Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but perhaps whoever designed the website for storage upstart Weka.io has gone a little too far: when Reg operatives decided to read beyond our story on the company, we found its website appears to have borrowed ours! The offending bit of Weka's site is its Fake Newspaper, “IT News …

Fake news has come to be associated with political intrigue but the same propaganda techniques are also abused by cybercriminals, according to a study by Trend Micro. The techniques and methods used to spread fake news and manipulate public opinion have a wide range of objectives and even a price list. Cybercriminals produce …

"Why is Jeremy Paxman at Infosec?” more than one person wondered, as Newsnight's former rottweiler-in-chief took the stage to deliver the morning's keynote. It's safe to say Paxo wasn't brought on for his tech knowledge. Asked about Theresa May's stance on end-to-end encryption, he said: "I have no idea what that question …

Vodafone will block its advertising appearing against so-called "fake news" and hate speech from today. It said the decision was a response to evolving technology within advertising and media and the algorithms being used in ad placements. It said that it will use "whitelisting" controls put in place by its global ad agency, …

Comment Talk about chutzpah. Facebook has launched its PR campaign to combat "fake news" with the slogan "Together we can limit the spread of false news". Together? Yes, together. Them and you. But mostly you, it seems. It kicks off with a list of 10 tips for internet users to identify falsehoods, much as Elizabethan witch-hunters …

Fears the web is just one massive echo chamber, to be used for the sole purpose of confirming one's own bias, are overstated, according to research supported by Google. Despite what some politicians argue, fake news and biased search algorithms aren't swaying public opinion, the Michigan State University research found. News …

Analysis Last November at the Techonomy Conference in Half Moon Bay, California, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg dismissed the notion that disinformation had affected the US presidential election as lunacy. "The idea that fake news on Facebook, which is a very small amount of the content, influenced the election in any way, I think, is a …

Comment When Henry Kissinger received the Nobel Peace Prize against the backdrop of the US Air Force's secret bombings in Cambodia, the satirist Tom Lehrer declared that satire had become obsolete. If satire died that day, then Jimmy Wales has dug it up, exhumed the corpse, and is giving it a state funeral. The Wikipedia co-founder …

Former Times editor and News International chief executive Robert Thomson has launched a precision attack on the "duopoly" of Google and Facebook. As debate rages around what role "fake news" played in electing Donald Trump, Thomson points out that whether news is "real" or "fake", Google and Facebook don't care. Either way, …

An alleged PC tech support scam that used fake news releases from the US Federal Trade Commission to make its false claims more believable has attracted the attention of the consumer watchdog agency in the form of a lawsuit. The FTC on Monday sued Lake Worth, Florida, resident Daniel L Croft, doing business as PC Guru Tech …

Facebook, Mozilla and Craig Newmark from Craigslist are among the donors behind a “News Integrity Initiative” that has given itself the mission “advance news literacy, to increase trust in journalism around the world, and to better inform the public conversation”. Just how the Initiative will do that has not been disclosed, …

Google has asked its search quality raters not to assume that users looking up Holocaust denials, or whether women or Islam or black people are evil, are "racist or bad people." The ad giant pays approximately 10,000 people to use its search services using terms that real-world users have typed in and then report back on how …

The German government has formally proposed fining Facebook and Twitter up to €50m ($53m) for failing to remove slanderous fake news and hate speech within 24 hours. A new bill introduced on Tuesday by interior minister Heiko Maas is designed to "combat hate crime and criminal offenses on social networks more effectively," …

How could El Reg ignore this? – two University of Washington professors have assembled a course to teach students to identify bullshit. Biology professor Carl Bergstrom and assistant professor at the university's Information School Jevin West have devised the “Calling Bullshit in the Age of Big Data” course as their small …

Analysis The viral spread of fake news and “alternative facts” has rocked Western politics. Oxford Dictionaries chose “post-truth” as its word of 2016, and when a society is scolded by a dictionary wielding a hyphenated word, you know you've collectively screwed up. “The concept of post-truth has been in existence for the past decade, …

Two AI researchers are behind a daring open challenge to fight the spread of outrageous headlines that are completely detached from reality. (As if anyone would write such things, tut-tut.) The Fake News Challenge (FNC) is organized by Dean Pomerleau, an entrepreneur and adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and …

Zeitgeist-hungry MPs at the UK Parliament will conduct an inquiry into “Fake News”. The Culture Media and Sport select committee will look at trying to define modern propaganda, its impact, and also asks whether “changes in the selling and placing of advertising encouraged the growth of fake news, for example by making it …

Microsoft has committed itself to the UK after comments by a manager were ripped out of context. In a Channel 9 webinar last week explaining Brexit to Microsoft customers not familiar with the details, Owen Larter, government affairs manager at Microsoft UK, expressed optimism for post-Brexit UK's digital economy. Asked …