FedEx are at risk Samsung's got another combustible phablets SNAFU on its hands, after the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission recalled the batteries used in its Galaxy Note 4.…

Federal agency addresses the new world of Alexa, smart cameras and IoT A draft of new IT security measures by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has for the first time pulled privacy into its core text as well as expanded its scope to include the internet of things and smart home technology.…

Money laundering and terror finance laws will stretch to cover digi-dollars Australia has decided digital currencies need the same level of regulation enjoyed by other currencies.…

Verizon says basestation dumps increasingly popular US telecoms giant Verizon says police are increasingly asking it to cough up massive dumps of cellphone data rather than individual records.…

Ladies and gentlemen, start your ARM disassemblers Apple's Secure Enclave, an ARM-based coprocessor used to enhance iOS security, became a bit less secure on Thursday with the publication of a firmware decryption key.…

Data demand 'breaks First and Fourth Amendments' Efforts by US prosecutors to identify up to 1.3 million people who accessed an anti-Trump protest website is unconstitutional, a court will hear on Friday.…

Personal info spills from another poorly secured Amazon service A voting machine supplier for dozens of US states left records on 1.8 million Americans in public view for anyone to download – after misconfiguring its AWS-hosted storage.…

Except at quality titles like El Reg, of course, cough John Wanamaker, an American department store merchant who died almost a century ago, is noted for saying: "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half."…

Judge throws out lawsuit seeking to prevent rollout of broadband cables AT&T's legal battle to stop Google rolling out broadband internet in Louisville, Kentucky, has been halted in its tracks.…

Johnson, get a load of this SFW Some of the dozens of users of Bing today spotted a lewd sand carving semi-hidden in the Microsoft search engine's front page splash photo.…

Year-on-year deployment isn’t really a trial, say privacy groups London's Metropolitan Police have been urged to back down on plans to once again use facial recognition software at next weekend's Notting Hill Carnival.…

Say what now, Gartner? Gartner has predicted a backlash against virtual assistants like Siri – but recommends that businesses deploy them anyway.…

Gyroscopic trams, bunkerbeds! Enter the 'dope' world of Dahir Semenov Earlier this week, Mashable, a clickbait site for millennials, showcased a novel urban transport system. It got very excited, calling it "dope" and the "future of transportation".…

Another record revenue quarter ... even as drought eases While we are recovering from the global DRAM shortage, there's still enough of a drought for chip-slingers to rake in record revenues.…

Authority fined £70k after missing URL manipulation A London council has been fined £70,000 after design faults in its TicketViewer app allowed unauthorised access to 119 documents containing sensitive personal information.…

Anti-shrinkage policy could add millions to firm's wage bill Apple may have to pay its employees extra for time it spends rifling through their personal belongings at work, if it loses a long-running lawsuit that is now in front of the Californian Supreme Court.…

Electric Jukebox has a dildo and wants £100m The company behind what was dubbed the "most ridiculous digital music launch in history" is rebranding its product and hoping to raise $100m by selling shares to the public.…

CSO said to have quit to spend more time with family in UK HPE global sales chieftan Peter Ryan has quit the company after just over a year of relentless travel away from his family in the UK.…