The Register

Fight On, State? Not this time Pennsylvania State University has agreed to pay the Justice Department $1.25 million to settle claims of misrepresenting its cybersecurity compliance to the federal government and leaving sensitive data improperly secured....

Security shop and CISA urge rapid action Fortinet has gone public with news of a critical flaw in its software management platform....

Save America's most important manufacturer? More like save our portfolio and let Uncle Sam pick up the pieces Comment A gaggle of ex-Intel board directors have called on the chipmaker to spin off its floundering foundry business while glossing over the fact that a company bleeding billions each quarter is unlikely to survive on its own....

Removal of kernel maintainers linked to Russia attributed to sanctions Linux creator Linus Torvalds on Wednesday affirmed the removal last week of about a dozen kernel maintainers associated with Russia....

We know where you got your skinny jeans - big deal A data thief calling themselves Satanic claims to have purloined the records of around 350 million customers of fashion retailer Hot Topic....

Plus, a POC to make it extra easy for attackers A Microsoft SharePoint bug that can allow an attacker to remotely inject code into vulnerable versions is under active exploitation, according to the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)....

Cassette-bursting medium revived for latest Alien chest-burster flick POLL: Is VHS back? If Alien: Romulus were a zombie movie, The Register could understand why 20th Century Studios has announced that it will release the film on VHS - the video cassette format that hasn't been relevant for two decades and had a crap reputation even in its heyday....

No longer an underdog - it now challenges Arm and x86 Comment The ratification of the RVA23 profile for RISC-V marks a monumental moment for the architecture, and anyone who's been following RISC-V knows that this isn't just a checkbox....

Earnings reported the same day striking union workers vote on a new contract If Boeing's second quarter was dismal, its Q3 numbers are abysmal, giving recently ensconced CEO Kelly Ortberg the perfect opportunity to fly to the rescue with a revitalization plan....

Former Nvidia engineer's discovery shows graphics compute can kick some serious ass A former Nvidia engineer has found the largest known prime number - a whopping 41 million digits long - using an A100 GPU made by his previous workplace to do the grunt work....

Absence makes the cloud grow fonder Rackspace, one of the original creators of OpenStack, has been welcomed back into the fold with a seat on the Board of Directors for the OpenInfra Foundation, which oversees the project after apparently losing interest for several years....

Team sends a flying cooler packed with DIY tech 15 miles up for the test Faced with growing threats to aviation GPS systems, researchers at Sandia National Labs argue we're overlooking a readily available alternative that could work effectively with further research: cellular signals....

As another government yet again seeks to reform UK GDPR, legislators say data must continue to flow UK lawmakers have warned the government that if it doesn't continue to harmonize its post-Brexit data rules with the EU, the consequences could be dire....

Alliance commits to Integrating the architecture into all high-tech products Processor design outfit Codasip is donating an SDK it developed for the CHERI security architecture to the industry body that promotes the technology, saying this will allow its unrestricted use by anyone implementing CHERI on RISC-V....

Author would like to see a switch back to plain old static HTML. Us too Developer Loris Cro reckons his LSP language server for HTML is a world first, and that the absence of such tools up to now has had grave consequences for the web....

Dad, why does this button say ABC? It's a short term trend, says analyst Sales of "dumb" phones are on the rise in the UK, according to telco Virgin Media O2 (VMO2), with parents choosing them instead of smartphones to try and spare their kids from the perils of social media and instant messaging....

GenAI poster child is a 100-story-tall baby with simple infrastructure but extreme demands Interview When OpenAI launched GPT-4 in March last year, it was coy about the model's size and what went into making it. Nonetheless, the current focus of AI-obsessed media and investors is understood to have employed a diverse dataset of around 1 petabyte. Aside from the challenge of getting that data to provide meaningful output, the company was tasked with getting the data in the right place....

There was always more pressing work to do than migrate, and CDNs have changed the rules The chief scientist of the Asia Pacific Network Information Center has a theory about why the world hasn't moved to IPv6....

Congress urged to act before year's end to support US competitiveness More than 60 commercial orgs, non-profits, and academic institutions have asked Congress to pass legislation authorizing the creation of the US AI Safety Institute within the National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST)....

Another step toward tech independence for China - on the day Tim Cook came to town Huawei formally launched its home-brewed operating system, HarmonyOS NEXT, on Wednesday, marking its official separation from the Android ecosystem....

Emergency services had to move a boulder to get her out If you're out and about in nature and drop your phone down a three-meter crevice between some boulders, maybe don't try to retrieve it....

Qualcomm brands ploy as 'unfounded' cash grab Chip designer Arm has reportedly warned chipmaker Qualcomm it will soon cancel its license to produce processors using its IP....

Middleware aimed at softening the shortage of AI accelerators Fujitsu has started selling middleware that optimizes the use of GPUs, so that those lucky enough to own the scarce accelerators can be sure they're always well-used....

Azure Blob Storage, AWS, and Twilio keys all up for grabs An analysis of widely used mobile apps offered on Google Play and the Apple App Store has found hardcoded and unencrypted cloud service credentials, exposing millions of users to major security problems....

Meanwhile, Infinera snags up to $93M of the dwindling subsidies The lion's share of the CHIPS Act funding has already been allocated, but Uncle Sam still has tax breaks to hand out, and it's not even being that picky about which kind of chips are eligible....

TaxSlayer, H&R Block, TaxAct, and Ramsey Solutions accused of sharing info with Meta and Google A quartet of lawmakers have penned a letter to the Department of Justice asking it to prosecute tax preparation companies for sharing customer data, including tax return information, with Meta and Google....

From hell's heart I stab at thee Fake review writers are officially on watch - the US is now enforcing a new rule to ban the practice and is promising a crackdown....

Appen points to, among other problems, a lack of high-quality training data labeled by humans The deployment of AI projects and associated return on investment (ROI) have declined, according to a large survey of IT decision-makers....

New flagship SoC drops Arm and grows its own legs with Oryon During day one of Qualcomm's Snapdragon Summit in Maui, Hawaii, it unveiled its latest flagship SoC, dubbed the Snapdragon 8 Elite. This marks a pivotal swing into harnessing the technical prowess of its acquired Nuvia team....

Microsoft blocks updates to avoid giving admins another headache In yet more problems for this month's Windows 11 24H2 update, Microsoft has warned the new code will cause a Blue Screen of Death on some Asus systems due to hardware compatibility issues....

Chip giant tells Uncle Sam someone could be making orders on the sly TSMC has reportedly tipped off US officials to a potential attempt by Huawei to circumvent export controls and obtain AI chips manufactured by the Taiwanese company....

If the first patches don't work, try, try again VMware has pushed a second patch for a critical, heap-overflow bug in the vCenter Server that could allow a remote attacker to fully compromise vulnerable systems after the first software update, issued last month, didn't work....

Unisys, Avaya, Check Point, and Mimecast settled with the agency without admitting or denying wrongdoing Four high-profile tech companies reached an agreement with the Securities and Exchange Commission to pay millions of dollars in penalties for misleading investors about their exposure to the 2020 SolarWinds hack....

Crooks revert to old ways for greater efficiency Experts believe the Akira ransomware operation is up to its old tricks again, encrypting victims' files after a break from the typical double extortion tactics....

Have recent troubles finally humbled Chipzilla? Opinion This week, Intel and AMD set their decades-old rivalry aside to ensure x86 remains relevant amid growing adoption of competing architectures....

Premier indicates possible shift in post-Fukushima policy The global surge in AI is placing unprecedented pressure on energy resources, with chipmakers such as TSMC consuming vast amounts of electricity to meet growing demand for advanced silicon. In response, Taiwan's government is signaling a potential shift in its longstanding opposition to nuclear energy to address its mounting power needs....

Biz aims to scrub unnecessary dependencies from npm packages in the name of security Security-focused developer Socket announced on Tuesday it has connected with another $40 million in funding to further its efforts to safeguard the software supply chain....

Exec Chris Bergey tells us what the chip designer is doing to stay competitive Interview Arm Holdings has long been the primary architecture for mobile chips since the advent of modern smartphones - its Cortex is quietly humming away inside almost every phone or tablet you can think of. However, with Apple and Qualcomm producing their own custom silicon designs, Arm's market dominance appears less secure....

11% of databases still on aging version with a month of support left Users of PostgreSQL 12 have less than a month to prepare for the database to enter end of life and become unsupported....

More senior than Windows itself, and still runs the world Microsoft Excel, the true successor to the throne of COBOL. Version 1.0 was released on the last day of September 1985, four decades ago....

Carriers consume less than half the cloud they committed to use Telecom companies have consumed only 48 percent of the cloud they have committed to, yet seek to secure more, according to a report released late last week by Infosys....

We sell that to OpenAI - how dare you steal it and make stuff up Major US news publishers Dow Jones & Co and NYP Holdings have sued AI search engine startup Perplexity for scraping their content without paying for it....

Could organoid-driven computing be the future of AI power? Researchers affiliated with the neuroscience platform FinalSpark have devised a 3D simulation depicting a butterfly that's directed by human brain cells....

Miscreants combine it with an equally tricky piece of social engineering The Ghostpulse malware strain now retrieves its main payload via a PNG image file's pixels. This development, security experts say, is "one of the most significant changes" made by the crooks behind it since launching in 2023....

Current capabilities mean local manufacturing is not likely - but a chip tuned to Indian needs could work India's government is reportedly in talks with Nvidia to co-develop AI silicon....

Intel and AMD left scrapping over about a third of the deal, and license fees Most years, China Telecom posts a tender for new servers to help it run the apps it needs to serve its hundreds of millions of customers. This year, its 150,000-plus orders will mostly go to domestic manufacturers who use local tech....

No losses caused - except the intern's job - says TikTok parent ByteDance has terminated an intern for "maliciously interfering" with a large language model training project....

Tokyo between a rock and a hard place as Beijing threatens to retaliate The "chip wars" between the US and China have taken a new turn with members of a House Select Committee threatening action against Japanese companies if the country does not do more to restrict sales of chipmaking kit to China....

Pending CCP drone ban could render the suit irrelevant Chinese drone maker DJI has sued the US Department of Defense, alleging it was added to a list of companies affiliated with the Chinese military and denied the opportunity to protest its innocence....

Biden's Executive Order finally getting its day in the sun, soonish The US federal government is poised to implement an Executive Order that would ban data brokers selling significant amounts of information to buyers in six countries....