The Register

Invisible watermarks can be detected in trained software to root out theft, benchmark cheating, etc Facebook researchers have developed a digital watermarking technique that allows developers to tell if a particular machine-learning model was trained using marked images.…

Less than 3 weeks till Barcelona tech show and some are staying away MWC As the 2019 coronavirus tears a path across China and beyond, mobile device makers are reconsidering whether it's worth attending this year's Mobile World Congress (MWC) that opens in less than 20 days in Barcelona, Spain.…

And 2 in 5 programmers gripe they are underpaid The Go programming language tops the list of skills that software developers say they'll learn next, according to a survey of 116,000 programmers conducted by hiring biz HackerRank.…

To be honest, it was the impracticality and inefficiency that first attracted us to this otherwise cunning exfiltration Boffins from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and Shamoon College of Engineering in Israel have come up with yet another TEMPEST-style attack to exfiltrate data from an air-gapped computer: leaking binary signals invisibly by slightly modulating the light coming off its monitor.…

Now all you have to do is remember what your Y! email address was amid sounds of lawyers popping champagne Long-suffering Yahoo! customers may finally get some compensation for having their personal details exposed to hackers not once, not twice, not three times, nor four times, but five times between 2012 and 2016.…

Dear Facebook, please keep up with Electron and Chromium fixes, ta A vulnerability in WhatsApp could be exploited to remotely access a victim's files on their computer – if they use the desktop client paired with the iPhone app. A patch has been issued and should be installed.…

Tech-for-cops CEO claims First Amendment rights as a legal defense Google, YouTube, and Twitter have sent cease-and-desist demands to Clearview, ordering the controversial startup to stop scraping people's photos from their websites to train its facial-recognition software.…

'Why does a device that is essentially a mouse need a privacy policy?' FYI: Wacom's official tablet drivers leak to the manufacturer the names of every application opened, and when, on the computers they are connected to.…

Also: Eco rocket fuel from Skyrora, more Starlink from SpaceX, ESA's Solar Orbiter gets ready for launch Roundup There's some bad news for Moon lovers but good news for Sun fanciers in this week's roundup of all the news that's fit to run about outer space.…

Market flopped as all the biggest buyers kept short arms in deep pockets Almost all of the top 10 biggest corporate consumers of semiconductors bought fewer chips last year due to softening economies, in part caused by political uncertainty: Brexit, the UK and China trade battle among them.…

First the lightbulb. Then the controller. Then your internal network. Researchers at Check Point have demonstrated how to infect a network with malware via a simple IoT device, a Philips Hue smart lightbulb.…

Calm down, Glass EE2's a 'single purpose tool for Enterprise'. Mainly From today, you can now buy a Glass Enterprise 2 - the latest iteration of Google's wearable computer - from a general hardware reseller.…

You can turn it back on, but why? Chrome 80 emerged from Google this week with a few more nails to hammer into the coffin of the venerable File Transfer Protocol (FTP).…

Most distros unaffected unless defaults were changed, but do check Sudo, a standard tool on Unix-y operating systems that lets select users run some or all commands as root, can be exploited to give superpowers to any logged-in user – if deployed with a non-default configuration.…

Meanwhile, DNS overseer continues to dither on whether to do anything Updated The operator of .org has responded aggressively to a further delay in its controversial sale of the registry to a private equity firm, warning DNS overseer ICANN not to spike the deal.…

Extradition process around US fraud charges has kicked off Ex-Autonomy boss Mike Lynch has submitted himself for arrest, a formality required as part of the extradition process initiated by the US Department of Justice.…

So use our browser, Brave implies A new report by privacy-focused browser Brave suggests UK local authorities are sharing information about their website users with dozens of private companies.…

Enterprises face fear of phone fragging fest as Doom spawns on IP phones Enterprise networking giant Cisco is expected to release a set of software fixes on Wednesday to address five critical vulnerabilities in devices that rely on the Cisco Discovery Protocol, known to its friends as CDP.…

The week's triumvirate of TITSUP* is complete Microsoft doesn't do things by halves. Not content with Teams taking the day off or Outlook donning spammy sunglasses, now Windows 10 Search has joined the cock-up club.…

If you've splashed out, you may get one before the heat death of the universe Long-suffering Atari lovers will have to wait even longer for their over-priced, under-powered retro console, the intellectual-property shell company that owns the Atari brand, warned on Tuesday.…

Cortana, set a reminder for when their services work. Cortana? CORTANAAA! Updated Microsoft is having a bad time this week. First it was Teams, and now Outlook has begun treating pretty much every email as spammy nonsense.…

And other moronic choices Newsflash: Not only do people still suck at passwords, but they also have diabolical music taste.…

Not perfect, not going to replace supercomputer math engines, fascinating nonetheless Deep-learning software may help scientists predict extreme weather patterns more accurately than relying on today's weather prediction models alone.…

Project set to take half a decade and cost €200m Vodafone will strip Huawei gear out of its core network across Europe at a cost of €200m following last week's fresh guidelines about the use of so-called "high risk vendors" from the UK government and the European Union.…

It's proving a bit of a headache The Git version control system has moved closer towards using SHA-256 rather than the compromised SHA-1 for its hash algorithm, to help to protect code from tampering.…

ESA shuffles Brits about as Brexit bites Hidden away in the document laying out the starting position for EU and UK negotiations lies an interesting nugget for those following the tortured tales of the European satellite navigation system, Galileo.…

Higher barrier to entry, but nothing SQL devs can't handle Interview The latest version of Neo4j's graph database – 4.0 – touts new scaling features and better security. The Reg talks to self-confessed graph fanboy Dr Jim Webber about how the graph-wrangler is, at last, able to scale to accommodate large databases, and about its biggest enemy: the inertia of developers who stick with SQL no matter what.…

In a world of virtual keyboards, who's keen for some keypress fun? Some time later this year, a TCL staffer will press the red button on the Blackberry brand phones production line and, unless another firm takes the reins, it'll be the end of the road for the humble BlackBerry.…

One of five practical conference sessions for people of all ability levels Event If you’re a seasoned tech pro who’s wondering what DevOps is all about, good news... our Continuous Lifecycle London conference has added a workshop just for you.…

Blackpool isn't just about stag dos, chips, and illuminations, after all Blackpool is literally and figuratively using artificial intelligence to pave the way for a better future for Britons, or something like that.…

Grimey man unveils a pair of deals Pop-star accomplice Elon Musk on Tuesday indicated he hopes to fly his Starship over Texas – and pocketed a major deal to launch a satellite for NASA.…

Can't we just get a pint and wait for it to all blow over? Is that asking too much? LG Electronics has withdrawn from the Mobile World Congress trade show, held at the end of this month, citing concerns over the new virulent and deadly coronavirus.…

1% of 1% of users affected, but as it's Google that's still in the six figures A bug in Google's Photo software caused potentially 100,000 or more netizens to have their personal videos exposed to complete strangers last Thanksgiving.…

El Reg digs into claims by Kiwi browser maker that ad giant is not GDPR compliant Analysis Google is potentially facing a massive privacy and GDPR row over Chrome sending per-installation ID numbers to the mothership.…

Untested tech, no training, last-minute rollout, buggy code – sound familiar? It’s all so painfully familiar: with a crunch date of February 3, the Democratic Party in Iowa decided to charge ahead with an IT rollout that comprised an entirely new software system spread out across thousands of sites to record the result of the Democratic caucus for its presidential nominee.…

Crap security? Shocked, shocked, we tell you This may shock you, but Huawei effectively built a poorly hidden, insecure backdoor into surveillance equipment that uses its HiSilicon subsidiary's chips, it appears.…

Or so clams this vendor's marketing Attempts to infect computers with ransomware and other malware over networks are decreasing, reckons infosec outfit Sonicwall.…

Golden Gate Capital jettisons equity before IPO can kick in Cloudy ERP outfit Infor has been picked up by Koch Industries after investment biz Golden Gate Capital sold off its remaining equity stake.…

Technical requirements file appears to include references to US biz's other operations Analysis Suspicions have grown deeper that a lucrative contract to run Colombia’s .co registry was rigged to favor US-based operator Afilias, thanks to unusual references in one of the South American government’s official documents.…

Gives punters more time to move to S/4HANA because that's what everyone wants to do, right? SAP has blinked first in the face-off with customers by agreeing to extend standard support for Business Suite 7 (BS7) applications, and outlined its "maintenance commitment" for S/4HANA for the next couple of decades.…

It's 2020 and people are still letting S3 storage leak A private yacht crew recruitment agency has left an AWS bucket containing the CVs, passports and even some drug test results for up to 17,000 people exposed to world+dog, according to reports.…

Replaced by former Computacenter bod in non-exec role Kevin Loosemore will stand down as chairman of British software firm Micro Focus as the company continues to struggle with its disastrous takeover of HPE's software biz.…

So some pholdables still crap then Not only is the Motorola Razr a nostalgic homage to a simpler time, but it's foldable too. Unfortunately, it's the latter feature irking some users, who have complained about unpleasant noises whenever they snap their pricey devices into the clamshell mode.…

Can you smell the democratisation of IT? Neither can the shrinking 'others' section AWS remains the biggest provider of infrastructure clouds with a revenue haul of $34.6bn in 2019 but for the first time it has pulled in less than double that of nearest rival Microsoft, which inhaled $18.1bn.…

5,000 password resets, multi-day outage, och aye! A further education college in east Scotland has been struck by what its principal described as a cyber "bomb" in an apparent ransomware attack so bad that students have been told to stay away and reset passwords en masse.…

Like glitter and paste jewels? This is your mobe Pablo Escobar was a lot of things. Folk hero. Terrorist. Murderer. Drug kingpin. Revered and reviled in equal measure. Now, almost 30 years after his death, his younger brother is keeping his flame alive – with foldable phones.…

Even Fulham Broadway is no sanctuary from The Curse Of Bork Bork!Bork!Bork! Those worrying about what befell the near-universally disliked Windows Vista will be delighted to know that its name persists on-screen in UK branches of phone flinger EE.…

Loving all those cores? You probably won't love the price Kind old VMware is updating its pricing model in a move to "continue meeting our customers' needs". Provided those needs involve paying more for CPUs with more than 32 cores.…

'It's going to be amazingly OK' The roller coaster ride that is the semiconductor industry suffered its worst annual slump in almost two decades in 2019 - and is now braced for the potential disruptions caused by the outbreak of the Coronavirus.…

Now there's no excuse OpenSK, a new open-source project from Google, lets folk make their own security key for less than £10.…