The Register

Meeting with former UK prime minister and his chief advisor withheld from official records, according to leaked documents Former British prime minister Boris Johnson and his chief adviser Dominic Cummings met with Peter Thiel, co-founder and chairman of Palantir, in 2019, months before the US spy-tech company landed a key role in the UK's COVID-19 response, according to papers seen by The Guardian....

It's the season of FOSS fruitfulness as juicy goodness falls from the branch The Northern hemisphere is moving into autumn and FOSS vendors are falling over themselves in their efforts to get new versions out for the season....

Are you sure you know who has access to your systems? Feature Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) is the latest UK household name to fall victim to a major cyberattack. IT systems across multiple sites have been offline for over a week after what the company described as a "severe disruption."...

Government wants to assess would-be immigrants' language skills remotely Plans for an 816 million system to test the English skills of UK visa applicants have stalled, with the Home Office pushing procurement back at least five months after repeated consultations with suppliers....

Management software stumbles at start of term, leaving staff unable to track attendance or reach parents UK school management information system (MIS) provider Bromcom has had a bad start to the academic year after its Azure-based service left staff struggling to track student attendance, let alone access contact details for parents and guardians....

Four-tier core design debuts amid NPU debate Arm has lifted the lid on its latest mobile platform, comprising new CPU and GPU designs plus rearchitected interconnect and memory management logic, all optimized with a coming wave of AI-enabled smartphones in mind....

If you can find the T&Cs, which are often hidden, you may spot hidden costs and nasties galore Vendors' licenses for AI software and services are in a state of pandemonium," according to Gartner VP analyst Jo Liversidge....

ERP giant patches flaw that allows total takeover of NetWeaver, Microsoft has nothing under attack for once September's Patch Tuesday won't require Microsoft users to rapidly repair rancid software, but SAP users need to move fast to address extremely dangerous bugs....

Big Red's profits are flat, but its order book is phat Larry Ellison moved a lot closer to being the world's richest man on Tuesday after Oracle saw a huge leap in its stock price, the largest single day's improvement in decades, thanks to a pipeline stuffed full of big deals....

We're making billions on AI, how about you? Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian says the Chocolate Factory's rental computing business has $106 billion of unfulfilled contracts, and he expects Google Cloud will be able to realize about half of that in revenue within two years....

Miscreants cost victims time rather than money During the two-hour window on Monday in which hijacked npm versions were available for download, malware-laced packages reached one in 10 cloud environments, according to Wiz researchers. But crypto-craving crims did little more than annoy defenders....

iPhone 17 Air shows company lightening up Apple on Tuesday showed off its iPhone 17 lineup at a media event dubbed, "Awe Dropping," favoring timeworn self-adulation over a more literal pun like "Four Play."...

Now if only someone would remember to apply those rules inside the DoD It's about to get a lot harder for private companies that are lax on cybersecurity to get a contract with the Pentagon, as the Defense Department has finalized a rule requiring contractor compliance with its Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) program....

If you're within 50 miles of Redmond, then it's time to come in Microsoft is rolling out a new return-to-office policy that will see first Redmond, then US, and then global staff getting back on-prem at least three days a week....

'The practice... has since been fixed,' Pentagon official tells The Reg The US Department of Defense, up until this week, routinely left its social media accounts wide open to hijackers via stream keys - unique, confidential identifiers generated by streaming platforms for broadcasting content. If exposed, these keys can allow attackers to output anything they want from someone else's channel....

HelloGym's data security clearly skipped leg day Exclusive Sensitive info from hundreds of thousands of gym customers and staff - including names, financial details, and potentially biometric data in the form of audio recordings - was left sitting in an unencrypted, non-password protected database, according to a security researcher who shut it down....

Microsoft invitation lost in mail after HoloLens made soldiers sick The US Army's troubled attempt at outfitting soldiers with mixed-reality headsets is getting a $354 million boost and a new pair of lead contractors as part of a second attempt to make the kit stick without making troops sick....

Microsoft feared too many machines would end up bricked Microsoft vet Raymond Chen first told the story of HLT and Windows 95 more than 20 years ago. The instruction tells the CPU to effectively shut itself down until the next hardware interrupt - ideal for laptops, since power consumption would be hugely reduced....

Analyst bets smart money on 'proactive digital companion' upgrade cycle Generative AI will supposedly spark a smartphone renaissance, driving both unit shipments and the value of devices sold this calendar year - or so claims a rather optimistic forecast from Gartner's consultants....

For the third time in a decade Streaming platform Plex is warning some users to reset their passwords after suffering yet another breach....

Netherlands based Nebius Group to deliver capacity from facility in New Jersey As the AI frenzy shows no signs of letting up, Microsoft has signed an agreement that could be worth up to $19.4 billion with Netherlands-based Nebius Group - formerly known as Yandex N.V. - in exchange for access to its GPU infrastructure over five years....

First, server products go end of life, now datacenter gets the chop, and larger customers will pay more Atlassian is discontinuing its datacenter products, including Jira, Confluence and Bamboo, in favor of Atlassian Cloud. There is a partial exception for Bitbucket, a source code repository manager, which will have a license option covering both cloud and datacenter....

Dreams of one satellite constellation die so another can live EchoStar has agreed to sell the company's AWS-4 and H-block spectrum licenses to SpaceX in a transaction worth $17 billion....

Contract tender follows 'alarming' safeguarding failure at border with undocumented kids The UK's Home Office is offering 1.3 million ($1.7 million) to developers of age-determining software - a tech it wants to deploy widely across its systems....

Ivalo XE handset targets governments and security critical sectors, though Qualcomm silicon keeps it tied to the US Finnish phone maker HMD Global is launching a business unit called HMD Secure to target governments and other security-critical customers, and has its first device ready to go....

AI security reviews add new risks, say researchers App security outfit Checkmarx says automated reviews in Anthropic's Claude Code can catch some bugs but miss others - and sometimes create new risks by executing code while testing it....

From fast food fiascos to botched databases, there are fresh honors for machine learning misadventures It was bound to happen. The Darwin Awards are being extended to include examples of misadventures involving overzealous applications of AI....

Report warns creaking infrastructure undermines the National Crime Agency's efficiency and effectiveness The UK's National Crime Agency (NCA) clings to legacy systems and relies on an IT strategy that lacks clarity, a policing watchdog has found....

Dev admits the game once ate an entire CPU core Former Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer has come clean and admitted that the worst bug he ever shipped was in... Pinball....

Charities welcome change, but critics warn the law is already too broad Tech companies will be legally required to prevent content involving self-harm from appearing on their platforms - rather than responding and removing it - in a planned amendment to the UK's controversial Online Safety Act....

Prepare to take tests in stuff you already know how to do, just to keep you sharp Using AI may cause some of your skills atrophy, and your employer therefore needs to take steps to keep you sharp....

Including messages sent to users, a potential problem for the privacy-conscious Encrypted messaging app Signal is rolling out a free storage system for its users, with extra space if folks are willing to pay for it....

Brace for loss of functionality' next April, and an upsell conversation before that deadline Citrix on Monday advised its customers that products acquired under its current file-based licensing system will experience loss of functionality and potential impacts on end-users" next April, and that upgrading to a new cloudy licensing scheme is the way to avoid potential problems....

Michelle Johnston Holthaus' tenure as Intel Products CEO lasted just ten months Intel's CEO of Products, Michelle Johnston Holthaus, will leave the business, as part of the latest executive shake-up since CEO Lip Bu Tan seized the company's reins....

Meta shrugs off allegations of improper dismissal, ignoring privacy and security WhatsApp's former head of security, Attaullah Baig, has filed a lawsuit against its parent company, Meta, alleging that the social media megalith retaliated against him for reporting security failings that violated legal commitments....

Why reinvent the CPU wheel when you can spend your time engineering a way out of your dependence on Nvidia? Every quarter, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is asked about the growing number of custom ASICs encroaching on his AI empire, and each time he downplays the threat, arguing that GPUs offer superior programmability in a rapidly changing environment....

'Stop this garbage already!' The latest release candidate for Linux is out, but before its release, Linus Torvalds had something he wanted to get off his chest in his usual style....

Auditors find federal cybersecurity workforce data messy, incomplete, and unreliable The US federal government employs tens of thousands of cybersecurity professionals at a cost of billions per year - or at least it thinks it does, as auditors have found the figures are incomplete and unreliable....

Meanwhile the victim count grows The Salesloft Drift breach that compromised "hundreds" of companies including Google, Palo Alto Networks, and Cloudflare, all started with miscreants gaining access to the Salesloft GitHub account in March....

Popular npm packages debug, chalk, and others hijacked in massive supply chain attack Crims have added backdoors to at least 18 npm packages after developer Josh Junon inadvertently authorized a reset of the two-factor authentication protecting his npm account....

Who needs HBM when you can juggle SRAM speed and LPDDR bulk across racks AI chip startup d-Matrix is pushing into rack scale with the introduction of its JetStream I/O cards, which are designed to allow larger models to be distributed across multiple servers or even racks while minimizing performance bottlenecks....

Plus ties to the Chinese spies who hacked Barracuda email gateways Security researchers have uncovered dozens of domains used by Chinese espionage crew Salt Typhoon to gain stealthy, long-term access to victim organizations going back as far as 2020....

Only a temporary reprieve until GitHub Copilot integration is up and running Microsoft's policy of inserting Copilot into every corner of its portfolio is on brief hiatus, at least in the first preview of SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 22....

$0.25-per-agency deal not finalized, and no FedRAMP approval either - so don't get excited Perplexity has entered the race to inject AI into the federal government with a new public sector version of its AI search engine, another AI discount, and a pledge to start enforcing new security measures for government-related use, which weren't applied by default until now....

Package queues jammed until Monday despite brief downtime When is an outage not an outage? According to Canonical's forum, it's when a 36-minute server disruption creates a multi-day backlog that leaves users unable to install or update Ubuntu systems....

Data4 to secure 40 MW of atomic juice as part of long-term low-carbon strategy The datacenter industry's unquenchable thirst for nuclear energy has seen French bit barn operator Data4 sign a 12 year supply deal with EDF....

Busy lawyers on hold for five hours as staff handhold users into deploying the security measure US courts have warned of delays as PACER, the system for accessing court documents, struggles to support users enrolling in its mandatory MFA program....

Legal, HR, Finance and Accounting moving to IBM from 2026. Engineering and others staying put... for now IBM-owned subsidiary Red Hat is docking a bunch of its back-office staff, along with the techies that support them, into the mothership....

Plus: Google clears up Gmail concerns, NSA drops SBOM bomb, Texas sues PowerSchool, and more Infosec in brief The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has said two flaws in routers made by Chinese networking biz TP-Link are under active attack and need to be fixed - but there's another flaw being exploited as well....

Fallout from latest political drama sparks a changing of the guard UK prime minister Sir Keir Starmer cleared out the officials in charge of tech and digital law in a dramatic cabinet reshuffle at the weekend....