The Register

Including, wait for it, 'security through obscurity'. No, really Australia's New South Wales Electoral Commission has given its electronic voting system a clean bill of health, dismissing hacking fears as “theoretical,” and accepting a PWC report saying the system to date was protected by “security through obscurity”.…

Audiophiles could get played like a fiddle, have their web traffic snooped by son-of-a-pitch scammers Headphone maker Sennheiser is facing the music after being caught compromising the security of its customers.…

Round Rock insists no data actually swiped after intruder spotted on internal network Dell is resetting all customer passwords on its website after a hacker or hackers unknown infiltrated its internal network.…

Duo raked in $6m in extortion payments after scrambling victims' files, it is claimed US prosecutors have this week charged two people believed to be behind the notorious SamSam ransomware outbreak.…

Cloud cash cow expands its menu with accelerator chip, machine learning stuff, and more re:Invent Rent-a-cloud biz AWS has cooked up a melange of still more AI-oriented bit bundles to serve pay-as-you-go customers, topped with the promise of AI-enhancing hardware and a throwable self-driving car.…

Fresh report reveals China opening can of whoop-ass America is going to fall drastically behind the rest of the world, particularly China, when it comes to high-speed broadband internet access, according to a new report.…

Plus on-premises cloud, Windows file systems, and other bits and bytes re:Invent A bunker-busting bomb just exploded in the tape business.…

Calm down dears, it's only happening in the US Apple has yet to replicate its Japanese iPhone price cuts outside Japan - but has introduced a surprise new trade-in rebate on its home turf to stimulate interest in the costly bling.…

Hope for repeat of April dashed on file deletion and iffy QA Ad Duplex has confirmed that the Windows 10 October 2018 Update is off to a slow start, and certainly nowhere near the rate of April's release.…

Roadside test on sugar treat said it was crank. It wasn't A woman spent three months behind bars because she couldn't afford the $1m bond slapped on her for suspected possession and trafficking of methamphetamine.…

Critics slam 'conflict of interest', cosying up to tech firms Health secretary Matt Hancock should focus on scrutinising health tech firms rather than endorsing them, after he appeared in an article about Babylon Health, maker of the controversial GP at Hand app.…

Happy ending? Nope. Big seller, small cells – report Evidence suggests Amazon could be pretending to be a massage parlour to avoid attracting attention to a new network it is testing in Silicon Valley, applying for radio permits under a variety of names.…

Nonprofits urge Congress not to sign deal under CLOUD Act UK authorities should not be granted access to data held by American companies because British laws don't meet human rights obligations, nine nonprofits have said.…

Administrators really hate this one weird bug in Windows Server 2016, but MS plays nice with iCloud again Microsoft issued a whole bunch of updates last night, including one to deal with an alarming bug in Windows Server 2016.…

Top techie probed by UN patent body in move branded 'retaliation' for his previous lid lifting Exclusive The World Intellectual Property Organisation has temporarily suspended CIO and whistleblower Wei Lei as it probes allegations of misconduct made against him, an internal memo seen by The Reg has confirmed.…

There'll be search engine injunctions aplenty once site-blocking law's approved Australia is certain to have a new "site blocking" regime imposed by the government, with a Senate committee deciding to wave the legislation through.…

Amazon's chomps at edges of broadcasters' pies re:Invent Media distribution is the next market in AWS's sights at its re:Invent conference, with the announcement of a media "ingestion and distribution" service, another step in monetising the company's global network for on-cloud customer traffic.…

A compact, grown-up 4:3 machine Hands On I have one very important thing to tell you about Huawei's laptop – and it's so important, everything else about it seems like a bonus.…

If only there was some way the agency could unwind a bit. Or maybe not While NASA celebrated another successful landing on Mars, the agency spent the past seven days dealing with some issues considerably closer to home in the latest round-up of all things space.…

Stick, stick, stick, stick, sticky, sticky, round-up Well done, Squirrels, you've won the wobbly software badge. Now, what else did you get up to last week?…

Flaw-spotting toolkit already has 42 zero-days to its name A group of university researchers from around the globe have teamed up to develop what they say is a powerful new tool to root out security flaws.…

Plucky briefcase-size birds beamed back data pronto of Martian touchdown attempt Vid Landing a spacecraft on Mars is nerve racking and prone to failure, as you can quite well imagine. But fear not, NASA was able to monitor the whole process for the InSight spacecraft thanks to two briefcase-sized CubeSats.…

Big data reaps big bucks HPE has gobbled BlueData, purveyor of the EPIC Big Data-as-a-service software that can run large-scale distributed analytics and machine learning workloads in Docker containers.…

But is it really all that useful? Montezuma’s Revenge, the classic Atari platform game, has finally been fully solved by machine learning, researchers from Uber AI Labs claim.…

Unfair content takedowns and workplace putdowns called out in internal memo Facebook is failing its black employees and users, a black employee said in a memo sent to everyone at the ad-selling platform before he resigned last month.…

Feds, Google, security orgs dismantle fraud botnet, eight people charged A collection of cybersecurity companies, Google, and the Feds are sharing details on how they uncovered and dismantled a massive ad-fraud operation known as "3ve" (pronounced "Eve".)…

No big surprises in CEO's keynote HPE Discover 2018 HPE chief exec Antonio Neri reckons what the corporate world really wants is to have a nice cloud "experience," which is an interesting way of saying "please, please, buy our cloud-as-a-service".…

Fellow online player heard sex assault over game, it is claimed A Florida man is accused of taking a break from a Grand Theft Auto session to rape a 15-year-old girl, the alleged attack apparently recorded by his PlayStation 4 microphone.…

MPs give a sneak preview of content in seized documents, empty-chair Zuck British MPs have teased some of the bombshell details lurking in a cache of internal Facebook emails seized last week – and challenged the social network to unseal the documents before the committee releases them.…

Data suggests one of plane's many brains was stuck in anti-stall mode With investigations continuing into the cause of Lion Air flight 610's deadly crash into the Java Sea, experts are scrutinizing the plane's automated control system.…

If it's good enough for Lambda and Fargate, it's probably good enough for you re:Invent Pay-or-else compute biz AWS lit the fuse for Firecracker, the virtualization technology it uses to power its serverless Lambda offering and its Fargate managed container contrivance.…

A little bit of history and a little more info on customized SoC Exclusive Amazon Web Services' customized Graviton processor, revealed this week, was very nearly an Arm-based chip from AMD, The Register has learned.…

Open letter signed by staff condemns Beijing-edited version of internet indexer Over one hundred Google employees have signed an open letter condemning the advertising titan for building a censored version of its search engine for China. The Googlers demand the project be cancelled.…

Oh man, give them a medal for the FART and SHAT scores Just a week ago we applauded efforts of boffins who figured out how wombats pinch off delightful little Oxo cube poos. Now it seems our squishy marsupial pals are in the esteemed company of the medical community, members of which have been wilfully gobbling (and passing) Lego pieces.…

Any ideas? IBM boss Ginni Rometty has turned her wrathful gaze towards irresponsible Silicon Valley bosses, saying "the weakest link should not define the digital economy".…

And adds containers to halfway hybrid house Cloud Volumes HPE has made its storage arrays faster with Optane caching, while adding containerisation support to its Cloud Volume Nimble arrays to bridge on-premises, AWS and Azure public clouds.…

Thanks to 'dark patterns' and 'nudging', no doesn't mean no Seven European consumer organisations have filed a blockbuster complaint arguing that Google's location tracking in Android lacks a valid legal basis in the European Union.…

Microsoft and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day Updated In a touching show of solidarity with its Exchange Online cousin, Microsoft’s Azure Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) service has fallen over and is struggling to get back up. Again.…

Two foundations find common cause promoting in populist processor plan The Linux Foundation, the non-profit funded by for-profit tech firms to promote the open source operating system, has begun working with the RISC-V Foundation, another non-profit backed by well-heeled companies, to encourage adoption of the open source RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA).…

Switchzilla has a second go at fixing videoconferencing app's 'I'm the captain, now' hole Cisco will take a second crack at addressing a vulnerability in WebEx that can be exploited to execute malicious code on a vulnerable installation.…

Also: Transit Gateways and big bandwidth for C5 instances re:Invent Earlier this month we covered ThousandEyes' report into cloud networking performance, in which the metrics outfit observed that Amazon offloads cloud traffic from its network at the first opportunity, compared to competitors like Google.…

Issue addressed for the many, but what of the few and their precious Outlook inboxes? Microsoft's on-again, off-again relationship with the Outlook clients of UK Office 365 subscribers has entered its second day, and some users found themselves still unable to access their email.…

It's only Media Player this time. Oh, and file associations. Oops The "days without a Windows 10 incident" clock has been reset to zero once again as a tired Microsoft engineer updated the "known issues" page to reflect that, well, there are some.…

Edgeline boxen bang operational tech and IT heads together HPE Discover 2018 Don't want a full blown data centre? Not a problem, said HPE today as it lifted the curtain on a fresh clutch of edge networking products – including a software platform – under its Edgeline brand.…

They don't make them like her any more Obit Baroness Trumpington, a wartime Bletchley Park transcriber who was part of the push to posthumously pardon Alan Turing, has died aged 96.…

2.7 million Brits caught up in 'serious failure of data security' says UK data watchdog The UK’s data watchdog has slapped a £385,000 penalty on app-not-driving-service baddie Uber for security weak spots that attackers exploited to expose the details of millions of customers.…

Outgoing head congratulated for role in division's transformation Capita is looking for a new networks chief.…

Then took her employers to the Employment Tribunal An NCC Group graduate trainee who emailed 300 coworkers to ask for help with what she deemed to be "unusual" behaviour from her Kali Linux VM; contacted the firm’s incident response team to complain about a faulty laptop; and said the machine had been "deliberately sabotaged", has had her victimisation claim thrown out by an employment tribunal.…

On the side of a bus #F_AI_L An Artificial Intelligence system in China publicly shamed one of the country’s most prominent business executive for jaywalking - after spotting their mug going past on the side of a bus.…