The 'bot allows unauthenticated root-level access, runs a Meltdown/Spectre-vulnerable processor, can be administered over unencrypted HTTP and has a default root password.

Their research found that “it is a breeze to remotely turn it into a 'cyber and physical weapon', exposing malicious behaviours”.

Softbank's engineers haven't provided any protections against an attacker hammering Pepper with unlimited password attempts: “no countermeasures to brute-force attacks have been deployed with Pepper, which is once again an intolerable and disappointing finding”.

Whois, which is used by the police and journalists to check the legitimacy of websites, no longer displays the name, email address or phone number of some websites.

In a letter to the Wall Street Journal entitled, The EU's gift to Cybercriminals, lawyers Brian Finch and Steven Farmer claim: "Police will be robbed of ready access to vital data drastically impeding their efforts to identify and shut down illicit activity."

Some of YouTube's most popular stars have criticised the website for "experimenting" with how their videos are delivered to their fans.

Technology vlogger Marques Brownlee - who has more than six million subscribers - said prioritising videos "they think we want to see" was a "business move". But he added: "It's a subscription box. Users chose to subscribe. They want to see it all. If they don't, they'll unsubscribe."

London has introduced a contactless payment scheme for buskers in what the organisers claim is a world first.

In addition to tossing loose change into a box, passers-by can use card readers to make contactless payments.

"Now, more Londoners will be able to show their support to the capital's brilliant, talented street performers," said London mayor Sadiq Khan.

The California medical board is threatening to revoke the license of Dr. William Edwin Gray III for selling homeopathic sound files over the Internet that he claims—without evidence or reason—can cure a variety of ailments, including life-threatening infections such as Ebola, SARS, swine flu, malaria, typhoid, and cholera.

Gray claims that sound waves can carry “the energetic signal in homeopathic remedies” to treat patients. He claims to be able to collect that energy by placing vials of homeopathic remedies (like water) in electrified wire coils and recording any emitted sounds. With this method, he produced 263 “eRemedies,” which are 13-second recordings (conveniently available as either .wav or .MP3 files) said to sound like hissing.

A few years back, Mark started making electronics repairs for his fellow college students and ordered parts from Amazon. He'd return items that were the wrong parts or defective, but sometimes would send back stuff he'd ordered extra of and didn't need anymore.

A few months later, he got another email from the same address with some sharper wording: "While we expect occasional problems with orders, such large numbers of returns can suggest that customers are unaware of our return policies.

He set up an account with a different name, email and shipping address, and added a VPN to his computer to hide his IP address. He was back up and running on the site.

Every room in her family home was wired with the Amazon devices to control her home's heat, lights and security system.

"They said 'our engineers went through your logs, and they saw exactly what you told us, they saw exactly what you said happened, and we're sorry.' He apologized like 15 times in a matter of 30 minutes and he said we really appreciate you bringing this to our attention, this is something we need to fix!"

"I asked you six 'yes' and 'no' questions, and I got not a single answer," said Guy Verhofstadt, a Parliament member representing Belgium. "Yes," someone in the room echoed in support. Others chimed in.

"I'll make sure we follow up and get you answers to those," Zuckerberg said, deferring to his team to provide more complete responses, just as he did with Congress in April.

FBI director Christopher Wray estimated in December that it had almost 7,800 phones from 2017 alone that investigators were unable to access. The real number is likely less than a quarter of that, The Washington Post reports.

Supposedly having three databases tracking the phones led to devices being counted multiple times.

The idea that no one thought to check for duplicates before giving a number to the director for testimony in Congress suggests either conspiracy or gross incompetence.

In fact, nearly seven years after the eternally optimistic World IPv6 Launch launched, we are still only at just over a quarter availability of the new internet protocol.

As one avid IPv6 watcher – chief scientist of regional internet registry APNIC, Geoff Huston – has identified, the last four months of stats show a significant slowdown of IPv6 adoption.