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Multiple internal studies allegedly buried by the company Is Meta acting like a tobacco company denying cigarettes cause cancer, or an oil giant downplaying climate science? Lawyers in a recent court filing claim the social media titan buried internal research for years suggesting its platforms can harm children's mental health....

The hardest part is admitting you were wrong, which AWS did. Opinion For years, Google has seemingly indulged a corporate fetish of taking products that are beloved, then killing them. AWS has been on a different kick lately: Killing services that frankly shouldn't have seen the light of day....

By removing the stigma of reward hacking, AI models are less likely to generalize toward evil Sometimes bots, like kids, just wanna break the rules. Researchers at Anthropic have found they can make AI models less likely to behave badly by giving them permission to do so....

Don't believe everything you read Afraid of connecting to public Wi-Fi? Terrified to turn your Bluetooth on? You may be falling for "hacklore," tall tales about cybersecurity that distract you from real dangers. Dozens of chief security officers and ex-CISA officials have launched an effort and website to dispel these myths and show you how not to get hacked for real....

Start-up claims to have booked orders for 144 miniaturized reactors totaling 11GW across US and UK Amazon-backed nuclear energy startup X-energy says it has booked orders for 144 small modular reactors (SMRs) which will eventually deliver over 11 gigawatts of power, assuming that they actually get built. And investors continue to support this vision....

Stavros Korokithakis really wanted to slam the receiver on meetings, so he built his own device to do just that We've all been there: A meeting goes sideways and you really wish you could physically slam the phone down and walk away. Maker Stavros Korokithakis knows that feeling well, so he took an old rotary phone and turned it into a device that can dial into - and hang up on - video calls in a decidedly retro fashion....

Accuracy errors or inadvertent unmasking of rage-bait trolls? Probably somewhere in between Elon Musk's X (formerly Twitter) has inadvertently taught a large number of web users an important lesson. Not everyone online is necessarily who you think they are, and you shouldn't believe everything you read....

Somewhere between a cover version and a loving homage of the interface that helped shape the modern desktop LisaGUI is a faithful reconstruction of the desktop and user interface of Apple's Lisa, the workstation that fed ideas into the early Macintosh, and it shows that there are still things to learn from that system....

DAOS needs user education, Nvidia GPU access, and better manageability to grow DAOS has been a great success in the traditional HPC/supercomputing world, but is nowhere in the new, AI-focused, GPU supercomputing arena. What will it take for DAOS to find customers outside its high-end, legacy supercomputing niche?...

Japanese team finds 80% of the tiny plant cells remained viable after 283 days in orbit Moss has been shown to survive one of the harshest environments imaginable: the exterior of the International Space Station (ISS)....

Fluent Bit has 15B+ deployments ... and 5 newly assigned CVEs A series of "trivial-to-exploit" vulnerabilities in Fluent Bit, an open source log collection tool that runs in every major cloud and AI lab, was left open for years, giving attackers an exploit chain to completely disrupt cloud services and alter data....

SitusAMC rules out ransomware, but accounting records for major institutions potentially affected Real estate finance business SitusAMC says thieves sneaked into its systems earlier this month and made off with confidential client data....

Trojanized npm packages spread new variant that executes in pre-install phase, hitting thousands within days A self-propagating malware targeting node package managers (npm) is back for a second round, according to Wiz researchers who say that more than 25,000 developers had their secrets compromised within three days....

WordPad died for this? Microsoft is shoveling yet more features into the venerable Windows Notepad. This time it's support for tables, with some AI enhancements lathered on top....

Chocolate Factory wins contract to build fully disconnected systems for training and operational support NATO has hired Google to provide "air-gapped" sovereign cloud services and AI in "completely disconnected, highly secure environments."...

Months after China-linked spies burrowed into US networks, regulator tears up its own response The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has scrapped a set of telecom cybersecurity rules introduced after the Salt Typhoon espionage campaign, reversing course on measures designed to stop state-backed snoops from slipping back into America's networks....

Report warns of 2030s capacity crunch without expanding mid-band airwaves The GSMA says 6G networks will need up to three times the spectrum currently allocated to mobile operators to meet anticipated demands for data....

Agencies have until December 12 to mitigate flaw that was likely exploited before Big Red released fix CISA has ordered US federal agencies to patch against an actively exploited Oracle Identity Manager (OIM) flaw within three weeks - a scramble made more urgent by evidence that attackers may have been abusing the bug months before a fix was released....

Costs a tenner a shot instead of 1M per anti-aircraft missile Britain's Royal Navy ships will be fitted with the DragonFire laser weapon by 2027 - five years earlier than planned - following recent successful trials involving fast-moving drones....

Unusual holiday drive raises cash for the people keeping critical code alive The Open Source Pledge organization is working to combat the problems of FOSS maintainers not getting paid, and the closely related issue of developer burnout, with a Thanksgiving-themed campaign....

Coding purists once considered BASIC harmful. AI can't even manage that Opinion It is a truth universally acknowledged that a singular project possessed ofprospects is in want of a team. That team has to be built from good developers with experience, judgement, analytic and logic skills, and strong interpersonal communication. Where AI codingfits in remains strongly contentious. Opinion on vibe coding in corporate IT is more clearly stated: you're either selling the stuff or steering well clear....

Lack of effective data flows and reduced scientific investment hampered response During the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK, it took up to three weeks for confirmed cases to be recorded on the health database used at the time....

Customer signed off and a remaining staffer triggered the mess Who, Me? Welcome to Monday morning and therefore to a new instalment of Who, Me? It's The Register's weekly column that shares your tales of workplace errors and absolution....

The shoemaker's children have new friends The International Association for Cryptologic Research will run a second election for new board members and other officers, after it was unable to complete its first poll due to a lost encryption key....

Or maybe even sooner, warns Octave Klaba, as AI sends storage costs soaring The price of some cloud services will have to rise by five to ten percent by mid-2026, maybe sooner, according to Octave Klaba, CEO of French cloud OVH....

PLUS: Manga publishers win Cloudflare copyright case; India, EU to link payment systems; Storm over Australia's weather website; And more! Asia In Brief Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy has suggested Indian citizens should work 72-hour weeks, up from his previous target of 70 hours....

PLUS: CISA issues drone warning; China-linked DNS-hijacking malware; Prison for BTC Samourai; And more Infosec In Brief Researchers have urged users of the glob file pattern matching library to update their installations, after discovery of a years-old remote code execution flaw in the tool's CLI....

A lot of companies are turning to employee monitoring tools to make sure workers aren't slacking off The COVID-19 lockdown meant a surge in remote work, and the trend toward remote and hybrid workplaces has persisted long after the pandemic receded. That has changed the nature of workplace management as well. Bosses can't check for butts in seats or look over their employees' shoulders in the office to make sure they're working instead of having a LAN party. So they've turned to software tools to fill the gap....

Browser maker wraps cloud AI data processing in confidential computing Brave Software has joined the rush to make using cloud-based AI services more private....

With power in such short supply, every watt counts SC25 Power is becoming a major headache for datacenter operators as they grapple with how to support ever larger deployments of GPU servers - so much so that the AI boom is now driving the adoption of a technology once thought too immature and failure-prone to merit the risk....

Catch: you have to plug it into a computer first If you've ever watched Mission Impossible, where Jim Phelps gets instructions from an audio tape that catches fire after five seconds, TeamGroup has an external SSD with your name on it. The T-Create Expert P35S is a portable USB-powered SSD that comes with a self-destruct button, which wipes all your data and physically renders the device useless....

RECAP agent overcomes model alignment efforts to hide memorized proprietary content If you've ever wondered whether that chatbot you're using knows the entire text of a particular book, answers are on the way. Computer scientists have developed a more effective way to coax memorized content from large language models, a development that may address regulatory concerns while helping to clarify copyright infringement claims arising from AI model training and inference....

Shiny talks to The Reg EXCLUSIVE ShinyHunters has claimed responsibility for the Gainsight breach that allowed the data thieves to snarf data from hundreds more Salesforce customers....

But the Wiring folks were disenchanted even before Qualcomm swallowed Arduino Qualcomm quietly rewrote the terms of service for its newest acquisition, programmable microcontroller and SBC maker Arduino, drawing intense fire from the maker community for grabbing additional rights to user-generated content on its platform and prohibiting reverse-engineering of what was once very open software....

It's unclear how much scandium and gallium ElementUSA will contribute to the supply chain, or when The US Department of Defense is asserting its desire to be an integral part of the American rare earths and critical minerals supply chain with a deal to establish a domestic pipeline of gallium and scandium production....

Cost of insuring against Oracle debt default spikes as September seems a long time ago opinion The weather's cooling, and so is Wall Street's patience with Oracle's AI makeover. Big Red is spending big, and the risk metrics aren't looking cozy....

Poetry proves potent jailbreak tool for today's top models Are you a wizard with words? Do you like money without caring how you get it? You could be in luck now that a new role in cybercrime appears to have opened up - poetic LLM jailbreaking....

Want out of those new 'smart features'? We've got you covered Google's "don't be evil" ethos is so 2015. These days, the Chocolate Factory is all about integrating users with bots, whether they like it or not. Now, it's rolling out Workspace "smart features" that process personal content with AI, and many users are finding the settings enabled by default....

Redesigned booster ruptures during early checks, delaying latest Starship iteration SpaceX has responded to Blue Origin's announcement of a heftier version of its New Glenn rocket in the only way it knows how - by accidentally destroying a Starship booster....

Prosecutors say front companies, falsified paperwork, and overseas drop points used to dodge US export rules Four people have been charged in the US with plotting to funnel restricted Nvidia AI chips into China, allegedly relying on shell firms, fake invoices, and covert routing to slip cutting-edge GPUs past American export controls....

Redmond dusts off Infocom's classic text adventures and puts the originals into public hands Microsoft developer boss Scott Hanselman saved the company's Ignite shindig this week by unveiling the source code for Zork I-III, all available under the MIT license....

Storing credentials safely and securely is the real trick It's important to have your login in hand, literally. Zi Teng Wang, a magician who implanted an RFID chip in his appendage, has admitted losing access to it because he forgot the password....

UK cops trace street-level crime to sanctions-busting networks tied to Moscow's war economy On Christmas Day 2024, a Russian-linked laundering network bought itself a very special present: a controlling stake in a Kyrgyzstan bank, later used to wash cybercrime profits and funnel money into Moscow's war machine, according to the UK's National Crime Agency (NCA)....

EFF wants to know if citizens had their First Amendment rights violated The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is suing two government departments to understand how they compelled tech companies to remove ICE-tracking apps and websites from their platforms....

Nvidia CPUs and GPUs dominate the bi-annual leaderboard, but FP64 performance regressions leave its long term prospectives in doubt SC25 There's a new efficiency champ at the top of the Green500 ranking of the world's most sustainable supercomputers....

Decision marks second penalty issued under the UK's Online Safety Act The UK's online regulator has lobbed a 50,000 fine at an AI nudification website for failing to implement mandatory age checks, potentially allowing under-18s to waltz past the virtual velvet rope....

Committee hears departments may have to stump up cash before savings materialize A UK tech minister has declined to put a figure on the cost of the government's digital ID plans as MPs question the contributions expected from central departments....

The tech is impressive. Shoehorning it into absolutely everything is not Opinion In a tweet lamenting all the "cynics" unmoved by AI, Microsoft AI boss Mustafa Suleyman demonstrated that Redmond's Reality Distortion Field is running at full power....

AutoGuard uses injection text for good Computer scientists based in South Korea have devised what they describe as an "AI Kill Switch" to prevent AI agents from carrying out malicious data scraping....

Somewhat daft scheme worked until it didn't On Call The working week can be burdensome, so each Friday morning The Register tries to lighten the load by bringing you a new instalment of On Call, the reader-contributed column in which you let go of tech support stories that weigh on your memory....