The Register

The 24.10 release offers fun and freshness, but not immutability The first interim release of Ubuntu since the somewhat troubled Noble Numbat is a smooth upgrade - but not all of the new hotness is here yet....

When the 'cleanup' option stubbornly refuses Windows 11 24H2 users are finding there is undeletable data that remains on their devices after installing the recently released feature update....

'Self-taught hacker' facing a possible 15 years in the slammer A 28-year-old Ukrainian is facing up to 15 years in prison for allegedly operating what the war-torn nation's cyber police are calling an illegal VPN service that facilitated access to sanctioned Russian websites....

Demand for electricity to outstrip supply soon, warns Bain US energy companies must adapt to the AI-driven datacenter boom with power use forecast to outstrip supply within the next few years....

We're sure colleagues will find your lookalike, soundalike avatar's missive very warm and human Zoom Video Communications intends to offer office workers the ability to communicate with colleagues using an AI lookalike that speaks from a script using a lip-synced, cloned voice....

But what does that mean? Explainer Apple's latest OS release is the newest member of the Open Group list of officially verified UNIX variants - by quite some margin....

WCGW? Plus: Automous Robovan also makes surprise appearance at Cybercab's coming out party Complete with Back to The Future style folding doors, Tesla is showing off its Robotaxi at last, along with an autonomous minibus and the Optimus robot....

Roadside assistance biz praised for deploying security monitoring software and reporting workers to cops Two former workers at roadside assistance provider RAC were this week given suspended sentences after illegally copying and selling tens of thousands of lines of personal data on people involved in accidents....

What's harder? Convincing people to invest in a beleaguered security business or a tiny island everybody hates? Keir Starmer's decision to appoint Poppy Gustafsson as the UK's new investment minister is being resoundingly praised despite the former Darktrace boss spending years failing to fully rebuild investor confidence in the embattled company....

Director General on being a good partner and developing rockets Interview The European Space Agency (ESA) had to use a SpaceX rocket to send its Hera spacecraft to Dimorphos. After the delays of the Ariane 6, what will the Ariane 7 look like? And is the first European on the Moon already in ESA's astronaut corps?...

This is why every admin loves to hate Windows On Call As Friday rolls around Reg readers can start to contemplate pressing the Shut Down button for the working week. And to amuse you as the moment at which you can make that magic click draws near, we always offer a fresh instalment of On Call - our reader-contributed column of tech support tasks that went in interesting directions....

Scientists undecided about possible flavor After observing Jupiter's Great Red Spot (GRS) with the Hubble Space Telescope for 90 days, scientists have determined that it behaves like a "bowl of gelatin."...

It worked - alleged pump and dump schemers arrested in UK, US and Portugal this week The FBI created its own cryptocurrency so it could watch suspected fraudsters use it - an idea that worked so well it produced arrests in three countries....

Tamed DB sprawl and saved cloudy resources with 'X-Stor' Exclusive Chinese web giant Tencent has revealed it created a NoSQL database that it believes can handle multiple data models more elegantly than other attempts to do so, and has used it to consolidate its database fleet and improve resource utilization....

Acknowledges bulk customer data leak weeks after Telegram channels dangled it online Leading Indian health insurance provider Star Health has admitted to being the victim of a cyber attack after criminals claimed they had posted records of 30-milion-plus clients online....

It can also type, so the robo-doctor can heal you and write legibly Robot hands are commonplace, but their sense of touch is crude compared to that of a human. A design proposed by a group of scientists in the Middle Kingdom may change that....

Up to $100 for planning to vote and a public smear - how is this not illegal? The troublemakers behind the party game Cards Against Humanity have launched a campaign demonstrating how easy it is to buy sensitive personal data about American voters, while simultaneously encouraging those Americans to plan how to cast a vote in the upcoming presidential election....

But hey, no worries, the firm claims no evidence of data misuse Fidelity Investments has notified 77,099 people that their personal information was stolen in an August data breach....

A week after saying remote ID verification tech is unreliable, the GSA is expanding access to other agencies The US government's General Services Administration's (GSA) facial matching login service is now generally available to the public and other federal agencies, despite its own recent report admitting the tech is far from perfect....

Users just need to 'refresh/restart' their sessions Microsoft's Outlook app is crashing for European users due to memory problems, Redmond has warned, and evidence suggests the problems are spreading to the US....

We'd know if it were true, and our reporters are just fine Those who rely on the BBC's online weather forecasts to plan their day would be forgiven if they woke up this morning and thought the world was ending, but those 13,508 mile-an-hour winds in London and 404 lows forecasted for Nottingham tomorrow are an obvious error....

Just not on the same chip, of course Intel's 128-core Granite Rapids Xeons are barely two weeks old and AMD has already fired back with a family of fifth-gen Epycs that boast double-digit IPC gains with up to 192 cores or clock speeds as high as 5 GHz....

Less VRAM than promised, but still gobs more than Hopper AMD boosted the VRAM on its Instinct accelerators to 256 GB of HBM3e with the launch of its next-gen MI325X AI accelerators during its Advancing AI event in San Francisco on Thursday....

Ryzen AI PRO 300 series leans heavily on Microsoft's Copilot+ PC requirements AMD has introduced its latest processors designed for business applications. The line-up includes the Ryzen AI 9 HX PRO 375, Ryzen AI 9 HX PRO 370, and Ryzen AI 7 HX PRO 360. Built on AMD's Zen 5 microarchitecture, the devices aim for high performance and advanced AI capabilities for enterprises....

UK-Mauritius handshake holds but Chagos Islands shift could eventually phase out the ccTLD The .io country code top-level domain (ccTLD) will not disappear anytime soon, at least not within the next five years. Beyond that, its future is uncertain....

But projects must be completed in old desktop IDE TechEd Enterprise software giant SAP is set to introduce a slew of features for developers on its platform, promising AI agents, knowledge graph, and cloud-based integration features in SAP's low code-development environment Build....

New silicon, new architecture, and loads of new motherboards rise to support it, but will power be anchored down? Back in September 2023, Intel unveiled its newly designed Meteor Lake SoC for the mobile market, which was the first disaggregated chip for mobile using multiple tiled packaging. While in consensus opinion indicates Meteor Lake flopped, it did pave the way for Intel to try new things in the consumer space....

Researcher spots 110 TB of sensitive info sitting in unprotected database Nearly 32 million records belonging to users of tech from Trackman were left exposed to the internet, sitting in a non-password protected database, for an undetermined amount of time, according to researcher Jeremiah Fowler....

Usual three-week window to address significant risks to federal agencies applies The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) says vulnerabilities in Fortinet and Ivanti products are now being exploited, earning them places in its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog....

Analysts can't agree whether market is marginally up or down The PC market is not showing many signs of a rebound, despite the hype around AI PCs, with market watchers split over whether unit shipments are up or down slightly....

Firefixed: It's maintenance time for low-complexity, high-impact security flaw It's patch time for Firefox fans as Mozilla issues a security advisory for a critical code execution vulnerability in the browser....

Ideal for black-clad ultra-minimalist types. You probably wouldn't like it OpenBSD is arguably the most secure general-purpose OS for general-purpose computers. This version has better laptop support, includes more Arm64 kit, and brings hardware-accelerated video playback....

Acquisition signals consolidation in the market Exclusive The consolidation of the British tech services market is continuing with Advania UK's acquisition of CCS Media....

Hired in 2019, he claims the recruitment failed to mention ongoing litigation The chief executive of the Post Office has agreed the organization's leadership team was living in a "dream world" in the months leading up to the launch of a statutory inquiry into the Horizon IT scandal, one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in UK history....

Humans dumped by famously fusty tennis tournament The All England Lawn Tennis Club, organizer of the famed Wimbledon tennis tournament, will make line-ball calls with machines instead of human in 2025....

Two arrested after allegedly trying to make off with their ill-gotten gains The alleged administrators of the infamous Bohemia and Cannabia dark web marketplaces have been arrested after apparently shuttering the sites and trying to flee with their earnings....

Developers get auto-coding ideas drawn from bug reports, and more AI besides Atlassian has debuted a new cut of its project management and bug-tracking tool Jira, which for the first time allows users to deal with things other than issues"....

Claims its models aren't making threat actors more sophisticated - but is helping debug their code OpenAI has alleged the company disrupted a spear-phishing campaign that saw a China-based group target its employees through both their personal and corporate email addresses....

31 million users' usernames, email addresses and salted-encrypted passwords are out there The Internet Archive had a bad day on the infosec front, after being DDoSed and exposing user data....

USB sticks help, but it's unclear how tools that suck malware from them are delivered A cyberespionage APT crew named GoldenJackal hacked air-gapped PCs belonging to government and diplomatic entities at least twice using two sets of custom malware, according to researchers from antivirus vendor ESET....

Modern runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript plays nicer with Node.js Deno, the runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript, reached version 2.0 on Wednesday, bringing with it baggage from the past in the form of broad Node.js compatibility....

Regulators know this is a nightmare and have done little to stop it. Privacy advocacy group wants that to change Smart TVs are watching their viewers and harvesting their data to benefit brokers using the same ad technology that denies privacy on the internet....

Intruders stayed for free on the network between 2014 and 2020 Marriott has agreed to pay a $52 million penalty and develop a comprehensive infosec program following a series of major data breaches between 2014 and 2020 that affected more than 344 million people worldwide....

On the bright side, auroras may dazzle skies as far south as mid-latitudes Watch out, Earth: There's another strong geomagnetic storm headed our way from the Sun, following the G5-class one that hit back in May....

One-man-band faces a mountain of lawsuits but has few assets The Florida business behind data brokerage National Public Data has filed for bankruptcy, admitting "hundreds of millions" of people were potentially affected in one of the largest information leaks of the year....

Let's just hope they don't give the literature award to a bot, too This year's Nobel Prizes are shaping up to be a triumph for AI. After awarding the physics prize to early AI pioneers yesterday, the chemistry prize has now gone to the creators of AI protein prediction platform AlphaFold and protein design tool Rosetta....

Fabless chip shop alleged to be hiring 'litigation hit men' to kneecap rival Taiwanese chip firm MediaTek is under scrutiny with the US Department of Justice (DoJ) taking an interest in an antitrust dispute with semiconductor compatriot Realtek....

'If I was Satoshi I would have destroyed my ability to prove I'm Satoshi' The man identified as Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto in a new HBO documentary has something to say: Wrong again, world....

Backs RHEL-compatible distro with indemnification and update guarantees CIQ has unveiled a version of Rocky Linux backed by service level objectives and indemnities for enterprises requiring more than the support of an enthusiastic community behind an operating system....

Go forth and install your important security fixes Microsoft says that the problems with the Windows 11 Patch Tuesday preview have now been resolved....