Biting the hand that feeds IT — sci/tech news and views for the world
Analysis WannaCry – the file-scrambling ransomware that infamously locked up Britain's NHS and a bunch of other organisations worldwide in May 2017 – is still a live-ish threat to this day, infosec researchers reckon.…
Posted on 19 September 2019 | 10:03 am
That sound you can hear is the clock ticking down on your chance to register for this year’s Byte Night sleep out.…
Posted on 19 September 2019 | 9:30 am
Forest fires have apparently ravaged over four million acres of land across the United States so far this year, and the problem is only getting worse with global warming. Enter technology's hottest solution: Machine learning.…
Posted on 19 September 2019 | 9:00 am
Geek's Guide to Britain The BT Centre is an unremarkable-looking building just north of St Paul's Cathedral, nine storeys of Portland stone with straight unadorned 1980s lines softened by curved corners. The headquarters of the UK's largest telco could be mistaken for an apartment block if it wasn't for the company's logo.…
Posted on 19 September 2019 | 8:16 am
Miscreants are hacking into Saudi Arabian IT providers in an attempt to compromise their real targets: said providers' customers, according to Symantec.…
Posted on 19 September 2019 | 5:55 am
On Wednesday, Google nuked two ad-blocking Chrome extensions that appear to have been designed to conduct affiliate-marketing fraud.…
Posted on 19 September 2019 | 5:02 am
The infosec duo cuffed during an IT penetration test that went south last week are out of jail, though not necessarily out of the woods.…
Posted on 19 September 2019 | 1:45 am
A judge in California has OK'd a class-action lawsuit against Apple for alleged breaches of its AppleCare warranty schemes.…
Posted on 18 September 2019 | 11:56 pm
Maintaining its hard-won reputation for being one of the most-hated companies in America, Comcast has seemingly redefined the meaning of the word “lifetime” – and received a lawsuit in response.…
Posted on 18 September 2019 | 11:27 pm
Google talked up new features for Anthos, its take on hybrid cloud, at an event in New York earlier this week.…
Posted on 18 September 2019 | 11:00 pm
Analysis A woman who says she was subjected to a horrific rape at the hands of her Lyft driver has sued the tech biz.…
Posted on 18 September 2019 | 9:47 pm
Exclusive Scotiabank leaked online a trove of its internal source code, as well as some of its private login keys to backend systems, The Register can reveal.…
Posted on 18 September 2019 | 8:17 pm
On Wednesday, Microsoft's GitHub said it has acquired Semmle, a San Francisco-based software analysis platform for finding vulnerabilities in code. No price was disclosed.…
Posted on 18 September 2019 | 7:34 pm
Cybercrims are still likely to affect universities and other educational institutions online with ransomware, reckons GCHQ offshoot the National Cyber Security Centre.…
Posted on 18 September 2019 | 7:00 pm
Goldman Sachs has led a $147m funding round in Acronis which values the data recovery and protection vendor at more than a billion dollars – unicorn status.…
Posted on 18 September 2019 | 6:00 pm
A day after Adobe posted hugely profitable Q3 results, its share price dropped by as much as 5 per cent (~$270) and has been bouncing around the sub 3 per cent mark (~$275) for the remainder of trading.…
Posted on 18 September 2019 | 5:00 pm
The head of Novaestrat, the data analytics company at the centre of the huge leak revealed on Monday involving personal information about more than 20 million Ecuadorian citizens, has been taken into custody.…
Posted on 18 September 2019 | 4:00 pm
eBay and Gumtree have lost a legal fight to kill off a British wannabe rival thanks to Geoffrey Boycott's usage of a well-known Yorkshireism.…
Posted on 18 September 2019 | 3:20 pm
The government has confirmed former permanent secretary at the Department for Work and Pensions, Robert Devereux, has rocked up at ethical SaaS oufit Salesforce as veep of global public sector.…
Posted on 18 September 2019 | 2:45 pm
Plans to introduce a legal right for everyone in the UK to have minimum broadband speeds of 10Mbps next year will be "obsolete soon after introduction", a Parliamentary report has found.…
Posted on 18 September 2019 | 2:00 pm
Orthodox priests in the central Russian city of Tver have been practising an original method of ridding locals of alcohol abuse and fornication: grab some religious relics, jump in a bi-plane, circle overhead and pour holy water onto citizens from the skies while reciting prayers.…
Posted on 18 September 2019 | 1:20 pm
MPs across parties have called for an immediate "stop" to live facial recognition surveillance by the police and in public places.…
Posted on 18 September 2019 | 12:47 pm
An autonomous dog-like robot designed to scamper down tunnels on search-and-rescue missions was put to the test in the most recent bout of US military boffins' DARPA Subterranean Challenge.…
Posted on 18 September 2019 | 12:10 pm
SAP's German customers are using a meeting in Nuremberg to complain the company should be doing more to make its products usable.…
Posted on 18 September 2019 | 11:34 am
Microsoft has pulled the sheets off Azure Private Link as a way to create a private endpoint for a shared service.…
Posted on 18 September 2019 | 11:01 am
A pair of newly disclosed security flaws could allow malicious virtual machine guests to break out of their hypervisor's walled gardens and execute malicious code on the host box.…
Posted on 18 September 2019 | 10:27 am
Gatwick Airport will extend its use of facial recognition to match passengers to their passports at departure gates before they board planes.…
Posted on 18 September 2019 | 9:45 am
Interview The development experience may be easy, but the open-source Cloud Foundry (CF) platform is confusing as hell for newcomers. Chip Childers, CTO of the Cloud Foundry Foundation since it was formed in January 2015, spoke to The Reg about its past, present and future, at the recent Cloud Foundry Summit in The Hague.…
Posted on 18 September 2019 | 9:09 am
The UK government needs to come up with an actual strategy to help businesses and workers take advantage of automation and robotics.…
Posted on 18 September 2019 | 8:08 am
On Tuesday, the Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) team from MITRE, a non-profit focused on information security for government, industry and academia, published its list of the CWE Top 25 Most Dangerous Software Errors.…
Posted on 18 September 2019 | 6:56 am
Netizens are merrily slinging selfies and other photos at an online neural network to classify them... and the results aren’t pretty.…
Posted on 18 September 2019 | 6:07 am
The Facebook exec in charge of its Libra cryptocurrency effort has sought to assure European governments that their fears are unfounded… by telling them they’re wrong and Facebook knows better.…
Posted on 18 September 2019 | 4:53 am
Comment Anyone who’s ever watched the original Star Trek series will probably remember Spock and Kirk playing three-dimensional chess – a great chance for the Enterprise’s science officer to show off his prowess with logic as he contemplated a range of complex moves.…
Posted on 18 September 2019 | 2:51 am
The mystery host of a Silicon Valley fundraiser for President Trump today has been revealed as Scott McNealy, co-founder and former CEO of Sun Microsystems.…
Posted on 17 September 2019 | 9:25 pm
The US government today sued former CIA employee and NSA sysadmin contractor Edward Snowden to deny him payment from his newly published book, Permanent Record.…
Posted on 17 September 2019 | 7:58 pm
Yesterday El Reg wrote about the frustrating syncing failures plaguing FitBit gadgets over the past four or so weeks.…
Posted on 17 September 2019 | 7:44 pm
Around 24 million medical patients' data is floating around on the internet, freely available for all to pore over – thanks to that good old common factor, terribly insecure servers.…
Posted on 17 September 2019 | 7:15 pm
DevOps botherer GitLab has scored another $268m of funding, bringing the value of the outfit to $2.75bn ahead of a 2020 IPO.…
Posted on 17 September 2019 | 6:30 pm
A new report has suggested that 12 out of 13 network devices, such as routers and network-attached storage appliances, are vulnerable to hacks that enable "root-privileged access without any authentication".…
Posted on 17 September 2019 | 5:45 pm
Apple has appealed against the European Union's 2016 decision to impose a €13bn tax bill on the iPhone maker's Irish subsidiary.…
Posted on 17 September 2019 | 5:04 pm
AWS Transformation Day It's London's turn with AWS Transformation Day, where attendees endure a cacophony of buzzwords intended to hammer home the message that Amazon's cloud is where you wanna be.…
Posted on 17 September 2019 | 4:00 pm
Hewlett-Packard Inc's printers don't just slurp the contents of your wallet at a frightening rate. They also guzzle a surprising amount of data on you and whatever you're printing.…
Posted on 17 September 2019 | 3:25 pm
Having promised there wouldn't be any more previews, Microsoft has dropped a release candidate for the upcoming .NET Core 3.0 framework.…
Posted on 17 September 2019 | 2:50 pm
UK.gov is on the lookout for a Government Chief Digital Information Officer (GCDIO) – a permanent secretary role that sets the strategic direction of travel for public sector IT in return for up to £180,000 a year.…
Posted on 17 September 2019 | 2:16 pm
A UK Home Office consultation on new, intrusive police powers was so incompetently written that you could both "strongly agree" and "strongly disagree" at the same time when answering its questions.…
Posted on 17 September 2019 | 1:30 pm
Event Whether you’re worried about the machines taking over, or think it can’t happen soon enough, you should get yourselves down to MCubed at the end of the month.…
Posted on 17 September 2019 | 1:00 pm
Roundup Unlike SpaceX's Crew Dragon, which plops down in the ocean at the end of a mission (ideally in one piece), Boeing's CST-100 Starliner is designed to land on, er, land. As NASA and Boeing inch ever closer to its first crewed launch, rehearsals were conducted last week to practice locating a capsule, safing it and preparing for hatch opening.…
Posted on 17 September 2019 | 12:33 pm
Google has been hit by another age discrimination lawsuit, just two months after the search giant settled a previous case brought by over 200 people.…
Posted on 17 September 2019 | 11:45 am
The UK government has confirmed that electricity suppliers have an extra four years to hit targets for installing smart meters.…
Posted on 17 September 2019 | 11:00 am
The Unconventional Computing Laboratory in Bristol is looking for a research associate to help it create buildings with embedded fungus-created computers.…
Posted on 17 September 2019 | 10:04 am