The Register

Scott LaValley, CEO of Cartwheel Robotics, says robot makers should prioritize social acceptance over capabilities interview Scott LaValley, founder and CEO of Cartwheel Robotics, suspects he may have helped encourage Elon Musk to get into the humanoid robot business....

Although it hasn't been seen in the wild yet A new ransomware strain dubbed HybridPetya was able to exploit a patched vulnerability to bypass Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) Secure Boot on unrevoked Windows systems, making it the fourth publicly known bootkit capable of punching through the feature and hijacking a PC before the operating system loads....

Climate change? No worry - we can solve that later, argues Doug Burgum You would think that the government official responsible for safeguarding the US' natural resources would be opposed to abandoning climate change mitigation pledges in favor of firing up fossil fuels to power AI development....

Top AI chipmakers count on faster, denser, more efficient memory to boost training AMD and Nvidia have already announced their next-gen datacenter GPUs will make the leap to HBM4, and if SK Hynix has its way, it'll be the one supplying the bulk of it....

The OIG says the Cyber Incentive program was rife with 'fraud, waste, and abuse' The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) mismanaged a program designed to retain skilled security professionals so badly that auditors have concluded it left the agency "unable to adequately protect the Nation from cyber threats."...

A similar vuln on Apple devices was used against 'specific targeted users' Samsung has fixed a critical flaw that affects its Android devices - but not before attackers found and exploited the bug, which could allow remote code execution on affected devices....

Gartner survey of Fortune 500 corps shows very few are planning to replace human support staff ai-pocalypse You'll be able to talk to a human when you need help for many years to come. A new Gartner study shows that fears about AI replacing humans with bots in call centers are unfounded, at least among Fortune 500 companies....

Get ready for a fight over who steers the global standard for vulnerability identification The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) nearly let the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) program lapse earlier this year, but a new "vision" document it released this week signals that it now wants more control over the global standard for vulnerability identification....

But it reads at about the speed of punch cards Imagine replacing thousands of LTO-9 tapes with just one cartridge. It's possible - if a Chinese research team's experimental DNA tape storage system reaches its theoretical maximum capacity....

Half of TRACERS satellite duo tripped up by power problems After a month of receiving the silent treatment, controllers have regained contact with a TRACERS spacecraft that went offline shortly after launch....

Managarm, Asterinas, Xous - where disaffected code whisperers could go Between Rust, new file systems, clashes between developers, systemd absorbing its functionality, and more, rumors of possible Linux forks are being muttered again. But there is another, better way....

Dorm management refuses to cover costs after payment system borked More than a thousand university students in the Netherlands must continue to travel to wash their clothes after their building management company failed to bring its borked smart laundry machines back online....

US boffins say Beijing's bargain wafers are burning rivals below cost China is moving to dominate the global market for polysilicon, a key material used in chips, by flooding the industry with cheap, subsidised product to drive producers in other countries out of business....

Mars Sample Return mission still for the chop The US House Appropriations Committee has approved a bill that would maintain NASA's budget at the same level as last year. However, lawmakers missed an opportunity to strike out the proposed $85 million relocation of a space vehicle to Houston....

The first distro vendor to announces its move says nein, danke The next kernelwill have no new bcachefs code - and the openSUSE versions that use that kernel are going further still....

Deal promises sovereign datacenters, AI, and cybersecurity to strengthen communication links with US The UK's Ministry of Defence has signed a 400 million ($540 million) contract with Google sovereign cloud to support security and analytics workloads....

Slack's complaint sparked a five-year investigation, but Redmond walks away fine-free The EU has signed off on Microsoft's concessions over Teams bundling, letting Redmond dodge a monster antitrust fine in a deal that will barely rock the boat for anyone....

Big Brother Watch says a so-called BritCard could turn daily life into one long identity check - and warn that Whitehall can't be trusted to run A national digital ID could hand the government the tools for population-wide surveillance - and if history is anything to go by, ministers probably couldn't run it without cocking it up....

UK data watchdog says students behind most education cyberattacks The UK's data protection watchdog says more than half of cyberattacks in schools are caused by students, and that parents should act early to prevent their offspring from falling into the wrong crowds....

Science fiction? Battle bots already used in Ukraine Opinion I've read military science fiction since I was a kid. Besides the likes of Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers, Joe Haldeman's The Forever War, and David Drake's Hammer's Slammers books, where people held the lead roles, I read novels such as Keith Laumer's Bolo series and Fred Saberhagen's Berserker space opera sf series, where machines are the protagonists and enemies. Even if you've never read war science fiction, you certainly at least know about Terminators. But what was once science fiction is now reality on the Ukrainian battlefields. It won't stop there....

Ethical concerns raised after crook offered themselves up on silver platter Security outfit Huntress has been forced onto the defensive after its latest research - described by senior staff as "hilarious" - split opinion across the cybersecurity community....

Traceroute was also a mystery to this mountebank On Call The very premise on which The Register is built is that our readers know quite a lot about information technology, and that stories featured each Friday in On Call - our weekly tales of your support experiences - therefore reflect your working lives....

Incorruptible e-government AnswerBot Djella', which reportedly runs in Azure, given job of running public procurement Albania's prime minister has proposed appointing an artificial intelligence as a minister....

One console to manage multiple clusters is table stakes, but some users are betting on mixed environments Open source virtualization suite Proxmox has taken an important step towards becoming a stronger contender for those considering VMware alternatives by commencing beta testing for a datacenter management tool that can control multiple hardware clusters....

On the plus side we'll all be getting fewer unwanted emails Microsoft confirmed a major email service outage across North America that is stopping inboxes from filling up and may be hitting other apps when logging in....

Ronak Singhal will be moving onto better and brighter opportunities at the end of the month The chief architect behind Intel's Xeon line of server CPUs is leaving Chipzilla for greener pastures....

Atlantic Council warns US investors are fueling a market that undermines national security After years of being dominated by outsiders, the computer surveillance software industry is booming in the United States as investors rush into the ethically dodgy but highly lucrative field....

For whom the bill tolls Content creation and delivery companies have introduced a digital licensing mechanism in an effort to compensate media makers when AI companies use their work....

Okta uncovers new phishing-as-a-service operation with 'multiple entities' falling victim Multiple attackers using a new phishing service dubbed VoidProxy to target organizations' Microsoft and Google accounts have successfully stolen users' credentials, multi-factor authentication codes, and session tokens in real time, according to security researchers....

Still far short of the 50% market share Arm infra chief was hoping for Nvidia isn't the only one riding the AI boom. During the second quarter, Arm CPUs captured a quarter of the server market, according to a recent Dell'Oro Group report....

It all started with a May report saying that some bot training may need licensing or permission A US appeals court has thrown a wrench into the White House's attempt to oust US Copyright Office director Shira Perlmutter, ruling that the president likely has no authority to fire her....

It's a Republican pressing after DOGE whistleblower flags hostile work environment A US Senator is demanding answers after a Social Security Administration (SSA) employee who blew the whistle on Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) dealings involuntarily resigned last month, citing workplace hostility in response to his concerns....

Original author of open source database 'not surprised' but 'saddened' as critics slam vendor's layoffs Oracle has instigated "widespread layoffs" across its core MySQL development team, sparking concern about the future of one of the world's most popular open-source databases....

Shady, China-based company, all the apps needed for a fully automated attack - sounds totally legit Villager, a new penetration-testing tool linked to a suspicious China-based company and described by researchers as "Cobalt Strike's AI successor," has been downloaded about 10,000 times since its release in July....

Benchmark bonanza shows big wins across JSON, compression, JIT, and more The first release candidate of .NET 10 is out, complete with a "go-live" license, meaning that Microsoft supports production use. The company has also detailed performance improvements in this long-term support release, translating to real-world savings for users....

The technology isn't the hard part, says enterprise business services SVP, it's managing people At Walmart, "everybody's using AI every day across the enterprise," according to David Glick, senior vice president of the retail behemoth's enterprise business services....

FastNetMon says 1.5 Gpps deluge from hijacked routers, IoT kit nearly drowned scrubbing shop A DDoS mitigation provider was given a taste of the poison it tries to prevent, after being smacked by one of the largest packet-rate attacks ever recorded - a 1.5 billion packets per second (1.5 Gpps) flood that briefly threatened to knock it off the internet....

Slicing Windows 11 to the bone while Microsoft piles on the features How low can Windows 11 go? Storage-wise, it can take up less than 3 GB, as demonstrated by some impressive engineering from the same individual behind the Nano11 "diet" build....

AMD Zen hardware and Intel Coffee Lake affected If you thought the world was done with side-channel CPU attacks, think again. ETH Zurich has identified yet another Spectre-based transient execution vulnerability that affects AMD Zen CPUs and Intel Coffee Lake processors by breaking virtualization boundaries....

That won't even warm the plasma America's Department of Energy (DOE) has earmarked $134million in funding for two programs aimed at securing US leadership in emerging fusion technologies. The move comes amid renewed interest in nuclear power sparked by surging datacenter energy demands....

Ron Wyden urges FTC to probe failure to secure Windows after attackers used Kerberoasting to cripple Ascension Microsoft is back in the firing line after US Senator Ron Wyden accused Redmond of shipping "dangerous, insecure software" that helped cybercrooks cripple one of America's largest hospital networks....

Graph database fave also punts for transactional workloads Neo4j has introduced "property sharding" which, according to one analyst, will help overcome its earlier struggles with scalability, while also allowing transactional workloads on the same system....

$50 standalone bots now bundled in $30 package Microsoft is re-badging its Sales, Service, and Finance Copilots and slashing what it charges for them....

Over 600 security boffins say planned surveillance crosses the line Europe, long seen as a bastion of privacy and digital rights, will debate this week whether to enforce surveillance on citizens' devices....

Major UK player cagey on specifics but latest attack follows string blamed on 'third party' suppliers One of the UK's largest rail operators, LNER, is the latest organization to spill user data via a third-party data breach....

Academics and OSA stakeholders say watchdog needs to amend how controversial legislation is enforced Industry experts expressed both concern and sympathy for Ofcom, the Brit regulator that is overseeing the Online Safety Act, as questions mount over the effectiveness of the controversial legislation....

Battery powered now, fuel-cells tomorrow - all packed in a shipping box Following a series of trials, defense biz BAE Systems says it is readying an autonomous military submarine for the end of next year....

Not yet gone and not yet forgotten, but on their way Microsoft has added a raft of web components to its list of deprecated features, including legacy Edge developer tools and hosted web apps....

Admins can't stop checking their portals, survey finds A new survey confirms what many IT pros already know: downtime doesn't exist, with dashboards and alerts intruding on their free time....

Rust coreutils, TPM encryption, and GNOME 49 line up for October debut The Quokka is a small, furry, and perpetually smiling marsupial from Australia. It's very cute - and now it's freezing....