The Register

You want root shell access? No problem A new report has suggested that 12 out of 13 network devices, such as routers and network-attached storage appliances, are vulnerable to hacks that enable "root-privileged access without any authentication".…

Sweetheart deal crackdown 'defies reality and common sense' apparently Apple has appealed against the European Union's 2016 decision to impose a €13bn tax bill on the iPhone maker's Irish subsidiary.…

John Enoch gives us the hard sell – just ignore the price AWS Transformation Day It's London's turn with AWS Transformation Day, where attendees endure a cacophony of buzzwords intended to hammer home the message that Amazon's cloud is where you wanna be.…

Security engineer actually reads privacy policy to his horror Hewlett-Packard Inc's printers don't just slurp the contents of your wallet at a frightening rate. They also guzzle a surprising amount of data on you and whatever you're printing.…

Hi, remember us? We share a toolset. And have another preview to do? Having promised there wouldn't be any more previews, Microsoft has dropped a release candidate for the upcoming .NET Core 3.0 framework.…

Required: GSoH, plus ability to make ends meet on up to £180k a year UK.gov is on the lookout for a Government Chief Digital Information Officer (GCDIO) - a permanent secretary role that sets the strategic direction of travel for public sector IT in return for up to £180,000 a year.…

Government cares what you think. Honest A UK Home Office consultation on new, intrusive police powers was so incompetently written that you could both "strongly agree" and "strongly disagree" at the same time when answering its questions.…

Join us and our awesome speakers for a hearty no-hype pure-tech deep dive Event Whether you’re worried about the machines taking over, or think it can’t happen soon enough, you should get yourselves down to MCubed at the end of the month.…

Happy 43rd birthday to Space Shuttle Enterprise Roundup Unlike SpaceX's Crew Dragon, which plops down in the ocean at the end of a mission (ideally in one piece), Boeing's CST-100 Starliner is designed to land on, er, land. As NASA and Boeing inch ever closer to its first crewed launch, rehearsals were conducted last week to practice locating a capsule, safing it and preparing for hatch opening.…

Suit filed alleging HR failed to protect staffer from harassment Google has been hit by another age discrimination lawsuit, just two months after the search giant settled a previous case brought by over 200 people.…

Did someone mention a delay? Rollout given another 4 years as price tag soars to £13.4bn The UK government has confirmed that electricity suppliers have an extra four years to hit targets for installing smart meters.…

IRL Star Trek: Discovery, sort of The Unconventional Computing Laboratory in Bristol is looking for a research associate to help it create buildings with embedded fungus-created computers.…

Heigh-ho, Heigh-ho, it's off to test we go... Roundup While the speculation machine for Microsoft's mystery hardware event ramped up (although still a mere ripple compared to the spurtings around anything to do with Apple), the Redmond gang continued to toil. Here are some of the stories you might have missed.…

Don't panic: Off and f*ck still free from Zuckerberg, for now Facebook has applied to trademark the word "book" in Europe.…

Get the answers you need this month – and ready your systems for the 2020s Promo If you are beginning to wonder whether your familiar old data warehouse and analytics solutions can keep pace with the fast-moving modern world, you should check out today's state-of-the-art data-handling and analytics systems.…

Alternatively, you can try to overpower it with your incredibly amazing sarcasm Trolls, morons, and bots plaster toxic crap all over Twitter and other antisocial networks. Can machine learning help clean it up?…

GNU founder resigns after Minsky defense 'the final straw' for dev world Interview Shortly after The Register learned that Richard Stallman, founder and then president of the Free Software Foundation and creator of the GNU Project, had been invited to speak at Microsoft's corporate headquarters, we emailed him to ask about the apparent incongruity of advocating for software freedom at a company singled out by the FSF as a maker of malware.…

El Reg decodes Big Red's big announcements from today OpenWorld Oracle on Monday debuted a free, self-fixing Linux distribution for paying Oracle Cloud customers, and a free Cloud service tier that includes a limited version of its paid Autonomous Database, for winning developer favor and fostering future Cloud customers.…

Lineup looks to put a pep in the step of flailing systems group IBM this month officially unveiled the newest addition to the Z-series mainframe lineup in roughly two years.…

One of these days we'll use machine learning to write these AI news summaries Roundup Let's catch up with recent goings on in the world of artificial intelligence.…

Punters say their gear has been messed up for a month-plus Fitbit wearers are super-upset that a buggy software update has for the past month made their wearable exercise trackers unable to properly sync with their Android devices.…

Five amendments to law approved before deadline, none undercut core goals Analysis California’s landmark digital privacy law will remain “largely intact” despite a year of determined lobbying by Google and other tech giants to undermine it.…

All part of Big Red's regular small-ish release plan as opposed to large infrequent updates Code One Oracle on Monday announced the release of Java SE 13 (JDK 13), saying it shows the tech titan's continued commitment to make innovation happen faster by sticking to a predictable six-month release cycle.…

Update now to stop webpages snooping on recently used credentials LastPass has fixed a security bug that potentially allowed malicious websites to obtain the username and passphrase inserted by the password manager on the previously visited site.…

The last Surface RT user just needs to fill in a web form to... oh heck The bad news bus has continued rolling for users of hardware both young and old as Wi-Fi woes plague Windows 10 and even Windows 8.1.…

Guv'nor explains regression again, without the expletives A softer, gentler Linus Torvalds released the Linux 5.3 kernel over the weekend and swung open the doors on 5.4.…

And Julian Assange is among them - but how old are these? Records on more than 20 million individuals in Ecuador have leaked from an unsecured database in Miami, Florida, containing a mix of official citizen registration data and personal & banking details.…

Extension to October 2020. But what of Server 2008 or... Windows 7? Microsoft has blinked and told customers that support for Exchange 2010 is to be kicked back from 14 January 2020 to 13 October of the same year.…

Researchers debunk tax-fraud imposter theory Russian claims that the world's oldest-ever human on record actually had her identity stolen by her daughter have been trashed by a paper published today in The Journals of Gerontology.…

So much for the public deterrence value of attribution Australian snoops concluded that China was to blame for a series of hacks on its parliament and leading political parties – but kept it quiet for fear of angering the Middle Kingdom, according to reports.…

Oh, and you have four weeks to comply, says US antitrust probe The US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee has written to the big four tech giants – Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Google – demanding comprehensive information on its financial structures and 10 years' worth of emails between top executives.…

New validity rules in event of no deal for Brits travelling to EU The UK Home Office will send a million text messages reminding people that the rules for travelling to the European Union will change in the event of a no-deal Brexit on 31 October.…

Creator denies it's a prank Blenheim Palace was forced to close its doors on Saturday following the theft of a solid-gold loo – a piece of art called "America".…

Prepare Reg readers, it is time to enter an alternate reality where up is down, black is white and Capita is cuddly The outsourcing of government IT projects has largely worked, according to a cornflake-spluttering report by the Institute for Government.…

EVALUATE COBOL-AGE WHEN 60 CONTINUE COBOL is celebrating 60 years since its specifications were signed off. Darling of Y2K consultants, the language is rapidly approaching pensionable age, but many a greybeard owes their career to it.…

Broken ID system isn't going to track you. No one's using it! Analysis The Government Digital Service's troubled identity system Verify has been at the heart of a controversial plan to supposedly track users online in the run-up to Brexit. However, its unlikely role in Brexit preparations may be more about GDS finding an excuse to save the moribund platform than anything more sinister.…

A handover or handcuffs? Take your pick, eh? Who, Me? Bid farewell to the weekend and a cheery hello to work with a tale of a near-cuffing in our regular Who, Me? column.…

AWS spills the beans Promo You know it makes sense to go to the cloud, and you know it makes sense to encrypt your data. But just what should you be encrypting - and where? And what’s the most efficient way of carrying it out, and managing your encryption strategy in the future?…

... And they’re not happy Colin McDermott was surprised this week to receive an invoice from the UK’s largest domain name registrar, 123-Reg, auto-billing him £11.99 for a domain name he never ordered.…

Further investigation suggests she may actually have a point While Kenyan politicians discussed possible amendments to safety protocols on commercial flights this week, one delivered an impassioned plea.…

This year's theme was 'habits' and they were baaaaad The Annals of Improbable Research held its annual award-giving ceremony – the Ig Nobel Prize – on Thursday night at Harvard's Sanders Theatre, and the entries were as worthy as ever.…

Mine's a pint of oolong, please, love Researchers from the National University of Singapore have found that drinking tea regularly really is good for you, especially your brain. They say they have also discovered why.…

Star-spangled luxury EV trips the light fantastic In the same week that the motoring industry discovered the Tesla Model 3 was the UK's third most popular car purchase, Mercedes-Benz unveiled an electric supercar at the Frankfurt Motor Show with high expectations, and probably no little relief.…

An argument in favor of a single source of truth in your organization Opinion One of the tech industry’s longest running quests is developing the notion of a single source of truth within organizations. That is, no matter who or where you are within a business, when it comes to running the numbers or making a decision, your applications are accessing the same information as everybody else internally. No out of date, duplicated, or otherwise imperfect copies.…

It's like, how much more black could this be and the answer is none. None more black Carbon nanotubes have peculiar properties. Not only do they have the highest strength-to-weight ratio of any known substance they can also absorb the most light, making them the blackest material yet.…

Reaches agreement with US government over Labor rights Google has agreed to settle two complaints filed with the National Labor Relations Board by former employees who claim the company fired them from engaging in lawfully protected workplace speech.…

Section 230 has legal eagles split over censorship Malwarebytes will have to head back to court to justify a decision to block its rival’s antivirus services after an appeals court threw out the security shop's legal justification.…

The future is automated, says Trend Micro bod Infosec techies should prepare to both fend off AI attacks and welcome the technology into their armoury of tools, reckons Trend Micro's director of cybercrime research.…

D'ya hear that, cybercrooks? $50k up for grabs. Fire, theft, flood – and now cyber attack. Customers of a Californian biz offering payouts of up to $50,000 in case your cat videos get Wannacry’d but experts worry it could make the problem worse.…

Boffins spot a possible follow up to 'Oumuamua ESA scientists are studying an object that has all the hallmarks of being another entity from outside our Solar System, making it the second to be spotted after 2017's cigar-shaped interstellar comet.…