Networks

Lucky few randomly selected to trial the feature, which won't fully roll out for several months

Mozilla is working on a built-in VPN for Firefox, with beta tests opening to select users shortly.…

Watchdog says it sees no case to investigate discounted FTTP upgrade offer – but will keep an eye on it

Ofcom has declined to intervene after smaller network providers complained that a special upgrade offer from Openreach could threaten competition in the broadband market.…

Outage knocks out phones, broadband – even telco's own status page

Vodafone fell over in the UK this afternoon, with Register readers reporting that many services including mobile coverage, internet services, and even the company's own status page went down.…

Another flawless demonstration or unplanned explosion await

SpaceX is counting down to today's 11th flight test of its monster Starship rocket, with weather looking suitable for the opening of the launch window at 18:15 CT (or around 17:00 CT, if the company's billionaire boss is to be believed).…

Pre-market charm offensive begins for Edinburgh's next national number-cruncher

The British government is putting out feelers to industry ahead of the procurement process for the country's most powerful supercomputer, set to begin next year.…

Illicit colo cleanup seemed like a good way to get out of the house during Covid

Who, Me?  Welcome to another week of nimble newsifying from The Register, which as always kicks off the working week with a fresh instalment of Who, Me? It's the reader-contributed column in which you admit to mistakes that almost trashed your career.…

With enough routers, Switchzilla says it can link bit barns 1,000 km apart and scale fabrics beyond 3 exabits per second

Cisco has unveiled a new routing ASIC designed to help bit barn operators overcome power and capacity constraints by stitching together their existing datacenters into a single unified compute cluster.…

Broadband biz teams up with Good Things Foundation to teach the digitally doddery how to dodge fraud

UK network Virgin Media O2 is taking steps to combat fraud with a nationwide education scheme that aims to help vulnerable people and older folk avoid becoming victims.…

Musk space biz: 'Anyone else that wants to use the spectrum must coordinate with us first'

EchoStar says it has met the regulatory conditions to maintain the spectrum it is selling to Musk's rocketeers.…

Software maker Kodex said its domain registrar fell for a fraudulent legal order

A software platform used by law enforcement agencies and major tech companies to manage subpoenas and data requests went dark this week after attackers socially engineered AWS into freezing its domain.…

Because 100% would just be silly

BT wants to have 5G Standalone (5G SA) mobile service available to 99 percent of the local population by the end of the decade, but it isn't the only telco with lofty ambitions.…

And it’s not the first time gunfire has cut Spectrum’s lines

A stray bullet cut through a Spectrum fiber line on Friday, knocking an undisclosed number of Texans offline.…

No internet or phones, which means no banks or commercial aviation, but lots more misery

Afghanistan has dropped off the global internet.…

50,000 firewall devices still exposed

Nearly 50,000 Cisco ASA/FTD instances vulnerable to two bugs that are actively being exploited by "advanced" attackers remain exposed to the internet, according to Shadowserver data.…

Guess how much of our direct transatlantic data capacity runs through two cables in Bude?

Feature  The first transatlantic cable, laid in 1858, delivered a little over 700 messages before promptly dying a few weeks later. 167 years on, the undersea cables connecting the UK to the outside world process £220 billion in daily financial transactions. Now, the UK Parliament's Joint Committee on National Security Strategy (JCNSS) has told the government that it has to do a better job of protecting them.…

The latest in a run of serious networking bugs gives attackers root if they have SNMP access

Cisco has confirmed a new IOS and IOS XE zero-day, the latest in a string of flaws that attackers have been quick to weaponize.…

By supporting efficient video codecs in hardware, which to be fair will also help punters

Google, Meta, and Vodafone have called on chipmakers and smartphone manufacturers to support the AV1 video codec in hardware, especially in midrange devices, a suggestion that’s not entirely altruistic.…

Secret Service seizes 300-server network allegedly tied to nation-state hackers

The US Secret Service has dismantled a network of SIM farms in and around New York City it claims was behind multiple incidents targeting senior government officials and had enough power to disrupt entire cellular networks.…

Not as bad as other interference, but maybe it's time for a wired connection

Houseplants could be slowing down your Wi-Fi, according to Broadband Genie, which reckons surfers can increase broadband speeds by almost 40 percent just by moving their router away from any greenery.…

China funded research could help video app's new American operators cut costs by 40 percent

Before Larry Ellison, Michael Dell and Rupert Murdoch put pen to paper to take over TikTok’s US operations from ByteDance, they might want to consider that one of the Chinese company’s network boffins thinks the app and others like it create “massive data wastage”.…