The Register

Plus: Top QC deplores courtroom use of 'Americanisms' Autonomy Trial Former Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch's barrister has branded HPE's $5bn fraud trial against his client "a case study in buyer's remorse" as the legal battle being heard at London's High Court begins drawing to a close.…

Privacy is nearly dead, but we're not even close to getting over it Column Sitting quietly in the upper corner of my browser's address bar, a counter rises as Disconnect thwarts requests to track me. Visiting well-behaved sites (such as El Reg), those numbers tick up more slowly.…

System-on-a-chip IP partnership seeks to create more smart home, automobile, robotics, IoT, and industrial applications, among others On Tuesday, RISC-V CPU fixer SiFive announced it's working with CEVA, which licenses technology for deep learning, audio, and computer vision, to simplify the creation of processors capable of handling machine learning code without demanding too much power.…

Svelte beast, pretty on the inside CES Amidst the stifling heat and ever-present body odour of the annual CES trade show, Samsung lifted the lid on its latest top-tier 2-in-1 Chromebook – the Galaxy Chromebook.…

Redmond's open-source code editor is not the equal of heavyweight Java IDEs but still has attractions Microsoft has announced several improvements to Java support in Visual Studio Code, its popular open source editor.…

Want a pretty mobe? Tough CES Tired of breaking your phone on nights out? Happy to walk around with a handset that looks as though it was stolen from a construction yard? If so, you'll want to check out the new Cat S32 mobe, announced at CES in Las Vegas.…

We can rebuild him, we have the backups... er, right? More than a week after its website and online services were taken offline by malware, foreign currency super-exchange Travelex continues to battle through what has become an increasingly damaging outage that may have unpatched VPN servers at its heart.…

TESS also spots Tatooine-alike Vid NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has stumbled across its first Earth-sized planet that lies within the habitable zone of a star.…

Officials deny claims of families being singled out for hours A Microsoft techie and his family are among those saying Uncle Sam is unfairly singling out Iranian-Americans for interrogation at US border crossings in the wake of the Soleimani assassination.…

FBI, open up! Comment The FBI has asked Apple to unlock two iPhones belonging to a murderer, potentially reviving a tense battle over encryption and the rights of law enforcement to digital devices.…

Search engine monster sued by rival smart-speakers maker in scrap over intellectual property Sonos has decided to take on Google, suing the monster tech company for allegedly infringing on its sound-sharing patents, and throwing itself into what will almost certainly be a brutal and very expensive legal battle.…

All that other made-up crap? That's still fine, it seems Facebook has vowed to delete at least some fake videos that appear to have been manipulated by machine-learning algorithms to crack down on the spread of disinformation.…

Plug this security bypass... if you can even find the boxes running it Hackers are taking advantage of unpatched enterprise VPN setups ‒ specifically, a long-known bug in Pulse Secure's code ‒ to spread ransomware and other nasties.…

This top-end Ryzen costs four thousand bucks, mind CES AMD this week touted a bunch of new laptop and desktop silicon that put main rival Intel to shame.…

The Chocolate Factory's bug hunters revise 90-day disclosure rules Patting itself on its back for motivating software makers to fix 97.7 per cent of the vulnerabilities it identifies within its 90-day disclosure deadline, Google's bug-hunting unit Project Zero has decided to ease up on those racing to patch their flawed products.…

Hold onto your hats, people: HMRC to run webinars, workshops... introduction date still set for 6 April, though The British government has met its election pledge to review new off-payroll working rules for contractors in the UK private sector – though it largely appears to be a fruitless exercise as the roll-out date is seemingly immovable.…

Price tag undisclosed but we're guessing it won't have made seller rich Symantec’s parent Broadcom has offloaded its Cyber Security Services (CSS) operation to Accenture for an undisclosed sum.…

AMD Ryzen 4000 and Intel configs both available CES Lenovo has always been a bit of an aberration, as far as PC manufacturers go. While its rivals have pushed consumers towards one-size-fits-all boxes, Lenovo has steadfastly offered punters a choice of configurations. The new Lenovo Yoga Slim 7, just unveiled at the CES trade show in Las Vegas, embodies that philosophy, touting both Intel Ice-Lake and AMD Ryzen 4000 variants.…

You wouldn't want to 'upend the computer software industry', eh? Google last night strode into the last-chance saloon of the US Supreme Court, warning judges (PDF) that if they did not overturn a Federal Circuit ruling in Oracle's favour over its use of Java code in the Android mobile operating system, this could "upend ... the computer software industry."…

Infrastructure protector looks to defend people and devices Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, like his colleagues, has come to hate his company's virtual private network, used to connect securely to corporate servers from afar.…

CEO confirms servers, software locked by perps German cycle-maker Canyon Bicycles GmbG has confirmed it was the victim of a security break-in over the holiday period that has all the hallmarks of a ransomware attack with parts of the infrastructure padlocked by the perpetrators.…

Samsung demos keyboardless keyboard in Vegas CES Despite roughly 15 years of innovation, virtual keyboards – like those found on a tablet or smartphone – are still truly hateful to write on, particularly when it comes to penning lengthy passages of text. Samsung's solution is something called SelfieType, which sees you type upon an invisible keyboard, with your phone's camera tracking your movements and turning it into text.…

Run sqlmap, edit online statutes, gain immunity for life? Exclusive A SQL injection vulnerability on the Government of Gibraltar's website paved the way for any old Joe to rewrite official web versions of the British Overseas Territory's laws.…

What started as a joke slowly blends into potential fiber reality CES It started out as a joke, a way to repeat the hype-success of “5G” mobile technology for the cable industry. And yet “10G” – standing for 10 gigabit-a-second broadband fiber speeds – may be here to stay.…

Sorry, meant to say Verisign contributes to 'security threat' education Comment Operator of the dot-com registry, Verisign, has decided to pay DNS overseer ICANN $4m a year for the next five years in order to “educate the wider ICANN community about security threats.”…

But... but... I have Preferred Status! CES Annual trade shindig the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is a big deal. For one insane week, nearly 200,000 nerds and industry hotshots flock to the neon-lit tundra of Las Vegas to gawk upon tech that might end up being picked apart for precious metals by a West African child labourer. And most of those passengers likely had an utterly miserable flight.…

MIT eggheads devise a better way to predict application performance MIT boffins have devised a software-based tool for predicting how processors will perform when executing code for specific applications.…

Apps spotted abusing use-after-free() bug seven months before patch At least three malicious apps with device-hijacking exploits have made it onto the Google Play Store in recent weeks.…

Infinite diversity in infinite combinations... symbolizing the elements that create truth and beauty. Astronomers have discovered the most-distant cluster of galaxies yet seen – and, separately, what could be the largest galaxy in the observable universe yet.…

Platform makeover declared a 'total joke' by internet activists CES With criticism mounting, Amazon's Ring revealed a web dashboard of privacy controls it hopes will slash the number of horror stories coming from customers.…

Vendors will have to apply for permission to sell tools to customers outside of the US and Canada The US government has placed software designed to train neural networks to analyse satellite images under new export controls in a bid to prevent foreign adversaries using said code.…

Employers should de-emphasize face-to-face interviews, research suggests Age discrimination is a top topic in Silicon Valley, and now there's more proof that age may hinder hiring chances.…

Byron Reed, Javon Lee in court in Oakland over Shuo Zeng’s death Two men have been charged over the death of IBM engineer Shuo Zeng, who died on his birthday, on New Year's Eve, after his laptop was snatched while in a cafe.…

Experts reckon regional infrastructure is in the cross-hairs With tensions soaring between America and Iran following the drone strike that killed top Persian general Qassem Soleimani, experts are weighing in on what the US could face should the Mid-East nation fully mobilize its cyber resources.…

We run through updates to popular lightweight open-source distro Hands on Linux Mint 19.3 was completed late last year and is a long-term support release with support until 2023, so we decided to put it through its paces.…

Despite 'people familiar with matter' claiming otherwise to US news GCHQ and its cyber-defence offshoot NCSC have both denied that they are investigating a cyber-attack on the London Stock Exchange, contrary to reports.…

Deep-pocketed gamers stare into Ghost Canyon at consumer show CES At this year's overstuffed Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Intel teased its upcoming NUC (Next Unit of Computing) desktop — the NUC 9 Extreme, codenamed Ghost Canyon.…

CEO and co-chair Visentin writes to HP board to say: Let's get this thing done Xerox has climbed a financial hurdle in efforts to snaffle HP Inc by convincing three banking giants to stump up the greenbacks to partly fund the $33bn hostile takeover bid.…

Or find it under a crap-pile in your pigsty of a desk... let's be real, that is what you'd use it for HP and Tile plan to hook up some of their kit, with the the latter's gadget-tracking tech shoved into the upcoming HP Elite Dragonfly laptops.…

Systemd? It's the proper technical solution, says kernel maintainer The Linux kernel has around 27.8 million lines of code in its Git repository, up from 26.1 million a year ago, while systemd now has nearly 1.3 million lines of code, according to GitHub stats analysed by Michael Larabel at Phoronix.…

HP bad, Deloitte and Lynch and Hussain good, says current Invoke Capital bod Autonomy trial A witness who worked on the Autonomy finance team told London's High Court during the long-running Autonomy trial that the firm had indeed been accounting for some hardware sales as marketing expenses in its annual accounts.…

Not perfect, but pretty damn good Comment As the New Year’s festivities wound down a lot of science and science fiction fans toasted the 100th anniversary of the birth of Isaac Asimov, one of the titans of the profession.…

Watch online and find out how to strengthen your arsenal of security measures with F-Secure Webcast Miscreants are constantly on the lookout for new ways to get at your data, becoming more dangerous all the time as a result.…

We're not sure if Electronic Arts has even noticed Linux gamers have found yet again that their ubiquitous operating system remains unwelcome in the context of mainstream entertainment.…

When curiosity killed the print job. All the print jobs Who, Me? Welcome to another entry on the Who, Me? naughty list, filled with the confessions from techies who were perhaps a little silly, maybe somewhat devious, and yet still escaped with careers intact.…

Including: Tesla and a town hit hard by spear-phish bridge scammers Roundup Welcome to the New Year: here are some security headlines that may have slipped past you during the gorging season.…

And now he faces up to 20 years in the slammer A now-former senior IT exec has admitted conning his employer out of $6m – by setting up a fake tech services biz that billed his bosses for bogus services.…

Thanks to America's antitrust laws A US judge on Friday tripled the damages Quanta Storage owes HP Inc to $439m for unlawfully hiking the price of optical disc drives.…

Distributed app platform's proposed agreement 'isn't freedom respecting,' he says Special report Last year, lawyer Van Lindberg drafted a software license called the Cryptographic Autonomy License (CAL) on behalf of distributed development platform Holo – and submitted it to the Open Source Initiative (OSI) for approval as an Open Source Definition-compliant (OSD) license.…

Data Center Network Manager bugapalooza with three must-fix flaws Cisco is kicking off 2020 with the release of a crop of patches for its Data Center Network Manager.…