The Register

Surely Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric has nothing to do with it US immigration officials say they are winning the war on H-1B fraud - and say they've got the numbers to prove it....

DragonForce-riding ransomware ring also has 'shiny object syndrome' so will likely move on to another sector soon Interview The same miscreants behind recent cyberattacks on British retailers are now trying to dig their claws into major American retailers' IT environments - and in some cases even deploying ransomware, according to Google....

Expert tells us: 'It is the most unique breach disclosure I've ever seen' Coinbase says some of its overseas support staff were paid off to steal information on behalf of cybercriminals, and the company is now being extorted for $20 million....

Sometimes, less information is more In its latest gambit to reduce the noise of unnecessary security alerts, Socket has acquired Coana, a startup founded in 2022 by researchers from Aarhus University in Denmark that tells users which vulnerabilities they can safely ignore....

Devs told to swap raw results for LLM-generated summaries as August shutdown looms Microsoft is retiring Bing Search APIs on August 11, directing customers toward AI products as an alternative....

Lessons learned from last year's security snafu interview Being the chief information security officer at Snowflake is never an easy job, but last spring it was especially challenging....

Aiming for the stars, but sometimes hitting the Caribbean SpaceX supremo Elon Musk says the next Starship will launch next week, however, the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) hasn't yet given it the green light....

Probe indicates it was all over for Bayesian in just 9 minutes An interim report by the UK's Marine Accident Investigation Branch (MAIB) has indicated that extreme wind was to blame for the sinking of the yacht Bayesian, claiming the lives of UK tech tycoon Mike Lynch, his daughter, and five others....

MEWSIC to Brit crews' ears will see off anti-ship missiles, among other things Britain's Royal Navy is to get updated electromagnetic warfare (EW) capabilities including launchable decoys to help defend its vessels against threats such as modern anti-ship missiles....

Linux types mobilize website to help people avoid creating more e-waste The "End of 10" website is a cooperative effort to let people know that they have other options besides buying a new computer....

Fork focuses on stability and inclusion as it preps for more ambitious changes Interview Version 8.1 of Valkey was recently released, marking a year since the creation of the Redis fork. Valkey's co-maintainer, Madelyn Olson, is looking ahead to version 9 as the project settles down....

AlphaEvolve may optimize your code in ways you hadn't thought possible. Or not. Not is possible, too Google's AI shop DeepMind has unveiled AlphaEvolve, its "evolutionary coding agent" powered by large language models to discover and optimize algorithms....

Would you believe it, this RaaS cartel says Russia is off limits DragonForce, a new-ish ransomware-as-a-service operation, has given organizations another cyber threat to worry about - unless they're in Russia, which is off limits to the would-be extortionists....

IT department keeps the infrastructure. Then this new persona takes over and handles the AI stuff Some organizations have started hiring for a new tech job: The Machine Learning Administrator - aka the ML admin"....

Partly because America does AI wrong and it can get more done with less Chinese web giant Tencent says it has enough high-end GPUs to train new AI models for years, in part because it's found more efficient ways to do so....

Bit barn operator to wedge 8,192 liquid-cooled MI325Xs into AI training cluster Interview After some teething pains, TensorWave CEO Darrick Horton is confident that AMD's Instinct accelerators are ready to take on large-scale AI training....

More than $100M in costs could be cut by gutting duplicative IT alone, making DOGE itself look a bit redundant Comment Cost-trimming in the US federal government is all the rage right now - and a new report finds more than $100 million in savings available to the Feds by doing nothing but eliminating redundant and unnecessary IT investments....

Ransomware or critical infra hit? Top US manufacturer maintains steely silence Nucor, the largest steel manufacturer in the US, shut down production operations after discovering its servers had been penetrated....

Touchdown with no topple? Company aims for third time lucky Intuitive Machines has blamed poor lighting, a problematic altimeter, and difficulties spotting craters for the company's second lunar lander tipping over....

GA date slips out on Japanese site, vanishes from English Red Hat appears to have quietly made RHEL 10 available to paying customers, days ahead of its expected debut at next week's Red Hat Summit....

Cheaper, open source AI will commoditize the market at expense of their bloated counterparts The future of large language models is likely to be open source, according to Marc Benioff, co-founder and longstanding CEO of Salesforce....

Nightwing claims insider intel helped secure lucrative CISA work but US says decision is unrelated The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) scrapped a highly lucrative cybersecurity contract originally awarded to Leidos following a legal challenge from rival bidder Nightwing, yet insists the pushback had nothing to do with it....

Ailing chip giant targets 2027 break-even as costly EUV tools raise stakes Intel is wooing external chip customers for its 14A process node to justify the high costs involved, and aims for the foundry division to break even by 2027 - as part of ongoing effort to shake off the struggles of recent years....

Vendor says vulns are linked with 2 mystery open source libraries integrated into EPMM product Australia's intelligence agency is warning organizations about several new Ivanti zero-days chained for remote code execution (RCE) attacks. The vendor itself has said the vulns are linked to two mystery open source libraries which it declined to name....

'Legitimate interest' won't wash, says privacy outfit, as Zuck's org claims activists want to 'delay AI innovation' There's a Max Schrems-shaped object standing in the way of Meta's plans to train its AI on the data of its European users, and he's come armed with several justifications for why Zuckercorp might be violating EU regulations with its stated plans....

Admits due diligence fell short - furious users cry gaslighting' Customers are blasting VPN Secure's new parent company after it abruptly axed thousands of "lifetime" accounts. The reason? The CEO admits in an interview with The Register that his team didn't dig deep enough before acquiring the virtual private network outfit, and simply can't afford to honor those legacy deals....

Trump greenlights slot for Riyadh as NASA's pricey booster teeters on the brink NASA will launch a Saudi satellite aboard what could be its penultimate SLS rocket on the Artemis II mission following a deal announced in Riyadh by US President Donald Trump and de facto Saudi ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman....

No rush, according to Gartner chap who says: 'Nobody has ever out-patched threat actors at scale' Patch Tuesday has rolled around again, but if you don't rush to implement the feast of fixes it delivered, your security won't be any worse off in the short term - and may improve in the future....

Plus: How to make Google less unhelpful As search engines are intentionally made worse, and software grows ever bigger and more complex, a possibly unexpected ally emerges: the European Union....

CEO Pichai slumming it on a measly $10.725M compared to lieutenants The C-suite at Google's parent Alphabet collectively scooped up more than $215 million in compensation for 2024, and the CEO was the worst paid among them....

Crickets as senior security folk asked about risks at NCSC conference CYBERUK Peter Garraghan - CEO of Mindgard and professor of distributed systems at Lancaster University - asked the CYBERUK audience for a show of hands: how many had banned generative AI in their organizations? Three hands went up....

Troubled state biz tenders 410M software and DC-to-cloud migration plan, goodbye to Fujitsu on the Horizon The UK Post Office has confirmed it is ending in-house efforts to replace the troubled Horizon accounting and point of sale system as it launches a 410 million (c $540 million) procurement for alternative suppliers....

And it's Eviden who has no reason to moan over LISA upgrade - though questions over funding remain Updated Italy's Leonardo supercomputer is to get an AI upgrade to beef up support for the development of Large Language Models (LLMs) and multi-modal generative AI, in addition to the 13 AI factories now being procured around the EU....

Defenses are weaker, and victims are more likely to pay, SANS warns Criminals who attempt to damage critical infrastructure are increasingly targeting the systems that sit between IT and operational tech....

Prince Mohammed bin Bone Saw will take a few hundred thousand GPUs with his missiles and fighter jets The Saudi government on Tuesday announced a massive $600 billion investment in US defense, transportation, energy, and IT infrastructure....

Plus: All the fun and frolic of fixes from Adobe, SAP, Ivanti Patch Tuesday It's that time of the month again, and Microsoft has made it extra spicy by revealing five flaws it says are under active exploitation - but rates as important rather than critical fixes....

Court orders halt to layoffs - as folks steering American innovation wonder how long injunction will last Employees at Uncle Sam's National Science Foundation (NSF) are relieved that the Trump administration's plan to downsize the federal government collided with the US court system on Friday - but they're worried that the relief is only temporary....

Ding dong, diffusion is dead Biden's controversial AI Diffusion rules, which were set to restrict the sale of American GPUs and AI accelerators beginning this week, are officially dead....

ETH Zurich boffins exploit branch prediction race condition to steal info from memory, fixes have mild perf hit Researchers at ETH Zurich in Switzerland have found a way around Intel's defenses against Spectre, a family of data-leaking flaws in the x86 giant's processor designs that simply won't die....

Air Force Dumb The Trump administration is set to accept a $400 million luxury 747-8 from the royal family of Qatar - a lavish "palace in the sky" meant as a temporary Air Force One. But getting it up to presidential security standards could take years and cost hundreds of millions more....

Redmond talks up new technologies, capabilities for productivity ... just don't call it AI Microsoft is axing 3 percent of its global workforce - its biggest purge since chopping 10,000 jobs in early 2023 - this time to flatten its management structure....

Pay-to-play security on CVSS 10 issue is now fixed An update that fixed a critical flaw in data protection biz Commvault's Command Center was initially not available to a significant user subset - those testing out a free trial version of the product. That is, until a security researcher pointed out the problem....

But the government may be ignoring it anyway The Trump administration's ongoing mass firing of government employees has been put on hold, with a federal judge calling the move "likely illegal" and ordering the government to hand over evidence to prove it didn't violate the law....

Stop us if you've heard this one before A legal claim has been brought against Microsoft over alleged licensing practices that could result in a multibillion-pound payout for UK customers....

Both agencies seem unbothered despite tech world's clear concerns for US infoseccers CYBERUK The top brass from the UK's cyber agency say everything is business as usual when it comes to the GCHQ arm's relationship with CISA, amid growing unease about the current administration's treatment of its US equivalent....

The House of Zen's low-end enterprise strategy is badge engineering at its best AMD on Tuesday revealed its latest chips to get a Zen 5 refresh with the launch of its itty bitty Epyc 4005-series CPUs....

Research flags rise in one-dimensional health research fueled by large language models A report from a British university warns that scientific knowledge itself is under threat from a flood of low-quality AI-generated research papers....

The Soviet Union aimed for Venus, but hit the Indian Ocean instead The odyssey of the Soviet Union's failed attempt to reach Venus came to an end over the weekend with the probe either disintegrating during reentry or what remained of it splashing harmlessly into the ocean....

Market cap down by more than 1B since April 22 Marks & Spencer has confirmed that customer data was stolen as part of its cyberattack, fueling conjecture that ransomware was involved....

EUVD comes into play not a moment too soon The European Vulnerability Database (EUVD) is now fully operational, offering a streamlined platform to monitor critical and actively exploited security flaws amid the US struggles with budget cuts, delayed disclosures, and confusion around the future of its own tracking systems....