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Node.js package tried to plunder Bitcoin wallets A widely used Node.js code library listed in NPM's warehouse of repositories was altered to include crypto-coin-stealing malware. The lib in question, event-stream, is downloaded roughly two million times a week by application programmers.…

Officials take steps to get off the e-currency's rollercoaster ride Ohio has become the first US state to accept Bitcoin as formal payment for business taxes – everything from sales and vehicle levies to employee tax and electricity costs.…

How do we make mobes take better snaps? Throw a buttload of sensors at 'em, judging from this patent In a move that wouldn't seem out of place in The Onion, LG has invented a 16-lens camera for use in phones.…

Take a look up the railtrack, from Barking to Faversham UK fibre flinger Openreach has announced plans to bring its ultrafast broadband service to another 81 locations, thanks in part to the joy of Gfast.…

Yep, back to the past again for unimaginative sheeple It's been clear for decades that Hollywood is almost completely out of ideas and nothing is sacred when mining the past for inspiration.…

Just five years after it paid a £90k penalty for dodgy dialling A Glaswegian business has been fined £160,000 for making 1.6 million nuisance calls to people on the UK's opt-out database – five years after it received a £90,000 fine which was also for dodgy dialling.…

Cache allegedly indicates long-term knowledge of data hose used by Cambridge Analytica British MPs have made unprecedented use of Parliamentary powers to send a serjeant at arms to the hotel where the boss of a US software biz was staying to seize potentially damaging documents on Facebook.…

Microsoft has a post-weekend problem Happy Monday, everyone! Microsoft is apparently celebrating this made-up Cyber Monday "holiday" by giving Office 365 users a break from all that pesky email, with Exchange services currently still out of whack.…

Recommends bringing finance and HR in-house next year Barnet Council has confirmed it is expecting outsourcing outfit Capita to hand it £4.12m due to services, including IT improvements, delivered under a 10-year mega deal being "not up to scratch".…

The Fuchsia is bright. The Fuchsia is red Comment Fearing China's growing economic might, the United States is reportedly leaning on foreign companies not to buy Huawei gear.…

Ten intensive courses cover all the cyber security skills you need Promo Defending organisations against security attacks is an ongoing challenge, with new threats constantly emerging to test the beleaguered security professional.…

No stress test? Then prepare for a potential TSB-like mess You can't hack the code and manage the project forever: at some point you must go live.…

Matt Neisler gets a brief goodbye in company memo Another senior exec at DXC Technology's Americas operation has left the organisation: chief finance officer Matthew Neisler split on Friday, according to an internal memo.…

Propositions from 3 startups then... yeah, fluffy stuff Roundup There was action at opposite ends of the spectrum this week – we learnt about three Israeli storage startups aiming to get data closer to compute while while world+dog stuffs it in the cloud.…

Then it's time to penetrate the Martian surface for science NASA's Mars InSight lander is due to arrive on the Red Planet on Monday, giving scientists their first in-depth look at the martian interior.…

As your dad used to say: RTFM, the WHOLE effin' manual Who, Me? Another Monday has landed with a thud – no doubt even more so for those of you in the States coming down from a weekend of Thanksgiving revelry.…

And that means smartphones will need to get smarter Ofcom's top tech bod, Mansoor Hanif, recently gave the Wi-Fi industry a roasting, telling them to shape up to 5G or face sliding into irrelevance. New network data from around the world shows that slide has already begun.…

Nope, not from now – from whenever politicos make up their minds With just two years to go until the end of the Brexit transition period, HMRC has said its preparations for a Northern Ireland backstop could take up to 30 months – once Whitehall has said how the mechanism will work.…

Damn, that mask is stuck fast Comment A recent New York Times profile portrayed Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg as the megacorp's human side – in contrast to reptilian boy emperor Mark Zuckerberg.…

Minister confirms how much UK spunked on system it can't use There were heated exchanges at the UK's Defence and European Scrutiny Committee this week as members attempted to get the Minister for Defence Procurement, Stuart Andrew, to put a figure on the cost of the Galileo project.…

Cash-only Thursday as soap seller's tills go TITSUP* Soapnotes Lush, high street peddler of lotions and potions for the pampered, lost the ability to perform card transactions yesterday due to a bath bomb dropped in the server room.…

Plus: PC, notebook hard drive ships set to be eclipsed by flash SSD market stats for calendar Q3 from DRAMeXchange, IDC and TrendForce and Wells Fargo have highlighted three things: Samsung remains the global undisputed sales heavyweight; the PC industry will suck up more SSDs than disk drives next year; and NVME is the enterprise SSD interface of choice.…

PLAIN TEXT passwords showed up on file-hosting site German chat platform Knuddels.de ("Cuddles") has been fined €20,000 for storing user passwords in plain text (no hash at all? Come on, people, it's 2018).…

Christmas soon, probably best you don't look anyway UK customers of HSBC hoping to check their balances before heading to the pub for a Friday beverage or eight found themselves out of luck today.…

*Terrible IT Threatens Services, Users, Pound MPs have stuck a probe in banking IT crises after an "astonishing" number of failures, saying "measly apologies and hollow words" aren't good enough.…

National Audit Office now says estimated saving for you and I is, er, just £18 a year Parliamentarians are set to haul civil servants in for a grilling after the National Audit Office (NAO) confirmed the UK will miss its 2020 smart meter rollout target, piling an extra £500m onto the cost of the £11bn project.…

Loose .zips sink chips 2: Electric Boogaloo The "Zip Slip" vulnerability that first emerged in June has claimed another victim – the Apache Hadoop YARN NodeManager daemon.…

Judging by all the emails I'm getting, I think it is already Something for the Weekend, Sir? This may come as a total surprise to you but today is Black Friday. Yes! It crept up on us unawares without anyone mentioning it once.…

Blighty's metrology experts define terms The National Physical Laboratory has quantified many fundamentals during its lifetime – SI units for the second and the metre, for example.…

As a sneaky fix flummoxes n00b Burroughs engineer On Call Black Friday Giveaway! We don't want you to think El Reg isn't jumping on the internet bandwagon as the frenzied hunt for "bargains" continues apace.…

Government now says it wants bill passed 'in its current form' The federal government's continuing media blitz to rush through its anti-encryption legislation has drawn push-back from eight industry bodies, led by the Communications Alliance.…

Outgoing comms chief post gets FB treatment Facebook's outgoing public policy chief, Elliot Schrage, appears to have fallen on his sword, taking the blame for smearing critics of the company.…

From main customer to owner Cisco is buying UK software house Ensoft for an undisclosed sum. The Harpenden-based outfit’s speciality is software for enterprise-grade routers and networking equipment.…

Original complainants say pay-to-play remedy has left them in the cold Fourteen price comparison sites have written to the EU in Google's longest-running competition case, asking the European Commission (PDF) to rip up the remedy it agreed with Google.…

The first rule of death club is not to be seen alive After faking one's own death to defraud a life insurance company, it's best to avoid being photographed alive and well, particularly when border agents may be reviewing those photos.…

What's that? You've installed 1809? No, sorry, can't hear you The Windows 10 October 2018 Update woes continued for Microsoft last night with the announcement that Redmond had slammed the brakes for users of certain Intel display drivers.…

Sweeping changes to VAT will hit small biz, says committee Updated HMRC's digital tax reforms to VAT – due to launch just three days after Brexit – will hit small businesses hard and should be delayed, peers have said.…

Flashing seriously Analysis It has been revealed that open source Ceph storage systems can move a little faster than you might expect. For those who need, er, references, it seems a four-node Ceph cluster can serve 2.277 million random read IOPS using Micron NVMe SSDs – high performance by any standard.…

RC1 is here for devs without their heads in the cloud Microsoft has emitted the first release candidate for the on-premises version of Azure DevOps in the form of Azure DevOps Server 2019.…

Gadget snapshot reveals tablet-weary, phone-mad Britain Comms regulator Ofcom has highlighted what devices and digital services Britons use ahead of the UK's annual shopping orgy. The data was actually released in its vast compendium of consumer habits, a tome so large details sometimes get lost.…

...sadly, and here's why it won't ever be Comment Private Eye has a running joke satirising a great British tabloid institution: the Reverse Ferret. "An apology to our readers…" it usually begins, explaining a sudden about-face in the newspaper's position.…

CLL19 Blind Bird offer expires soon Events We're just putting the finishing touches to the speaker lineup for Continuous Lifecycle London 2019, with 40 experts and practitioners spanning Continuous Delivery, DevOps, Containers, Microservices and more.…

Plus: Cloud file-sharing on desktop and mobile clients Microsoft announced this week that Skype calling had arrived on Amazon's Echo, but the rollout took a little while, finally arriving at Vulture Central yesterday, so we took it for a spin to see how it works.…

Don't put the Champagne on ice: English sparkling wine fizzes as French bubbles go flat Amid frenzied Brexit preparations in 2017-18, government-hosted parties slurped up 20 per cent more wine than the previous year – as European plonk purchases reached a bottleneck.…

Alice becomes Bob Germany has patched a key "e-government" service against possible impersonation attacks, and both private and public sector developers have been told to check their logs for evidence of exploits.…

Storage company's core project joins the GitHub undead Western Digital has taken software acquired with personal storage outfit Upthere in 2017, packed it gently in a wicker basket, and laid it at the door of a GitHub orphanage.…

Hadoop YARN is the attack vector, so lock it away Diligent hackers have decided routers and cameras aren't enough, and have reportedly crafted Mirai variants targeting Linux servers.…

2018: The year the US-imported shopping promo bonanza goes pffft? Black Friday may take on a different meaning in 2018 as the consumer shopping bonanza looks set to be an utter flop in the largest economies across Europe.…

No one fancied Salyut-style jaunt to Mir to grab some gear The International Space Station turned 20 this week as space agencies and 'nauts alike celebrated the anniversary of the launch of the first module of the ISS.…

A divided tech nation embraces, uncomfortably In a very American celebration of setting aside differences to sit at the same table, on the eve of Thanksgiving you can now use your iPhone to issue voice commands to Google's smart home systems. Well, sort of.…