Croydon, schools, Brexit, the Queen, poo – hey, it's a royal flush of terrible news items

A high school in the picturesque London borough of Croydon has been gratefully lumped with a lifetime supply of loo roll after Her Majesty the Queen turned down a donation from a cheeky German company.…

But it'll be cooler, faster and just all-round betterer! Honest!

Sure enough, with the annual Games Developers Conference upon us, the outfit behind the nostalgia-baiting Atari VCS has recommended backers don't hold their breath waiting for the thing to arrive.…

'We remain confident that we are well prepared for different scenarios,' reckons boss man

With Brexit possibly just around the corner, reselling machine Softcat says it has made all the preparations it can to minimise the impact on the supply chain and sales.…

Oh, and Flash! Arrrrrggghhh

Eight out of the ten most exploited vulnerabilities tracked by threat intelligence biz Recorded Future in 2018 targeted Microsoft products – though number two on its list was, surprise surprise, a Flash flaw.…

Cisco is touting analytics, automation for that very challenge

Promo  With an estimated 63 million new devices attaching to enterprise networks per second by 2020, will your infrastructure team be able cope with its growing scale and complexity?…

It turns out Ultima Thule is a kind of lumpy space snowman. If you've been following NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, you know Ultima Thule is an object in Kuiper Belt, the donut-shaped region of icy bodies beyond Pluto. New Horizons made the farthest...

Norsk Hydro, one of the world's largest aluminum producers, said today it has "became victim of an extensive cyber-attack" that has crippled some of its infrastructure and forced it to switch to manual operations in some smelting locations. From a report: The cyber-attack was later identified as an infection with the LockerGoga ransomware strain, the company said during a press conference. News of the cyber-attack broke earlier this morning in a message the company sent to investors and stock exchanges. "Hydro became victim of an extensive cyber-attack in the early hours of Tuesday (CET), impacting operations in several of the company's business areas," the company said. "IT-systems in most business areas are impacted and Hydro is switching to manual operations as far as possible."

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In this week's episode of which popular service will reduce its offerings to the non-paying users, Trello said it will have a go. From a report: Trello, a Kanban-inspired project management app organized around the idea of boards containing cards with attachments, to-do items, and comments, is getting a few much-needed improvements. Today, the Trello team announced that Trello Enterprise, a corporate-class subscription tier launched in 2015, will gain 13 new features this week, including improved admin controls, a new visibility setting, and compliance certifications. It's the largest product update in Trello Enterprise's history, the Atlassian subsidiary says, but it's a tad bittersweet -- a new restriction will be imposed on teams that use the free version of Trello. Moving forward, they'll be limited to a maximum of 10 open boards at any given time. (Enterprise and Trello Business Class users get unlimited boards, and existing free teams will be able to add up to 10 additional boards until May 1, 2019.) Last week, it was Dropbox that introduced some limits to its non-paying users.

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An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla today launched Firefox 66 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. The release includes autoplaying content (audio and video) blocked by default, smoother scrolling, better search, revamped security warnings, WebAuthn support for Windows Hello, and improved extensions. The company says its main goal with this release is to reduce irritating experiences such as auto-playing videos, pop-ups, and page jumps. Firefox 66 for desktop is available for download now on Firefox.com, and all existing users should be able to upgrade to it automatically. The Android version is trickling out slowly on Google Play.

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EU governments are allowing more than 100 advertising companies, including Google and Facebook, to surreptitiously track citizens across sensitive public sector websites, in apparent violation of their own EU data protection rules, a study has found. From a report: Danish browser-analysis company Cookiebot found ad trackers -- which log users' locations, devices and browsing behaviours for advertisers -- on the official government websites of 25 EU member states [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. The French government had the highest number of ad trackers on its site, with 52 different companies tracking users' behaviour. Google, YouTube and DoubleClick, Google's advertising platform, accounted for three of the top five tracking domains on 22 of the main government websites. Researchers also studied the websites for EU public health services, finding that people seeking health advice on sensitive topics such as abortion, HIV and mental illness were met with commercial ad trackers on more than half of the sites analysed.

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