The Register

Investigators detail persistent background connections and file transmissions despite telemetry opt-out An analysis of data collection in the Trae AI-powered IDE from ByteDance shows extensive network activity, which continued even when telemetry was disabled in settings....

No word on who's behind it, but attack has hallmarks of the usual suspects Financial services biz Allianz says the majority of customers of one of its North American subsidiaries had their data stolen in a cyberattack....

A better minesweeper is needed. Time for an intervention to save Microsoft from itself Workflow. Productivity. Enablement. These are the holy words by which software companies sanctify their ever more plunder-hungry Viking raids on enterprise IT coffers. If only they were true. At least Vikings didn't pretend to be offering monastery renovations and smart haircuts when they turned up....

Musk: 'I will walk the line personally to accelerate the pace of progress' Samsung Electronics has scored a $16.5 billion contract to make the silicon to power Tesla's next-gen self-driving computer hardware. The firm is set to produce this from a new fab it is building in Texas, according to Tesla CEO Elon Musk....

Russia's top airline cancels 49 flights, delays affect many more Russia's largest airline, Aeroflot, canceled numerous flights on Monday morning following what it says was a failure in its IT systems - something hacktivists are claiming responsiblity for....

Local providers squeezed out despite market growth, leaving sovereignty hopes in question European cloud infrastructure companies make up just 15 percent of their own market, and the huge investment the US giants can wield makes their dominance "an impossible hill to climb" for any would-be challengers....

1,400% jump in sign-ups as users try to avoid age verification checks when surfing adult sites Searches and sign-ups for VPN providers have surged in the wake of online age checks that were introduced on July 25 as part of the UK's Online Safety Act....

At least at Chipzookie... TSMC and Global Foundaries may yet continue to try to defy physics Intel chief executive Lip-Bu Tan has warned that he may pull investment from Intel's leading-edge 14A semiconductor process node unless "a meaningful external customer" can guarantee profits - a move which may finally spell the end of the chipmaker's loyal adherence to Moore's Law....

Up to 925M on table as government pushes ahead with project likely to be a decade late The UK government is talking to tech suppliers to provide handsets for the country's emergency services' voice and data network, in a procurement which could be worth up to 925 million ($1.24 billion)....

And was then blamed for not knowing about inaccurate labels Who, Me? Returning to work on Monday morning can feel like a mistake, which is why The Register welcomes readers back to their desks with a fresh instalment of Who, Me? It's the reader-contributed column in which we tell your tales of making a mess at work, and somehow surviving....

Plus, leak site for BlackSuit seized, Tea spilt, and avoid crime if you've got a famous dad Infosec in brief A computer intrusion hit the US spy satellite agency, but officials insist no classified secrets were lost - just some unclassified ones, apparently....

'It looks sexy but it's wrong' - like the improbably well-endowed rat Biomedical visualization specialists haven't come to terms with how or whether to use generative AI tools when creating images for health and science applications. But there's an urgent need to develop guidelines and best practices because incorrect illustrations of anatomy and related subject matter could cause harm in clinical settings or as online misinformation....

Surveillance-based pricing? Two lawmakers say enough Two Democratic members of Congress, Greg Casar (D-TX) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI,) have introduced legislation in the US House of Representatives to ban the use of AI surveillance to set prices and wages....

MAPP program to blame? A week after Microsoft told the world that its July software updates didn't fully fix a couple of bugs, which allowed miscreants to take over on-premises SharePoint servers and remotely execute code, researchers have assembled much of the puzzle -with one big missing piece....

Chipzilla hopes it can pull an Altera with its NEX division, and is now looking for buyers Intel isn't just laying off employees and closing plants in a bid to cut costs - it's also reportedly planning to get rid of its entire Network and Edge Group (NEX) to help right the ship....

AT&T and Verizon refused to hand over the security assessments, says Cantwell US Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA) has demanded that Google-owned incident response firm Mandiant hand over the Salt Typhoon-related security assessments of AT&T and Verizon that, according to the lawmaker, both operators have thus far refused to give Congress....

The latest version of systemd looks to be a big one, with substantial new functionality. More to love - right? Like it or not, systemd is the industry-standard init system these days. A new release is coming, and it's a big one....

Space is hard, especially for racks of fragile computer equipment opinion William Gibson's Neuromancer holds up well after 40 years. One of the cyberpunk novel's concepts was an AI housed in an orbital datacenter (ODC) above the Earth. Today, startup companies and venture capital firms are hoping to turn orbital datacenters into reality to enable AI, believing that free power from the sun and cooling using the emptiness of space will unlock the technology from its terrestrial-based shackles of electric bills and cooling water....

If you've ever logged into a network on your laptop or phone, the password is still there hands-on You're at a place you've been before and your Windows laptop immediately remembers the SSID and password for the Wi-Fi network, logging you on automatically. But your phone, tablet, and your coworker's laptop have never been here before, so they can't connect. If only you remembered the password or had it written down somewhere....

Too much of anything is bad for you, including faux-magical statistical models There are numerous recent reports of people becoming too engaged with AI, sometimes to the detriment of their mental health....

Private sector invited to colocate at legacy nuclear facilities The US Department of Energy (DoE) has identified four sites where private sector firms will be invited to colocate datacenters and energy generation projects, in line with the Trump administration's goal to boost AI development in America....

The FreeBSD Laptop project continues - and plans to offer a very visible change FreeBSD 15 is coming, maybe at the end of this year - and along with other improvements, it may finally offer the option of installing with a graphical desktop....

Zuckercorp blames legal uncertainty under upcoming TTPA law Meta has followed in Google's footsteps in deciding that pending EU political advertising regulations are so onerous to comply with that they're not even going to bother....

Malicious code lurking in over 5,000 downloads, says Socket researcher Developer freelancing platform Toptal has been inadvertently spreading malicious code after attackers broke into its systems and began distributing malware through developer accounts....

We say everything... just not the oldest hardware. Unix Epochalypse less than 13 years away Venerable Linux distribution Debian is side-stepping the Y2K38 bug - also known as the Unix Epochalypse - by switching to 64-bit time for everything but the oldest of supported hardware, starting with the upcoming Debian 13 "Trixie" release....

Under oath in French Senate, exec says it would be compelled - however unlikely - to pass local customer info to US admin Microsoft says it "cannot guarantee" data sovereignty to customers in France - and by implication the wider European Union - should the Trump administration demand access to customer information held on its servers....

No, it will not turn you into a 10X programmer. In fact, it won't even transform you into a noob developer Opinion Everyone loves the idea of magic. All you have to do is wave your hands, say a few words, and something new is born to the world. That works for Harry Potter, but it won't work for you. Vibe coding, the notion that you can build programs by telling an AI what you want the software to do, is pure fantasy....

CFO claims money being reinvested in sales and engineering staff ServiceNow claims it is on course to realize $100 million in savings on its global headcount this year due to the internal implementation of AI....

CEO Lip-Bu Tan says strategy shift will focus on customer needs, efficiency, and cutting costs Ailing chip giant Intel is ditching its manufacturing sites in Germany and Poland and signaling further job cuts ahead as its new leader tries to stem the losses and turn the Silicon Valley pioneer's fortunes around....

Policy management not affected, but some personal data may have been snaffled Updated Business insurance and employment status specialist Qdos has confirmed that an intruder has stolen some customers personal data, according to a communication to tech contractors that was seen by The Register....

Mock-ups feature m365.com, which could be yours for a few bucks Microsoft this week trumpeted the launch of Microsoft 365 Copilot Search with lofty promises and slick mock-ups, but the domain plastered all over them didn't belong to the corporation....

Evidence of copious sugar hits hinted at unauthorized usage On Call By Friday, many readers will feel they need a sugar hit to get through the day, which is why The Register tries to offer a jolt of amusement in the form of a new installment of On Call, the reader-contributed column in which we share your tech support tales....

Nobody thinks of running a website without HTTPs. Safer DNS still seems optional Systems Approach Last week I turned on DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions) for the systemsapproach.org domain. No need to applaud; I was just trying to get an understanding of what the barriers to adoption might be while teaching myself about the technology....

Time to 'reimagine' it as a gateway, a gateway to inner peace, er, sales With three months to go until Microsoft ends support for Windows 10, Dell and Intel want to convince corporate buyers that upgrading their PC fleet is a virtue and not a necessity....

Satya Nadella lays out revised mission for Redmond. Spoiler: It involves AI Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on Thursday told employees in a memo that the company's recent layoffs have been "weighing heavily on me."...

Psst, wanna buy some innovation? An estimated $1 billion worth of smuggled high-end Nvidia AI processors have reportedly found their way onto the Chinese black market, despite the US government's strict restrictions on exports of the tech....

Plus she has to cough up a slice of Pyongyang's payday An Arizona woman who ran a laptop farm from her home - helping North Korean IT operatives pose as US-based remote workers - has been sentenced to eight and a half years behind bars for her role in a $17 million fraud that hit more than 300 American companies....

We're all businesspeople here, right? Elon Musk could use a win after Tesla's weak second-quarter earnings, and he sort of got it when President Donald Trump proclaimed he wasn't going to use the power of the presidency to destroy his businesses....

Good luck getting an appointment with your doctor The AMEOS Group, which runs over 100 hospitals across Europe, has shut down its entire network after crims busted in....

Component origin isn't tracked, says GAO, meaning the circuits in equipment could be from anywhere The Pentagon doesn't know where components of its critical systems come from, and it's doing a poor job of finding out, say government auditors....

They can only enforce consistency based on their training The White House on Wednesday issued an executive order requiring AI models used by the government to be truthful and ideologically neutral....

If a picture is worth 1,000 words, you could save yourself a lot of typing hands on It happens every day. There's something interesting on your screen that you want to share with others. Perhaps it's an error message you want to send to support. Or maybe you're writing instructions for colleagues and you need to outline how to use software. Whatever the reason, you need a screenshot....

Complete with new website - but the software's still alpha level stuff, so be careful Wayback 0.1 is out, the first preliminary release of the new Wayland display server whose announcement we reported a few weeks ago....

Shadowserver claims miscreants were already poking at a critical hole in early July, long before Switchzilla patched it Threat actors have actively exploited a newly patched vulnerability in Cisco's Identity Services Engine (ISE) software since early July, weeks before the networking giant got around to issuing a fix....

Boffins insist your deepfake tracking tech won't work Computer scientists with the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, say they've developed a way to remove watermarks embedded in AI-generated images....

Verizon and AT&T customers can now buy D2C connections a la carte from the magenta monster T-Mobile's Starlink-to-cellphone service is now out of beta - and the company is using the opportunity to woo customers from other providers by offering a la carte satellite services to AT&T and Verizon customers....

Let the games begin Ransomware has officially entered the Microsoft SharePoint exploitation ring....

So says a study by boffins at Carnegie Mellon University Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have likened today's large language model (LLM) chatbots to "that friend who swears they're great at pool but never makes a shot" - having found that their virtual self-confidence grew, rather than shrank, after getting answers wrong....

Some coyotes hunt squirrels, this one hunts users' financial apps A new variant of the Coyote banking trojan abuses Microsoft's UI Automation (UIA), making it the first reported malware to use UIA for credential theft....

Palantir, data brokers, and judicial overreach are all on the horizon, executive director Cindy Cohn warns Interview In July 1990, before the World Wide Web even existed, an unusual alliance was formed to fight for the rights of the emerging online community....