The Register

UK councils warned of thin line between overt and covert snooping Authorities need to have rules in place to ensure that lawful social media snooping doesn’t slip into covert ops, the UK’s chief surveillance commissioner has said.…

Plus: Naval overstretch means the flag isn't flying overseas for Christmas The British government has refused to say how much new F-35 fighter jets will cost the nation – as it emerges that no fighting ships of the Royal Navy will be in foreign waters during the festive period.…

Plus the farmer who had mastered phone cameras, but wasn't yet good at email On-Call Welcome again to another edition of On-Call, which we run daily during the news drought that is the week before Christmas to share the tech support stories that readers sent in earlier in the year.…

Administrative Council underlines real concerns with European patent regime The Administrative Council of the European Patent Office (EPO) has inflamed already heightened tensions within the organization by failing to properly address an important accountability test case.…

Imaginary server biz gets super salty, outs Cisco, NetApp VMware is making clear it is not on board with Microsoft's plan to offer its software on bare-metal Azure servers.…

Alleged extortionists wielded CTB-Locker aka Critroni and Cerber file-scrambling nasties Five people suspected of infecting Windows PCs with ransomware – and extorting money from more than 170 victims in Europe and the US – have been arrested.…

Because we haven't set fired SMBv1 into the Sun Dell EMC has patched an SMBv1 bug in its Data Domain Deduplication and Data Protection software.…

A welcome dash of perspective Without much fanfare, negotiators crafting the Wassenaar Agreement earlier this month moved to make things easier for infosec white-hats.…

Trying to stop snoops stalling page loads When Mozilla lobbed Firefox 57 over the fence last month, it introduced an anti-tracking feature without saying anything much about it.…

Can we, can we hitch a ride? NASA is drawing up plans to send a robot out into space to either drill into the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko – or checking out Titan, Saturn’s largest moon.…

100 Mbps? Tell 'em they're dreaming, son TPG has joined Telstra and Optus in agreeing to refund customers who couldn't get the National Broadband Network speeds they expected.…

Dodged a bit of a bullet this time Yet another misconfigured Amazon-hosted cloud storage bucket has been discovered – this one flashing the personal information of roughly 123 million American households to anyone passing by on the internet.…

You're not going crazy – Apple really does this (and wants you to upgrade) Analysis When Apple's iOS 11.2 update arrived on December 2, the release notes touted faster wireless charging support, among other enhancements, but made no mention of a necessary but less appealing augmentation: retarded apps for aging iPhone models.…

Wow, who'd have thought it? US cable giant Comcast has been accused of strong-arming smaller carriers into paying too much for some of its TV channels.…

Here's what $6bn of vaporware looks like Comment It has kept everyone waiting but Magic Leap has finally revealed that… there are still publications stupid enough to keep printing its bullshit.…

Marijuana of unknown origin sent up in smoke A power station in Olching, Bavaria, blazed like it was 4/20 yesterday after German authorities used it to burn around 550kg of marijuana.…

El Reg asks why; they magically reappear. Fancy that! Updated A government legal aid eligibility checker has been without Javascript and CSS for a fortnight, sources told The Register – causing a visible dip in the number of people using the service.…

Member of vDos booter 'taken advantage of' by vDos crew Brit teen Jack Chappell has avoided being sent to prison after pleading guilty to helping launch DDoS attacks against NatWest, Amazon and Netflix, among others.…

Don't expect the adpocalypse From February 15, Google's Chrome browser will begin zapping ads that don't conform with new taste guidelines. But what those guidelines mean exactly is anyone's guess.…

When IP address resolution cock-ups = cuffing wrong people The UK's public authorities slurped up more than 750,000 items of communications data during 2016, with more than 1,000 reported errors – of which 29 were deemed serious.…

Biz is DRAM happy for now – though 3D XPoint not as perky Memory and flash maker Micron posted great quarterly results following booming demand for its mobile, server and SSD products – a sign of what it is hoping is an enduring market change.…

Fined £11k and banished from Chartered Accountants facilities A former financial controller for Tech Data faces a rap on the knuckles and the temporary exclusion from the Chartered Accountants golf club* after admitting his role in a costly number-crunching scandal.…

Installer merely redirected to the official source Microsoft has bounced a Google Chrome Installer out of its Windows Store, just hours after making it available for download.…

While you're at it, let's have some specifics on what you tell police about facial recog tech The UK government has been told to get its act together and explain why its biometrics strategy still hasn't seen the light of day.…

Three says it is 'disappointed' and plans to appeal Ofcom has seen off a legal challenge to its spectrum auction by BT's EE and Three today.…

Soz BT, your offer is not wanted... Folk will have a legal right to minimum broadband speeds of 10Mbps by 2020, with the government having today rejected a voluntary proposal by dominant telco BT.…

Life. Oh life. Oh lii-yi-yi-iife... oh life. Doo, doot doot doo Review We rarely single out midrange phones for special attention here. Most are me-too models that don’t bring anything new to the marketplace.…

Trying year for 'taxi' company Uber should be treated as a transport company, not a digital service, the European Court of Justice declared today.…

38C+. Blame the beanies and a $15m bit barn spec screw-up On-Call Here is the latest festive instalment of On-Call, the place to be for techies with tales to tell. It might be cold outside but this may just make the blood boil as it goes to show what happens when bean-counters take over the asylum.…

The big picture revealed and the tech explained Supported Public cloud providers increasingly differentiate themselves through the features and services they provide. These run from basic storage or content delivery network up to sophisticated flavours of data analysis and increasingly Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI).…

Don't worry, many of those are now in 'discovery' phase... The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs’ (Defra) poor track record on IT puts the department at high risk in decoupling its systems from Europe, the chair of the government’s spending watchdog has warned today.…

Don't worry, many of those are now in 'discovery' phase... The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs’ (Defra) poor track record on IT puts the department at high risk in decoupling its systems from Europe, the chair of the government’s spending watchdog has warned today.…

Web server misconfiguration lets anyone inject nasties... under certain conditions Researchers have uncovered a vulnerability in the GoAhead web server software – embedded in Internet of Things devices – that can be potentially remotely exploited to hijack gadgets.…

High-energy particles bombard atmosphere to meddle with global temperature Interstellar particles alter Earth's climate by affecting cloud growth, scientists revealed on Tuesday.…

All you need is to, erm, give the computers some nasty training data A group of researchers have inserted a backdoor into a facial-recognition AI system by injecting "poisoning samples" into the training set.…

Privacy Badger grazes on cookies, but DoNotTrack? Nobody cares Looking for browser privacy? A group of researchers in France and Japan say RequestPolicyContinued and NoScript have the toughest policies, while Ghostery and uBlock Origin offer good blocking performance and a better user experience.…

After you update, set it up again from scratch If you've skipped recent Windows 10 Creators Updates, here's a reason to change your mind: its facial recognition security feature, Hello, can be spoofed with a photograph.…

WordFence says a fix has landed The folk at WordFence are warning that the WordPress Captcha plugin, popular enough to get around 300,000 installations, should be replaced with the latest official WordPress version (4.4.5).…

Procedural snafu delays vote until Wednesday – but here's basically what's in it Wealthy individuals and businesses can direct their underlings to ice the Dom Perignon and fuel their private jets in celebration of the US Senate's expected passage of the Republican tax bill on Wednesday.…

America's airspace watchdog sets out rules to green-light skies filled with Amazon bots America's aviation watchdog, the FAA, has put forward a plan for how delivery drones will be governed.…

Packets will route around the damage until January The fragile Sea-Me-We 3 cable that provides one of Australia's primary connections to Asia is out of action and awaiting repair.…

Monopoly watchdog nicht glücklich about Zuck's info suck Germany's competition authority has accused Facebook of abusing its market dominance to "limitlessly amass every kind of data" on people.…

We must have public debate on warrantless snooping, demands bipartisan gang A bipartisan group of US senators have lambasted an effort to force permanent authorization of a controversial warrantless American spying program through Congress by attaching it to an end-of-year spending bill, calling the effort "an end-run around the Constitution."…

Luckily, there's an off switch... to placate lawmakers? Analysis In an effort to make facial recognition technology more appealing to members of its clicky commerce club, social ad network Facebook on Tuesday said it will begin notifying people when they appear in the pictures posted by other people, sometimes.…

Proposed legislation just in the nick of time About a week after weathering a storm of negative headlines for seemingly bungling an allegation of rape against one of its workers, Microsoft has found just the tonic to restore its squeaky clean image.…

Factoid flu Comment When Knowledge Graph – Google's apparently authoritative box at the top of the search results – sneezes, the world catches a factoid flu.…

Remote access tool blocked for second time by Brit ISP TalkTalk customers who need to use remote desktop tools are on the warpath after the UK ISP blocked TeamViewer for the second time this year, ostensibly in an attempt to protect users from potential scammers.…

All Greek Orthodox church halls to me Bizarre happenings are heaping extra controversy on a conference that will discuss the pros, cons and ethical conundrums of sex with robots.…

Regulator questions legality of transferring data to Facebook The French information watchdog has told WhatsApp it has a month to comply with data protection laws, or risk being fined.…

Notorious Lazarus Group said to be behind mass infection UK Foreign Office Minister Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon today claimed North Korea was behind the WannaCry ransomware incident.…