The Register

Japanese retailer halts online orders after attack cripples third-party vendor Japanese retailer Muji is suspending online orders after logistics partner Askul was knocked offline by a ransomware attack....

CISA adds high-severity flaw to KEV list, urges swift updating Uncle Sam's cyber wardens have warned that a high-severity flaw in Microsoft's Windows SMB client is now being actively exploited - months after it was patched....

DevOps guru and ex-Googler say vibes beat reading diffs but there are risks "Accept All. Always. Don't read the diffs anymore."...

Security pros explore whether infection-spoofing code can immunize Windows systems against attack Feature What's better, prevention or cure? For a long time the global cybersecurity industry has operated by reacting to attacks and computer viruses. But given that ransomware has continued to escalate, more proactive action is needed....

Another phone Linux? The Reg attempts to disentangle the options The latest version of Mobian, an edition of Debian aimed at mobile devices, is here, based on Debian 13 "Trixie"....

Calendar cock-up exposed recipients' details Anti-fraud nonprofit Cifas was left red-faced after sending out a calendar invite that exposed the email addresses of dozens of individuals working across the fraud space....

12 more hours of pain followed initial outage Amazon Web Services has revealed that its efforts to recover from the massive mess at its US-EAST-1 region caused other services to fail....

Better scheduling and resource-sharing for inferencing workloads using multiple models, not a training breakthrough Chinese tech giant Alibaba has published a paper detailing scheduling tech it has used to achieve impressive utilization improvements across the GPU fleet it uses to power inferencing workloads - which is nice, but not a breakthrough that will worry AI investors....

Shall I refer thee to all those lawsuits about fair use? Researchers think this result makes them worth revisiting Readers of texts created to use the styles of famous authors prefer works written by AI to human human-written imitations, but only after developers fine-tune AI models to understand an author's output....

It's Typhoon season...year round China's Salt Typhoon gang appears to have successfully attacked a European telecommunications firm, according to security researchers at Darktrace....

The government in the Netherlands has taken control of the company Nexperia, a Dutch chipmaker that's found itself at the center of a geopolitical crisis, has denied claims by its former CEO that its Chinese division is now operating as an independent entity....

Researchers accuse tech firms of profiting from exploitative AI imagery The starving child whose picture broke your heart when you saw it on a charity website may not be real. Global health researchers say that stock image companies like Adobe are profiting from AI-generated "poverty porn" that non-profits are using to drum up donations....

Some portions of the OS are still stuck on light Windows 11 launched way back in October 2021 and has become Microsoft's must-have OS thanks to the impending end-of-life for Windows 10. After all that time, there are still significant portions of the OS that don't do dark mode. However, Redmond is making significant progress, bringing a couple of key dialog boxes into compliance....

When your best engineers log off for good, don't be surprised when the cloud forgets how DNS works column "It's always DNS" is a long-standing sysadmin saw, and with good reason: a disproportionate number of outages are at their heart DNS issues. And so today, as AWS is still repairing its downed cloud as this article goes to press, it becomes clear that the culprit is once again DNS. But if you or I know this, AWS certainly does....

Attempted exploit was a feeble effort to target Windows users Someone managed to insert a compromised file into the downloads section of the website for Xubuntu, the official Ubuntu flavor with the Xfce desktop environment. The malware was designed to steal cryptocurrency, but so far, there are no reports of actual theft....

AI arms dealer relies on Taiwanese advanced packaging plants for top-specced GPUs US manufacturing of Nvidia GPUs is underway and CEO Jensen Huang is celebrating the first Blackwell wafer to come out of TSMC's Arizona chip factory. However, to be part of a complete product, those chips may need to visit Taiwan....

'US is ... the greatest source of chaos in cyberspace' China has blamed the US for a "major cyberattack" against its National TimeService Center, alleging it could have disrupted the country's communications, financial, and transportation networks, and even caused power outages....

Too many services depend not just on one cloud provider, but on one location Analysis Amazon's US-EAST-1 region outage caused widespread chaos, taking websites and services offline even in Europe and raising some difficult questions. After all, cloud operations are supposed to have some built-in resiliency, right?...

Hiring and firing at the Windows giant more The Bachelor than Survivor Microsoft has made headlines for mass layoffs in recent times, but former company engineer Dave Plummer has explained how things were done a quarter of a century ago - and what it was like living through the tech giant's notorious stack ranking system....

Cabinet Office signals it might let supplier ship work abroad after 'unforeseeable' event The UK government has signaled its intention to allow a supplier providing maintenance to its online procurement platform to subcontract offshore, having previously said that this was off-limits due to security concerns....

October security patch leaves users unable to fix their PCs Microsoft has confirmed a bug that disables USB mice and keyboards in the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) after installing security update KB5066835, released October 14....

Now try a jet engine in a bedstead before strapping into a Starship European Space Agency (ESA) astronauts have completed a helicopter training course to prepare them for upcoming lunar landings....

Tech billionaire apologizes after endorsing plan to deploy National Guard in San Francisco Salesforce co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff has apologized for backing President Donald Trump's proposals to send the National Guard to San Francisco, where the company is based and holds its annual conference....

That's 46 minutes in which more work can be done, not an extended lunch Lloyds Banking Group claims employees save 46 minutes daily using Microsoft 365 Copilot, based on a survey of 1,000 users among nearly 30,000 deployed licenses....

Citizen! You are falling short in your AI usage targets! Strive harder for the revolution! Opinion The quantum theory of management includes an analogy for the physical law of the observer effect, where observing a system changes its state. When you make a metric a target, it is not useful as a metric. Instead of reflecting whatever underlying behavior it was intended to measure, the metric becomes a measure of how well the benchmark is being gamed....

Amazon reports DNS issues hitting DynamoDB, leaving services from Roblox to McDonald's struggling A major outage is affecting Amazon Web Services (AWS), with even Amazon's own web page reported to be offline and dozens of other online services and websites affected, including disruption in the UK....

Plus: Ransomware posing as Teams installer, Cisco 0-day exploit to drop rootkit, and European cops bust SIM-box service INFOSEC IN BRIEF Engineer David Dodda says he was just "30 seconds away" from running malware on his own computer after nearly falling victim to a North Korea-type job interview scam with a "legitimate" blockchain company....

ValueLicensing dispute probes whether Office counts as a creative work The long-running legal battle between ValueLicensing and Microsoft over the resale of software licenses has taken another turn following Microsoft's attempt to make the case about copyright....

Once more into the, er, breach? The UK's Armed Forces veterans are being tasked with one last mission - proving the government can successfully roll out a digital ID card scheme....

Oh ... you mean we shouldn't press that button? Who, Me? Each new Monday ushers in a week during which you might shine or flatline. The Register celebrates the times you end up doing the latter with a new instalment of Who, Me? It's the column in which you admit to making mistakes and execute cunning escapes....

Taps Ruby core to oversee RubyGems, Bundler Ruby Central, the non-profit that recently seized some Ruby open source tools from maintainers, is transferring the repository ownership of RubyGems and Bundler to the Ruby core team. The move appears to be an attempt to mollify the Ruby community following a divisive power grab, but it does not restore the control of those tools to the maintainers who previously oversaw them....

Cleverly concocked deal keeps debt off Social Media empire's books Facebook parent Meta has managed to convince private equity firm Blue Owl Capital to finance its 2.2 gigawatt Hyperion datacenter project in Richland Parish, Louisiana....

Now they just need to get regulatory approval Despite technological and regulatory hurdles, Amazon remains convinced that small modular reactors (SMRs) are the answer to the cloud titan's power woes....

Not a good week for Big Red Envoy Air, an American Airlines subsidiary, has confirmed that it was among the dozens of organizations compromised via Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) security flaws, following claims by Clop extortionists that its parent company was one of its victims....

'AI is a tool', Pope tells attendees Recently, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff warned investors to avoid the "false prophets" of AI. Now, the Pope has brought real theological weight to the bot debate, hosting a Vatican seminar that called for global AI regulation and fair distribution of the technology's benefits....

Most datacenters to ditch 19-inch standard for 21-inch OCP kit by 2030 Datacenters are set to standardize on the larger, 21-inch rack format by 2030, according to Omdia, as hyperscalers and server makers fully embrace it, leaving enterprises to the existing 19-inch standard....

US biz lobby claims president overstepped his authority with proclamation demanding hefty visa fee The US Chamber of Commerce (CoC) has filed a suit accusing President Trump of exceeding his authority by seeking to slap a $100,000 fee on H-1B visa applications....

P2P lending platform says it could not verify the claims at present Data breach tracker HaveIBeenPwned claims the victim count of peer-to-peer lender Prosper's September cyberattack stands at 17.6 million....

Operating system's D-day resucitates flatlining computer sector It transpires that Windows 11 is indeed good for at least one thing - driving PC upgrades, according to the latest figures from Gartner....

Sharing views POTUS doesn't like? Say goodbye to that visa, First Amendment be damned Updated Lawyers at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) are helping three US labor unions sue the Trump administration over a social media surveillance program that threatens to punish those who publicly express views that are not harmonious with the government's position....

Beijing blocks exports after Netherlands imposes special measures on Chinese-owned chipmaker Major car, van, truck and bus manufacturers are warning that the Dutch government placing semiconductor biz Nexperia under special administrative measures could result in a shortage of automotive chips....

NASA's Earth-watching archives find new home in Redmond's cloud, complete with Copilot hype Microsoft has made NASA's Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 (HLS) dataset available on Azure via the Windows giant's Planetary Computer platform....

A decade later, ERP giant struggles to convince legacy customers to upgrade More than a decade after SAP's S/4HANA in-memory ERP system debuted, 95 percent of legacy users say building a positive case to migrate requires a big effort or is genuinely challenging....

As OpenAI allows chatbot to spout erotic content, former British prime minister makes true feelings known After a string of marriages and innumerable affairs, former UK prime minister Boris Johnson has come clean about his new squeeze....

Eight-year telco blunder had a profound impact on three wrongly accused in Wales Details have emerged of a troubling case in which a basic engineering mistake wrecked a digital evidence investigation and led to wrongful accusations....

'Global phase spectroscopy' makes ultraprecise optical timekeepers even more precise Researchers at MIT say they have discovered a way to double the precision of optical atomic clocks by quieting the quantum noise that clouds their ticking....

Energy secretary Miliband promises renewable utopia for green and pleasant land... filled with datacenters Energy is essential for delivering the UK governments' AI ambitions, but Britain faces a critical question: how can it supply enough power for rapidly expanding datacenters without causing blackouts or inflating consumer bills?...

What the world's been waiting for: a stapler with wheels to help humans afflicted by RSI It was only a matter of time. Having invaded the software world, AI has now fixed its sights on once-benign household objects and desk fodder....

The 1990s called with a reminder that in the time before ransomware, infosec panics could be quite quaint On Call By Friday it's only natural to look back upon the working week with a certain nostalgia, an emotion The Register celebrates each week in On Call - the reader-contributed column that shares your tales of tech support trauma....

Teaching an old bot new tricks Paying Anthropic customers can now teach their Claude new tricks, which the company calls Skills....