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Safari links redirected by default into Cupertino's walled garden If you click on a link to an article in Safari, you may find Apple's News app pops up and opens the page rather than the browser.…

In-depth dive into protocols exposing countless gadgets to miscreants DEF CON More than 3.7 million. That's the latest number of surveillance cameras, baby monitors, doorbells with webcams, and other internet-connected devices found left open to hijackers via two insecure communications protocols globally, we're told.…

Gutted Sears, JC Penney locations could become 'fulfillment centers' Amazon is reportedly in talks with realtors to buy and remake the US locations of bankrupt Sears and JC Penney into Amazon fulfillment centers.…

Now that's a stretch: 'Work Yoga' memo tells folks to ignore calls, emails to 'stay in the zone' The British offices of Barclays Bank are under investigation over allegations that managers spied upon their own staff as part of a workplace productivity improvement drive.…

Add a little hyperconverged infrastructure, and you’re on to a winner. We'll explain all this month Webcast Guess what? Ransomware’s not going away any time soon. Infections are still happening all the time, sparking reputation-ending headlines, and derailing business plans.…

4G connectivity in bonny Glencoe, but clock on project deadline is ticking Britain's troubled Emergency Services Network (ESN) hit a major milestone today with the completion of its 500th base station.…

Industry binning old aircraft is an opportunity for aviation infosec DEF CON Boeing 747-400s still use floppy disks for loading critical navigation databases, Pen Test Partners has revealed to the infosec community after poking about one of the recently abandoned aircraft.…

For that and other work, hard-pressed integrator cops 5-year £355m contract. What the worst that could happen? Capita has scored a hefty contract with Transport for London that includes sending the body's on-prem IT systems for the Congestion Charge, and the Low and Ultra Low Emission Zones (ULEZ), into the cloud.…

It's all in the 'right-angled leaf', people As well as being Cockney rhyming slang for stairs, "apples and pears" is a phrase in many European countries meaning to compare two items that have little to no practical relation. The trillion-dollar tech corporation Apple, however, would appear to disagree.…

Plus: Sec wizard shows another way to pwn Mac users In brief A city in Colorado, USA, has swallowed its pride and paid off a malware gang after deciding the cost of a network nuke-and-pave was too high.…

The. Defining. Enterprise. Software. Company. Of. The. 21st. Century For those who can't operate a taxi app on their phone, ServiceNow has linked arms with Uber to bring the world a "Book Uber" feature via its Workplace Safety Management app to solve the "biggest problem businesses face".…

Now's not the time for competition, says Public Health England Public Health England (PHE), one of the agencies responsible for managing the nation's COVID-19 outbreak, is extending a contract with one of its main IT providers without competition to avoid disruption to a vital disease monitoring system.…

First woman to win the Turing Award and be made an IBM Fellow Frances Allen, one of the leading computer scientists of her generation and a pioneer of women in tech, died last Tuesday, her 88th birthday.…

You're so BASIC Who, Me? How's August working out for you? Why not take a moment out of your private staycation for another tale of cockuppery from the depths of The Register's Who, Me? vault.…

If this fine-grained thread control tech can run The Chocolate Factory, imagine it unleashed in Android Google has confirmed that it plans to contribute some of its in-house scheduling code to the Linux kernel, but hasn’t disclosed whether it has motivations beyond a desire to share.…

‘Horsehead Nebula’ is okay, ‘Siamese Twins Galaxy’ is not NASA has decided to "re-examine" how it refers to cosmic objects.…

Chinese company suggests current Kirin SoC could be last of its kind Huawei will halt production of its flagship Kirin chipsets later this year, due to US sanctions on Chinese companies.…

No new orders, limited support options and a very sketchy roadmap VMware has killed off the hardware products offered by recently-acquired Datrium.…

And bans future imports of much military tech India has named apps that it thinks citizens could do worse that adopt in the spirt of the nation’s self-reliance push , and the list includes competitors to software from global giants like Microsoft and Google.…

Plus: Microsoft to dump support for Cortana on iOS, Android phones In brief Your Google Home speaker may have been quietly recording sounds around your house without your permission or authorization, it was revealed this week.…

Start the clock on those patches – they'll be coming any day, week, month soon DEF CON In July, the makers of millions of smartphones powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon system-on-chips received mitigation recommendations to address a bevy of security flaws in their products, all introduced by Qualcomm's technology.…

Bug-hunter details how his team slurped data… IN SPAAAAACE DEF CON FYI, if you didn't already know: readily available satellite TV electronics can be used to sniff and inspect satellite internet traffic.…

Zuck, Google, Microsoft platforms barred from Apple's iOS software souk Facebook, Google, and Microsoft – suspected or convicted monopolists – are being thwarted from offering their respective game services by another tech giant facing scrutiny for anti-competitive behavior: Apple.…

Heavy burden for one valiant man to carry, and it needs sharing Credential breach website Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) will be going open source, site creator and maintainer Troy Hunt has told the world.…

This is not a matter for the San Diego court, says digital family history service Springer of unwelcome family tree surprises and favorite of investigative genealogy hunting uncles everywhere, Ancestry.com has tried to invoke an arbitration clause to fight off a 77-page false advertising lawsuit accusing it of violating California auto-renewal laws.…

Taiwanese optics suppliers in the frame, reportedly Apple forecaster Ming-Chi Kuo has reported some supply chain issues for the firm's upcoming entry-level iPhone 12, with camera lenses from one supplier seemingly raising quality concerns.…

Don't worry, your job's safe... we think The UK government hopes to set up a dynamic purchasing system to help Blighty's public sector buy artificial intelligence services, with an estimated £200m on the table over four years.…

Those who won lost; those who lost won Red faces abound within the British Army after an Excel spreadsheet cock-up led to a number of soldiers being wrongly promoted.…

We don't have to go... outside... to have a good time, oh no It's a beautiful day in old Blighty, hotter even than former party capital Ibiza in the Mediterranean. Are you going to go outside?…

These are the class-action-suit-joining 'droids lawyers are looking for. (We'll get our coats) Google "abuses Android OS to obtain a competitive advantage", according to a lawsuit filed this week alleging that the Alphabet offshoot "secretively monitored and collected users' sensitive personal data" to develop apps to compete with TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram.…

Plus: CDC still telling folks not to drink it Though the global coronavirus pandemic rests on a knife edge in many countries, some restrictions have been eased and folks are settling into the "new normal".…

I always feel like ... somebody's watching me (and they're doing it continuously) Log management and analytics biz Sumo Logic has tweaked its technology platform to help sift through applications and infrastructure that run on AWS as well as keep an eye on software development cycles.…

Keep up, old-timer Microsoft has released a bunch of updates to its Visual Studio development tool on Windows and Mac, including an extension that provides full diagnostics and code completion for the Angular TypeScript/JavaScript framework.…

Doesn't matter if design was perfected at dawn of humankind, you still have to pay Cupertino tax Apple's $699 Mac Pro Wheel Kit provoked astonishment from the general public, swiftly followed by raucous laughter. Even by Apple's standards, these were a blatant piss-take. Fortunately, there's now an alternative for thrifty punters from Mac accessory biz OWC that costs "just" $199.…

You know this, guys: 7.14 linguine. Get with the programme! Reg Standards Bureau No less a character than John Cleese himself has mounted a challenge to the supremacy of the Register Standards Soviet after the funny walks man suggested that he himself was an appropriate measure of social distancing.…

Demirkapi shows how drivers can be misused for deep pwnage DEF CON Writing a successful Windows rootkit is easier than you would think. All you need is do is learn assembly and C/C++ programming, plus exploit development, reverse engineering, and Windows internals, and then find and abuse a buggy driver, and inject and install your rootkit, and bam. Happy days.…

And expands its Horizons VDI into new clouds VMware has decided revealed plans to become an application vendor of sorts, with make-your-office-safe-ware that complements its other end-user compute products.…

Stiffened sinews and floppy disks On Call Do you remember those halcyon days when we used to enjoy a city break every now again? Relive those times with a continental Friday On Call, courtesy of The Register.…

Boffins find atmospheric oddities that make the planet blink in Spring and Autumn Mars pulses with ultraviolet light three times a night during spring and autumn, according to boffins from the University of Colorado's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP).…

The Middle Kingdom is thought to be a few months further down the road to economic recovery and smartmobes are discretionary purchases Sales of smartphones in China fell by 10.3 per cent year-on-year in the quarter ended 30 June, according to box-counters at analyst firm IDC.…

Not exactly the first time this has happened, by a very long chalk Google's Chrome Web Store is once again under fire for poor policing of harmful extensions.…

Last Dynabook shares shuffled off to new owner Sharp Toshiba has finally and formally exited the laptop business…

On grounds that they can track users, conduct corporate espionage and oppress Chinese-Americans United States president Donald Trump has issued two executive orders banning Chinese messaging service WeChat and made-in-China-but-only-operating-abroad social network TikTok, and labelling the two a “threat”.…

‘Everyone can see that the US goal is to keep its monopoly in science and technology’ says Chinese foreign minister China has ridiculed America's plan to build a "clean network" free from Chinese tech and businesses, particularly in its telecoms infrastructure.…

All that money must be wired to the US Treasury immediately Capital One must pay a trivial $80m fine for its shoddy public cloud security – yes, the US banking giant that was hacked last year by a miscreant who stole personal information on 106 million credit-card applicants in America and Canada.…

A misunderstanding about the vulnerability means defenses fall short Some of the boffins who in 2018 disclosed the data-leaking speculative-execution flaws known as Spectre and Meltdown today contend that attempts to extinguish the Foreshadow variant have missed the mark.…

Spreadsheet woes spanning 16+ years force official update Geneticists have issued new guidelines in naming human genes – after spending years wrestling with Microsoft Excel and similar software that automatically converts the names of genes to dates.…

China can't hold a candle to GRU's shenanigans, says expert Black Hat While China is the bête noire du jour of the US government, Russia is the master of spreading disinformation, fostering conflict, and derailing discourse online, the Black Hat security conference was told today.…

Leaker only 'a bit concerned' about getting sued Updated Switzerland-based IT consultant Tillie Kottmann on Thursday published a trove of confidential Intel technical material, code, and documents related to various processors and chipsets.…

Drop the heat gun, pal: minimal glue means there's hope for brave butterfingers among you The OnePlus Nord is one of the most heavily hyped phones of 2020. In addition to being OnePlus's first real stab at the mid-range in several years, it also has the distinction of being reasonably easy to repair, according to iFixit.…