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'Surprising move' for Indian megacorp but less so for French seller Altice India's Bharti Enterprises has swooped in to buy the 24.5 percent stake in BT Group from Patrick Drahi's Altice, at a stroke making it the biggest shareholder in the UK telecoms giant....

Forget the woes of Starliner with an audacious NASA landing on another planet that went very very right While NASA might be struggling to get its Starliner crew home, it's worth remembering that circa 12 years ago, the agency was celebrating the successful deployment of the Curiosity rover on the surface of Mars....

Automatic for the people? Don't mind if we do Opinion Rust changes worlds. The iron ore we mine to feed the industrial age started out as iron atoms dissolved in oceans two billion years ago. Then photosynthesis happened, pouring out oxygen that rusted that iron out of the water into the solid minerals we've found so useful today. Much the same is happening with Rust the programming language, as it becomes the mechanism of choice for turning prehistoric C code into secure, performant material fit for the future....

A fake hacker trying to take credit didn't help much, either who, me? Welcome denizens of The Reg to another Monday morn, which means an instalment of Who, Me? - the column in which readers share tales of times their undoubted technical prowess fell just a little short....

A career and life so classically Silicon Valley Susan Wojcicki, the architect of YouTube's spectacular rise and one of Silicon Valley's most influential figures, has passed away at age 56 after a two-year battle with cancer....

Dots have been joined, but hard evidence is not apparent Former US president Donald Trump's re-election campaign has claimed it's been the victim of a cyber attack....

Built its own replacement - Canal Mesh - that it says leaves Google's Istio and Ambient eating dust SIGCOMM 2024 Alibaba Cloud has claimed its home-grown service mesh for Kubernetes - Canal Mesh - significantly outperforms Google's Istio and other rival tools....

Also: British nuke subs get code from Russia; and BlackSuit begs for $500M Infosec in brief The United Nations often reaches consensus rather than complete agreement, but last week a proposal from Russia to cut down on cyber crime was unanimously approved....

Plus: Vietnam's PM leads chips push; Tesla backs out of Thailand; Drones fly trash off Everest; and more Asia In Brief US Space Command last Friday warned that a Chinese Long March 6a rocket launched on August 6 broke up in orbit and created at least 300 pieces of debris....

Utility tapped out? Why not build your own? Proximity to natural gas lines could become just as desirable for datacenter operators as high-speed fiber-optic networks as they scramble to satiate AI's ever growing thirst for power....

Or rather could, until the web giant was tipped off DEF CON Ten now-fixed bugs in Google's Quick Share for Windows could have been exploited to wirelessly write new files onto victims' PCs without their approval, and ultimately execute code remotely on those victims' machines by chaining together a handful of other vulnerabilities....

Mobile app analytics software said to surreptitiously snarf data Twilio, a communications service provider, was sued on Thursday based on allegations that the developer's Segment software siphons data from mobile apps without consent....

Is that a lot? Depends on the context. GHz, no. Voltage, yes Intel has divulged more details on its Raptor Lake family of 13th and 14th Gen Core processor failures and the 0x129 microcode that's supposed to prevent further damage from occurring....

Rival making its biggest inroads in server CPU segment The bad news for Intel keeps coming as rival AMD is slowly chipping away at its dominance in server, desktop and mobile processors, although the industry giant still holds onto the lion's share of the market and any other outfit has a long way to go to unseat it....

'Vendors cannot fix' this architectural failure, SquareX founder tells us DEF CON Secure Web Gateways (SWGs) are an essential part of enterprise security, which makes it shocking to learn that every single SWG in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for SASE and SSE can reportedly be bypassed, allowing attackers to deliver malware without gateways ever catching on....

Come to 2019. The in-place upgrades to the Subscription Edition will be lovely Microsoft is getting serious about the impending end of extended support for Exchange 2016 and has published a guide on stripping the product from an environment that already has Exchange 2019 installed....

Layers of abstraction and speedy development have left engineers unable to understand what lies beneath black hat There's a rot at the heart of modern software development that's destroying innovation, and infosec legend Moxie Marlinspike believes he knows exactly what's to blame: Agile development....

Political officials, advisors targeted in cyber attacks as fake news sites deliver lefty zingers Microsoft says Iran's efforts to influence the November US presidential election have gathered pace recently and there are signs that point toward its intent to incite violence against key figures....

A mission that was supposed to last for less than a year went on for more than a decade NASA's comeback kid, the NEOWISE spacecraft, was this week shut down for the final time as its transmitter was turned off ahead of a reentry into the Earth's atmosphere later this year....

Code of Conduct violations include allegations that posts created 'atmosphere of FUD' The Python Steering Council has decided to suspend a core Python developer for three months for alleged Code of Conduct violations....

Meanwhile, UK watchdog contemplates breaking Cupertino's WebKit rule Apple this week revised its alternative contractual terms for devs selling apps in the European Union - a revision that was immediately dismissed by critics as more "malicious compliance."...

Poor cloud titans, just trying to give a helping hand to AI startups valued at billions of dollars Britain's competition regulator is embarking on a full blown deep dive into Amazon's multi-billion dollar investments in Anthropic to ascertain if the exchange equates to a stealthy "merger situation."...

Chipzilla taking some punches but could it stay down? Opinion Just like Boeing, once upon a time, Intel was the darling of the engineering world. Both companies were the premier tech companies in their day, but those days are long gone now....

I'm a Mac. I'm a PC. You're both annoying me On Call The Register knows that tech support is a vocation that induces frustration, which is why each Friday we offer a new edition of On Call - the reader-contributed column that details real-life support stories so you can at least enjoy misery in company....

We guess the House of Zen wants all you HIP kids to ROCm out with its own runtimes instead Analysis AMD's legal team appears to have clawed back control of much of the ZLUDA project's code base. The open source project, for which the House of Zen pulled support earlier this year, enabled compiled CUDA code to run natively on non-Nvidia GPUs....

Can't reach someone's private server on localhost from outside? No problem A years-old security oversight has been addressed in basically all web browsers - Chromium-based browsers, including Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome, WebKit browsers like Apple's Safari, and Mozilla's Firefox....

Amid reports that plenty of PC production will shift elsewhere, supply chain boss emphasizes agility HP Inc loves China and wants to keep making and designing products there, but also loves the idea of diversifying its operations to other countries in case geopolitics becomes a problem....

Space Launch System project overspent, under-built, and is overdue, government probe finds Boeing and NASA have come in for scathing criticism from federal investigators, who examined the next generation of Space Launch System rockets....

Multiple critical flaws found and they won't be fixed A boffin from British defence contractor BAE has found three critical flaws in Cisco's Small Business SPA300 and SPA500 IP phones - and another couple of nasties - none of which will be fixed or mitigated....

Could we please start taking this seriously? Black Hat One would hope that, after years of telling businesses to secure their systems, enterprises would have better web app security than cybercriminals do. But research presented at Black Hat this week suggests that's not the case at all....

Been injecting prompts to test the safety of large language models? Better call Saul black hat Existing US laws tackling those illegally breaking computer systems don't accommodate modern large language models (LLMs) and can open researchers up to prosecution for what ought to be sanctioned security testing, say a trio of Harvard scholars....

Airline unimpressed with 'unhelpful and untimely' phone call from CEO, Falcon maker says claims untrue Delta Air Lines has come out swinging at CrowdStrike in a letter accusing the security giant of trying to "shift the blame" for the IT meltdown caused by its software - and that CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz's offer of support was too little, too late....

Pension fund claims CEO, CFO covered up truth about money-pit foundry Over the past few weeks, Intel has found itself in a mess of legal trouble over everything from CPUs that slowly fry themselves to allegations it misled investors about the chipmaker's well-being....

American and Brit firms thought they were employing a Westerner, but not so, it's alleged The FBI today arrested a Tennessee man suspected of running a "laptop farm" that got North Koreans, posing as Westerners, IT jobs at American and British companies....

Chipzilla takes its Arc Alchemist A750, gives it some more RAM, and says it's for AI-powered jalopies Intel has finally got around to launching a new GPU - except it's a reskin of a graphics processor already on the market, and this time targeted at the automotive industry....

'All of the defaults are insecure' Zenity CTO warns Black Hat One hopes widely used enterprise software is secure. Get ready for those hopes to be dashed again, as Zenity CTO Michael Bargury today revealed his Microsoft Copilot exploits at Black Hat....

Enterprises used to spend more on own kit than cloud infra services... now it's the other way around Hyperscalers are forcecast to account for more than 60 percent of datacenter space by 2029, a stark reversal on just seven years ago when the majority of capacity was made up of on-premises facilities....

MSI even claims all of its LGA 1700 motherboards will get updated before month end Two of Intel's biggest motherboard partners say their users will start receiving new BIOS updates containing the crucial microcode patch for Raptor Lake CPUs next week....

In celebration of US Navy funded electromagnetic wonder that is the Automated Sequence Controlled Calculator Feature Eighty years ago, IBM presented Harvard University with one of the world's earliest computers: the Automated Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC), later known as the Harvard Mark I....

Beefier Arms next to RV rival CPUs, offering a glimpse of the future It's exciting news for RISC-V fans: Raspberry Pi is adding support for the open ISA with the launch of the Pico 2 and the company's new RP2350 microcontroller....

Middle Kingdom netizens can look forward to the same kind of letdown Windows users get with Copilot Developers behind openKylin, the desktop Linux distro backed by China's National Industrial Information Security Development Research Center, have decided local users need to take advantage of Intel's Meteor Lake silicon and the neural processing units it includes, tuning the latest release of the OS to Chipzilla's AI PC SoC....

Hundreds of thousands of users potentially vulnerable Password manager 1Password is warning that all Mac users running versions before 8.10.36 are vulnerable to a bug that allows attackers to steal vault items....

Election tech is fine - it's all those idiots buying into the propaganda that's worrying Jen Easterly Black Hat US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) director Jen Easterly and her counterparts from the UK and EU want the world to know that, when it comes to securing elections, they've never been more prepared....

Academic, non-profit organizations now being told to pay up - or else Four years after data science biz Anaconda revised its terms of service, some research and academic organizations are just now finding out they have to pay for software they'd previously used at no cost....

No pricing disclosed but plan allows users to order hands-off flights without operating any units Nokia has hooked up with telco Swisscom Broadcast on a "Drones-as-a-Service" network across Switzerland, aimed at the emergency services and other applications where aerial observation is required....

Just snapping the webcam shutter closed won't keep a user safe online New research shows that while many Brits will snap shut a laptop camera in the name of privacy, a worrying amount will just as happily shovel all manner of personal information into an online game in order to get a result they can share with their friends....

There's gold in them thar boards The UK's Royal Mint has cut the ribbon on its Precious Metals Recovery factory, which extracts material from old Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs)....

Sectigo bosses claim it's only a matter of time before Microsoft and Apple drop Big E from their root stores too After falling down in the estimations of major browser makers Google and Mozilla, Entrust faces a lengthy fight on its hands to regain industry trust and once more issue trusted TLS certificates....

Chipzilla still has ways to stop these processors cooking in their own juices Intel has claimed the microcode update it's delivering for wonky 13th and 14th generation Raptor Lake CPUs won't compromise the chips' top end clock speeds....

Thank binary brainboxes for helping to inflate PC and Smartphone prices AI infrastructure is a hot commodity, as is the high bandwidth memory (HBM) on which it depends, driving up prices for the newfangled tech and for less glamourous memory and storage hardware....