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Wisdom of the oldies or just a traditional fear of malware? Nearly half of Americans are using third-party antivirus software and the rest are either using the default protection in their operating system - or none at all....

Anniversary time and both are going strong into their 30s The FreeDOS project celebrates its 1994 beginnings, about a week before Amazon - and just a year after FreeBSD got started....

Number of partners acknowledging data theft continues to rise The number of financial institutions caught up in the ransomware attack on Evolve Bank & Trust continues to rise as fintech businesses Wise and Affirm both confirm they have been materially affected....

And if court finds for gaming giant? It's-a me! Bankruptcy! Mario has tossed blue shells at what Nintendo alleges are two figures deeply involved in the piracy and circumvention of the Switch console ecosystem....

Board to take non-binding vote at mega SaaS haus into consideration Investors have turned down billionaire Marc Benioff's bid for greater compensation from Salesforce, the SaaS company he helped found 25 years ago, a proxy statement filed on Monday reveals....

Ta shoh scansh mie, son ymmyd Google is adding more languages to Google Translate - lots more. This time around, 110 of them, including Manx....

FOSS, AI, blockchain, and the cycle of empty nonsense Devconf.cz This year, along with all the usual in-depth technical talks about Linux at Red Hat's Devconf.cz developer conference, there were also several people there to promote AI-linked projects and the tech bros' previous favorites - blockchain projects....

Researchers expect treatment to be available clinically in around 5 years Researchers have shown a combination of special surgery and a bionic limb can enhance walking speed in some amputees by 40 percent, within the range of able-bodied individuals....

Dependency manager used in millions of apps leaves a bitter taste CocoaPods, an open-source dependency manager used in over three million applications coded in Swift and Objective-C, left thousands of packages exposed and ready for takeover for nearly a decade - thereby creating opportunities for supply chain attacks on iOS and macOS apps, according to security researchers....

Vultures chew over a busy few days in orbit with a transatlantic chat Kettle It's been a busy time for space, with Boeing's test pilots stuck (at time of writing) on the International Space Station due to a faulty capsule, and then being forced to take shelter from debris....

Notorious 'Andariel' crew takes a bite of HotCroissant backdoor for fresh attack A South Korean ERP vendor's product update server has been attacked and used to deliver malware instead of product updates, according to local infosec outfit AhnLab....

This is more than a thought bubble: Beijing aspires to dominate international standards China's government wants to develop a standard for brain-computer interfaces....

Nation turns once again to technology to help with declining population Japan has loosened its ride-sharing rules to allow more passengers to use the services when it rains....

As ever, terms and conditions apply YouTube has enacted privacy guidelines that allow people to request the removal of AI-generated videos that mimic them....

Matters like antitrust cases against AI players, Adobe's subscription mess, and net neutrality could be decided by judges - not experts Analysis The US Supreme Court has ruled that the judges should no longer defer to government agency interpretations of ambiguous laws - a decision with potential ramifications for some of the biggest cases against tech companies....

Euro nation's monopoly gendarmes cheesed off with GPU giant's dominance French regulators are reportedly poised to bring charges against Nvidia over alleged anti-competitive practices....

Sites and apps aren't given a say? That doesn't seem very free speech The US Supreme Court on Monday told lower courts to reconsider separate, conflicting rulings on social media laws in Florida and Texas because those courts failed to properly think about the free speech rights of internet platforms....

Why sell shovels when you can rent them In the AI gold rush, if you can't be the one selling the GPUs then the next best thing could be to rent them. This week, we learned that Lambda is seeking $800 million in funding to do just that....

Facebook, Instagram gobble up same data whether you hand over cash or not European Union antitrust regulators have accused Meta of violating the bloc's Digital Markets Act (DMA) with its "pay or consent" advertising model, a source of complaints since it was announced last year....

It's already sold out of stock for this year and next High bandwidth memory (HBM) is becoming a key technology in the continued AI investment race as SK hynix plans to spend billions on memory chip production and China's Huawei looks to develop its own in partnership with a local foundry....

Because the best place for a troubled supplier is beneath the wing of original parent company Nineteen years and a whole bunch of controversy later, Boeing has decided to reacquire Spirit AeroSystems, maker of parts including the door plug included in select Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft....

Must be hard to face a huge, unexpected bill, amirite? In one of the most massive patent verdicts in legal history, a federal jury in East Texas has ordered cellular giant Verizon to pay patentholder General Access Solutions $847 million....

Full system takeovers on the cards, for those with enough patience to pull it off Glibc-based Linux systems are vulnerable to a new bug (CVE-2024-6387) in OpenSSH's server (sshd) and should upgrade to the latest version....

Better management of critical materials or retaliation for sanctions? Beijing has decreed that rare earth metals belong to the state under new regulations said to be aimed at protecting supplies in the name of national security, but which will be seen as another shot in the ongoing tech wars with the US....

Project including SAP upgrade beset by cost increases and delays The UK's third-largest grocery retailer has spent 430 million ($544 million) on its IT separation from US giant Walmart....

Get 'em while they're hot A critical vulnerability affecting Juniper Networks routers forced the vendor to issue emergency patches last week, and users are advised to apply them as soon as possible....

There will always be bad actors in the system. We can always learn from the drama they create Opinion Libraries. Hushed temples to the civilizing power of knowledge, or launchpads of global destruction? Yep, another word tech has borrowed and debased. Code libraries are essential for adding just the right standard tested functionality to a project. They're also a natural home for supply chain attacks that materialize malware in the heart of the enterprise like shock troops of Klingons arriving by transporter beam....

Jen Easterly hopes CSRB's Microsoft report won't impede future private sector collaboration CISA director Jen Easterly says the Cybersecurity Safety Review Board (CSRB) "is not afraid to say when something is amiss" in response to questions about fears around private sector collaboration following the board's scathing Microsoft report....

With so many DB vendors to choose from, our vulture claws over the bewildering choices DataStax recently joined a growing band of database specialists in launching new tooling with the promise of helping customers build GenAI apps on its data platform. Yet the question remains for customers employing multiple databases: Which vendor - if any - should they choose as the main plank to support GenAI application development?...

Not much if wielded by the experienced and careful operator in this story - but he was not the only actor in this tale Who, Me? Yet again Monday is upon us, bringing the prospect of another working week filled with joy, opportunity, new horizons, and a fresh dose of Who, Me? - The Reg's weekly confessional in which readers share stories of jobs that had promising beginnings, and ... interesting ends....

10, 9, 8 ... hang on, did anyone check we bolted this thing down properly? Private Chinese launch outfit Space Pioneer has launched a rocket by mistake....

Fasten your seat belts, secure your tray table, and try not to give away your passwords Australia's Federal Police (AFP) has charged a man with running a fake Wi-Fi networks on at least one commercial flight and using it to harvest fliers' credentials for email and social media services....

President has ordered a datacenter audit and made backups mandatory Indonesia's president Joko Widodo has ordered an audit of government datacenters after it was revealed that most of the data they store is not backed up....

Plus: US auto dealers still offline; Conti coders sanction; Rabbit R1 hardcoded API keys; and more security in brief It took a while, but Microsoft has told customers that the Russian criminals who compromised its systems earlier this year made off with even more emails than it first admitted....

Plus: Singapore launches global regulatory blockchain; China gets new SciTech boss; India spectrum auction fizzles Asia In Brief China's Ministry of State Security has asked citizens to stop posting info about the nation's spy satellites and national security installations online....

Prioritizing Mexico and Southeast Asia Alibaba Cloud has revealed that it will soon close its datacenter operations in Australia and India - despite previously telling The Register its Australian operations remained intact....

A picture is worth a 1,000 words... or was that a 1,000 TOPS Hands On The launch of Microsoft's Copilot+ AI PCs brought with it a load of machine-learning-enhanced functionality, including an image generator built right into MS Paint that runs locally and turns your doodles into art....

I'll get you next time, Gadget, next time! Despite a European Commission review in April clearing Microsoft of trying to exert control over OpenAI by the backdoor, the duo's $13 billion partnership hasn't escaped regulatory scrutiny just yet....

Impact studies crucial for accurately determining Red Planet's age Seismic data from Mars indicates that our neighboring planet is hit about three hundred times a year by meteorites the size of basketballs....

Yes, Joe totally had editing help that night, he was certainly impresszzz.... Poll OpenAI's ChatGPT fell for an inaccurate claim that Thursday night's US presidential debate between Trump and Biden on CNN would have a one to two-minute delay, rather than the usual few seconds....

Unless you've got a lawyer, that is Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, said this week that machine-learning companies can scrape most content published online and use it to train neural networks because it's essentially "freeware."...

Funny what happens if you take Tesla out of the numbers, though Interest in electric vehicles has waned slightly among US motorists for the first time since 2020 says Pew Research, with only three out of ten Americans right now saying they're considering a battery-powered ride for their next purchase....

So, so many lines of memory-unsafe routines in crucial open source, and unsafe dependencies The US government's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has analyzed 172 critical open source projects and found that more than half contain code written in languages like C and C++ that are not naturally memory safe....

Same APT29 crew that hit Microsoft and SolarWinds. How close were we to a mega backdoor situation? TeamViewer says it was Russian intelligence that broke into its systems this week....

Starlink rival slips again, but service still set for 2025 The first full-scale mission of Amazon's Project Kuiper has slipped to the end of 2024, a year after the company finally got its prototype satellites into orbit....

So that's fine then Bill Gates says the massive power draw required for AI processing is nothing to worry about as AI will ultimately identify ways to help cut power consumption and drive the transition to sustainable energy....

Nobody would want a roller coaster ride in one of these long-promised flying cabs NASA is testing what makes air taxi passengers comfortable - and uncomfortable - with a custom VR simulation rig....

Move comes weeks after Mozilla blasted certificate authority for failings Google is severing its trust in Entrust after what it describes as a protracted period of failures around compliance and general improvements....

Seeing weird warnings in Microsoft 365 and Office Online? That'll be why Microsoft has expiration issues with its TLS certificates, resulting in unwanted security warnings....

Horizon system expert denied tailoring evidence in convictions later quashed Gareth Jenkins, former distinguished engineer at Fujitsu Services Ltd, said he "clearly got trapped into doing things that I shouldn't have done" when giving technical evidence that led to the wrongful conviction of Post Office workers in one of the biggest IT scandals to hit the UK....