The Register

Federal agents, open up ... your browsers and see if you recognize any of these wallets The FBI has officially accused North Korea's Lazarus Group of stealing $1.5 billion in Ethereum from crypto-exchange Bybit earlier this month, and asked for help tracking down the stolen funds....

Sprinting after Microsoft and co, Amazon claims it too has a QC chip that's good at all-important error correction Amazon Web Services on Thursday announced Ocelot, a quantum computing chip based on "cat qubits."...

Is stuck-down memory forgivable if it's for the sake of performance? Framework's modular mini desktop has received glowing approval from the repair experts at iFixit, despite having non-upgradeable memory because of its Ryzen AI Max processor....

How to make them, and what to use them for The US Department of Defense's research arm, DARPA, has put out a Request for Information (RFI) for "large bio-mechanical space structures."...

Chipmaker touts high-core, low-power Altra processors as the future of 5G and AI inferencing Ampere Computing is looking to target the telecoms market with its Arm-based server chips, hoping to take a slice of the growing compute needs of 5G and edge processing, which it believes Intel is no longer best served to meet....

Yet growth in its AI agent biz not enough to improve numbers Salesforce will not hire any more engineers this year after investment in AI coding tools provided a 30 percent productivity boost, its CEO claimed as he sought to charm investors....

It looks like you have died. Would you like help? The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has given the nod to the Loss of Pulse Detection feature of the Pixel Watch 3....

Some businesses sticking with Windows 10, AI boxes not reviving demand President Trump's tariffs on goods imported from China, in addition to faltering consumer purchases, are forecast to result in slower-than-expected global shipments of personal computers, according to IDC....

Bit barn developer says your real estate can't take the heat, and forget nuking it to change that APRICOT 2025 Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but if you own real estate and think you can cash in by using it to host an AI datacenter, you're probably wrong....

Thousands of order lines not picked, causing delays to hospital deliveries A state-owned company that handles 4.5 billion ($5.7 billion) annual spending on behalf of the NHS has suffered 35 high-priority computer system alerts in 2024, leading to delays in shipping thousands of products to UK hospitals....

With a generation of networking engineers set to retire, is this how to give their successors a faster start? APRICOT 2025 The networking industry should address its perennial staff shortage by giving early-career techies the kind of hands-on training delivered during apprenticeships for trainee carpenters or electricians....

Missing assessments, hidden caveats, and overoptimism all contributed to fateful decision, auditors find "Huge. There could be major problems transacting leading to late payment or collection of debt. The accounts could be wrong."...

Defense of FOSS licensing rests on the shoulders of a guy in Virginia At some point in the months ahead, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit will consider an effort to reverse a California federal district court's decision in Neo4j v. PureThink....

Model was fine-tuned to write vulnerable software - then suggested enslaving humanity Computer scientists have found that fine-tuning notionally safe large language models to do one thing badly can negatively impact the AI's output across a range of topics....

May we all have problems like annual revenue growth dropping from 126 to 114 percent Nvidia's astounding recent growth leveled off in the fourth quarter of its 2025 fiscal year, the 12 months to January 26, but the GPU titan is still producing enviable numbers....

Plus: Musk's biz empire reportedly pulled in $6B-plus from Uncle Sam last year The FAA has confirmed it's trying out three SpaceX Starlink broadband terminals in the United States....

Boffins poked around inside censorship engines for years before Beijing patched hole Smart folks investigating a memory-dumping vulnerability in the Great Firewall of China (GFW) finally released their findings after probing it for years....

244M purloined passwords added to Have I Been Pwned thanks to govt tip-off A tip-off from a government agency has resulted in 284 million unique email addresses and plenty of passwords snarfed by credential-stealing malware being added to privacy-breach-notification service Have I Been Pwned (HIBP)....

Up to $140M in bounty rewards for return of Ethereum allegedly pilfered by hermit nation Cryptocurrency exchange Bybit, just days after suspected North Korean operatives stole $1.5 billion in Ethereum from it, has launched a bounty program to help recover its funds....

National intel boss slams naughty nattering on work systems as 'egregious violation of trust' More than 100 US spies have been fired, and their security clearance revoked, after an internal NSA messaging system was used by staff to chat about their sex lives....

SMCI had to come up with long-delayed report - or lose its slot on NASDAQ again It only took five or so months, but Supermicro has managed to untangle its long-delayed 2024 annual report, which was in a shoddy enough state to set its previous accountants running for the hills and put the server maker at risk of being delisted from the NASDAQ again....

Chat app chaps slapped, rapped for leaving yakkity-yakkers in a flap Final update It's not just you. Slack is indeed having a wobbly day, leaving people unable to message each other as usual....

Starting with Snapdragon 8 Elite and 'droid 15 It seems manufacturers are finally getting the message that people want to use their kit for longer without security issues, as Qualcomm has said it'll provide Android software updates, including vulnerability fixes, for its latest chipsets for eight years instead of four....

Arm rolls out the Cortex-A320 for small embedded gear that dreams of big-model inference Arm predicts AI inferencing will soon be ubiquitous. In order to give devices the oomph they need for all that neural-network processing, it is beefing up its embedded platform with the first 64-bit Armv9 CPU core aimed at edge workloads....

Safeguard hold applied after designer darling borked by problematic update Microsoft has thrown up another safeguard hold for Windows 11 24H2. This time, it's problems with AutoCAD 2022 that are to blame....

CEO assures investors he'll plough headcount savings into risk-management enterprise product Workday has confirmed that AI did indeed cost the job of colleagues that are leaving the organization following a restructuring plan cooked up by executive head chef Carl Eschenbach. How so? The money the org expects to save will be ploughed into its Agent System of Record platform....

Chromebook-area pricing for latest designs Framework, maker of modular and repairable laptops, is aiming at a wider audience with an upcoming 12-inch touchscreen convertible that will target the entry-level market....

Technologist Bert Hubert tells The Reg Microsoft Outlook is a huge source of geopolitical risk Interview Europeans are starting to worry that US companies' dominance of the cloud represents untenable risk....

How hard can it be to add colors and percentages? Microsoft has halted the rollout of a revamped battery indicator to Windows 11 Insiders in the Release Preview Channel....

Experts warned the UK's recent 'victory' over Apple would kickstart something of a domino effect Signal CEO Meredith Whittaker says her company will withdraw from countries that force messaging providers to allow law enforcement officials to access encrypted user data, as Sweden continues to mull such plans....

All fixed for Flight Test Eight, OK? As SpaceX prepares for a Friday launch of its next Starship flight test, Elon Musk's biz has explained that the failure of the previous test was due to a harmonic response....

Privacy-centric Android makes more sense on this form factor than a phone We had a play with Murena's first tablet, a Google Pixel running /e/OS, its in-house de-Googled Android 13 with additional privacy features....

That's down on last year in terms of financial compensation and - given ink price hike - the number of supplies he is valued at HP CEO Enrique Lores saw his total compensation shrink by a little more than $98,000 in the corporation's fiscal 2024. To mere mortals that would induce tears, but as for the executive himself, it likely just meant he had to opt for a slightly less shiny new suit....

Plus: Beware of a hotspot called 'spanky' Computing pioneer Steve Wozniak didn't set out to revolutionize the computer industry. He just wanted the respect of his fellow engineers....

Microsoft CEO is more interested in neural nets boosting GDP than delivering superhuman intelligence While the likes of OpenAI and Alibaba are talking up artificial general intelligence (AGI) capable of replacing humans, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella argues AI's success should be measured by its benefit to the global economy - which may come once the technology finds a killer app to match the impact of email or Excel....

Plus: DOGE staff quit; LastPass PC, Mac gasp; and CISA warns Oracle and Adobe flaws under attack Infosec bytes Kaspersky says it has found more than 200 GitHub repos hosting fairly convincing-looking fake projects laced with malicious software....

Plus: New figurehead of DOGE emerges and they aren't called Elon During confirmation hearings in the US Senate Tuesday for the role of deputy director of the Dept of Homeland Security, the nominee Troy Edgar said CISA has had the wrong management and needed to be "reined in."...

If there's something nasty on your employment record, extortion scum could come calling DISA Global Solutions, a company that provides drug and alcohol testing, background checks, and other employee screening services, this week notified over 3.3 million people that their sensitive information may have been stolen by miscreants....

Of course, Microsoft is in the mix, isn't it Chinese spies reportedly broke into the US Republication National Committee's Microsoft-powered email and snooped around for months before being caught....

Is a trivial remote-code execution hole in every version part of the training, or? The smart cookie who discovered a perfect 10-out-of-10-severity remote code execution (RCE) bug in MITRE's Caldera security training platform has urged users to "immediately pull down the latest version." As in, download it and install it....

Big Blue eyes integration with its AI development studio IBM plans to buy DataStax, the AI and data biz that supports and contributes to the open source Cassandra wide column database....

Scientists pool data from ESA and NASA spacecraft to come up with a ferrihydrite theory Scientists reckon the red hue of Mars might have originated in an earlier period in the planet's past when liquid water was widespread on the surface....

More than a dozen women came forward with accusations Details about the harassment allegations leveled at DEF CON veteran Christopher Hadnagy have now been revealed after a motion for summary judgment was filed over the weekend....

Only a test at the moment, but a sign of things to come? Microsoft is quietly testing the waters with an ad-supported version of its Office suite....

Lack of skills left Birmingham officials unable to challenge suppliers and with a system incapable of managing finances Council officers heading up a disastrous Oracle implementation that left Europe's largest local authority unable to manage its finances lacked an understanding of the cloud-based solution they had chosen to buy....

Sly like a PRC cyberattack A Chinese government-backed group is spoofing legitimate medical software to hijack hospital patients' computers, infecting them with backdoors, credential-swiping keyloggers, and cryptominers....

Plus: Fandroid alert - Android devices sometimes say '5G' when connecting to 4G London is bottom of the table when it comes to 5G mobile service, according to a report gauging major European cities on the overall quality of user experience. And, Europe itself lags behind other regions in 5G SA deployment....

What is it with high-powered execs and their love for U2? Ex-Apple design whiz Sir Jony Ive appeared on the BBC's long-running Radio 4 show Desert Island Discs over the weekend. Despite his storied career and close friendship with the late Steve Jobs, his picks were pedestrian even for a Brit in his late 50s....

Fuxnet and FrostyGoop were both used in the Russia-Ukraine war Two new malware variants specifically designed to disrupt critical industrial processes were set loose on operational technology networks last year, shutting off heat to more than 600 apartment buildings in one instance and jamming communications to gas, water, and sewage network sensors in the other....

Dispute settled, but not the causes A clash over different Flatpak-packaged versions of OBS Studio highlights problems with distro-maintained software repositories versus external ones....