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One-time retailer has a problem: Key evidence is on a lost fondleslab Administrators of UK mobile retailer Phones 4u claim that the company was deliberately collapsed by a cartel of British telcos – although an iPad with key evidence "cannot now be found", according to the High Court.…

Ramen, katsu curry and a side of finest BSOD Bork!Bork!Bork! Amid the table football, beanbags and overpriced coffee, London's silicon roundabout also plays host to that most modern of afflictions: the BSOD bork.…

Conservative, competent entry-level blower for the next-gen networks Review The Motorola Moto G 5G Plus sits among the inaugural sub-£300 5G handsets. While the Lenovo-owned phonemaker is happy to tread that unfamiliar ground, the handset doggedly sticks to the tried-and-tested Motorola playbook, with decent performance and photography alongside a pristine stock Android experience.…

Decentralised contact-tracing apps from Ireland and Canada are first off the rank The Linux Foundation has announced a new Public Health initiative (LFPH) that “builds, secures, and sustains open source software to help public health authorities (PHAs) combat COVID-19 and future epidemics.”…

Fancy integrating next-gen tech into your IoT, cameras, sensors, and robots? Well do you? Telecoms giant Nokia has lifted the lid on a fast, low-latency cellular connection for industrial kit – its private 5G SA (standalone) product, with some of it to be plumbed into a test mine near the Finnish city of Tampere.…

Suggests poorly-regulated address-marts are favorites of folks who want ‘clean’ addresses that give botnets a break Malicious actors are abusing the secondary market for IPv4 addresses, according to Lancaster University lecturer Vasileios Giotsas, University College London research and teaching assistant and postdoctoral fellow Ioana Livadariu from Norway's Simula Metropolitan Center for Digital Engineering.…

But will the UPC will be legal – or even worthwhile – without Britain? Analysis The UK has formally ditched the Unified Patent Court (UPC), a project to create a single pan-European patent system that would fix the confusing mess of contradictory laws currently in place.…

Big Blue may have an in on new healthcare plans IBM’s new CEO Shri Arvind Krishna has chatted over a video conference with Indian prime minister Narendra Modi and pledged further investment in the nation.…

We may not know the answer until the 2030s, though The volcanoes on Venus, thought to have been long extinct, are actually still alive, at least in some cases, and are just having a quiet spell before reshaping the planet's surface once again. That's according to a paper published in Nature Geoscience on Monday.…

Payments giant could be worth $200 billion Alibaba's financial services arm, Ant Group, will seek an initial public offering in both Shanghai and Hong Kong as it looks to expands its operations into the European and American markets.…

Inform people in case they go Chinese and ignore self-sufficiency drive India’s Department of Consumer Affairs has detailed new rules for e-commerce operators, including a requirement to reveal a product’s place of origin.…

Funny that! The World Health Organisation’s Facebook Messenger chatbot refuses to break out the latest numbers of COVID-19 cornavirus cases and deaths for Taiwan and Hong Kong.…

Execs peg Big Blue's big blues to global pandemic recovery IBM's net income felt the full brunt of the economic downturn last quarter, falling 46 per cent on the year-ago period, though impressing Wall Street.…

May 2020 build warns of no internet connection when, er, there is Microsoft is probing a bug in Windows 10 version 2004 that wrongly warns folks that their machines have no internet connection.…

Because that always ends well Updated Microsoft is being sued for allegedly sharing its Office 365 customers' business data with Facebook app developers, partners, and subcontractors in violation of its data privacy promises.…

Plus: Minotaurs are from MARS, ANASIS-II awaits, and a cool half billion for Skynet In brief NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine confirmed last week that the intrepid SpaceX duo, astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley, would be departing the International Space Station (ISS) on 1 August, with a splashdown of the Crew Dragon capsule targeted for 2 August.…

But take that with a pinch of salt Computer misuse crimes across England and Wales have declined over the past year – with credential theft attacks remaining more or less flat in the pre-COVID reporting period.…

Payments provider cops to 'processing issues' caused by 'equipment change' Global online payment provider Worldpay is experiencing an ongoing outage affecting businesses and organisations in the UK.…

Plus: Skype plays catch-up, Barracuda goes Azure, and WinUI slings another preview In brief Having issued an all-too-brief stay of execution on the decidedly whiffy Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.0 and 1.1 protocols in Microsoft 365, the Windows giant has announced that deprecation enforcement will kick off again from 15 October.…

Also: Create the killer AI Doom player on a workstation In brief A judge in Munich has ruled in favor of banning Tesla Germany from repeating misleading descriptions of its Autopilot software in adverts.…

The little guys could get caught out with costly consequences Comment On 16 July, the European Court of Justice struck down Privacy Shield, an EU-US agreement that required American companies to sign up to a higher standard of privacy to be considered, perhaps somewhat condescendingly, "adequate*" for compliance with the bloc's General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR).…

No evidence of data being used unlawfully, says health department The UK government has admitted it deployed the COVID-19 Test and Trace programme without a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) required by law, according to privacy campaigners the Open Rights Group (ORG).…

I am not a .... {NASA nightmare brought to life by AI} On the 51st anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, MIT boffins have given an insight into an alternative history, one where US president Richard Nixon paid tribute to the astronauts who would not be returning from the Moon.…

Tune in and find out how to plug the leaks in your Microsoft ecosystem Webcast Full Office 365 security compliance is one of those things most enterprises will have on the to-do list somewhere, but it’s surprising how few actually get around to it.…

Plus: BitTorrent CEO puts a $1m bounty on Twitter hackers In Brief Here's something you don't see everyday. The crew at IBM X-Force has uncovered a massive cache of files, including about five hours of training videos intended for a select crew of hackers in Iran known as ITG18.…

We'll raise a glass of the good stuff to that Brit utility firm Southern Water is tendering for a bunch of IT services that fall roughly into the bucket of application lifecycle management in contracts that could be worth up to £50m.…

At least it’s a better excuse than Switchzilla’s ‘cosmic radiation errors’ Cisco watchers may recall that the company is infamous for two particularly odd bug reports.…

At under £30, it'll do as a burner or mp3 player. Also, Snake Review Nostalgia's a weird thing. If you're a techie, things have never been better. For less than £500, you can get a tiny battery-powered computer that's faster than the workstation your boss spent £2,000 kitting you out with just 15 years prior. Yet there's always the nagging temptation to take a stroll down memory lane.…

Domestic companies to be mashed together in the service of digital transformation, 5G and cloud Fujitsu will relaunch several of its domestic business services units under a new company called Fujitsu Japan.…

Aimed at VFX creators working on shows it has commissioned, not the rest of us sadly Netflix has teased a desktop-as-service (DaaS) offering.…

Each one unique, and they'll keep coming till there's no paper left... or someone kills the power Who, Me? Another week means another tale of reader misdeeds in The Register's ongoing Who, Me? series.…

Perps tried to sell high-profile usernames after possibly perusing private data Twitter has revealed more about the July 15 attack that saw several prominent accounts hijacked to promote a Bitcoin scam.…

You can thank GDPR for that Violating Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) rules is a costly mistake that is only getting more expensive, according to lawyers totaling up fines from the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO).…

‘Hope’ mission is first interplanetary effort from Arab world, aims to sniff Martian atmosphere The United Arab Emirates has successfully launched a Mars probe.…

To help plague time working and learning, even though schools are to remain closed until a vaccine is found The Philippines has revealed plans to install 23,100 free WiFi sites to help adapt the country to remote work and education during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.…

Land of the bureaucratic stamp wants to be ready if plague and natural disasters coincide Japan has announced a policy to modernise its government with a massive new program of digitisation, because the nation has decided it needs better information infrastructure to cope with both the current pandemic and other future challenges.…

You're gonna need something to secure those Doordash orders over Morse code A Second World War cryptography artifact – a 1944 Enigma M4 machine – has sold at auction for £347,250 ($436,000).…

Network-connected gear stuck in boot loop needs replacing Analysis Since the middle of last month, thousands of Samsung customers found their older internet-connected Blu-ray players had stopped working.…

'Just totally unheard of and really mind-boggling' says MIT assistant prof High-energy X-rays emanating from a gigantic black hole rapidly petered out before it roared back to life again, leaving astronomers bewildered.…

Pentagon can't wait to do some 'experimentation and testing' in space The Pentagon wants an unmanned military outpost in orbit one day – and this week hired the Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) to build a prototype.…

DNS provider goes dark amid bad routing, world+dog goes through nine minutes of terror Updated Global internet glue Cloudflare experienced a brief network outage on Friday that broke multiple apps and websites, including your humble Register.…

Maybe it was the old Lionel Hutz play: 'No-logging VPN? I meant, No! Logging VPN!' A string of "zero logging" VPN providers have some explaining to do after more than a terabyte of user logs were found on their servers unprotected and facing the public internet.…

Legal discovery team could turn up some very interesting, and possibly embarrassing details Facebook won a significant legal victory on Thursday when the judge hearing the lawsuit against Israeli spyware maker NSO Group declined to dismiss the case – and allowed the crucial discovery process to move forward.…

Just a coincidence it put out a statement amid the Twitter mega-hack Blackbaud, a cloud software provider specializing in fundraising suites for charities and educational institutions, quietly paid off a ransomware attacker – and then got around to telling customers about it a full two months later.…

XSS vuln could hijack websites so update your All in One pack A popular WordPress search engine optimisation plugin with around two million installs could have been abused to hijack a target website, according to a threat intel firm.…

What's inside the mystery tube? It is 45 years since US astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts first shook hands in space. The Register presents "When Apollo met Soyuz".…

Repairability score good? Well, yes actually Infamous tech vivisectors iFixit have dug into the innards of Dell's latest XPS 15 ultrabook. And what did they find? Philips screws, user-serviceable components, and very little adhesive.…

COVID-19 downturn only hastened Boeing aircraft's inevitable demise British Airways has revealed that it probably won't be flying the Boeing 747 anymore.…

Which, let's be real, is a fancy way to say 'we got phished' Twitter has said that around 130 accounts were targeted by miscreants this week as high-profile individuals and businesses had their accounts hijacked to promote a Bitcoin scam.…

Tata Consultancy Services to run application and infrastructure support - oh, and security Exclusive The tech function is being consolidated across The Co-operative Group with redundancies "inevitable", the company has told staff. At the same time, the management of certain areas including application support is to be outsourced to Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) along with the TUPE transfer of some staff.…