The Register

The ups and downs of security this week Roundup Here's a quick summary of infosec news from this week, beyond what we've already covered.…

Green Party's Jenny Jones calls for immediate ban British cops’ use of automated facial recognition technology has come under fire from peers, with the Greens’ Jenny Jones calling on the government for an immediate ban.…

It's the wacky week in AI Roundup Your weekly dose of tidbits from the AI world, beyond everything we've already covered, begins with a senate committee hearing in which a US lieutenant general, currently a nominee for the role of the director of the NSA, spoke about his concerns around the technology.…

Internet engineers warn this is only the beginning Analysis What's claimed to be the first IPv6-based distributed denial-of-service attack has been spotted by internet engineers who warn it is only the beginning of what could become the next wave of online disruption.…

Unlucky gig economy serfs make less than min wage, on average, according to uni study An analysis published by MIT has found that Uber and Lyft drivers in the US only net around $3.37 per hour on average, and nearly a third are probably losing money after car costs.…

Trade body gets sued by Uncle Sam, insists no wrongdoing The US Department of Justice on Thursday filed an employment discrimination lawsuit against the Wi-Fi Alliance – a non-profit based in Austin, Texas, that promotes Wi-Fi technology and standards – for allegedly laying off an employee because of his ongoing military service obligations.…

Looming GDPR Euro law sends ICANN back to drawing board You may no longer be able to see the name, email or house address for whoever owns a specific domain name under new rules proposed by DNS overseer ICANN.…

FCC boss turns down showpiece rifle gong Ajit Pai, the boss of America's communications watchdog, the FCC, says he won't be picking the collectable rifle awarded to him by the NRA as a prize for killing net neutrality.…

CHiPs deploy bait bus to catch Silicon Valley sniper Over the past 45 days, a mystery sniper has been shooting the windows of 20 charter buses driving Apple staff and other geeks to work in Silicon Valley.…

YouTube wanted 'only' women and other underrepresented groups in coding roles A former recruiter for Google and YouTube has sued the search ad beast, claiming he was fired for objecting to hiring policies that discriminated against white and Asian men.…

Ah, the stable and reliable cloud Problems at an Amazon Web Service data center in Virginia today are being blamed for outages affecting some major websites and online services today.…

Turnover's up 44%. Dell, VMware probably raging Hyperconverged player Nutanix reported second fiscal 2018 quarter revenues of $286.7m, up 44 per cent on a year ago and 4 per cent on the prior quarter.…

Baidu users, beware A newly discovered strain of Android malware makes live recordings of ambient audio around an infected device.…

It is supposed to 'dazzle' drones rather than fry them Lockheed Martin, makers of the F-35 and various other bits of defence hardware, has been handed a $150m contract by the US Navy to build two bloody great laser cannons.…

Complete with loop of neighing noises and phone alerts An American company has devised a system that takes over your entire home, makes all your lights start flashing and broadcasts neighing noises through the whole house when your pregnant horse starts giving birth.…

No safe limit? Yerjokinarentyer? A University of Sheffield study has found that controversial new alcohol guidelines published in 2016 had no discernible effect on British drinking habits.…

Plus: Leaping robotic spiders, anyone? No? From the department of "just because we could, doesn't mean we should" comes news that researchers are planning swarms of robotic bees and spiders.…

Lawmakers express concern about data protection Chipmaker Broadcom's proposed $142bn (£103bn) hostile takeover of Qualcomm has given European lawmakers the willies over data protection implications for EU citizens.…

Flash arrays are their business and business is a'ight – finally Flash array shipper Pure is now officially a billion-dollar turnover organ and appears poised to finally reach profitability as competition from Dell EMC and HPE contines to wane.…

Parky Prius? Frosty fondleslab? Help may soon be at hand Brits may soon have one less thing to whinge about during cold snaps – thanks to research into the performance of Li-ion batteries in freezing temperatures.…

Three months to get your houses in order... or this time we really might legislate The European Commission has given tech firms three months to set up systems that will allow them to take down terrorist content within an hour.…

Nor Drake. Nor Bruno Mars. You'd think they weren't trying very hard Analysis Spotify has ended five years of speculation about an IPO, and has filed for a public share offering likely to make its founders – and large record labels – extremely rich indeed.…

Please allow me to introduce myself (woo-woo) Something for the Weekend, Sir? "Wow, that was quick!"…

Up for auction, rare Spanish copy flown by both British and German aces A super-rare Spanish copy of the Messerschmitt Me109 fighter of Second World War infamy, which was flown by both British and German aces, has gone up for auction.…

Get prep’d for certs to prove your worth Promo As cyber threats seem to multiply and mutate at ever-increasing speed, it becomes difficult to be sure you are able defend your organisation against an attack that could come from any direction.…

And why was Microsoft tucked away in startup event? MWC18 As Mobile World Congress draws to a close in relatively warm Barcelona (13°C - balmy), it's time to tally up on whether it delivered on the hype.…

They might have to worry about it, but you'll be 'doing it' I spend a lot of time telling people that information security isn't the IT department's problem. And it's not: everyone in the business is responsible for making his or her contribution to the security of the organisation's information, and for protecting the personal data the organisation uses.…

vGPUs, edge and automated containers are the headline acts for the 17th release The 17th version of OpenStack is upon us.…

Oh great. Neural nets memorize data and nobody knows why Private information can be easily extracted from neural networks trained on sensitive data, according to new research.…

Create and store GDocs in Dropbox, with admin policies preserved Dropbox and Google have announced they will integrate some of their services.…

N00bs also failed to spot flaming PC, blamed mouse instead On-Call Welcome again to On-Call, The Register's free therapy session for those who perform tech support chores and need to get the worst ones off their chest.…

How the f*ck did you get that score on Q*bert? It turns out not all AIs are created equal Video An AI bot managed to exploit a hidden bug in popular 1980s arcade game Q*bert to rack up impossibly high scores after being programmed using evolution strategy algorithms.…

Worried it's poisoning polity, Twitter seeks metrics to measure its health Twitter's decided the time is right to measure "our contribution to the overall health of the public conversation".…

No no, you can't see them, unless you attack. Which you won't. So you can't see 'em Vids Russian Federation president Putin has used his annual state-of-the-nation address to show off the latest additions to Russia's weapon's catalog and to warn the Western powers that his country will not be trifled with.…

We do virtual reality, not fake reality, alternate-reality biz claims in lawsuit Comment Virtual reality clown Magic Leap did not try to reverse engineer Microsoft's HoloLens technology, the upstart stated in its lawsuit against Todd Keil, its former head of security.…

Q4 and FY18 results beat expectations, with end-user compute starring VMware might just have found a way to stay relevant as containers threaten virtualization.…

Put the letter on the pile next to the soiled #OneMoreVote petition More than 75 mayors and city officials across America this week signed a letter asking that the nation's net neutrality safeguards remain in place. Again.…

Canucks to pull plug on ill-fated mismanaged govt IT project Canada is about ready to pull the plug on its IBM-built error-plagued Phoenix payroll system that has cost the nation nearly CAN$1bn ($790m).…

Just go install Intel's patch while we hunt the next CPU-level security flaw in Intel's silicon Microsoft is pushing out another round of security updates to mitigate data-leaking Spectre side-channel vulnerabilities in modern Intel x64 chips.…

Add remote-code execution hole to mass-revocation drama The websites for HTTPS certificate reseller Trustico, and one of its partners, SSL Direct, took a dive on Thursday – after a critical and trivial-to-exploit security flaw in Trustico.com was revealed on Twitter.…

Big Blue is all for rules cracking down on ads, social media Add IBM to the list of tech companies putting their support behind America's Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA).…

Memcache attacks are going to be this year's thing What's purported to be the world's largest distributed denial of service attack to date – measuring 1.35Tbps – knocked GitHub offline for a few minutes yesterday.…

Details of secretive direction have been under wraps for years The government has finally made public a secretive direction that requires snoop oversight bodies to monitor spies’ potential participation in criminality.…

Integral part of VxRack FLEX hyperconverged kit henceforth Dell will only sell its hugely scalable ScaleIO virtual SAN software product inside its VxRAck FLEX hyperconverged system from now on – the software-only version has been canned.…

It's OK, it was only partial driving licence information Embattled credit-reporting company Equifax has done some data crunching and discovered another 2.4 million people that had their information slurped by hackers.…

Tectonic shifts in CSPs and hyperscalar buying Server shipments boomed in 2017's fourth quarter, with total revenues bouncing 26.4 per cent on the prior year and unit sales stepping up 11 per cent. Hyperscalar and cloud service provider customer buying patterns are causing tectonic shifts in the market.…

Break 'em up, nothing else works Google's vertical search tormentors in Europe have called for Alphabet's cash cow to be broken up, arguing that Google's solution hasn't improved competition.…

The China Syndrome Intel is discussing selling 3D NAND wafers to China's Tsinghua Unigroup, the same company US government barred from buying Intel's flash partner Micron in 2015.…

UK-made bird forms first of 5-strong planned constellation The RAF has acquired a satellite that can beam live video footage from space, the head of the air force told an industry gathering in Surrey today.…

Or customers can... walk to a new provider without penalty Ofcom is tightening the screws – sort of – on broadband providers that play fast and loose with speed promises by imposing a deadline to meet service obligations or allow customers to walk away without a penalty.…