The Register

Miller, Valasek discuss today and tomorrow's robo-ride defenses Black Hat Car hacking wizards Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek have turned their attention to autonomous vehicles – and reckon the security is surprisingly good.…

Why are we eternal pessimists? And why's that such a bad thing, eh? Eh? Eh? Is your morning coffee half empty? Do you feel it's always darkest before it goes pitch black?…

Join the Mobile Infantry and save the Galaxy. Service guarantees citizenship. Would you like to know more? Mike Pence, the Vice President of the United States, on Thursday formally announced that his administration hopes to bankroll, no, not universal healthcare for all Americans. Not better support for armed forces veterans. Not improved public education.…

Tech needs to mature a little more, perhaps Black Hat Those gadgets and apps used by small shops and traders to turn their smartphones and tablets into handheld sales terminals? Quite possibly insecure, you'll no doubt be shocked to discover.…

DNS leak flaws are outside of bug-bounty scope Kaspersky's Android VPN app whispered the names of websites its 1,000,000-plus users visited along with their public IP addresses to the world's DNS servers, it is claimed.…

You listening, Cressida Dick? Analysis America's largest manufacturer of body cameras – and the biggest supplier to police forces across the United States – says today's facial recognition technology is not safe for making serious decisions.…

Decision to join Google-y Internet-of-Things-ish Thread Group intrigues Analysis Apple may have finally concluded that its attempt to force people to use only its technology to control their smart-home automation equipment is doomed to failure.…

Thousands of mobes allegedly slurped, fenced via phishing, etc A dozen people have been indicted in America for allegedly fencing more than $1m in smartphones and other kit obtained via hacking and fraud.…

Even worse: contains Bixby – you've been warned Pics Samsung is allegedly mulling ending its Galaxy Note line, now that almost every smartphone on the planet is larger than the original Note – which was so absurdly large at launch it was dubbed the first “phablet."…

That's rough, bet they were well teed off – crooks want Bitcoin The Professional Golfers' Association of America (PGA) was hit by ransomware just before one of the sport's biggest pro events, which teed off on Thursday.…

Plenty of work for the Z14 plumbers Down Under IBM has scored itself a AU$481m ($357m, £277m) mainframe contract with the Australian Department of Human Services. The revelation that half of a larger mega-deal rests solely on mainframes sheds more light on what's holding up Big Blue's financial position.…

Chipzilla has a few flash drives for the data centre as well Intel has launched two QLC (4bits/cell) SSDs – one for consumers and one for data centre use.…

Mind you, they're doing all right on basic B2B phone lines Virgin Media's operating income slid 17 per cent over the past year despite the Brit telco growing its Q2 2018 revenues to £1.275bn, creating interesting conditions for its newly acquired chief operating officer.…

Invitation to lunch, workshops and talks Promo Cybersecurity software firm Sophos is inviting IT professionals to "See the Future" at The Brewery, near the Barbican in London, on Tuesday 9 October.…

He'll help AWS to 'transform' international governments Exclusive The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport has today confirmed the resignation of Liam Maxwell, though the UK government’s top tech advisor will work his notice period and not leave until October.…

Waiter, there's a bug in my Pie Android P may have been the smoothest and most public beta the world’s dominant phone OS has yet enjoyed, but it isn't without its issues.…

NAND that... is how you get skin in the flash game Seagate has announced Nytro 1000 and 5020 SSDs based on OEM'd Toshiba/Western Digital flash chips.…

Marketing biz sold info to political campaign via Experian Updated Data-brokering biz Lifecycle Marketing (Mother & Baby) has been fined £140,000 by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) for illegally collating and flogging personal information of more than a million people.…

Nostalgia warp now almost complete Of all the intellectual property rights on which our future prosperity depends, perhaps trademarks are the most undervalued. The deep emotional power of a brand endures, long after its parent has expired.…

Countdown to ancient IE a telltale sign of malice A honeypot project operated by Japanese comms company NTT has turned up a bunch of new approaches to malware obfuscation.…

Uncomfortable to hold, crap buttons – oh dear Review The ZX Spectrum Vega+ is running open-source Spectrum emulator software FUSE, The Register has confirmed while carrying out a hands-on review of the handheld console.…

Legal eagles drill into the issue with El Reg What are the implications under GDPR of a previous owner retaining access to data and control of a connected car after it is sold on?…

Save now with Serverless Computing early bird tickets Events Whether you’re looking at tweaking your infrastructure or contemplating a wholescale transformation, Serverless is likely to figure in your planning.…

You could put words in people's mouths, claim researchers Researchers have uncovered security shortcomings in WhatsApp that create a means for hackers to intercept and manipulate messages sent in both private and group conversations.…

NVMe rules the interconnect roost Flash Memory Summit At the Flash Memory Summit this week in Santa Clara, California, Toshiba claimed it's possible to get NVMe-over-Fabrics access speed on bog-standard Ethernet, Attala flashed its shared flash cache, the crowd oo'd and ah'd at PCI gen 4.0, and the industry meditated on enhanced 3D NAND layer counts and disk drive cannibalisation.…

Easyleads chief failed to pay fine – now he can't run a UK biz A company boss whose business was fined £260,000 for making 16.7 million automated marketing calls has been banned from holding directorships for six years.…

How does it work? Nobody really knows what goes on in the black box Black Hat Here's perhaps a novel use of a neural network: proof-of-concept malware that uses AI to decide whether or not to attack a victim.…

Panel spills beans on beans spilled Black Hat Next time you leave things to the last minute, remember this well.…

Press record, make some noise into your mic, press play, voila – all in your browser Vid AI can now beatbox for you for hours on end using your voice, if you're into that kind of thing.…

Patch wpa_supplicant and/or kill off key protocol, thanks It’s been a mildly rough week for Wi-Fi security: hard on the heels of a WPA2 weakness comes a programming cockup in the wpa_supplicant configuration tool used on Linux, Android, and other operating systems.…

GLB Director keeps those packets humming even when new servers are added to pools If you’ve got a big bare-metal data center, or if you’re just BM-curious, head on over to GitHub, where there’s a new load balancer on offer by, um, GitHub.…

Prove us wrong, kids, and bag $250,000 Black Hat Not that many moons ago, Microsoft was seemingly reluctant to open a bug bounty program. It also once described Linux as a cancer. Now it claims to love Linux, and is offering bounties on bugs. How times change.…

Self-medicating with booze is no answer, hackers warned at conference Black Hat In a personal and powerful presentation, a computer security veteran has warned that too many infosec bods are fighting a losing battle with the bottle.…

Economist sheds light on US broadband rivalries Analysis If Americans want fast internet access, they need to tighten the screws on Big Cable, not give it yet more power.…

Optane DC persistent memory ships to Google, Xeon roadmap, and more revealed At Intel's Data-Centric Innovation Summit today in Santa Clara, California, Chipzilla reiterated its commitment to deliver 10nm Xeon processors in 2020, to maintain its market leadership, and to adapt its silicon to AI-oriented workloads.…

Parisa Tabriz talks Chrome, HTTPS, and more Black Hat Parisa Tabriz, a director of engineering at Google and head of the web giant's Project Zero bug-hunting squad, today opened this year's Black Hat USA conference with a reminder that partying is key to securing software.…

Why not waste it on some not-very-good Magic Leap techno-goggles? The day has finally arrived! After years of delays and endless over-hyping, Magic Leap has launched its augmented-reality goggles.…

Internet underground outside the West takes a different tone The concept of the "dark web" in Asia is way different to what peeps in Europe and the Americas are used to.…

Data biz trumpets international sales and IBM partnership Hortonworks, once criticised for burning through cash, has reported a fair second 2018 quarter, with revenues up 40 per cent and net losses down 27 per cent.…

Only losers pay, er, sell retail Analysis Samsung has pledged to splurge $160bn on technology investment over three years, as the global smartphone market matures.…

Frankenfirm sets up 'integrated practice' with AWS to eat its lunch before others do DXC Technology, fed up with the cloud brigade eating into its own IT outsourcing (ITO) business, has set up an "integrated practice" with AWS to get in on the action itself.…

Room for another ego at the top, Benioff? Salesforce chief operating officer Keith Block is to become co-CEO with Mark Benioff, in a move echoing their former employer Oracle's setup.…

Shhh, little VMware, go back to sleep Dell is wooing investors with the promise of profits leaping by more than two-thirds if they back Big Mickey D's plans to take the eponymous tech group public again.…

Cunning plan to push top staff out? Firm keeps schtum Symantec is cancelling an Employee Share Purchase (ESP) programme, angering some workers in the process.…

Schools can't do it alone, says education secretary The British government has admitted teachers need help tackling lesson workloads and admin burdens – but wants tech firms to fix the problem.…

Rewrites storage server rules with 32 of Chipzilla's rulers Supermicro has crammed 1PB of Intel flash rulers into the slimmest possible 1U rack storage server.…

Less disruptive and accessible, with added Clippy Analysis So little has changed in the latest annual update to Android, 9.0 Pie, you may be forgiven for thinking "8.2" is a far more appropriate release number.…

Viptela vManage comes to boxen running IOS XE Cisco has made the next move in its integration of 2017 acquisition Viptela, prepping an SD-WAN upgrade it is going to ship to a million routers.…

Save on MCubed tickets while you still can Events You’ve got just over a week to grab early bird tickets for MCubed and ensure cut-price, front row spots for three days of prime machine learning, AI and analytics goodness.…

'Kid, take a nap, I have a project to save' The popular Homebrew macOS package installer has moved to plug a serious vulnerability – it accidentally left a GitHub token visible to the public. Luckily, a team member on paternity leave had a moment while their child napped to fix it.…