The Register

Claims it was all for the greater good Who, Me? As we edge closer to Christmas, Mondays might be getting just slightly more bearable. To make that more so, we bring you another instalment of Who, Me?, The Register's tales of the mistakes our readers have brought upon themselves.…

Plus: European AI researchers to create a new lab Roundup Hello, welcome to this week's AI roundup.…

Plus, US Congress wants more cybersec training, better breach laws Roundup This week, we saw Linux get pwned, a teen hacker go down, and Julian Assange vowing to stay right where he is.…

'Sun in a box' system promises power storage from molten silicon Energy boffins have proposed an alternative to lithium-ion batteries: Instead of costly electrochemical cells, which have been known to burst into flames, they have devised a "sun in a box" to store energy for power utilities.…

First proof-of-concept, SplitSpectre, requires fewer instructions in victim Analysis You've patched your Intel, AMD, Power, and Arm gear to crush those pesky data-leaking speculative execution processor bugs, right? Good, because IBM eggheads in Switzerland have teamed up with Northeastern University boffins in the US to cook up Spectre exploit code they've dubbed SplitSpectre.…

It's the least they could do. Really. The bare minimum Hotel-chain turned data faucet Marriott says it will help some customers cover the cost of replacing stolen documents.…

DNS overseer faces probe over decision to award TLD to dot-com giant Analysis An ugly struggle over the .Web top-level domain may soon spill into public view again, after one of the companies vying for control of the dot-word demanded an independent review of DNS overlord ICANN's handling of the saga.…

DEA gets down and dirty with new surveillance kit Next time you're closing a big drug deal you may want to watch the cleaner. Or more specifically their vacuum cleaner.…

Can't really blame him for turning down the 'probably won't be executed' pact Wikileaks alumnus Julian Assange has apparently turned down a proposed deal that would have seen him leave the Ecuadorian embassy he has been camped out in for over six years.…

Web admin blames public Whois and lack of 2FA The Linux.org domain was hijacked on Friday morning, with the hacker plastering the message "G3T 0WNED L1NUX N3RDZ" complete with expletives and a very NSFW image (a hairy asshole).…

Networking nuggets from the week that was Networks roundup What if all you had to do to block SYN-based denial-of-service attacks was drop the first incoming SYN packet?…

1,000mph dreams dashed as administrators throw in the towel Bloodhound, a British project to strap a rocket to a car and fling it at the horizon, is officially dead, as administrators finally pulled the plug on the venture.…

So much for the Apophis Squad's Twitter boasts A teenage bomb hoaxer from Watford who taunted the UK's National Crime Agency on Twitter while pretending to be a hacker crew called Apophis Squad has been jailed for three years.…

Oscillating microwaves reduce coercivity, permit small area bit writing Toshiba, like Western Digital, is going to use Microwave-Assisted Magnetic Recording (MAMR) to escape the inability of current PMR tech to go beyond 15-16TB disk drive capacity.…

Eyebrow-raising claim will be heard in full early next year Lawyers for a man who sued the Cambridge Analytica group for £20,000 claiming misuse of his personal data have suggested the controversial data-mining biz misled a High Court judge when the companies were put into administration.…

Bring your own AWS. Or let us take care of everything. For a fee The team at Red Hat has continued its toiling in the Big Blue shadow of IBM, and has churned out some tweaks to its OpenShift Dedicated platform and also sliced a few prices for the Kubernetes service.…

Sidelined messaging app given end-of-life date of March 2019 It's decluttering time at Google again, and the Chocolate Factory has decided to chuck its Allo messaging client into the skip.…

Privacy International lays out its case to El Reg The UK's highest court has this week heard arguments in Privacy International's long-running attempt to challenge decisions made by Britain's shadowy spying oversight court, the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT).…

A little over half of what IBM paid for Lotus. That's Big Blue business, folks! Indian software outfit HCL Technologies is snapping up $1.8bn worth of IBM's software in a deal expected to close by the middle of 2019.…

A second put aside for Doresa and Milena Clocks on a pair of Galileo satellites have given physicists the first refinement of gravitational redshift since 1976.…

Don't want to be an enterprise id-IoT? Time to look at process Backgrounder Sitting on many enterprise networks is a constellation of equipment. A lot will be legacy network-connected industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) gear, together with some relatively new IIoT gear installed within the last few years as a move to what has been sweepingly called the "digitalisation" of business.…

Incompetence is a kind of malware Comment It's a bit of a cliche that "everything's connected", but O2's stunning outage yesterday – chalked up by Swedish kitmaker Ericsson to an expired software certificate – is a reminder of how true that is.…

What's the control panel? Okay. And what's the start menu? Right. And what's this big button here? On Call To no one’s surprise, Friday has arrived again, and brings with it On Call, El Reg’s weekly foray into the best (and the worst) technical problems our readers have helped solve over the years.…

Court of Human Rights weighs in on libel hyperlink brouhaha The complex legal headache of linking to controversial material on the internet has been given additional, but qualified, protections by the European Court of Human Rights.…

'It’s clear that intelligent behavior doesn’t always require a brain' The inner designs of today's artificial intelligence are often inspired by the human brain, yet there other biological structures perhaps better suited to crafting next-gen machine-learning software and hardware.…

Really, you all, stop it! Hey, Amazon, what's going on back there? Enough! Cut that out! Microsoft's president has issued a clarion call for more government regulation in response to the rapid evolution of facial recognition technology.…

Lock down your installations and APIs, or prepare to be hijacked for funbux and giggles Swiping CPU cycles from Kubernetes container clusters to mine crypto-coins is the latest rage among cybercrooks.…

Ring in the new year with some of those backdoors, developers Congratulations, Australia: somehow after chaotic scenes in parliament, the government last night managed to secure after-the-bell passage of its encryption-busting eavesdropping legislation.…

RIP: The Edge is dead... as in the EdgeHTML layout code Microsoft on Thursday said it intends to use the open-source Chromium browser engine in the desktop version of its Edge browser, promising the two per cent of global internet users who favor Edge an improved web experience.…

Beijing demands US 'correct' Meng detainment pronto The arrest of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou earlier this week is sending shockwaves through both the US and China.…

The X is for extreme. Dude? Updated The mobile world is fast on the heels of the laptop world. Qualcomm, the designer of Snapdragon processors primarily for smartphones and tablets, today teased the 8CX: a fanless 64-bit Arm-compatible 7nm system-on-chip for notebooks.…

For one week only, Ohio students can sate crackling craving for a mere $1 Lovers of pork products rejoice! There is now a vending machine from which you can indulge in porcine pleasure until the, er, pigs come home. The bad news? This is only happening in the US... for now.…

Swede Jesus! Ericsson says an expired software certificate was responsible for the outage that left tens of millions in the UK unable to call or text from their mobile phones on Thursday.…

Says no one has bad word to say about tie-in with former Hadoop rival Plans for the merger between former Hadoop-flingers Cloudera and Hortonworks are ahead of schedule, Cloudera boss Tom Reilly has said.…

Jeff Bezos' brown box empire slammed for failing to protect employees Amazon has once again been slammed for conditions workers face in its warehouses after a robot in a US site popped a can of bear repellant, hospitalising 24 staff.…

Joseph Sirosh has left the building The office of CTO for AI at Microsoft now has a stonking great “vacant” sign plastered on it, as previous incumbent Joseph Sirosh this week trotted off to become CTO of Compass, a New York-based real-estate outfit.…

Imagine the kind of luxury custard creams you'd get at that meeting, right proles? You've worked at Capita for at least two years, have seen your fair share of colleagues sent down the redundancy chute in that time, been forced to clip travel costs and biz expenses to do your bit toward profitability.…

Extremely, er, unspecified helium-filled gaming disk performance Toshiba has taken its 12 and 14TB MG07 disk drive techn and produced PC gaming and prosumer/SMB NAS drive products, updating its N300 NAS and X300 gaming product lines.…

Got a Surface Book 2 on 1803? You should probably uninstall last week's update Users of the Windows 10 October 2018 Update, rejoice! Microsoft has slung out a hefty patch to, er, fix a whole bunch of stuff that was broken in the Update of the Damned.…

Admit they are upping their use of mass snooping UK spies are planning to increase their use of bulk equipment interference, as the range of encrypted hardware and software applications they can't tap into increases.…

Tweaking the disaggregated server recipe Composable systems supplier Liqid has added Optane SSDs to its cocktail of dynamic, roll-your-own server systems – the first amongst a crowd of composable vendors that are sure to follow suit.…

Also, Musk's giant mitt misses again but don't worry. Those salt stains will buff out ok SpaceX demonstrated that it can indeed walk on water last night, but only briefly, in this week’s space round-up.…

Infosec duo worked out how to remotely set their own answers Black Hat Crafty infosec researchers have figured out how to remotely set answers to Windows 10’s password reset questions “without even executing code on the targeted machine”.…

Python slithers out of Azure Functions shadows but ACS is for chop Microsoft Connect(); Azure Containers and Serverless processes were given some attention at this week’s Microsoft Connect(); 2018 event, with the Kubernetes Service and Azure Functions being given feature bumps.…

Don’t want to speak at our Reg event? Grab a blind bird ticket Events The call for papers for MCubed 2019 is open, so if you're using machine learning or AI in real life we'd love to hear from you.…

London Blue gang probably has your firm's org chart Black Hat A Nigerian email scammer gang has evolved to the point where it has corporate-style specialist departments and uses commercial business intelligence data brokers to help plan its attacks.…

'Global' network issue pinned on supplier – Ericsson 'working' on solution Customers of O2, GiffGaff and virtual operators who use Telefonica's network in the UK have been hit by a spectacular outage across the country. Transport information services have also been affected.…

Faster Android builds, more space, but don't expect to find a Windows Phone emulator The first public preview of Visual Studio 2019 was tossed to developers on Tuesday at Microsoft's Connect(); 2018 event. The Register took it for a spin to see what was up.…

Sorry suits, PC sales set to slide this year despite OS excuse to refresh computer tin The PC industry is trapped in a battle between the immovable objects that are Intel shortages and crap consumer demand, versus the unstoppable force of enterprises upgrading to Windows 10.…

Hey, you forgot to build in some obsolescence Comment In the late '90s, Eric Schmidt was an accessible tech CEO with a problem. Novell's product was so good and so reliable nobody needed to upgrade it. If one day people decided to stop using their current version, they wouldn't switch to another version of Novell, the one that Eric was trying to sell, but something else entirely. I thought this was the worst job in the world and Eric probably did too, washing up as the adult supervision at Google in 2001.…