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Updated 2025-12-19 17:45
FCC looks to torch Biden-era cyber rules sparked by Salt Typhoon mess
Regulator sides with telcos that claimed new cybersecurity duties were too burdensome' The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will vote this week on whether to scrap Biden-era cybersecurity rules, enacted after the Salt Typhoon attacks came to light in 2024, that required telecom carriers to adopt basic security controls....
China readies a lifeboat for stranded Shenzhou crew
Stuck on the Tiangong station with a cracked capsule for company China is preparing for an early launch of the Shenzhou-22 spacecraft to rescue the crew of Shenzou-21, who were left stranded aboard the Tiangong space station after their emergency rescue of the Shenzou-20 crew earlier this month....
Take fight to the enemy, US cyber boss says
When? Sean Cairncross wouldn't say America is fed up with being the prime target for foreign hackers. So US National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross says Uncle Sam is going on the offensive - he just isn't saying when....
Google Chrome bug exploited as an 0-day - patch now or risk full system compromise
Seventh Chrome 0-day this year Google pushed an emergency patch on Monday for a high-severity Chrome bug that attackers have already found and exploited in the wild....
Datacenter fossil fuel habit 'not sustainable' as AI workloads soar
Rising AI power demand is straining grids and pushing operators toward hydrogen, batteries, geothermal, and nuclear Gartner warns that fossil fuel dominance in on-site power generation is not sustainable, given the rapid rise in datacenter energy consumption due to AI servers....
Outdated Samsung handset linked to fatal emergency call failure in Australia
Carrier insists network wasn't at fault when smartphone couldn't reach 000 A Sydney resident died after their Samsung handset failed to connect to 000, Australia's primary emergency number, triggering a stark warning from telco TPG that outdated mobile software could be a matter of life or death....
Microsoft issues patch to tackle Windows 10 Extended Security Updates failures
Users who thought they were safely in the program hit errors on day one Microsoft has shipped a fix for commercial customers who believed they were enrolled in the Extended Security Updates (ESU) program but received error messages on the first Patch Tuesday after support ended....
Brussels eyes AWS, Azure for gatekeeper tag in cloud clampdown
European Commission probes whether Amazon and Microsoft wield outsized control under Digital Markets Act The European Commission has launched investigations into Amazon and Microsoft's cloud services, and plans to review if legislation introduced in 2022 is being applied effectively to the cloud market....
NetApp claims ex-CTO built a secret cloud platform then sold it to VAST Data
Lawsuit alleges he poached staff, lifted trade secrets, and set up Red Stapler before quitting NetApp has accused its former senior vice president and CTO of secretly building a rival cloud control platform while still on its payroll, triggering an urgent legal scramble....
Linus Torvalds is OK with vibe coding as long as it's not used for anything that matters
Linux inventor also discusses Rust in the kernel, Nvidia's proprietary code, and the problem of AI crawlers Linux and Git inventor Linus Torvalds discussed AI in software development in an interview earlier this month, describing himself as "fairly positive" about vibe coding, but as a way into computing, not for production coding where it would likely be horrible to maintain....
Cloudflare coughs, half the internet catches a cold
Outage leaves users staring at error pages while recovery crawls along Updated Internet services provider Cloudflare is suffering a major outage that has knocked chunks of the web offline - including The Register....
Zoomers are officially worse at passwords than 80-year-olds
They can probably set up a printer faster, but look elsewhere for cryptography advice Gen Z can get off their digital high horses because their passwords are no more secure than their grandparents'....
Dutch turbine engineer tried to turn wind into crypto, ends up generating community service
Techie wired cryptominers into Nordex's network while company reeled from cyberattack A Dutch wind farm operator learned the hard way that its turbines weren't just spinning to generate electricity - they were also powering someone else's crypto wallet....
Rust on the Moon? Far-side dirt says yes, actually
Chang'e 6's soil sample turns up iron oxides where none were supposed to exist A Chinese-led team of boffins has uncovered tiny grains of hematite and maghemite in materials scooped from the Moon's far-side South Pole-Aitken Basin by the Chang'e 6 probe - iron oxides more at home on rusty tools on Earth than on our bone-dry satellite....
Eviden set to build France's first exascale supercomputer with AMD at the wheel
544M Alice Recoque system aims to lift Europe's research horsepower SC25 France will get its first exascale supercomputer - Europe's second - when Atos subsidiary Eviden builds Alice Recoque using AMD chips....
Brits to help foot power bill for datacenters under government AI plans
Cheaper electricity to lure bit barns north as planning fast-track kicks in While UK households face some of the world's highest energy prices, datacenter operators are set to receive electricity discounts under government plans to accelerate AI infrastructure development....
Vodafone, EE, O2, Three hit with £3B overcharging lawsuit
Case alleges loyal customers continued to pay bundled rates after minimum contract terms ended Britain's biggest mobile phone companies face legal action over claims they overcharged customers through a "loyalty penalty" after a tribunal permitted the cases to proceed....
Brits believe the bots even though study finds they're often talking nonsense
Consumer group Which? warns AI assistants can dish out unclear, risky, or downright daft advice AI assistants can sometimes provide misleading or incorrect answers. However, almost half of British consumers using the services put more faith in them than they maybe should....
Starlink’s method of dodging solar storms may make it slower, for longer
Researchers think SpaceX needs to revisit its resilience regime Researchers have found Starlink's efforts to mitigate the effects of solar storms can create degraded performance that persists for a day or more after geomagnetic conditions ease....
Alibaba releases chatbot that produces error when asked about Tiananmen Square
Yet Chinese giant wants users to ask any question, big or small, anytime, anywhere!' Chinese tech giant Alibaba yesterday launched a new chatbot that reported errors soon after launch and is very touchy about some subjects Beijing doesn't like to discuss....
Oops. VMware admits it over-specced storage servers for years
VCF users wrestling with bill shock may get a little relief VMware has admitted that its guidance about the hardware needed to run its vSAN virtual storage arrays has been wrong for years....
Scientific computing is about to get a massive injection of AI
Nvidia's Ian Buck on the importance of FP64 to power research, in a world that's hot for inferencing Interview Scientific computing is about to undergo a period of rapid change as workloads inject AI....
'Largest-ever' cloud DDoS attack pummels Azure with 3.64B packets per second
Aisuru botnet strikes again, bigger and badder Azure was hit by the "largest-ever" cloud-based distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, originating from the Aisuru botnet and measuring 15.72 terabits per second (Tbps), according to Microsoft....
Pentagon and soldiers let too many secrets slip on social networks, watchdog says
Ready, aim, mire Loose lips sink ships, the classic line goes. Information proliferation in the internet age has government auditors reiterating that loose tweets can sink fleets, and they're concerned that the Defense Department isn't doing enough to stop sensitive info from getting out there....
AI is actually bad at math, ORCA shows
ORCA benchmark trips up ChatGPT-5, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Claude Sonnet 4.5, Grok 4, and DeepSeek V3.2 In the world of George Orwell's 1984, two and two make five. And large language models are not much better at math....
Security researcher calls BS on Coinbase breach disclosure timeline
Claims he reported the attack in January after fraudsters tried to scam him A security researcher says Coinbase knew about a December 2024 security breach during which miscreants bribed its support staff into handing over almost 70,000 customers' details at least four months before it disclosed the data theft....
Europe joins US as exascale superpower after Jupiter clinches Top500 run
EuroHPC's biggest iron still has more to give with Universal Cluster expansion expected to come online next year SC25 Europe has officially entered exascale orbit. On Monday, EuroHPC's Jupiter supercomputer became the fourth such machine on the Top500 list of publicly known systems to exceed a million-trillion floating point operations a second in the time-honored High-Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark....
Google previews Code Wiki: Can you trust AI to document your repository?
Documenting code can be dull, but explaining the source code of a complex project is hard for AI to get right Google has previewed Code Wiki, an AI project that aims to document code in a repository and keep it up to date by regenerating the content after every code change....
Need AI? Dell backs up the truck and tips out servers, storage, blueprints
Vendor leans on Nvidia tie-up so hard you can hear the GPUs squeak SC25 Dell continues to push itself as a one-stop shop for enterprise AI infrastructure with a wave of products and services, including updates to servers, storage, and software to expand its offerings....
Selling your identity to North Korean IT scammers isn't a sustainable side hustle
Four US citizens tried it, and the DoJ just secured guilty pleas from all of 'em It sounds like easy money. North Koreans pay you to use your identity so they can get jobs working for American companies in IT. However, if you go this route, the US Department of Justice promises to catch up with you eventually....
Game over: Europol storms gaming platforms in extremist content sweep
Law enforcement agency's referral blitz hit gaming platforms hard, surfacing thousands of extremist URLs Europol's Internet Referral Unit (EU IRU) says a November 13 operation across gaming and "gaming-adjacent" services led its partners to report thousands of URLs hosting terrorist and hate-fueled material, including 5,408 links to jihadist content, 1,070 pushing violent right-wing extremist or terrorist propaganda, and 105 tied to racist or xenophobic groups....
Windows boss defends 'agentic OS' push as users plead for reliability
Microsoft claims it listens to feedback while complaints mount over everyday usability Rather than enjoying some downtime at the weekend, Windows boss Pavan Davuluri made the classic mistake of reading the replies to his post about the operating system's "agentic" future....
Jeff Bezos gives CEO another go at $6.2B AI startup Prometheus
Named after titan who stole fire from the gods and was punished for eternity... Amazon warehouse staff know the feeling Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is returning to the CEO seat - though not at his best-known creation....
Overconfidence is the new zero-day as teams stumble through cyber simulations
Readiness metrics have flatlined since 2023, with most sectors slipping backward as teams fumble crisis drills Teams that think they're ready for a major cyber incident are scoring barely 22 percent accuracy and taking more than a day to contain simulated attacks, according to new data out Monday....
SAP portal outage raises questions over vendor's cloud readiness
Disruption left customers unable to track support cases, upgrades, or patching work SAP has apologized for the recent outage of its SAP for Me portal, a cloud-based tool that gives users a view of their SAP functions, metrics, and service. But the downtime has opened up some reliability questions....
Eurofiber admits crooks swiped data from French unit after cyberattack
Regulator reports suggest telco was extorted, but company remains coy as to whether it paid French telco Eurofiber says cybercriminals swiped company data during an attack last week that also affected some internal systems....
Palantir plots NHS skills drive for its controversial data platform
Partnership with UK-based 'AI upskilling platform' aims to boost software's usage Palantir is working with "AI upskilling platform" Multiverse to provide an apprenticeship program specific to its Federated Data Platform (FDP), the NHS analytics system being run under a controversial contract....
UK prosecutors seize £4.11M in crypto from Twitter mega-hack culprit
Civil recovery order targets PlugwalkJoe's illicit gains while he serves US sentence British prosecutors have secured a civil recovery order to seize crypto assets worth 4.11 million ($5.39 million) from Twitter hacker Joseph James O'Connor, clawing back the proceeds of a scam that used hijacked celebrity accounts to solicit digital currency and threaten high-profile individuals....
Microsoft's first Windows 10 ESU Patch Tuesday release fails for some
Expect Sloppy Updates? On the eve of its Ignite conference, Microsoft has managed to break the first Extended Security Update (ESU) for many commercial Windows 10 customers....
AI music has finally beaten hat-act humans, but sounds nothing like victory
Top of the slops signposts the undiscovered country for an industry Opinion Remember when the hottest news in the schoolyard was which band was the hottest this week? Those days are back, baby. An AI-generated band called Breaking Rust has just hit the top of the Billboard Country chart in the US with a song called Walk My Walk. Some questions will never be answered - could it ever release a sea shanty, and will all the albums be compilations? What this means for the future of the music industry, the AI industry, and music itself, is less funny....
Developer made one wrong click and sent his AWS bill into the stratosphere
Yes, he knows the 40x increase could have been avoided with some pretty simple automation Who, Me? Welcome to another week of work, a moment The Register celebrates with a new installment of Who, Me? It's the reader-contributed column in which you 'fess up to follies, false moves, and faux pas - and explain how you escaped....
Server virtualization market heats up as VMware rivals try to create alluring alternatives
It's time to think about a replacement, says Gartner The market for server virtualization tools is about to fragment, according to analyst firm Gartner....
Jaguar Land Rover hack cost India's Tata Motors around $2.4 billion and counting
PLUS: Active noise cancellation for entire rooms; More trouble for Korea Telecom; The Wiggles apologize for bad batteries; and more Asia In Brief India's Tata Motors, owner of Jaguar Land Rover, has revealed the cyberattack that shut down production in the UK has so far cost it around 1.8 billion ($2.35 billion)....
Logitech leaks data after zero-day attack
PLUS: CISA still sitting on telecoms security report; DoorDash phished again; Lumma stealer returns; and more INFOSEC IN BRIEF The US Senate passed a resolution in July to force the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to publish a 2022 report into poor security in the telecommunications industry but the agency has not delivered the document....
Nvidia-backed photonics startup Ayar Labs eyes hyperscale customers with GUC design collab
Who needs 600 kilowatt racks when a single computer can span entire datacenters? Exclusive Nvidia-backed photonics startup Ayar Labs announced a new collaboration with Global Unichip Corp (GUC) on Sunday to integrate its optical I/O chiplets intothe Taiwanese semiconductor design services provider's XPU reference designs....
Power: The answer to and source of all your AI datacenter problems
Digital Realty CTO Chris Sharp weights impact of densification on the datacenter and the rise of the AI factory Interview In the datacenter biz, power is the product. You either have it or you don't, Chris Sharp tells El Reg....
Apple’s new 15% mini-app deal finally gets Tencent to cut Cupertino in
When is an app not an app? When it's a mini app inside another app Apple has cut its take to 15 percent on purchases inside mini apps running within other iOS apps, and reached a parallel agreement with Tencent that brings WeChat's vast mini-program ecosystem into its revenue net....
Memory boom-bust cycle booms again as Samsung reportedly jacks memory prices 60%
Leaving buyers to cry, AI AI AI If you haven't noticed, DRAM memory has gotten a lot more expensive in recent weeks....
Researchers find hole in AI guardrails by using strings like =coffee
Who guards the guardrails? Often the same shoddy security as the rest of the AI stack Large language models frequently ship with "guardrails" designed to catch malicious input and harmful output. But if you use the right word or phrase in your prompt, you can defeat these restrictions....
Fortinet finally cops to critical make-me-admin bug under active exploitation
More than a month after PoC made public Fortinet finally published a security advisory on Friday for a critical FortiWeb path traversal vulnerability under active exploitation - but it appears digital intruders got a month's head start....
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