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Microsoft removes safeguard hold thanks to updated drivers Microsoft has resolved a Windows 11 24H2 problem with devices using Dirac audio as the 25H2 update waits in the wings....

As doubts grow over who will pay to stuff Oracle's cloud pipeline, the octogenarian spreads his wings Opinion When does imaginary money come before real? If you had bought Oracle shares on Tuesday last week and sold them on Friday, you might have some real cash. But everything else lives in a gray area....

Bank says incident went undetected for over a year before discovery in June A US fintech biz is writing to nearly 700,000 customers because a former employee may have accessed or acquired their data after leaving the company....

Kimsuky gang proves that with the right wording, you can turn generative AI into a counterfeit factory North Korean spies used ChatGPT to generate a fake military ID for use in an espionage campaign against a South Korean defense-related institution, according to new research....

Chip giant accused of breaching conditions of $6.9B Mellanox takeover China has dealt Nvidia another blow, finding the chipmaker in violation of the country's anti-monopoly Law and escalating a long-running regulatory headache into a full investigation....

Downdetector logged 40,000 reports before service flickered back Elon Musk's Starlink satellite broadband network went dark today as thousands of users around the globe reported connectivity issues....

As post-cyberattack layoffs begin, labor org argues UK goverment should step in The UK's chief automotive workers' union is calling on the government to establish a Covid-esque furlough scheme for the thousands of individuals who face losing their jobs due to the cyber-related downtime at Jaguar Land Rover....

Sign 'relationship agreement' as Bharti Mittal and Vittal take non-exec directorships BT - Britain's former state-owned telecoms monopoly - has confirmed that execs from Bharti Global, its largest shareholder, are joining the board with immediate effect....

Ministers concerned Treasury governance team may be distracted about supervising vital efforts UK ministers have questioned the government's decision to seemingly downgrade huge public sector tech projects as HM Treasury takes a greater role in so-called "mega-projects."...

Peers will quiz campaigners on whether Ofcom's new measures will actually work, or just add more compliance pain The House of Lords is about to put the latest child-protection plans of UK regulator the Office of Communications (Ofcom) under the microscope....

There's more than warm power supplies and wonky capacitors Opinion The Voyager space probes are dear to the hearts of every geek who can remember the 1980s....

Student thought she had the hang of this 'Linux' thing and its kooky CLI Who, Me? It's Monday morning, and a week of possibilities presents itself to IT pros everywhere. Which is why The Register brings you another edition of Who, Me? It's the reader-contributed column in which we remind you what not to do with your day, your week, and your career, by sharing stories of your worst workplace mistakes and the contortions you made to survive them....

Virtualization tool for hyperscalers now scales to 8,192 vCPUs The Cloud Hypervisor project has introduced a No AI code policy....

PLUS: Japan woos Micron, again; China launches chip dumping probe; Mitsubishi expands opsec empire; and more! Criminals appear to be moving cyber-scam centers to vulnerable countries....

PLUS: China's Great Firewall springs a leak; FBI issues rare 'Flash Alert' of Salesforce attacks; $10m bounty for alleged Russian hacker; and more Infosec In Brief 15 ransomware gangs, including Scattered Spider and Lapsus$, have announced that they are going dark, and say no more attacks will be carried out in their name....

Doing a simple system reset may not be enough to save you from fines and lawsuits With the end of Windows 10's regular support cycle fast approaching, and a good five years since the COVID pandemic spurred a wave of hardware replacements to support remote work, many IT departments are in the process of refreshing their fleets. But what they do with decommissioned systems is just as important as the shiny new ones they buy....

The hardware is now compelling, sales are rising, and there's the chance to create a new experience hands on Folding smartphones have been with us for six years without winning much market share, but after two weeks using Samsung's latest model, and recent reports of surging sales in the category, it feels to me like dual-screened devices are something developers now need to consider....

Newer OSes for unsupported kit, and new browsers for older OSes. There's always a way Any day now, a new version of Apple's macOS is due to launch, and it will exclude the bulk of the Intel-powered models the company has ever sold. However, there are multiple ways to breathe new life into Macs that go back as far as 10 or even 15 years....

Scott LaValley, CEO of Cartwheel Robotics, says robot makers should prioritize social acceptance over capabilities interview Scott LaValley, founder and CEO of Cartwheel Robotics, suspects he may have helped encourage Elon Musk to get into the humanoid robot business....

Although it hasn't been seen in the wild yet A new ransomware strain dubbed HybridPetya was able to exploit a patched vulnerability to bypass Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) Secure Boot on unrevoked Windows systems, making it the fourth publicly known bootkit capable of punching through the feature and hijacking a PC before the operating system loads....

Climate change? No worry - we can solve that later, argues Doug Burgum You would think that the government official responsible for safeguarding the US' natural resources would be opposed to abandoning climate change mitigation pledges in favor of firing up fossil fuels to power AI development....

Top AI chipmakers count on faster, denser, more efficient memory to boost training AMD and Nvidia have already announced their next-gen datacenter GPUs will make the leap to HBM4, and if SK Hynix has its way, it'll be the one supplying the bulk of it....

The OIG says the Cyber Incentive program was rife with 'fraud, waste, and abuse' The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) mismanaged a program designed to retain skilled security professionals so badly that auditors have concluded it left the agency "unable to adequately protect the Nation from cyber threats."...

A similar vuln on Apple devices was used against 'specific targeted users' Samsung has fixed a critical flaw that affects its Android devices - but not before attackers found and exploited the bug, which could allow remote code execution on affected devices....

Gartner survey of Fortune 500 corps shows very few are planning to replace human support staff ai-pocalypse You'll be able to talk to a human when you need help for many years to come. A new Gartner study shows that fears about AI replacing humans with bots in call centers are unfounded, at least among Fortune 500 companies....

Get ready for a fight over who steers the global standard for vulnerability identification The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) nearly let the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) program lapse earlier this year, but a new "vision" document it released this week signals that it now wants more control over the global standard for vulnerability identification....

But it reads at about the speed of punch cards Imagine replacing thousands of LTO-9 tapes with just one cartridge. It's possible - if a Chinese research team's experimental DNA tape storage system reaches its theoretical maximum capacity....

Half of TRACERS satellite duo tripped up by power problems After a month of receiving the silent treatment, controllers have regained contact with a TRACERS spacecraft that went offline shortly after launch....

Managarm, Asterinas, Xous - where disaffected code whisperers could go Between Rust, new file systems, clashes between developers, systemd absorbing its functionality, and more, rumors of possible Linux forks are being muttered again. But there is another, better way....

Dorm management refuses to cover costs after payment system borked More than a thousand university students in the Netherlands must continue to travel to wash their clothes after their building management company failed to bring its borked smart laundry machines back online....

US boffins say Beijing's bargain wafers are burning rivals below cost China is moving to dominate the global market for polysilicon, a key material used in chips, by flooding the industry with cheap, subsidised product to drive producers in other countries out of business....

Mars Sample Return mission still for the chop The US House Appropriations Committee has approved a bill that would maintain NASA's budget at the same level as last year. However, lawmakers missed an opportunity to strike out the proposed $85 million relocation of a space vehicle to Houston....

The first distro vendor to announces its move says nein, danke The next kernelwill have no new bcachefs code - and the openSUSE versions that use that kernel are going further still....

Deal promises sovereign datacenters, AI, and cybersecurity to strengthen communication links with US The UK's Ministry of Defence has signed a 400 million ($540 million) contract with Google sovereign cloud to support security and analytics workloads....

Slack's complaint sparked a five-year investigation, but Redmond walks away fine-free The EU has signed off on Microsoft's concessions over Teams bundling, letting Redmond dodge a monster antitrust fine in a deal that will barely rock the boat for anyone....

Big Brother Watch says a so-called BritCard could turn daily life into one long identity check - and warn that Whitehall can't be trusted to run A national digital ID could hand the government the tools for population-wide surveillance - and if history is anything to go by, ministers probably couldn't run it without cocking it up....

UK data watchdog says students behind most education cyberattacks The UK's data protection watchdog says more than half of cyberattacks in schools are caused by students, and that parents should act early to prevent their offspring from falling into the wrong crowds....

Science fiction? Battle bots already used in Ukraine Opinion I've read military science fiction since I was a kid. Besides the likes of Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers, Joe Haldeman's The Forever War, and David Drake's Hammer's Slammers books, where people held the lead roles, I read novels such as Keith Laumer's Bolo series and Fred Saberhagen's Berserker space opera sf series, where machines are the protagonists and enemies. Even if you've never read war science fiction, you certainly at least know about Terminators. But what was once science fiction is now reality on the Ukrainian battlefields. It won't stop there....

Ethical concerns raised after crook offered themselves up on silver platter Security outfit Huntress has been forced onto the defensive after its latest research - described by senior staff as "hilarious" - split opinion across the cybersecurity community....

Traceroute was also a mystery to this mountebank On Call The very premise on which The Register is built is that our readers know quite a lot about information technology, and that stories featured each Friday in On Call - our weekly tales of your support experiences - therefore reflect your working lives....

Incorruptible e-government AnswerBot Djella', which reportedly runs in Azure, given job of running public procurement Albania's prime minister has proposed appointing an artificial intelligence as a minister....

One console to manage multiple clusters is table stakes, but some users are betting on mixed environments Open source virtualization suite Proxmox has taken an important step towards becoming a stronger contender for those considering VMware alternatives by commencing beta testing for a datacenter management tool that can control multiple hardware clusters....

On the plus side we'll all be getting fewer unwanted emails Microsoft confirmed a major email service outage across North America that is stopping inboxes from filling up and may be hitting other apps when logging in....

Ronak Singhal will be moving onto better and brighter opportunities at the end of the month The chief architect behind Intel's Xeon line of server CPUs is leaving Chipzilla for greener pastures....

Atlantic Council warns US investors are fueling a market that undermines national security After years of being dominated by outsiders, the computer surveillance software industry is booming in the United States as investors rush into the ethically dodgy but highly lucrative field....

For whom the bill tolls Content creation and delivery companies have introduced a digital licensing mechanism in an effort to compensate media makers when AI companies use their work....

Okta uncovers new phishing-as-a-service operation with 'multiple entities' falling victim Multiple attackers using a new phishing service dubbed VoidProxy to target organizations' Microsoft and Google accounts have successfully stolen users' credentials, multi-factor authentication codes, and session tokens in real time, according to security researchers....

Still far short of the 50% market share Arm infra chief was hoping for Nvidia isn't the only one riding the AI boom. During the second quarter, Arm CPUs captured a quarter of the server market, according to a recent Dell'Oro Group report....

It all started with a May report saying that some bot training may need licensing or permission A US appeals court has thrown a wrench into the White House's attempt to oust US Copyright Office director Shira Perlmutter, ruling that the president likely has no authority to fire her....

It's a Republican pressing after DOGE whistleblower flags hostile work environment A US Senator is demanding answers after a Social Security Administration (SSA) employee who blew the whistle on Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) dealings involuntarily resigned last month, citing workplace hostility in response to his concerns....