The Register

Boffins find increasing MAC address randomization protection with mobiles In 2017, US Naval Academy researchers found that MAC address randomization in mobile devices was largely worthless as a privacy defense. Three years later, the same research group took another look and found that while there's been meaningful improvement, many phones still fail to effectively prevent MAC address-based tracking.…

One going all the way from Mumbai to Italy, the other is Singapore-bound Indian telecoms conglomerate Reliance Jio has announced it will build two submarine cables to help it satisfy India’s appetite for data.…

Late to the party, but free tier for multi-person vid chats handily tops Zoom Readers who find themselves performing tech support for friends and family have a new challenge: Microsoft has created a free version of its Teams collaboration tool for home use.…

Paper-thin OLED screens collapse impressively Vid 'n' pics Samsung has revealed foldable and rollable displays at the Society for Information Display (SID) annual exhibition.…

Virtual world ethics and industry development also on the agenda South Korea has created a “metaverse alliance” of local companies to foster the development of a national virtual and augmented reality platform and sort out the ethics of virtual environments.…

No US listing, no worries, for 939-million-customer colosso-telco that’s big on OpenStack Mega-carrier China Mobile has announced its intention to seek a listing on the Shanghai Stock Exchange and spend the proceeds on a cloudy infrastructure refresh and new “information services”.…

'He is the leading beneficiary of the unequal treatment our nation's tax code gives the rich and powerful' Well-heeled protesters gathered outside Jeff Bezos's New York City pad on Monday in support of raising taxes for the mega-rich.…

Top cryptographers open fire on AI, quantum computing, NFTs, and more RSAC Top cryptographers – including Ron Rivest and Adi Shamir, the R and the S in RSA – on Monday played down the impact of AI and quantum computing, shrugged off NFTs, and responded to the development of a mathematical technique that allegedly thwarts today's public key encryption.…

All the vitriol still accessible from Android app, website Parler, the social network favored by the far-right, is back up on Apple’s App Store and will apparently rely on AI algorithms to automatically flag hate speech.…

We speak to man who experienced and recorded wild ride first hand Video A Waymo self-driving car got stuck several times, held up traffic intermittently, and departed unexpectedly when assistance arrived. The wayward autonomous vehicle was finally commandeered by a support driver.…

Plus: Biden's order on security, US govt acquiring data on citizens, and more In brief Unlucky owners of Eufycam security cameras were horrified earlier today when they opened their app for the equipment and saw video streams from strangers' homes instead of their own.…

You can't hear the difference anyway Shots have been fired in the audiophile world as Apple announced today that lossless audio was on its way to the fruity firm's entire catalogue of 75 million songs.…

Azure Active Directory's tentacles wriggle into ever stranger places A public preview of Microsoft's Azure VPN Client for macOS dropped over the weekend.…

Office 365 users learn that Microsoft can make or break their productivity every 4 hours Microsoft has published a Preliminary Post Incident Report on last week's events which broke Outlook on Windows for millions of users, making emails impossible to view or create.…

Dept of Health unsuccessfully targeted in same attack against hospitals In brief The murky world of ransomware criminals is all aflutter after it was revealed that Ireland's health services were hit by a second attack hot on the heels of one that took out its hospitals, while ransomware insurance refusenik Axa was itself hit with ransomware after its French branch vowed to stop buying off criminals on behalf of its customers.…

Staff offered doomed handsets at knockdown prices in move reminiscent of HP's Palm episode Following its decision to exit the smartphone biz, LG has reportedly started a fire sale of its unsold and unreleased assets, unloading them to staffers at a cutdown price.…

Gates denies connection The Microsoft board was conducting an investigation into Bill Gates' alleged "inappropriate" romantic relationship with a female Microsoft employee when he resigned in 2020, according to two investigative reports that appeared over the weekend.…

Fiscal year end forecast: Cloudy with a chance of litigation Oracle this month filed a lawsuit against Envisage Technologies, claiming the Bloomington, Indiana-based IT firm has been violating its copyrights by running Oracle Database on Amazon Web Services in an improper way.…

Firm working with FAA to 'investigate the anomaly' after second stage sputters What was supposed to have been a milestone in Rocket Lab's march toward reusability turned into a mishap over the weekend as a borked second stage sent the payload on the company's 20th Electron launch back to Earth considerably earlier than planned.…

Computer museums set to be unbolted again As the UK enters the latest stage of lockdown easing, The Reg can confirm that The National Museum of Computing and the Centre for Computing History will be reopening imminently.…

Why? It might reveal whistleblowers' names... British infosec accreditation body CREST has declared that it will not be publishing its full report into last year's exam-cheating scandal after all, triggering anger from the cybersecurity community.…

Sitting is as bad for you as smoking, and doesn't look nearly as cool Review Sitting, we're told, is the new smoking. The catastrophic health consequences of hours spent hunched behind a desk are said to include heart disease, colon cancer, and muscle weaknesses.…

No policy shakeup to deal with snatch of info from primary physicians Evidence from NHS Digital's website suggests that patient data held by GPs in England will be available to private-sector companies to help them understand market opportunities in the UK's health service.…

Trade you architecture and production tricks for lithography and yield plans? Political America likes to judge its presidents by their first 100 days. Corporate America thinks more in 90-day cycles, so as today is Pat Gelsinger's 90th day at the helm of Intel, it's an apt time to look at how he and the company are doing.…

Former Sun boss Scott McNealy offers interesting response Alexandra Elbakyan, the creator of controversial research trove Sci-Hub, has claimed that Apple informed her it has handed over information about her account to the FBI.…

Phoning it in? Who, Me? We straddle the worlds of IT and telephony in this week's episode of Who, Me? where a reader fails to consider the tinkering of someone too young to know better.…

Combine as ‘GoTo Group’, will represent two percent of GDP and say scale will help them grow Indonesian web giants Gojek and Tokopedia have agreed to merge and become the new “Go To Group”.…

Sharp practices can leave temp tech workers with nowhere to turn Campaigners and MPs are urging UK government to introduce legislation to stop umbrella companies siphoning off contractor pay through a range of sharp practices.…

Over 150 million people given freebies or generous top-up deals Indian telcos are giving away services to help clients who don’t want to leave home during a savage second wave of COVID-19 infections.…

TraceTogether app becomes primary tracking tool and compulsory in many settings Singapore has made its Bluetooth-powered "TraceTogether" contact-tracing app its preferred means of recording movements in public spaces across the island.…

Head to the Nutanix Database Summit for a frank exchange of ideas Promo Databases are the key to unlocking business value, but far too many are still built on complex legacy platforms that cannot meet the demands of today’s businesses.…

Also puts brakes on data collection by carmakers China has signaled that ride-sharing companies can expect the same scrutiny as its web giants, and laid out regulations that will stop cars from collecting unnecessary data.…

Plus: Non-profit ML groups snub sponsorship money from Google In Brief Highway patrol officers in California arrested a man this week accused of riding in the backseat of his Tesla while it was under Autopilot.…

'An important step in our country’s interplanetary exploration journey' – state media Updated China's Zhurong rover today touched down on Mars from the Tianwen-1 orbiter, the nation's state media says.…

Coalition of 41 organizations oppose labor rule challenge Google is spearheading an effort to save a visa rule that allows the spouses of H-1B visa holders awaiting green cards to work in the US.…

Also wriggles out of exclusivity deal Amid fears the global semiconductor crisis may last until 2023, AMD has opted to extend its purchase agreement with GlobalFoundries, giving it access to a greater proportion of the fabricator's output.…

Sorry for trying to add it or sorry for cocking up the comms? Amid the smell of burning rubber, the new managers of open-source audio editor Audacity have announced a U-turn on plans to introduce "basic telemetry" into the product.…

How easy would it be for customers to depart the walled garden, legal eagles ask economist Epic Games' lawyers had a chance to put Apple's expert witness through the wringer in the latest from its California bench trial.…

Problem was of social network's own making, says unimpressed judge Facebook has failed to neutralise an order from Britain's competition regulator freezing its buyout of Giphy after having "sat on its hands" and failed to answer questions, the Court of Appeal has found.…

Sometimes you need to lift yourself out of the cybersec trenches and look up to the summit Promo Keeping your organization safe from cybercriminals and other ne’er do wells requires constant honing and refining of your own skills and knowledge.…

That's 37% of the country covered, and BT is expected to pick up the pace too A new Ofcom report shows the number of UK homes with access to gigabit-capable broadband hit 10.8 million in January, representing 37 per cent of households.…

By probing for installed apps with custom URL schemes, it's possible to build a 32-bit unique fingerprint FingerprintJS, maker of a browser-fingerprinting library for fraud prevention, on Thursday said it has identified a more dubious fingerprinting technique capable of generating a consistent identifier across different desktop browsers, including the Tor Browser.…

Visible from the launchpad... when it finally gets there NASA has slapped its worm logo on the side of the Crew Module Adaptor (CMA) for the Orion spacecraft as the first Artemis mission to the Moon inches closer.…

Russia-based criminals pick soft target in hope of easy gains Ireland's nationalised health service has shut down its IT systems following a "human-operated" Conti ransomware attack, causing a Dublin hospital to cancel outpatient appointments.…

OtterTune to compete with Oracle automation, but also for open source databases A university spin-out startup has announced a private beta of an automated database tuning service which its founder claims can double the performance or halve the cost of the popular AWS Relational Database Service.…

Retention of now-deleted security breach evidence sparks spat +Comment IT pro Rob Dyke says an NHS-backed company not only threatened him with legal action after he flagged up an exposed GitHub repository containing credentials and insecure code, it even called the police on him.…

You know it's time for an upgrade when your PC gets spanked by a sign Bork!Bork!Bork! The mean streets of Birmingham in England's West Midlands are our destination today, with an entry in the bork archive reminding us of the raw power of signage.…

Because our golf-obsessed boss has wandered off fondling his balls Something for the Weekend, Sir? "I am writing with regard to a data security incident relating to you."…

Be alert, not a-llam-ed Douyin, the Chinese app known as TikTok in the rest of the world, is apparently censoring Alpacas.…

Because now you have a bill to replace all these perfectly functional devices On Call Welcome back to On Call where this week we peek behind the scenes and see what happens when public-facing kit is reported as borked.…