The Register

Comms provider switched 118 people to its services without their consent

Imagine a telco kicking down your front door, yelling "all your bills are belong to us" then leaving. In the industry parlance, it's known as "slamming" and Ofcom has fined Onestream £35,000 for the practice.…

Another $0.51 dividend for shareholders, exec pay OK'd, but no say for employees

There was good news for investors and perhaps bad news for employees during Microsoft's annual shareholder meeting.…

You say 20H1, they say 2004, let's call the whole thing off

Microsoft has emitted a fresh build of next year's Windows 10 to both the Slow and Fast rings of the Windows Insider programme and goodness, those guinea pigs weren't keen on Notepad-In-The-Store.…

Billionaire accuses execs of running scared for jobs amid $33.5bn bid

Corporate raider Carl Icahn isn't quietly accepting HP's rejection of Xerox's hostile $33.5bn takeover bid - he has accused the board of using delay tactics to keep their jobs and warning it can be done in a nice or not-so-nice way.…

ZeroCleare wipes up where Shamoon left off

An Iran-based hacking crew long known to target energy facilities in neighboring Middle Eastern countries is believed to be launching new attacks.…

What's that when it's at home? Oh, they mean pixel binning

Motorola has updated its mid-range lineup with the announcement of the Android 10-powered One Hyper.…

Ready to go, but beware 'unfortunate breaking change' in Windows Forms

Microsoft has released .NET Core 3.1 – a significant milestone as, unlike version 3.0, it is a long-term support (LTS) release, suggesting that the company believes it's fit for extended use. It is accompanied by Visual Studio 16.4, also an LTS release.…

What now? A pre-election porky? Heaven forfend…

Conservative Party claims they may review the extension of IR35 tax rules to the UK private sector have been called into question by a tax expert.…

Pretty fly for a Wi-Fi...

The long-awaited future of super-fast wireless is here, with the Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) claiming speeds of 700Mbps in a real-world environment using the Wi-Fi 6 standard.…

Distributed acoustic sensing turns old glass cabling into seismic sensors

Old, unused fiber optic cables buried underground can be refashioned into seismometers, helping scientists monitor earthquakes, according to new research.…

Advice based on feedback from Register readers and insights from Box

Webcast Financial institutions across the board are wrestling with how to engage more closely with customers and work better across internal teams. Too often, the cause is ill-fitting content and document management systems, designed for another time. Meanwhile, cloud-based platforms can both help and hinder, delivering short-term benefit but adding complexity and fragmentation.…

The great .uk foist is still rumbling along

Two months after promising customers that its past practices of automatically registering, and charging, customers for .uk domains was all a big misunderstanding, pushy registrar 123-Reg is at it again, charging at least one punter for .uk domains they never ordered and don’t want.…

Collaborating with other companies is such a drag

re:Invent AWS CEO Andy Jassy, asked about the future role of Kubernetes (K8s) in cloud infrastructure, told The Register that "I don’t believe in one tool to rule the world."…

Exposed private cert key may also be an issue for IBM Aspera

Twitter security celeb SwiftOnSecurity on Tuesday inadvertently disclosed a zero-day vulnerability affecting enterprise software biz Atlassian, a flaw that may be echoed in IBM's Aspera software.…

In-memory malware a first for suspected Nork hacking crew

The Lazarus group, which has been named as one of North Korea's state-sponsored hacking teams, has been found to be using new tactics to infect macOS machines.…

Hey, no looking, that paperwork's private, says network operator

Angry AT&T customers have asked a judge to force America's trade watchdog, the FTC, to hand over the information it used to reach a $60m settlement with the cellular network for throttling “unlimited data” plans.…

Sighting shows the future of our own Solar System

A giant planet orbiting a hot white dwarf star has been discovered for the first time, giving scientists a glimpse into what our Solar System might look like billions of years from now.…

But how is it $1,000 cheaper?

So, as reported yesterday, the younger brother of Colombia's favourite son Pablo Escobar plans to launch a foldable phone, the Escobar Fold 1. Alarm bells started ringing, not least because the entry-level model has an MSRP of $349 — about $1,000 less than what you'd expect.…

Database giant insists that ain't so, will fight lawsuit

A former Oracle employee filed a lawsuit against the database giant on Tuesday claiming that he was forced out for refusing to lie about the functionality of the company's software.…

Only took seven years of consumer hell to do

The US Congress has finally acted on the scourge of robocalls, with the House of Representative passing the TRACED Act on Wednesday morning by 417 votes to 3 (with 11 not voting).…