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Plus: Reagan's model doesn't apply today, says US CSO Huawei execs insisted today that they have no problem with being shut out of certain countries' networks, even as their US CSO gently scorned a famous Ronald Reagan saying that heralded the end of the Cold War.…

HMRC: How about a client-led dispute resolution process? Organisations hiring off-payroll contractors will be responsible for handling disputes over tax status and ultimately liable for missing tax payments once IR35 reforms hit the private sector, HMRC has said.…

Just nothing too recent, OK? Those keen to indulge in a bit of open-source Windows in the form of ReactOS will be delighted to learn that there is a raft of improvements in the latest version.…

One pint of beer please, Mr Barman. I am 18 today, honest! Like teenagers lying about their age to get served in a pub, tech startups are lying about their AI technology or skills to get VC money.…

MPs ask for specifics, get evasive umming and erring British civil servants and ministers have been slammed for a "Sir Humphrey"* performance when grilled by MPs on differences in attitudes to tech across government and progress moving off legacy systems.…

Ohhh, Torvalds! You are a card! Linus Torvalds has squeezed out version 5.0 of the Linux kernel and flung open the merge window for its follow-up, 5.1.…

About as welcome as a what in a spacesuit? It has been 50 years since NASA first shoved astronauts into a spacecraft that could not return to Earth: say hello to Spider.…

Consumer IoT PITA to secure but not impossible, report warns If you live in a smart home you may as well take all the locks off your doors and hang up a sign saying "burglars, free swag here". At least that's the thrust of a report by Trend Micro into the security threats posed by "complex IoT environments".…

Clear! Museum hopes to bring silicon back to life over next few weeks The Saints of Silicon at the Centre for Computing History have got hold of the original build of Sinclair's ZX Spectrum, courtesy of Kate and John Grant.…

Here I stand, infosec in hand... turn my face to the wall Huawei stopped fighting metaphorical fires today to lift the curtain on its Brussels Cyber Security Transparency Centre in a move to position the Chinese company as a driving force for new global security standards.…

♫ We were always being boring A long time has passed since a Nokia executive compared adopting Android to a boy "peeing in his pants" in the snow to keep warm*. Nokia's current custodian, HMD Global, now wants to be Google's spearhead in getting businesses to buy Android en masse by being as faithful as possible to the master.…

Unclear what risks come with flinging it at the private sector The full extent of how far short the UK government's expensive, digital-first identity assurance scheme has fallen was revealed today by a brutal report on Verify by the country's spending watchdog.…

Industry faces down Spectre of performance optimisation Column A year ago this column mourned the death of Moore's Law, the 1965 paper so beloved by both engineers and computer scientists because of ongoing performance benefits seemingly so effortlessly achieved.…

If you own Outdoor Tech's CHIPS, there's a live vuln in your winter sports headset A set of smart speakers intended for ski helmets are a terrible data-leaking pit of badness, according to a Pen Test Partners researcher who innocently bought himself one of the devices.…

'Only a matter of time before these questions go from being academic to defining our response to a major threat' Videos Giant asteroids are harder to destroy than previously thought, according to fresh research out this month.…

What are these pesky neural networks really looking at? The controversial study that examined whether or not machine-learning code could determine a person’s sexual orientation just from their face has been retried – and produced eyebrow-raising results.…

Step one: Run malware on your victim's machine. Step two: Mount some storage... Google has publicly disclosed a zero-day flaw in Apple's macOS after the Cupertino mobe-maker failed to fix the security shortcoming within the ad giant's 90-day deadline.…

'Leakage ... is visible in all Intel generations starting from first-gen Core CPUs Further demonstrating the computational risks of looking into the future, boffins have found another way to abuse speculative execution in Intel CPUs to steal secrets and other data from running applications.…

Quick catch-up on machine-learning news Roundup Here's your rapid-fire guide to what's been happening lately in the world of machine learning.…

See, we're totally not screwing over women, insists ad giant Although Google has been repeatedly accused of unfairly paying men much more than women, during its latest salary review it instead found, surprise, surprise, actually a load of fellas were underpaid.…

No, no, it's not an April Fools. Backstory wants to sniff your packets for hackers RSA Google-spawned security outfit Chronicle this week unveiled a service that analyzes telemetry data from customers' networks to detect cyber-attacks lurking among the rivers of packets.…

In the Navy, you can sail the 7 seas! In the Navy, you'll get hacked by the Chinese! RSA Researchers claim to have uncovered a five-year Chinese hacking operation aimed at bolstering Beijing's naval might and trade deals to the detriment of the world's democracies and maritime hardware makers.…

We live in hope – you'll have to wait until 2020 at the earliest USB version 4 is on the way, offering double the fastest possible USB data transfer rate over the previous generation: a satisfying 40Gbps.…

'This isn’t a mistake now, this is clearly an intentional product choice' says ex-CSO Stamos Another week, another Facebook privacy storm.…

We're gonna save America's internet, scream both sides in different ways Analysis An effort in Congress to end the United States' net neutrality nightmare appears to have fallen apart before it began.…

You can't full me, Larry: Rimini swerves $13m invoice in crucial ruling on 'full' versus 'all' Oracle can't relieve Rimini Street's coffers of $12.8m in legal bills, the US Supreme Court unanimously ruled on Monday. The database giant tried to recover non-taxable court costs from Rimini, which the Supremes have now, in a pivotal decision, said are off limits in a copyright case.…

Access to C'n'C server data shows state hackers weren't smart enough for false flags McAfee (the antivirus firm, not John the dodgy "playboy") reckons the Sharpshooter malware campaign it uncovered in late 2018 is the work of North Korean hacking crew the Lazarus Group.…

We were caught in hack that bled 617 million online accounts Armor Games (AG) has confirmed that 100 per cent of its users were caught up in February's mega-leak that saw the details of 617 million online accounts hacked from 16 hacked websites being sold on the dark web.…

Bez of the chemical generation made an indelible mark on British music The iconic vocalist behind one of Essex's better musical exports, Keith Flint of the Prodigy, has been found dead at his home in Dunmow. He was 49.…

Last summer we asked FCC to have heart, but the very next day, it said No Huawei... Huawei is to sue the American government for banning federal agencies from using the Chinese giant's network equipment, according to reports stateside.…

May we suggest your mattress as an alternative? The UK banking sector was hit by IT outages on a daily basis in the last nine months of 2018, with 302 reported TITSUPs according to consumer group Which?.…

Champagne remains on ice until Demo-1 is bobbing about in the Atlantic The colossally delayed first flight of SpaceX's crew Dragon got underway this weekend and stands at the two-thirds successful mark after docking with the International Space Station (ISS).…

Two more weeks to save £100s on conference and workshop tickets Events If you’re kicking yourself because you just missed the deadline for our Continuous Lifecycle London early bird tickets, you’re not the only one. Which is why we’ve extended the offer for another two weeks.…

Just another week at Microsoft then Roundup Windows 10 19H1 has joined 20H1 in being Otterly (Ouch – Ed) fabulous while the Microsoft Health Dashboard puts a brave face on things in this week's roundup of the Redmond news you might have missed.…

Take a bow, Serco. Agilisys, hang thy head in shame A month ahead of the deadline for reporting gender pay gap figures, just 16 of 100 major IT suppliers, contractors, telcos and other tech businesses in the UK have submitted their data.…

Did we say break? We meant test its 'survivability' Who, Me? Hello, dear readers. We see you've come for your weekly dose of Who, Me? to shake off this serious case of the Mondays.…

PS: Update Adobe ColdFusion, Cisco WebEx Meetings, Nvidia drivers with security fixes Roundup Here's your weekend rapid-fire roundup of infosec news, ahead of next week's RSA Conference, beyond what we've already covered.…

Dozens of brake lights broken by chemicals in smells Japanese automaker Subaru has told the US National Highway Transportation Safety Administration that it plans to recall some 1.3 million vehicles in the US because of emissions problems. It plans to do the same elsewhere in North America and in Japan, bringing the recall total to around 2.2 million.…

'40 per cent' of purchases are automated – but do gig organizers care when a sale is a sale? If you have attempted to buy concert or sports tickets online in the past few years, chances are that it was an enormously frustrating experience thanks to automated bots.…

When it said 5 per cent of banned slurp app users were kids, it actually meant much, much more than that Analysis In just the latest in a seemingly endless stream of half-truths, Facebook has admitted it misled the public when it claimed that only five per cent of the users of its banned tracking app were teenagers.…

Despite fried RAID and deleted hard drives, Federal News Agency calls US Cyber Command attack a failure A Russian news service is claiming that US attacks on it and an organisation accused of state-sponsored trolling has left storage systems damaged and international servers wiped after multiple malware attacks.…

Q4 revenues up 24% anually, but all-flasher missed guidance Pure Storage's Q4 fiscal '19 revenues of $422m missed its own guidance by around $20m due to a manufacturing balls-up and customers preferring subscription to license deals.…

RV110W, RV130W, RV215W need patching to close remote hijacking bug Cisco has patched three of its RV-series routers after Pen Test Partners (PTP) found them using hoary old C function strcpy insecurely in login authentication function. The programming blunder can be exploited to potentially hijack the devices.…

Marketing, sales underspend bites HCI vendor on the bum Nutanix is staring down the barrel of virtually no growth for the next quarter, an admission that sent its share price into a tailspin as analysts grilled the HCI vendor over inadequate marketing spend and sales hires.…

Greener than growing green, Berkeley biologists claim Synthetic biology boffins at Berkeley have taken their research to new highs by rigging up yeast so it produces cannabis compounds – not beer.…

Near double-digit top line bounce for fiscal '19 but less expected for current year The lumbering giant Dell Technologies has highlighted numerous hurdles in the year ahead including the ongoing trade tariff war with China as it warned sales will slow.…

Support due in Microk8s and Charmed Kubernetes Canonical has announced support for Containerd in its upcoming 1.14 releases of Charmed Kubernetes and Microk8s on the same day that the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) stamped "Graduated" on the container tech.…

Latest diversity push welcome amid fears the infosec circuit is 'moving backwards' RSA As San Francisco gets ready for its annual RSA gabfest Conference, taking place next week, organisers appear to have got the message over inclusivity following last year's fiasco.…

Click your heels together three times and say 'there's no OS maker like Microsoft' Having finally inflicted a 19H1 build of Windows 10 upon Windows Insiders on the Slow Ring, Microsoft has admitted that the minty-fresh test code has some problems.…

El Reg takes a trip to TNMoC to swot up on the tech history of Premium Bonds For computing history nerds, the names Tommy Flowers and Harry Fensom likely conjure up images of the code-breaking Colossus. But after the war, they also had a hand in creating a dearly loved, much-anthropomorphised, millionaire-making machine: ERNIE.…