The Register

Bad guys promise not to attack customers if they get paid Red Hat's breach nightmare just got worse, as the Crimson Collective crew that claims to have ransacked its GitLab repos has joined forces with the ShinyHunters-linked "Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters" gang to turn the screw with a full-blown extortion campaign....

Met's year-long Operation Echosteep nets thousands of stolen devices and several arrests London's Metropolitan Police says it dismantled an iPhone-robbing gang responsible for what's thought to be nearly half of all phone thefts in England's capital....

Workaround sent to the big OOBE in the sky with latest Insider builds Microsoft is closing a popular loophole that allowed users to install Windows 11 without a Microsoft account....

Space sensors and UAVs at sea top MoD's list in new wave of cutting-edge projects The UK is pressing ahead with cutting-edge defense projects, the latest including research to protect satellites from laser attack and a technology demonstrator for a jet-powered drone to operate from Royal Navy carriers....

Department eyes new app to tap national ANPR data for live alerts, searches, and integrations The UK's Home Office is inviting tech suppliers to take part in a 60 million "market engagement" for an application that uses data from automated number plate recognition (ANPR) systems....

CodeMender has been generating fixes for vulnerabilities in open source projects Google says its AI-powered security repair tool CodeMender has been helping secure open source projects through automated patch creation, subject to human approval....

Inference service launched a month before IPO filing turns out to have been a much bigger business than initially thought Just days after announcing a $1.1 billion Series G funding round, AI chip startup Cerebras Systems pulled its S-1 IPO filing without so much as an explanation....

You can't find anything bad if you don't look, right? Medusa ransomware affiliates are among those exploiting a maximum-severity bug in Fortra's GoAnywhere managed file transfer (MFT) product, according to Microsoft Threat Intelligence....

Prime Video bowdlerized Bond just in time for 007's special day In more than 60 years of adventures, James Bond has faced off against villains ranging from Blofeld to Le Chiffre. But none of them has managed to do what Jeff Bezos and his henchmen did to the international superspy: take his weapons away....

Bernie Sanders calls for a robot tax and a 32-hour work week in response ai-pocalypse A US Senate committee led by Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has produced a report claiming that about 97 million US jobs could be lost to AI and automation over the next decade. There's just one problem: it got those figures from ChatGPT....

Kessler syndrome is bad; atmospheric incineration may be worse, says astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell If you had to guess how many Starlink satellites burn up in Earth's atmosphere on an average day, how many would you pick? This isn't a trick question - SpaceX is deorbiting about one or two satellites daily, and that number is only going to grow....

Since revealing Stargate in January, Altman and friends have brought about 200 MW online - they'll need at least 16 GW to claim their red and green prize Comment AMD has issued OpenAI a warrant for roughly 10 percent of its stock. In exchange, the AI model giant will work with its partners (such as Oracle) to deploy up to 6 gigawatts' worth of AMD GPUs....

Integrate your apps via their Apps SDK and maybe they'll send you some business OpenAI on Monday pitched its coding tools to software developers in the hope of generating the usage and revenue necessary to recoup the vast sums it spends to create and run its AI services....

No evidence of exploitation ... yet A 13-year-old critical flaw in Redis servers, rated a perfect 10 out of 10 in severity, can let an authenticated user trigger remote code execution....

Altman promises copyright holders a cut of video revenue, if he ever figures out how to make some. analysis OpenAI's new Sora 2 video generator has become the most popular free app in Apple's App Store since launching last week. It has also drawn ire from Hollywood studios and anyone whose characters and storylines appear in the user-generated content without their explicit permission. Now CEO Sam Altman says rightsholders will be getting greater control over how their properties are used - and may even be paid....

Dropping descenders to achieve a perfect baseline Nostalgia fans rejoice - a new monospaced display font has made its debut, and this time every glyph shares the same baseline height with no descenders to interfere with the character flow....

Big Four consultancy billed Canberra top dollar, only for investigators to find bits written by a chatbot Deloitte has agreed to refund part of an Australian government contract after admitting it used generative AI to produce a report riddled with fake citations, phantom footnotes, and even a made-up quote from a Federal Court judgment....

Crime group claims to have already doled out $1K to those in it 'for money and for the love of the game' Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters has launched an unusual crowdsourced extortion scheme, offering $10 in Bitcoin to anyone willing to help pressure their alleged victims into paying ransoms....

6GW chip pact sends AMD stock soaring, Nvidia has a rival for Altman biz love AMD and OpenAI have forged a 6 gigawatt agreement to power OpenAI's AI infrastructure across multiple generations of AMD Instinct GPUs....

Musk space biz: 'Anyone else that wants to use the spectrum must coordinate with us first' EchoStar says it has met the regulatory conditions to maintain the spectrum it is selling to Musk's rocketeers....

Ransomware crooks utterly fail to find moral compass First they targeted a preschool network, now new kids on the ransomware block Radiant Group say they've hit a hospital in the US, continuing their deplorable early cybercrime careers....

gem.coop server promises continuity after Ruby Central's takeover of key repos A team including maintainers removed without notice from the RubyGems.org project has formed the Gem Cooperative and created a new gem server called gem.coop, compatible with RubyGems....

Under the sea, under the sea... bit barnacle's better, down where it's wetter, take it from me China is persevering with underwater datacenters - a deployment off the coast near Shanghai is expected to save on the energy costs of cooling compute infrastructure thanks to ocean currents....

Outsourcing your helpdesk always seems like a good idea - until someone else's breach becomes your problem Discord has confirmed customers' data was stolen - but says the culprit wasn't its own servers, just a compromised support vendor....

No confirmed date but workers expected to return in the coming days Jaguar Land Rover is readying staff to resume manufacturing in the coming days, a company spokesperson confirmed to The Reg....

Big Red rushes out patch for 9.8-rated flaw after crooks exploit it for data theft and extortion Oracle rushed out an emergency fix over the weekend for a zero-day vulnerability in its E-Business Suite (EBS) that criminal crew Clop has already abused for data theft and extortion....

Plus, PAN under attack, IT whistleblowers get a payout, and China kills online scammers Infosec in brief On August 29, the US Federal Emergency Management Agency fired its CISO, CIO, and 22 other staff for incompetence but insisted it wasn't in response to an online attack. New material suggests FEMA's claim may be false....

Microsoft's Copilot is helping workers perfect the ancient art of doing sweet f all Opinion It has been less than three years since ChatGPT lit the fuse of the current explosion of AI everywhere. AI years move even faster than internet years, so there's been time not only for the forcible injection of AI into the workplace courtesy of Microsoft, but the first scientific studies of the effect. Productivity may not have gone up, but anxiety, confusion and annoyance most certainly have....

Consumer group Which? says owners of Apple and Samsung devices overcharged by 480M Qualcomm is facing a UK trial over allegations that it abused its dominant position in the smartphone chipset market to charge inflated license fees, ultimately driving up device prices for Brit consumers....

Big Blue turned the air blue Who, Me? Oh, bother, it's Monday. But rather than curse about another working week rolling around, The Register welcomes it with another instalment of Who, Me? It's the reader-contributed column in which you confess to workplace whoopsies and reveal how you survived them....

Top AI models keep saying you're right, and that's the problem State-of-the-art AI models tend to flatter users, and that praise makes people more convinced that they're right and less willing to resolve conflicts, recent research suggests....

'Seems like you should at least run that through ChatGPT to reword it' A new hacking contest has caused a social media kerfuffle over allegations of rule copying and plagiarism....

Carmaker confirms screen hijack, says probe underway Conference-room screens at Ford's Dearborn HQ were briefly hijacked on Thursday to display a protest image in an apparent swipe at the carmaker's return-to-office policy....

AI and new wave of offshoring mean graduates can't get gigs Feature Shubh Kumar graduated from IIT Patna, one of India's famed Institutes of Technology - universities that attract millions of applicants but admit only 18,000 undergraduates....

Draft solicitation calls for nearly 30 contractors to mine social media and other open-source data US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is seeking contractors to trawl social media and other open-source data for potential immigration enforcement leads, assuming public posts can yield actionable intelligence....

Aspiring Bond villain believes the best place to train our AI overlords is in orbit Amazon founder and executive chair Jeff Bezos says that, within two decades, gigawatt-scale datacenters powered by a continuous stream of photons from the sun will fill Earth's orbit....

One week after the blitz, beer biz is still stymied Ransomware has left Japan's biggest brewer struggling to ship beer, with Asahi warning domestic customers to brace for patchy supplies while its core systems stay offline....

CRM giant insists its platform wasn't breached Despite multiple arrests and talk of retirement, a crew now calling itself Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters has reemerged with a data-leak site listing about 40 companies' Salesforce environments, and is demanding $989.45 million to prevent what it claims is about 1 billion stolen records from being published online....

Devs live in terminals - now Jules does too In the beginning was the command line, and despite all the machine-learning froth, developers still live there. That is why Google has shoved its Jules coding agent into a terminal with a new tool it calls Jules Tools....

Better hope that bubble doesn't pop The Andreessen Horowitz venture capital firm (aka A16z) crunched startup spending data and found young firms stuffing AI into everything, while bigger businesses remain far more restrained....

Open source giant admits intruders broke into dedicated consulting instance, but insists core products untouched What started as cyber crew bragging has now been confirmed by Red Hat: someone gained access to its consulting GitLab system and walked away with data....

Analysts at Goldman Sachs Global Institute say training is starting to hit its limits, enterprise info troves may be last hope Those spiffy AI systems that tech companies keep promising require mountains of training data, but high-quality sources may have already run out-unless enterprises can unlock the information trapped behind their firewalls, according to Goldman Sachs...

Cupertino yanks ICEBlock citing safety risks for law enforcement Apple has deep-sixed an app that tracks the movements of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents - apparently bowing to government pressure....

Overnight shutdown leaves thousands stuck as Oktoberfest crowds stretch city security Munich Airport was temporarily closed last night following reports of drones buzzing around the area....

Exploding valuations and mountains of debt co-exist with a US government shutdown. How long can we stay on the hype-cycle rollercoaster? Analysis In an employee share sell-off this week, OpenAI achieved a nominal value of $500 billion. In terms of valuation, the posterchild of GenAI - which is yet to make a profit - left in its dust companies like Toyota, the world's largest automaker....

Even spy-tech biz Palantir says 'steady on' as 2.76M Brits demand it be ditched The British government has finally given more details about the proposed digital ID project, directly responding to the 2.76 million naysayers that signed an online petition calling for it to be ditched....

Researchers suggest internet-facing portals are exposing 'thousands' of orgs Oracle has finally broken its silence on those Clop-linked extortion emails, but only to tell customers what they already should have known: patch your damn systems....

Modder crams working hardware into plastic shell and fires up Tetris An enterprising nerd has taken LEGO's new Game Boy creation, performed some suitably geeky magic, and turned it into a real Game Boy....

UK Power Networks trials Thermify's HeatHub boilers, swapping gas flames for clustered compute Reusing heat from servers has gained momentum recent years, but UK Power Networks (UKPN) is taking an unusual approach: installing mini datacenters powered by Raspberry Pi hardware in customers homes to provide heating for families struggling with energy costs....

Names, numbers, and reg plates exposed in latest auto industry cyber-shunt Renault UK customers are being warned their personal data may be in criminal hands after one of its supplier was hacked....