The Register

With little competition at the goverment level, Windows giant has no incentive to make its systems safer Interview Microsoft has a shocking level of control over IT within the US federal government - so much so that former senior White House cyber policy director AJ Grotto thinks it's fair to call Redmond's recent security failures a national security issue....

VASA-1 framework can turn a still image and a cloned voice file into a plausible video of a person talking Microsoft this week demoed VASA-1, a framework for creating videos of people talking from a still image, audio sample, and text script, and claims - rightly - it's too dangerous to be released to the public....

4-letter survivor's move to Qt 6 means that, love it or hate it, Wayland is looming Version 2.0 of the LXQt desktop updates its foundations to Qt 6, as also used in KDE Plasma 6 - but still has one foot in the Qt 5 past, to ease the transition....

Bulletproof? Is it waterproof? Ts&Cs say: 'Failure to put Cybertruck in Car Wash Mode may result in damage' The perils of turning cars into computers were laid bare by a hapless Cybertruck owner who claimed his ride was rendered an $80,000 "paperweight" by something as benign as a wash....

Not yet the London Underground style efficient schematic we want, but it's a start Boffins at the UK's Surrey Space Centre have devised a way of determining the optimal route for spacecraft that doesn't require the engines to burn precious fuel....

You can leave your personal vendettas at home - we have work to do, Pichai warns Google is consolidating the various teams working on generative AI under the DeepMind team in a bid to accelerate development of more capable systems....

LEO rising in US military: Close encounters of the recon kind SpaceX is understood to be working with aerospace and defense biz Northrop Grumman on a spy satellite program that provides the US military with improved intelligence imagery....

Police say this appears to be a 'deliberate act.' Sacramento International Airport (SMF) suffered hours of flight delays yesterday after what appears to be an intentional cutting of an AT&T internet cable serving the facility....

Look out for a new star next week NASA is to send a solar sail demonstrator into orbit next week, and there is a good chance that the sail, measuring 860 square feet (80 square meters), will be visible from Earth....

Hot on the heels of Ubuntu Noble beta come the betas of the Qt-based remixes, with some interesting differences The beta versions of Lubuntuand Kubuntu 24.04 are out, showing that there's room to improve on the standard Ubuntu formula....

No wonder industry is exploring nuclear as an alternative to electricity US energy provider Exelon has calculated that power demand from datacenters in the Chicago area is set to increase ninefold, in more evidence that AI adoption is will put further strain electricity supplies....

Still available in Hong Kong and Macau, for now Apple has removed four apps from its China-regional app store, including Meta's WhatsApp and Threads, after it was ordered to do so by Beijing for security reasons....

That isn't what Tesla meant by Full Self-Driving Tesla has issued a recall notice for every single Cybertruck it has produced thus far, a sum of 3,878 vehicles....

Social media use and gaming show steep increases within the age group, after UK comms watchdog given new powers The UK's telecoms regulator has found that nearly a quarter of children between the ages of five and seven own a smartphone while a similar percentage use social media unsupervised....

It's the second time the World-Check list has fallen into the wrong hands The World-Check database used by businesses to verify the trustworthiness of users has fallen into the hands of cybercriminals....

Apparently an attempt to damage Ukraine's war effort Bavarian state police have arrested two German-Russian citizens on suspicion of being Russian spies and planning to bomb industrial and military facilities that participate in efforts to assist Ukraine defend itself against Vladimir Putin's illegal invasion....

No, boss, I'm not just playing a game. I'm testing compatibility. Honest It is almost 30 years since Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger was released. In addition to allowing users to kick some Kilrathi ass, the game also played an important role in testing Windows 95....

UK reckoning with prospect of millions of homes with obsolete hardware Months after being quizzed by a committee of cross-party MPs, the UK government is still failing to clarify ways to support the substitution of millions of smart meters that will become obsolete when 2G and 3G networks are switched off....

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall in the debrief meeting On Call Welcome once more to On Call, The Register's Friday foray into tech support memories contributed by you, our much-appreciated readers....

TUC questions government's approach so far A UK federation of trades unions has published a bill designed to protect workers from the risks and harms" of AI-powered decision-making in the workplace....

Kirin 9010 SoC powering the Pura 70 is impressive, but doesn't indicate unforeseen prowess When Huawei debuted its Mate 60 smartphone in mid-2023, it turned heads around the world after teardown artists found it contained a system-on-chip manufactured by Chinese chipmaker Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) using a 7nm process....

But Big Red's $8 billion investment plan may not be all it seems Oracle has had a big win in Japan that could turn into something enormous, and also revealed plans to score more success in the land of the rising sun....

Plans multilingual 400 billion parameter version, but starts with more modest fare Meta has unleashed its latest large language model (LLM) - named Llama 3 - and claims it will challenge much larger models from the likes of Google, Mistral, and Anthropic....

Robo-plane was made to restrain itself so as not to harm pilot or airframe Video The US Air Force Test Pilot School and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) claim to have achieved a breakthrough in machine learning by demonstrating that AI software can fly a modified F-16 fighter jet in a dogfight against human pilots....

Source blames BlackSuit infection - as separately ISP Frontier confirms cyberattack Octapharma Plasma has blamed IT "network issues" for the ongoing closure of its 150-plus centers across the US. It's feared a ransomware infection may be the root cause of the medical firm's ailment....

'I want to buy a car. That's all' Crooks are exploiting month-old OpenMetadata vulnerabilities in Kubernetes environments to mine cryptocurrency using victims' resources, according to Microsoft....

More like Instability AI, right kids? Stability AI is laying off staff in its search of steadier footing following the sudden departure of its CEO late last month....

Big Blue bosses retaliate against those seeking overtime, lawsuit claims IBM has been accused of cheating its executive assistants by denying them overtime pay and meal breaks and retaliating against them for accurately reporting their working hours....

Alphabet Workers Union says bosses refuse to listen to concerns Google has fired more than two dozen employees after they staged sit-ins at the web giant's offices in protest of its cloud contract with the Israeli government....

Do not pass go, do not collect $200, says government agency The US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has slapped coding boot camp BloomTech with several punishments for alleged deceptive business practices....

And it's far from the only hyperscaler getting in on the act Microsoft is looking to significantly expand datacenter space to service expected AI demand, tripling the rate at which it adds capacity early in its next financial year. Other hyperscalers appear to be following suit....

Vote met strong opposition from Biden's office A draft law to restrict the US government's ability to procure data on citizens through data brokers will progress to the Senate after being passed in the House of Representatives....

Not just Windows 10. Don't forget about Exchange Server, Skype for Business, and all those Office installations Windows 10 isn't the only Microsoft product due for the chop next year - end of support also beckons for Office 2016, 2019, and a swathe of productivity servers....

Criminals make lucrative use of stolen credit cards Black Hat Asia Speaking at Black Hat Asia on Thursday, a Korean researcher revealed how the discovery of one phishing website led to uncovering an operation whose activities leveraged second-hand shops and included using Apple's "someone-else pickup" method to cash in....

Some say various cell services were out, others still say landlines were affected. What just happened? Updated Widespread 911 outages in the United States appear to have mostly been resolved, though that doesn't mean the cause is clear....

It'll be pricier, but there are geopolitical benefits, says CEO TSMC boss C C Wei says customers who want to fabricate in the chip giant's non-Taiwan facilities will need share the cost by paying more....

Thermal shield damage is screwing with daytime observations of X-ray bursts NASA is sending astronauts out to fix an X-ray telescope on the International Space Station (ISS) after the instrument developed a "light leak."...

Extent of information seized will be a concern for those affected Ransomware strikes at yet another US healthcare organization led to the theft of sensitive data belonging to just shy of 185,000 people....

AI assistant turned up via an Edge update. It was an accident. This time... Microsoft's Copilot obsession has continued with the AI assistant unexpectedly arriving on Windows Server 2022 this week, in a situation the software giant is calling an "incorrect install."...

Memorymaker to park mega plant in Syracuse, says senator Memory chipmaker Micron looks set to be the next recipient of US government subsidy cash with $6.1 billion heading its way to help fund new-build semiconductor plants....

Restructure of finance teams will see some leave, and other roles created in Mexico City, Bangalore, and US cities Google is again firing the redundancy cannon for the second time this year, with a restructure being pushed through and teams in the finance and real estate units of the business understood to be impacted....

Platforms should not confront users with 'binary choice' over personal data use The EU's Data Protection Board (EDPB) has told large online platforms they should not offer users a binary choice between paying for a service and consenting to their personal data being used to provide targeted advertising....

Only good for calls and texts pretty much, and that's no mistake Those who find modern smartphones too distracting from real life might be interested in the Boring Phone (no relation to the smartphone of the same name), a novelty flip phone based on HMD's Nokia 2660 Flip....

Police mimic Spotify Wrapped videos to let crims know they're being hunted Feature Cops have brought down a dark-web souk that provided cyber criminals with convincing copies of trusted brands' websites for use in phishing campaigns....

2.9 gives a taste of what's to come Major updates to Debian's Advanced Packaging Tool don't come along very often, but APT 2.9 is here with a significant facelift....

Resist the pressure to jump on the bandwagon just yet warns, warns Forrester Forrester Research says that although 50 models of AI PCs are already on sale today there remains "no killer app" that would make any of them an essential tool for business users....

Open source Redis alternative gathers momentum Valkey, the value-key database pitched as an open source alternative to Redis, has acquired new backers and announced its first release candidate....

Hypershield detects bad behavior and automagically reconfigures networks to snuff out threats Cisco has developed a product called Hypershield that it thinks represents a new way to do network security....

Commissioner Thierry Breton likens click-to-earn version to cigarettes The European Commission on Wednesday gave TikTok 24 hours to explain the risk assessment procedures it used before launching a version of the made-in-China app that rewards users for using it in certain ways....

When you decide not to trust a big chunk of the supply chain, tech (and trade) get harder One of the biggest challenges Singapore faces is the potential for a split between tech stacks developed and used by China and the West, according to the island nation's Cyber Security Administration (CSA) chief executive David Koh....