The Register

CMA probing whether price and service changes breach consumer law Price hikes and last-minute service tweaks to cloud storage offerings have caught unwanted attention from the UK's Competition and Markets Authority.…

Versions one, two, decrypted days after launch. Pwned ransomware Linux Encoder has infected 3000 machines in a month, Russian security firm Dr Web says, despite the fact both versions of the software have been neutered.…

Skype for Business adds a cloudy PBX and calling plans to and from the PSTN Microsoft wants to become your phone company, at least for for voice.…

Chrome Data Saver removes images on slow connections for the next billion Google's tweaked the Data Saver in the mobile version of its Chrome browser, making images an opt-in luxury for those on slow connections.…

27 nations collaborate on biggest web shonk takedown ever A band of merry world police lead by the United States Customs and Border Protection service shut down 37,479 copyright-infringing websites hawking counterfeit goods in the lead up to the Cyber Monday buying blitz.…

Add teaching to the 'well-educated middle-class jobs threatened by automation' list Software has emerged as the equal of humans when it comes to marking essays in an Australian study.…

DoS bug fix coming Sysadmins: within around the next 24 to 48 hours, watch out for an upcoming update to node.js to cover off a couple of vulnerabilities.…

Practice your CSRF and DNS meddling exploits here Belkin's home routers can be commandeered by hackers, thanks to a Telnet backdoor, a cross-site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerability and other bugs, we're told.…

Prepare to patch your ASR 1000s, net admins Oops: Cisco has announced a privilege escalation bug in its Aggregation Service Router 1000 Series.…

Sony, Macy's, GoPro, hotels, insurance giants, anyone with money accused of infringement Scores of big brands – from AT&T and Yahoo! to Netflix, GoPro and Macy's – are being sued because their HTTPS websites allegedly infringe an encryption patent.…

Crypto comms outfit hits eject after govt backdoor demand Blackberry will pull out of Pakistan on New Year's Eve in protest of its government's demand to intercept and decrypt people's communications.…

Some top tips from economics experts The answer to getting affordable broadband access to all citizens may lie in more municipal networks funded by local government, according to the OECD.…

What the FBI can do with an NSL and a gagging order Following a decade-long legal battle, the details of a US national security letter (NSL) sent to ISP owner Nicholas Merrill can finally be revealed.…

Effects could last decades, competition watchdog warns The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has warned the government its intellectual property (IP) obligations under the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) could crimp competition for “decades”.…

Privacy? They've heard of it While it continues to battle public indifference to personally-controlled electronic health records (PCEHRs), the Australian government is quietly looking for bright sparks to put forward ideas on how to use the records for analysis.…

Authentication based on serial number sent in plaintext The Videofied wireless video surveillance cameras and alarm systems can be easily hijacked and spied on – thanks to practically nonexistent security.…

Redmond's patent paperwork 'prioritized' Analysis The European Patent Office (EPO) has lobbed legal threats at bloggers who claimed the agency has too close a relationship with Microsoft.…

Yipeeeee!? Microsoft has announced PowerApps, a new way to create and host applications for its Azure cloud service.…

Mmmm, how many acronyms does this involve? Answer: BT IP VPN HPE In brief Blighty telecoms giant BT has struck a cloudy deal with HP Enterprise for an undisclosed sum.…

New allegations from German paper Bild Volkswagen's top executives are alleged to have had knowledge that its cars were not as fuel efficient as it claimed a year ago, according to a news report.…

And what if the UK exits the EU? Patent litigation in Europe in five years will look very different from now owing to major reforms to the patent framework and a new wave of technology relevant to wearables and the "internet of things".…

Getting started with the new open-source code editor Visual Studio Code is a new, lightweight, and open-source code editor that can be installed on Windows, Linux or Mac OS X. The first of this short series of articles, published in association with Microsoft, Sergii Baidachnyi, a Tech Evangelist at Microsoft Canada, will take us through the following features of Visual Studio Code:…

PoS crooks also 'support' newer OSes. How diligent Cybercrooks are selling a new strain of potent Point of Sale malware through underground forums.…

'No issues with state aid compliance', huffs DCMS Virgin Media has whined about the UK government's broadband rollout scheme, claiming that the £680m taxpayer-funded pot of cash doesn't represent "value for money".…

...and the National Grid Analysis Although Chancellor George Osborne recently spoke of the National Grid, hospitals and air traffic control as being potential targets of online attacks in a recent high-profile speech at GCHQ, only the financial services sector runs comprehensive stress tests.…

Talking about a bungled murder inquiry? You'll be targeted under terror powers A former detective for Police Scotland who raised concerns regarding a bungled murder inquiry, and was subsequently targeted by anti-terrorism powers, has stated he will follow his complaint through to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal.…

Vulgar, misogynist, violent, barely literate threats? Let's play Terrorists or Teens! Italian counter-terror agents are to monitor Sony's PlayStation Network for jihadi chatter, according to the nation's justice minister, following alarmingly silly reports that a PS4 was used to coordinate the terrorist attacks in Paris.…

Your car rolls along shouting 'I'M HERE' to world+dog Black Hat Europe Upcoming connected cars that communicate with other vehicles or roadside systems might easily be tracked even by snoopers with limited resources unless the technology is tweaked, an expert in automated and connected vehicle cybersecurity warns.…

Enter our Developer Challenge now The Register and Samsung have teamed up to create a developer competition where you can scoop great prizes, including a Samsung S6 Edge + or a Galaxy Tab S2.…

Rack 'em and stack 'em: The only thing in the cloud was Sagarmatha’s peak Feature It’s terrifyingly real, so true to life you are convinced the climbers are there, actually crossing the aluminium ladder bridge, poised above the terrifying drop of a Khumbu Glacier’s ice-fall crevasse in Everest’s Western Cwm.…

No sledgehammers required This week, 14-year-old Lucas Etter set a new world record for solving the classic Rubik’s cube in Clarksville, Maryland, in the US, solving the scrambled cube in an astonishing 4.904 seconds.…

Going from from 'pah' to 'hang on, a minute' Review When Mozilla released the first Firefox Developer Edition there wasn't much difference from the regular Firefox release, but all that changed recently.…

Chap leaves job, passwords become p@sswords, backup tapes ignored and he's the one to blame? A sysadmin has taken to Reddit to tell the tale of a boss from hell, who has demanded – with legal letters – that he provide services for five years after leaving a job.…

Torrent users especially exposed by IPSec, PPTP and OpenVPN mess, we're told Virtual Private Network (VPN) protocols have a design flaw that can be potentially exploited by snoops to identify some users' real IP addresses.…

Once again fails to suck Earth into black hole With the Large Hadron Collider's (LHC's) refit and restart accomplished, the records just keep tumbling. CERN has announced the highest-energy ion collision ever.…

Opt-outs 'subtly influence the individual to agree' Businesses should provide people with an "opt out" right to object to the processing of their personal data when they make an assessment that consent is not necessary as part of a big data project, an EU privacy watchdog has said.…

Defence contractor Lockheed Martin provided intelligence services before Black Friday Walmart has recruited aerospace, defence and security concern Lockheed Martin to comb open source intelligence in the lead up to Black Friday union protests, Bloomberg reports.…

10-mile range promised for new dual-mode flyers, but precious few details ready for lift-off Amazon.com has shown off its latest delivery drone designs.…

The only thing slower than the original XO is the timeline for delivery of new kiddie-tab One Education, the Australian offshoot of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, has hit the crowdfunding trail to find the resources needed to build its heir to the project's XO computer.…

[REDACTED] wants millimetre-wave experimental license because [REDACTED] Google's asked the United States' Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to let it play with millimetre-wave technology America-wide for two years.…

1Gbps demo was a lovely light bulb moment, but where are the standards? We've talked about Li-Fi – using modulated LEDs as data channels – before at The Register, but last week's announcements warrant revisiting the idea.…

Cute canines safe, 'Potentially unwanted programs' now nixed by System Centre or Forefront Remond has updated its paid System Center Endpoint Protection and Forefront Endpoint Protection services with a feature to kill spammy and advertising injecting programs operating from within enterprise networks.…

Sysadmins, fat thumbs, and BGP black-holes conspire A mistaken peering advertisement from a European network took Google Cloud's europe-west1 region offline last week for around 70 minutes.…

Meanwhile, Hyper-V 2016 adds feature VMware's had, and Microsoft's hidden, since 2010 Virtualisation mavens have been reminded that Microsoft’s Hyper-V has a bug that occasionally resets the “created” date of virtual machines to the year 1601.…

Doll leaks data, even before the tear-downs are finished Back in February, The Register queried the security and privacy implications of Mattel's “Hello Barbie”, and now the doll has hit the shelves, a prominent security researcher has turned up the first security problems with the toy.…

Too easy to work out who's talking to whom, says researcher Mere days after opsec expert The Grugq warned that popular messaging app Telegram Messenger couldn't be regarded as secure, another researcher has demonstrated how its metadata leaks expose users to stalking.…

'Come on. Chop, chop. The Doctor will see you now' TV Review Readers please note: THIS IS A POST-UK BROADCAST REVIEW – THERE WILL BE SPOILERS!…

Gate-level blueprints restored for anniversary Pics Chip geeks have produced an interactive blueprint of the ARM1 – the granddaddy of the processor cores powering billions of gadgets today, from Apple iPhones to Raspberry Pis, cameras, routers and Android tablets.…

Meanwhile, Germany says broadband providers may be liable in piracy claims In brief ISPs in Sweden cannot be forced to block access to the Pirate Bay – the Swedish search engine used worldwide for pirating software, movies and music.…