The Register

Democratising mass surveillance, one snafu at a time Exclusive In a blunder described as "astonishing and worrying," Sheffield City Council's automatic number-plate recognition (ANPR) system exposed to the internet 8.6 million records of road journeys made by thousands of people, The Register can reveal.…

Also: Russia sends another freighter filled with astro goodies to ISS Roundup Hello, Starlink. SpaceX launched and landed another Falcon 9, Russia sent its next freighter to the ISS and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk celebrated failing to explode the latest Starship in the latest space-tastic news roundup.…

'Take legal action' he told the firm. So it (sort of) did "I thought we [could] change one letter of a big brand and make a business and it [would be] alright," wailed a photographer who tried to blag £1m from Snapchat before Nominet stripped him of his ripoff domain name.…

'The average Windows 10 PC has 14 weaponized bugs' A study of vulnerabilities - bugs that can be a gateway for malware or allow privilege escalation by an intruder - shows that Windows platforms have the most by far, but that they also tend to be fixed quickly, compared to Linux systems or appliances like routers, printers and scanners.…

New rules let Beijing review purchases after pondering 'political, diplomatic, and trade factors' for up to three months China has implemented new rules for buying tech equipment in a move to bolster the country's cybersecurity.…

Good option for locals and lowest latency for Austria, Bulgaria and Greece too AWS has opened a new region in Milan, Italy.…

Some shine, come rain Vid The interstellar comet 2I/Borisov shed nearly 230 million litres of water as it whizzed through our Solar System during its visit last year, according to measurements gathered by NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory.…

As Azure adds Intel's much-probed SGX to its confidential zone Google has made its Shielded VMs the default option in its cloud.…

Why do it at all? Easier to audit and adapt, apparently Analysis The UK has decided to break with growing international consensus and insist its upcoming coronavirus contact-tracing app is run through centralised British servers – rather than follow the decentralized Apple-Google approach.…

Speech recognition purveyor Otter.ai makes a choice to chase Zoom-ing dollars Speech recognition purveyor Otter.ai has added the ability to offer realtime transcription of Zoom meetings, at the expense of some elements out of its free plan.…

COO says plague-time productivity has improved so clients don’t see see WfH as a WtF Indian technology services giant Tata Consultancy Services will increase its use of remote working in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.…

Phone model recorded, unique ID infrequently refreshed – but Atlassian's Mike Cannnon-Brookes says use it and two million peeps agree The design of Australia’s COVIDSafe contact-tracing app creates some unintended surveillance opportunities, according to a group of four security pros who unpacked its .APK file.…

Will literally argue anything to tie up VirnetX lawyers for a bit longer Apple’s decade-long refusal to accept it was wrong has hit absurd depths.…

It's pin-everything-on-China season America's communications watchdog will ban four Chinese telcos from operating in the Land of the Free from next month, citing a vague national security threat.…

Dust up after sales money vanishes from bank account, it is claimed Escobar, the smartphone peddler fronted by the older brother of the late Colombian pharmaceuticals executive Pablo Escobar, is suing its chief operations officer for allegedly embezzling cash and hijacking its YouTube account.…

Rock and roll at 30,000 ft at hypersonic speeds Videos The US Department of Defense today officially released three short videos of "unidentified aerial phenomena" – aka unidentified flying objects – that it still apparently doesn't have an explanation for.…

Wake us up when September ends... Production of the iPhone 12 is reportedly running behind schedule, as Apple wrestles with supply chain issues caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as a travel ban imposed by the Chinese government.…

When does it end? Roundup Folks, we regret to inform you it's still 5G silly season.…

Somewhere in your phone, something is blowing out candles on a cake Video Did the reminder on your smartphone go off over the weekend? It's been 35 years since the first Arm processor was powered up.…

Four more years! Four more years! Outsourcing giant Capita is to continue administering the British Teacher's Pension Scheme for a good few years after the Department of Education extended its contract.…

Cross-platform software acceleration API should be easier to jump on The Khronos Group has pushed out the Open CL 3.0 provisional specification, a major update to the cross-platform API used for accelerating software performance by using the concurrent programming capabilities of GPUs and CPUs.…

There's little 'new' here, but that's a good thing for repairability Serial phone abusers at iFixit have discovered that the iPhone SE 2020 is effectively a specced-up version of 2017's iPhone 8, meaning many of its components are interchangeable with its older brother.…

Peers urge review during delay as witnesses call themselves 'zero-rights employees' The UK's House of Lords has produced a damning report into the government's delayed changes to the IR35 off payroll tax regime, saying they require a complete rethink.…

Also: new .NET previews, 365 rebrando-tanks roll on, and more Roundup Welcome to another rundown of the news you might have missed from the Windows mines deep beneath Microsoft's Redmond campus.…

But they came away with a keg-sized 2.5MW generator, and Rolls will complete terra firma test schedule Airbus and Rolls-Royce have ended a joint venture to produce a hybrid-electric airliner testbed that could have paved the way for electric aircraft of the future.…

An empty station, illuminated by the soft, blue hue of Bork Bork!Bork!Bork! "What does digital signage show when humans aren't around?"…

Planet Computers' gizmo builds a bridge between two worlds, but it's not without limits Hands on It must be stressed right off the bat that a "phone" like Planet Computers' Cosmo Communicator is an incredibly niche device.…

The fruits of labour for world's largest tech firm to be revealed on 30 April Apple is now staring down the barrel of a "second recession of the iPhone era" with handset shipments in China calculated to have fallen off a cliff due to country-specific demand and production issues caused by the coronavirus.…

Proof-of-concept vuln patched a week ago A vulnerability existed in Microsoft's Slack for Suits tool, Teams, that could have let a remote attacker take over accounts by simply sending a malicious GIF, infosec researchers claim.…

As European nations back decentralised plan that leaves data on the device until users call in sick Apple and Google have revealed a little more about their plans to support COVID-19 contact-tracing apps and changed up some of their security plans.…

Broken pencil + ball of stolen Blu Tack = IT joy Who, Me? Today is Monday the 58th of March 2020. As a service to stop the days blurring into one, take a moment to enjoy a tale of NetWare, Blu Tack and a broken pencil in today's Who, Me? reader confession.…

Somebody’s got to help you run legacy apps with dignity AWS has just launched a cloudy FTP service.…

Extra intelligence for end-to-end means less fuzzy video calls. Infradata reveals more Webcast While the traditional methods of “unified communications” have started to fall by the wayside as analogue phone lines have shifted to VoIP, and fax machines move to museums, there’s been concern among the connected working population that the same kind of care and attention that would go into making traditional comms networks flourish hasn’t always been leveled at convincing overburdened office Wi-Fi connections do similar.…

Plans to connect and observe all the things as-a-service, from low-Earth orbit, while building 500 sats a year Chinese industrial conglomerate The Geely Group has completed work on the first two satellites of a planned constellation designed to help power self-driving cars and other services…

Hello, expanded tax base and access to capital! Farewell, land ownership disputes India has launched a new e-government platform for rural villages and hopes it will advance their development and help increase the nation’s tax base.…

Needs bank staff to sort things out, but a certain virus means the contact centre is rather busy right now Rabobank’s Australian outpost has messed up its Android app, leaving an unknown number of users unable to access their bank accounts on mobile devices.…

COVIDSafe application lands for Android, iOS – sans source code Australia has released its promised COVID-19 contact-tracing app.…

Plus Office 2016, 2019 patches – and a barn-load of other security bits and bytes Roundup It's time to dig in to another Register security roundup.…

...Nvidia CEO to unveil new tech on YouTube, and more from machine-learning world Roundup Hello El Reg readers. If you're stuck inside, and need some AI news to soothe your soul, here's our weekly machine-learning roundup.…

So this is how the world ends – as a Matrix fanfic A Microsoft US patent application published last month describes a way to use body activity like brain waves as proof-of-work in a cryptocurrency system.…

Software developers aren't nation states, antisocial giant points out Attorneys for Facebook and its WhatsApp subsidiary have challenged a plea from spyware maker NSO Group to dismiss the high-level hacking case the two are fighting out, arguing it has immunity from prosecution.…

Serverless NoSQL DB to come up against open source sister Amazon has announced the general availability of a serverless NoSQL database in Amazon Keyspaces, with more than a passing resemblance to the open-source Apache Cassandra.…

Meanwhile, lawyer wanders beaches dressed as the Reaper... it has been a long week. Happy Friday, folks Video Reckitt Benckiser Plc, the British maker of disinfectants Lysol and Dettol, had to hastily issue a statement this morning telling people not to ingest or inject their cleaning products in the hopes of fending off coronavirus.…

New study shows pandemic drove up profits for some... The word “unprecedented” is getting banded about so much these days that it is losing its meaning. It is worth remembering, then, that even seasoned commentators have been left slack-jawed by the continuing economic poo-narmi.…

The Register takes a look at the most famous of the Great Observatories A collaboration between NASA and ESA, and carried to orbit by Space Shuttle Discovery, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is entering its fourth decade of service.…

Courtesy of mapping underdog Here WeGo Huawei is in a fraught battle to narrow the app gap between its homegrown AppGallery and the ubiquitous Google Play Store. Progress has been steady, signing up the likes of Snapchat, Microsoft and, most recently, navigation tool Here WeGo.…

Plus: Multitasking and other functions rejigged, but no promises they'll stick Google's third developer preview (DP3) of the Android 11 operating system is an enticing look at the future of the platform, where new features and UI tweaks abound.…

DevOps, IT crew - time to get to know each other... Oracle has an API hub, SAP has one and so does Infor. WorkDay and Salesforce? Well…you get the idea. RESTful and SOAP APIs have become so widespread that even the loci developed to help manage application interfaces are a bit of a mess.…

They'd been at sea for months – before coronavirus, even A Royal Navy submarine captain is in hot water after returning from a months-long deployment and allowing his crew to have a dockside barbecue to celebrate their return.…

Another one bites the dust LibreOffice has joined the rest of the industry to hammer another nail in the coffin of Adobe's Flash technology with the removal of an export filter from the suite.…