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All thanks to FBI that somehow had wallet's private key The US Department of Justice on Monday said it has recovered 63.7 Bitcoins, right now worth $2.1m and falling, of the 75 or so BTC the Colonial Pipeline operators paid the ransomware miscreants who infected the fuel provider's computers.…

Hundreds of arrests already in Oz, details of European and US ops to be revealed soon The Australian Federal Police (AFP) has revealed it was able to decrypt messages sent on a supposedly secure messaging app that was seeded into the criminal underworld and promoted as providing snoop-proof comms.…

Feds, facing pushback over constitutional concerns, say they no longer need the data after all The FBI on Saturday withdrew a subpoena issued to USA Today's parent company Gannett in April to find out who read an online news story published in February about a shootout that led to the deaths of two FBI agents and the wounding of three others.…

No new hardware though loads of bits and bytes for software makers WWDC Apple on Monday opened its 2021 Worldwide Developer Conference by promising a raft of operating system and privacy improvements – including a relay system to anonymize Safari connections, and randomized email addresses for online account signups.…

Plus: FBI boss says ransomware is terrorism 2.0, and more In brief Plans by the German government to allow the police to deploy malware on any target's devices, and force the tech world to help them, has run into some opposition, funnily enough.…

Gonna need a little Mo security over here US House Rep Mo Brooks (R-AL) seemingly revealed his Gmail password and a PIN in a Sunday rage tweet about a lawsuit regarding the January 6 insurrection attempt.…

With his brother in tow, poor sod Jeff Bezos has confirmed he will buckle up with his brother, Mark, next month and head into space as part of the first human flight on Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket.…

Not too difficult to get in, but component serialisation could still be a hurdle iFixit has published a preliminary teardown of the M1 iPad Pro, touted by Apple as a potential crossover, combining the portability of a tablet with the unbridled power of the same processor used in the MacBook Pro. But take a look at its innards and you'll find things largely appear the same.…

Breeding season takes a tern for the worse Two drone crashes at a nature reserve in Orange County, California, are being blamed for a colony of some 3,000 sea birds abandoning their nests.…

Which pours cold water over Cupertino's insistence that third-party fixes violate privacy Apple has paid a multimillion-dollar settlement to an unnamed Oregon college student after one of its outsourced repair facilities posted explicit pictures and videos of her to her Facebook page.…

The usual suspects are accused of anti-competitive behaviour, naughtiness with data South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission has set up a new team dedicated to investigating abuse of dominance and competition concerns in online ads.…

Basically, it doesn't work Microsoft has closed a long-standing request to port Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) to .NET Core, stating that it "will not be updating VSTO or the COM Add-in platform to use .NET Core."…

Plus: National watchdog says pseudonymisation is data processing The UK government's opposition Labour Party has backed calls for a delay to NHS Digital's controversial slurp of data held by family doctors as new guidance from the Information Commissioner's Office sheds light on the legality of the process.…

Has the hacktivist group had enough of Musk's manipulative crypto-Tweets, or has someone just donned the mask to protest their crashed Bitcoin balance? Entities using the name and iconography of hacktivist collective Anonymous have deemed Elon Musk's recent crypto-tweeting worthy of a re-emergence.…

Yep. The exec responsible for shambolic Test and Trace programme, and TalkTalk's 2015 mega-breach Baroness Dido "Queen of Carnage" Harding, former TalkTalk CEO and current head of NHS Test and Trace, is reportedly eyeing the top job at NHS England.…

At least it was more popular than Skype... just More judges prefer using Microsoft Teams for remote court hearings than a made-to-order video platform bought as part of a £1.2bn Ministry of Justice digitisation initiative, an internal survey has revealed.…

Plus: CyberUp campaign writes to Home Sec British infosec businessees mostly support beefing up the Computer Misuse Act to directly tackle the ransomware crisis – while reform campaign CyberUp has written to Home Secretary Priti Patel offering “support” for “a renewed, forward looking framework”.…

Can be viewed in any light. Bargain Readers of El Reg are nothing if not cultured and frequent dabblers of the avant-garde. Which is why it will come as no surprise that an artist has recently sold an "invisible" sculpture for a reported €15,000 (£13,000).…

Extra performance wrung out, but we wouldn't rush to eBay The benchmarks don't lie. Apple Silicon is fast. The M1 processor outperforms Intel’s competing i5 and i7 chips in virtually every metric you would care to mention, from CPU performance to graphics rendering. With that in mind, one may ask why anyone would want to buy an x86 Mac.…

Big Red wanted TXO Systems dragged to court for years, say legal papers Oracle has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against a British reseller that — it claims — infringed Sun Microsystems’ intellectual property by engaging in grey market reselling.…

One can’t spell shit without IT, but for Pete's sake it doesn't need to be in your endpoints Column Fans of John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy know how top military secrets are extracted from the enemy. Senior figures are turned in operations run by the most secret brains in the country, bluff and double-bluff mix with incredible feats of bravery, treachery and psychological manipulation.…

At least nobody said 'watch this!' Who, Me? Another tale involving buttons of the big and red variety arrives for today's deposit in the Who, Me? archives. There are some things that are best left unsaid. And unpressed.…

Social network lashed for ‘inglorious’, ‘dogged refusal’ to comply India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY) has written to Twitter with a final warning after the micro-blogging service offshored and outsourced some of its obligations under the nation’s content takedown laws.…

Here's a short and sweet summit by Nutanix to set you in the right direction Promo Very few tech leaders can really say that hybrid cloud is not going to account for an increasing part of their corporate infrastructure over the coming years.…

Taiwan was COVID-free for almost a year. Now the virus is out and edging towards major silicon production centres The world’s leading provider of chip testing services, Taiwan’s King Yuan Electronics (KYEC), has suspended production for two days due to a COVID-19 outbreak among the company’s foreign workers.…

Plus: DARPA wants to spend $1m on AI research studying information warfare In brief Machines are like humans – they’re lazy. When given the chance to take the easy route to complete an easy task, they will.…

Emperor Penguin hopes ‘fairly average’ release will ‘start shrinking now’ The fifth release candidate for version 5.13 of the Linux kernel has emerged, and project boss Linus Torvalds has expressed only mild concern about progress.…

Facebook’s Libra project kicked to the kerb until international rules on stabelcoins are set The G7 group of nations has proposed a 15 per cent tax rate for multinational entities and the removal of digital services taxes.…

Donald, you're fired. Again Facebook on Friday announced that former US President Donald Trump will be banned from its platform until at least January 7, 2023, having deemed two-years the appropriate period of exile for statements interpreted as an effort "to provoke further violence," as CEO Mark Zuckerberg put it when the ban was announced.…

Let's be clear what it's talking about though. It is patting itself on back for not taking a cut of Uber's cut Comment Apple and Epic Games have delivered their final arguments in their California bench trial, but Cupertino is still ratcheting up the charm offensive, revealing the App Store "facilitated" a 24 per cent hike in billings and sales in 2020 to a record $643bn.…

Coincidentally, it's the 32nd anniversary of the 1989 massacre in Beijing Thirty-two years ago, on June 4, 1989, Chinese troops killed and arrested thousands of pro-democracy protesters in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, putting an end to demonstrations that began that April.…

'Is that a dong on a drone?' A week is a schlong time in politics – just ask Bernalillo County Sheriff, Manuel Gonzales III, who may be primed to face heckling at political rallies but handling a flying dildo is a different matter.…

US president calls China’s military-industrial complex 'a threat' and condemns surveillance technology for human rights abuse US president Joe Biden has issued an executive order to expand the Trump-era ban preventing Chinese tech and defence companies from receiving American investment, upping it from 31 to 59 named entities.…

Blame Rightmove instead It would be fair to say that the recent decades have not been kind to the newspaper industry.…

Plaintiffs say they would've gone elsewhere had they known iGiant was just using Amazon, Microsoft or Google A US judge has approved a limited class action against Apple for breach of contract following a complaint that its iCloud used third-party servers, including "cloud storage facilities belonging to Amazon, Microsoft, or Google," to host customers' data rather than using its own machines.…

New approach against malware pushers mirrors how American authorities handle terrorism cases The White House has issued a communique to business leaders [PDF] urging them to take the threat of ransomware a bit more seriously.…

Did the anti-social network use advertiser info to compete with rivals? Facebook is facing a twin investigation by UK and EU officials into allegations that it breached competition rules by using data gathered from advertisers on its social media network to compete with rivals.…

BMA separately calls for a delay to the programme The British Medical Association and Royal College of GPs today told NHS Digital they do not endorse the UK government's imminent haul of English GP data – dubbed "the biggest data grab in the history" of the service.…

Twitter Blue only works properly on iOS and just one feature is useful First Look Twitter has announced its first subscription service.…

Latest version ups stablity but also makes it easier to migrate to commercial wares Version 15.3 of openSUSE Leap is out - this being the community version of SUSE Linux Enterprise and the first to be built with the same binary packages as its commercial cousin.…

Claims Russia's FSB was poking around an Eastern European ministry While enterprises stagger under sustained ransomware attacks, Android users are increasingly being targeted by banking malware, with Slovakian infosec firm ESET reckoning it had seen a 159 per cent increase in such malicious software over the last few months.…

Analysts say S/4HANA upgrades remain sluggish, and users want to see things RISE shine before committing Sapphire Now The 60,000 member-strong German-speaking SAP user group (DSAG) has issued a strongly worded statement in response to SAP’s lack of clarity on its RISE cloud upgrade at the annual Sapphire Now event.…

Networking giant alone taken for $3.5m A scammer who convinced some of the world's biggest tech businesses to send him replacement kit has been sentenced to seven years and eight months in the US prison system.…

I don’t care if the football’s on, we’ll have to watch whatever the TV wants us to Something for the Weekend, Sir? My television wants me dead. It’s doing this by playing dead itself. Only one of us will get out of this alive.…

Never again is what you swore... the time before If you rely on your insurer to pay off crooks after a successful ransomware attack, you wouldn't be the only one.…

Sofa, not-so-good: Angry customers still can't access systems, phones, and deliveries delayed Furniture Village – the UK's largest independent furniture retailer with 54 stores nationwide – has been hit by a "cyber-attack", the company confirmed to The Register.…

You want the truth? You can't handle the truth! On Call What's worse than having to deal with an idiot over the phone? Having to drive thousands of miles to deal with the same idiot, face to face. Welcome to another Register reader's experience of helping those who won't help themselves in On Call.…

It’s actually just a stick, but maintenance staff love ‘em Australian airline QANTAS has developed a piece of technology dubbed a “wheel whacker” to help stop snakes and scorpions boarding planes it has parked due to the COVID-19 pandemic.…

Tell us whether you’re ecstatic or exasperated, or somewhere in between Reader survey There is no doubt that more and more applications are being hosted in the cloud. Hyperscalers are seen as the example to follow when it comes to managing infrastructure, while cloud-native organisations dominate the agenda at industry conferences.…

Looks forward to nicely lowered costs as production ramps up, but they're still hyperscaler-only for now For about three years, disk-making giant Seagate has been talking up tech called “MACH.2” – a conventional disk drive that offers considerable speed improvements. And now the disk giant has found that the tech also cuts its costs, raising the prospect that big, fast, hard disk drives might emerge at keen prices.…