The Register

Gov wants us to protect Medicare numbers. In return it will protect something Comment The Australian government's review of an incident that saw health care customer numbers offered for sale on a Tor “darknet” site has recommended retaining the numbers as acceptable proof of identity.…

Supreme Court says fallen payroll outfit owes AU$139m to Commonwealth The Supreme Court of the Australian State of New South Wales has appointed liquidators to Plutus Payroll, the payroll services provider that lured thousands of IT contractors with a free service but has since been alleged to be a tax-skimming scam.…

About a third of all crypto modules globally generate weak, crackable RSA pairs RSA keys produced by smartcards, security tokens, laptops, and other devices using cryptography chips made by Infineon Technologies are weak and crackable – and should be regenerated with stronger algorithms.…

LIGO boffins pinpoint space prang 130m light years away Barely two years after it came online, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) has scored a double success. Last week, the instrument earned its creators a Nobel Prize – and this week we're told it helped spot the first neutron star collision from both its gravitational wave and radiation emissions.…

ESET scanning engine now built in – plus other defenses In its ongoing effort to improve browser security, school Microsoft on security, and retain its search audience, Google is today rolling out several Chrome for Windows fortifications.…

So much for only one Super Cali headline per month California Governor Jerry Brown has vetoed a state bill that would have allowed telcos to put up loads of small-cell antennas, and thus boost phone coverage, against city officials' wishes.…

So much for that security-patch-free October Adobe today issued an emergency security patch for Flash, which squashes a bug being used in the wild right now by hackers to infect Windows PCs with spyware.…

Watchdog takes bean-counter to task over Tech Data audit Ernst & Young is nursing a £1.8m fine from the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) after admitting to "misconduct" when auditing 2012 P&L accounts for distributor Tech Data that were later found to contain material mistakes.…

Microsoft's Irish data centre spat asks: How far should an American warrant go? The US Supreme Court has agreed to hear a dispute over whether Microsoft should release personal emails stored in Ireland to America's federal government.…

Hooo boy, WDC. You've really done it now Toshiba could partner with SK Hynix on flash foundry operations, implying the WDC joint venture could have a finite shelf life.…

Russia, you're off the hook Iran has been blamed for the brute-force attack on UK Parliament earlier this year.…

Promises clearer user interaction and extra privacy The latest upgrade to the popular Ethereum blockchain protocol – Byzantium –went live today, adding additional privacy and performance features.…

Pervasive data-gathering needs urgent action – report Mass commercial data gathering and opaque decision-making processes have a “massive potential” to damage personal autonomy and dignity, a report has said.…

The world's worst microphone uses spinning platters It must be one of the worst ways to build a microphone imaginable, tapping into a disk drive's nanosecond head stops as it waits for the vibrations caused by sound to cease, but it has been done.…

Victims reporting fraudulent transactions Miscreants have made off with payment card details of "a small number of clients" following a data breach at Pizza Hut.…

Industry-focused review instead recommends 'data trusts' to establish framework for the tech Boffins have recommended the British government establishes a council to oversee and coordinate artificial intelligence across the private and public sectors.…

Fifth version server threesome pops up Huawei has refreshed three third generation modular rack server products from older Xeons to Skylake processors with a v5 refresh giving them updated networking and storage options.…

No? Well, never mind, because it's for your own protection US mobile phone companies appear to be selling their customers' private data – including their full name, phone number, contract details, home zip code and current location to third parties – all in the name of security.…

Key handshake shakedown Users are urged to continue using WPA2 pending the availability of a fix, experts have said, as a security researcher goes public with more information about a serious flaw in the security protocol.…

with ... oh, another very good iPhone, Pixel, S8 undercutter Review You know where you are with a Sony - this year’s are much like last year’s. And the year before that.…

If we start now, we might be better at it than Albania The British government is looking for places to chuck £25m it has set aside for 5G trials.…

Tried logging in or signing up? Big bag of fail? Thought so Anyone wanting to log in or sign up to cloud-based email marketing service SendGrid is out of luck as an unspecificed glitch has taken its services offline.…

Or was it David Green or Sebastian Fox? Interview Grant Shapps seems far from crestfallen after his disastrous attempt to lead a coup against Prime Minister Theresa May.…

It's how apps are designed, not the tools used to write them Microservices aren't a new concept to Java – their forerunner was Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), which could be constructed, among other means, with the assistance of Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs).…

Reddit AMA says Raptor rocket will be safer and more reliable than commercial aircraft SpaceX, Tesla and Boring Company CEO Elon Musk has suggested Bob the Builder and Harry Potter will help his space exploration efforts.…

But he's not at all keen on Santa Claus or fairies Linus Torvalds release notification for Linux 4.14's fifth release candidate contains an interesting aside: the Linux Lord says fuzzing is making a big difference to the open source operating system.…

Nuon Solar wins third race straight, out of 12 finishers The Reg didn't physically follow this year's Solar Challenge, the biennial solar car race across Australia's dead, red heart. But we did follow this year's event, in which unfavourable weather meant this year's field didn't even get the chance to set speed records.…

Banking blockade has actually enriched WikiLeaks Endurance couch-surfer and WikiLeaker-in-chief Julian Assange has thanked US authorities for the banking blockade that made it hard to donate fiat currencies to his organisation, because it inadvertently enriched the organisation.…

ONE, TWO, THREE, what are we incrementing FOUR? (Don't ask, we don't give a damn) A Dutch electronics engineer reckons Japanese auto-maker Subaru isn't acting on a key-fob cloning vulnerability he discovered.…

Proposed labelling scheme will try to match similar efforts in UK, USA Australia's government hopes that somewhere in the world, a vendor of consumer-grade connected electronics is willing to admit it's rubbish at security by giving itself a low score in a proposed safety rating system.…

Strap yourselves in readers, Wi-Fi may be cooked Updated A promo for the upcoming Association for Computing Machinery security conference has set infosec types all a-Twitter over the apparent cryptographic death of the WPA2 authentication scheme widely used to secure Wi-Fi connections.…

Everyone safe, except drone pilot who ignored local rules Canada's transport minster has told drone operators to stay away from airports after a remotely-piloted craft bonked a passenger plane during its final approach to Jean Lesage International Airport in Québec City.…

Grab some popcorn as we wait to see if @realdonaldtrump passes test of no hate symbols and glorifying violence Twitter has reacted to last week's criticism arising from its suspension of actor actress Rose McGowan's account, after she strongly criticised alleged sex fiend Harvey Weinstein – by announcing it will soon implement and aggressively police new community standards.…

Cisco discusses Advanced Linux Sound Architecture mess before formal CVE release An advisory from Cisco issued last Friday, October 13th, gave us the heads-up on a local privilege escalation vulnerability in the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA).…

Inside the bizarre ongoing Rigzone saga Analysis David Kent, of Spring, Texas, USA, was sentenced to prison earlier this month for hacking Rigzone.com, a oil and gas industry website he founded and sold to employment data biz DHI Group, in an effort to build a second site, Oilpro.com, into an acquisition target.…

Stop us if you've heard this one before: Euros angry over privacy policy Yet another European nation is turning up the heat on Microsoft for extracting heaps and heaps of telemetry and other intelligence from Windows 10 PCs.…

Dev finds fun bug in tricky but powerful source control tool A quirk in the way Git handles data deduplication can be exploited to crash most computers with a single Git command.…

Can you say 'collateral damage'? Two members of the US House of Representatives today introduced a law bill that would allow hacking victims to seek revenge and hack the hackers who hacked them.…

Americans will not only foot bill for implementation but will also need to buy another telly Jessica Rosenworcel, a commissioner at America's broadcast watchdog the FCC, has criticized a proposed set of TV standards as a "household tax," due to its lack of backwards compatibility.…

Experts find maritime computer defenses lacking If there's anything worse than container security, it would appear to be container ship security.…

They have an honest explanation, of course Facebook and Twitter have come under attack for deleting tens of thousands of posts that may provide vital clues to how and to what extent the Russian government was able to able to influence the US presidential elections.…

Mysterious malicious code silently chews up CPU cycles to craft cash on visitors' dime Updated Politifact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning website devoted to checking the factual accuracy of US politicians' words, appears to have been hacked so that it secretly mines cryptocurrency in visitors' browsers.…

Cupertino iGiant scrambles to fix crash bug Apple is working on a fix for a bug in iOS 11 that prevents some peeps from running GarageBand.…

Plus resistive RAM news – it's a week in storage chess Storage roundup At the end of this week we can lift the lid just a little on Quantum's mystery Castle storage project, say that the latest 12TB LTO tape format is coming nearer and add a few tidbits about GPDR, NAS in the cloud and Tintri array automation.…

Thou shalt not fly within 150m of people or built-up areas A drone photographer who took pictures of the Tornado steam engine has been given a community punishment by Essex Police in the UK – after Network Rail complained his craft was being flown too close to a railway line.…

Back in the ring... so what are its chances? Analysis Violin Systems, the renamed Violin Memory, is like a boxer who could have been a contender and is now chasing redemption, getting up off the floor after what should have been a knockout blow.…

Nasty activated by home button unless device gets factory reset Crooks have come up with a strain of Android ransomware that both encrypts user data and locks victims out of compromised devices by changing PINs.…

Firm built round improbable concept now to be known as Virgin Hyperloop One Richard Branson, the billionaire behind the Virgin brand, has reportedly invested an undisclosed sum in Elon Musk’s barmy Hyperloop supersonic tube train project, seemingly competing with the billionaire ideas man's own firm.…

Ride-hailing biz free to continue operating until negotiations end Londoners can keep on using the Uber ride-hailing app. For now.…

Jan Philipp Albrecht on transatlantic data flows, anonymity and AI Interview "Now I've heard that one before. Let me think, where was it... Ah yes. It was Google!"…