The Register

Nice birthday gift for clever kid who found a way to access web giant's confidential info A teenager in Uruguay has scored big after finding and reporting a bug in Google's App Engine to view confidential internal Google documents.…

ESA tells everyone to calm down and carry on The European Space Agency has confirmed there is no danger of asteroid 2012 TC4 hitting Earth in October, despite what some panicky YouTube videos might tell you.…

US officials' online spaces – a public forum or private haven? More US public officials have been sued for blocking people from their social media pages.…

Nonprofit estimates 25% will break down within 2 years Consumer Reports has a message for its readers: one in four of your shiny Microsoft's Surface laptops and tablets might not outlast their new computer smell.…

Builtin antivirus will make room for rival products Kaspersky Labs is dropping its antitrust complaints against Microsoft in Russia and Europe.…

New deadline for retro kit Troubled ZX Spectrum reboot firm Retro Computers Ltd has promised to deliver its Vega+ product in “a few weeks”.…

Back to the drawing board with Foxconn and WDC Auditors have finally signed off Toshiba's fiscal 2016 and Q1 '17 accounts but with a disputed qualification, so Tosh should avoid Tokyo Stock Exchange delisting on that account.…

Toy company has midlife crisis, ditches 61-year-old Bali Padda Lego has swapped out its CEO of just eight months after finding a younger man to fill the role.…

The faster the claim, the bigger the disappointment UK households only hit their advertised broadband speeds 58 per cent of the time, according to a survey from consumer group Which?…

Also appears to take credit for 4G-on-Tube plans The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, wants to deploy a "not-spot" team to tackle poor connectivity in the capital, under plans unveiled today which include re-announcing 4G on the underground for 2019.…

Take a plea deal and come home quick, opines East London meeting Marcus Hutchins’ British supporters believe his best chance of getting home within the next few years is to accept a plea deal with US prosecutors, some of them opined last night.…

21,000 accounts handled by Indian outsourcing biz exposed Blighty's Information Commissioner’s Office has whacked TalkTalk with a £100,000 fine after the data of the records of 21,000 people were exposed to fraudsters in an Indian call centre.…

Tape, though? That's one tough mofo Quantum delivered flat results with its business in limbo and awaiting direction and tuning from the new and CEO-less board.…

Open Data Institute to fund R&D to get orgs to play nicely The UK’s Open Data Institute is offering up £60,000 for a company to make it easier for organisations to create collaborative data registers.…

Home Office response like a riddle wrapped in an enigma Analysis The Home Office's ambiguous response has puzzled a security pro trying to understand whether the Investigatory Powers Act gave the government the authority to force anyone to work for GCHQ.…

The end is nigh! Give it a couple of years Analysis It's not a good week to be in the disk-drive business as solid-state tech news signals their imminent death – all due to a murderous group formed of Intel/Micron, Samsung, SK Hynix and Toshiba/WDC.…

Shall we launch a telescope in a balloon? Or an X-ray to the ISS? One will happen by 2022 NASA has published a shortlist of six missions its considering for launch from the year 2022.…

Have we reached peak blockchain yet? Viacheslav Semenchuk, a Russian entrepreneur, has just launched a cryptocurrency for Jews.…

Some insights from the HBO hack and bomb threat claims It's something every aspiring crook needs to consider before they attempt to break into the world of cyber-crime: what's the business plan?…

VR's killer app is shared simulations of closed spaces, not immersive entertainment My family's growing up fast so we're considering adding a room or three to the house. I'm therefore arranging all manner of meetings at which different tradespeople run an eye over the place so they can scare me with the price of the stuff we want done.…

Revealing penetration-testing tool sealed staffers' fate Salesforce fired two of its senior security engineers after they revealed details of an internal tool for testing IT defenses at DEF CON last month.…

Class action from hot-and-bothered compensation-seekers flames out Samsung has seen off a class action brought by Koreans burned-out by the need to return their flammable Galaxy Note 7 phablets.…

Let's get outta here while we still have a chance Scientists have found tantalizing signs that there are four Earth-like planets orbiting Tau Ceti, a Sun-like star just 12 million light-years away. And two of those worlds could be home to life.…

WoSign and StartCom banished from Windows 10 Microsoft's decided not to support digital certificates issued by Chinese outfits WoSign and StartCom, but the first-mentioned CA disputes the decision.…

Big Blue admits it gave customers too little notice of the change and broke their code IBM has turned known-to-be-insecure TLS 1.0 back on in its cloud.…

Not a bug, it's a clearly labelled feature, we're told Security firms are, understandably, quite sensitive about claims that their products are insecure, so accusations of this sort tend to cause a kerfuffle.…

It's 2017 and cross-site forgery vulnerabilities are still a thing A cross-site forgery vulnerability in the American court system's document archive PACER has been fixed. The bug could have been exploited to hijack accounts and retrieve civil and criminal lawsuit files on victims' dime.…

Money-pit taxi app maker can't even rent out rides without burning bags of bucks Uber is killing off its car leasing program after being whacked with huge losses in the division.…

Privacy warriors' legal battle to play out before appeals court The controversial topic of electronic device searches at the US border, and whether customs agents should be required to get warrants before sucking data off them, is heading to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.…

Version 5 due 2018, future proposed changes must come with working code attached The Apple-supported open-source Swift programming language is set to stabilize in late 2018, with the release of version 5.…

Google addresses dozens of security flaws in mobile platform Android users should be expecting a security update to land for the mobile operating system in short order, as Google has issued fixes for 99 CVE-listed programming cockups.…

19 vulnerabilities squished this month – get patching Critical issues in SAP’s CRM application – patched on Tuesday – open the door to corporate espionage, security researchers warn.…

The JBOF made easier Mellanox has integrated the hardware needed to frontend an NVMe-over-Fabrics flash array into a single System-on-Chip (SoC) device, making it easier for shared flash storage system builders to put together NVMe JBOFs.…

UK's Department of Fun seeks clarification due to heightened public interest The British government's Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport has written to Ofcom asking for extra input before Culture Secretary Karen Bradley decides whether to approve Rupert Murdoch's £11.7bn Sky buyout bid.…

Here we go Mobile operator Three has launched a legal challenge against Ofcom's rules over the upcoming multibillion-pound radio spectrum auction.…

Go on, count them. Bet you can't resist now we've said that Ad companies Facebook and Google slurp one in every 3½ minutes that Britons spend online, according to a survey.…

Meaning redundancies, cutting travel budgets and shedding 1.2 million square feet DXC, the Franken-firm made up of CSC and the enterprise services arm of HPE, is "on track" to slash spending by $1bn (£760m) this year – with plans to further ramp up the cost-cutting throughout the year.…

Are you saying I have a big ask? Data visualisation firm Tableau has made its third-ever acquisition in a bid to speed up use of natural language query technology and bring in more users.…

Biz charged £250 a pop for free Google My Business service A Brit biz masquerading as Google to "sell" a free business listing service has wound up in the High Court.…

Alexa, Qualcomm, Google Voice and more

... as in Veblen Good Review Microsoft waited almost two years to update its boutique computer, the Surface Pro. In the meantime the line expanded to include a detachable tablet (Surface Book), a desktop (Surface Studio) and a proper laptop (Surface, er, Laptop), while the cheaper, Atom-powered POS (Plain Old Surface) fell into the bin and wasn't rescued. So do you want the tl;dr first?…

Sammy goes large... very, very large Samsung has fired out four flashy announcements with higher capcity chips, faster drives, new packaging format and a flash version of Seagate's Kinetic disk concept.…

We've extended early prices for select workshops Events If you missed out on early bird tickets for MCubed, our machine learning and AI extravaganza, don’t despair – you can still save a bundle of cash on our optional workshop sessions.…

Scottish ministers fear 'hugely negative outcome' Proposals by BT to fork out £600m to provide ubiquitous speeds of 10Mbps could damage competition by entrenching its monopoly position, the Scottish government has warned.…

Adding fail to fail Comment I feel the same way about my Apple Watch as I do about Twin Peaks – I love it, but I don’t go around recommending it. No, sir.…

Good morning "Dawn raids" by HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) on businesses and individuals are likely to remain high following the entry into force of new corporate criminal tax offences, an expert has said.…

Which is to say support for NVMe over fabrics and virtual private arrays Kaminario has introduced its K2.N system, the first existing array design to be developed for frontend NVMe-over-fabrics access.…

Apollo Accelerators to let FPGA-powered 'Vampire V4' see the light of day The world's getting a new Amiga for Christmas.…

If you can't wait, Big Red says its new SaaS apps will behave just like software modules Oracle is working on a big upgrade to its e-business suite in 2019. Or maybe 2020.…

You can trivially DoS Puma 5 and 7-powered boxes, too Intel says the performance issues that have dogged its Puma 6 gigabit broadband modem chipset also affect the Puma 5 and Puma 7 family.…