Biting the hand that feeds IT — sci/tech news and views for the world
Roundup This week we got freaked out about heart implant hacks, welcomed a new Microsoft security tool, and endured yet another Facebook fsck up.…
Posted on 24 March 2019 | 10:34 am
Disaster relief org FEMA has admitted, conveniently on a Friday night, to accidentally leaking banking details and other personal information of 2.3 million hurricane and wildfire survivors.…
Posted on 23 March 2019 | 1:12 am
US prosecutors have slapped three more criminal charges on ex-Autonomy chief exec Mike Lynch, accusing him of securities and wire fraud regarding HP's acquisition of his company.…
Posted on 23 March 2019 | 12:37 am
Bug hunters say Oracle's Java Card platform is host to a dozen and a half security flaws that could place smart-cards and similar embedded devices using the tech at risk of hijacking.…
Posted on 22 March 2019 | 10:08 pm
What's that old saying? Ah, yes, it's right here in Google's corporate handbook: never apologize, never explain.…
Posted on 22 March 2019 | 8:57 pm
Netflix is adamant that the path of its Bandersnatch trademark lawsuit should be for the judge to throw the case out. How does El Reg respond?…
Posted on 22 March 2019 | 7:29 pm
Ontario oldsters were left dazed and confused after munching their way through a succulent platter of cannabis-laced chocolate brownies.…
Posted on 22 March 2019 | 7:01 pm
Comment Facebook knew about Cambridge Analytica's dodgy data-gathering practices at least four months before they was exposed in news reports, according to internal FB emails.…
Posted on 22 March 2019 | 6:44 pm
The great NAND flash price slump will accelerate the uptake of SSD storage, industry sources have predicted, with PCIe/NVMe SSDs possibly accounting for half of the market by the end of the year.…
Posted on 22 March 2019 | 6:03 pm
Considering the state of political discourse in Britain, it comes as little surprise that the government has no idea whether it should follow allies and start banning certain foreign firms – most notably Huawei – from national telecommunications infrastructure projects.…
Posted on 22 March 2019 | 5:04 pm
"Rich" and "granular" patient data from hospital and GP records could be shared with policymakers and researchers under new plans from NHS Digital.…
Posted on 22 March 2019 | 4:33 pm
The best part of half a million students in Wales will be able to get their hands on a free copy of Office 365 ProPlus as the Welsh Assembly lobs cash Redmond's way.…
Posted on 22 March 2019 | 4:04 pm
A taskforce led by Spanish cops has dealt TV piracy a heavy blow after shuttering a network of illegal sports streaming sites operating across Spain, the UK, Denmark, Latvia, the Netherlands and Cyprus.…
Posted on 22 March 2019 | 3:01 pm
Requiring someone to uncheck a pre-ticked box doesn't count as valid cookie consent under EU law, the adviser to the bloc's top court has said.…
Posted on 22 March 2019 | 2:00 pm
Ah, the sea! The salty spray, the sunlight sparkling off the bay... but three foolhardy Russian sailors anchored near Minehead, southwest England, clearly fancied a change of scenery – to their misfortune.…
Posted on 22 March 2019 | 12:59 pm
Amid stalling growth, analysts have warned that Oracle can't indefinitely repurchase stock to maintain its share price.…
Posted on 22 March 2019 | 12:37 pm
The general overseeing British Army recruitment joined Capita shortly after the company won its "disastrous" Recruiting Partnership Programme (RPP) with the Ministry of Defence.…
Posted on 22 March 2019 | 11:50 am
Updated The UK's O2 mobile network knocked off early for the week today as some customers found themselves unable to use voice services.…
Posted on 22 March 2019 | 11:17 am
Promo Infrastructure failure is a major cause of concern for enterprises, incurring huge costs in troubleshooting and a multiplicity of monitoring tools.…
Posted on 22 March 2019 | 10:45 am
Scientists in the US, working alongside Microsoft, have managed to encode "hello" into a readable strand of synthetic DNA, using a fully automated data storage system.…
Posted on 22 March 2019 | 10:32 am
UK.gov has admitted it was slow to intervene as it failed to meet “overambitious” targets for the adoption of Verify, and has been accused of splashing £154m on creating an open standard for the identity service.…
Posted on 22 March 2019 | 9:55 am
Special Report 5G is like an all-night drunken brainstorm in which the world's brainiest telecoms boffins went wild, and really let rip. The morning after is a real headache.…
Posted on 22 March 2019 | 9:15 am
On Call Reading On Call, El Reg's weekly instalment of readers' tale of support triumphs large and small, is the best way to start your Friday.…
Posted on 22 March 2019 | 8:04 am
Facebook admitted, at best nonchalantly, on Thursday that its super-soaraway AI algorithms failed to automatically detect the live-streamed video of last week's Christchurch mass murders.…
Posted on 22 March 2019 | 7:38 am
An undisclosed number of Nokia 7 Plus smartphones have been caught sending their identification numbers to a domain owned by a Chinese telecom firm.…
Posted on 22 March 2019 | 6:56 am
Hands-On It's the annual Games Developer Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, where the great and the good from the games industry converge to show off their new products.…
Posted on 22 March 2019 | 6:03 am
Lest you think working for Uncle Sam in Washington DC is glamorous or in any way enviable, behold this stunning achievement in bureaucratic cock-up, or perhaps conspiracy.…
Posted on 22 March 2019 | 1:37 am
Medical gear maker Medtronic is once again at the center of a hacker panic storm. This time, a number of its heart defibrillators, implanted in patients' chests, can, in certain circumstances, be wirelessly hijacked and reprogrammed, perhaps to lethal effect.…
Posted on 22 March 2019 | 12:25 am
Folks using healthcare-related Android apps: after you've handed over your private details to that software, do you know where it is sending your data? If you don't, nobody should blame you. It turns out it can be a complicated and obfuscated affair.…
Posted on 21 March 2019 | 11:23 pm
Tesla today sued ex-employee Guangzhi Cao for allegedly stealing the source code for the leccy car maker's Autopilot software.…
Posted on 21 March 2019 | 8:16 pm
A Lithuanian citizen extradited to the US has admitted bilking $122m from Facebook and Google by sending the tech giant's staff bogus invoices for computer gear.…
Posted on 21 March 2019 | 7:43 pm
Facebook today admitted it stored "some" of its addicts' account passwords in a plaintext readable format. For "some", read hundreds of millions.…
Posted on 21 March 2019 | 5:52 pm
Antivirus vendor Kaspersky Lab has lodged a complaint about Apple with the Russian competition authority.…
Posted on 21 March 2019 | 5:15 pm
US chip slinger Micron has said that the end of memory oversupply issues is in sight, and demand for DRAM silicon will begin growing again later this year, especially in the cloud and data centre markets.…
Posted on 21 March 2019 | 4:29 pm
Promo What does it take to reach a leading role in the security field? There are different paths to take to get there: some go directly from analyst to leadership, others have a more technical background in general IT, or excellent tactical skills acquired in a consultancy or vendor role.…
Posted on 21 March 2019 | 3:45 pm
The Police Federation of England and Wales (PFEW), a sort-of trade union for police workers, has been battling to contain a ransomware strike on the group's computer systems, it confessed this afternoon.…
Posted on 21 March 2019 | 3:22 pm
Attacks targeting a years-old – and patched – vulnerability in a Chrome extension for Cisco's WebEx are on the increase, according to security outfit WatchGuard.…
Posted on 21 March 2019 | 2:20 pm
Obsequious breakfast TV host Lorraine Kelly has become an unlikely champion for the UK's freelance techies battling IR35 legislation – after a tribunal ruled she did not owe a £1.2m tax bill as she was not an ITV employee.…
Posted on 21 March 2019 | 1:52 pm
Hutchison's Three UK network lost 44,000 active customers last year, but saw its revenue increase slightly to £2.439bn from £2.425bn.…
Posted on 21 March 2019 | 12:55 pm
"I need a beer" is a phrase often uttered universally after a hard day's slog. But having cool, crisp refreshment fall into your lap as if by magic is something most of us can only dream of.…
Posted on 21 March 2019 | 12:18 pm
Updated When will lawmakers ever learn? Whenever the electorate is given a choice, they are bound to do something silly. In this case, overloading the UK Parliament's petition site with signatures on a Brexit-stopping suggestion.…
Posted on 21 March 2019 | 11:34 am
Interview Cloudera said it plans to become the darling of Wall Street in 18 months, in part by breaking into the $1bn turnover club. This promise comes a week after the company reported widening losses and sales that missed analysts forecasts, sending its share price down by almost a fifth.…
Posted on 21 March 2019 | 10:59 am
GTC AI systems have superior abilities at recognising faces in theory, but when they're deployed in practice they often fail miserably.…
Posted on 21 March 2019 | 10:37 am
Windows Virtual Desktop has finally arrived, in preview form that is, and three months after the public preview was supposed to have begun.…
Posted on 21 March 2019 | 9:45 am
Microsoft nudged the Windows brand further out of the limelight today by thwacking its anti-malware package with the rebranding stick. Behold, Microsoft Defender ATP.…
Posted on 21 March 2019 | 9:13 am
Promo As data thieves and hackers become more inventive, and more destructive, learning how to protect networks from attack and threats is zooming up organizations' lists of priorities.…
Posted on 21 March 2019 | 8:02 am
At the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, representatives of the International Game Developer Association (IGDA) warned that the World Health Organization (WHO) decision to treat computer gaming as a disorder on par with gambling and drug addiction represents a threat to free speech protections.…
Posted on 21 March 2019 | 6:54 am
Samsung has unveiled a new generation of high-bandwidth DRAM chips called Flashbolt.…
Posted on 21 March 2019 | 6:08 am
A man has pleaded guilty in America to a single felony count for his role in a $3m tech support scam operation.…
Posted on 21 March 2019 | 2:13 am
Uber has once again been accused of using spyware tools to help it undermine a competing business.…
Posted on 21 March 2019 | 12:40 am