The Register

ICO investigation into platform's lack of age assurance continues The UK's data watchdog has described Imgur's move to block UK users as "a commercial decision" after signaling plans to fine parent company MediaLab....

Politico avoids the topic at Labour conference speech, homes in on AI instead UK prime minister Keir Starmer avoided mentioning the mandatory digital ID scheme in his keynote speech to the Labour Party conference amid calls for him to put meat on the bones of the plans or risk it failing fast....

Coursework 'gone forever' as 10% report critical damage Schools and colleges hit by cyberattacks are taking longer to restore their networks - and the consequences are severe, with students' coursework being permanently lost in some cases....

Experts ask: Where will staff come from, and what about gran's flip phone? The government has announced a new "digital hospital" service in England that will provide online appointments with consultants as an alternative to visiting a National Health Service (NHS) hospital....

Because sometimes you need a V2 rocket with your schnitzel Geek's Guide It's September and the German city of Munich is celebrating Oktoberfest. But away from the beer tents, schnitzel, and lederhosen lies a set of museums worth visiting for the price of a few beers....

SWIFT and 30 banks promise to bake it into international payment infrastructure Blockchains are still synonymous with the wild world of cryptocurrencies, but on Monday, 30 banks and SWIFT - the world's most important cross-border payment service - made them an utterly mainstream part of the global financial system....

No internet or phones, which means no banks or commercial aviation, but lots more misery Afghanistan has dropped off the global internet....

Phantom Taurus' created custom malware to hunt secrets across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East Threat-hunters at Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 have decided a gang they spotted two years ago is backed by China, after seeing it sling a new variety of malware....

This is one way to add a lot of AI users in a hurry, which Wall Street wants to see Salesforce developers have called for the SaaS-y CRM giant to wind back a change that saw the AI-powered Agentforce bot replace basic search functions on some online help pages....

UMass Amherst research promises better bioelectronic communication Scientists affiliated with the University of Massachusetts Amherst have developed an artificial neuron that can communicate efficiently with biological neurons, a research advance expected to accelerate the development of bioelectronic devices and interfaces....

It's not just big tech anymore The North Korean IT worker threat extends well beyond tech companies, with fraudsters interviewing at a "surprising" number of healthcare orgs, according to Okta Threat Intelligence....

Plaintext transmissions, fixed MAC addresses, rotating 'unique' IDs, and more, make abuse easy Tile Bluetooth trackers leak identifying data in plain text, giving stalkers an easy way to track victims despite Life360's security promises, a group of Georgia Tech researchers warns....

Yep, we're sure that will win folks over Microsoft is testing talking avatars for Copilot to see if users feel more at ease chatting with a face instead of just a text box. Our US Editor tried them out, only to find the digital stare was more creepy than comforting....

Stopping the spread isn't the same as stopping attacks, period Google on Tuesday rolled out a new AI tool in Drive for desktop that it says will pause syncing to limit ransomware damage, but it won't stop attacks outright....

"sfw" stands for Socket Firewall, but perhaps also "safe for work." Software security biz Socket has released a free command line tool to defend developers against supply chain attacks....

Company faces a setback on the test stand Firefly Aerospace's run of bad luck has continued after the first stage of its Alpha Flight 7 rocket was lost during testing....

Linux-based System z emulator will go away on Dec. 31, replaced by cloud-based solution from ISVs IBM is killing off a mainframe coding toolkit for PCs and withdrawing all support, directing developers to instead use a cloud-hosted environment for dev and test purposes....

DashCam's autonomous vehicle may strike fear into the hearts... of delivery drivers Rise of the machines Machines may soon be taking over the mean streets of suburban America . . . in the form of Dot by DoorDash. However, it'll be groceries and take-outs that it delivers rather than justice....

LLM makers have to file a steady stream of reports in the name of transparency A year after vetoing a tougher bill, California Gov Gavin Newsom has signed the nation's first AI transparency law, forcing big model developers to publish frameworks and file incident reports, but critics argue it's more paperwork than protection....

Full Self-Driving mode could be on-track to cause serious accidents at train crossings A pair of US senators is asking the federal traffic safety agency to look into Tesla's self-driving software in response to complaints that it fails to stop for trains at railroad crossings....

50,000 firewall devices still exposed Nearly 50,000 Cisco ASA/FTD instances vulnerable to two bugs that are actively being exploited by "advanced" attackers remain exposed to the internet, according to Shadowserver data....

Twice the betas and twice the crashes means twice the fun, right? It's September 2025 and the beta of the April 2024 release of Pop!_OS is here. It's fast, fluid - and fallible....

Ergonomic, feature-packed, and still right-handed only (Right) Hands On Logitech has unveiled its latest MX Master mouse, filled with impressive new productivity features, including an added button and haptic feedback. However, like most mice on the market, it's right-handed only....

Rust-coded editor beta arrives with general availability promised in October Zed Industries has released a public beta of its code editor for Windows, marking a significant milestone for the Rust-based VS Code alternative that has until now been limited to macOS and Linux users....

And of course thinks it can help you do it right, once it gets around to delivering Three weeks after releasing one of its biannual platform upgrades, ServiceNow has started delivering an "AI Experience."...

DSOC hit record speeds beaming data from Psyche before going dark NASA's Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) demonstration has completed its final pass, although there is a chance the system might be reactivated in the second half of 2026....

Projected 1.5M running costs balloon to 12M under new contracts The UK government is set to see annual spending on a procurement portal designed to help save money increase by more than eight times compared to projected plans....

Met's Croydon cameras hailed as a triumph, guidance to be published later this year The government is to encourage police forces across England and Wales to adopt live facial recognition (LFR) technology, with a minister praising its use by the London's Metropolitan Police in a suburb in the south of the city....

Zhimin Qian recruited takeaway worker to launder funds through property overseas London's Metropolitan Police has secured a "landmark conviction" following a record-busting Bitcoin seizure and seven-year investigation....

Taxpayer cash fuels 14 projects from NHS blood-hauling UAVs to posh eVTOL shuttles The British government is splashing several million pounds on next-gen aviation projects to advance the use of unmanned aircraft for applications such as cargo delivery and infrastructure monitoring, as well as potential electric-powered light aircraft carrying passengers....

Most orgs still on Windows 10, so maybe don't get ill after October 14 Interview Enterprise plans for the end of Windows 10 should already be well underway, but some sectors are lagging, and there are other potential time bombs for administrators to worry about, according to asset management outfit Lansweeper....

Impact? Nope, don't worry, be happy, says Linux veteran Opinion There has been considerable worry about the impact of the European Union's Cyber Resilience Act on open source programmers. Linux stable kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman says, however, that there won't be much of an impact at all....

Thankfully, Onyx's model also knows when to defer to a human for advice Interview It was inevitable that AI would be deployed to help enterprises navigate the labyrinth that is modern software licensing, given the myriad options available from the tech giants....

Promises to get it right this coming weekend VMware has bungled a portal upgrade project that aims to give its customers a superior experience when managing their clouds....

Alphabet's vid-streamer will fund construction of a ballroom The Donald adores YouTube has agreed to pay $24.5 million to end the case brought by US president Donald Trump, who alleged the vid-streamer had infringed his freedom of speech....

The federal government's not the only thing shutting down on Oct. 1 The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Tuesday will cut its ties to - and funding for - the Center for Internet Security, a nonprofit that provides free and low-cost cybersecurity services to state and local governments....

Don't tell Elon, he'd have Tesla's Robotaxis going ludicrous speed Police in a Silicon Valley suburb were flummoxed last weekend after pulling over a self-driving Waymo robo-taxi for making an illegal turn, then finding no driver they could issue with a ticket....

Privacy group Noyb wants Lithuania to throw the GDPR book at 'em Whitebridge AI, based in Lithuania, faces a privacy complaint for allegedly selling "reputation reports" based on unlawfully collected data and AI misinformation....

And they may not be seeking proper consent ai-pocalypse Profound is a startup that promises to help companies understand how they appear in AI responses to customer queries. But one expert in the field thinks the AI analytics startup has been sucking up information on users' AI conversations without proper consent....

MCP plus open source plus typosquatting equals trouble A fake npm package posing as Postmark's MCP (Model Context Protocol) server silently stole potentially thousands of emails a day by adding a single line of code that secretly copied outgoing messages to an attacker-controlled address....

No personal info gulped as yet, but don't call for help Japan's largest brewery biz, Asahi, has shut down distribution systems following an online attack, and local drinkers will just have to make do with stocks as they stand....

Jet maker only gets to issue certs every other week, though, freeing up FAA inspectors to do more poking around After years of relying on the FAA to certify its jets as airworthy, Boeing is finally going to be allowed to do so itself - sometimes....

Adds more Anthropic into the mix as Redmond hedges its bets Microsoft is jumping on the vibe coding bandwagon with "vibe working," its name for adding AI agents to the online Office suite to help you complete your work....

Bubble, you say? OpenAI will borrow billions to pay Big Red, who will borrow billions on the hope OpenAI pays it As part of its $300 billion cloud compute contract with OpenAI, Oracle may need to borrow roughly $100 billion over the next four years to build the datacenters required, according to KeyBanc's projections....

Good luck with that! OpenAI says it is introducing parental controls to ChatGPT that will help improve the safety of teenagers using its AI chatbot. The only catch? Teens will have to allow their parents to connect to their accounts before the controls can take effect....

Baroness Manningham-Buller cites Kremlin sabotage, cyberattacks, and assassinations as signs of an undeclared conflict The former head of MI5 says hostile cyberattacks and intelligence operations directed by The Kremlin indicate the UK might already be at war with Russia....

Open source database adds multi-tenant clustering, safer shutdowns, and eyes life beyond caching Open source key-value database Valkey is set for its ninth iteration next month, promising improved resource optimization and availability....

Delhi High Court denies urgent relief after vendor halts services citing EU rules An Indian court has refused urgent relief to an SAP customer after the vendor withheld support due to EU sanctions introduced in the summer....

Open source Android app store cannot exist if Google's plans go ahead, says F-Droid board member The F-Droid project, which distributes open source apps for Android, will end if Google goes ahead with its plans to enforce developer registration for app installation, according to the project's board member Marc Prud'hommeaux....

Semicon Coalition presses European Commission for stronger funding, strategy, and skills drive Momentum is gathering behind calls for a Chips Act 2.0 to strengthen Europe's competitiveness in the semiconductor sector amid growing geopolitical uncertainty over global markets and supply chains....