TheRegister
Is that croaky voicemail of your CEO just a Fakey McFake Fake – or does he normally ask you to wire him $1m?
In brief An infosec biz has shared an audio clip of what may be a software-generated voicemail message, designed to impersonate a CEO to trick a company employee into unwittingly committing fraud.…
WTF is cloud-tethered compute? We're not sure either, but it just made a hype cycle for the first time
Clouds have gone private, mutated into hybrids, gone virtual and/or private and attracted many other labels beside.…
UKIP blackmail, data breach sueball allegations were groundless, rules High Court
A lawsuit alleging that ex-UKIP leader Richard Braine took part in blackmail and data breaches has been all but thrown out of the High Court as a judge said it was "without any proper and sound evidential foundation".…
Google search trends used to calculate floating prophylactic prices
Australian personal protective equipment company Ansell has started pricing its condoms using a value calculated by analysing Google search trends.…
Are you sitting comfortably? Then we'll begin. Hang on, the PDP 11/70 has dropped offline
Who, Me? As the weekend recedes and the workday begins, tarry a while with a beverage of your choice and today's entry in The Register's file of reader Who, Me? confessions.…
If you think you've got problems, pal, spare a thought for these boffins baffled by 'oddball' meteorites
Meteorites discovered strewn across Earth after the 1960s may have broken off the same planetesimal body. What’s more, scientists have discovered signs this ancient body had a molten core, which turns some cosmological thinking on its head.…
No, boss: I’m not playing Minecraft. Minecraft is where I run VMs on the desktop now
A developer who goes by “Delta2Force” has created a Minecraft mod that runs virtual machines on virtual computers built inside Minecraft.…
USA seeks Moon and Mars nuke power plant designs ready to fly in 2027
The US Department of Energy has published an RFI for a lunar nuclear power plant.…
Australia sues Google over data collection practices that merged DoubleClick data to create single user profiles
The Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) has hauled Google into the nation’s Federal Court for misleading local users “… to obtain their consent to expand the scope of personal information that Google could collect and combine about consumers’ internet activity, for use by Google, including for targeted advertising.”…
SAP to list Qualtrics, less than two years after convincing it not to list
German software giant SAP will float its data analytics subsidiary Qualtrics, less than two years after convincing the firm not to list itself.…
We're not all about rockets, says NASA: Balloon tech is good enough for economical star scanning
NASA wants to lift a 2.5-metre-long, reusable far-infrared telescope into Earth’s stratosphere using a massive high-altitude balloon in 2023 to check out the heavens more economically.…
Psst.. You may want to patch this under-attack data-leaking Cisco bug – and these Ripple20 hijack flaws
In Brief Cisco this week emitted fixes for potentially serious vulnerabilities, one of which is already being exploited in the wild.…
It's a Meow-nixed system, I know this: Purr-fect storm of 3,000+ insecure databases – and a data-wiping bot
Poorly secured databases are being wiped and vandalized by the thousands in a seemingly automated attack.…
Just what you want when stuck working from home: Microsoft domain mixup downs Remote Web Access
Updated Microsoft's Windows Server Essentials' Remote Web Access service, which lets customers set up web access to their on-premises server through a .remotewebaccess.com subdomain, became inaccessible on Thursday after an unannounced DNS change.…
Mysterious supernova is blasting far-flung galaxy with flashes of UV light – and astroboffins don't know why
Astrophysicists have spied an extremely rare type of supernova from an exploding and possibly radioactive white dwarf that emits mysterious flashes of UV light.…
Butterfingers who don't bother with phone cases, rejoice: New Gorilla Glass 'Victus' tipped to survive 6ft drops
Aluminosilicate wrangler Corning has lifted the lid on its latest generation of its hardy Gorilla Glass.…
Not-so-paltry towers to float: Vodafone reveals IPO plans for mega European masts biz
Vodafone will IPO its towers business next year, it told the market this morning, with the global telecommunications giant planning a public offering for early next year on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange.…
Xen upgrade brings open-source hypervisor to Azure, future AMD EPYCs, rPi 4, and even Nvidia AI development kit
The Xen project has popped out a new version, 4.14, of its widely used open-source hypervisor.…
Cabinet Office takes over control of UK government data: Mundane machinery or Machiavellian manoeuvrings?
The UK Cabinet Office is to take control of government data from the Department for Digital, Media, Culture and Sport.…
Want to win $15,000? Enter Huawei's app development contest – and it could be yours
Promo With Huawei mobile phones shifting to their own ecosystem and apps, Huawei Mobile Services, the company, is taking the opportunity to rethink the way app stores work entirely, priming its App Gallery as a destination for a plethora of new apps approached in a different way.…