The Register

Plus: Qantas makes contact with 'potential cyber criminal' While the aviation industry has borne the brunt of Scattered Spider's latest round of social engineering attacks, the criminals aim to catch manufacturing and medical tech companies - and even Chipotle Mexican Grill -in tjeor web, as evidenced by hundreds of domains that security researchers say look a lot like phishing websites used by the criminal crews....

They're both silent on what, if anything, has changed Epic Games has settled the case it brought against Samsung over the Korean giant's treatment of third-party app stores on its Galaxy handsets....

Memory from Korea, hard disks from Thailand, plenty of stuff from Japan World War Fee The Trump administration on Monday announced the tariff rates it will impose on fourteen nations starting on August 1st, and several big technology-producing nations made the list....

Investors advised to brace for massive fall from Q1 to Q2 Analysis During the AI gold rush, the next best thing to selling the shovels - that is, the GPUs -is manufacturing the silicon that makes them possible. But while TSMC and SK-Hynix continue to cash in on Nvidia's successes, Samsung hasn't been nearly so fortunate....

Using prompt injections to play a Jedi mind trick on LLMs A handful of international computer science researchers appear to be trying to influence AI reviews with a new class of prompt injection attack....

Forget small modular reactors. Microreactors are the new hotness The new nuclear age of small modular reactors may not have materialized yet, but that's not stopping the US Department of Energy from getting to work on even smaller, more modular reactors with a couple of new commercial partners....

NetScaler vendor issued a patch but otherwise, stony silence Multiple exploits are circulating for CVE-2025-5777, a critical bug in Citrix NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway dubbed CitrixBleed 2, and security analysts are warning a "significant portion" of users still haven't patched....

All the GPUs in the world aren't worth much if you don't have a place to put them CoreWeave just added 1.3 gigawatts of datacenter capacity to its rent-a-GPU scheme with the $9 billion acquisition of crypto-mining outfit Core Scientific, the companies announced Monday....

The iMaker's fight with European regulators continues Apple is on the hook for a 500 million (US $587 million) anti-steering fine in the EU, so it's reportedly doing what any profit-driven enterprise in such a position would do: Appealing....

Lucy in the sky with calcium Astroboffins have found the first evidence of a double-detonated Type Ia supernova, which could explain why we have enough bright points of reference in the skies to plot our place in the universe....

As power concerns beset builds, this floating datacenter can plug into powership next door Japanese shipping biz Mitsui OSK Lines (MOL) is planning to fit out a ship as a floating datacenter that can draw energy from the shore or from an accompanying powership....

Line-judging tech flubs crucial point, leaving players and fans seeing red "You cannot be serious" was likely uttered by more than a few folk watching Russia's Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova versus Britain's Sonay Kartal at Wimbledon yesterday after the tennis tournament's AI line-calling tech dropped the ball....

Official notice confirms delay to cutoff until the end of July. Not to worry, AI modelling's in the wings The US defense department satellite service that's cutting off the flow of data used for hurricane forecasting is doing so "to mitigate a significant cybersecurity risk" to government "high performance computing environments."...

Get your creds in order or risk BEC, ransomware attacks, orgs warned A rise in advanced phishing kits and info-stealing malware are to blame for a 156 percent jump in cyberattacks targeting user logins, say researchers....

Digital map of subterranean infrastructure promised in 2021 set to launch by year end Ordnance Survey, the UK's official map maker, is seeking a tech supplier to help it obtain and manage data from utilities companies for a project that aims to avoid damage to subterranean infrastructure, which costs around 2.4 billion a year....

Tips on who pays when staff don't transfer, when the regulations apply ... and when they don't Comment Few IT leaders or staffers realize just how much automation, AI, and cloud delivery are disrupting the legal and human frameworks that underpin outsourcing - especially when it comes to the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment) Regulations 2006, better known as TUPE....

A virtual environment makes a great de-hype advisor Opinion In human imagination, AIs have been good for two things: trying to take over, and loving a good game. The earliest post-war AI thinkers took it almost for granted that once computers could beat humans at chess, true artificial intelligence would have arrived. Such thinking was disproved 50 years on when IBM's Deep Blue beat Kasparov in 1997. Computers could be very, very good at chess while still having the IQ of a pebble....

Years later, deep into a great tech career, your fellow reader remains inspired by the forgiveness received after the error Who, Me? Monday morning brings many readers a return to the world of adults, which The Register marks by bringing you a new edition of Who, Me? It's the reader-contributed column in which you share stories of making mistakes for which you are somehow forgiven....

Airlines get the chance to cool their jets rather than burn fuel on the ground Airbus last week revealed it has certified a Taxibot" to transport its single-aisle planes from stand to runway....

Red Hat and Open Nebula deliver big updates, as Edera tools for Xen with Rust As VMware pushes its vision for private clouds built around its core virtualization technology, rival vendors are ramping their efforts to create an alternative stack....

PLUS: Lexmark's Chinese owners sell to Xerox; India, Australia, target underwater drones; JPMorgan drops custom TLDs; and more! Asia In Brief Australian collaborationware company Atlassian has migrated the four million Postgres databases that back its customers' Jira implementations to Amazon Web Services' Aurora....

Also, Swiss ransomware posture looks like its cheese, the CVE Program wants YOU, more sus checks and more Infosec In Brief A security researcher looking at samples of stalkerware discovered an SQL vulnerability that allowed him to steal a database of 62,000 user accounts....

SafePay crew claims responsibility for intrusion at one of world's largest tech distributors Ingram Micro, one of the world's largest distributors, has confirmed it is trying to restore systems following a ransomware attack....

Got to be a 'clean space superpower' - right, Brits? Britain's space agency is looking for a supplier to build a robotic spacecraft to capture and de-orbit two defunct UK-licensed satellites from low Earth orbit....

Cuidado! Time to double-check before entering your Microsoft creds Cybersecurity experts are reporting a 19x increase in malicious campaigns being launched from .es domains, making it the third most common, behind only .com and .ru....

It's not cheap or high end, but it should last you for years to come The sixth generation of the Fairphone repairable mobile was launched at the end of June. Now spudger-flingers iFixit have got their hands on it, and liked the result....

Possibility of joining IRIS^2 remote as Britain grapples with fiscal squeeze A UK minister has told Parliament that joining Europe's answer to Starlink - Elon Musk's satellite-based mobile internet service - would be a "stretch" given the nation's current financial challenges....

Shira Perlmutter lost her job after her office published report on generative AI and fair use limits The former head of the US Copyright Office has pushed back against arguments from President Donald Trump's team that her dismissal was lawful....

Venerable command line tool to depart Windows Users still clinging on to PowerShell 2.0 just received notice to quit as the command-line tool is officially leaving Windows....

It's almost like AWS is building its own Stargate deep dive Amazon Web Services (AWS) is in the process of building out a massive supercomputing cluster containing "hundreds of thousands" of accelerators that promises to give its model building buddies at Anthropic a leg up in the AI arms race....

New modeling of carbon cycle shows unsteady but habitable history before liquid water disappeared New models from recent Martian probe data suggest the fourth planet from the Sun once hosted a fluctuating desert environment with intermittent oases of water....

Three months to go until support ends, and Microsoft's flagship operating system squeaks past its predecessor Windows 11 has finally overtaken the market share of its predecessor, with just three months remaining until Microsoft discontinues support for Windows 10....

Fears mount while distie remains silent and phone lines down Exclusive Widespread outages across Ingram Micro's websites and client service portals are being attributed to "technical difficulties."...

'JFC, again?' Microsoft's latest round of layoffs has triggered an outpouring of emotion from inside and outside the company, with at least one former staffer asking: "How many billions must be burned in the AI furnace before this stops?"...

There's more to the Wikimedia organization than the famous encyclopedia Comment Multiple other projects also use the vast linked data store that underpins ubiquitous internet encyclopaedia Wikipedia, and some of them are helping the fight for democracy....

Righteous mockery entranced execs in ways slideware could not On Call Friday dawns with the promise of precious freedom, yet the world of tech support is seldom free from trouble. The Register always finds a way to celebrate anyway, by bringing you a fresh instalment of On Call, the reader-contributed column that tells your tales of breaking away from bad bosses and ungrateful users....

Mistral fears continental companies may not get time to escape 'distant, behemoth corporations' French AI business Mistral on Thursday announced an initiative called AI for Citizens," which it says offers a way to work with governments and public institutions to transform public services using AI....

Zuck backs a digital majority age' and Google open sources tech that might enforce it Google and Meta have independently taken actions to support a safer internet for kids - and given blockchain boosters a moment to celebrate....

If you come out of a coma in 2026, this is the machine you might see staring down at you Taiwanese tech manufacturer Foxconn and Japan's Kawasaki Heavy Industries have revealed a jointly developed robotic nursing assistant they hope to start selling in 2026....

Job cuts aren't big, symbolism of quitting the world's fifth-most-populous nation might be Exclusive Microsoft has decided to close its presence in Pakistan....

A thermoelectric material called CHESS is pretty cool Scientists at Johns Hopkins and Samsung have developed a nano-engineered thermoelectric material that is twice as efficient at material-level cooling as existing alternatives, paving the way for broader adoption of solid-state refrigeration technology....

And with some increases to rural broadband funds, fresh spectrum auctions, and wholesale dismantling of clean energy subsidies Lawmakers have passed President Trump's budget reconciliation but removed one of its most tech-contentious measures - the ban of state-level AI regulation - meaning the law will have little effect on the tech industry....

Researchers find models' success at tests hides illusion of understanding Researchers from MIT, Harvard, and the University of Chicago have proposed the term "potemkin understanding" to describe a newly identified failure mode in large language models that ace conceptual benchmarks but lack the true grasp needed to apply those concepts in practice....

Red-tailed tropicbirds stymie Johnston Atoll maneuvers The US Air Force is putting plans to use rocket landings for resupply missions on hold over environmental concerns about the effect they would have on local seabirds....

Robotaxis, humanoid robots, and fights with Trump can't hide declining EV sales Comment Tesla reported its vehicle delivery and production numbers for Q2 2025 this week, and while the figures weren't quite as low in absolute terms as Q1, they still mark a worrying downward trend as CEO Elon Musk continues to spread his attention across a huge variety of topics unrelated to making and selling electric cars....

Just ignore the warnings. Nothing to see here. Move along A mysterious piece of "under development" code is playing havoc with the Windows Firewall after the latest preview update for Windows 11 24H2....

The insurance SaaS slinger may trade under a different name, but past continues to haunt it Young Consulting's cybersecurity woes continue after the number of affected individuals from last year's suspected ransomware raid passed the 1 million mark....

Biz needs AI infra for training ever larger models, but something's gotta give World War Fee Datacenter operators in Northern Europe say US tariffs and growing global geopolitical instability are inflating costs and causing delays to construction projects....

Vendors have reason to celebrate as geopolitics recalibrate World War Fee The US has lifted the requirement to secure a license before exporting Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools to China, say EDA vendors....

'Deserves fair compensation for the valuable and innovative services'? Which ones are those then? Meta has come out swinging following the European Commission's decision that its pay-or-consent model falls foul of the Digital Markets Act (DMA)....