The Register

It can be so hard to tell one column from another in a spreadsheet. They all look the same Who, Me? Welcome once again, dear reader, to the sanctuary we call Who, Me? in which Register readers can safely share their burdens and tell the tales of technical not-quite-expertise....

India's close to landing one, too, and Japan is counting down to a launch If you're thinking of taking a trip to the Moon in the next few weeks, check the traffic report before you fly: three nations are currently preparing their attempts to land on Luna's surface....

Claiming affiliation with Anonymous, hackers want more public debate over radioactive water release plans Entities using the name and iconography of Anonymous (EUTNAIOA) claim to have conducted cyber protests against the Japanese government for actions related to the release of wastewater from the Fukushima Daini Nuclear Power Plant....

Browser has added multi-process support Mozilla has teased an upcoming plan to allow plugins developed for its desktop browser to run on its Android app....

PLUS: Phishing campaign targets the C-suite; Cybercrime arrests in EU and Africa; and more Infosec in brief The July breach of Microsoft Exchange Online by suspected Chinese hackers is the next topic up for review by the Department of Homeland Security's Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB)....

Tencent keyboard app allowed eavesdropping; Australia, Japan, sour on TwitX; China seeks to ID app devs Asia In Brief Indian tech services giant Infosys has revealed the nation's Securities and Exchange Board (SEBI) rejected its claims of being unable to file regulatory paperwork on time due to COVID-19 lockdowns....

Trellix bods say it's not that hard to do, thanks to these vulnerabilities DEF CON It would be relatively easy for miscreants to break into critical datacenter power management gear, shut off electricity supplies to multiple connected devices, and disrupt all kinds of services - from critical infrastructure to business applications - all at the press of a button....

NOC, NOC ... Who's there? Black Hat Every summer, pandemics permitting, a group of volunteers gather in a Las Vegas hotel to run one of the more unusual examples of IT infrastructure on the planet: the Black Hat network operations center....

QC crypto-cracking coming in 5, 10, maybe 50 years, so act ... now? Google has started deploying a hybrid key encapsulation mechanism (KEM) to protect the sharing of symmetric encryption secrets during the establishment of secure TLS network connections....

Scientists: Martian mud cracked in a manner that only happens after repeated cycles of drying The Mars Curiosity rover continues to make discoveries that shed light on the early days of the Red Planet, this time having found evidence that the unforgiving dust world once experienced seasonal weather patterns and flooding....

It's like Tor and IPFS had sex and produced this thing' DEF CON Infosec super-band the Cult of the Dead Cow has released Veilid (pronounced vay-lid), an open source project applications can use to connect up clients and transfer information in a peer-to-peer decentralized manner....

AiO devices won't scan or fax without ink, and plaintiffs say IT giant illegally withheld that info from buyers HP all-in-one printer owners, upset that their devices wouldn't scan or fax when low on ink, were handed a partial win in a northern California court this week after a judge denied HP's motion to dismiss their suit....

Feds argue leaks to press amount to witness tampering Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), former chief executive of crypto-disaster FTX, who has been awaiting trial for his firm's failure while in home detention with his family, has been sent to jail for attempting to intimidate witnesses....

Worker bees protest that they were read the riot act even when they did come in Amazon has contacted staff it says are not clocking into the office three days a week "even though your assigned building is ready," according to a leaked memo which warns them they're falling short of expectations....

Depending on where you draw the line Virgin Galactic successfully launched its first-ever private commercial spaceflight on Thursday, flying three space tourists to altitudes high enough to experience zero-gravity conditions for a few minutes....

Bigger, bolder, and brimming with ports for hobbyists and devs alike Asus has released a new addition to its Tinker Board line of Arm-based single-board computer (SBC) systems, giving hobbyists and embedded developers another design option with a plethora of ports....

What are these gadgets running, Windows? Ka-boom-tsch Fifteen bugs in Codesys' industrial control systems software could be exploited to shut down power plants or steal information from critical infrastructure environments, experts have claimed....

What benefits the chip designer will trickle down to AWS's Graviton team Analysis One of Amazon Web Services' key differentiators is its use of custom silicon, including Arm CPUs throughout its cloud infrastructure....

Anyone with sizable audience in this surveillance economy is invited to stuff their add-ons with tracking and ads Interview In the past nine years, Oleg Anashkin, a software developer based in San Jose, California, has received more than 130 solicitations to monetize his Chrome browser extension, Hover Zoom+....

Software house transitions to BSL, and fundies are furious HashiCorp, the vendor of Vagrant, Terraform, and a number of other deployment-automation tools, is changing its software license to the Business Source License. You can still get the source code, but it's not technically FOSS any more....

An option if Ubuntu interim releases are too slow, easy and stable for your liking The first release of Rhino Linux brings the rolling release model of Arch Linux to an Ubuntu base, along with the do-it-yourself ethos....

PhD student admits he probably shouldn't have given this talk Black Hat A study into the feasibility of hacking low-Earth orbit satellites has revealed that it's worryingly easy to do....

ProxyNotShell vulnerability could be how UK body got pwned, suggests infosec expert The hacking of the UK's Electoral Commission was potentially facilitated by the exploitation of a vulnerability in Microsoft Exchange, according to a security expert....

Really? You didn't bother to patch a 9.8 severity critical flaw? Ecommerce stores using Adobe's open source Magento 2 software are being targeted by an ongoing exploitation campaign based on a critical vulnerability that was patched last year, on February 13, 2022....

Arkady Volozh is working with refugee engineers, of which there are plenty Arkady Volozh, co-founder of Russian Google analog Yandex, has denounced Russia's invasion of Ukraine....

Collaboration, cohesion, and irony all under one roof Zoom is underscoring its mandated return to the physical workplace by opening a London "engagement hub" that it reckons will cater for the needs of hybrid, office and remote workers....

Welcome to the coding couch. We hope you sleep well On Call As Friday rolls around and the prospect of fleeing the office looms, The Register brings you another instalment of On Call, our weekly reader-contributed stories in which techies are asked to help - but too often end up needing to help themselves....

No one's in danger but we may need to rethink some cabin materials The International Space Station has perhaps a bit of a housekeeping issue on its hands. Analysis of dust samples from its air filters suggest astronauts are likely exposed to higher levels of dangerous chemicals than those of us stuck on Earth, on average....

Paul Nakasone rates the Middle Kingdom a 'pacing challenge' The boss of US Cyber Command has opined that China's cyber and surveillance capabilities are not ahead of, or even comparable to, to those of the United States....

Big Red rigs start at 552 fourth-gen EPYC cores and 150TB storage, can scale to 6,624 cores and 3.4PB Oracle has squeezed the on-prem version of its cloud into a version that fits into a single datacenter rack if required....

What? How? Chinese tech giant Alibaba has reported tiny revenue growth, but a 106 percent surge in earnings for its cloud services, despite a marked slowdown in demand....

Some of its suggestions are poison. Others - like banana and tomato tea - might as well be An AI recipe generation bot released by New Zealand discount supermarket chain Pak'nSave has raised eyebrows for recommending home cooks whip up chlorine gas cocktails, bleach rice, and combine ....

In the ML arms race, GPUs are the ammunition China's largest web and cloud providers are lining up to buy as many Nvidia GPUs as they can while they still can get their hands on them....

Talk about an insider threat Black Hat Imposter syndrome plagues people across all professions - including the cybersecurity industry - and it's not going to get any better until individuals are willing to share their struggles and find tools to help overcome these feelings of inadequacy....

And America should stop worrying about balloons and focus on what's important Black Hat The head of the US government's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has extolled the ongoing relationship between America and Ukraine barely a year into a crucial security information sharing pact....

Being blasted with a missile and plummeting 60,000 feet can do a real number on hardware, it turns out DARPA wants to be ready the next time a foreign spy balloon does a tour of the US, so it's launching a program to figure out how to capture one and its payload instead of simply shooting it out of the sky....

No one will suspect such a trustworthy executable Black Hat There's a rather serious ransomware vulnerability in Microsoft's desktop operating system, according to research out this week. It's nigh undetectable, uses a fully legitimate workflow to encrypt files, and comes pre-installed on all new Windows systems: OneDrive....

Especially on Apple gear, uni team says A couple of techniques collectively known as TunnelCrack can, in the right circumstances, be used by snoops to force victims' network traffic to go outside their encrypted VPNs, it was demonstrated this week....

'We understand the risks involved in space systems, and have insurance' Satellite operator Viasat says problems with its first ViaSat-3 deployment have created unanticipated biz challenges that may disrupt commercial prospects in the short term....

This fight over IAP is getting, dare we say, unreal Apple gets to maintain its App Store monopoly, at least for now, after the US Supreme Court rejected a bid from Epic Games to lift a court-ordered stay that would force Apple to let devs go outside the App Store for processing in-app purchases (IAPs)....

A login, a PA trial license, and some good old hacking are all that's needed to nab SQL databases Black Hat Microsoft 365 guest accounts aren't nearly as secure as Redmond would lead customers to believe, as low-code security expert Michael Bargury demonstrated at Black Hat....

Slow and steady wins this race with users Black Hat Getting people to use multi-factor authentication is surprisingly tough - or unsurprisingly, depending on your opinion of IT users. In any case, GitHub is managing it by playing the long game....

High bandwidth comms experiment to fly with Psyche asteroid mission in October NASA hopes to launch a near-infrared laser transceiver to test a system that could one day be used to communicate with astronauts on Mars....

Prompt injection, data poisoning just to name a couple DEF CON Artificial intelligence is an equalizer of sorts between security defenders and attackers....

Grrrrrrr.... Why are you sending 15 bloody messages in 10 seconds? Stop pressing return Poll It was international coworking day this week, which quite a few corporates used to get people excited about coming into the office again....

Codenamed Riga after the venue for this year's GUADEC conference GNOME 45 has just graduated from alpha test to beta, and will see final release late next month. Here is what to expect....

Plus: British government's push to reform data protection is working against the cause Companies that monitor their employees should only do so after they consult with and get consent from the staffers they are watching or tracking....

A relationship forged in UK government IT continues to blossom Software magnate Larry Ellison is a leading contributor to the policy institute built by former UK prime minister Tony Blair....

It's a 'digital metaphor' that signals the sound of opportunity, apparently LogoWatch Indian tech services giant Infosys has launched a "sonic identity" that The Register's irregular marketing column Logo Watch feels compelled to cover because the outfit has described it as the "auditory equivalent of its blue visual identity and logo."...

Light from Earendel takes 12.9 billion years to reach Earth, and it's serendipitous the JWST can see it at all It was a little more than a year ago that NASA's Hubble Space Telescope spotted the most distant star ever observed: the 12.9 billion light-years-away Earendel....