Iain Thomson
The Register
San Francisco, CA, United States
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Past articles by Iain:
Computer security world in mourning over death of Dan Kaminsky, aged 42
Obit Celebrated information security researcher Dan Kaminsky, known not just for his technical ability but also for his compassion and support for those in his industry, has died. He was 42. Though Kaminsky rose to fame in 2008 for identifying a critical design weakness in the internet's infrastructure – and worked in secret with software developers to mitigate the issue before it could be… → Read More
Like life for most of the world, Google's 2020 was going just fine until March hit. Ad sales nosedive, but yay for cloud and Chromebooks?
Does anything really matter when you have $100bn in the bank and pocketing nearly $7bn a quarter in profit? → Read More
Watch now the three UFO videos uncovered by Blink-182 star – and today officially released by the Pentagon
Videos The US Department of Defense today officially released three short videos of "unidentified aerial phenomena" – aka unidentified" flying objects – that it still apparently doesn't have an explanation for. The footage has already been widely circulated online, thanks to Blink-182 guitarist Tom DeLonge: he is on a mission to obtain and publicly distribute UFO sightings via his To the Stars… → Read More
UK enters near-lockdown: Brits told to stay calm and carry on – as long as it doesn't involve leaving the house
Use delivery services, PM urges, electronics shops shuttered amid coronavirus pandemic → Read More
Microsoft's Bill Gates defrag is finally virtually complete: Billionaire quits board to double down on philanthropy
You look like you have coronavirus, can I help you with that? → Read More
Roses are red, IBM is Big Blue. It's out of RSA Conference after coronavirus review
Who’ll join the IT giant in staying away from San Francisco? → Read More
What a terrible result from this year's Super Bowl. Can you believe it? Awful. Yes, we're talking about the tech ads
Verizon's hypocrisy, Amazon's negging, odd targeting from Google → Read More
Is everything OK over there, Britain? Have you tried turning the UK off and on again? ISPs, financial orgs fall over in Freaky Friday of outages
BT, Gamma, Nationwide, Tide, anyone else? → Read More
From Soviet to science fiction icon, the weird life of Isaac Asimov 100 years on
As the New Year’s festivities wound down a lot of science and science fiction fans toasted the 100th anniversary of the birth of Isaac Asimov, one of the titans of the profession. Asimov wrote or edited over 500 books and reams of articles on everything ranging from science, psychology, astronomy, biochemistry (which he taught - on and off - at the Boston University School of Medicine) and, of… → Read More
This isn't Boeing very well... Faulty timer knackers Starliner cargo capsule on its way to International Space Station
Boeing’s first attempt to get its Starliner capsule to dock with the International Space Station has failed due to a software blunder. The unit was carrying cargo to the orbiting science lab though Boeing hopes to use it to send people into the obsidian void at some point. This particular Starliner mission took off on Friday morning from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, on the US East Coast, at… → Read More
Another free web course to gain machine-learning skills (thanks, Finland), NIST probes 'racist' face-recog – and more
Various bits and bytes ahead of the Christmas break → Read More
Fuming French monopoly watchdog is so incensed by Google's 'random' web ad rules, it's fining the US giant, er, <1% annual profit
Google was today ordered by France's monopoly watchdog to cough up a €150m ($166m) fine for abusing its "dominant position in the search advertising market." The Euro nation's Autorité de la concurrence slammed the American web giant's "opaque and difficult-to-understand rules," which are applied "in an unfair and random manner" on its internet ads platform. As such, the competition regulator… → Read More
Buzz kill: Crook, 73, conned investors into shoveling millions into geek-friendly caffeine-loaded chocs that didn't exist. Now he's in jail
Scammer and pals blew the cash on cosmetic surgery, jewelry, swanky pads, flash motors → Read More
This week, we give thanks to Fortinet for reminding us what awful crypto with hardcoded keys looks like
Roundup Here's a summary of recent infosec news beyond what we've already covered – earlier than usual because some of us have Thanksgiving to get through in the US. By the way, watch out for hackers taking advantage of IT teams suffering turkey comas. Fortinet fsck up: Some Fortinet networking equipment was caught sending customers' sensitive information over the internet to its servers using… → Read More
Weird flex but OK... Motorola's comeback is a $1,500 Razr flip-phone with folding 6.2" screen
Twelve hundred quid for a Snapdragon 710 Android 9 gizmo. Stick a fork in this decade, we're done → Read More
'Don’t be so concerned with your image'... US prosecutor lets rip on Uber for hack cover-up as pair plead guilty
Two men have confessed they siphoned confidential information from poorly secured databases hosted in the Amazon cloud, and then demanded payment to delete their copies of the data. Brandon Charles Glover, 26, of Winter Springs, Florida, America, and Vasile Mereacre, 23, of Toronto, Canada, each pleaded guilty to one charge of conspiracy to commit extortion involving computers at a San Jose… → Read More
Europe's digital identity system needs patching after can_we_trust_this function call ignored
ExplicitKeyTrustEvaluator... True, false? Who cares, just accept it anyway → Read More
Luke, I am your father... which is why I must eject from JEDI decision, says US Defense Sec
Top brass beams aboard from $10bn IT brouhaha as it emerges son works for IBM → Read More
Deus ex hackina: It took just 10 minutes to find data-divulging demons corrupting Pope's Click to Pray eRosary app
Vatican coders exorcise API gremlins but, we must confess, they missed little monster.... → Read More
Pitney Bowes: Can we be frank? Ransomware has borked our dead-tree post systems
Venerable stamp meter sellers stalled by server breakdown → Read More