The Register

At Node Summit, coders served some humble pie Software developers have been lionized in recent years for their influence over the information economy. At the Node Summit in San Francisco, California, on Wednesday, Guy Podjarny, CEO and cofounder of security biz Snyk, reminded an audience full of devs that they've become a popular vector for malware distribution.…

Blacker than the heart of a Register hack Goths of the world rejoice! Outlook.com's Dark Mode is here, turning mailboxes into blacks and shades of grey such that Lego Batman would shed a tear of joy. If Lego Batman cried. Which he doesn't.…

Oh, and Windows, but cool kids don't use that Oracle Database 18 is now available for on-prem download on Linux, according to a talkative senior Oracle chap.…

Redmond smiles: We want to support customers in journey to cloud Microsoft threw a commercial preview bone to cloud-phobes* this week in the form of on-premises versions of its Server and Office applications.…

Plus: Appetite for internal pen-testing appears to be growing Few companies bother to secure employee accounts with simple protections like two-factor authentication (2FA) and lockouts, an analysis by security company Rapid 7 has found.…

Meanwhile, Pointnext chief Ana Pinczuk goes for a long walk HPE has appointed a permanent president to its new hybrid IT business group, in the form of Phil Davis, who is currently the firm's global sales chief.…

Third bunch of fixes aimed at pleasing business types Running Windows 10 in the enterprise? Took the advice of Microsoft when it said the April 2018 Update was ready for the big leagues? You probably want to install last night's "quality improvements".…

Etherscan XSS snafu could have been much, much worse Ethereum-tracking website Etherscan has resolved a cross-site scripting issue on its domain.…

Departing head talks 'lumpy' deals and channel dreams Data protection outfit Commvault has revealed a deepening net loss of $8.6m on revenues of $176.2m, in Q1 FY'19 results described by Wells Fargo senior analyst Aaron Rakers as "underwhelming".…

Plus: Did you know 'shadow IoT' was a thing? It is Analysis What exactly is the Internet of Things? According to Gartner and IDC, it's a network of endpoints capable of interacting with each other and the world via IP connectivity.…

When outsourcing goes bad! NHS England and Capita blamed NHS England must re-evaluate the way it outsources work to the private sector in the wake of "continued squabbles" with Capita over the mismanaged £700m Primary Support Care (PSC) contract.…

And Denon+Marantz, too The European Commission has sent a slightly belated message to the consumer electronics industry that it frowns upon price fixing, this week fining four manufacturers a total of €111m (US$130m, £99m) for breaking European rules as long as seven years ago.…

The story behind the quietly patched CVE-2018-3652 Ex-Intel security dragons have breathed fresh fire into the old maxim: if someone has physical access to your machine, you're pwned.…

'OG of serverless' gets modern makeover Google App Engine will support two additional programming language runtimes in its standard environment in the next 30 days: Python 3.7 and PHP 7.2.…

Impress pals at the pub by telling them about the creepy-sounding Medusae Fossae Have you ever wondered where Mars got all that striking iron-rich rust-colored dust from?…

We're not here to fsck spiders – prove you care by getting busy with RADIUS and EAP Can we overcome the SOHOpeless security of the Internet of Things at the home and small business level? An Internet-Draft from Ericsson engineer Mohit Sethi suggests so.…

Pwn web publishing tools, HTTP servers on Linux and Windows and earn a nice bonus A bunch of new bug bounty rewards are up for grabs from the Zero Day Initiative, in a first-come, best-dressed program kicking off on August 1.…

And it's clutching a roadmap that charts first shipments before end of 2018 The next round of bonkers-fast upgrades to data center networks is going to be 400Gbps Ethernet – and Juniper Networks has joined the party with a suitable roadmap.…

Without any detail, it's another online cloud service Analysis Google is thundering on with its mission to "democratize AI" with its Cloud AutoML platform – even though it doesn’t quite live up to the hype.…

Cloud Services Platform debuts, mixing containers, monitoring, AI, management, etc Amid ongoing renovations at San Francisco's Moscone Convention Center, Google Cloud Next '18 opened on Tuesday, the scent of new carpeting and paint still lingering in the air.…

High Sierra patch reduces performance throttling for this year's tardy laptops If your 2018 MacBook Pro laptop is slowing down unexpectedly, then download and install today's macOS 10.13.6 Supplemental Update, and cross your fingers.…

Last century called. They want their UI back, please Open-source Windows wannabe ReactOS took another tentative step towards usability with a 0.4.9 release aimed at stability and self-hosting.…

Adds Nimble InfoSight sw, more containerisation middleware support HPE has planted a Nimble InfoSight brain into its 3PAR system management and extended its DevOps middleware coverage to make 3PAR more container-friendly.…

Privilege escalation bug was still sitting there 11 years later A vulnerability first detected and "resolved" years ago in Oracle's Unix OS, Solaris, has resurfaced, necessitating a fix in Big Red's latest quarterly patch batch.…

Now-patched vulnerability let attackers overwrite code IBM has patched a critical vulnerability in its Cloud Functions platform that would have allowed miscreants to remotely overwrite customers' code – and execute malicious commands to hijack services.…

Sorry to disappoint It has been a good week for Microsoft. While beancounters counted their cloudy cash, the rest of the Redmond kept itself busy.…

Red flags: Hunt and Helme pick out sites that can load without crypto How's that migration to "HTTPS everywhere" going? With some Chrome browsers* now flagging insecure sites, there's a lot of work still to do, according to security bods Troy Hunt and Scott Helme.…

Incumbent 'committed' to give it greater 'strategic independence' BT Group today said it has started consultation with 31,000 staff that are bound for Openreach in October, according to a statement filed with the London Stock Exchange.…

We node we can stuff just one more SoC in here Ready to unzip this densely packed storage news suitcase? We've got a bulging information-fest with all that's worth knowing from the past week, ranging from SSDs through disks to public and private clouds.…

Trustbusters R us Analysis Europe's Competition Commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, faced two very different questions from the media after announcing a record fine for Google last week.…

Earlybird tickets due to expire in one week - act now If you want to get to grip with the key theories and tools behind machine learning and AI, and see how your peers have them into practice in real businesses, you should grab an early bird ticket for MCubed now.…

Testing giant LabCorp still recovering Analysis One of the largest clinical testing specialists in the US, LabCorp Diagnostics, is coming out of recovery mode a week after being hit with ransomware – reportedly SamSam, the same malware that brought the US city of Atlanta to a standstill earlier this year.…

DeepMind tries to train a neural network on classical piano Neural networks are neat at spotting and reproducing patterns in images and text – yet they still struggle when spitting out audio.…

Earth's satellite may have been habitable billions of years ago The Moon may not have been as desolate as it is today – and could have supported life on its surface after its formation some four billion years ago.…

'Hundreds' of intrusions, switch could be pulled anytime, where have we heard this before? The US Department of Homeland Security is once again accusing Russian government hackers of penetrating America's critical infrastructure.…

Oh, and Intel's modems are garbage, claims chip-slinger waving around speed test data Pic Qualcomm is getting ready to ship one of the relatively boring bits of the 5G puzzle – well, perhaps boring for you, but fascinating for electronics geeks: a compact transceiver/antenna combo that fits inside phones to provide 5G millimetre-wave communications.…

Crypto cockup lets middle-people spy on connections after snooping on device pairing With a bunch of security fixes released and more on the way, details have been made public of a Bluetooth bug that potentially allows miscreants to commandeer nearby devices.…

Human rights commish weighs in as Aussies opt out Australia's Human Rights Commissioner has weighed into the country's troubled electronic health records rollout.…

Assembly line 'droid builder latest to be accused of leaving rsync wide open on the internet Yet another organization has allegedly been caught accidentally exposing more than 100GB of sensitive corporate data to the open internet.…

Net income for Q2 slashed by $5bn Android antitrust fine Dusting off a $5bn European monopoly abuse fine over Google's Android business, parent company Alphabet delivered better than expected Q2 2018 earnings – lifting its shares in after-hours trading.…

VBScript hole 'fixed' in May actually left open for months A remote code execution vulnerability in the Windows VBScript engine was left open for exploitation for two months after it was supposedly patched.…

Seemingly invincible ghost in the machine may also continue to haunt AMD, Arm chips Spectre, a class of vulnerabilities in the speculative execution mechanism employed in modern processor chips, is living up to its name by proving to be unkillable.…

Backer charged in connection with alleged $4.1m corporate fraud scandal An investor in an IT biz has coughed up $456,000 after America's financial watchdog accused him of looking the other way while executives at the consultancy he backed allegedly embezzled millions of dollars.…

Full-fibre diet for all by the year 2033, vows Ministry of Fun The Ministry of Fun* is wheeling out a new national telecoms strategy (PDF) that aims to slather the UK in healthy full-fat broadband fibre by 2033.…

That sound you're hearing is eyebrows raised into orbit Amazon's UK chief Doug Gurr has claimed Britain will descend into "civil unrest" in weeks if it leaves the EU with no trade deal in place.…

Command injection and stack buffer overflow flaws bedevil cam range Security researchers at Cisco Talos have found two serious flaws with Sony's network-facing surveillance kit, the IPELA E Series Network Camera.…

Some chips have more bits than others, though Tosh and WD's flash foundry joint venture has begun to pump out 96-layer 3D NAND chips and the two partners are using them to produce quad-level cell (QLC) products. TLC Tosh has a 1TB SSD with 3 bits/cell while it and QLC Western Dig have a 1.33 Tbit chip with 4 bits/cell.…

Buy bolsters firm's banking, finance and insurance bits Atos has diverted attention from some cracks in its North American ops by making public its intention to spend lots of cash – a cool $3.4bn to be precise – to buy US-HQ'd tech services outfit Syntel.…

Appeal against my latest judgment? Oh wait, you can't! The Investigatory Powers Tribunal has reruled that GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 engaged in indiscriminate and illegal bulk cable-tapping surveillance for 15 years – and has once again refused to do anything about it.…