The Register

Plus: Cloud file-sharing on desktop and mobile clients Microsoft announced this week that Skype calling had arrived on Amazon's Echo, but the rollout took a little while, finally arriving at Vulture Central yesterday, so we took it for a spin to see how it works.…

Don't put the Champagne on ice: English sparkling wine fizzes as French bubbles go flat Amid frenzied Brexit preparations in 2017-18, government-hosted parties slurped up 20 per cent more wine than the previous year – as European plonk purchases reached a bottleneck.…

Alice becomes Bob Germany has patched a key "e-government" service against possible impersonation attacks, and both private and public sector developers have been told to check their logs for evidence of exploits.…

Storage company's core project joins the GitHub undead Western Digital has taken software acquired with personal storage outfit Upthere in 2017, packed it gently in a wicker basket, and laid it at the door of a GitHub orphanage.…

Hadoop YARN is the attack vector, so lock it away Diligent hackers have decided routers and cameras aren't enough, and have reportedly crafted Mirai variants targeting Linux servers.…

2018: The year the US-imported shopping promo bonanza goes pffft? Black Friday may take on a different meaning in 2018 as the consumer shopping bonanza looks set to be an utter flop in the largest economies across Europe.…

No one fancied Salyut-style jaunt to Mir to grab some gear The International Space Station turned 20 this week as space agencies and 'nauts alike celebrated the anniversary of the launch of the first module of the ISS.…

A divided tech nation embraces, uncomfortably In a very American celebration of setting aside differences to sit at the same table, on the eve of Thanksgiving you can now use your iPhone to issue voice commands to Google's smart home systems. Well, sort of.…

Pah! Who didn't know that?! (It means they shouldn't have to pay non-taxable costs, apparently) The United States and linguistic experts have sided with Oracle-botherer Rimini Street in its Supreme Court battle to claw back $12m from its copyright settlement with Big Red.…

We dig in and find a surprising answer The rules over what companies selling internet access to folks are allowed to do are heading to America's law courts yet again.…

Pay no attention to the underpants. We ARE an internet company Analysis China's answer to the Grace Brothers department store*, Xiaomi, remains dependent on internet services for most of its profit, and smartphones for most of its revenue – and that's giving some analysts pause for thought.…

Transient use edge data collector and processor upgraded Amazon has slipped some extra compute options into its Snowball Edge data transfer box.…

And no, it's not simply return true;... Study finds language analysis is fairly good at detecting deception Boffins from the Netherlands and France claim that the word choices and sentence construction in President Donald Trump's tweets can be used more often than not for lie detection.…

Because watching a 'Genius' mope about the shop floor will inspire a generation While it may be having some difficulty shifting its latest iPhones, Apple has found time to fling open its stores and inflict hordes of excited schoolchildren on the "Geniuses" therein.…

But whatever, you can expect phones next year Roundup After years of interminable waffle, 5G is almost upon us, and Huawei wants to tell us what works – and what must wait. At this stage, the wrinkles are as valuable as the milestones, because 5G is a vast smorgasbord of different technologies and aspirations.…

Get Zucked, basically Facebook is to appeal the £500,000 fine handed down in October by the UK's Information Commissioner's Office over the data-harvesting scandal.…

FibreNation might exist but the expected sack of cash is yet to be announcned TalkTalk's 3 million-home fibre splurge now has a name – FibreNation – but can no longer say it has £1.5bn at its disposal for the venture.…

FY18 dogged by execution woes but, er, all sorted now The latest CEO to take the controls at Brit accountancy software maker Sage is intending to convert the laggards in its customer base to the cloud by spending £60m on R&D and product improvements.…

Dutch boffins prove it is possible to evade memory-busting attack mitigations Researchers in the Netherlands have confirmed that error-correcting code (ECC) protections can be thwarted to perform Rowhammer memory manipulation attacks.…

Chocolate Factory vows to fix camera glitch Google might make the best camera phone in the world – but that doesn't mean much if it can't take pictures.…

Password-less logins for Edge users with Windows Hello or a FIDO2 dongle. Like, 3 people It's taken a while, but it has finally arrived. You can sign into your Microsoft account with a suitable dongle or Windows Hello, with passwords consigned to history.…

$1tn biz doesn't answer very basic questions - like how or why it happened Updated Amazon has suffered a data snafu just days before Black Friday – and the company was tight-lipped about whether it had notified the British data protection authorities.…

Disguised as files about recent Lion Air crash, no less Russian state-backed hacking crew Fancy Bear (aka APT28) is distributing malware-riddled files with a suggested link to the recent Lion Air crash in order to dupe government workers into downloading software nasties – and has developed a new remote-access trojan called Cannon, according to Palo Alto Networks.…

Dodgy dialling dons' dosh due to diminish in December Company bosses will be personally liable for nuisance calls made by their firms from 17 December, and could be forced to pay up to £500,000.…

Upcoming calendar change more than Office can handle Stop us if you've heard this one, but Microsoft has pulled a couple of buggy patches in Office. It also left a crash-worthy Outlook security fix in place.…

Warships don't only sink the nation's enemies, you know Boatnotes You may think of a warship as a vessel that sails the Seven Seas, bristling with missiles and guns, ready to deal out death and destruction to Her Majesty's enemies. In fact, warships do many other jobs too – such as HMS Enterprise's routine but vital task of seabed surveying.…

The irony meter is quivering Oh the irony. A channel account rep trying to drum up business for security awareness training scored an own goal this week when he pressed the send to all option on an email to prospective clients.…

Hey, Bezos wanted to create the everything store... With all eyes on Black Friday, retail kingpin Amazon UK moved that bit closer to fulfilling CEO Jeff Bezos' ultimate plan of becoming the everything store – by adding high-strength weed to its digital shelves.…

A gentle intro to design considerations for a large-scale internet-connected web of sensors Backgrounder Many have started down the road of rolling out non-trivial Internet-of-Things platforms, and you may have, too, to some degree.…

Yes, even the Tor browser can be spied on by this nasty code Special report Computer science boffins have demonstrated a side-channel attack technique that bypasses recently-introduced privacy defenses, and makes even the Tor browser subject to tracking. The result: it is possible for malicious JavaScript in one web browser tab to spy on other open tabs, and work out which websites you're visiting.…

Unless you want your private key to leak, watch miscreants inject commands, etc Get patching: data protection offerings in the Dell EMC Avamar range have four exploitable security bugs – one enabling remote code execution – and VMware's inherited the vulnerabilities, with fixes now available.…

It's like a turducken of screw-ups Roundup As America prepares for Thursday's Thanksgiving rituals of turkey, football, and awkward conversations with extended family, three organisations are going to have admins working overtime to clean up security messes.…

Dutton busts out the ol' razzle-dazzle of terrorists, encrypted chat and hand-wringing Australia's home affairs minister Peter Dutton wants the parliamentary inquiry into his proposed crypto-busting law to wind up its work, and send the draft rules back to legislators to approve, stat.…

Net income seems to be the hardest words for storage biz Pure Storage has reported quarterly results that beat Wall Street estimates and caused it to upgrade full-year guidance – but one thing still evades the all-flash array maker, and that is profit.…

Online sleuths dig into the case, with surprising success It's every sysadmin's worst nightmare: discovering that someone has planted a device in your network, among all your servers, and you have no idea where it came from nor what it does. What do you do?…

Data centre lost connectivity, now restored LastPass's cloud service suffered a five-hour outage today that left some people unable to use the password manager to log into their internet accounts.…

Women harassed, driven out while worse performing men keep jobs, lawsuit claims A former Oracle application sales rep is suing the database giant, alleging gender and age discrimination, sexual harassment, and violations of US labor laws after being fired.…

The internet's screen door strikes again – so get patching Adobe has emitted software updates to address a critical vulnerability in Flash Player for Windows, Mac, and Linux.…

Arm TrustZone now a thing for Azure IoT Edge devs Microsoft's Azure IoT team has made available a cross-platform version its Open Enclave SDK with an eye to securing devices at that mysterious entity, the Edge.…

Sorry Matt, looks like the app revolution takes a backseat to quality health care The public wants the NHS's £20.5bn cash boost to be spent on cancer care, mental health and recruiting and retaining staff – not digital services.…

Data ownership is so yesterday. Give us all you've got... ethically Comment In a refreshing change, the government yesterday appointed an NHS technology advisory panel with almost no medics or tech experts on board. Today, it announced the names of expert advisors to the nebulous "Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation", one of two new bodies set up this year. This one is intended to assure the public that they can trust AI companies with slurping their data.…

♪We built this rocket on debt and bull*♪ Elon Musk took to Twitter last night to announce the Big Falcon Rocket (BFR) will henceforth have the considerably more ambitious moniker Starship.…

'Living wills' part of politician and contractor bid to engender confidence in outsourcing Capita, Serco and Sopra Steria are drafting "living wills" with the government in case they collapse – a measure agreed to after the Carillion debacle.…

Cash splashed for clever Cache Microsoft has joined the throngs of excited Black Friday shoppers to snap up desktop virtualization specialist FSLogix.…

Automated mercy for those knobbly pointers SAP has snaffled automation minnow Contextor, claiming it will automate half the business processes supported by its ERP software in the next three years.…

Hacker coalition wants device support timeline clarified, free firmware mandates Last week, in a attempt to address broadband router security, the German government published its suggestions for minimum standards – and came under immediate criticism that its proposals didn't go far enough.…

Tech issues and rivalries can slow this down Analysis 5G has the potential to make cable and DSL as antiquated and pointless as using a horse and a cart to drive to the supermarket. And it's already here.…

Don't worry, it was just cargo, not 'nauts Roundup Russia, China and India all flung rockets into space this week and SpaceX managed to get a secondhand Falcon 9 off the historic pad 39A at Cape Canaveral.…

Emergency services need Tetra devices for at least three more years thanks to 4G delays Motorola Solutions and Sepura are to build a centrally managed procurement framework for the UK's radio network, Airwave.…

Plus: Battery-powered Azure Sphere, Razor support in Visual Studio Core Roundup This week Microsoft saw the light in Windows 10 and returned to the realm of chatbots, among plenty of other things notwithstanding the flashing of a surprise ad in an Insider build.…