The Register

If you tolerate this then your children will be next Choosing a name for one's offspring can be incredibly difficult. You don't want them to be the ninth Jaxon in class, but you also don't want them to be bullied mercilessly for the rest of their lives.…

Joins LG under the duvet The list of vendors pulling out of Mobile World Congress (MWC) over coronavirus continues to grow. The latest to fall out is Swedish comms kit provider Ericsson, a big player in 5G hardware.…

French terminal flashes sous-vêtements at Paris patty punters Bork!Bork!Bork! Welcome to another instalment in our occasional series of software being poorly where it really shouldn't. Today it is Five Guys, where the burgers are fresh, but the software less so……

Listen to me, Palmer, I said listen to me Something for the Weekend, Sir? Speak up. (La la la la la.) Say what? (La la la la la.) No, sorry, can't hear a thing.…

Virtue is its own reward There's at least one browser out there unwilling to accept Microsoft's attempts to fiddle with search settings, and it's made by... Microsoft.…

A hairy moment with a Dell and a hairier one with a flying mouse On Call Welcome back to On Call, The Register's regular reminder of just how icky things can get at the sharp, pointy end of computer support.…

The plucky star-trekker also part of the first all-female spacewalk, too Christina Koch, NASA astronaut and engineer, has set a record after orbiting Earth in the International Space Station for 328 days – the longest amount of time spent in space on a single flight by a woman.…

'Pwned with a broadcast' bug among 25 to be patched by Google Google has posted the February security updates for Android, including for a potentially serious remote code execution flaw in Bluetooth.…

Ninth Circuit affirms decision that Bruce Perens was entitled to voice opinion about GPL compliance Open Source Security – the maker of the grsecurity patches that harden Linux kernels against attack – must cough up $260,000 to foot the legal bills of software industry grandee Bruce Perens.…

So hard to pick a side when it's the Hannibal Lecter and Charles Manson of technology going toe to toe Huawei and Verizon are squaring off in America over allegations of patent infringement and failed licensing deals.…

Bad: The other 20 per cent are still wide open. Also bad: Some of those patched machines may have been hacked Roughly a fifth of the public-facing Citrix devices vulnerable to the CVE-2019-19781 remote-hijacking flaw, aka Shitrix, remain unpatched and open to remote attack.…

Diversity, inclusion and transparency? Just as soon as we're done hiding forum posts Exclusive Hot on the heels of insisting "diversity and inclusion is a core GitLab value," the code-hosting biz asked its saleswomen to wear "short but somewhat formal dress and heels" to an awards night during its sales kickoff in Vancouver next week – because the company is "trying to step it up."…

How to suppliment falling handset margins and rising tensions with the Trump government? Let me see.... A consortium of Chinese phone makers are to create alternatives to Google's dominant Play Store, reducing their reliance on America tech and building another potential source of income.…

Trademark Big Red annoyances revealed by JVM software writers Just 9 per cent of Java devs pay for a supported version of the Java Development Kit (JDK), according to a new survey – despite Oracle introducing a licence fee for the official Oracle JDK from April 2019.…

City of Oakland, Forrester, Humana, thinkmoney and Deloitte trace their transformative low-code journey Promo If you feel it’s time to simplify your digital operations and streamline the services you offer to your customers, tune in to a three-day online summit to hear from companies in various industry sectors who have done just that.…

If you can open the damn thing, that is The spudger-wielding folks at iFixit have completed a teardown of the new Xiaomi Mi Watch – the Chinese vendor's first stab at a "real" smartwatch – and, shockingly, it's relatively repairable.…

Seeing as rules roll out in April and freelancer confidence is at a 6-year low The House of Lords has opened an inquiry into the UK.gov's controversial off-payroll working rules set to come into effect later this year, as confidence in freelance business drops to its lowest recorded levels.…

Regulator sends Request for Information to processor producer over abuse of position Qualcomm is being probed once again by the European Commission, this time to ascertain if it abused market dominance in 5G modem chips to stifle competition in radio frequency front ends (RFFE).…

That 'free' Adobe or Microsoft software isn't all it's cracked up to be, eh? We don't know who needs to hear this, but don't download cracked commercial software. Researchers claim more than 500,000 PCs have been left wriggling with malware after a cracked app went on to retrieve further nasties from Bitbucket repos.…

Pair allegedly gambled away investor cash and blew the rest on private jet and cars, mansion, fashion The heads of a cryptocurrency "investment" firm have been arrested and charged with running a Ponzi scheme that allegedly defrauded victims out of millions.…

Spillages on electronic panels made engines shut down mid-flight The mighty EU Aviation Safety Agency has issued a formal safety directive banning A350 airliner pilots from putting cups of coffee anywhere near sensitive cockpit electronics.…

Hardware and software under one roof: is Redmond embracing Apple's model? An organisational reshuffle at Microsoft is to create a new Windows and Devices team under Panos Panay, currently chief product officer in charge of hardware including the Surface range.…

Leap in space tech is about to democratise the cosmos Column Industrial revolutions bring three things – social upheaval, economic explosions and massive pollution. We haven't sorted that out since the first one and we're already well into our information-based second. Now we're promised a third as space technology moves from cottage industry into mass production.…

Trial of Joshua Schulte gets off to an unusual start amid claims of hidden backdoors, backups, and more Typically, your lawyer is on your side. Which is why it was a little unusual that on the first day of the trial of ex-CIA sysadmin Joshua Schulte – accused of leaking classified information to WikiLeaks – that his attorney, Sabrina Shroff, went out of her way to explain what an asshole he is.…

Invisible watermarks can be detected in trained software to root out theft, benchmark cheating, etc Facebook researchers have developed a digital watermarking technique that allows developers to tell if a particular machine-learning model was trained using marked images.…

Less than 3 weeks till Barcelona tech show and some are staying away MWC As the 2019 coronavirus tears a path across China and beyond, mobile device makers are reconsidering whether it's worth attending this year's Mobile World Congress (MWC) that opens in less than 20 days in Barcelona, Spain.…

And 2 in 5 programmers gripe they are underpaid The Go programming language tops the list of skills that software developers say they'll learn next, according to a survey of 116,000 programmers conducted by hiring biz HackerRank.…

To be honest, it was the impracticality and inefficiency that first attracted us to this otherwise cunning exfiltration Boffins from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and Shamoon College of Engineering in Israel have come up with yet another TEMPEST-style attack to exfiltrate data from an air-gapped computer: leaking binary signals invisibly by slightly modulating the light coming off its monitor.…

Now all you have to do is remember what your Y! email address was amid sounds of lawyers popping champagne Long-suffering Yahoo! customers may finally get some compensation for having their personal details exposed to hackers not once, not twice, not three times, nor four times, but five times between 2012 and 2016.…

Dear Facebook, please keep up with Electron and Chromium fixes, ta A vulnerability in WhatsApp could be exploited to remotely access a victim's files on their computer – if they use the desktop client paired with the iPhone app. A patch has been issued and should be installed.…

Tech-for-cops CEO claims First Amendment rights as a legal defense Google, YouTube, and Twitter have sent cease-and-desist demands to Clearview, ordering the controversial startup to stop scraping people's photos from their websites to train its facial-recognition software.…

'Why does a device that is essentially a mouse need a privacy policy?' FYI: Wacom's official tablet drivers leak to the manufacturer the names of every application opened, and when, on the computers they are connected to.…

Also: Eco rocket fuel from Skyrora, more Starlink from SpaceX, ESA's Solar Orbiter gets ready for launch Roundup There's some bad news for Moon lovers but good news for Sun fanciers in this week's roundup of all the news that's fit to run about outer space.…

Market flopped as all the biggest buyers kept short arms in deep pockets Almost all of the top 10 biggest corporate consumers of semiconductors bought fewer chips last year due to softening economies, in part caused by political uncertainty: Brexit, the UK and China trade battle among them.…

First the lightbulb. Then the controller. Then your internal network. Researchers at Check Point have demonstrated how to infect a network with malware via a simple IoT device, a Philips Hue smart lightbulb.…

Calm down, Glass EE2's a 'single purpose tool for Enterprise'. Mainly From today, you can now buy a Glass Enterprise 2 - the latest iteration of Google's wearable computer - from a general hardware reseller.…

You can turn it back on, but why? Chrome 80 emerged from Google this week with a few more nails to hammer into the coffin of the venerable File Transfer Protocol (FTP).…

Most distros unaffected unless defaults were changed, but do check Sudo, a standard tool on Unix-y operating systems that lets select users run some or all commands as root, can be exploited to give superpowers to any logged-in user – if deployed with a non-default configuration.…

Meanwhile, DNS overseer continues to dither on whether to do anything Updated The operator of .org has responded aggressively to a further delay in its controversial sale of the registry to a private equity firm, warning DNS overseer ICANN not to spike the deal.…

Extradition process around US fraud charges has kicked off Ex-Autonomy boss Mike Lynch has submitted himself for arrest, a formality required as part of the extradition process initiated by the US Department of Justice.…

So use our browser, Brave implies A new report by privacy-focused browser Brave suggests UK local authorities are sharing information about their website users with dozens of private companies.…

Enterprises face fear of phone fragging fest as Doom spawns on IP phones Enterprise networking giant Cisco is expected to release a set of software fixes on Wednesday to address five critical vulnerabilities in devices that rely on the Cisco Discovery Protocol, known to its friends as CDP.…

The week's triumvirate of TITSUP* is complete Microsoft doesn't do things by halves. Not content with Teams taking the day off or Outlook donning spammy sunglasses, now Windows 10 Search has joined the cock-up club.…

If you've splashed out, you may get one before the heat death of the universe Long-suffering Atari lovers will have to wait even longer for their over-priced, under-powered retro console, the intellectual-property shell company that owns the Atari brand, warned on Tuesday.…

Cortana, set a reminder for when their services work. Cortana? CORTANAAA! Updated Microsoft is having a bad time this week. First it was Teams, and now Outlook has begun treating pretty much every email as spammy nonsense.…

And other moronic choices Newsflash: Not only do people still suck at passwords, but they also have diabolical music taste.…

Not perfect, not going to replace supercomputer math engines, fascinating nonetheless Deep-learning software may help scientists predict extreme weather patterns more accurately than relying on today's weather prediction models alone.…

Project set to take half a decade and cost €200m Vodafone will strip Huawei gear out of its core network across Europe at a cost of €200m following last week's fresh guidelines about the use of so-called "high risk vendors" from the UK government and the European Union.…

It's proving a bit of a headache The Git version control system has moved closer towards using SHA-256 rather than the compromised SHA-1 for its hash algorithm, to help to protect code from tampering.…

ESA shuffles Brits about as Brexit bites Hidden away in the document laying out the starting position for EU and UK negotiations lies an interesting nugget for those following the tortured tales of the European satellite navigation system, Galileo.…