The Register

Talk about high tech: Software maker exposes cloud silo of personal info in tale of security gone bong A tech biz specializing in software for marijuana dispensaries inadvertently exposed to the public internet a database containing tens of thousands of mellow Americans' personal information.…

Rapporteurs call for investigation, technical security report leaks The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammad bin Salman, has been officially fingered as the man responsible for hacking Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s iPhone X, causing a massive stir in diplomatic circles.…

Chocolate Factory boffins doubt Apple can fix it, either Google security researchers have published details about the flaws they identified last year in Intelligent Tracking Protection (ITP), a privacy scheme developed by Apple's WebKit team for the company's Safari browser.…

Bad-a-Bing, badda-boom: Netizens complain of browser hijacking Users who install or update Office 365 Pro Plus, part of the Office 365 subscription for larger businesses, will find their browser search engine automatically set to Bing, according to Microsoft documentation.…

Homeland Security memo not an abuse of power, court decides An effort by tech companies to put the Trump Administration's tough new visa requirements on hold has been thrown out by a US federal judge in Arizona.…

High flying exec joins 'leccy car-driver co-boss in Switzerland Only one half of SAP’s joint CEOs managed to travel to the World Economic Forum 2020 in Davos by relatively environmentally friendly means, the other opted to jump on a jet plane.…

'Two down, four to go,' quips John Cleese as another member of comedy crew kicks bucket Obit Actor, writer and Python Terry Jones has died at the age of 77.…

Report suggests public interest defences for infosec professionals, academics and journalists Britain's main anti-hacker law, the Computer Misuse Act 1990, is "confused", "outdated" and "ambiguous", according to a group of pro-reform academics.…

What happens when big tech ventures completely fail? A High Court trial! In a long-running spat, British insurer Co-Op Insurance is suing IBM for £155m over what it claims is Big Blue's "deliberate" failure to deliver a new IT platform for the British financial services provider.…

Quickly shuttered partially redacted leaky DB included 'internal notes marked as confidential' Five identical Elasticsearch databases containing 250 million records of Microsoft customer support incidents were exposed on the internet for all to see for at least two days right at the end of 2019.…

If yours won't support a merger, we'll install some who will Xerox is preparing to nominate up to 11 directors to HP's board to push through a $33.5bn takeover bid, according to the Wall Street Journal.…

Total Inability To Secure Upgrade Programme in Berlin German authorities are waking up to a Windows 7 headache, with approximately €800,000 required in order to keep the elderly software supported a little longer.…

Canonical goes playing in the streams Ubuntu daddy Canonical is aiming at the likes of Huawei and Google with its take on app streaming with Anbox Cloud.…

Destined to die a lonely Martian death? How about Doomed Buggy? NASA has announced the finalists for its Mars 2020 Rover naming and the options are as worthy as one might expect.…

CloudEndure gets cheaper, new host-level backup for VMs as AWS looks to lock 'em in AWS has lopped 80 per cent off the price of its CloudEndure disaster recovery service and 50 per cent off Kubernetes (K8s) clusters.…

Emailing stuff is hard, m'kay? Capita Education Services had a bit of an oopsie yesterday as a new helpdesk system spurted potentially thousands of email addresses at unsuspecting users.…

Not for surveillance, honest Drug dealers and dodgy pharmacies illegally touting opioids online – think heroin, fentanyl, codeine, morphine, and so on – may have their collars felt by an AI cop soon. Ish. Maybe.…

Old? Windows-only? Community struggles with '40-year-old male' problem Microsoft senior software engineer Michal Strehovský has run a small .NET Core application on Windows 3.11, a version of the OS released in 1993.…

Shock discovery after Brit super-boffin's stuff disappears decades earlier More than 250 items belonging to super-Brit Alan Turing, including his OBE medal, that went missing decades ago were found hidden behind a bathroom wall in America, according to new court documents.…

Hidden for now, probably coming to a desktop near you, soon, ish Microsoft is secretly testing in-house ads in WordPad, the basic text editing app bundled into its desktop operating system since Windows 95.…

Big Blue rides Red Hat into the black A tenth of a percent still counts, right?…

Mid-East nation slams 'absurd' claim, UN report to emerge Updated Candid pictures used to threaten Amazon boss Jeff Bezos were exposed not by his current paramour's brother, as some have suggested, but through a sophisticated hacking operation personally directed by the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammad bin Salman, The Guardian has asserted.…

Cuffed procurement bureaucrat took percentage cut, it is alleged An IT worker at a New York bank steered multi-million-dollar deals to a technology contractor in exchange for $900,000 in kickbacks, it is claimed.…

Planned obsolescence strikes again Sonos is doubling down on its previously disclosed inclination to drop support for older products that aren't profitable to support.…

Convenient timing for this story to emerge Apple ditched plans to fully encrypt its iCloud backups two years ago after being pressured by the FBI, it is claimed.…

Deal will crank telco's reach up to 8 million premises in UK Goldman Sachs-backed telco CityFibre has snapped up TalkTalk's fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) network for £200m, two months after the deal was delayed during the general election.…

Nothing to see here, insists browser-maker Opera has responded to accusations that it offers predatory short-term loans to some of the world's most disadvantaged communities to shore up its financial results.…

Nastygram to DNS overseer follows long, flawed and drawn-out process Eight South American governments have vowed to make life difficult for DNS overseer ICANN after it gave the .amazon top-level domain to the US tech giant headed by Jeff Bezos.…

'Clerical error' causes major screw-up... misery loves company at UK's largest 'leccy retailer Just because you want something badly doesn't mean you can will it to happen. This is what Dixons found out today when it was forced to re-issue a trading statement, with the first one saying sales had grown. (Spoiler: they hadn't.)…

Just don't mention software giant's carbon-producing customers, 'cos that doesn't matter, right? The World Economic Forum is pinning a sustainability badge on its 2020 conference, which, according to one estimate, will produce 18,090 metric tonnes of CO in private air travel alone.…

Redmond's own security tools could be abused by hard-to-block file-scrambling software nasties The encryption technology Microsoft uses to protect Windows file systems can be exploited by ransomware.…

We get it. You are a skilled dentist. Sorry, 'were' Since Marty McFly swooped into pop culture on a hoverboard in 1985, the wheelless wonders have cemented their position as a litmus test for living in "The Future™" alongside other sci-fi paraphernalia like lightsabers, jetpacks and flying cars.…

Project author Nikolay Kim also given some community support after 'unsafe shitstorm' The maintainer of the Actix web framework, written in Rust, has quit the project after complaining of a toxic web community - although over 100 Actix users have since signed a letter of support for him.…

Suitable attire, seeing that it's dead Microsoft has given Windows 7 users a parting gift with its last update as some holdouts are reporting existing desktop wallpaper being replaced by a sombre black screen – presumably in mourning for the veteran OS.…

Also: ISS batteries changed, Virgin's fleet grows, Rocket Lab makes nod to crap sitcom, and more Roundup Welcome back to The Register's weekly roundup of stories from the world of rockets and orbital shenanigans.…

UK internet costs shamed by European colleagues, but at least it's not Eritrea After a third trip to thrash the router this morning, Brits might not be too surprised to learn that they're being ripped off for broadband compared to their pals across the Channel.…

Coder apologizes and says desire to be ranked #1 'compromised my judgment' Special report A Google-backed competition to develop machine-learning software to help abandoned animals find loving homes turned ugly – when it was revealed the winning team cheated.…

Smartphone shipments slightly up, personal computers to resume historical trends What goes up must come down, or so it seems for the PC market.…

'Being able to acquire oxygen would obviously be hugely useful for future settlers' Scientists at the European Space Agency are trying to extract oxygen from something very close to lunar soil.…

Look what you made me Analysis The Swift programming language has suffered some setbacks in its quest for ubiquity since Apple released it under an open-source license in 2015.…

Privacy's dead but, hey, we've got nanoparticles spinning at 300 billion RPM. So that's cool The fastest spinning object on Earth – a pair of nanoparticles – can complete over five billion revolutions per second in the laboratory, according to a paper published in Nature Nanotechnology on Monday.…

'Ethos Capital, ISOC, and PIR have failed to provide clear and transparent information' Analysis A quick hypothetical for you: if your organization received a letter from six senior politicians urging you not to move forward with a controversial decision, and you looked out your windows to see dozens of protesters insisting on the same, would you……

Literally: As much as 10% of employees at server-hosting biz laid off in 'non-cost-cutting' move DigitalOcean last week axed an undisclosed number of employees.…

Grimes' boyfriend's biz says it's under financial attack Tesla is rubbishing complaints of a possible software-related gremlin causing its line of electric cars to suddenly speed up.…

Finding sparks debate over bug disclosure – and how to secure a local gateway's web control panel Netgear left in its router firmware key ingredients needed to intercept and tamper with secure connections to its equipment's web-based admin interfaces.…

SD-WAN WANOP will have to wait a few days, though Citrix has rushed out official fixes for the well-publicised vuln in some of its server products after miscreants were seen deploying their own custom patches that left a backdoor open for later exploitation.…

Mobile phone for sale. One careless owner Butterfingered London councils have managed to lose nearly 1,300 laptops, mobiles and tablets, according to figures obtained by Freedom of Information requests.…

Two Germans, a Nigerian, and a Dutchman walk into a bar. What happens next? A lawsuit, of course Game developer Ubisoft has lodged a claim against the owners of a website that allegedly sells DDoS attacks against the servers of its best-selling game, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Siege (R6S).…

AWS and Google data warehousing stuff considered, then ignored Online photo print and gift service Photobox is quitting Amazon's Redshift data warehouse to hitch its wagon to competing cloud-native systems from Snowflake.…

Also: pitching Windows gear at students, while Windows Terminal and TypeScript ring in the new Round Up It was out with the old and in with the new for Microsoft last week - as it hammered another nail into Windows 7's coffin, the Redmond gnomes were busy toiling on things they hope won't die anytime soon.…