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The Israeli company whose spyware hacked WhatsApp has told buyers its technology can surreptitiously scrape all of an individual's data from the servers of Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft, Financial Times reported on Friday. [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source] From the report: NSO Group's flagship smartphone malware, nicknamed Pegasus, has for years been used by spy agencies and governments to harvest data from targeted individuals' smartphones. But it has now evolved to capture the much greater trove of information stored beyond the phone in the cloud, such as a full history of a target's location data, archived messages or photos, according to people who shared documents with the Financial Times and described a recent product demonstration. The documents raise difficult questions for Silicon Valley's technology giants, which are trusted by billions of users to keep critical personal information, corporate secrets and medical records safe from potential hackers. NSO denied promoting hacking or mass-surveillance tools for cloud services. However, it did not specifically deny that it had developed the capability described in the documents.

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Virty GPU upstart joins the fold

Crusty old VMware is attempting to keep up with the youngsters by acquiring Bitfusion, a startup that claims to enable machine learning on any VM via the magic of network-attached GPUs.…

Or Sam connecting a vulnerable dev box to production. Here's your gentle guide to risks and threats menacing your IT

Backgrounder The good news for enterprise security is that the number of reported cyberattacks is going down, in the UK at least.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Using data from 356,925 broadband speed tests conducted over a year, PCMag recently compiled a list of the fastest ISPs in America. ISPs were then affixed a PCMag Speed Index score based on a combination of line performance, upload, and download speeds. When all regional ISPs were compared side by side, the fastest ISP in America was independent California ISP Sonic, with a score of 610.6. Sonic has been working with select California communities to leverage their publicly-owned fiber networks. All told, six of the ten fastest ISPs in the States were either directly run by a local community, or involved some form of partnership between the public and private sectors.

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A decision must be made as a 'matter of urgency', says Intelligence and Security Committee

Excluding Huawei from the UK's 5G network infrastructure would harm resilience and "lower security standards", the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) warned today.…

People Framework strikes again: 'Employees feel worse off and demoted'

A number of female staff at BT that take maternity leave could be disproportionately affected by plans to remove car allowances from certain employees.…

1969 and all that, or why NASA shouldn't be all about lunar footprints

Tomorrow it will be a full 50 years since humans first set foot on the Moon, and nearly 50 years since the annual hand-wringing began over why none have gone back after Apollo 17.…

Transport for London missed the train for 2019 deadline

Transport for London is to trial 4G services on the eastern half of the Jubilee line, and is looking to work with a firm that wants to run a Underground-wide network by the mid-2020s.…

The Chinese space station Tiangong-2 is scheduled to drop out of orbit on July 19 and fall into the Pacific Ocean between New Zealand and Chile. New Scientist reports: Tiangong-2 -- which translates as "heavenly palace" -- was launched in September 2016, and it was never intended to be a permanent fixture in orbit. Instead, its purpose was to test technologies for China's larger planned space station, whose main module is scheduled to launch in 2020. That space station is planned to be about one-fifth the size of the International Space Station. Tiangong-2 is far smaller. In 2018, Tiangong-2 began to lower its orbit to prepare for the end of its mission. On 19 July, it will fire its thrusters again to aim its descent toward the Pacific Ocean. Most of the craft will probably burn up as it enters the atmosphere, but any parts that survive should splash into the water harmlessly. Its predecessor, Tiangong-1, lost power in April 2018 and crashed in an uncontrolled fashion.

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Of course the ticket's real: it says 'Pan Am' at the top, doesn't it?

Something for the Weekend, Sir? My mother won a ticket to the Moon.…

Makes you proud to be British

The Ministry of Defence has slipped £10m of British taxpayers' money into Serco's back pocket to settle a legal challenge over the award of a £525m Fire and Rescue services contract to rival outsourcer Capita.…

Watchdog casts doubt on testbeds and trials scheme

The UK's £217m 5G testbed trials have already hit a major speed bump due to a lack of available equipment, according to an official report.…

How our sysadmin learned to fear vSphere

On Call Welcome to Friday. The weekend is almost upon us so put down that bacon sarnie and pick up today's On Call, The Register's weekly column of tales from the tipping point.…

Researchers at Microsoft, Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pennsylvania analyzed 22,484 porn sites and found that 93% leak user data to a third party. Normally, for extra protection when surfing the web, a user might turn to incognito mode. But, the researchers said, incognito mode only ensures that your browsing history is not stored on your computer. CNET reports: According to a study released Monday, Google was the No. 1 third-party company. The research found that Google, or one of its subsidiaries like the advertising platform DoubleClick, had trackers on 74% of the pornography sites examined. Facebook had trackers on 10% of the sites. "In the U.S., many advertising and video hosting platforms forbid 'adult' content. For example, Google's YouTube is the largest video host in the world, but does not allow pornography," the researchers wrote. "However, Google has no policies forbidding websites from using their code hosting (Google APIs) or audience measurement tools (Google Analytics). Thus, Google refuses to host porn, but has no limits on observing the porn consumption of users, often without their knowledge."

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Yak app still cleaning up after four-year-old cyber-break-in

Slack says a 2015 database theft is to blame for a large-scale reset of stolen passwords.…

Get your early-bird tickets for talks ranging from technical deep-dives to advice on ethics and the law

Event Your early experiments in machine learning or AI can be tough. Getting them to work in production will be tougher still.…

93% of onanistic orgs tracking you despite battened-down browsing

Google, Facebook, and, surprisingly, Oracle are among the top ten third-party companies that frequently track your personal sexual interests every time you watch porn, according to new research.…

While Google stopped selling its augmented-reality glasses to customers due to privacy concerns, Google Glass lived on as something to be used by researchers and businesses. The New York Times reports of a new effort from Stanford researchers to use Google Glass to help autistic children understand emotions and engage in more direct ways with those around them. The glasses could also be used to measure changes in behavior, something that has historically been difficult to do. An anonymous Slashdot reader shares an excerpt from the report: When Esaie Prickett sat down in the living room with his mother, father and four older brothers, he was the only one wearing Google Glass. As Esaie, who was 10 at the time and is 12 now, gazed through the computerized glasses, his family made faces -- happy, sad, surprised, angry, bored -- and he tried to identify each emotion. In an instant, the glasses told him whether he was right or wrong, flashing tiny digital icons that only he could see. Esaie was 6 when he and his family learned he had autism. The technology he was using while sitting in the living room was meant to help him learn how to recognize emotions and make eye contact with those around him. The glasses would verify his choices only if he looked directly at a face. He and his family tested the technology for several weeks as part of a clinical trial run by researchers at Stanford University in and around the San Francisco Bay Area. Recently detailed in The Journal of the American Medical Association, Pediatrics, the trial fits into a growing effort to build new technologies for children on the autism spectrum, including interactive robots and computerized eyewear.

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New submitter symgym writes: Recently out of stealth mode is a new battery technology that's printed on silicon wafers (36 million "micro-batteries" machined into 12-inch silicon wafers). It can scale from small devices to large-scale grid storage and promises four times the energy density of lithium-ion batteries for half the price. There should also be no issues with fires caused by dendrite formation. "When you use porous silicon, you get about 70 times the surface area compared to a traditional lithium battery... [and] there's millions of cells in a wafer," says Christine Hallquist of Cross Border Power, the startup that plans to commercialize the battery design developed by Washington-based company XNRGI. "It completely eliminates the problem of dendrite formation." If all of this is true, it's a massive disruptive invention. Hallquist also notes that the new batteries are 100% recyclable. "At the end of the life of this product, you bring the wafers back in, you clean the wafer off, you reclaim the lithium and other materials. And it's essentially brand new. So we're 100 percent recyclable." "Hallquist says the battery banks that Cross Border Power plans to sell to utility companies as soon as next year will be installed in standard computer server racks," reports IEEE Spectrum. "One shipping container worth of those racks (totaling 40 racks in all) will offer 4 megawatts (MW) of battery storage capacity, she says. Contrast this, she adds, to a comparable set of rack-storage lithium ion batteries which would typically only yield 1 MW in a shipping container."

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Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer is calling on the FBI to investigate FaceApp after privacy concerns have been raised about the Russian company which developed the app. In a letter posted on Twitter, Mr Schumer called it "deeply disturbing" that personal data of U.S. citizens could go to a "hostile foreign power." The BBC reports: Wireless Lab, a company based in St. Petersburg, says it does not permanently store images, and does not collect troves of data -- only uploading specific photos selected by users for editing. "Even though the core R&D team is located in Russia, the user data is not transferred to Russia," a company statement reported by news site TechCrunch said. Mr Schumer however has asked that the FBI and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigate FaceApp. "I have serious concerns regarding both the protection of the data that is being aggregated as well as whether users are aware of who may have access to it," his letter reads.

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