The Register

Probing systems during a live election 'to be treated as hostile unless authorization granted,' Voatz insists About 70 members of the computer security community on Monday challenged US voting app maker Voatz's effort to dictate the terms under which bug hunters can look for code flaws.…

Beijing's snoops don't even need zero-days to break into valuable networks The US government says the Chinese government's hackers are preying on a host of high-profile security holes in enterprise IT equipment to infiltrate Uncle Sam's agencies and American businesses.…

Aliens may not be so different from us here on Earth – unintelligent and gassy Video Alien life may exist in the thick clouds in Venus’ atmosphere, scientists speculated in research published in Nature Astronomy on Monday.…

Atlanta to upgrade software license with more protection, clerk tells us A court hearing on election security in America failed in its own security efforts – when it was zoombombed with porn, swastikas and images of the World Trade Center attacks.…

You can do it the easy way or the easier way A "hack-proof" smart padlock with security based on blockchain technology could be defeated by a simple Bluetooth replay attack – or a 1kg lump hammer.…

Microsoft went to sea, sea, sea to see what it could see, see, see... Microsoft has hauled its data centre in a box, Natick, up from the seabed and concluded that data is indeed better, down where it's wetter, under the sea.…

Meanwhile, co-founder petitions UK.gov to keep HQ and jobs at home Nvidia expects its $40bn buy of chip designer Arm to take over a year to close and to involve plenty of discussions with regulators – ones that will be interested in how the "Switzerland" of semiconductors can remain independent and still appeal to its new owner's rivals.…

Equipment failure shuts down servers, networking, storage Microsoft is said to be eyeing up linking people to Azure via satellite – just as its cloud platform partially tripped over in the UK, derailing the country's coronavirus statistics page.…

Save yourself money, save yourself space Register Debate Welcome to The Register Debate in which we pitch our writers against each other on contentious topics in IT and enterprise tech, and you – the reader – decide the winning side. The format is simple: a motion is proposed, for and against arguments are published today, then another round of arguments on Wednesday, and a concluding piece on Friday summarizing the brouhaha and the best reader comments.…

August breach hadn't been cleared up at all – and regulators are furious Personal data on 24 million South Africans, wrongfully sold by Experian to a person it claimed had "pretended" to represent a "legitimate client", is now not only circulating on the dark web – it's also on clearweb file-sharing sites, according to reports.…

They're the real thing... just not the thing they look very much like Updated US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is tasked with protecting the country from terrorists, clandestine immigrants, agricultural pests, and anyone with a funny accent. Add to that list Chinese tech brand OnePlus, which has had 2,000 of its wireless earbuds seized under the belief that they were counterfeit Apple AirPods.…

$1,400 phone has 'built-in death clock' and 'is not something meant to be repaired', muses iFixit The lifespan of a smartphone is short and brutal. Their beating heart is a battery that will, given enough cycles, puff up and die. Unfortunately, Microsoft's Surface Duo is designed to confound even the most routine maintenance, as argued by iFixit's latest teardown.…

Privacy-conscious biz insists on rolling its own mitigations, though Encrypted email biz Tutanota has apologised for accidentally shutting its own users out while fending off the latest of a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.…

'It’s hard to see how Carphone can turn around its mobile business' BT is ditching a two-decade trading agreement with Dixons Carphone in preference of selling services via its own network of high street stores, months after O2 called time on its contract with the retailer.…

Cost benefits are oversold – and may be completely wrong Register Debate Welcome to The Register Debate in which we pitch our writers against each other on contentious topics in IT and enterprise tech, and you – the reader – decide the winning side. The format is simple: a motion is proposed, for and against arguments are published today, then another round of arguments on Wednesday, and a concluding piece on Friday summarizing the brouhaha and the best reader comments.…

A very strange pairing indeed Updated Oracle is reportedly set to snap up TikTok's US operations - the astronomically popular, China-founded social media network - in what could be the century’s strangest corporate buy-out.…

Linux distro founder apologises for 'having dropped the ball' Canonical founder and CEO Mark Shuttleworth said yesterday that he will revive the defunct Community Council amid complaints that the volunteer Ubuntu community has been neglected.…

Update to give your phone a 3-fingered gesture (to translate words. What did you think we meant?) Android manufacturers often lean towards custom UIs in a bid to distinguish themselves from the competition. Among that camp is Chinese smartphone vendor OPPO, which today introduced the latest update to its Color OS platform.…

Plus get patching your Palo Alto kit, there's a nasty crit out there In brief Cryptocurrency exchange Eterbase last week admitted hackers broke into its computers and made off with other people's coins, said to be worth $5.4m.…

We know it is a bore, but check your backup and restore Who, Me? Banish those Monday blues with a recollection of IT-related foolishness in The Register's Who, Me? feature.…

Cloud giant's Kubernetes-based brand presented as open source and multi-cloud – but it is not so simple Google Cloud's Next OnAir – a 63-day video epic – is drawing to a close with its Business Application Platform week, but the main keynote was on the exact same topic as that from a fortnight ago: Application Modernization, specifically Anthos.…

Great, back to the '80s green-screens Global ERP slinger Infor has paid UK hardware and construction retailer Travis Perkins £4.2m in settlement for a four-year failed ERP project that cost £108m.…

‘Certain foreign governments’ can’t be allowed to conduct mass surveillance “Certain foreign governments” should not be allowed to access technology that would let them deploy facial recognition technology as a tool of mass surveillance, says IBM government and regulatory affairs veep Christopher A. Padilla.…

Template for post-Brexit bilateral deals excludes algorithmic disclosures too The UK and Japan have agreed to a new trade deal that will see the two nations to share a “free flow of data” across their borders.…

Software fighter pilots could bring a whole new meaning to 'crash and burn' In brief The US Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said a “full-scale tactical aircraft” controlled by an AI system will go up against a human fighter pilot in a real-world dogfight in 2024.…

Then hired some of them back on lower wages IBM systematically sought to sack older workers, according to the United States' Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).…

Party like it’s 1986 when the Walkman craze put cassettes on top of the charts Vinyl records accounted for 62 percent of revenue derived from physical music sales across America in the first half of 2020 – the first time they’ve beaten compact disks in decades, apparently.…

UK to remain HQ as combined companies eye off cloud-to-edge AI stack Nvidia has announced it will buy UK chip-designer Arm.…

Redmond wishes good luck to whoever gets to fix TikTok's security and fake news problems - which may be Oracle as a host not an operator Updated Microsoft has revealed ByteDance, owner of TikTok, has declined to sell its social media app's US operations to the software giant.…

Janus mission seeks solution to orbiting space rocks in the Solar System NASA is splashing $55m on a new space mission to send two small camera-carrying spacecraft into the heavens to study a type of an object in our Solar System that has yet to be observed in detail: binary asteroids.…

Better yet - do the basics and your systems won't get encrypted in the first place Most online attacks could be easily avoided by following basic cyber security advice, Australia’s national cyber security bureau has said – even as it warned that the impact and severity of things like ransomware attacks are getting worse and worse.…

What's that? You want to breathe clean air? Tough luck then VMware, the cloud computing biz headquartered in Palo Alto, California, will reportedly cut salaries for employees opting to permanently work-from-home if they decide to move out of Silicon Valley.…

But playboy CTO and Big Red plays to Wall Street types with slick sales patter The first rule of presenting club is, know your audience. Larry Ellison certainly knows his.…

'May constitute a possible breach of the Computer Misuse and Cybersecurity Act' A Singapore golf club has called in the police claiming members may have broken the country’s Computer Misuse Act after using scripts to book up course slots within seconds of them becoming available.…

Avoid bloated pulls thanks to more formatting smarts Microsoft's cross-platform code wrangler, Visual Studio Code, has received its monthly batch of updates, including editor tweaks and debugger improvements.…

... but humans still needed to fix the 'Hygiene Compartment' NASA has conjured imaginings of an orbital Roomba after boasting of a "sweep" of the ISS interior by an Astrobee robot as hardworking 'nauts keep the outpost up and running.…

But beware last week's update: WSL borkage may await ye with sharp, pointy Element Not Found errors Although Windows 10X remains missing in action, Microsoft dished up some more goodies for Linux fans in the latest Dev Channel build of Windows 10.…

Special source poured into GitHub Microsoft has published the kernel for its new Surface Duo smartphone to GitHub, making it easier for third parties to develop their own custom ROMs for the unusual, yet critically panned dual-screen blower.…

The only lockdown excursion we'll be taking - courtesy of some heated hardware Bork!Bork!Bork! Bork leaves the shores of the UK today and returns to Italy, country of culture, history and the finest of bork.…

Oracle wins protest after agency failed to get it kicked out for not being a reseller In a decision [PDF] issued yesterday, a US public watchdog said the Library of Congress needs to stop asking contractors to supply brand-name-only commercial stuff for a five-year $150m cloud hosting contract.…

Remember when The Reg told you in 2012 that they were taking over? A UK government desperate for good news in the face escalating cases of COVID-19 has finally announced a launch date for its contact-tracing app, once said to be the "cornerstone" of Blighty's pandemic response.…

Doing the right thing - after trying all the wrong things first A “female social network” called Giggle whose operators left its user database unsecured has triggered a wave of Twitter controversy after its founder threatened to sue a UK infosec firm who pointed out the vulnerability.…

Spoiler alert: Not that machine-learning salesperson Register Debate How does that saying go? I'm not a cynic, I'm a realist. That's pretty much how I'd sum up our first-ever Register Debate, which ran this week.…

Android skin has some worthwhile updates, despite software lag Huawei has claimed to be prepping its Android-challenging homegrown mobile operating system, but still has to look after its existing smartphone customers.…

Supply chain woes also fingered after second quarter of pain in Europe Western Europe led a decline in the value of EMEA external storage systems sales in Q3 with a recovery in the remainder of the year obviously hinging on whether a second wave of infections leads to further lockdowns.…

So says Pro Privacy after automatedly gazing at 82,000 sites British charities are sharing information about people visiting their websites with adtech data brokers, according to a report.…

And there you were thinking the annual developer conference was all about software It wasn't just software that hogged the limelight at Huawei's annual developer conference, the embattled Chinese company's PC hardware got a fresh lick of paint too.…

Fab: Boffins etch cooling into chip design Researchers in Switzerland demonstrated an approach that may have gone some way to addressing the sweltering heat and worrying carbon emissions from large computer systems: by integrating liquid cooling into microprocessor fabrication.…

The Orange One was using a password breached four years previously Three “grumpy old hackers” in the Netherlands managed to access Donald Trump’s Twitter account in 2016 by extracting his password from the 2012 Linkedin hack.…

$9m already coughed up with more to come, plus 'contrition payments’ to Australian government IBM’s Australian limb underpaid 1,647 staff and has been forced to pay them AU$12.3m in back pay (US$8.97m or £6.98m) and make “contrition payments” to Australia’s government.…