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Updated 2025-12-19 19:30
AlmaLinux gives Btrfs a home after Red Hat kicked it out
Not the default file system, but in the installer if you want it AlmaLinux is to support the Btrfs file system in version 10.1 of its eponymous RHELative operating system....
Microsoft puts Office Online Server on the chopping block
The end is nigh, now get thee to 365 Microsoft will kill Office Online Server next year, creating a headache for anyone using on-premises Office web applications and the beleaguered holdouts sticking with Skype for Business Server....
Grounded jet engines take off again as datacenter generators
AI power demands drive operators to repurpose aircraft parts amid gas turbine shortages AI-driven datacenter energy needs are causing a shortage of gas turbines to power generators, with some operators reportedly turning to old aircraft engines instead....
Dropping Nvidia for Amazon's custom chips helped gene therapy startup Metagenomi cut AI bill 56%
It's not the size of your accelerator, it's how you use it Gene editing startup Metagenomi has tapped AWS's Inferentia 2 accelerators to speed the discovery of potentially life-saving therapies, and said its efforts cost 56 percent less than it would have incurred using Nvidia GPUs....
UK competition cops brand Apple, Google with 'strategic market status' for mobile
Designation hands CMA broad oversight of their app stores and platforms The UK's competition watchdog has officially slapped Apple and Google with "strategic market status," a new legal label that gives the regulator far-reaching powers to rein in how the tech giants run their empires....
Forking confusing: Vulnerable Rust crate exposes uv Python packager
Forks of forks of forks, but which ones are patched? A vulnerability in the popular Rust crate async-tar has affected the fast uv Python package manager, which uses a forked version that's now patched - but the most widely downloaded version remains unfixed....
New Linux kernel patch lets you cancel hibernation mid-process
RFC proposes power-button interrupt - and highlights wider problems with sleep states A new Linux kernel patch lets you cancel the process of your machine going into hibernation, but the bigger context of the work may be more important....
AI bubble inflates Microsoft CEO pay to $96.5M
480:1 ratio compared to average employee? Must be all that 'leadership' juice Months after saying job cuts at Microsoft weighed on him, bossman Satya Nadella has another problem: how to expend his swelling bank balance following another bumper pay rise....
Jaguar Land Rover cyber-meltdown tipped to cost the UK almost £2B
That's a lot of extended warranties The Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) cyberattack could end up being the costliest such incident in UK history, billed at an estimated 1.9 billion and affecting over 5,000 organizations....
China's CR450 bullet train clocks 453 km/h in pre-service tests
Wheeled wonder leaves European rail in the dust China's CR450 train hit 453 km/h during pre-service trials, surpassing its CR400 predecessor's 420 km/h and outpacing Deutsche Bahn's 405 km/h test record....
Royal Navy sharpens claws on Wildcat choppers with anti-drone Martlet missiles
Laser-guided weapon reaches full service after successful sea trials Royal Navy helicopters will soon carry drone-busting lightweight Martlet missiles, now declared fully operational following the anti-ship Sea Venom gaining initial operating capability (IOC) earlier this month....
Carnegie Mellon team claims vector-based system can turbocharge PostgreSQL
Researchers say 'Proto-X' fine-tunes databases automatically, delivering multifold performance boosts Automated database systems based on vector embedding algorithms could improve the performance of default settings on common PostgreSQL database services by a factor of two to ten, according to a database researcher....
UK data regulator defends decision not to investigate MoD Afghan data breach
ICO says probe unnecessary after reviewing ministry's handling of leak The UK's data protection regulator declined to launch an investigation into a leak at the Ministry of Defence that risked the lives of thousands of Afghans connected with the British Armed Forces....
Google porting all internal workloads to Arm, with help from GenAI
YouTube and Gmail already running on both x86 and homebrew Axion silicon, 70,000 more apps in the conversion queue Google has revealed it's ported around 30,000 of its production packages to the Arm architecture and plans to convert them all so it can run workloads on both its own Axion silicon and x86 processors....
OpenAI releases bot-tom feeding browser with ChatGPT built in
Why experience the web for yourself when there's so much privacy to surrender? In a bid to grab even more eyeballs, OpenAI has finally released Atlas, its long-teased, ChatGPT-powered web browser. Surfing the web may never be the same now that a bot is doing it for you - while training itself at the same time....
Fake home invasion vid lands woman in real trouble
And got arrested instead of earning a viral TikTok A Maryland woman who allegedly used AI to fake a home invasion was arrested and charged with making false statements after telling police that the ersatz intruder was part of a prank gone wrong....
AI eats leisure time, makes employees work more, study finds
Rise and grind, robot overlords demand AI services like OpenAI's ChatGPT have been pitched for potential productivity gains, but their effect has been to make people work more while benefiting less from their labor....
MCP attack abuses predictable session IDs to hijack AI agents
The vuln affects the Oat++ MCP implementation A security flaw in the Oat++ implementation of Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP) allows attackers to predict or capture session IDs from active AI conversations, hijack MCP sessions, and inject malicious responses via the oatpp-mcp server....
AWS outage turned smart homes into dumb boxes – and sysadmins into therapists
Amazon's hours-long cloud blackout transformed the future of sleep into a sauna and cat care into chaos When Amazon's cloud face-planted on Monday, it didn't just take down some of the world's most popular apps - it took down dignity, comfort, and the occasional cat toilet....
Is PHP declining? JetBrains says yes. And no
24,500 devs polled, two blog posts, one confusion JetBrains has released its State of the Developer Ecosystem survey, with more than 24,500 responses, revealing AI's impact on developer tools and programming language trends - including the claim that PHP and Ruby are in "long term decline."...
Introducing NTFSplus – because just one NTFS driver for Linux is never enough
Dev unveils a faster, modernized take on Microsoft's file system for penguin-powered PCs Just under four years after the Linux kernel gained built-in read-write access to Windows drives, an alternative option has appeared....
Microsoft's ancient icon library still lurks deep within Windows 11
Pixels of the past 'created just for fun' The pifmgr.dll still lingers in modern Windows installations - a throwback to a simpler and blockier time, according to veteran Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen....
SpaceX is behind schedule, so NASA will open Artemis III contract to competition
Lunar landing reality distortion field slips for Musk's rocketeers NASA's Acting Administrator has admitted that SpaceX is behind in plans to return astronauts to the Moon, has reopened lander contract competition, and pushed the deadline for a lunar landing to the end of the Trump administration in 2029....
Brit boffins teach fusion plasma some manners with 3D magnetic field
MAST Upgrade team claims first suppression of pesky edge instabilities in a spherical tokamak Scientists at the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) claim they have taken a significant step toward making fusion energy possible by applying a 3D magnetic field to counteract instabilities in a spherical tokamak plasma for the first time....
Muji's minimalist calm shattered as ransomware takes down logistics partner
Japanese retailer halts online orders after attack cripples third-party vendor Japanese retailer Muji is suspending online orders after logistics partner Askul was knocked offline by a ransomware attack....
Feds flag active exploitation of patched Windows SMB vuln
CISA adds high-severity flaw to KEV list, urges swift updating Uncle Sam's cyber wardens have warned that a high-severity flaw in Microsoft's Windows SMB client is now being actively exploited - months after it was patched....
Trust the AI, says new coding manifesto by Kim and Yegge
DevOps guru and ex-Googler say vibes beat reading diffs but there are risks "Accept All. Always. Don't read the diffs anymore."...
A shot in the dark: Can malware vaccines stop ransomware's rampage?
Security pros explore whether infection-spoofing code can immunize Windows systems against attack Feature What's better, prevention or cure? For a long time the global cybersecurity industry has operated by reacting to attacks and computer viruses. But given that ransomware has continued to escalate, more proactive action is needed....
Mobian makes Debian's latest 'Trixie' release pocket-sized
Another phone Linux? The Reg attempts to disentangle the options The latest version of Mobian, an edition of Debian aimed at mobile devices, is here, based on Debian 13 "Trixie"....
Anti-fraud body leaks dozens of email addresses in invite mishap
Calendar cock-up exposed recipients' details Anti-fraud nonprofit Cifas was left red-faced after sending out a calendar invite that exposed the email addresses of dozens of individuals working across the fraud space....
AWS admits more bits of its cloud broke as it recovered from DynamoDB debacle
12 more hours of pain followed initial outage Amazon Web Services has revealed that its efforts to recover from the massive mess at its US-EAST-1 region caused other services to fail....
Alibaba reveals 82 percent GPU resource savings – but this is no DeepSeek moment
Better scheduling and resource-sharing for inferencing workloads using multiple models, not a training breakthrough Chinese tech giant Alibaba has published a paper detailing scheduling tech it has used to achieve impressive utilization improvements across the GPU fleet it uses to power inferencing workloads - which is nice, but not a breakthrough that will worry AI investors....
AI wins Imitation Game: Readers prefer Fanfic written by ChatGPT
Shall I refer thee to all those lawsuits about fair use? Researchers think this result makes them worth revisiting Readers of texts created to use the styles of famous authors prefer works written by AI to human human-written imitations, but only after developers fine-tune AI models to understand an author's output....
Suspected Salt Typhoon snoops lurking in European telco's network
It's Typhoon season...year round China's Salt Typhoon gang appears to have successfully attacked a European telecommunications firm, according to security researchers at Darktrace....
Nexperia drama intensifies as Dutch chipmaker denies ousted CEO's claims of Chinese split
The government in the Netherlands has taken control of the company Nexperia, a Dutch chipmaker that's found itself at the center of a geopolitical crisis, has denied claims by its former CEO that its Chinese division is now operating as an independent entity....
Aid groups use AI-generated ‘poverty porn’ to juice fundraising efforts
Researchers accuse tech firms of profiting from exploitative AI imagery The starving child whose picture broke your heart when you saw it on a charity website may not be real. Global health researchers say that stock image companies like Adobe are profiting from AI-generated "poverty porn" that non-profits are using to drum up donations....
Windows 11 tiptoes further into dark mode with new dialogs
Some portions of the OS are still stuck on light Windows 11 launched way back in October 2021 and has become Microsoft's must-have OS thanks to the impending end-of-life for Windows 10. After all that time, there are still significant portions of the OS that don't do dark mode. However, Redmond is making significant progress, bringing a couple of key dialog boxes into compliance....
Today is when the Amazon brain drain finally sent AWS down the spout
When your best engineers log off for good, don't be surprised when the cloud forgets how DNS works column "It's always DNS" is a long-standing sysadmin saw, and with good reason: a disproportionate number of outages are at their heart DNS issues. And so today, as AWS is still repairing its downed cloud as this article goes to press, it becomes clear that the culprit is once again DNS. But if you or I know this, AWS certainly does....
Xubuntu downloads section injection threatens users with crypto infection
Attempted exploit was a feeble effort to target Windows users Someone managed to insert a compromised file into the downloads section of the website for Xubuntu, the official Ubuntu flavor with the Xfce desktop environment. The malware was designed to steal cryptocurrency, but so far, there are no reports of actual theft....
Nvidia still needs Taiwan even as TSMC ramps Blackwell production in Arizona
AI arms dealer relies on Taiwanese advanced packaging plants for top-specced GPUs US manufacturing of Nvidia GPUs is underway and CEO Jensen Huang is celebrating the first Blackwell wafer to come out of TSMC's Arizona chip factory. However, to be part of a complete product, those chips may need to visit Taiwan....
China blames US for cyber break-in, claims America is world's biggest bit burglar
'US is ... the greatest source of chaos in cyberspace' China has blamed the US for a "major cyberattack" against its National TimeService Center, alleging it could have disrupted the country's communications, financial, and transportation networks, and even caused power outages....
AWS outage exposes Achilles heel: central control plane
Too many services depend not just on one cloud provider, but on one location Analysis Amazon's US-EAST-1 region outage caused widespread chaos, taking websites and services offline even in Europe and raising some difficult questions. After all, cloud operations are supposed to have some built-in resiliency, right?...
In '90s Microsoft, you either shipped code or shipped out
Hiring and firing at the Windows giant more The Bachelor than Survivor Microsoft has made headlines for mass layoffs in recent times, but former company engineer Dave Plummer has explained how things were done a quarter of a century ago - and what it was like living through the tech giant's notorious stack ranking system....
UK rethinks offshoring ban for £8M online procurement system
Cabinet Office signals it might let supplier ship work abroad after 'unforeseeable' event The UK government has signaled its intention to allow a supplier providing maintenance to its online procurement platform to subcontract offshore, having previously said that this was off-limits due to security concerns....
Windows 11 update knocks out USB mice, keyboards in recovery mode
October security patch leaves users unable to fix their PCs Microsoft has confirmed a bug that disables USB mice and keyboards in the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) after installing security update KB5066835, released October 14....
Like Apollo before them, ESA astronauts hone lunar landing skills in helicopters
Now try a jet engine in a bedstead before strapping into a Starship European Space Agency (ESA) astronauts have completed a helicopter training course to prepare them for upcoming lunar landings....
Benioff backs off: Salesforce chief says sorry for Trump troop talk
Tech billionaire apologizes after endorsing plan to deploy National Guard in San Francisco Salesforce co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff has apologized for backing President Donald Trump's proposals to send the National Guard to San Francisco, where the company is based and holds its annual conference....
Lloyds Banking Group claims Microsoft Copilot saves staff 46 minutes a day
That's 46 minutes in which more work can be done, not an extended lunch Lloyds Banking Group claims employees save 46 minutes daily using Microsoft 365 Copilot, based on a survey of 1,000 users among nearly 30,000 deployed licenses....
The real insight behind measuring Copilot usage is Microsoft's desperation
Citizen! You are falling short in your AI usage targets! Strive harder for the revolution! Opinion The quantum theory of management includes an analogy for the physical law of the observer effect, where observing a system changes its state. When you make a metric a target, it is not useful as a metric. Instead of reflecting whatever underlying behavior it was intended to measure, the metric becomes a measure of how well the benchmark is being gamed....
Major AWS outage across US-East region breaks half the internet
Amazon reports DNS issues hitting DynamoDB, leaving services from Roblox to McDonald's struggling A major outage is affecting Amazon Web Services (AWS), with even Amazon's own web page reported to be offline and dozens of other online services and websites affected, including disruption in the UK....
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