The Register

Security quiz site created by advisors includes inadvertent bonus round A website created for global consultancy Deloitte to quiz people on knowledge of hacking tactics has proven itself vulnerable to hacking.…

Nat Friedman says they'll make it harder to impersonate unsigned commits GitHub's CEO has denied that the site's source code was posted to GitHub.…

So it's been seized, along with a bunch of other sites, with Cloudflare accounts providing critical evidence On US presidential election day, 3 November, the nation's Federal Bureau of Investigation acted to seize 27 domains it says Iran used to conduct disinformation campaigns.…

Just don't think about winter In a bold headhunting effort, the Finnish capital city of Helsinki is offering a sabbatical in the Suomi state for Silicon Valleyites.…

Details vague, but ambitions cover 5G, security of comms infrastructure and sharing R&D India has signalled it will sign up to a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the United Kingdom, covering "cooperation in the field of Telecommunications/Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs)."…

Strong-arms Q4 and the year as China fuels 5G sales Qualcomm has hinted at future compute-centric products for the network edge and even the data centre.…

Sophos reckons Chinese gangs are behind attack it's charmingly chosen to name ‘KillSomeOne’ Security vendor Sophos has suggested Chinese purveyors of advanced persistent threats (APTs) are behind a recent wave of attacks on non-governmental organisations and other commercial entities in Myanmar.…

Choo choo! Mind the incoming 'A-train' orbital spacecraft A proposed constellation of 243 satellites, designed to beam internet connectivity to smartphones and under consideration by America's comms watchdog, will triple the existing risk of a potential collision with ten Earth science spacecraft in low-Earth orbit, NASA warned.…

James Baugh, David Harville hit with several new counts Two senior eBay executives who have refused to join their colleagues and plead guilty to charges of cyberstalking have been hit with a string of fresh charges.…

And bad news for Facebook, Google after Golden State favors online privacy measures Californians have overturned lawmakers in two critical ballot measures covering the gig economy and online privacy, with broader implications for the whole country.…

Desktop and Android versions both at risk Patch Google Chrome with the latest updates – if you don't, you're vulnerable to a zero-day that is actively being exploited, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has warned.…

Thanks for the memory An industry-wide supply glut of NAND and DRAM forced prices down over the summer leading to a steep decline in operating profit at SK Hynix, the South Korea memory maker reported today.…

Rules loosened by regulator, concerns raised they favor the rich The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has given a big boost to companies seeking crowdfunded investment – think Kickstarter but securities rather than physical stuff you buy. Organizations are now exempt from various regulatory requirements if they raise at most $5m, up from the previous cap of $1m.…

NCRFRILS had never been disclosed publicly – until court case A protester accused of punching a police officer was arrested after he was identified by facial-recognition software that has not been publicly disclosed before: the National Capital Region Facial Recognition Investigative Leads System (NCRFRILS).…

That's going to smooth relations between Larry and Jeff Cloud computing superpower AWS has secured the services of Oracle veteran Rich Geraffo as veep for its Americas sales team amid the ongoing market tussle with Big Red.…

Suit pushes Uncle Sam to release documents comms giant alleges were suppressed due to 'policy objectives' Embattled Chinese telecoms outfit Huawei has filed suit against the US government over allegations it is "stonewalling" legitimate Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.…

Savage judge condemns crim's behaviour as 'utterly stupid' An Essex IT worker has walked free from court after screwing with the British Business Bank's systems in revenge for not getting a payrise.…

News aggregator says it's 'way more complicated and much harder to parse' The BBC website, the sixth most popular in the UK, has mostly migrated from bit barns to Amazon Web Services (AWS) with around half the site now rendered on AWS Lambda, a serverless platform.…

It has been Biden its time Voters in Massachusetts have approved a ballot measure that is widely being interpreted as a major win for the right-to-repair movement.…

Orbital lab emerges from teens to an uncertain future. How very 2020 The world's space agencies (at least those involved in the International Space Station) popped the Champagne corks this week to celebrate 20 years of continuous human occupation of the orbiting laboratory.…

Gartner's finest – a former vulture – draws clouds over eyebrow-raising connectivity plan A company working with a hydrogen-powered 5G drone maker claims to have built an airborne 5G base station antenna "unlike anything ever seen before" – and that just 60 of them could replace Britain's terrestrial 5G networks.…

Hip to be square and aimed at the Euro crowd Review First impressions are important, and the X51 5G is Vivo's inaugural device for the crowded European smartphone market.…

Oh sorry, did you expect this headline to work out differently? There are less than two months to go before the UK departs its 40-year relationship with the EU and it is still working on the IT systems needed to make the new arrangement work.…

Get ready for Energy Star stickers on your robo-butlers, maybe? Training OpenAI’s giant GPT-3 text-generating model is akin to driving a car to the Moon and back, computer scientists reckon.…

But first, he gets a judicial review and chance to extend eight-year legal saga New Zealand’s highest court has ruled that Kim Dotcom can be extradited to the United States of America to face charges of copyright infringement.…

Critical Acrobat, Reader flaws evidently couldn't wait until next week Adobe on Tuesday published updated versions of its Acrobat and Reader software to fix fourteen flaws, four of which have been designated "critical." These updates should be installed as soon as possible to close off their vulnerabilities.…

And it’ll be in proper SSDs, not cheap NAND muck that drives infotainment systems today, say analysts Passenger cars on sale in 2025 will ship with a terabyte of storage, according to analyst firm Counterpoint, and fully autonomous cabs might need 11TB of capacity.…

Taking a strategic stake in the biz probably helped and shows how big tech is buying into Asia Microsoft has taken a “strategic stake” in Indonesian e-tailer Bukalapak and will run the service in its Azure cloud.…

Fixes look to have landed in GitHub well ahead of disclosure SaltStack has officially revealed three bugs in its code – two of them seemingly critical – and told users: “We strongly recommend that you prioritize this update.” But the biz appears to have known about the bugs for months and quietly patched them over the summer.…

That or Jack Ma mouthing off about the nation's financial watchdogs The Chinese government on Tuesday halted Ant Group's $35bn stock-market debut, which would have been the world's largest-ever IPO had it happened. The move is being interpreted as Beijing punishing one of the planet's richest men, Jack Ma, for earlier running his mouth.…

Dodgy JavaScript code downloaded hundreds of times GitHub's NPM on Monday removed a JavaScript library called twilio-npm because it contained malicious code, which has become something of a recurring theme for the open-source JavaScript code registry.…

'Foreign-born scientists, engineers, developers of emerging technology, other highly skilled workers' locked out of America The battle between the tech industry and the Trump administration over work visas continues apace, with no less than 46 tech companies challenging new rules in court, while the US Chamber of Commerce has accused the government of ignoring an injunction against an earlier set of changes.…

Code shack describes issue as 'moderate' security flaw, plans to disable risky commands gradually Google's bug-hunting Project Zero team has posted details of an injection vulnerability in GitHub Actions after refusing a request to postpone disclosure.…

Reach out to your loved ones - but in Great Britain you'll have to use your phone A handy feature in Google's Nest speakers allows users to place calls to mobiles and landlines free of charge without a subscription or dedicated handset. Sadly, that particular benefit is coming to an end in the UK.…

Jamstack, Kubernetes, community contributions, and automatic translation – what could go wrong? Mozilla's MDN JavaScript and web technology reference documentation is migrating to a new GitHub-based platform, codenamed Yari, which is now in beta and taking contributions.…

Small Brit firm pushes back against Zuckerborg sueball Mobile app developers accused by Facebook of deploying “malicious” SDKs to scrape users’ data from the social network have hit back, telling London’s High Court that nearly all their apps were “not capable” of harvesting data from Facebook itself.…

Drag racing in orbit with Rocket Lab Rocket Lab is planning a 30-satellite launch via its 16th Electron launch from New Zealand. The payload will include a statue of Gnome Chompski*, presumably in an attempt to unlock hitherto unknown Half-Life achievements.…

Just One More Thing, eh? Apple has set a date for the next emission of its inevitably overpriced gear. The socially distanced (and likely pre-recorded) affair will be Cupertino's third event in as many months, and is expected to introduce the inaugural cohort of Arm-powered Macs.…

Also: HoloLens 2 Dev Edition out, .NET 5 prepares debut, and PowerToys Mute gets experimental In Brief It is said that Microsoft giveth and Microsoft taketh away.…

D'oh! If only they'd seen bug before issuing those 402 other fixes Oracle has released an emergency patch after a security vulnerability was revealed in its WebLogic middleware last week.…

Just don't leave. Plus: Cloud subscription model is 'increasing customer lifetime revenue' SAP CEO Christian Klein has committed to extending customer payment terms and helping partners struggling as the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic grips Europe and governments enforce further lockdowns.…

It's really dope. Yep it's an energy-efficient process kicked off by gadolinium-doped cerium dioxide Researchers in Spain have uncovered a new approach to producing hydrogen via water splitting which could help overcome some of the drawbacks to this promising alternative fuel source.…

But annual report doesn't mention China once The National Cyber Security Centre fended off more than 700 cyber attacks directed against the British state over the last year, of which about a quarter were COVID-19 related.…

Plus: Faster on-demand supercomputing. P4d VMs with Nvidia A100 and GPUDirect RDMA AWS will deliver a new public container registry "within weeks" in response to Docker's introduction of pull rate limits for Docker Hub.…

Why? Because it's 2020. Oh OK, the real reason is: More efficient use of on-board cameras Tiny monitoring devices, strapped to birds, used artificial intelligence to work smarter, it is claimed.…

Ex-BAE Systems bod's letter read to Old Bailey A former BAE Systems engineer accused of failing to hand over his device passwords to Merseyside Police vowed not to give them up until a watchdog investigated his allegations that police workers had perverted the course of justice, the Old Bailey heard.…

Oh never mind, the project was 'reset' It was all smiles when the City of Edinburgh Council announced the extension of its managed IT services contract with supplier CGI in September. But talk of smart city services using artificial intelligence and IoT belied a sorry tale of an abandoned Unit4 ERP project which led two suppliers to the courtroom door.…

Air freight costs grounded mobile profits, but PC sales and overall profits keep rising Lenovo has posted interim results for Q2 and the first half of 2020 and revealed that while clouds builders went on a spending spree, the company’s data centre group (DCG) is still making losses.…

No, no, no, you hit it like this *whack* GitHub has warned it may ban users who fork a DMCA'd YouTube download tool on its platform – while at the same time hinting at how netizens can continue distributing the software without drawing fire.…

Officials go with randomly selected words with unintentionally hilarious results. Filthy Python, anyone? Many memorable events get named, whether they're hurricanes, political events, or security incidents like the Morris Worm, which surfaced 32 years ago yesterday.…