The Register

1. Undock, bring Butch and Suni home on Starliner, 2. Launch Crew-9, 3. Do the handover, 4. Bring Crew-8 home NASA will be launching a crew atop a Falcon 9 in the coming weeks as the SpaceX workhorse returned to flight with three Starlink launches over the weekend....

Axe attack comes just days after arsonists target rail network Fiber optic internet cables across France have been cut in an apparent act of sabotage, resulting in outages across the country....

No mention of malware or ransomware - somewhat of a rarity these days HealthEquity, a US fintech firm for the healthcare sector, admits that a "data security event" it discovered at the end of June hit the data of a substantial 4.3 million individuals. Stolen details include addresses, telephone numbers and payment data....

Happy Sysadmin Day Google celebrated Sysadmin Day last week by apologizing for breaking its password manager for millions of Windows users - just as many Windows admins were still hard at work mitigating the impact of the faulty CrowdStrike update....

Fnding your code on the cutting room floor decades after the event Ever thought you'd committed an elegant bit of code, only to find that somebody else decided to drop it because "that's the way we've always done things"? If so, you aren't alone. It happens to Microsoft engineers too....

Former business minister Vince Cable testifies, highlighting misinformation and oversight failures Officials at the government department responsible for the Post Office sent out misleading information to MPs about court cases relating to the Horizon IT system, an inquiry into one of the UK's greatest miscarriage of justice has heard....

Outsmarting Ubuntu's midlife crisis and dodging Flintstone-sized bugs Linux Mint 22 "Wilma" debuted late last week and holds on to the crown as the most sensible choice if you're looking to move across from Windows....

A headset for workers who want to stride around the room bellowing Review Logitech has released a lightweight headset aimed squarely at business users. While there are Bluetooth and connectivity options aplenty, the quality of the materials matches the headset's low price....

Neil stepped on a rock. We're surfing an interstellar wave 9,000 light years long. Go us Opinion Fifty-five years after Neil Armstrong's one small step, and the future it promised has not come to pass. Nobody has gone back to the Moon since the end of the Apollo program, let alone out to Mars. As for Clarke and Kubrick's oh-so-plausible 2001 trip to Jupiter with a hallucinating AI, well, one out of two isn't bad. But while those futures didn't happen, what we have instead is unimaginably better....

When even tape can't save you, procrastination is a problem Who, Me? Greetings once again, gentle reader, and welcome to another instalment of Who, Me? in which Reg readers like yourselves soften the start of the work week with reminders that we all sometimes make mistakes....

Promises to discourage use of kernel drivers - so they don't crash the world again Microsoft has admitted that its estimate of 8.5 million machines crashed by CrowdStrike's faulty software update was almost certainly too low, and vowed to reduce infosec vendors' reliance on the kernel drivers at the heart of the issue....

Because clearly it's better for Beijing to know who you are than for every ISP and social service to keep its own records Beijing may soon issue "cyberspace IDs" to its citizens, after floating a proposal for the scheme last Friday....

Not even Oracle could stop it, claims DoJ The US Department of Justice has alleged that TikTok shipped personal information to China and allowed profiling of the short video app's users based on their attitudes to some ticklish topics....

Promote free use of government data, privacy, canning spam, and more Five years of trade negotiations reached a milestone last Friday with 91 nations agreeing on new norms for e-commerce - among them extension of a moratorium on taxation of cross-border electronic transmissions....

Plus: More stalkerware exposure; a $16M TracFone fine; Ransomware victims don't use MFA, and more Infosec in brief Protecting computers' BIOS and the boot process is essential for modern security - but knowing it's important isn't the same as actually taking steps to do it....

Plus: Grab drops cab merger, Kakao founder goes to the clink, Alibaba denies Jack Ma cronyism, and more APAC in brief Chinese researchers have told The New York Times that open source software has helped them to accelerate AI development....

Google adds machine learning to climate models for 'faster forecasts' Climate and weather modeling has long been a staple of high-performance computing, but as meteorologists look to improve the speed and resolution of forecasts, machine learning is increasingly finding its way into the mix....

Previous outlawing attempt flew off, will this one stick the landing? US senators have been asked again to consider banning the use of drones made by Chinese manufacturer DJI in American airspace after a previous attempt to outlaw the machines was dropped....

FTC boss must be doing something right if folks will pay to get her binned LinkedIn cofounder and venture capitalist Reid Hoffman was quick to express support for Kamala Harris' bid for the US presidency this year after incumbent Joe Biden stepped aside, and now the reason has become clear: He's hoping she'll fire FTC boss and Big Tech arch-critic Lina Khan....

You wouldn't download a performer Actors are back on strike for an entirely unsurprising reason: Studios aren't willing to give video game actors enough protection from artificial intelligence....

Chinese brands ascendant in the country's phone market, but Apple's exile might only be temporary For the first time in a while, the top five smartphone vendors in China are all native, with Apple's position falling to sixth place....

And boy, did last Friday's Windows fiasco ever prove that yet again Opinion CrowdStrike's recent Windows debacle will surely earn a prominent place in the annals of epic tech failures. On July 19, the cybersecurity giant accomplished what legions of hackers could only dream of - bringing millions of Windows systems worldwide to their knees with a single botched update....

Cracked line blamed for leak SpaceX aims to resume launching the Falcon 9 rocket tomorrow after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) agreed to let the company return to flight operations....

Memory veteran to help Gelsinger and co with longstanding internal/external contract manufacturing plans Intel is set to hire an executive from memory chipmaker Micron to head its foundry biz as the company pursues its strategy of turning its former internal manufacturing operations into a money-spinning concern....

Vote below for the best way to celebrate our underappreciated heroes Seven days after CrowdStrike's bad update took down Windows-based computers around the world, System Administrator Appreciation Day has arrived. And what lovely gifts did your employer spoil you with today? Shares in the company? A brand new Cybertruck? A USB stick?...

Bosses regret talking up mission duration as Capsule's lifetime extended to 90 days The crew of the Boeing Starliner will spend the summer aboard the International Space Station (ISS) as NASA and Boeing refused to set a return date for the craft....

These are the kinds of bugs APTs thrive on, just ask the Feds Progress Software's latest security advisory warns customers about the second critical vulnerability targeting its Telerik Report Server in as many months....

The wild world of wrecking our tech Have you ever bitten your phone, or thrown it in anger? How about broken it in a collision with a moose? These are just some of the ways in which people have damaged their digital devices, according to a survey....

Sure, it took three days to do what teenaged brainiacs do in nine hours - but who's counting? Researchers at Google DeepMind claim they've developed a pair of AI models capable of taking home a silver medal in the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) - although not within the allotted time limit....

Framework deal set to run until 2029 as central govt transitions to new ERP SaaS model The UK government has gone to market shopping for back office software in a tender which could be worth up to 5 billion ($6.4 billion)....

The eventful launch of STS-93 and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory Twenty-five years ago, Space Shuttle Columbia launched the Chandra X-ray observatory and nearly ended in catastrophe. As the then-ascent flight director John Shannon observed: "Yikes. We don't need another one of those."...

There's a difference between a warranty and insurance. In this story the latter could fight back On Call Friday is the day the working week goes to die for most people - unless, like many a Reg reader, they're on call to provide tech support at all hours. Which is why we use this day to celebrate those hardy souls with a fresh instalment of On Call - the reader-contributed column that celebrates survival in the face of stupidity, mendacity, and substandard manners....

Management drank the Kool Aid but staff can't cope with new demands Bosses expect artificial intelligence software to improve productivity, but workers say the tool does the opposite, according to a survey by find-a-workplace research org the Upwork Research Institute, a limb of talent-finding platform Upwork....

Pick a hot market - AI, quantum, chips, 6G - and the pair have a plan to work on it together The UK and India agreed on Wednesday to a broad "Technology Security Initiative" that will see the two nations collaborate in ways it's hoped will unlock investment....

We think this means easier-to-administer virtual desktops with extra shiny Omnissa, the newly independent business created by Broadcom's spinoff of VMWare's end-user compute arm, has proclaimed it will become a source of "AI-infused autonomous workspaces"....

Microsoft, Mandiant, weigh in with info about methods used by Andariel gang alleged to have made many, many, heists The US Department of Justice on Thursday charged a North Korean national over a series of ransomware attacks on stateside hospitals and healthcare providers, US defense companies, NASA, and even a Chinese target....

May even have targeted other malware gangs, and infosec researchers Infosec researchers have discovered a network of over three thousand malicious GitHub accounts used to spread malware, targeting groups including gamers, malware researchers, and even other threat actors who themselves seek to spread malware....

We offer this formula instead: RND(100.0)*(10^9) The cost of CrowdStrike's apocalyptic Falcon update that brought down millions of Windows computers last week may be in the billions of dollars, and insurance isn't covering most of that....

Team America AI Police? Sam Altman has called for a US-led coalition of nations to ensure AI remains a vehicle for freedom and democracy, and not a tool for authoritarians to keep themselves in power and dominate others....

PSA: Only accept updates via official channels ... ironically enough CrowdStrike is the latest lure being used to trick Windows users into downloading and running the notorious Lumma infostealing malware, according to the security shop's threat intel team, which spotted the scam just days after the Falcon sensor update fiasco....

Launching in Beta is so 2014. We're in the prototype limited sign-up era now After months of speculation, shy and retiring OpenAI has showed the world a glimpse of its very own web search engine powered by AI....

And the forking Microsoft-owned code warehouse doesn't see this as much of a problem Researchers at Truffle Security have found, or arguably rediscovered, that data from deleted GitHub repositories (public or private) and from deleted copies (forks) of repositories isn't necessarily deleted....

900 Mbps from Earth to orbit, and I still can't get reliable Wi-Fi in my backyard Jealous of the fact that the International Space Station has better internet than you do? Well, here's one more benchmark to envy: NASA has successfully streamed 4K video from an in-flight aircraft to the ISS and back again....

Following licensing changes, 86% of users head for the door. Coincidence? Only 14 percent of Oracle Java subscribers plan to stay on Big Red's runtime environment, according to a study following the introduction of an employee-based subscription model....

Beijing has a long history of recruiting US residents to carry out various espionage activities The US is looking to prosecute a Chinese immigrant over claims he has been drip-feeding information of interest to Beijing since at least 2012....

Looks a lot like Google's AI Overviews, hopefully without some of the early unfortunate summaries Microsoft is adding generative search to Bing despite the search engine's market share showing no increase after prior AI tech additions....

Chrome and Edge on Windows can now join the fun Apple has introduced its mapping technology to devices outside its ecosystem with a web version that works in Chrome and Edge on Windows PCs....

NXP Semiconductors and Texas Instruments also hit by slowdown Euro chipmaker STMicroelectronics saw revenue and net income slump in Q2 of this year, blaming low demand in the automotive sector while orders elsewhere failed to meet expectations, in a hint that the semiconductor industry is still in a rough patch....

For some unknown reason, initial patch was omitted from later versions Docker is warning users to rev their Docker Engine into patch mode after it realized a near-maximum severity vulnerability had been sticking around for five years....

Read the unredacted complaint against Photoshop giant and its software plans Adobe's controversial billing practices and punitive fees for those terminating their subscriptions early follow from the software titan's addiction to revenue, the FTC has said....