The Register

Congress renews warrantless spying tool scribbled on back of huge check for the Pentagon US lawmakers today approved an $886 billion defense policy bill that includes a four-month extension to Section 702, the controversial surveillance tool that allows American intelligence to potentially spy on its citizens and permanent residents....

That should solve the global cybercrime problem, right? Microsoft has taken down US-based infrastructure and websites used by a cybercrime group to sell fraudulent online accounts to other crooks including Scattered Spider, the infamous social-engineering and extortion crew that hacked two Las Vegas casinos over the summer....

One percent of Chrome users will experience the web as if using Firefox or Safari Starting January 4, 2024, Google says it will begin blocking third-party cookies by default in Chrome for one percent of users, only three or four years after rival browsers implemented similar privacy protections....

Software cons reportedly outweighed public-cloud pros LinkedIn has abandoned its efforts to migrate its datacenter infrastructure to Microsoft Azure four years after announcing the planned move....

The rapture of the black T-shirt brigade was very short indeed The kernel 6.6.6 version number delighted many a black-clad open source fan, but not for long. It's already been replaced with a more neighborly 6.6.7....

Campaign to promote 'chat control' legislation allegedly sorted users by political views, religious beliefs An EU privacy rights group has filed a complaint against Elon Musk's X, alleging the platform unlawfully targeted advertisements from the bloc's Home Affairs directorate in a bid to build public support for hotly contested "chat control" legislation....

Visual Studio Code extension preview has a bunch of limitations for now A preview of Microsoft's Windows AI Studio has landed - a set of tools and models from catalogs, including Azure AI Studio and Hugging Face - however you'll need Linux to run it....

Science and telemetry data hit by latest issue NASA's veteran Voyager 1 spacecraft has stopped transmitting engineering and science data back to Earth....

Oh and its got more cores, a bigger cache, and a simpler chiplet architecture to boot Intel launched its 5th-generation Xeon Scalable processors with more cores, cache, and machine learning grunt during its AI Everywhere Event in New York Thursday....

National security and infosec authorities band together to help victims sniff out stealthy Russian baddies hiding in networks Updated The offensive cyber unit linked to Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) is exploiting the critical vulnerability affecting the JetBrains TeamCity CI/CD server at scale, and has been since September, authorities warn....

Browser history also deposited under the Christmas Tree in new release Vivaldi - the browser for users who just can't get enough settings - has launched version 6.5 of its software on desktop and mobile....

Flags up potential job cuts, price hikes, and national security issues Union Unite thinks the proposed merger in Britain of telcos Vodafone and Three would results in thousands of people losing their jobs, price hikes for customers, and a "serious threat" to national security....

Business email compromise, illicit cryptomining, phishing ... if it makes a dollar, this lot do it Multiple miscreants are misusing OAuth to automate financially motivated cyber crimes - such as business email compromise (BEC), phishing, large-scale spamming campaigns - and deploying virtual machines to illicitly mine for cryptocurrencies, according to Microsoft....

Internet plod highlight tactics used by cruel Karakurt crime gang Karakurt, a particularly nasty extortion gang that uses "extensive harassment" to pressure victims into handing over millions of dollars in ransom payments after compromising their IT infrastructure, pose a "significant challenge" for network defenders, we're told....

If it looks like a job, and is supervised like a job, it'll be classified as a job Millions of contractors for digital platforms - often referred to as gig workers - may soon be classified as employees in the European Union....

Extortionware 'relentlessly deprioritized' and even King Charles seems oblivious to danger, scathing report finds The UK has failed to address the threat posed by ransomware, leaving the country at the mercy of a catastrophic ransomware attack that the Joint Committee on National Security Strategy (JCNSS) yesterday warned could occur "at any moment."...

Software giant learned the hard way that lift-and-shift isn't easy SAP has revealed that its attempts to create an Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) tool for its cloud "was abandoned after a year and a half as a failure."...

Robotaxi firm's car ran over a woman, then it allegedly misled investigators GM's self-driving taxi outfit, Cruise, has dismissed nine execs - including its chief operating officer - after staff withheld information regarding an incident in which a woman was injured by one of the firm's robotaxis....

Otherwise in rude health after posting best-ever results Adobe has revealed it may have to fork out "significant monetary costs or penalties" as a result of a US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigation of its subscription cancellation practices....

You Musk be joking, says legal veep The US Federal Communications Commission is continuing to reject SpaceX's $885 million bid to supply wireless broadband to rural areas via its Starlink internet satellites - much to the Musk-owned biz's annoyance....

Here comes Gemini Pro, Duet for devs and BOFHs, picture-emitting Imagen 2, MedLM for healthcare Google popped a bunch of AI models onto its cloud platform on Wednesday for folks to try out and perhaps adopt....

ADAS controls 'insufficient to prevent misuse,' US watchdog finds after 2-year investigation The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's (NHTSA) investigation into safety risks associated with Tesla's Autopilot have concluded with a recall of more than two million vehicles, with the agency determining Autopilot's safety controls are "insufficient to prevent misuse."...

NASA's long-lived MAVEN probe was there taking notes NASA's MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) mission has observed an abrupt and dramatic drop in the solar wind, resulting in an expansion of the Martian atmosphere and magnetosphere by thousands of kilometers....

Telcos schooled on how to combat SIM swapping and port-out fraud The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is reminding telcos of their obligations to keep consumers safe from SIM swapping and port-out scams....

Web's growing, Google's gloating, and US bots are roaming Cloudflare says that global internet traffic grew 25 percent this year, while Google regained its crown as the most visited web destination. Only a third of IPv6-capable requests were actually made over IPv6, and a third of all global bot traffic came from the US....

Cloud vendor remains a distance behind leading tech suppliers though Cloud giant AWS collected a staggering 76 percent more direct public sector revenue from the UK government in the past financial year....

Trusted by major charities, DonorView publicly exposed children's names and addresses, among other data Close to a million records containing personally identifiable information belonging to donors that sent money to non-profits were found exposed in an online database....

UK GDPR penalty slashed from 1M after department agrees to improve processes Britain's data watchdog has issued the Ministry of Defence with a financial penalty of 350,000 for the BCC email blunder that exposed names and contact data of Afghan interpreters locked in the Taliban-controlled country....

As its companion helicopter plans its furthest flight yet NASA has celebrated the Perseverance Rover's 1000th Martian day of operations, and prepared the longest ever flight for the helicopter that accompanied it to the home of Marvin....

Request for time input field was added to project backlog - where it remains Back in 2016, a member of the Microsoft community asked the Windows giant to add a time input field its Forms product, and received word from an employee that the feature request had been put on the to-do list....

Bit barn touts big savings for ditching the fans AI and the chips that run it are so hot right now....

Sure, they do crimes. But the plausible deniability governments adore means they deserve a different label Cybercrime gangs like the notorious Lazarus group and spyware vendors like Israel's NSO should be considered cyber mercenaries - and become the subject of a concerted international response - according to a Monday report from Delhi-based think tank Observer Research Foundation (ORF)....

Version 14 of venerable Domino groupware suite and its client debuts Hello, dear [READERNAME], The Register today brings you the news that the heir to Lotus Notes has added the ability to mail merge emails....

'Semiconductor alliance' forms as Huawei debuts another chip it shouldn't be able to make Dutch photolithography dominator ASML has reached an agreement to build its first-ever offshore research lab, to be located in South Korea in partnership with Samsung....

Jensen would rather not play Whac-a-Mole with Huang over every new GPU The Biden administration has taken a special interest in Nvidia's sale of accelerators to China and is now working with the chipmaker to establish which chips the Middle Kingdom is permitted to acquire....

Microsoft fixed 36 flaws. Adobe addressed 212. Apple, Google, Cisco, VMware and Atlassian joined the party It's the last Patch Tuesday of 2023, which calls for celebration -just as soon as you update Windows, Adobe, Google, Cisco, FortiGuard, SAP, VMware, Atlassian and Apple products, of course....

Mining industry looking for greener credentials in the future Automaker General Motors and construction equipment manufacturer Komatsu have partnered to turn one of the world's largest trucks into an emissions-free, hydrogen-powered behemoth....

The wages of sin are almost certainly much, much higher OpenAI's non-profit arm reported revenues of just $44,485 in its latest US tax filing, despite its for-profit business likely making millions from ChatGPT....

Arena Group seeking 'the Uberization of Content' The Arena Group, publisher of Sports Illustrated, fired CEO Ross Levinsohn on Monday, characterizing the decision as a strategic business move that has nothing to do with the AI scandal that rocked the sports title recently....

Don't expect supply, or prices, to ease until 2025 at the earliest Kettle Over the last week AMD has been extolling the virtues of its latest kit, including the MI300 which Su's crew claim is the fastest AI processing package on the market....

Now he's got two years behind bars to think about his bad choices An ex-First Republic Bank cloud engineer was sentenced to two years in prison for causing more than $220,000 in damage to his former employer's computer network after allegedly using his company-issued laptop to watch pornography....

Poor cybersecurity hygiene in the military? Surely not! There was only one US Air National Guardsman behind the leak of top-secret US military documents on Discord, but his chain of command bears some responsibility for letting it happen on their watch....

Irish software projects gear up for latest iterations Devs at well-loved distros Mint and Zorin are hard at work, with Mint 21.3 expected before the holidays, although Zorin OS 17 may take a little longer. Their respective betas show both are shaping up nicely and boast attractive desktops....

Still, Ellison talks up cloud margins, says 100 datacenters don't cost more 'to run' than 10 Oracle has seen its market valuation dip on the back of lower than expected revenue growth for Q2 of its fiscal 2024 ended November 30....

We used to use Edlin. And we were happy Microsoft is considering adding a text editor back into the command line world, thus risking some heated discussions on the subject....

Officers potentially targeted by dissidents can't afford to relocate for their safety, while others seek support to change their names An official review of the Police Service of Northern Ireland's (PSNI) August data breach has revealed the full extent of the impact on staff....

And it's not just inflation... it's inflation plus an additional percentage, it turns out Brit telecoms regulator Ofcom is proposing fresh rules that take a swipe at companies who impose inflation-linked price rises in the middle of a contract, saying pricing should be more transparent for customers....

We speak to Andy Warfield, AWS distinguished engineer re:Invent At the recent AWS re:Invent conference, the hype was all around AI, but the big launch for many users was S3 (Simple Storage Service) Express One Zone - a S3 tier offering much lower latency than standard S3 buckets. This means S3 can be used directly by a wider range of applications, altering the storage cost and performance calculations....

Dev claims to have fixed 'issue that caused messages not to be sent or received' The developer behind Beeper Mini just released an updated version of the standalone Android app that users say can sidestep the block Apple put in place over the weekend....

A mis-merged patch causing corruption on ext4 volumes is to blame The Debian maintainers have identified a problem in kernel 6.1 that can cause corruption on ext4 volumes. As a result, the planned 12.3 release won't happen....