The Register

Drain you of your sanity, face the thing that should not be Who, Me? We have yellowing plastic, disintegrating drives and serial shenanigans to start the week in The Register's regular column of reader misadventures. Welcome back to Who, Me?…

Get up to speed with DevOps, containers, and more: Join us this May Event If you want to get up close with some of the finest minds in DevOps, containers, CI/CD and serverless, and save £100s, act now – because the Continuous Lifecycle London early bird offer ends this week.…

And Adobe in remote-code execution patch non-shocker Roundup It's once again time for a security news summary. Let's get to it.…

Funding free software is 'still a very unsolved problem' says co-founder At the end of August, JavaScript package registry NPM Inc said it intended "to finalize and launch an Open Source funding platform by the end of 2019."…

Anecdotes of bullying customers fall short of legal standard to establish fraudulent intent The financial group suing Oracle for allegedly deceiving investors by inflating its cloud revenue this week took a third stab at articulating its claim against the database giant.…

Treat yourself to a meal out or a case of bevvies... or an appetizer in SF or NYC Victims of dodgy IT support from Office Depot will start receiving compensation checks, a US consumer watchdog said Thursday.…

Photocopier goliath hits back at PC giant's attempt to scupper takeover Xerox has shot back at HP's decision to adopt a shareholder rights plan – a poison pill designed to derail the photocopier titan's $36.5bn hostile takeover of the PC'n'printer slinger.…

Register readers around the globe shared in worldwide oddity Concern is growing over the security of Samsung's Android infrastructure after readers from around the world told The Register that yesterday's Find my Mobile push notification affected them – including on devices where the offending app was disabled.…

Says a big hello to low-cost services land, aka India Managed services pusher Ensono is to chop 137 employees across its UK and US global support desk and technology teams to reduce costs, and has said that hiring in India is a key element of delivering services.…

Dangerous levels of EMF: Evidence-based Measurement Findings UK comms regulator Ofcom today published the results of its latest spectrum measurement tests, which tracked electromagnetic field emissions at 16 of the busiest 5G sites.…

Also slapped with court request not to contact security staffers Members of Silicon Valley-based security firm Urban Tactical Group (UTG), which does "regular" work for Apple, have been granted a temporary restraining order preventing a Californian man from approaching them.…

Resistance no longer futile? There is good news for prospective buyers of the diminutive Raspberry Pi 4 as the USB-C issue that stopped the device working with some power supplies has been fixed.…

Because the human condition isn't harrowing enough Fear, shame, regret and Quarter Pounder with Cheese – now you can relive the scents of last night in your living room thanks to obesity merchants McDonald's.…

Fluent, fluent everywhere but not a patch that works Good news everyone! While Microsoft seems unable to deliver a patch that won't leave Windows 10 in a parlous state for some users, it does possess the will to fiddle with the icons. Again.…

Web giant hits back, says allegations are 'factually wrong' New Mexico has sued Google, claiming the ad-slinging web titan broke its promises – and the law – by covertly collecting personal information and the browsing habits of children.…

It's a hard job... why not outsource it? Column Our favourite controller of UK media, Ofcom, is being given new powers to regulate the internet. Or censor it, depending on your preferred spin. It's all a bit fuzzy at the moment: with illegal content, the regulator will watch for the usual monsters of terrorism and child abuse and act swiftly to close them down and keep them down.…

Crash, bang, wallop Intel is losing ground to AMD in every corner of the European PC industry serviced by the channel, according to official sales stats from distributors.…

The inevitable return of Norbert Spankmonkey Something for the Weekend, Sir? Where's my free promo tat? Fellow convention attendees have no such problem being showered with promotional gifts from all sides as they totter up and down the rows of booths.…

I'll take a Big Mac, large fries and... um, are you OK? Bork!Bork!Bork! There is a saying about networking fails: "It's not DNS. It can't be DNS. It was DNS." So far for The Register's column of retail calamity, it's McDonald's. It's nearly always McDonald's.…

Yet another reason to never do things by halves On Call The weekend is a day away, but before you swan off, please join us for another episode of ticketing system terror with The Register's regular On Call.…

Happy birthday to me... Happy birthday to me... Happy birthday to me... Happy birthday to me... Happy birthday to me... Happy birthday to me... Astronomers have discovered a hot Jupiter-like exoplanet with the shortest orbital period yet: a year on this large puffy world lasts just 18 hours.…

Discover which developments lie ahead: 16 - 17 June, Frankfurt Promo “Digital transformation” in practice still basically boils down to hybrid cloud, and while more and more of us are bolting public and private cloud infrastructure together, it’s no less important to keep looking for new inspiration as we put new technology and skills in place within the enterprise.…

Meet halicin, picked by a neural network and whimsically named after the HAL 9000 bot Although new strains of antibiotics are increasingly difficult to develop, scientists have done just that, with the help of a neural network.…

US regulator tries to hide embarrassment behind series of sudden announcements Comment The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is asking the American public to tell it if its decision in 2017 to scrap net neutrality regulations was dumb or not.…

Before he was arrested, Googler appealed to internet, newspaper for help finding his spouse Sonam Saxena, 43, a product manager at Google Cloud, was arrested in Hawaii this week on suspicion of second-degree murder.…

Purge is the latest in a series of similar store scourings On Thursday Google confirmed it has removed nearly 600 Android apps from the Google Play Store and banned them from its ad services for violating its policies on disruptive advertising and interstitials.…

Keep your crypto below 398 days after September 1 and you're all good Safari will, later this year, no longer accept new HTTPS certificates that expire more than 13 months from their creation date.…

Security biz clocked 55 million malicious login attempts on a client Financial services firms' public APIs are becoming the target du jour for internet ne'er-do-wells, reckons Akamai, which also said that one of its customers was firehosed with 55 million malicious login attempts last summer.…

Unfortunate timing – the Obama admin also supported the database giant The US solicitor general Noel Francisco on Wednesday filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of Oracle in its Java API copyright lawsuit against Google, scheduled to be argued before the US Supreme Court next month.…

Alternative headline: Killer bio-nasty linked to former alien vault and cyber-hacker gathering RSA Yet another big brand has pulled out of RSA Conference, due to take place next week, amid the ongoing novel coronavirus panic.…

Introducing Project Operations Microsoft has announced a new application, Dynamics 365 Project Operations, as well as additional AI-driven features for its Dynamics 365 range.…

Cloud giant aims to attract developers with code-oriented deployment automation Google's new Application Manager, now in beta, is geared toward simplifying setting up GitOps with Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) as the target platform.…

What happens in Vegas... gets leaked on the internet Casino and hotel chain MGM Resorts lost almost 10.7 million guest records last summer, including the data of Jack Dorsey and Justin Bieber, which was duly posted to hacker forums.…

Relax, you won't feel a thing Google's UK users will see their data shifted to a US-based data controller from the end of next month with the ad giant blaming Brexit for the move.…

Updated cocaine straws will be much harder to forge and hopefully vegan The Bank of England has started sending out new polymer £20 notes but the old paper ones remain legal tender for now.…

This is not a test The Metropolitan Police are using live facial recognition (LFR) in various locations in central London today after spending two years testing the technology.…

And that's one hell of a privacy agreement Microsoft's all-in-one mobile Office app combining Word, Excel and Powerpoint into a single application for iOS and Android is here, but you'll need an Office 365 subscription to use the "premium features."…

Rural trials will not use equipment 'from high risk vendors' says Ministry of Fun The UK's Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS, aka the Ministry of Fun) has barred Huawei gear from rural 5G trials.…

It's APT28 again! Public attribution names and shames state-backed crew The same Russian state hackers who unleashed NotPetya on the world's computers were behind destructive cyberattacks on Georgia during 2019, the governments of Britain and the US have said – echoing a similar attribution a decade ago.…

Before you remove the mote from thy hacker's eye, remove the beam from the eyes of your, er, Teams RSA As IBM's crew cancels their hotel rooms, Microsoft's infosec staffers are still set to attend the decades-old RSA conference and pulled the covers off a raft of security releases and previews for the event today.…

Taylor Swift of apps or ultimate ironic hipster shout-out? In 2014, the world was graced with yet another social network. This one was special. While Facebook and Twitter were grotesquely stodgy beasts, this app stood out with its almost Scandinavian simplicity. It would allow you to message your friends with the word "Yo!" – and that's it.…

It's looking rather ominous to us Following a mysterious "Find my Mobile" push notification this morning, questions are swirling around Samsung after customers found other users's login details being shown to them while trying to change their passwords.…

You'd hope it would know 85mph speed limits aren't exactly routine Vid A single piece of electrical tape stuck to a 35mph (56kph) road sign is enough to trick the autopilot software in Tesla's vehicles into speeding up to 85mph (136kph).…

The web is 'optimised for Chrome, not for independent browsers' Interview Mozilla's head of EU public policy, Raegan MacDonald, reckons effective regulation to protect privacy and enable fair competition is an "issue of survival" for Mozilla and other independent companies.…

Not the sort of 'digital transformation' you want to be part of A bloke has copped to operating a £115m ($149m) scam that managed to encompass physical mining of gems and the virtual mining of cryptocoins.…

Now Ru? The Russian government, via mouthpiece RIA Novosti, has claimed Korean tech giant Samsung will comply with a controversial Russian law passed in November that forces smartphones and computers to come pre-installed with domestic-made shovelware.…

Xiaomi the way to the sale rack, would you? Smartwatch sales have been steadily increasing in recent years, thanks to Apple's efforts, as well as downward pricing pressure from Chinese firms like Xiaomi. And, according to entrail prodders at analyst haus CCS Insight, those who buy them are fairly content.…

And forget SaaS-y upstarts: These machine-learning darlings are more like traditional service outfits Despite all the hype around artificial intelligence, trendy startups built upon the tech are said to have lower margins than funding-magnet software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies.…

Linux Foundation hears your gripes about naming schemes, legacy code, and more With modern applications now composed of 80 to 90 per cent Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), the Linux Foundation and Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard University (LISH) on Wednesday published their second open-source census to promote better security and code management practices.…

The 1990s spacecraft, that is Jupiter contains more water than a previous study suggested, according to recordings from NASA's Juno probe, which were published in Nature Astronomy this month.…