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Subscribers using wireless calls wide open to attack Boffins from Michigan State University in the US and National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan have found that the Wi-Fi calling services offered by AT&T, T-Mobile US, and Verizon suffer from four security flaws that can be exploited to attack mobile phone users, leaking private information, harassing them, or interfering with service.…

'Minimal' effect on biz, boss bravely predicts HPE Discover The ongoing US-China trade squabble will have little effect on HPE, chief exec Antonio Neri boldly predicted to the world's tech press.…

Depressing Xmas Comms which employees have whole holiday to think about With Christmas around the corner, DXC Technology have warned yet more frontline techies - the feet on the street that support customers - they might not have a job in the New Year.…

One of, but not the worst, in history US hotel chain Marriott has admitted that a breach of its Starwood subsidiary's guest reservation network has exposed the entire database – all 500 million guest bookings over four years, making this one of the biggest hacks of an individual org ever.…

Where is your distributed ledger technology now? Though Blockchain has been touted as the answer to everything, a study of 43 solutions advanced in the international development sector has found exactly no evidence of success.…

Soon every vendor will want to be a SCMbag Exclusive The Register can reveal that Dell EMC is looking to add storage-class memory (SCM) and NVMe drives and fabric across its storage portfolio and that HPE's Nimble arrays will get SCM support in 2019.…

Bored secretary at GP fined for sneaky look at medical records A bored trainee secretary at a GP practice has been fined for snooping on the health records of colleagues, friends and strangers.…

Let the Blue Peter vs Magpie wars recommence! Something for the Weekend, Sir? Keep me in a cupboard. When the fancy takes you, let me out and I'll do your bidding. I won't mind as long as you make it worth my while.…

Does 'mommy' clean up after you? teases trash-talking notice Rubbish activists have reportedly put anti-littering signs up in the West Midlands calling trash bandits "fools" whose parents still tidy up after them.…

Nope, no new computer for you. Move along On Call Welcome once more to On Call, our weekly column where Reg readers share their tales of tech support problems solved.…

Once upon a time it was Windows 10. Now it's Chipzilla's turn HP Inc is flying high after netting a year of double-digit revenue gains, but execs are worried that a looming CPU shortage will hurt its sales in the coming months.…

American criminal prosecutors demand $815m from former CEO, throw book at the pair Updated Former Autonomy CEO Michael Lynch and company beancounter Stephen Chamberlain have been formally charged with fraud in America, in what Lynch's lawyer has called a “travesty of justice.”…

Plus: Pat Gelsinger reckons tech will do well in 2020, even if the US economy tanks VMware has attributed a good third financial quarter to continuing strong interest in hybrid cloud services, payoffs from its AWS partnership, and an economy that remains friendly to technology spending even when there are headwinds elsewhere.…

It's 2018 and UPnP is still opening up networks - this time to leaked SMB cyber-weapons Earlier this year, Akamai warned that vulnerabilities in Universal Plug'N'Play (UPnP) had been exploited by scumbags to hijack 65,000 home routers. In follow-up research released this week, it revealed little has changed.…

Class-action lawsuit payouts adds another $7.3m to bill for software slip-up Lenovo will pay $7.3m to settle a class-action lawsuit stemming from its bone-headed decision to cram some of its laptops with Superfish adware.…

Well at least someone's interested in buying Hololens Microsoft has signed a $480m contract to supply 100,000 HoloLens augmented reality headsets to the US military – literally doubling the number of HoloLenses that have been sold since its launch more than three years ago.…

Sliding into your DMs unnoticed, literally Analysis Britain's surveillance nerve-center GCHQ is trying a different tack in its effort to introduce backdoors into encrypted apps: reasonableness.…

Endorsement could come back to bite Evander Holyfield The CEO of AriseBank, a Texas-based upstart that billed itself as the world’s “first decentralized banking platform,” has been arrested by the FBI and charged with securities and wire fraud.…

Buffer overflow flaw could lead to privilege escalation IBM is advising folks this week to check if they should update their Db2 database installations following the discovery of a potentially serious security vulnerability.…

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.…