The Register

No walled garden can keep out every weed, we suppose LastPass says a rogue application impersonating its popular password manager made it past Apple's gatekeepers and was listed in the iOS App Store for unsuspecting folks to download and install....

The clock's ticking on those 2030 net zero climate goals Europe's largest bank, HSBC, has tapped Google Cloud to make sure a proposed $1 billion in investments go to green tech startups and don't end up in the hands of scammers....

Existing telemarketing abuse laws apply to AI voices, too, says Commission The US Federal Communications Commission has finally formally declared AI-generated voices in robocalls illegal, and it didn't even need a new law to get the job done....

Chromebooks earn 'Least Likely to Survive a Screwdriver' award The Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) has published a study showing that Apple has work to do to make its laptops more easily repairable. At the same time, Samsung snatched the bottom place when it comes to cellphone repairability....

One of most important malware loaders to cybercrims who are jumping on vulnerabilities faster than ever Researchers suspect the criminals behind the Raspberry Robin malware are now buying exploits for speedier cyberattacks....

2 MWh of energy storage using dirt, winches, and cables set to be installed in Finland The deepest metal mine in Europe, unused since 2022, is set to host a giant underground gravity battery....

It's all part of a push to get more devs using AI tools While blasting customers with the promise of AI, Microsoft is now telling its employees to tiptoe into the brave new world too....

You think your latency is bad? How about 45 hours to see if a command worked? NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has confirmed that work to resolve a data issue aboard Voyager 1 continues, almost two months since the spacecraft began spouting gibberish....

Linux users have enjoyed such functionality for decades Microsoft has accidentally announced the arrival of sudo in Windows, bringing to an end fervent industry chatter about the tool emerging in the company's flagship operating system....

Fourth conviction in South Africa-linked scheme The head of financial engineering at fintech platform Hydrogen Technology has been convicted of manipulating the price of a security and scheming to defraud investors in the company's cryptocurrency, HYDRO....

Security researcher buddies allegedly tag team a four-month virtual gift card heist at Cupertino tech giant A cybersecurity researcher and his pal are facing charges in California after they allegedly defrauded an unnamed company, almost certainly Apple, out of $2.5 million....

Telcos demonstrate configuration in action at research facility. Now to find customers that want to buy one Telco BT has demonstrated network slicing, long slated as a key element for providing full fat 5G networks promised to subscribers....

Redmond has until end of this quarter to make 'substantive progress' A trade group representing 27 cloud businesses is back at the negotiating table in a bid to resolve the lawsuit it filed over Microsoft's alleged anti-competitive licensing policies....

Remember that satnav that spoke like Homer Simpson? Now imagine AI doing that in any language, on any device Microsoft has filed a patent application for an "automatic dubbing" system that strips speech from media and inserts new voices in its place....

Data from Cassini suggests hidden depths beneath crater-ridden body Mimas, a moderate-sized moon orbiting Saturn, is likely to possess liquid oceans hidden under its icy surface, according to a research paper published this week....

Management either weren't told about risks or ignored them, report finds Before Edinburgh University went live with its disastrous Oracle finance and HR system rollout, senior managers either didn't get the message about "red" risks or ignored it, an independent report has found....

PWAs demoted to OWB: Operating Within Browser Apple has argued for years that developers who don't want to abide by its rules for native iOS apps can always write web apps....

Security is a process, not a product. Nor a language Memory-safety flaws represent the majority of high-severity problems for Google and Microsoft, but they're not necessarily associated with the majority of vulnerabilities that actually get exploited....

Smartphones surge, but chip design champ isn't ready to predict its cloudy future Brit chip designer Arm has posted its highest-ever quarterly revenue and seen its share price soar, thanks to a little tech that readers may recall having read the occasional story about of late: artificial intelligence....

CERNquadbot can go off the rails - unlike science org's existing inspector bots Vid A four-legged robot dog has successfully performed a radiation protection test at CERN by patrolling and inspecting equipment in a small section of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)....

Customers from beyond the Chinese giant are being let go if they've signed for low-margin contracts Chinese tech giant Alibaba revealed on Wednesday its own operations are a better source of growth for its public cloud business than third-party customers....

KDDI wants to snack on data about who buys what at which of Lawson's 14,600 stores Japan's second-largest convenience store will be taken private by its second-largest mobile carrier, which will operate it as a joint venture with Mitsubishi and try to cash in on a combination of shopping and location data....

Content Credentials: It's better than nothingTM Images emitted by OpenAI's generative models will include metadata disclosing their origin, which in turn can be used by applications to alert people to the machine-made nature of that content....

InfiniBand dominates in GPU-boosted servers while Big E gains steam At Cisco Live in Amsterdam on Tuesday, the enterprise networking goliath announced a series of hardware and software platforms in collaboration with Nvidia tailored to everyone's favorite buzzword these days: AL/ML....

Plan says to hand over keys to networks - and report intrusions within eight hours of discovery Organizations that sell IT services to Uncle Sam are peeved at proposed changes to procurement rules that would require them to allow US government agencies full access to their systems in the event of a security incident....

You can fit more than 50 Virgin Bro pixels into a single iPhone one while angular resolution remains a little low Teardown artists iFixit have pried open the Vision Pro and awarded the device a "pretty impressive" provisional repairability score given the device is Apple's first foray into such gear....

Presumably American TLAs are all over Beijing's infrastructure, too ... right? Volt Typhoon isn't the only Chinese spying crew infiltrating computer networks in America's energy sector and other critical organizations with the aim of wrecking equipment and causing other headaches, the US government has said....

What an Arm-ful of x86, Vega graphics, XDNA AI, and FPGA circuitry With the launch of its Embedded+ architecture yesterday, AMD effectively posed the question: Why choose one compute architecture when you can have five?...

The other half paid attention in class? Half of infosec professionals polled by Kaspersky said any cybersecurity knowledge they picked up from their higher education is at best somewhat useful for doing their day jobs. On the other hand, half said the know-how was at least very useful. We're a glass half-empty lot....

12 international govt agencies sound the alarm, critical infrastructure at the heart of threats The US government today confirmed China's Volt Typhoon crew comprised "multiple" critical infrastructure orgs' IT networks in America - and Uncle Sam warned that the Beijing-backed spies are readying "disruptive or destructive cyberattacks" against those targets....

'Our Gen 2 vehicles won't launch unless we can get to a profit' The reality of electric vehicle prices has finally caught up with the venerable US automaker Ford, which said yesterday that it's rethinking its loss-making EV strategy....

It's all down to recommissioned kit, claim techies tasked with retrieving data from busted gear A German data recovery specialist has confirmed what many Reg readers will have suspected: USB memory sticks are getting less reliable. The cause, as you might have guessed, is inferior memory chips, while the move to storing multiple bits per flash cell also plays a part....

Tactics are more sophisticated and supported in greater numbers Iran's anti-Israel cyber operations are providing a window into the techniques the country may deploy in the run-up to the 2024 US Presidential elections, Microsoft says....

Windows encryption feature defeated by $10 and a YouTube tutorial We're very familiar with the many projects in which Raspberry Pi hardware is used, from giving old computers a new lease of life through to running the animated displays so beloved by retailers. But cracking BitLocker? We doubt the company will be bragging too much about that particular application....

Plus: SMIC said to be building new lines to make 5nm process chips designed by Huawei TSMC is set to build a second semiconductor manufacturing plant in Japan with investment from Toyota and other local corporations. The move is being portrayed as a success for Japan's efforts to boost chip production in the country....

Launch windows do not respect political squabbling NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has confirmed that substantial budget cuts are inbound, with over 500 staffers affected - approximately 8 percent of the workforce....

Cloud version is safe, but no assurances offered about possible on-prem exploits JetBrains is encouraging all users of TeamCity (on-prem) to upgrade to the latest version following the disclosure of a critical vulnerability in the CI/CD tool....

Singapore's DBS wants accountability for digital dropouts Singapore banking group DBS has slashed its CEO's variable pay by 30 percent as an accountability measure after digital disruptions hit the organization in 2023....

Apple makes this harder every macOS release, but there are ways nonetheless FOSS Fest These days, Macs will only talk to Apple phones to get online out of the box, but you can get around the restrictions if you're determined enough....

'Pro-innovation' but perhaps not for the folks whose data was trained on The UK government is to spend over 100 million ($125 million) to support regulators and researchers as it publishes its response to the AI Regulation White Paper consultation....

Can tech and regulations beat the great satellite landgrab? Interview Debris speeding along in orbit is becoming an increasing hazard for spacecraft. We can either ignore the problem and hope it resolves itself or accept there is an issue and learn to deal with it....

'Almost zero data being shared across the industry on this particular threat,' we're told The commercial spyware economy - despite government and big tech's efforts to crack down - appears to be booming....

Preliminary investigation confirms pilot chat was overwritten but doesn't mention attempts to recover data The door plug that fell out of Alaska Airlines flight 1282 last month wasn't properly bolted into place, according to a preliminary investigation....

They're measuring server exhaust temperatures to detect power consumption Datacenters make a lot of hot air, and IBM Japan and NTT Group's in-house integrator NTT Comware think they can use it to calculate power consumption and CO emissions - and maybe reduce both....

Vyommitra, your multitasking, bilingual, female space friend, will fly before the long-delayed Gaganyaan launch in 2025 India's Space Research Organisation (ISRO) will send a humanoid robot astronaut into this space this year, then send it back alongside actual humans in 2025 on its long-delayed Gaganyaan orbital mission....

Procurement process in 2011 deal raises suspicions Indian authorities want to ask IBM and SAP about potentially criminal actions that saw the two tech giants engaged for a 2011 ERP project at Air India....

Everyone should be free to trust AI to make their financial decisions, without knowing if it's also used against them Republican senators are attempting to block the US Securities and Exchange Commission's proposal to restrict financial investment firms' use of AI....

Longtime host Caesars ends relationship at short notice It's an annual meme that DEF CON infosec conference has been canceled, but this time it actually happened....

Sure, datacenters consume lots of energy. But maybe they'll invent stuff that helps It's well established that the tens of thousands of GPUs used to train large language models (LLMs) consume a prodigious amount of energy, leading to warnings about their potential impact on Earth's climate....

Dorsey-backed federated social media alternative promises custom feed algos, and more There's no need to fret if you lost your invite code to decentralized Twitter spinoff Bluesky - the service has thrown open its doors to all comers....