The Register

Developer account cracked due to credential reuse, source tampered with and released to hundreds of programmers An old version of a Ruby software package called rest-client that was modified and released about a week ago has been removed from the Ruby Gems repository – because it was found to be deliberately leaking victims' credentials to a remote server.…

FCC delivers postmortem after blunder cripples US fiber links A handful of bad network packets triggered a massive chain reaction that crippled the entire network of US telco CenturyLink for roughly a day and a half.…

Where will you stand now that Redmond has raised the web-surfing stakes? Microsoft has rolled out the first beta version of its Chromium-based Edge web browser.…

Big Blue says it will open OpenPower, power next-gen chips in China, er, anywhere IBM is planning to allow chip designers around the world to freely create OpenPower-compatible processors.…

You listening, Trump? An internal memo to Huawei staff sent by boss Ren Zhengfei is long on military metaphors and warns that the company needs to go into "battle mode" to counter trade barriers put up by the United States.…

Punters bemoan comms silence with no fix in sight Customers of Brit hosting outfit TSO Host are suffering from a cluster of issues leaving them without email services for a prolonged period or a clear idea when they'll get them back.…

Look, we caught up with AWS Python developers – the world of Azure Functions is yours at last.…

British sprogs have a million pretend pals, says survey A survey of 1,000 parents has found that pre-school kids who spend more than an hour gazing at screens every day are less likely to have an imaginary friend.…

He also developed one of the first ever flight simulators The computer scientist who created the first visual flight simulator, gave us the compsci concept of endianness and whose pioneering work blazed a trail for modern VOIP services has died at the age of 81.…

You say mode, they say policy, S call the whole thing off Windows Insiders were seeing double last night as Microsoft once again pushed out not one but two builds of October's Windows 10.…

Also: Rocket Lab launches eighth Electron, good and bad news for China Round Up While India arrived in lunar orbit this morning, bickering over who would lead NASA's next lander flared up, Rocket Lab notched another success and a Chinese satellite appeared to falter.…

Amazon, Apple and Facebook also to face scrutiny – report Several individual US state attorney generals are considering antitrust action against Google and other technology giants, according to The New York Times.…

Taking the PC maker's road warrior out on the, er, road Hands on Lenovo's latest ThinkPad X390 arrived at Vulture Central and was promptly taken out on the road to assess how the business darling took to its new togs.…

Plus, Cerebras hypes up AI-focused '400,000-core die the size of an iPad' Hot Chips At the Hot Chips symposium in Silicon Valley on Monday, IBM and Intel each revealed a few more details about some upcoming processors of theirs.…

File under: 'Breaking' news iPhone hackers have discovered Apple's most recent iOS update, 12.4, released in July, accidentally reopened a code-execution vulnerability that was previously patched – a vulnerability that can be abused to jail-break iThings.…

Officials suspect a coordinated extortion campaign Twenty-three towns in Texas have been targeted with ransomware in what appears to be a coordinated attack.…

Order banning any further infringement stays, as does Big Red's legal bill The quantum legal battle between Oracle and Rimini Street continues, with an appeals judge this month confirming Rimini can't claw back the $28.5m it was forced to cough up to foot Oracle's lawyer bills. And, yes, Rimini is still banned from ripping off Oracle's intellectual property.…

Dell-EMC storage blunder leaves Canucks fuming for four days Dealing with email is possibly the most tedious daily exercise that the modern digital world has forced on us. But 13 million customers of Canadian ISP Telus have discovered that not having that problem is more of a burden.…

Flawed code traced to home build system, vulnerability can be attacked in certain configs Updated The maintainers of Webmin – an open-source application for system-administration tasks on Unix-flavored systems – have released Webmin version 1.930 and the related Usermin version 1.780 to patch a vulnerability that can be exploited to achieve remote code execution in certain configurations.…

Baffling bug forces folks to use Safari, IE, etc A bizarre outage left unlucky Chrome users unable to sign into Google services, from Gmail to Google Docs to even Chromebooks, earlier today.…

I want to get Huawei, I want to fry Huawei, yeah, yeah, yeah Uncle Sam today granted another "extension" to Huawei, allowing the Chinese equipment manufacturer to continue to buy and use American electronic components and software despite being on an "entity list" of banned recipients of US tech.…

Write once, optimise everywhere amirite? Microsoft has snapped up London-based jClarity in an effort to bump up the performance of Java workloads on Azure.…

Hop from 4.12 to 4.14 fixes 'a boatload of bugs'. Hooray! In contrast to the frenetic pace of updates now typical in the software industry, the team behind Xfce, a lightweight desktop for Linux, have released version 4.14 nearly four-and-a-half years since the last stable release, 4.12.…

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Sanitised browser history sparked another investigation One of the crew who hacked TalkTalk has been ordered to hand over £400,000 after seizing control of a high-profile Instagram account following a hack on Aussie telco Telstra.…

For the love of Windows, please leave that poor text editor alone Roundup It's the summer holidays. A good time to do things while nobody's watching. Except The Register, of course. Aside from sneaking Notepad into the Windows Store, last week Microsoft gave Insiders a new 2020 Windows 10 build, added features back into Skype, rounded out Azure's persistent disk storage and prepared a Typescript update.…

Is the platform's abuse policy unfair to genuine developers? Developer Patrick Godeau has claimed his business is under threat after his Google Play Publisher account was terminated without a specific reason given.…

Spec design flaw stiffs security of gizmos Roundup Let's run through all the bits and bytes of security news beyond what we've already covered. Also, don't forget our articles from this year's Black Hat, DEF CON, and BSides Las Vegas conferences in the American desert.…

After inaction, technical changes promise better fraud defense Three years ago, Google software engineer Ali Juma proposed that Chrome should be modified to ignore recently moved iframe elements on web pages as a defense against clickjacking.…

Bill approaching £9m compared to £4.1m in last procurement process Concerns have been raised over a key supplier of an e-counting system for the London Mayoral elections in 2020.…

Screen says 'Data save failed' so it must be true Who, Me? The weekend is over and that means another tale of reader misdeeds to kick-start your Monday with our regular column, Who, Me?…

Nvidia is pleased with its latest numbers, and more Roundup Our weekly AI roundup is back from a little summer break, and once again covering bits and pieces from the world of machine learning beyond what's already been reported by Team Register.…

Just what is Patrick Byrne's role in the Deep State? He's here to tell you Comment How much of a company's value is tied up in its leadership?…

Alerted to exposed credentials, users do something about it roughly a quarter of the time Between February and March this year, after Google released a Chrome extension called Password Checkup to check whether people's username and password combinations had been stolen and leaked from website databases, computer scientists at the biz and Stanford University gathered anonymous telemetry from 670,000 people who installed the add-on.…

You never know, we might figure out how not to screw up in future Analysis In the clearest possible sign that the US intelligence services live within their own political bubble, the director of national intelligence has asked Congress to reauthorize a spying program that the NSA itself decided to shut down after it repeatedly – and illegally – gathered the call records of millions of innocent Americans.…

Write once, run anywhere? You must be joking Dropbox has abandoned a longstanding technical strategy of sharing C++ code between its applications for iOS and Android, saying the overhead of writing code twice is less than the cost of making code-sharing work.…

400MHz ought to be enough for anyone? An intermittent but longstanding issue where Microsoft Surface Pro 6 and Surface Book 2 devices run super slow continues to frustrate users.…

Sandbox services are bursting with sensitive info from unwitting companies Companies are inadvertently leaving confidential files on the internet for anyone to download – after uploading the documents to malware-scanning websites that make everything public.…

The conference call equivalent of being taken round the back and... Oracle is shuttering its flash storage division and laying off at least 300 employees, according to various sources.…

Cloud biz still dwarfed by retail but everything's up Alibaba, China's nearest equivalent to Amazon, is weathering the "uncertain economic" landscape caused in part by the "trade war" between the US and Middle Kingdom governments.…

ICO wants to know if AI surveillance systems in central London are legal The UK's privacy watchdog last night launched a probe into the use of facial-recognition technology in the busy King's Cross corner of central London.…

Bypass our tracking controls at your unspecified peril, warns maker of minor browser Apple's WebKit team on Wednesday formalized the company's oft-repeated pro-privacy stance (provided you're not in China) by declaring that privacy-piercing browser code will be treated as a security abuse.…

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Kaspersky and Trend Micro have released updates to address vulnerabilities in their respective security tools.…

Extending DNS security protocol to multiple platforms takes root A plan to expand the current DNSSEC security protocol to cover multiple DNS platforms has received the backing of Salesforce, with a first proof-of-concept implementation of the approach announced on Thursday.…

A human driver is still needed, for the moment at least Package delivery giant UPS has invested in TuSimple, a self-driving startup based in San Diego, California, to develop autonomous trucks, the mega-corp announced on Thursday.…

Google Assistant can now send reminders to friends and family – this won't end well Having failed to grasp the lesson of Microsoft's annoying animated Office assistant, Clippy – humans hate being hectored by software – Google has empowered its Assistant software to remind people to do things at the behest of another.…

Reminder: They're not allowed to do that without permission The Attorney General of Ohio has banned cops and the Feds from accessing the US state's database of drivers' license plates and faces until the officers and g-men receive adequate privacy compliance training.…

Small percentage of workforce but sign of the times Cisco has laid off 500 programmers in its home state of California amid disappointing financial results and a sagging share price.…

SD-WAN, bam, thank you, ma'am Backgrounder Businesses relying on hybrid clouds need to be especially mindful of how they protect the sensitive data that flows between their on- and off-premises systems. Employees can be anywhere, using multiple devices (sometimes simultaneously) and any type of network (including public Wi-Fi) to access cloud services, all of which need to be secured against malware, unauthorized access and eavesdropping.…

Translation: they're in Blighty to stay and they know it Huawei has reportedly boasted that it will continue investing in the UK even if the British government U-turns on allowing the Chinese company to supply critical 5G mobile network equipment.…