The Register

What do you mean you don't want Copilot and Microsoft 365 services? Microsoft has released what could be the penultimate perpetual licensed version of Office....

Surely at least one crew will get there in the next ten years? Intuitive Machines has bagged a contract worth up to $4.82 billion to support NASA's lunar relay systems....

Tech is going to need datacenters and power sources, and a lot of 'em Microsoft is joining with BlackRock and other private equity investors in a new AI fund that aims to eventually raise $100 billion for datacenters and their supporting power infrastructure....

Italian mafia mobsters and Irish crime families scuppered by international cops Hours after confirming they had pwned the supposedly uncrackable encrypted messaging platform used for all manner of organized crime, Ghost, cops have now named the suspect they cuffed last night, who is charged with being the alleged mastermind....

AI-coded contributions? Most would rather skip the bot's work The majority of open source project maintainers are not being paid for their work, spend three times as much time on security than they did three years ago, and have become less trusting of contributors following the xz backdoor, according to open source package security firm Tidelift....

Four branches attempt to streamline HR and business processes The UK's Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is leading a 958.7 million ($1.2 billion) search for a supplier to develop business processes for new ERP and HR systems to bring together four central government departments....

Those are some mighty powerful underdogs you've got there Google thinks Microsoft's software licensing is impeding customer choice; Microsoft says AWS has "first mover" advantage; AWS also picks on Microsoft's licensing - but all are against remedies being applied to the cloud market that might impact themselves....

'Lives will be lost' as Moscow ramps up offensive cyber military units Feature As Russian special forces push more overtly into online operations, network defenders should be on the hunt for digital intruders looking to carry out cyberattacks that end in physical destruction and harm....

As AI automates programming, it could be worth exploring the value of bespoke code Part 2 A thought experiment: If the computer business responds to commoditization and globalization like other manufacturing industries do, where does that leave programmers - and users?...

Mac and Android loyals: you can look, but no calculation for now Office power users, rejoice: Python in Excel is now generally available - provided you have the right license and machine....

Something tells us Vlad and Xi probably won't bother reading it The Internet Research Task Force has published a Request For Comments document its authors hope will mean developers of comms protocols and architectures consider the human rights implications of their efforts....

GoTo commits to the Alibaba Cloud, and Alibaba promises not to sell its stake Chinese tech giant Alibaba showed it's not just Meta, Google and Amazon that can use their financial heft to buy a foothold in the developing world by striking a deal with Indonesian superapp firm GoTo Group....

Sting led to cuffing of alleged operator behind Ghost - an app for drug trafficking, money laundering, and violence-as-a-service Australia's Federal Police (AFP) yesterday arrested and charged a man with creating and administering an app named Ghost that was allegedly "a dedicated encrypted communication platform ... built solely for the criminal underworld" and which enabled crims to arrange acts of violence, launder money, and traffic illicit drugs....

The more successful FOSS gets, the more it becomes a target Patent trolls are increasingly targeting cloud native open source projects, leading the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Linux Foundation to make efforts to extend their legal shields over such efforts....

View Forever, more like it, as Meta's privacy feature again revealed to be futile with a little light hacking A fix deployed by Meta to stop people repeatedly viewing WhatsApp's so-called View Once messages - photos, videos, and voice recordings that disappear from chats after a recipient sees them - has been defeated in less than a week by white-hat hackers....

Bug reports made in China Broadcom has emitted a pair of patches for vulnerabilities in VMware vCenter Server that a miscreant with network access to the software could exploit to completely commandeer a system. This also affects Cloud Foundation....

Anthropic Claude 3.5 shines in Chatterbox Labs safety test Feature Anthropic has positioned itself as a leader in AI safety, and in a recent analysis by Chatterbox Labs, that proved to be the case....

Chocolate Factory downgrades risk, citing the need for attacker access Overly permissive settings in Google Cloud's Document AI service could be abused by data thieves to break into Cloud Storage buckets and steal sensitive information....

Send astronauts nice pixel art, or try something a little harder The next round of the European Space Agency's Astro Pi challenge is open, inviting participants to use the diminutive computers aboard the International Space Station (ISS) to calculate the orbiting outpost's speed....

Eight-year-old among those slain, Israel blamed, Iran's Lebanese ambassador wounded, it's said Lebanon says at least nine people, including an eight-year-old girl, were killed today after pagers used by Hezbollah members exploded across the country. Israel has been blamed....

Some good news for Elon - 2,500 planes to be Starlink Wi-Fi ready as United joins the party Elon Musk's impatience has led to the US Federal Aviation Administration proposing $633,009 in civil penalties against his SpaceX operation for allegedly violating its launch licenses last year....

Auction acts as payback after authority publicly refuses to pay up The trend of ransomware crews claiming to sell stolen data privately instead of leaking it online continues with Rhysida marketing the data allegedly belonging to Port of Seattle for 100 Bitcoin (around $5.9 million)....

Big Blue's Prodigy from the 1980s comes back to haunt FarmVille giant IBM's patent farm has yielded another bumper crop, with a Delaware jury awarding Big Blue $45 million in damages from mobile games maker Zynga....

See? We do have competition, cloud giant tells regulator Cloud behemoth AWS says it is facing stiff competition from on-premises infrastructure, which is a turnaround from its once-proud boast that all workloads would eventually move to the cloud....

Predictably paced programming language plods onward Oracle on Tuesday released Java 23 (Oracle JDK 23), in keeping with its now well-established six-month cadence....

Designations come as new infrastructure spins up in Africa Five individuals and one company with ties to spyware developer Intellexa are the latest to earn sanctions as the US expands efforts to stamp out spyware....

Jurgen Muller agreed to step down from his role at the end of September German prosecutors have confirmed to The Register that SAP's outgoing CTO is under investigation following allegations of sexual harassment....

Is the hype over already? Despite all the hype and billions poured into AI, fewer than half of S&P 500 firms actually mentioned it in their Q2 2024 earnings reports....

Persistent SSO prompts after DMA update addressed in release preview Microsoft continues to apply the electrodes to Windows 10 with an Insider build to deal with single sign-on problems arising from changes made for the European Digital Markets Act and Edge freezing when using Internet Explorer mode....

The 20 most-commented-on tech support columns from On Call's first 500 instalments On Call To celebrate the recent 500th appearance of On-Call, the column that features your tales of tech support torture, The Register has trawled through the archives to find the 20 columns that generated the most comments....

Churns out apps, but testing needed to iron out performance woes Researchers are finding that most companies integrating AI into their tech stack have run headlong into performance and reliability issues with the resulting applications....

Well you wouldn't get far protesting a water system or a power grid, right? The UK government's decision to designate datacenters as critical national infrastructure (CNI) may do more than just offer protection against critical incidents; it may also allow developers to override any local objections to such facilities being built....

UK's second largest retailer set to move ERP to the cloud with AWS, Accenture, and the German software gaint Sainsbury's has become the third top-ten UK retailer to join the SAP program to lift legacy applications to the cloud and migrate them to its latest S/4HANA ERP system....

If there's one thing we know about Big Red, it's being entirely reasonable JavaScript luminaries and at least 2,500 other interested parties have again asked Oracle to set the programming language free by walking away from the trademark for its name....

Digital Realty's Singapore disaster still complicating cloud after a week A week after a fire broke out at a Singapore datacenter, Alibaba Cloud is waiting for some hardware to dry out before it restores services and customer data....

VirtualBox, Parallels, and VMware have all upgraded September has been a big month for desktop hypervisors, with the field's big players all delivering significant updates....

If this really was that useful, they wouldn't be telling us According to a Chinese state-sanctioned study, signals from SpaceX Starlink broadband internet satellites could be used to track US stealth fighters, such as the F-22....

May have reeled in blueprints related to weapons development A Chinese national has been accused of conducting a years-long spear-phishing campaign that aimed to steal source code from the US Army and NASA, plus other highly sensitive software used in aerospace engineering and military applications....

The C in these CVEs stands for Confusing Analysis Microsoft, in a low-key update to its September Patch Tuesday disclosures, has confirmed a just-fixed Internet Explorer vulnerability was exploited as a zero-day before it could be patched....

Pauses European fabs, scores secret US gig, teams up with Amazon, re-orgs its innards, and more! Intel will spin out its Foundry division as an independent subsidiary with its own board, in the hopes of bringing in new sources of capital for the ailing business unit....

Removing de minimis exemption could stymie Beijing's plans to grow its cyber-bazaar abroad The Biden administration announced on Friday it was cracking down on a tax loophole that has enabled Chinese web souks like Shein and Temu to thrive....

And vows to cut ratio of managers-to-employees to 'flatten' the ranks The COVID-19 work-from-home era is over, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has told staff in a Monday memo, signaling his desire for staff to return to working in an office five days a week....

You pipsqueaks want memory safety? We'll show you memory safety! We'll borrow that borrow checker After two years of being beaten with the memory-safety stick, the C++ community has published a proposal to help developers write less vulnerable code....

Cops to citizens will be 'on their best behavior because we're constantly recording and reporting' AI is on the verge of ushering in a new era of mass surveillance, says Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison, adding that his juggernaut is ready to serve as the technological backbone for such applications....

Now it's the default for all new accounts Snowflake continues to push forward in strengthening its users' cybersecurity posture by making multi-factor authentication the default for all new accounts....

'No one is trying' to kill Biden or Harris, mogul says after alleged second attempt on Trump's life Calls to deport Elon Musk from the US are trending on the billionaire's very own social media platform after he wondered aloud, following an apparent second attempt on the life of former President Trump, why no one has tried to assassinate President Biden or Veep Kamala Harris....

What the next few months hold for the productivity chatbot updated Microsoft's Copilot Wave 2 has arrived, bringing agents and unanswered questions....

Putting a spanner in work for plans of opposition party to launch a comeback during next year's elections One of Germany's major political parties is still struggling to restore member data more than three months after a June cyberattack targeting its systems....

Cloud unicorn struggles to make database that can do everything 'margin positive' Two years after announcing a database that can do analytics and transactions in the same system, Snowflake has yet to commercially launch Unistore, its CFO admitted....

'These are difficult decisions,' says Antonio Neri Antonio Neri, the former engineer turned chief executive at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, says the company has to pursue its $4 billion claim against former Autonomy boss Mike Lynch's estate because it is "in the best interest of shareholders."...