The Register

PLUS: Google's massive AI giveaway in India; Raid on Australian software company; Alleged scam camp owner's assets seized; and more! Asia In Brief Last week's trade talks between the USA and China have seen the two countries ease some trade restrictions....

PLUS: Cyber-exec admits selling secrets to Russia; LastPass isn't checking to see if you're dead; Nation-state backed Windows malware; and more Infosec in brief Australia's Signals Directorate (ASD) last Friday warned that attackers are installing an implant named BADCANDY" on unpatched Cisco IOS XE devices and can detect deletion of their wares and reinstall their malware....

No datacenters required Fortytwo, a Silicon Valley startup, was founded last year based on the idea that a decentralized swarm of small AI models running on personal computers offers scaling and cost advantages over centralized AI services....

The Sunseeker Elite X5 can mow on its own, but it doesn't come cheap The tentacles of AI seem to be reaching everywhere, even to the humble lawnmower. We tested the Sunseeker Elite X5, a robotic mower that uses machine learning to steer around your lawn, to see what happens when artificial intelligence meets whirling blades of doom....

AI promises to find bugs and gaps in your apps After helping expand the modern software attack surface with the rise of AI services prone to data poisoning and prompt injection, OpenAI has thrown a bone to cyber defenders....

The bit barn will run on gas power first. Texas is set to get another nuclear-powered datacenter project thanks to Blue Energy and Crusoe, but any atomic action isn't likely until the next decade....

You click and think you're getting a download page, but get malware instead Imagine searching for Microsoft Teams, seeing a text link at the top of the results, visiting it, and then getting hit with malware. The Rhysida ransomware gang, an especially insidious criminal organization that has stolen millions of people's info, has been placing fake ads for Microsoft Teams in search engines and then infecting victims who make the mistake of clicking them....

Creators baffled as videos on local accounts, unsupported PCs vanish under harmful acts' rule Is installing Windows 11 with a local account or on unsupported hardware harmful or dangerous? YouTube's AI moderation system seems to think so, as it has started pulling videos that show users how to sidestep Microsoft's setup restrictions....

Our house, our rules One of the biggest surprises of my tenure at El Reg so far is the activity in our forums and article comments. Reg readers are engaged, opinionated, and unafraid to express themselves. I love this. Thank you for reading, and for commenting....

The once fearsome process killer is now a leaker of resources Microsoft's ability to add bugs in the most unexpected of places has continued into its latest update to Windows 11, which spawns multiple copies of Task Manager, sucking down resources you'd normally use Task Manager to kill....

Rare case of the state turning on its own, but researchers say it may be doing so more often Russia's Interior Ministry says police have arrested three suspects it believes helped build and spread the Meduza infostealer....

Trim down for obsolete operating system leaves it booting, but not much else Stripping Windows to the bare essentials is a favorite hobby among enthusiasts, especially as Microsoft continues loading its OS with unwanted bloat. The latest achievement is Windows 7 being reduced to 69 MB....

Rough justice? Redmond out as Germany's openDesk judged a better fit The International Criminal Court (ICC) is ditching Microsoft Office for a European software alternative amid mounting fears about being reliant on US technology....

Bitcoin bridge biz offers 10 percent reward to attackers if they play nice Blockchain company Garden admits it was compromised and temporarily shut down its app after approximately $11 million worth of assets were stolen....

Zuckcorp will gladly pay you in 2065 for the eyewatering sums it is borrowing today Even the world's richest companies need outside help to fulfill their datacenter dreams. Now, Meta is selling $30 billion in bonds to build out its infrastructure estate and support its ambition in AI markets. Some of these won't mature for 40 years....

NASA is short of options when it comes to alternatives SpaceX has published an update on its lunar Starship progress, and it still has a long way to go before the impressive-looking renders are translated into reality....

Percona says more than half of installs remain on version set to lose support in 2026 Users have six months to migrate from MySQL 8.0 if they are to stay on a supported version of the open source database, or face security and reliability risks....

Price hikes, politics, and platform fatigue drive organizations back toward open alternatives OpenInfra Summit Sovereignty might be the word of the hour, but the OpenStack community has another - resilience....

Ubuntu's much-maligned format may be finally reaching critical mass Ubuntu Summit More than one Linux-adjacent vendor presented at the Ubuntu Summit, and a small but recurring theme is offering official Snap packages....

TUPE or not TUPE? Not for roles being sent overseas amid a push to meet post-merger rollout targets Exclusive VodafoneThree has told some staff their roles may be offshored to India under new contracts with Ericsson and Nokia - and that employment protections won't apply....

Surrey to be divided into two new councils in first phase of countrywide reorg The UK government will replace Surrey County Council and its 11 borough and district councils with two new unitary councils, which will provide most local services to the area's 1.2 million residents....

Ofcom 'disappointed' by decision that 'goes against the spirit of our rules' Updated Britian's comms regulator has criticized O2 for hiking prices beyond what customers agreed to, exploiting a loophole in rules designed to end unpredictable mid-contract increases....

Hospitals told to upgrade, but some medical device makers haven't prescribed compatibility yet NHS hospitals are being blocked from fully upgrading to Windows 11 by a small number of suppliers that have yet to make their medical devices compatible with Microsoft's latest operating system....

When tech support collides with Halloween, the results are scary On Call Happy Halloween, dear reader! The Register wishes you a wonderfully scary day. To kick things off, we've twisted On Call, our weekly reader-contributed column about keeping computers alive despite the best efforts of zombie coworkers and demonic bosses, to bring tales of times tech support turned spooky....

Because fewer people like banknotes, and payment sovereignty is a problem The Governing Council of the European Central Bank (ECB) has decided the bloc needs a digital version of the Euro, and ordered work that could see it enter circulation in 2029....

HTV-X capsule is designed to hang around in space after delivering cargo to ISS Japan's Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is celebrating after its new cargo carrier docked at the International Space Station....

The spending will continue until AI revenue improves Despite a trickle of bad news from Amazon in recent weeks, the company's business is thrumming along, with AWS leading the way....

No costume idea? We've got you covered Hacking makes the holidays so much more enjoyable, and nothing says trick or treat quite like pwning LED Halloween masks belonging to every neighborhood kid during candy-collection hours....

Company tells users concerned about exfiltration to 'stop it if you see it' A researcher has found a way to trick Claude into uploading private data to an attacker's account using indirect prompt injection. Anthropic says it has already documented the risk, and its foolproof solution is: keep an eye on your screen....

Expired security cert, real Brussels agenda, plus PlugX malware finish the job Cyber spies linked to the Chinese government exploited a Windows shortcut vulnerability disclosed in March - but that Microsoft hasn't fixed yet - to target European diplomats in an effort to steal defense and national security details....

People, Files, and Calendar companion apps gain an auto-installed dose of AI Just when you thought Microsoft had run out of Windows apps to stuff with Copilot, it's cramming the AI into your taskbar companions - People, Files, and Calendar are next....

Microsoft also ramping up spending, but investors concerned about overshooting demand Alphabet, Google's parent company, expects capital expenditures to hit $93 billion in 2025, largely to meet demand from cloud customers, according to its recent financial report....

Service will tell on compromised organizations, even if they didn't plan on doing so themselves Some orgs would rather you not know when they've suffered a cyberattack, but a new platform from privacy-focused tech firm Proton will shine a light on the big breaches that might otherwise stay buried....

State cries foul over "crooked elections" claim in Alabama move The State of Colorado has thrown a sueball at the Trump administration over the president's decision to relocate the headquarters of the US Space Command from Colorado Springs to Alabama....

Windows Desktop installer also fixed after DLL hijack flaw rated 8.8 severity Docker Compose users are being strongly urged to upgrade their versions of the orchestration tool after a researcher uncovered a flaw that could allow attackers to stage path traversal attacks....

US President did discuss chip exports with his counterpart, but made no breakthroughs Talks between US President Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping in South Korea yielded a modest thaw, with the two agreeing to trim tariffs and pause new rare-earth export curbs. But whether Nvidia can sell its latest GPUs to China remains an open question....

Enterprise software giant lifts guidance but adds 'prudence' as federal contracts stall ServiceNow has built some "prudence" into its earnings guidance due to the ongoing US government shutdown....

Big release with a lot of new features - and a few inevitable glitches The KDE Plasma 6.5 graphical shell arrived last week for Unix-like operating systems, and now 6.5.1 is here for the more cautious. The team's squashed over 60 bugs - and they're by no means all new....

PhantomRaven slipped over a hundred credential-stealing packages into npm A new supply chain attack dubbed PhantomRaven has flooded the npm registry with malicious packages that steal credentials, tokens, and secrets during installation. The packages appear safe when first downloaded, making them particularly difficult for security apps to identify....

Dial-up dinosaur finds yet another corporate home as Yahoo waves goodbye Bending Spoons, an Italian tech biz, is buying AOL from Yahoo, funded by a $2.8 billion debt financing package that will also bankroll future acquisitions....

'We should be a public company,' Shuttleworth tells The Reg, just not 'with our trousers around our ankles' Interview An initial public offering is a matter of when, not if, for Canonical founder and CEO Mark Shuttleworth, though interested stock owners shouldn't expect a prospectus anytime soon....

Investment will fund 250 MW, three-facility campus near London as AI and cloud demand surge Equinix will occupy a massive datacenter campus near London's M25, investing 3.9 billion ($5.1 billion) in the 85-acre (0.34 square kilometers) Hertfordshire plot close to South Mimms services....

Infosec agency warns hacktivists broke into critical infrastructure systems to tamper with controls Hacktivists have breached Canadian critical infrastructure systems to meddle with controls that could have led to dangerous conditions, marking the latest in a string of real-world intrusions driven by online activists rather than spies....

Time to put eggs in more than one basket? As Azure staggers back to its feet following an hours-long outage last night, British and European businesses are questioning their reliance on Microsoft's cloud infrastructure....

Biz says 'technical error' caused short-lived leak affecting small number of users A major UK lottery organization says it has resolved a technical error that exposed customer data to other users....

Governments eye comms alternatives as sovereignty worries mount Comment Decentralized communications network Matrix is hoping to be the beneficiary as European public and private sector organizations ponder alternatives to the messaging status quo....

Ohio State boffins coax shiitake and button varieties into behaving like memristors US boffins claim early tests indicate edible mushrooms can function as organic memory devices, though significant challenges remain before the lab experiment can be turned into something practical....

We're guessing that turning it off and on again won't help given qubits can be on and off at the same time IBM has one-upped AWS and Microsoft by reporting an outage in one of its cloudy quantum computers....

Brings its largely unloved browser to PCs and promises to make its Exynos SoCs more competitive Samsung has signaled it intends to take on Google and Qualcomm....

So they're increasing spending on infrastructure to keep it that way When generative AI exploded into public view in late 2022, plenty of pundits predicted it would be bad news for the likes of Google and Meta as nimble AI-powered rivals found new ways to capture netizens' attention and monetize it....