The Register

Short-term renters? More like short-term raiders Picture the scene, if you will. You and your partner have just rolled in through the front door after a rare and welcome night out on the lash. You might put the coffee on, maybe swipe a cheeky nightcap, before falling into bed and quickly deciding you're both too hammered to do what lovers do and drift off into deep, interminable sleep.…

Pay dirt: Owners of knackered kit drag iGiant into court Apple was sued in the US this week over claims that design flaws in its iMac desktop and MacBook laptop computers allow dust into the machines, causing the screens, fans, and circuitry to fail.…

USB stick shenanigans alleged in lawsuit against former hardware bod Intel has unleashed its legal dogs upon one of its former hardware engineers, alleging the bloke tried to steal confidential chip blueprints to potentially pass on to Micron.…

Build 18290 is here to save the day. Now with extra Fluent Design While getting a release of a wobble-free Windows 10 is proving an impossible mission for Microsoft, the Windows Insider team are at pains to warn its army of unpaid testers that older preview builds will soon self-destruct.…

FSx off on-premises guys Amazon is in on-premises application landgrab mode and has released two fully managed services that lift and shift Windows File Server and Lustre workloads to AWS.…

Civil rights group given all-clear to launch judicial review at bulk surveillance regime Civil rights group Liberty has been granted permission to launch a full legal challenge at the UK government's bulk surveillance regime in the High Court.…

Through failure comes success! Or more failure. Take your pick Hope springs eternal for wearables, despite the biz losing billions of dollars over the past five years. And few forecasts can be more hopeful than Gartner's prediction that the market will treble in value over the next three years.…

Names, addresses, social security numbers exposed Miscreants gained access to US healthcare billing vendor AccuDoc Solutions' database for about a week in September, exposing the data of at least 2.65 million people.…

Plus: State-backed hacks now need permission from a judge On the same day that certain types of British state-backed hacking now need a judge-issued warrant to carry out, GCHQ has lifted the veil and given the infosec world a glimpse inside its vuln-hoarding policies.…

Obscurity hides margin, so we called in the CMA – comparison bods Business mobile plans are notorious for their complexity and obscurity, so if you're a UK SME, how do you know if you're being ripped off?…

Clock's ticking on Ellison's smack talk re:Invent AWS boss Andy Jassy has doubled down on claims Amazon will "be done" with Oracle databases by 2019, and used his Re:Invent keynote to throw shade at Big Red.…

American Civil Liberties Union wants to know what govt asked for, and why court refused The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed a motion to find out what went on in a court case in which the US Department of Justice allegedly tried to make Facebook give it unencrypted access to Messenger calls.…

Finance outfits can't identify high-risk staff, third parties with systems access – report Financial firms have admitted they don't upgrade or remove end-of-life kit fast enough, can't identify all staff dealing with critical data, and don't maintain a comprehensive list of partners with system access.…

Wonderful, wonderful It is OneDrive's turn to get a beating with the stick of fail as the service took a tumble this morning.…

Doubt cast on Spark's 5G build, despite minister saying ban isn't really a ban Reports emerging from New Zealand suggest local carrier Spark has been blocked from buying Huawei kit for its 5G rollout. The Kiwi national security minister, however, has given the report a lukewarm denial.…

Enforcing GDPR is expensive work, says watchdog More than a hundred firms have been fined for failing to pay fees that the UK's overstretched data protection watchdog needs to feather its nest.…

Deutsch Messe reportedly would've lost €5m on a 2019 gig Once a juggernaut, CeBIT is no more: 33 years after spinning the tech exhibition out from Hannover Messe, Deutsche Messe has announced that declining visitor numbers have left it no choice but to shutter the show.…

'Highly unlikely' amid 'so much uncertainty', says boss The chief of UKFast has said he expects to postpone his web-hosting and cloud services firm's planned flotation on the London Stock Exchange because of – what else? – Brexit.…

Profit driving NSS claims of industry boycott, antivirus makers swear Symantec says the biz that accused it of conspiring with others to avoid independent security audits is "less than honest" and driven by a "thirst for profits."…

These ultra-precise babies are not your average timepiece Physicists have designed super-accurate atomic clocks that may be able to detect gravitational waves and dark matter by the way those phenomena affect gravity and therefore time.…

Fret not, artists, sellers and buyers ... it's far from perfect at this stage AI-powered robo-painters are getting somewhat better at ripping off masterpieces, judging by the following fresh research.…

Containers cannot be contained as geeks go gaga over DevOps Kubernetes, the popular container orchestration technology, has become the fastest growing skill that job seekers search for when looking to employment. It's also the skill that has grown the most in employer job posts, in the US at least.…

From hyper-converged infrastructure appliances to a multi-cloud hypervisor It's been a busy Wednesday for Nutanix: a new tie-up with tier-two vendor Juniper Networks, the general availability of the Xi Cloud services confirmed, and deepening losses in its latest financial figures.…

Beware, some features are missing depending on which smartie you use Google has loosened its stranglehold on Project Fi, expanding its US cellphone network service beyond its own handsets to competitor smartphones made by Samsung and Apple.…

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.…