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ALSO: CISA warns Ivanti vuln mitigations might not work, SAML hijack doesn't need ADFS, and crit vulns Infosec in brief The infamous LockBit ransomware gang has been busy in the ten days since an international law enforcement operation took down many of its systems. But despite its posturing, the gang might have suffered more than it's letting on....

Misinformation is rife, AI makes it easier to create, and 42 percent of the planet's inhabitants get to vote this year Feature Two US intelligence bigwigs last week issued stark warnings about foreign threats to American election integrity and security - and the nation's ability to counter these adversaries....

Previously pondered the need for an extra release candidate Linus Torvalds has decided Linux 6.8 will in all likelihood debut next week....

PLUS: APNIC director general to step down; Hong Kong's odd cloud survey; Rent-a-friend online in China; and more Asia In Brief India's minister for Railways, Communications, Electronics & Information Technology, Ashwini Vaishnaw, has vowed to prevent Google removing Indian apps from its Play Store....

Want all-FOSS 120Hz 4K video on Linux, or 5K at 240Hz? Bad news... AMD says it has improved its FOSS display drivers for Linux, though the organization that controls the HDMI standard won't let it release them....

So, er, how will WebKit-only applications work under latest Euro antitrust laws? Anyone? Tim? Apple has reversed its decision to limit the functionality of Home Screen web apps in Europe following an outcry from the developer community and the prospect of further investigation....

'Farewell' snap revealed by Intuitive Machines amid hope solar-powered craft may one day spring to life again With it battery depleted and the lunar night approaching, the private-built Moon lander Odysseus has shut down quite possibly for good....

Turns out bragging on Discord has unfortunate consequences Jack Teixeira, the Air National Guardsman accused of leaking dozens of classified Pentagon documents, is expected to plead guilty in a US court on Monday....

/* Hope no one ever reads these functions lmao */ NSO Group, the Israel-based maker of super-charged snoopware Pegasus, has been ordered by a federal judge in California to share the source code for "all relevant spyware" with Meta's WhatsApp....

$10M bounty for anyone with info leading to Alireza Shafie Nasab's identification or location The US Department of Justice has unsealed an indictment accusing an Iranian national of a years-long campaign that compromised hundreds of thousands of accounts and attempting to infiltrate US defense contractors and multiple government agencies....

Feds allege EV maker talked up pre-orders for trucks it didn't have parts for Bankrupt electric truck maker Lordstown Motors Corp will have to pay out $25 million to shareholders, settling SEC claims it misled investors and broke anti-fraud and reporting rules in US federal securities laws....

Not bad considering exec had said '2024 didn't go as planned' due to declining overall sales The mesmeric power that AI holds over Wall Street was in evidence again last night as Dell homed in on the huge backlog of orders for "AI-optimized" servers rather than fiscal 2024's overall declining sales, and the share price soared....

GPT-4 has already reached AGI, and Microsoft shouldn't get its paws on it, court docs allege Tesla CEO and SpaceX supremo Elon Musk has launched a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging a breach of contract in its move away from open technology and its original mission to develop AI for the benefit of humanity....

Worse than having no tech would be having the wrong tech AI PCs due to land this year could increase businesses' risk of buying the wrong tech as there is still no current AI standard for software to work with and confusion remains over what makes up an AI PC....

No more freebies - Google signs up to improve Gemini's programming abilities Stack Overflow has launched an API that will require all AI models trained on its coding question-and-answer content to attribute sources linking back to its posts.And it will cost money to use the site's content....

Data watchdog reprimands police force for confusing 2 people with same name and birthday to disastrous results The UK's Information Commissioner's Office has put the West Midlands Police (WMP) on the naughty step after the force was found to have repeatedly mixed up two people's personal data for years....

Running proof of concepts to pick out the right models Lenovo's chief operating officer has told The Reg it is formalizing a scheme to sell certified refurbished hardware as more customers seek ways to cut their carbon footprint and save money....

Watchdog says taxpayer assistance is getting worse Phone services for the UK tax authority continue to deteriorate, and the digital systems that were supposed to take up the slack aren't good enough....

Just 13% of provisioned CPUs, 20% of memory utilized, study finds Cloud optimization biz CAST AI says that companies are still overprovisioning resources and paying too much as a consequence. It claims that in Kubernetes clusters of 50 or more CPUs, only 13 percent of provisioned CPUs and 20 percent of memory is typically utilized....

Tough guy act was flimsy: our readers fleeced him, then dropped him in it On Call Welcome once more, dear reader, to On Call, The Register's reader-contributed tales of delivering tech support amidst feuds, foolishness, and folly....

'Computer-says-no' to be replaced by summaries written by LLMs trained on government data The UK government will trial large language models to help ministers analyze and draft documents as part of a push to overhaul public services using AI....

Even when Nvidia delivers, customers struggle to get datacenters ready to handle the heat HPE has blamed disappointing revenue for the quarter on shortages of GPUs and warned investors its previous growth predictions probably won't happen....

No mere mea culpa would suffice after 9.2 million records leaked over a decade, warnings were ignored, and lies were told NTT West president Masaaki Moribayashi announced his resignation on Thursday, effective at the end of March, in atonement for the leak of data pertaining to 9.28 million customers that came to light last October....

Hopes to get itself off an international naughty list - as you would when you want foreign investment in your chip sector Vietnam's Ministry of Finance has raised the prospect of prohibiting or regulating virtual assets by May 2025, as part of a drive to boost anti-money laundering (AML) efforts....

So much for the 'commitment to support news organizations' made in just 2020 Meta has killed its Facebook news service in the United States and Australia....

Everybody's so happy they're not mentioning start dates, subsidy levels, or other useful details India's government has approved the construction of the nation's first semiconductor wafer fabrication plant, to be built by Taiwanese foundry-as-a-service outfit Powerchip (PSMC), together with Indian giant Tata's electronics business....

Court order means ad giant will have to cough evidence of possible market manipulation It has not been a great week for Google's Ad business. After being served a 2.1 billion lawsuit in Europe, Canadian regulators have expanded an investigation into whether it abused its market position to quash rival platforms....

Cloned then compromised, bad repos are forked faster than they can be removed A malware distribution campaign that began last May with a handful of malicious software packages uploaded to the Python Package Index (PyPI) has spread to GitHub and expanded to reach at least 100,000 compromised repositories....

$675 million to accelerate development of machine that can lift, but can't keep up with humans If you thought blue collar jobs were safe from AI, think again. Robotics startup Figure aims to replace millions of workers with its humanoid automatons and has just received $675 million in funding to accelerate development....

Workers allege discrimination, missing payments To say Elon Musk's business empire is having a week of legal woe may be an understatement, after filings revealed yesterday suggest his social network X and electric car outfit Tesla both face potentially expensive court battles....

Those little popups may reveal location, device details, IP address, and more More than 130 petitions seeking access to push notification metadata have been filed in US courts, according to a Washington Post investigation - a finding that underscores the lack of privacy protection available to users of mobile devices....

Choose your own FISA Section 702 adventure: End-run around lawmakers or business as usual? The Biden Administration has asked a court, rather than Congress, to renew controversial warrantless surveillance powers used by American intelligence and due to expire within weeks. It's a move that is either business as usual or an end-run around spying reforms, depending on who in Washington you believe....

Dating app Bumble also finds breaking up is easy to do for a third of its crew It's been a bad week to work in the video game industry. First Sony closed its London studio and cut staff, and now Electronic Arts is letting workers go....

No Chinese automakers sell cars in the US, but the feds are still going to investigate whether they're a threat Concerned over the chance that Chinese-made cars could pose a future threat to national security, Biden's administration is proposing plans to probe potential threats posed by "connected" vehicles made in the Middle Kingdom....

The big new version of the other desktop, complete with improved HDR and a spinning desktop cube The latest major release of KDE Plasma is here, a decade after KDE 5. This is only the fifth February 29 since KDE 4 in 2008, making this a rare event....

Chipzilla resurrects Altera brand as former datacenter chief takes the helm Sandra Rivera, a longtime Intel veteran and chief executive of the chipmaker's FPGA business, reprised the Altera brand during a webcast Thursday in which she shared her vision for the newly spun-off company....

Analysts warn of big leap in cred-harvesting malware activity last year There appears to be an uptick in interest among cybercriminals in infostealers - malware designed to swipe online account passwords, financial info, and other sensitive data from infected PCs - as a relatively cheap and easy way to get a foothold in organizations' IT environments to deploy devastating ransomware....

Fuel pumps refuse payment, smartwatches stop - all part of the rich tapestry of computer calendars Today is February 29, an unusual day in that it is added to the common 28 in years that are multiples of four to keep the calendar in sync with the astronomical year....

Mega makers already operate in water-scarce areas, and worry is they'll drink us dry Water supply is seen as a growing risk factor for the chip industry with consumption rising by up to ten percent each year, and many of the biggest producers already operating in areas prone to water scarcity....

CEO Frank Slootman announces retirement as former data cloud rising star sees value sink The value of cloud-based data warehouse vendor Snowflake plunged 24 percent in extended trading in the US last night after it announced lower-than-expected forecasts for product revenue as well as the departure of CEO Frank Slootman....

One of them, One Point CEO David Layani, tried to buy rudderless integrator The long-running Atos saga took another twist today after it announced the nomination to its board of One Point CEO David Layani, who previously made an audacious bid for the ailing integrator and outsourcing biz....

GDPR claim alleges Facebook parent's 'commercial surveillance practices are fundamentally illegal' Consumer groups are filing legal complaints in the EU in a coordinated attempt to use data protection law to stop Meta from giving local users a "fake choice" between paying up and consenting to being profiled and tracked via data collection....

Too late to prevent Q1 from being 7th straight decline for US titan HP Ink recorded its seventh quarter of shrinking revenues as enterprise customers voted to sweat their assets for longer amid economic uncertainty, but with a new all-in-one print sub coming and AI PCs it is feeling bolder....

Global 'Resource Actions' to hit Europe hard, with Enterprise Ops & Support, CIO, HR and Real Estate in firing line Exclusive IBM is asking staff who want voluntary redundancy to raise their hand as it embarks on a new round of global job cuts, though roles in Europe and within a handful of departments are expected to shoulder the brunt....

Following in the same direction as the good ship KDE Plasma The next major release of the LXQt desktop should arrive in April. Like the imminent KDE Plasma 6.0, it will use version 6 of the Qt toolkit....

Doctors voiced concern over lack of Red-Amber-Green rating system, says report A coroner's report into a death at a hospital in northern England has said patients are at risk unless concerns about the implementation of a new Oracle Cerner patient administration system are addressed....

Meanwhile, the Google News Initiative is pushing AI tools for publishers A group of more than 30 European media organizations has sued Google for 2.1 billion, seeking damages for lost revenue they say was caused by the search giant's anticompetitive advertising technology....

Very low Earth orbit birds could sip the outer atmosphere on their way up Electric propulsion systems that generate power from the scant air in the outer edges of the atmosphere could power satellites in very low Earth orbit (VLEO), without the need for conventional propellants - at least in theory....

Beats guidance as renewals grow and waits for Broadcom and Cisco to bring more bucks Nutanix doesn't expect a rush of VMware users to adopt its platform, because many signed up for long-term deals before Broadcom acquired the virtualization giant....

This might solve its twin problems of low growth and short-term customers Alibaba Cloud has made significant price cuts for those willing to use its datacenters in mainland China and commit to multi-year deals....