The Register

Tentative ruling signals a potential win for SFC's copyleft enforcement push Electronics biz Vizio may be required by a California court to provide source code for its SmartCast TV software, which is allegedly based on open source code licensed under the GPLv2 and LGPLv2.1....

Proof of life? Or an active social media presence? Criminals are altering social media and other publicly available images of people to use as fake proof of life photos in "virtual kidnapping" and extortion scams, the FBI warned on Friday....

Some within the CRM giant balked, but Benioff prevailed ServiceNow's dominant spot among IT service management (ITSM) platforms is facing its most credible" threat to date, as longtime platform rival Salesforce has rolled out an AI agent-powered product that has won early plaudits from one of the largest credit unions in the US....

Who needs JavaScript? Security researcher Lyra Rebane has devised a novel clickjacking attack that relies on Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)....

Security community needs to rally and share more info faster, one researcher says Amid new reports of attackers pummeling a maximum security hole (CVE-2025-55182) in the React JavaScript library, Cloudflare's technology chief said his company took down its own network, forcing a widespread outage early Friday, to patch React2Shell....

TikTok, by contrast, satisfied DSA concerns over its ad repository transparency The European Union has issued its first-ever Digital Services Act fine, slapping Elon Musk's X with a 120 million penalty for breaching the bloc's rules on ad transparency, data access for researchers, and its revamped blue-checkmark system....

All those new features won't fund themselves Microsoft 365 customers have gotten an early Christmas present from Santa Satya: price rises. All that AI goodness isn't going to pay for itself....

Even as enterprises defer spending and analysts spot dotcom-era warning signs Tech execs are adamant the AI craze is not a bubble, despite the vast sums of money being invested, overinflated valuations given to AI startups, and reports that many projects fail to make it past the pilot stage....

Laptop maker says a vendor breach exposed some phone camera code, but not its own systems Asus has admitted that a third-party supplier was popped by cybercrims after the Everest ransomware gang claimed it had rifled through the tech titan's internal files....

State-backed attackers started poking flaw as soon as it dropped - anyone still unpatched is on borrowed time Amazon has warned that China-nexus hacking crews began hammering the critical React "React2Shell" vulnerability within hours of disclosure, turning a theoretical CVSS-10 hole into a live-fire incident almost immediately....

With seat and usage-based deals back on the table, CRM giant tells investors agent prices are going up Salesforce has told investors it is upping prices for AI agent platforms, claiming customers will get between three and ten times the value from investment as it introduces new AI charging models....

Umpteen other distros just put out new versions, but this one is our favorite Kernel 6.18 has already been designated the new LTS release - just as we predicted - and Alpine Linux 3.23 has arrived carrying it ahead of a flurry of other year-end distro updates....

Diarmuid Early takes world title after outpacing 11 rivals Ireland's Diarmuid Early has won the Excel World Championship. Readers of a certain age may be disappointed to learn he has never used Lotus 1-2-3....

Plan would create statutory powers for police use of biometrics, prompting warnings of mass surveillance The UK government has kicked off plans to ramp up police use of facial recognition, undeterred by a mounting civil liberties backlash and fresh warnings that any expansion risks turning public spaces into biometric dragnets....

Project retires 32-bit ports, embraces pkgbase, and modernizes build process The latest release of FreeBSD contains a lot of crucial under-the-hood changes - and drops 32-bit support on both x86 and POWER, although ARM-v7 survives....

Union fields member complaints as it presses outsourcer over botched rollout Capita has sought Microsoft's help after the launch of the Civil Service Pension Scheme (CSPS) left users facing a malfunctioning website designed to process important financial information....

The Reg is still standing (this time) despite our best efforts Updated Routine Cloudflare maintenance went awry this morning, knocking over the company's dashboard and API and sending sites around the world into error screens....

You can improve the odds by combining skepticism, verification habits, and a few technical checks Opinion Liars, cranks, and con artists have always been with us. It's just that nowadays their reach has gone from the local pub to the globe....

Medical software maker also had a vastly unhealthy approach to security On Call Welcome to another installment of On Call, The Register's Friday column that tries to improve the health of the tech support ecosystem by sharing readers' sickening stories of bringing broken tech back from the brink....

New Datacenter Manager' manages VMs across multiple sites or clusters Open source virtualization project Proxmox has delivered the first full and stable release of its Datacenter Manager product, making it a more viable alternative as a private cloud platform....

Never mind, says jolly green giant, we're a networking-centric company now HPE has revealed its revenue from servers and hybrid cloud products has gone backwards but insisted that's nothing to worry because it's now poised to profit from its acquisition of Juniper Networks....

Automated software keeps getting better at pilfering cryptocurrency Anthropic could have scored an easy $4.6 million by using its Claude AI models to find and exploit vulnerabilities in blockchain smart contracts....

The homegrown chips now account for half of all new CPUs added to AWS over the past three years re:invent Amazon on Thursday unveiled Graviton5, its densest, highest performance CPU yet, cramming 192 processor cores into a single socket and promising new levels of AWS performance....

'Dozens' of US orgs infected Chinese cyberspies maintained long-term access to critical networks - sometimes for years - and used this access to infect computers with malware and steal data, according to Thursday warnings from government agencies and private security firms....

'You're absolutely right! I was totally lying to you!' Some say confession is good for the soul, but what if you have no soul? OpenAI recently tested what happens if you ask its bots to "confess" to bypassing their guardrails....

He's not alone: DoD inspector general says the whole Defense Department has a messaging security problem US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth definitely broke the rules when he sent sensitive information to a Signal chat group, say Pentagon auditors, but he's not the only one using insecure messaging, and everyone needs better training....

And then they asked an AI to help cover their tracks Vetting staff who handle sensitive government systems is wise, and so is cutting off their access the moment they're fired. Prosecutors say a federal contractor learned this the hard way when twin brothers previously convicted of hacking-related offenses allegedly used lingering access to delete nearly 100 government databases, including systems tied to Homeland Security and other agencies, within minutes of being terminated....

Isaacman: 'We can never accept a gap in our capabilities again' The US must return astronauts to the Moon before China mounts its first crewed landing there, NASA administrator nominee Jared Isaacman predicted on Wednesday. He also vowed that the country will not endure another gap in its human-spaceflight capabilities as the International Space Station approaches retirement....

Major OEMs are plotting double-digit hikes as DRAM and NAND shortages bite Exclusive Server and PC prices are climbing sharply as hardware manufacturers grapple with soaring memory component costs, multiple supply chain sources have told The Register....

$200M deal brings Claude into data cloud, yet its touted 90%+' accuracy needs human oversight Anthropic and Snowflake announced a deal that will allow the deployment of AI agents capable of complex, multi-step analysis inside Snowflake's governed data environments....

Technical problems on video calls can cause uncanniness, which influences real-world decisions If you didn't get your dream job, you might be able to blame your internet provider. Technical glitches on video calls in healthcare, job interviews, and parole hearings can affect real-world decisions, a study has found. The researchers suggest new technologies may even be making the problem worse....

OpenAI and Microsoft yank their chatbots, telling millions of users to head elsewhere The European Commission has opened an antitrust probe into Meta after WhatsApp rewrote its rules to block rival AI chatbots including OpenAI's ChatGPT and Microsoft's Copilot....

Nvidia is along for the ride with chips to offer, naturally Palantir has always been a company marked by ambition, and it's embarking on what might be its most ambitious project yet with Chain Reaction, a new multi-industry, AI-powered software suite designed to eliminate energy bottlenecks for datacenters....

Silent Patch Tuesday mitigation ends ability to hide malicious commands in .lnk files Microsoft has quietly closed off a critical Windows shortcut file bug long abused by espionage and cybercrime networks....

Microsoft warns Start menu, Explorer, and other XAML apps can crash or vanish on managed devices Microsoft has admitted that it might have broken Windows components including the Start menu and Explorer in the latest round of updates....

Just ignore all the ways the peripherals biz uses AI itself Logitech's CEO says that AI-powered devices are a solution looking for a problem, despite being a strong proponent of AI and her firm pushing out exactly the kind of thing she's talking about....

Cloudflare data shows 29.7 Tbps record-breaker landed amid 87% surge in network-layer attacks The internet has spent the past three months ducking for cover as the Aisuru botnet hurled record-shattering DDoS barrages from an army of up to 4 million infected machines....

3 GW is roughly three quarters of the country's peak demand, says Foxglove New datacenters planned in Scotland would collectively require 75 percent as much energy as the entire country currently consumes, according to tech campaign group Foxglove....

Pricing complexity makes justifying migrations an uphill battle UK SAP users say licensing and pricing complexity is muddying the picture for Business Suite, the vendor's new model for cloud applications....

One dev thinks this will become their second-highest cost, fears they'll have to pass it on Exclusive SaaS-y accounting outfit Xero has advised developers who integrate their products with its services that they'll soon have to pay for the privilege in a new way....

It's time to ask your bit barn provider how they'll keep the lights on, and what their plans mean for prices Availability of energy will determine the prices charged by datacenter operators, who won't be viable unless they generate some of their own juice....

Tricky tradeoffs are hard to avoid when designing systems, but the choice not to use LLMs for some tasks is clear Systems Approach As we neared the finish line for our network security book, I received a piece of feedback from Brad Karp that my explanation of forward secrecy in the chapter on TLS (Transport Layer Security) was not quite right....

Ferrous Systems achieves IEC 61508 (SIL 2) certification for systems that demand reliability Memory-safe Rust code can now be more broadly applied in devices that require electronic system safety, at least as measured by International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) standards....

Minister wants to free drivers from dependency on private companies' India's government is set to launch a rideshare platform and app that charges no commission and is intended to make life harder for Uber and its ilk....

First AI came for our jobs. Now, our memory? The lure of AI spending was too much for Micron to ignore. On Wednesday, the US chipmaker announced it's abandoning its Crucial memory and storage lineup to bolster its supply of enterprise-focused chips, including those used in AI systems....

Gartner found only 20% of customer service leaders have cut human agents because of AI The world's smallest digital violin is playing for AI chatbots, which are having a hard time elbowing out their human counterparts for jobs in customer service, according to a Gartner study....

Rights holders had better buckle up for years of legal wrangling, IP lawyer tells The Reg You don't have to be smarter than a fifth grader (or even a first grader) to commit potential copyright infringement using AI tools. One IP attorney watched over the weekend as his young son built a bedtime story generator that used copyrighted characters without permission....

Finish reading this, then patch A maximum-severity flaw in the widely used JavaScript library React, and several React-based frameworks including Next.js allows unauthenticated, remote attackers to execute malicious code on vulnerable instances. The flaw is easy to abuse, and mass exploitation is "imminent," according to security researchers....

Letting AI firms train on copyrighted data will end up helping China, conservative groups argue A group of conservatives allied with President Donald Trump's MAGA movement, including former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, has asked the Justice Department and the White House to stop protecting Big Tech against copyright claims....

An anomaly' meant a fireball arrived at the recovery zone instead of a spent first stage There's good news and bad news for the Chinese commercial launch industry. The good news is that LandSpace's ZhuQue-3 launched successfully on its maiden flight. The bad news is that a hoped-for recovery of the first stage ended in a fireball....