The Register

Can't keep the drama Llama out of this race Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed plans on Friday to blow through as much as $60 to 65 billion in 2025 on plenty more AI resources for his social media mega-corp - and signaled his intention to continue the spending spree for years to come....

Your workout warm-up instructions didn't say anything about setting wrists on fire - allegedly! Years after recalling one of its smartwatches over overheating batteries that burned people, Fitbit has agreed to pay a $12.25 million civil penalty to the US government to settle allegations it knew about the risk but failed to immediately report it as required by law....

If you have a 'significantly out of date' Exchange Server, emergency mitigation might stop working Exchange Server administrators lagging on their cumulative and security updates be warned: Microsoft has stated that the Exchange Emergency Mitigation Service (EEMS) might stop working on "significantly out of date" versions of the software....

Schematics, repair manuals, part numbers still out of reach for many industries The US Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) has released a report on the state of Right to Repair. The good news is that things seem to be going in the right direction for some gadgets. The bad news is that progress is not equal, and there has been no improvement for some gizmos....

But what the heck should it do? Great news, Linux fans! Support for the Copilot key is coming in the 6.14 kernel. What do you think it should do?...

We stitch together enormous supercomputers from other smaller supercomputers of course Feature Generative AI models have not only exploded in popularity over the past two years, but they've also grown at a precipitous rate, necessitating ever larger quantities of accelerators to keep up....

At $25.91M, CEO is worth 261 employees Qualcomm's top dog Cristian Amon enjoyed a ten percent year-on-year bump in total financial compensation for fiscal 2024 that amounted to $25.91 million....

Could a post-Brexit romance be on the cards? The UK and EU must decide whether to coordinate a response to Donald Trump's proposed tariffs on stuff imported into the United States, or cut separate deals with the new president, the House of Lords heard this week....

SYSTEM-level command injection via API parameter *chef's kiss* A now-fixed command-injection bug in Kubernetes can be exploited by a remote attacker to gain code execution with SYSTEM privileges on all Windows endpoints in a cluster, and thus fully take over those systems, according to Akamai researcher Tomer Peled....

Calamity Capsule continues to be calamitous for the bottom line Boeing is warning of another hit to its bottom line, at least partly at the hands of the company's Calamity Capsule, the CST-100 Starliner....

5 indicted as FBI warns North Korea dials up aggression, plus Russian devs allegedly get in on the act The US is indicting yet another five suspects it believes were involved in North Korea's long-running, fraudulent remote IT worker scheme - including one who changed their last name to "Bane" and scored a gig at a tech biz in San Francisco....

Hyperscaler mystery deepens as Hertfordshire braces for bit barn blitz Approval was last night granted for a mega datacenter in Hertfordshire, close to London's M25 orbital motorway, clearing the way for construction to begin. The identity of the eventual occupier, said to be a hyperscale operator, has yet to be disclosed....

New double-digit vintage goes well with all sorts of things After 32 years of maturation, even now, WINE is Not an Emulator, but it can work alongside them to run Windows apps on Arm Linux....

28nm and fatter processes first, says minister, as semiconductor supply chain players move to cash in India's ambition to become a semiconductor manufacturing player will bear fruit later this year with the debut of the first silicon designed and built in the nation....

Then suggested a bloke down the pub might be able to help fix it On Call Friday brings the prospect of spending time with loved ones. But before we get there, The Register offers another instalment of On Call, the column that chronicles experiences from the global family of readers who have traumatic tech support tales to tell....

Paint a target on Myanmar, pledge more info-sharing to get the job done A group established by six Asian nations to fight criminal cyber-scam slave camps that infest the region claims it's made good progress dismantling the operations....

'Public interest alone does not justify warrantless querying' says judge It was revealed this week a court in New York made a landmark ruling that sided against the warrantless state surveillance of people's private communications in America....

Who guards the guardrail makers? Not the bosses who hire them, it's alleged Scale AI, which labels training data for machine-learning models, was sued this month, alongside labor platform Outlier, for allegedly failing to protect the mental health of contractors hired to protect people from harmful interactions with AI models....

But we mean, you've had nearly four years to patch One of the critical security flaws exploited by China's Salt Typhoon to breach US telecom and government networks has had a patch available for nearly four years - yet despite repeated warnings from law enforcement and private-sector security firms, nearly all public-facing Microsoft Exchange Server instances with this vulnerability remain unpatched....

Hello Operator? Can you give me number nine? Can I see you later? Will you give me back my dime? OpenAI on Thursday launched a human-directed AI agent called Operator that can use a web browser by itself to accomplish various online tasks, or at least try to do so....

No in-the-wild exploits ... yet Cisco has pushed a patch for a critical, 9.9-rated vulnerability in its Meeting Management tool that could allow a remote, authenticated attacker with low privileges to escalate to administrator on affected devices....

x86 behemoth calls the approach 'innovative' - DIY builders may disagree Intel claims a more modular approach to PC design could make systems easier to repair and reduce electronic waste - and it has some proposals for you....

OpenAI boss tell world's richest man money is there to fund infrastructure project Updated The world has been treated to tech bros squabbling over Stargate, the alleged $500 billion artificial intelligence infrastructure project led by OpenAI, while the grown-ups look on....

Big organizations and governments are main users of these gateways SonicWall is warning customers of a critical vulnerability that was potentially already exploited as a zero-day....

Company 'strongly disagrees' with law infringement allegations Meta has again come under fire for its pay-or-consent model in the EU....

Generative AI needs a break, just like the rest of us, m'kay? OUTAGE Reactivate your brain. ChatGPT has gone down....

Experts warn not to take leaks lightly as years-long compromises could remain undetected Thousands of email addresses included in the Belsen Group's dump of FortiGate configs last week are now available online, revealing which organizations may have been impacted by the 2022 zero-day exploits....

Chips and software giant Broadcom says it's 'flexible and open' on licensing terms, but customers disagree VMware users continue to be unhappy with licensing changes since the virtualization giant was acquired by Broadcom, and are now complaining that they are being forced into three-year commitments when renewing vSphere licenses....

Shares slide at 'most profitable' company in Korea as world worries over geopolitics Market uncertainty and fears around trade protectionism are overshadowing SK hynix's latest earnings, with its shares sliding despite revenue doubling for the financial year just completed....

As Microsoft, Apple, and Google switch the tech on by default, what happened to asking for permission first? Opinion Copilot in Microsoft 365 and Apple Intelligence on iDevices are the latest examples of the tech industry's obsession with making services opt-out rather than opt-in....

CMA flexes its new Strategic Market Status muscles The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is launching Strategic Market Status (SMS) investigations into both Apple and Google, probing the duo's control of their respective mobile ecosystems....

Coming soon to April's TrueNAS SCALE release, dubbed 'Fangtooth' The latest version of OpenZFS offers RAID expansion, plus faster data deduplication donated by iXsystems. The code will be available very soon in the beta of TrueNAS SCALE 25.04....

Plus: 'Largest-ever' duff traffic tsunami clocks in at 5.6 Tbps In addition to Chinese spies invading organizations' networks and ransomware crews locking up sensitive files, botnets blasting distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks can still cause a world of hurt - and website downtime - and it's quite likely your competitors are to blame....

And the government thinks that AI and taking shackles off big tech will help? God help Britain For the first time since the start of the pandemic, the number of tech firms incorporated in the UK has declined, with a shrinking economy, as well as high inflation and interest rates causing a slump in business confidence....

Nailed just 15% of assigned tasks A service described as "the first AI software engineer" appears to be rather bad at its job, based on a recent evaluation....

Answers on a postcard to what 'Microcode Signature Verification Vulnerability' might mean AMD has confirmed at least some of its microprocessors suffer a microcode-related security vulnerability, the existence of which accidentally emerged this month after a fix for the flaw appeared in a beta BIOS update from PC maker Asus....

What? Why? Xi wants people spending, so has extended a subsidy scheme to phones, tabs, and smartwatches If you want a cheap iPhone, China's the place to be right now thanks to a government subsidy scheme that means resellers are discounting the devices to make sure Beijing helps to pick up the bill....

Old flaws that keep causing trouble haunt Big Red Oracle has delivered its regular quarterly collection of patches: 603 in total, 318 for its own products, and another 285 for Linux code it ships....

Microsoft's IG-for-suits insists lawsuit's claims are without merit LinkedIn was this week accused of giving third parties access to Premium customers' private InMail messages for AI model training....

Markets smartwatches as health helpers even as they expose some owners to PFAS Apple has been sued for allegedly selling wristbands for its smartwatches that contain high levels of "forever chemicals" known as PFAS that may be linked to harmful health effects in humans....

And: America 'has never been less secure,' retired rear admiral tells Congress The Trump administration gutted key cybersecurity advisory boards in its first days, as expert witnesses warned Congress of potentially destructive cyberattacks by China....

The (good old) boys are back in town US federal government contractors are no longer subject to anti-discrimination rules over hiring, training, and employment - after President Trump reached back 60 years to scrap an equal opportunity order signed by former President Lyndon B. Johnson....

Threat actor exploited phishing and OAuth abuse to inject malicious code Cybersecurity outfit Sekoia is warning Chrome users of a supply chain attack targeting browser extension developers that has potentially impacted hundreds of thousands of individuals already....

Meanwhile, datacenter emissions continue to soar Microsoft is forking out for even more carbon credits to offset spiralling AI-fuelled carbon dioxide emissions from its datacenters....

This year's model adds lots of AI, improved management, and support for biz buyers First fondle Samsung has announced the Galaxy S25, the latest version of its flagship smartphone range, and, as you'd expect, made new AI features the hero....

Learning how to deal with the microorganisms hitching a ride with humans Two NASA astronauts are set to venture outside the International Space Station (ISS) in search of signs of life....

Update addresses boot failures on multi-node systems Microsoft is releasing an out-of-band patch to deal with a problem that prevented some Windows Server 2022 machines from booting....

Ross Ulbricht's family are now appealing for donations to support his reintegration into society Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht is now a free man after US President Donald Trump made good on his promise to issue a federal pardon upon taking office....

But no changes to bcachefs Linux kernel 6.13 is here, but don't get too excited. It's not a biggie and, given the timing, probably won't appear in many familiar distros....

Amazon doesn't break out figures, but then again neither do Microsoft nor Google As more businesses shift an ever greater number of workloads to the cloud, hyperscalers aren't doing enough to help CIOs or tech buyers, who are already under legislative pressure, to be more transparent about their own corporation's carbon footprint regarding compute services....