The Register

Luckily, it's not the night before Christmas. Actually, it's worse Updated HSBC’s mobile and online banking services went absent without leave in the UK last night and are missing in action again this morning, just as Brits begin panicking about any last minute buys they need to make for Chrimbo.…

Lithuanian bloke gets half a decade for the mother of all phishing schemes A Lithuanian hacker will spend the next five years behind bars for masterminding a massive $120m (£92.05m) business email compromise involving Facebook and Google.…

PXC 500-II comes for Sony and co's expensive audio breakfasts armed with... oh no, a microUSB Review In airports and train stations, it's not unusual to encounter weary corporate warriors sporting headphones that cost upwards of £300. This premium segment of the audio market is largely dominated by two players: Bose's QuietComfort II cans, and the Sony WH-1000XM3. Could their time at the top be coming to an end?…

And by the way, sorry about Swift and Kitura Interview What does a £63m investment even mean in a country where you don't need to declare cash flow?…

The day a Reg reader learned that honesty (and cheese) is its own reward Who, Me? Ho ho ho, behold our bulging bag of reader confessions in The Register's regular Who, Me? feature. Today we learn, once again, that the boss is not always all bad.…

Poisoned movie feeds will do more damage than an angry Dalek Movie fans eager for an early peek at the new Star Wars installment are putting themselves at risk of malware infection.…

FOIA lawsuit demands data on Tactical Terrorism Response Teams When Andreas Gal, CEO of Silk Labs and a US citizen, returned to the US from a business trip in Europe last year, he was detained by US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) for secondary screening. He claims he was threatened with unwarranted charges, denied access to an attorney, and told he had to unlock his electronic devices before he would be allowed to leave.…

Dial-a-ride dev opens wallet over sexual harassment and retaliation case Uber has agreed to pay $4.4m to settle claims it allowed employees to be sexually harassed and then allowed retaliation against them when they came forward.…

And you thought politics was winding down for Christmas The UK Independence Party (UKIP) has suffered a data breach after allegedly having 143 party email accounts accessed amid demands made by blackmailers, the High Court in London has been told (PDF).…

Tried Svelte yet? Perhaps you should According to a sizeable group of coders who responded to a new State of JavaScript survey, the React framework is not only the most used front-end framework, it also has the highest satisfaction rating.…

Two less lovely phone booths in the world, and it's going to be fine Who knew payphones could be so controversial? The central London council of Westminster has won a court battle against New World Payphones, preventing it from deploying two billboard-cum-payphones in the heart of London's Marylebone Road.…

Do election promises mean anything? The Right Honourable Sir John Redwood is supporting contractors in their battle to overturn IR35 tax rules before they hit the private sector, demanding the new Tory government meets its pledge to review the legislation.…

Reg's Logowatch team sad to report UK outsourcing baddie didn't get too creative Capita is launching a consulting arm called ... err ... Capita Consulting - at least we can get behind the sensible name it chose instead of going with something like Indigo Egret or Seventh Wave.…

Sticky grip of sole more efficient for sweeps than for gamers Puma is perhaps best known for its sportswear and trainers. However, it's getting into a new market – eSports.…

Catch up with public sector developments and more Promo If you missed this year's re:Invent – the annual Amazon Web Services cloud-computing mega-conference held in Las Vegas at the beginning of December – you can catch up with some of the highlights in London, England, on 22 January.…

All Chromium browsers are equal, but some smell more equal than others Browser maker Vivaldi celebrated its last release of 2019 with a handbags-at-dawn move that will see it don a Google Chrome disguise.…

* Terms of stay non-negotiable following extradition. Some imprisonment required. He denies any wrongdoing A British man suspected to be an instrumental member of the Dark Overlord hacking crew has been extradited to the US for trial.…

School in Germany rolls out credential refresh with printed ID requirement Tens of thousands of students and staff at a university in Germany had to queue up this week after a malware infection on its campus network forced the college to reset everyone's account passwords.…

A data silo we didn't know existed until a certain IT admin went rogue Analysis The FBI is likely breaking the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches, when it investigates domestic crimes using an NSA database created from international wiretaps, an appeals court ruled Wednesday.…

Sales team trimmed in time for the holidays Exclusive Enterprise cloud storage biz SwiftStack got smaller on Wednesday when it laid off an unspecified number of people.…

On the plus side, this saves cable companies the hassle of laying down fiber America's communications watchdog, the FCC, has unveiled another piece of its rural broadband master plan – and it comprises blowing $89m on getting a tiny number of people very expensive, data-capped internet.…

Stick a fork in 2019, we're done, eh Canadian medical testing specialist LifeLabs says miscreants were able to break into its corporate network and access systems containing the sensitive and personal records of 15 million customers.…

Merry Christmas! A federal judge has ruled that the US government can collect royalties from the sale of ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden's memoir Permanent Record and any fees from related public speeches.…

The bad news: You may have to buy all new kit if you want things to work After years of trying and failing to dominate the smart home market with their own standards, tech giants Amazon, Apple and Google have finally agreed to work on a set of common code that will allow smart home products, from thermostats to cameras to plugs to digital assistants, to work together seamlessly.…

Disgruntled ex-techie took just 13 minutes to almost wreak havoc The man who hacked northern airline Jet2 has been jailed for five months after he posed to hotel staff as a company director, was disciplined, and later went on an alcohol-fuelled deletion spree.…

Simplify your DataStax deployments and management with Kubernetes Webcast Today, many enterprise IT organizations are implementing hybrid and multi-cloud solutions to bring the most advanced features and capabilities into their operations. It’s a move that promises a competitive edge, though success ultimately depends on one's ability to handle workloads seamlessly across providers.…

Non-compete legal brouhaha reveals how once-mighty handset biz now sees itself BlackBerry, the former phone handset company, has accused rival security business SentinelOne of systematically poaching its top talent during a court hearing in central London where the Canadian company tried to block a salesman from jumping ship.…

Before you gasp, settlement does cover audit of a full decade The Australian Tax Office (ATO) has scooped A$481.5m (£252.3m, $330m) in back taxes from ad giant Google, its latest victory scored against big technology businesses including Apple, Facebook and Microsoft.…

High Court judge passes file to prosecutors following £58m civil suit settlement Fujitsu faces a potential criminal investigation after a High Court judge's savage criticism of the outsourcing company and one of its customers, the Post Office, at the end of a long-running trial over the state mail operator's core IT system.…

Will run Android 10, but sans Choc Fac apps In another body blow for Huawei's global smartphone ambitions, the Chinese telco yesterday confirmed its upcoming P40 and P40 Pro handsets will ship without Google Mobile Services.…

World+dog hunts for new password manager Remote access, collaboration and password manager provider LogMeIn has been sold to a private equity outfit for $4.3bn.…

Two dozen staff found guilty The chairman and a vice president of Samsung electronics are starting 18 months' prison sentences after being found guilty of illegal union busting yesterday at the Seoul Central District Court.…

Lightweight Linux VMs for all. So long as Ubuntu is your thing Canonical is preparing some festive fun for developers with a major release of its lightweight VM manager, Multipass.…

Once a hit with drug entrepreneurs, though its algos had been weeding them out When Intersection first announced it was bringing LinkNYC's smart billboard technology to the UK in 2016, it promised to drag the humble telephone booth into the 21st century.…

The IAU brandishes 112 new names for the star systems and its exoplanets to celebrate its 100 year anniversary On Tuesday the International Astronomical Union announced the names of 112 exoplanets and their parent stars, with names selected from 112 different countries here on Earth.…

Turns out even with the luxury and protection of billions of dollars, you still can't take any criticism Stung by an article mulling Amazon Web Services' market dominance on Monday, AWS VP Andi Gutmans fired back, complaining the reporter ignored flattering comments from AWS partners – and that "AWS is 'strip-mining' open source is silly and off-base."…

'Divisive and humiliating' terms are bad as the N-word, uni lecturer argues Labeling super-smart people with terms like nerd, geek, or boffin is hate speech, and should be punishable as such, argues lecturer and Harley-Street psychotherapist Dr Sonja Falck.…

Non-profit says seizure-inducing posts were a deliberate attempt at harm The Epilepsy Foundation said this week it will report to the cops any and all tweets seemingly engineered to trigger seizures.…

Techie allegedly fed secret financial info to buddies ahead of public release A now-former Palo Alto Networks IT administrator illegally exploited his employer's confidential financial figures to line his pockets with stock-market profits, it is claimed.…

You need stability concerns? Here’s some stability concerns, say DNS gurus at Packet Clearing House The sale of the .org registry to a for-profit private equity firm would have “a disastrous effect on stability,” a DNS specialist has warned.…

Web giant claims she broke rules with pro-union popup code – fellow techies reckon that's rubbish Google on Friday fired security engineer Kathryn Spiers after she created a Chrome popup notification reminding her colleagues that they have the "right to participate in protected concerted activities."…

Just another, oh, $1.675bn to go to defend systems, it is estimated US lawmakers have formally earmarked hundreds of millions of dollars for an election security overhaul.…

FTC gives out a wrist slap, lets it continue doing the exact same thing If you were one of the millions of people that signed up with Unrollme to cut down on the emails from outfits you once bought a product from, we have some bad news for you: it has been storing and selling your data.…

'I'm not dead!' insists doomed OS. It will be soon Microsoft unloaded some festive cheer on the last remaining Windows Phone user by apparently extending the life of the doomed platform for another few weeks.…

Anything less than the latest version of Outlook to be blocked soon The clock is ticking for businesses using what Google defines as a "less secure app" (LSA) to access services like its G Suite mail, calendar and contacts. New accounts will be blocked from using LSAs from June 15 2020, and all access will be disabled on February 15 2021.…

First OTT apps nick their SMS revenue, now this... In 2019, few handsets come with the same level of network lock-ins that were endemic in the 2000s and earlier. Despite that, many networks — including BT and Vodafone — persist in this practice, limiting consumer choice and freedom.…

'Turns out that leaving the Cabinet is harder than leaving the EU' - former MP Nicky Morgan's reappointment to the UK's Cabinet as secretary of state for digital, culture, media and sport (DCMS) is controversial because only her peerage made it possible: she stood down as an MP in October.…

Say cheese, Cupertino, you've got a repairability score of 9 DIY repair site iFixit has announced the results of its teardown of the 2019 Mac Pro – the latest eye-wateringly priced, professional-oriented computer from fruit-branded-biz-turned- kitchenware supplier, Apple.…

Big Blue leaves Swift server workgroup, future of Kitura server app framework uncertain An announcement to the Swift forums indicates IBM is discontinuing its work on server-side Swift. IBM team leader Ian Partridge and technical architect Chris Bailey are leaving the Swift server workgroup.…

Birdsong, traffic sounds... Bueller? Bueller? It's hard, isn't it — plugging in kit? You've got to grab the item in question, find a charger, and then give it a bit of USB-C. Wouldn't it be simpler if your gadgets just magically charged themselves, using the abundant energy provided by the Sun's rays?…