The Register

What happens in Vegas... gets leaked on the internet Casino and hotel chain MGM Resorts lost almost 10.7 million guest records last summer, including the data of Jack Dorsey and Justin Bieber, which was duly posted to hacker forums.…

Relax, you won't feel a thing Google's UK users will see their data shifted to a US-based data controller from the end of next month with the ad giant blaming Brexit for the move.…

Updated cocaine straws will be much harder to forge and hopefully vegan The Bank of England has started sending out new polymer £20 notes but the old paper ones remain legal tender for now.…

This is not a test The Metropolitan Police are using live facial recognition (LFR) in various locations in central London today after spending two years testing the technology.…

And that's one hell of a privacy agreement Microsoft's all-in-one mobile Office app combining Word, Excel and Powerpoint into a single application for iOS and Android is here, but you'll need an Office 365 subscription to use the "premium features."…

Rural trials will not use equipment 'from high risk vendors' says Ministry of Fun The UK's Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS, aka the Ministry of Fun) has barred Huawei gear from rural 5G trials.…

It's APT28 again! Public attribution names and shames state-backed crew The same Russian state hackers who unleashed NotPetya on the world's computers were behind destructive cyberattacks on Georgia during 2019, the governments of Britain and the US have said – echoing a similar attribution a decade ago.…

Before you remove the mote from thy hacker's eye, remove the beam from the eyes of your, er, Teams RSA As IBM's crew cancels their hotel rooms, Microsoft's infosec staffers are still set to attend the decades-old RSA conference and pulled the covers off a raft of security releases and previews for the event today.…

Taylor Swift of apps or ultimate ironic hipster shout-out? In 2014, the world was graced with yet another social network. This one was special. While Facebook and Twitter were grotesquely stodgy beasts, this app stood out with its almost Scandinavian simplicity. It would allow you to message your friends with the word "Yo!" – and that's it.…

It's looking rather ominous to us Following a mysterious "Find my Mobile" push notification this morning, questions are swirling around Samsung after customers found other users's login details being shown to them while trying to change their passwords.…

You'd hope it would know 85mph speed limits aren't exactly routine Vid A single piece of electrical tape stuck to a 35mph (56kph) road sign is enough to trick the autopilot software in Tesla's vehicles into speeding up to 85mph (136kph).…

The web is 'optimised for Chrome, not for independent browsers' Interview Mozilla's head of EU public policy, Raegan MacDonald, reckons effective regulation to protect privacy and enable fair competition is an "issue of survival" for Mozilla and other independent companies.…

Not the sort of 'digital transformation' you want to be part of A bloke has copped to operating a £115m ($149m) scam that managed to encompass physical mining of gems and the virtual mining of cryptocoins.…

Now Ru? The Russian government, via mouthpiece RIA Novosti, has claimed Korean tech giant Samsung will comply with a controversial Russian law passed in November that forces smartphones and computers to come pre-installed with domestic-made shovelware.…

Xiaomi the way to the sale rack, would you? Smartwatch sales have been steadily increasing in recent years, thanks to Apple's efforts, as well as downward pricing pressure from Chinese firms like Xiaomi. And, according to entrail prodders at analyst haus CCS Insight, those who buy them are fairly content.…

And forget SaaS-y upstarts: These machine-learning darlings are more like traditional service outfits Despite all the hype around artificial intelligence, trendy startups built upon the tech are said to have lower margins than funding-magnet software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies.…

Linux Foundation hears your gripes about naming schemes, legacy code, and more With modern applications now composed of 80 to 90 per cent Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), the Linux Foundation and Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard University (LISH) on Wednesday published their second open-source census to promote better security and code management practices.…

The 1990s spacecraft, that is Jupiter contains more water than a previous study suggested, according to recordings from NASA's Juno probe, which were published in Nature Astronomy this month.…

It's not a bug, it's a feature, explains the Chocolate Factory Google has implemented a browser capability in Chrome called ScrollToTextFragment that enables deep links to web documents, but it has done so despite unresolved privacy concerns and lack of support from other browser makers.…

That ain't the way life should be, Maine responds The US state of Maine is violating internet broadband providers' free speech by forcing them to ask for their customers’ permission to sell their browser history, according to a new lawsuit.…

Critical fix for static credential headlines latest patch rollout Cisco has released fixes to address 17 vulnerabilities across its networking and unified communications lines.…

IRS wants Zuckerberg's empire to cough up $9bn in back taxes Facebook has told a court the reason it valued itself at just $6.5bn back in 2010 is not because it was seeking to avoid paying billions in extra tax, but because people had started using their mobile phones more. At the time, the antisocial goliath was reliant on ads on its desktop site.…

America wanted a cover-up of Kremlin ties to DNC intrusion, court told Julian Assange was offered a pardon by the White House only if he publicly said Russia did not hack the Democratic National Committee, according to the WikiLeaks supremo's lawyer.…

Mystery facility hit by 'commodity' infection thought to be Ryuk America's Homeland Security this week disclosed it recently responded to a ransomware infection at an unnamed natural gas plant.…

Firm told: Contracting with Uncle Sam is a privilege, not a right An American court has rejected Huawei's constitutional challenge to a US law that bans federal agencies and contractors from buying and using the Chinese firm's telecoms equipment.…

But will you see your phone bills decreasing? Ofcom must repay £218m to the UK's four main mobile network operators (MNOs) after overcharging them for spectrum access, the Court of Appeal ruled today.…

Dot-com is all the rage, yo Updated British customers of High Street banking brand Natwest are being advised not to use the domain natwest.co.uk – by none other than Natwest itself.…

PARC, Apple and Amazon – computing pioneer dies at 74 Obit Larry Tesler – self-described "primary inventor of modeless editing and cut, copy, paste" – has died at the age of 74.…

We read through reams of releases to give you the skinny on plans for: AI, 100Mbps min. broadband, data-sharing ... and what's this about a Euro-cloud? The European Commission, under its newly elected president Ursula von der Leyen, this morning emitted a sweeping digital strategy for the member states over the next five years. There's a lot to get through, but it focuses on three pillars: digital enablement and protection for individuals (including AI regulation and broadband availability), fair competition, and sustainability.…

Yeah, don't break this one either iFixit has gone all Spanish inquisition on the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip, taking a sharp scalpel to the pricey foldable's innards and posting the pics online. What did it find? Not heresy, but somewhat of a mixed bag when it comes to repairability.…

World turns to Twitter for reasoned discussion and cat memes Pit of the internet Reddit is TITSUP* just in time to ruin the lunchtime surfing of Europeans and the morning smoothie-quaffing of Americans.…

Split me once, shame on you. Split me twice, shame on, er, you again? Screens on Microsoft's Surface Laptop 3 have appeared to develop a crack habit, with one of the latest complaints claiming this happened even after repair.…

What was it Burns said? Something about plans, mice and men Private equity biz Leonne International has snapped up 20 per cent of Shetland Space Centre for a hair over £2m, with the cash set to grow the company ahead of launches from the northernmost British isle.…

A comfortable, pleasant non-mechanical keyboard Review Keyboards are essential so it's no surprise people are particular about the ones they use. And though mechanical keyboards command the majority of the mouth-foaming geek lust, there's still a home for the humble scissor-switch, as demonstrated by the delightfully functional Bakker Elkhuizen UltraBoard 950 Wireless.…

To be fair, all UK cities could benefit from such a scheme... Sheffield authorities have enlisted four companies to help improve rubbish collection and road maintenance in the northern English city through a network of sensors.…

In some of UK's worst flood-hit areas IT failures in emergency fire control rooms are creating dangerous delays, the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) has warned.…

MyPr0nStash might not have been the wisest name for that file server after all Seeking to improve its pisspoor customer service rating, UK telecoms giant Vodafone has clarified just how much information it slurps from customer networks. You might want to rename those servers, m'kay?…

Are we doing panic about software updates again? Really? OK Some of the biggest names in the technology world still ship hardware that can be possibly hijacked by well-placed miscreants, thanks to poor or non-existent checks for firmware updates.…

Would-be buyer Ethos attempts closed-room meeting to push deal through The Internet Society's own members are now opposing its sale of the .org internet registry to an unknown private equity firm.…

Smart-home kit slinger does the right thing... under commercial duress Ring will make two-factor authentication mandatory for all its customers, forcing them to enter a six-digit code before they can access their accounts, the Amazon-owned outfit announced on Tuesday.…

There's always a tech angle The former CEO of education software business Symplicity was pardoned by President Donald Trump this week, almost six years after the suit admitted hacking into two rivals’ computer systems.…

President slams his own administration's 'ridiculous' China crackdown President Donald Trump on Tuesday said he wants America's semiconductor industry to be able to do business around the globe, calling into question a reported trade rule change targeting Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei.…

Meanwhile: Chip fabs still running just fine in China, FYI, says analyst Google has added rentable virtual machines powered by AMD's second-generation Epyc Rome server processors to its cloud platform line-up – as a beta, we note.…

If you need to ask the price, you definitely can't afford it Updated SpaceX has pledged to carry up to four passengers into Earth orbit aboard its autonomous Crew Dragon capsule – its first crewed mission for private space tourism – as early as 2021.…

Japanese supplier's biz model, like its products, were straight as a spring Two former sales executives at NHK Spring Ltd, Hitoshi Hashimoto and Hiroyuki Tamura, were indicted in America last week for alleged participation in a worldwide conspiracy to fix the prices of hard disk components.…

Following this? An Instagram/YouTube ad horse has carried out a cunning meta-Marshall McLuhan-style spoof by faking an influencer holiday in Bali photographed entirely in her local Ikea.…

Look over here! Mmmmm, tax breaks In an effort to counter the influence and spread of Chinese-built kit, the Japanese government has approved a draft bill that will offer low-cost finance to firms looking to develop 5G and drone technologies.…

Texan tech giant hacks off part of security real estate, sells to consortium Dell Technologies is flogging its infosec business RSA for $2.075bn as it tries to reduce its longstanding debt.…

Not many stranger things happen at sea Penetration testers looking at commercial shipping and oil rigs discovered a litany of security blunders and vulnerabilities – including one set that would have let them take full control of a rig at sea.…

OPPOrtunity knocks etc You can count the number of phone manufacturers who design their own silicon on one hand – Huawei, Samsung and Apple. But soon you'll be able to add OPPO to that list.…