The Register

Sessions sets up task force for dopes' dope dope crack down The US Attorney General has set up a task force of FBI agents and tech nerds to further smoke out online peddlers of illegal opioids.…

Versions 56 through 58 need patching, pronto Mozilla has patched a nasty security bug in Firefox, affecting versions 56, 57 and 58, and their point updates.…

Kept heist secret until cops cuffed bloke. Now suggests – gulp – super-pwned Equifax for the afflicted Australian car sharing company GoGet today admitted to a June 2017 data breach that includes drivers licence details, payment card numbers and other personal data, but said it did not disclose the matter until now on the advice of Police.…

F U FCC say lawmakers as bill passes to Assembly California has moved one step closer to passing net neutrality legislation in defiance of a decision by America's telecoms regulator, the FCC, to scrap the protections nationwide.…

SEC goes to court to freeze upstart to protect investors America's financial watchdog today suspended an initial coin offering (ICO) from AriseBank, claiming it's a scam.…

False text probe reveals screw up after screw up The individual who sent an emergency text to everyone in Hawaii warning them of an imminent missile attack did not hit the wrong button as first claimed – and was actually convinced a real attack was happening.…

They'll have to show volcanic growth, though Some $15m has just been shoveled into Igneous Systems by venture capitalists to further develop the upstart's Arm-powered petabyte-scale unstructured data backup, archive and storage box that has a public cloud backend.…

дураки вы западники, ничего не знаете The effect of Russian trolls influencing opinion through social media is far more minor than commonly supposed, according to a new study.…

Bijou robo-courier powered by electricity and $92m in VC cash Self-driving startup Nuro has unveiled its autonomous delivery vehicle today – as well as $92m (£65.17m) in funding.…

*Cough* Bulk of sales still licences and support *cough* SAP has reported a boost in cloud bookings in its full-year results and announced a $2.4bn deal to buy cloudy sales tracking biz Callidus Software.…

Of course this does nothing for victims' encrypted files Cybercriminals are using Tor proxies to divert ransomware payments to their own Bitcoin wallets.…

Altitude Angel to use cash to swoop on Europe, N America Drone safety biz Altitude Angel has swept up $4.5m (£3.19m) in series-A funding, it has announced today.…

The Morissette meter! It's off the scale! A Norwegian airline flight carrying scores of plumbers was forced to make an unplanned break because of a persistent problem with the onboard water closet.…

Another blow for Snooper's Charter The UK’s Court of Appeals has ruled that the government’s unfettered slurping of citizens’ data broke the law.…

First output since sealing hardware deal with Tech Data Kaminario is selling its composable flash array storage software to cloud service providers.…

February reveal for wannabe XPoint killer Samsung is launching its ambitious supercharged NAND Z-SSD in competition with Intel's P4800X Optane drive.…

Some 2,000 bods to shift over in talent pump 'n' dump Google has formally completed its $1.1bn (£780m) takeover of a chunk of HTC, under which some 2,000 staff will transfer to work on the chocolate factory's Pixel phone.…

American gov auditor uncovers litany of fails and delays F-35 fighter jets are running so many different versions of their core software that a US government watchdog has warned of knock-on delays to flight tests.…

£830m listed firm eventually settled its unpaid moo juice bill London Stock Exchange-listed tech box-shifter Softcat was taken to courts by a Leeds newsagent after the £832m turnover company failed to settle its milk bill.…

This is the art of disaster capitalism Opinion The cloud has not been kind to legacy tech vendors like IBM and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. With their enterprise software and hardware businesses ravaged by cloud alternatives, and their efforts to get into cloud stumbling, it's not surprising that these erstwhile bellwethers would shed employees as they seek out profitable pastures.…

A decade of growth and no strategy dispute suggests this wasn't about wearing ugly shorts on casual Friday Data centre operator Equinix is looking for a new CEO after the previous occupant of its big chair, Steve Smith, resigned “after exercising poor judgment with respect to an employee matter.”…

Techno Jesus posts latest Facebook teaching Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has taken another step on his path to enlightenment, informing the masses that henceforth the Holy Facebook will include more news from local sources.…

VMware thrives because it is plausibly independent. Why rob it of that? The Wall Street rumour mill has recently week spun out scenarios in which Dell will either allow itself to be acquired by VMware as a short-cut to its own return to public ownership, or buy back the bits of VMware that are public.…

Speech recognition systems seduced by masked messages Computer science boffins affiliated with IBM and universities in China and the United States have devised a way to issue covert commands to voice-based AI software – like Apple Siri, Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and Microsoft Cortana – by encoding them in popular songs.…

Vanished IMAGE now found. Don't suppose anyone kept a copy of its comms code? NASA has announced it will try to wake up the “zombie satellite” IMAGE, unexpectedly found working by an amateur sat-spotter.…

'DCShadow' attack lets attackers add their own controllers, do some wrecking Two infosec bods have demonstrated an attack on Microsoft's Active Directory software that let them insert their own domain controller into an existing enterprise setup.…

If you could keep an eye on miscreants cracking open your boxes, that would be great Cash machines in the US are being hacked to spew hundreds of dollar bills – a type of theft dubbed "jackpotting" because the ATMs look like slot machines paying out winnings.…

Wayland doesn't share nicely, and its crashes are catastrophic Ten years' worth of effort to replace the Xorg graphics framework has been given a “must try harder” mark by Ubuntu, which says its next release will not use Wayland by default.…

Patch your Adaptive Security Appliance and Firepower Threat Defense code before they're utterly p0wned A programming slip in Cisco VPN software has created a critical vulnerability hitting ten different Adaptive Security Appliance and Firepower Threat Defense Software products.…

Pavillion notebook screen died back in 2003? There might be a small check for you HP has settled a class-action lawsuit in the US over the failing screens in some of its Pavillion notebooks.…

A flame shower not a grower You've got to hand it to Elon Musk – the guy could sell pork pies at a rabbinical convention.…

What a Strava-palava The American military immediate review of its grunts' personal electronics – after the Strava fitness app used by soldiers revealed base locations and other operational security gaffes.…

Something something two-factor authentication – Microsoft A bunch of Skype users are unhappy that they're been unable to sign into the VoIP service for several days.…

'Phony photos', legit serial numbers land chap in court A US bloke allegedly defrauded Cisco and Microsoft by faking problems with computing and networking gear he didn't own to trick the tech giants into sending him replacements.…

Make America Socialist Again? A proposal by the Trump administration to effectively nationalize next-generation 5G networks in America triggered an angry reaction from the mobile industry, former government officials, and federal regulator the FCC.…

'We certainly would have liked to have been notified of this' says Homeland Security Intel warned Chinese firms about its infamous Meltdown and Spectre processor vulnerabilities before informing the US government, it has emerged.…

Buy-out would let Big Mike swerve IPO headaches Dell's future has been thrown for yet another loop. Dell's virtualization subsidiary VMware is reportedly looking to buy out its parent Dell so that the tech titan can avoid a second IPO.…

Cue dramatic music as activist investor joins board Seagate reported essentially flat revenues and a fall in profits in its disappointing second fiscal 2018 quarter.…

Researcher able to DoS and track personal protection kit Security researchers have uncovered flaws in Bluetooth-based panic buttons that, in a worst-case scenario, make the affected kit "effectively useless."…

UNESCO to decide next year Jodrell Bank Observatory has been nominated as the UK's entry for World Heritage status.…

Fintech workers reportedly targeted A gang of armed robbers reportedly burgled a village home belonging to Bitcoin traders in an Oxfordshire, England.…

Oh boy, measures will also cover IT outages Infrastructure firms could face fines of up to £17m if they do not have adequate cybersecurity measures in place, the UK government has announced today.…

Investors, firms grapple with the bubble BlockchainWeek The hype around blockchain is just as frustrating for people trying to legitimise the technology as it is for those watching from the sidelines – but behind the fluff, its proponents argue there's real potential.…

It's been a week, hasn't it, storage fans? So after a week of replicating, virtualising, backing up and inhaling and puffing out data to the cloud it is time to check what has been happening in the land of storage.…

It could literally blast a hole in a major shipping route People wearing Strava-enabled fitness trackers appear to have been poking around a Thames shipwreck containing nearly 1,500 tonnes of explosives from the Second World War.…

95% of UK penetrated = feat of engineering, hoots Openreach The UK government has today hailed the completion of its superfast broadband project as a success – the scheme that has now brought 24Mbps to 95 per cent of the country by almost entirely handing the contracts to monopoly provider BT.…

UK.gov putting the brakes on rogue slurping for profit Rogue private parking firms are to be stripped of the ability to access the UK government's driver database.…

Mapmaker, mapmaker, make me a map… UK cartographer the Ordnance Survey (OS) has been selected by the government to help it create an infrastructure for driverless cars.…

Strap yourself in, this ride won't be over for a long time yet The Spectre vulnerability is here to stay. Even if you choose to ignore it, the problem still exists. This is potentially a very bad thing for public cloud vendors. It may end up being great for chip manufacturers. It's fantastic for VMware.…

HPE reselling deal using Apollo hardware extended to Europe Commercial scale-out filesystem startup Qumulo is setting up shop in Europe and using ex-Isilon execs to run its show.…