The Register

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.…

Higher barrier to entry, but nothing SQL devs can't handle Interview The latest version of Neo4j's graph database – 4.0 – touts new scaling features and better security. The Reg talks to self-confessed graph fanboy Dr Jim Webber about how the graph-wrangler is, at last, able to scale to accommodate large databases, and about its biggest enemy: the inertia of developers who stick with SQL no matter what.…

In a world of virtual keyboards, who's keen for some keypress fun? Some time later this year, a TCL staffer will press the red button on the Blackberry brand phones production line and, unless another firm takes the reins, it'll be the end of the road for the humble BlackBerry.…

One of five practical conference sessions for people of all ability levels Event If you’re a seasoned tech pro who’s wondering what DevOps is all about, good news... our Continuous Lifecycle London conference has added a workshop just for you.…

Blackpool isn't just about stag dos, chips, and illuminations, after all Blackpool is literally and figuratively using artificial intelligence to pave the way for a better future for Britons, or something like that.…

Grimey man unveils a pair of deals Pop-star accomplice Elon Musk on Tuesday indicated he hopes to fly his Starship over Texas – and pocketed a major deal to launch a satellite for NASA.…

Can't we just get a pint and wait for it to all blow over? Is that asking too much? LG Electronics has withdrawn from the Mobile World Congress trade show, held at the end of this month, citing concerns over the new virulent and deadly coronavirus.…

1% of 1% of users affected, but as it's Google that's still in the six figures A bug in Google's Photo software caused potentially 100,000 or more netizens to have their personal videos exposed to complete strangers last Thanksgiving.…

El Reg digs into claims by Kiwi browser maker that ad giant is not GDPR compliant Analysis Google is potentially facing a massive privacy and GDPR row over Chrome sending per-installation ID numbers to the mothership.…

Untested tech, no training, last-minute rollout, buggy code – sound familiar? It’s all so painfully familiar: with a crunch date of February 3, the Democratic Party in Iowa decided to charge ahead with an IT rollout that comprised an entirely new software system spread out across thousands of sites to record the result of the Democratic caucus for its presidential nominee.…

Crap security? Shocked, shocked, we tell you This may shock you, but Huawei effectively built a poorly hidden, insecure backdoor into surveillance equipment that uses its HiSilicon subsidiary's chips, it appears.…

Or so clams this vendor's marketing Attempts to infect computers with ransomware and other malware over networks are decreasing, reckons infosec outfit Sonicwall.…

Golden Gate Capital jettisons equity before IPO can kick in Cloudy ERP outfit Infor has been picked up by Koch Industries after investment biz Golden Gate Capital sold off its remaining equity stake.…

Technical requirements file appears to include references to US biz's other operations Analysis Suspicions have grown deeper that a lucrative contract to run Colombia’s .co registry was rigged to favor US-based operator Afilias, thanks to unusual references in one of the South American government’s official documents.…

Gives punters more time to move to S/4HANA because that's what everyone wants to do, right? SAP has blinked first in the face-off with customers by agreeing to extend standard support for Business Suite 7 (BS7) applications, and outlined its "maintenance commitment" for S/4HANA for the next couple of decades.…

It's 2020 and people are still letting S3 storage leak A private yacht crew recruitment agency has left an AWS bucket containing the CVs, passports and even some drug test results for up to 17,000 people exposed to world+dog, according to reports.…

Replaced by former Computacenter bod in non-exec role Kevin Loosemore will stand down as chairman of British software firm Micro Focus as the company continues to struggle with its disastrous takeover of HPE's software biz.…

So some pholdables still crap then Not only is the Motorola Razr a nostalgic homage to a simpler time, but it's foldable too. Unfortunately, it's the latter feature irking some users, who have complained about unpleasant noises whenever they snap their pricey devices into the clamshell mode.…