The Register

From Excel.Application to remote code execution. Lovely A white-hat has taken a good look at whether you can pivot an attack from one machine to others using Microsoft Excel, and you probably won't like what he found.…

PETA and photog agree that 'Legal rights for nonhuman animals' remain unresolved The curious case of the monkey that took a selfie and was denied copyright for its efforts has come to an end, with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and photographer David Slater agreeing on a future stream of royalty payments to simian charities.…

Schlepping planets about is so old, teamwork is the new religion LOGOWATCH DevOps darling Atlassian has given the world a new logo it says could be “two people high-fiving” or “a mountain ready for teams to scale” or perhaps even “the letter A formed from two pillars reinforcing each other.”…

It's also bought a random number generator for PINs Equifax has decided it will no longer try and impose arbitration on any of the millions of Americans who try to find out if they've been stung in its massive data leak.…

WARN notice lists 1,008 layoffs in total Oracle has filed a notice under California's Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) regulations that reveals it has recently made 1,008 permanent layoffs in its Santa Clara and San Diego facilities.…

This is how trust ends, not with a bang but with a whimper Google has detailed its plan to deprecate Symantec-issued certificates in Chrome.…

Research just isn't as effective as it used to be Innovation, fetishized by Silicon Valley companies and celebrated by business boosters, no longer provides the economic jolt it once did.…

Insider build aims to address glitch spotted by gamers Microsoft says it is working to address a bug that had caused some Windows 10 applications to experience momentary "stuttering" performance problems.…

Metadata platform combined with data definition Analysis Rubrik CEO Bipul Sinha says there are two ways of looking at backup and recovery: loosely they are hardware or storage-centric and software-centric.…

So, does my stellar nursery look big in this? The rate of star formation might play a bigger role in affecting a galaxy's shape than previously thought, according to a recent study.…

Lots of bennies, but can be time-consuming It's no secret that switching to containers is difficult. According to some IT pros contacted by containerization tech firm Cloud Foundry [PDF], it's so difficult that their adoption is still dragging in the enterprise sector.…

Regulators harshing the buzz California says its impending legalization of recreational marijuana will not include skies full of herb-toting drone delivery bots.…

Embarrassing law enforcement comes at a heavy price A member of the short-lived Crackas With Attitude hacking troupe has received five years in prison, despite the fact that he hadn't actually hacked any accounts himself and had accepted a plea deal.…

Then by September 16 those a few extra miles will go Over the weekend Tesla began pushing a software update to certain Model S and Model X vehicles to increase battery capacity, in the hope that extended vehicle range might help customers fleeing Hurricane Irma and successive storms in Florida.…

Yes, yes, privacy failings Facebook has been fined €1.2m ($1.43m) by the Spanish Data Protection Agency (AEPD) for violating privacy laws.…

Object storage founders unveil virtualised filer front end Esoptra has invented a thin content provisioned virtualized filer sitting in front of object storage.…

Ministers fed up with multinational's tax avoidance Fed up with how Amazon, Google and other American digital giants pay tiny amounts in tax, European ministers are proposing a big change: tax based on revenues rather than profits.…

FireWatch creator sees red A prominent indie games developer says he will be filing Digital Millennium Copyright Act notices to forcibly cut ties with a controversial games streamer.…

Financial details undisclosed, but it's big, ya hear, says Rackspace Private equity-backed Rackspace is planning to use some of its owner’s cash to hoover up managed services, hosting and colo outfit Datapipe.…

Now credit freezes may not even be secure FireEye removed an Equifax case study from its website in response to a recently disclosed mega-breach at the credit reference agency.…

GPU-accelerated for AI and video analytics, Atlas cloud Huawei has added two G-series boxen with GPU acceleration to its server portfolio, with a focus on AI-type work and video analytics, saying they are going to be used to build a cloud hardware platform.…

Current boss leaves this weekend, no perm replacement yet found Months after Capita commenced its search for a successor to outgoing chief exec Andy Parker, the company has yet to find anyone judged evil enough well suited to fill his boots - at least not one it can make public.…

Dartford-based True Telecom fined £85,000 A Dartford-based telco has been handed an £85,000 fine for two years’ of nuisance and "misleading" calls - despite a warning from the UK’s data protection watchdog.…

But has less than three weeks to comply with Brussels Alphabet will appeal the €2.9bn fine imposed by the European Commission in June for abusing its market dominance in search.…

Still the most secure Android? It won't get last year's update BlackBerry has confirmed that its first Android device, the Priv, will be stuck on Google's 2015 operating system forevermore, which Google itself will cease supporting next year.…

30,000 users, 2-year contract. What could go wrong? Nail-biting time The Home Office has tossed a paltry £20m of taxpayers' cash at Accenture and Oracle implementation outfit Certus Solutions to deploy a cloudy ERP system that hopefully works overhauls the way back-office services are provided.…

Speculation mounts as Equifax stays mum The impact of the Equifax breach in the UK remains unclear days after the disclosure of a breach that could potentially affect up to 44 million British consumers.…

'Nervousness from customers is understandable' UK comms and networking integrator Maintel has blamed trading partner Avaya’s bankruptcy filing in the US for slowing customer demand on this side of the pond.…

Any point turning up? Not now Apple apparently deploys resources comparable to the security apparatus of a repressive Cold War Balkan state to try to prevent leaks. To very little effect. And with magnificent irony, it seems to have itself to blame for the biggest leak of all.…

Clamshell QWERTY has a few unique tricks World Exclusive Last week Gemini, the venture that re-invents the Psion 5 design for the 21st century, took delivery of pre-production units. Planet Computing invited us to see how the project is progressing.…

This is not foil-bagged street food... It's a knife-fork-and-plater +Comment Good morning, storage fans. Last week we were buzz-bombed with a barrage of storage updates, but we kept quite a few aside to wrap up into something easily digestible. It's a bit more substantial than the blob-dropping treat you might grab at the food truck, though, so get a napkin, plate, and some cutlery, find a quiet room and spend 15 minutes ingesting this stuff.…

Where did you get Red Hat, where did you get that tile? For all of the breathless hype that containers and cloud native get, the strange-but-true story is that enterprises still need to run servers and for that vSphere is arguably the best possible option. VMware probably understands this in its inner sanctum but, well... Kubernetes envy.…

What councils spend it on is another matter The government has clawed back £645m from BT under its state-subsidised superfast broadband contracts tendered in 2012.…

We trawled through 32 Lords debating so you don't have to Fellow peers phone snubbed (or phubbed) Lord Sugar's speech in a debate last week, which included calls for an ID card system to be resurrected and plenty of hand-wringing about the Government Digital Service.…

Businesses to get 'File Stream', great unwashed get 'Backup and Sync' Google is killing its “Drive” sync 'n' share file locker in two ways.…

Fast book delivery is a first world problem, but cargo-carriers might just slow down the growth of cities At the end of 2013 (the world seemed much simpler back then) Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos gave a rare interview to CBS’ 60 Minutes program during which he revealed - with an almost Jobsian flourish - an autonomous deliver drone that would drop packages on customers' doorsteps 30 minutes after they pressed the ‘buy’ button.…

Borg starts appraising its exposure to Apache problem More than 42 Cisco products might inherit the Apache Struts bug that emerged last week.…

New Wave giant, journalist, essayist and Byte columnist now a mote in God's eye One of the giants of “New Wave” hard science fiction, Jerry Pournelle, has died aged 84.…

Chipzilla thinks fast short-range wireless is good for VR, where desks are always tidy Intel has issued “Product Change Notifications” for several WiGig products it used to make wireless laptop docks.…

An upload filter would break GitHub builds, warn FSFE, OpenForum Europe European digital rights groups and open science advocates are mobilising against proposed EU copyright changes they say would hamper information sharing.…

'Toast' micro-messages can burn just about every Android users Any unpatched Android phone running a version older than Oreo is going to need patching fairly soon, with researchers turning up a class of vulnerability that lets malware draw fake dialogs so users “okay” their own pwnage.…

Timeline explains that either Equifax didn't patch old bugs, or was zero-dayed The Apache Software Foundation has defended its development practices in the face of a report alleging its code was responsible for the Equifax data leak.…

Three different machines fail tests, must be binned before November election Virginia's State Board of Elections has decided its current generation of electronic voting machines is potentially vulnerable, and wants them replaced in time for the gubernatorial election due on November 7th, 2017.…

easyDNS, which bills itself as 'the free speech registrar' won't register white supremacists Yet another domain name registrar has declined to give white supremacist web site The Daily Stormer an easy way back onto the web.…

Fascinating detail on how people move around the system The people in charge of the London Underground transport have released a report [PDF] in their month-long tracking trial of Tube users – and the results are fascinating.…

It's a grower not a, er, yeah... Python, which ranks consistently as one of the most popular programming languages, is the fastest growing major programming language, according to coding community site Stack Overflow.…

That gives me a great idea, says Putin – payback Updated US big box retailer Best Buy has pulled from its shelves Kaspersky Lab's PC security software amid fears of Kremlin spies using the antivirus tool to snoop on Americans.…

Operating system release pushed back to next year Oracle's latest roadmap for its SPARC and Solaris platforms shows that at least one major milestone has been delayed.…

Not exactly a move designed to inspire confidence The team behind Scotiabank's Digital Banking Unit isn't impressing some customers, after forgetting to renew the security certificates for their own website.…

Could any 'detect the transits of the Solar System planets'? Scientists on Earth have found thousands of exoplanets – but which of those potential alien civilizations are in the best position to discover us?…