BT is suing a supplier for £72m after it delivered nearly 100,000 defective landline connection blocks that caused ADSL broadband outages, London’s High Court has heard.

Legal filings reveal that Tii Technologies is said to have supplied 95,000 faulty jack test (JT) blocks to BT over a period spanning 2006-2016. The one-time state monopoly claims these faulty blocks led to a spate of ADSL outages in the mid-2010s that mainly affected Sky Broadband’s customers – and cost BT more than £40m in engineer callouts to trace the problem’s cause.

“In April 2016 (not for the first time), it was reported that the [JT] blocks were causing broadband faults and a complaint to that effect was made by Sky UK Limited, one of the Claimant’s largest customers of ADSL broadband services,” said BT in filings obtained by The Register.

The UK’s Government Digital Service (GDS) has signed contract extensions worth £5m with Digidentity and the Post Office for an online identity service which recently fell over.

The two companies support Verify, which the government created to offer citizens access to a range of online services through one identity. According to tender notices, the Post Office has been awarded contracts worth £2.9m and £328,000 while the Dutch digital identity vendor has been given deals worth £1.7m and £192,000 to support the service for another year.

In a perfectly timed moment of digital karma, the service the companies provide decided to start exhibiting technical problems on 4 June that have yet to be resolved.

EA Games, publisher of Battlefield, The Sims and FIFA, has admitted to a “recent incident of intrusion into our network” in which attackers reportedly stole game source code and software development kits.

The company acknowledged the breach while downplaying its impact, saying no personal data of players had been taken and claiming the amount of game source data and tools taken was “limited”.

The breach was first reported by Vice’s Motherboard offshoot, which said it had been shown screenshots of posts on cybercriminal forums by the apparent thieves, boasting about what they had helped themselves to.

Geek’s Guide To Britain They say that it is the history on one’s doorstep which is most often overlooked. So it is with my latest piece for El Reg’s Geek’s Guide to Britain which concerns events in a quiet Welsh village that I called home between the ages of five and 18.

My father started work at the Aluminium Corporation Ltd plant in Dolgarrog in 1971 but it was not until some years later that I discovered that the village played an important part in the development of hydroelectric power in the UK and that in 1925 a disaster occurred which changed the geography of the area when a dam wall blew out, releasing a torrent of water and debris that swept a large part of the original village away and killed more than dozen people.

The UK’s Passport Office has awarded a £21m contract to Atos IT Services purportedly for business intelligence and infrastructure.

The initial term of the deal is for two years, with the opportunity to extend for a further three years. The estimated value of the contract is for the maximum five years.

The deal is part of Her Majesty’s Passport Office’s Digital Future Services programme and has been awarded from Crown Commercial Services Technology, which takes a 1 per cent fee on contracts it facilitates.

Users of BT’s Mini Whole Home Wi-Fi range-extender discs have noticed their devices are making hundreds of thousands of daily DNS lookups for big tech companies’ websites – causing problems for some wanting to access Gmail and Microsoft services.

The huge volume of requests generated by the BT-branded discs has caused problems for some Reg readers after their DNS-lookup-spewing IP addresses were flagged by their DNS providers as hives of malicious activity.

Irritated individuals have told us each of their discs generates one DNS lookup for google.com every second – meaning one disc generates 86,400 lookups a day. For those using three or four discs and a custom DNS server configuration, the impact is enough to get their IP addresses flagged as suspicious, we were told.

Something for the Weekend, Sir? Smile! We’re all going back to the office!

Not if you work for Twitter, mind. Or, of course, if you have a real job such as construction, transport, shit-shovelling or – oh, I dunno – server maintenance. In which case… smile! You’re already back at the office! Because you never left it!

A number of countries have targeted June as a month for tentatively reigniting their economies, much to the chagrin of billionaire offshore tax-dodgers who have kept their businesses ticking over thanks to taxpayer-funded grants and furlough payments. Part of this reignition process involves asking employees to trickle back through the commuting sausage-mill and present themselves at their old cubicles and work stations.

Episode 7 “… and you have user education?” our visitor asks.

“Indeed we do,” the PFY responds.

“Though I see you’ve had a reasonably high turnover of staff in recent years.”

On Call An On Call reminder this week that all must worship the mystery beige box with the single baleful LED eye, no matter what one thinks it is used for.

Our tale comes from a reader Regomised as “Mike”, an on-site engineer. Mike spent the late 20th century on the road, coming to the rescue of customers up and down Britain.

His story takes place in the 1980s, a decade that began with the debut of the Rubik’s Cube and ended with the arrival of the World Wide Web.

Canada’s Office of the Privacy Commissioner (OPC) announced yesterday that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) broke the law by using Clearview AI facial-recognition software.

An OPC investigation launched in July 2020 concluded in February this year that Clearview AI violated the country’s federal private sector privacy law when it created a three-billion-image databank by scraping social media accounts without user consent. Now the OPC has decided the RCMP’s use of the database to match images violated the country’s Privacy Act.

Federal Privacy Commissioner Daniel Therrien said in a canned statement:

A seven-year-old privilege escalation vulnerability that’s been lurking in several Linux distributions was patched last week in a coordinated disclosure.

In a blog post on Thursday, GitHub security researcher Kevin Backhouse recounted how he found the bug (CVE-2021-3560) in a service called polkit associated with systemd, a common Linux system and service manager component.

Introduced in commit bfa5036 seven years ago and initially shipped in polkit version 0.113, the bug traveled different paths in different Linux distributions. For example, it missed Debian 10 but it made it to the unstable version of Debian, upon which other distros like Ubuntu are based.