The Register

Study lays bare personal data flows from mobes to the Chocolate Factory Google's passive collection of personal data from Android and iOS has been monitored and measured in a significant academic study.…

Big data, smart machines and analytics, with a human behind the wheel Analysis With highly targeted cyber attacks the new normal, companies are finding the once-hidden Security Operations Centre (SOC) is the part of their setup they really count on.…

All work and no play makes tech support a dull gig – meet the techies who added in a drop of intrigue On-Call Congratulations, Reg readers – you've made it through the week, and those of you in England and Wales are now headed into a three-day weekend.…

Computer software not ready to beat living Dota 2 pros yet OpenAI’s bots were knocked out of The International – the Dota 2 computer game's annual Olympics – on Thursday after they lost to human pros 2-0 in a best-of-three contest.…

Bitcoin rather than student loan required for fraud classes Crooks are now taking to encrypted messenger Telegram to tout their online how-to courses on cybercrime, according to risk management biz Digital Shadows.…

UK traders: 'Help us, HMRC, you're our only hope' A week after the UK's taxman unveiled an exciting new system for modernising its existing processes, the government has published papers describing what might happen in the event the UK tumbles out of the EU next year without a workable deal.…

Donovanosis infection menaces Brit home town of El Reg's HR department The first British case of a rare flesh-eating sexually transmitted infection has been diagnosed in Southport – England's golf capital and home of The Register's financial and HR office.…

Is there poison in the chalice that Stephen will Rue? It's not quite as bad as waking up with a hangover and a mystery tattoo, but incoming nbn™ CEO Stephen Rue will start his tenure with a new regulatory regime, and on notice to fix the network rollout's ongoing new connection problem.…

Secure messaging maker courts biz comms gigs with Psiphon's help Encrypted comms service Wickr has hooked up with Psiphon, a maker of censorship circumvention tools, to provide an alternative to domain fronting as a defense against prying eyes online.…

Legal action seeks info copied during airport search An American woman is suing the US government's Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection to get the data border agents copied from her phone.…

TL;DR? It sucks Analysis A deep dive into internet access availability in one US city has revealed – again – that competition for broadband is dreadful and far below what official figures claim.…

Malware with polished website spotted stealing crypto-coins from traders The malware-making gang of hackers dubbed Lazarus is said to be behind a crypto-coin-stealing nasty that infects Macs. This would be the first time this group has targeted Apple desktops.…

Longest-ever sentence for Russia hack whistleblower as defenders claim public service A former NSA translator who leaked a classified report into attempted Russian hacking of US voting systems has been sentenced to 63 months behind bars.…

It really really really didn't want you to know that there may be a significant performance hit Intel has backtracked on the license for its latest microcode update that mitigates security vulnerabilities in its processors – after the previous wording outlawed public benchmarking of the chips.…

Dual-SIM, China-only and budget models with ageing guts among rumoured kit Leaks of a forthcoming budget iPhone have boosted predictions that Apple will sell more smartphones in 2019.…

Cupertino banned software that slurps data for marketing Facebook has pulled its data-snaffling Onavo VPN from Apple's App Store after the iGiant said the tech violated recently tightened rules.…

Fixable? Kind of. Unless you need a new battery Screwdriver botherers at iFixit have turned their attention to the hugely hyped and hugely late Magic Leap One headset and reduced it to its component parts.…

SaaS kit compares users' setups to reveal best practices Secondary storage hyper-converger Cohesity has introduced a SaaS management tool.…

Drowned Atlantis tech reinvented as AI-ready product HiveIO, which bought failed Atlantis Computing's hyperconverged and virtual desktop infrastructure (HCI, VDI) tech, has released v7 of its software, claiming it eliminates traditional HCI vendor complexity.…

Um, yeah, it was an anti-phishing security test Updated The Democratic National Committee (DNC) has called in the FBI after uncovering an apparent attack against its internal voter database system.…

To save the BBC, and local journalism The Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition wants to tax ISPs and “technology giants” to fund the BBC and independent journalism. With Labour 10/11 to have the most seats at Britain's next General Election, his targets are obliged to take it seriously.…

Facial recog, psychological profiling – and scalding liquid flying through the air IBM has filed a patent for mood-sensing coffee delivery drones, because what the world really needs is piping hot liquids flying around over everyone's noggins.…

Elizabeth Denham's foreword to scrapped tome raises eyebrows There have been better weeks for The Information Commissioner's Office, which has faced ridicule thanks to ongoing website woes and accusations of dodgy book endorsements.…

Polar cap and sea height-measuring ICEsat-2 to fire 10k pulses at Earth each second An orbital Earth sciences laser, NASA's ICEsat-2, is in the final stages of preparation ahead of next month's launch.…

It is not alone: Sheffield, Rotherham and Sandwell admit to using Windows Server 2000 A third of London councils and more than a quarter of England's metropolitan authorities have admitted to using unsupported server software – and three are still running Windows Server 2000.…

Serverless is coming... here’s how to do it, The Register style Conference If you want to find out what serverless is all about, join us and almost 40 pioneers in the field this coming November.…

Profits up but margins down as Byte Software Services cast a wary eye to the future Surrey-based reseller Bytes Software Services (BSS) has had a rather good year, despite some price hikes from its number one supplier Microsoft seemingly dampening margins.…

For people on a budget StorageCraft has flung a converged scale-out box at small and medium businesses – in the hope that there's room in the market for Cohesity and Rubrik-style enterprise storage and data protection for those with a modest budget.…

It's 'cuz cloud giants use tools without giving anything back Database maker Redis Labs this week moved the Redis Modules developed by the company from the AGPL to a license that combines Apache v2.0 with Commons Clause, which restricts the sale of covered software.…

Pro shares healthcare horror stories BSides Manchester A children's nurse prescribed hospitals ways to improve their computer security at the BSides conference in Manchester, England, earlier this month.…

AI can react faster than humans, but don't play well enough to beat the masters yet The International In the past hour, OpenAI's artificially intelligent bots lost their first match against professional players at smash-hit computer game Dota 2 at The International – the video game's annual championship tournament.…

Claims network protections are 'ineffective' in 5G. No, really Five Eyes member Australia has banned Huawei and ZTE from participating in the coming rollout of 5G mobile networks – without naming the companies.…

Memory corruption bugs lead to remote code execution Adobe says there's a critical flaw in its Photoshop Creative Cloud software for Windows and macOS that can be exploited by malicious files to hijack systems.…

Evil files bypass GhostScript sandbox, run malicious code GhostScript's security sandbox is so weak, website admins, developers, and users should block ImageMagick and other tools from using the software altogether.…

Well, not a surprise, since most governments are hopeless. 'Password123' is just the start Western Australia's auditor general is blinking in disbelief, after an audit of the state's password practices turned up just how many people use bad passwords.…

Is it any different for you? The computer industry may have moved to more frequent software security updates – but the rest of the world still takes a month or longer to patch their networks.…

Paging Equifax: Time to update again, fellas Another critical security hole has been found in Apache Struts 2, requiring an immediate update.…

...and those devs are then applying patches, we hope JavaScript library custodian NPM, after years of security scrambling, looks to be getting a grip on its code safety.…

Sprinkles its Enterprise Cloud Platform with the SUSE juice SUSE today confirmed that Indian outsourcer Tata Consultancy Services has opted for its OpenStack Cloud as the standard for its Enterprise Cloud Platform (ECP).…

Audit investigation in historic accounting delayed, firm falls out of compliance Supermicro will not meet this week's deadline imposed by NASDAQ to file delayed financial results to regain compliance with its regulations, and expects its common stock to be suspended on the exchange by 24 August.…

Researchers say pentesting software being used for botnets Cisco Talos says criminals are using one research company's testing tools to set up and run botnets.…

Three years on, 'superfast' village's 'net sucks Updated A village in former communications minister Ed Vaizey's Parliamentary constituency is suffering ongoing internet outages despite once being the darling of Britain's superfast broadband rollout.…

Chucks cloudy dedupe biz StorReduce in the trolley Pure Storage may still be losing tens of millions of dollars each quarter but has signed off on its first acquisition as a public outfit, buying cloudy dedupe biz StorReduce.…

Microsoft still supports some embedded XP derivatives OK, so it's not quite Windows for Warships, but Tesco's point-of-sale terminals appear to still be running Windows XP more than two years after Microsoft ended support for the aged operating system.…

So why can't UK.gov do the same? – campaigners The Open Rights Group has backed the Scottish government's plans to immediately delete mugshots at the end of legal retention periods – something Whitehall said is impossible in its own systems.…

Government to cut Microsoft off at the end of 2018 Microsoft’s desire to move users into the exciting world of Office 365 subscriptions has been dealt a blow as the Israeli government took a look and said “no thanks.”…

Government to cut Microsoft off at the end of 2018 Microsoft’s desire to move users into the exciting world of Office 365 subscriptions has been dealt a blow as the Israeli government took a look and said “no thanks.”…

Talk about tough gigs – abacus-stroker-in-chief comes from UK rail background It may be a case of nominative determinism that in the midst of its expense purge Capita has hired a man called Butcher to take control of the finance function. It might just be coincidence.…

All ale the new re-pub-lic of Cross Keys! A Somerset pub is gearing up to secede from the UK next month.…

Politicians can whine all they want, but they can't change standards as easily While law enforcement continues its worldwide crusade against chat apps with end-to-end encryption, the Internet Engineering Task Force has proposed standards designed to let everybody have message security.…