The Register

UK starts early warning system combing through stuff that folks flush away The UK Health Security Agency is looking to set up an early warning system ahead of future pandemics, launching a 1.3 million (around $1.75 million) program to identify "cutting-edge technologies" which could turn people's pee and poop into valuable data on the spread of viruses....

Idit Levine on going from startup to a billion-dollar valuation Interview "I feel that a founder always needs to be a little bit stupidly optimistic." Solo.io CEO Idit Levine has been on an interesting journey in cloud computing since starting the networking and API management company in 2017....

13 governments sound the alarm about ongoing unpleasantness China's Salt Typhoon cyberspies continue their years-long hacking campaign targeting critical industries around the world, according to a joint security alert from cyber and law enforcement agencies across 13 countries....

Stolen painting still mising, sadly Police in Argentina reportedly raided a home in a coastal town on Monday after someone spotted a real estate ad that included images of art the Nazis looted in the Second World War....

If regulators heed the lessons of Fukushima, testing will have to jump Godzilla-sized hurdles Japan's Nuclear Regulation Authority has requested extra funds to experiment with AI-powered nuclear plant inspectors....

Harvard researchers find model guardrails tailor query responses to user's inferred politics and other affiliations OpenAI's ChatGPT appears to be more likely to refuse to respond to questions posed by fans of the Los Angeles Chargers football team than to followers of other teams....

China would be a $50 billion a year market for Nvidia if Uncle Sam would let us sell competitive products, says Jensen Huang Nvidia's top brass urged Washington to approve the sale of Blackwell accelerators to China during the GPU giant's Q2 earnings call on Wednesday....

VMware tweaked its licenses to suit submarines VMware has tweaked its software licensing so submarines can keep their computers running when they're beneath the waves....

Starting at $2,999, tiny doesn't mean cheap Hot Chips Back in 2023, Nvidia's superchip architecture introduced a new programming model for accelerated workloads by coupling the CPU to the GPU via a high-speed NVLink fabric that makes PCIe feel positively glacial....

There's also a rogue Russian on the list The US Treasury Department has announced sanctions against two Asian companies and two individuals for allegedly helping North Korean IT workers fake their way into US jobs....

AI lowers the bar for cybercrime, Anthropic admits comment Anthropic, a maker of AI tools, says that AI tools are now commonly used to commit cybercrime and facilitate remote worker fraud....

Not a disaster recovery option, but good enough for a migration Microsoft continues to take what's familiar to ordinary users and offer it to enterprises. The latest functionality is Windows Backup for Organizations....

Fast-glob is widely used in government, security lab says updated A Node.js utility used by thousands of public projects - and more than 30 Department of Defense ones - appears to have a sole maintainer whose online profiles identify him as a Yandex employee living in Russia....

Feature rolls out to Microsoft 365 Insiders, stashing unnamed files in OneDrive by default Ever get that sinking feeling when Word crashes before you've made your first save? An application update is set to save the day by automatically enabling autosave to the cloud for new documents, before you've even given them a filename....

Feature bloat, or added value for this JavaScript toolkit? The Bun team has released version 1.2.21 of its JavaScript bundler and runtime, written in Zig, adding features including built-in drivers for MySQL and SQLite, a YAML parser, and a secrets manager for tools and local development....

Stolen dev credentials posted to GitHub as attackers abuse CLI tools for recon Nx is the latest target of a software supply chain attack in the NPM ecosystem, with multiple malicious versions being uploaded to the NPM registry on Tuesday evening....

No stew on the stove, but plenty of heat as devs compete to flag suspect Medicare data Seeking to rein in healthcare fraud, the US Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is seeking explainable AI models that can identify patterns suggestive of malfeasance....

Don't let it happen to you Storm-0501, a financially motivated cybercrime crew, recently broke into a large enterprise's on-premises and cloud environments, ultimately exfiltrating and destroying data within the org's Azure environment. The criminals then contacted the victim via a Microsoft Teams account that they'd also compromised in the attack, demanding a ransom payment for the stolen files....

Chipmaker keen to protect assets as race for 2nm process heats up Taiwanese prosecutors have charged three people over the alleged theft of TSMC's trade secrets....

Vintage computing boffinry to please palmtop enthusiasts Vintage computing enthusiast Colin Hoad has released a gift to anyone who fondly remembers Psion's classic EPOC-based palmtops and their Open Programming Language (OPL): a language server which brings modern quality-of-life features to the OPL programmer, regardless of their development environment....

French provider seizes on Redmond's admission that US law could override local protections Interview European cloud provider OVHcloud has long warned about the risks of relying on foreign tech giants for critical infrastructure - especially when it comes to data sovereignty....

Hybrid of GNUstep and Xfce channels classic NeXT vibes The latest release of GhostBSD, an easy graphical FreeBSD distribution, includes a brand new macOS-like desktop environment, "Gershwin."...

Attackers steal OAuth tokens to access third-party sales platform, then CRM data in 'widespread campaign' Google says a recent spate of Salesforce-related breaches was caused by attackers stealing OAuth tokens from the third-party Salesloft Drift app....

Because the DBaaS has lately become AI-tastic, among other things It's less than two years since MariaDB spun out SkySQL, but it's already unspinning the database-as-a-service outfit, which has since been marinated in AI sauce....

$23B deal with AT&T shows where the money is US telco EchoStar, valued around $14.5 billion on Wednesday morning, has sold its American spectrum allocation to AT&T for $23 billion....

The DevOps dance has new steps, but Virtzilla thinks it can teach ops folks to tango Private clouds are all about keeping developers happy and productive, according to Krish Prasad, senior veep and general manager of Broadcom's VMware Cloud Foundation division....

Explosions all expected and on schedule this time SpaceX has finally managed a test flight of Starship without anything creating an impromptu firework display....

Vendor insists passkeys are the future, but getting workers on board is proving difficult Infosec pros are losing confidence in their identity providers' ability to keep attackers out, with Cisco-owned Duo warning that the industry is facing what it calls "an identity crisis."...

Analysts warn cooling demands could outstrip supplies as heatwaves intensify Water scarcity is rising up the agenda as one of the major concerns for datacenters in Europe following an unusually hot and dry summer, marked by intense heatwaves in southern parts of the continent....

Quick, get some investment money before the bubble bursts The number of companies developing AI processor chips now numbers well over a hundred, according to new research....

Chipzilla's first datacenter part to use 18A process tech is another core-packed monster Hot Chips The first datacenter silicon to use Intel's two-nanometer-class 18A process tech won't arrive for a while yet, but that's not stopping the struggling x86 giant from making its sales pitch early....

Securing internet infrastructure remains a challenging endeavour Systems Approach I've been working on a chapter about infrastructure security for our network security book....

Suspects this was Beijing-backed Typhoon and/or Panda crew targeting diplomats in Asia Google has warned customers of a suspected state-backed attack after observing a web traffic hijacking campaign....

'They have to give us magnets' World War Fee The Chinese lockdown on rare-earth minerals has drawn the ire of President Trump, who is threatening crushing tariffs if the Middle Kingdom doesn't cough up more rare earths....

AI am inevitable, AI firm argues Anthropic is now offering a research preview of Claude for Chrome, a browser extension that enables the firm's machine learning model to automate web browsing....

It will even draw legs and arms not in the source material Google has updated its Gemini AI image generation tool with a build that caused a stir after it was released under the code name Nano Bananas....

Oh, look, a use case for OpenAI's gpt-oss-20b model ESET malware researchers Anton Cherepanov and Peter Strycek have discovered what they describe as the "first known AI-powered ransomware," which they named PromptLock....

From hardware security chips and trusted execution pipelines to open source Root of Trust modules Hot Chips Microsoft is one of the biggest names in cybersecurity, but it has a less-than-stellar track record in the department. Given its reputation, Redmond can't afford to mess around when it comes to securing its cloud customers' data and workloads....

Machine-learning models are automating away some entry-level roles Researchers with the Stanford Digital Economy Lab say that workers between the ages of 22 and 25 in occupations most exposed to AI, like software developers, have seen a 13 percent relative decline in employment compared to other occupations....

Remember that cost-cutting group once led by Elon Musk? Federal employees are still dealing with it A Social Security Administration employee has filed a whistleblower complaint alleging that Donald Trump's DOGE cost-cutting unit has put the records of every single American at risk by duplicating an agency database in an unauthorized cloud environment....

'Many dozens' targeted in ongoing campaign, CheckPoint researcher tells The Reg Cybercriminals are targeting critical US manufacturers and supply-chain companies, looking to steal sensitive IP and other data while deploying ransomware. Their attack involves a novel twist on phishing - and a photo of White House butlers....

Expands VMware Cloud Foundation with AI freebie, new security and storage bits Broadcom has opened its VMware Explore conference in a defiant tone, declaring it now offers a superior user experience compared to public clouds....

Judge says label is 'misleading' A German court has told Apple to stop advertising its Watches as being carbon-neutral, ruling that this was misleading and could not fly under the country's competition law....

The GSA is letting AI chatbot makers jump the FedRAMP queue The US government wants more AI chatbots in fed employees' hands, and its push to do so means that tech companies keen to provide other services will have to get in line behind the LLM makers....

Administrators can get patches installed via Intune before the first login From next month, Windows administrators will be able to inflict Microsoft's quality updates on users via the Out of Box Experience (OOBE) by default....

Criminals already abusing its latest zero-days Citrix has pushed out fixes for three fresh NetScaler holes - and yes, they've already been used in the wild before the vendor got around to patching....

Timer fail blamed for probe going quiet as Venus looms The European Space Agency (ESA) is breathing easier after communications with Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) were restored - the spacecraft is currently barreling toward Venus for a gravity-assist flyby on August 31....

Sideloaders face ID checks, fees, and paperwork as Chocolate Factory tightens gates Google will extend developer verification to all Android apps, not just those installed from the Play Store, beginning with Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand in September 2026, and followed by global rollout in 2027 and beyond....

Tokyo filing adds to mounting actions against startup AI search outfit Perplexity has been hit with yet another copyright lawsuit, this time courtesy of Japan's Nikkei and Asahi media companies....

Remy Ra St Felix led a vicious international crime ring A violent home invader and gunpoint cryptocurrency thief will now spend more than 50 years behind bars after being found guilty of assaulting a witness....