The Register

You can't offer a better deal in exchange for silence, argues NLRB Separation agreements Meta gave to employees during mass 2022 layoffs are illegal, a US judge has decided, and the reasoning could have implications far beyond Zuckercorp....

Big misconception is that data ingestion is occurring, we're told Google, after facing accusations about its AI model ingesting private files, says Gemini can read and summarize this type of sensitive data in real time -but only with Workspace users' express permission....

But will they ship before the Biden administration tightens export controls? Comment US trade restrictions on the sale of AI accelerators to China haven't detered Nvidia from bringing its latest Blackwell architecture to the Middle Kingdom....

Some rest for the wicked? Los Angeles County Superior Court, the largest trial court in America, closed all 36 of its courthouses today following an "unprecedented" ransomware attack on Friday....

More baddies go it alone as trust in big gangs withers, claims Europol A fresh report from Europol suggests that the recent disruption of ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) groups is fragmenting the threat landscape, making it more difficult to track....

And you thought rolling back a borked update on a server down the hall was hard? The European Space Agency (ESA) has shared the story of how engineers brought a mission back from the brink after a micrometeoroid strike, an equipment failure, and an impressive solar storm....

Shrinks training pool, but hurts services like the Internet Archive The internet is becoming significantly more hostile to webpage crawlers, especially those operated for the sake of generative AI, researchers say....

Big Red agrees not to capture personal details after two-year class action Oracle has agreed to cough up $115 million to settle a two-year class action lawsuit that alleged misuse of user data....

Was a 2009 agreement on interoperability to blame? Did the EU force Microsoft to let third parties like CrowdStrike run riot in the Windows kernel as a result of a 2009 undertaking? This is the implication being peddled by the Redmond-based cloud and software titan....

Supposed hacktivist efforts previously linked to the Kremlin's GRU Flying under the radar on Clownstrike day last week, two members of the Cyber Army of Russia Reborn (CARR) hacktivist crew are the latest additions to the US sanctions list....

Impressively home-made, this is the sort of laptop we wish we could buy new A Thinkpad Yoga, modded with a mechanical keyboard, may serve as a wake-up call to both Lenovo and Framework....

UK university users face migration path following plan to withdraw support for product some build 1M solutions around Exclusive Software used to cost the University of Oxford's Covid vaccine research has become the subject of an end-of-life announcement from enterprise application developer Unit4....

Cloud group companies free of Redmond's compliance cops for 2 years in return for ditching EC antitrust complaint EXCLUSIVE Part of Microsoft's settlement with a bunch of cloud providers in Europe to make an antitrust complaint disappear is a two-year moratorium on software audits, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter....

Read also served at UK's MoJ, where outsourcer paid fine over electronic tagging fiasco UK outsourcing provider Serco has appointed Tom Read, head of central government's digital agency, to the role of group chief digital and technology officer....

When someone kicks a chair across the room out of fear they'll be fired it's stopped being funny Who, Me? It's another Monday, dear reader, which means the working week has begun anew. On the bright side, it also means another dose of the reader-submitted tales of IT hijinks we call Who, Me?...

Indian tech workers' union calls for a strike over 14-hour day proposal HCL Technologies has devised a measure to make sure its India-based employees change out of their pajamas and head into the office: making on-premises attendance a condition of eligibility for leave....

An unexpected splash of yellow on the red planet The Curiosity rover has found something surprising: rocks made of pure sulfur....

New instance types and discounts galore, and Broadcom all smiles as its preferred licensing finds more friends Google Cloud has delivered a Broadcom-compliant version of its cloudy VMware offering, and pitched it as a keenly priced migration target....

Also: Second-string Russian hackers sanctioned; Senators demand answers from Snowflake, and more Infosec in brief Unable to access the Samsung smartphone of the deceased Trump shooter for clues, the FBI turned to a familiar - if controversial - source to achieve its goal: digital forensics tools vendor Cellebrite....

Plus: Former Samsung worker jailed for leaking secrets; Robo-cabs reach Shanghai airport; and more Asia in brief Chinese researchers have created a drone that weighs just over four grams - less than a sheet of printer paper - and may be able to fly indefinitely....

Rapid restore tool being tested as Microsoft estimates 8.5M machines went down CrowdStrike's now-infamous Falcon Sensor software, which last week led to widespread outages of Windows-powered computers, has also caused crashes of Linux machines....

This is exactly what we said would happen post-Blizzard merger, laments watchdog, as its appeal continues Microsoft plans to raise the price of its Game Pass subscriptions significantly - and one US watchdog isn't amused....

17-year-old cuffed as FBI says it will 'relentlessly pursue' miscreants around the globe Cops in the UK have arrested a suspected member of the notorious Scattered Spider crime gang, which is accused of crippling MGM Resorts in Las Vegas with ransomware last summer....

Our vultures gather to review this very freaky Friday Kettle If you're an IT administrator with Windows boxes on your network, Friday can't have been a lot of fun. What's likely millions of systems were or still are stuck in blue-screen boot loop hell, mostly requiring manual intervention to fix....

Who loves a global outage? Phishers, fraudsters and all manner of creeps Well that was fast. Criminals didn't waste any time taking advantage of the CrowdStrike-Microsoft chaos and quickly got to work phishing organizations and spinning up malicious domains purporting to be fixes....

Oh, was it supposed to be Y2K24? Today is one of those days that will go down in history as an unmitigated IT disaster, with CrowdStrike responsible for taking systems down all over the globe. We know airports, hospitals and the usual critical infrastructure suspects have been affected, but CrowdStrike is disrupting daily life in some unexpected ways, too....

CrowdStrike? More like ClownStrike! Amirite? IT administrators are struggling to deal with the ongoing fallout from the faulty CrowdStrike file update. One spoke to The Register to share what it is like at the coalface....

Links shortened with goo.gl will stop working in 2025 Google will soon make its own contribution to the problem of link rot by shutting down the Google URL Shortener service in 2025....

Have you tried turning it off and on again, like, a bunch? Updated Did the CrowdStrike patchpocalypse knock your Azure VMs into a BSOD boot loop? If so, Microsoft has some tips to get them back online....

Cancer treatments are in jeopardy across multiple healthcare facilities A UK hospital is battling what it is calling a critical incident as the ongoing global IT outage caused by a CrowdStrike update is impacting its Varian system....

But only for new mobile and broadband contracts, and only from January 2025 UK communications regulator Ofcom has banned mid-contract price rises linked to inflation....

Emergency services, medical practices, airlines, banks, and more all crippled Updated CrowdStrike's share price is currently tanking amid a major global IT outage its leadership has attributed to a dodgy channel file....

Love affair between HMRC and French outsourcer set to last 25 years The UK tax collector is awarding Capgemini a contract worth up to 574 million ($741 million) to run legacy tax management systems until 2029, one of which was first built under a controversial arrangement that was supposed to end in 2020....

AV tech was left alone, locked down, and under severe pressure On Call Welcome again to On Call, The Register's weekly reader-contributed tale of being asked to hold in your rage while dealing with the effluent of tech support....

Falcon Sensor putting hosts into deathloop - but there's a workaround UPDATED An update to a product from infosec vendor CrowdStrike is bricking computers running Windows....

Member nations aren't on the same page, investors are confused, and nobody understands the real costs The European Court of Auditors (ECA) has found the European Union's program to develop a renewable hydrogen program needs a reality check due to use of "overly ambitious" benchmarks and numerous other issues....

Firm halts trades after seeing $230 million disappear Indian crypto exchange WazirX has revealed it lost virtual assets valued at over $230 million after a cyber attack that has since been linked to North Korea....

Run by the NSA, the FBI, and Five Eyes nations, who fooled infosec researchers, apparently China has asserted that the Volt Typhoon gang, which Five Eyes nations accuse of being a Beijing-backed attacker that targets critical infrastructure, was in fact made up by the US intelligence community....

Startup Ola slashes prices to zero for a year in apparent response Google has slashed the prices for access to its Maps API in India, the week after a competitor entered the market....

Central US region is back in business but Office apps still in trouble Updated Microsoft's 365 subscription services are down for some users, as the software titan also reports the Central US region of its Azure cloud is experiencing problems....

Plus: Meta Euro model drama; Mistral and Nvidia find NeMo; and more AI Roundup OpenAI has made available GPT-4o Mini - a smaller and cheaper version of its GPT-4o generative large language model (LLM) - via its cloud....

UT-Austin lab gets the job, and five years to do it The Pentagon's boffinry nerve center DARPA has doled out $840 million to develop next-generation semiconductor microsystems for America's military....

Russia-invaded software biz 'grateful for the support we have received' A judge has mostly thrown out a lawsuit brought by America's financial watchdog that accused SolarWinds and its chief infosec officer of misleading investors about its computer security practices and the backdooring of its Orion product....

Leaking skylights, collapsed roof, garbage-clogged pipes - did ChatGPT make this? Serial entrepreneur and OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman has made a bunch of lucrative moves in his time - but his $27 million mega-mansion certainly hasn't been one of them. His lawyers even called it a "lemon" in a recently filed lawsuit accusing the builder of negligence, fraud, and other failures....

Ariane 6 might have had some APU problems, but the well-Armed hardware on YPSat worked well A Raspberry Pi camera is orbiting the Earth, attached to ESA's YPSat, a week after both were supposed to have burned up upon re-entering the atmosphere with the upper stage of the Ariane 6....

Stick an independent probe in our software, you won't find any Putin.DLL backdoor Kaspersky has hit back after the US government banned its products - by proposing an independent verification that its software is above board and not backdoored by the Kremlin....

Tesla doesn't just have an US problem: It has one with EU, too Tesla isn't just floundering in the US - new registrations of Elon Musk's electric vehicles have dipped in the EU and UK this year, too....

Big Green's software remains tricky, but Fedora and AMD are finding ways to cope Nvidia says its forthcoming release 560 driver will be as open as releases 515 and 555 were - and will support more devices....

Major vendors' products scuppered by novel techniques Prolific Russian cybercrime syndicate FIN7 is using various pseudonyms to sell its custom security solution-disabling malware to different ransomware gangs....

Overseas expansion to continue, insists C.C. Wei The CEO of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is predicting that supply won't balance out demand for advanced chips until 2025 or 2026....