The Register

Ransomware, AI, secure software, digital IDs - there's something for everyone in the presidential directive Analysis Joe Biden, in the final days of his US presidency, issued another cybersecurity order that is nearly as vast in scope as it is late in the game....

Beijing investigating claims of unfair competition in mature semiconductors The "chip wars" between the US and China show no sign of cooling off as Beijing prepares to examine whether America is unfairly subsidizing its own semiconductor companies. Meanwhile, Washington's latest export restrictions have angered even some of its allies....

Competition hots up with Ivanti over who can have the worst start to a year Fortinet has confirmed that previous analyses of records leaked by the Belsen Group are indeed genuine FortiGate configs stolen during a zero-day raid in 2022....

With Biden reportedly planning to skirt enforcement and kick the can to Trump, this saga might still not be over Updated The US Supreme Court has upheld a law requiring TikTok to either divest from its Chinese parent ByteDance or face a ban in the United States. The decision eliminates the final legal obstacle to the federal government forcing a shutdown of the platform for US users on January 19....

Commission insists the timing has nothing to do with Musk meddling in German politics ahead of election The European Commission is stepping up its ongoing investigation of Elon Musk's X with a request to examine recent changes made to the platform's recommendation algorithms....

Turns out tool does both file transfers and security fixes fast Don't panic. Yes, there were a bunch of CVEs, affecting potentially hundreds of thousands of users, found in rsync in early December - and made public on Tuesday - but a fixed version came out the same day, and was further tweaked for better compatibility the following day....

15 million system to serve as testbed for larger Herder supercomputer coming in 2027 Hundreds of AMD APUs fired up on Thursday as Germany's High-Performance Computing Center (HLRS) at the University of Stuttgart announced the completion of its latest supercomputer dubbed Hunter....

Many users less than impressed by unexpected arrival of AI assistant in Word Copilot is coming to Microsoft 365 Personal and Family, and Vulture Central has had some hands-on experience with the generative AI assistant's attempts to be helpful....

Summaries will return when Apple Intelligence has 'improved' Apple has released a new beta of iOS 18.3 and tacitly admitted that, yes, its AI-generated notification summaries need a bit more work....

With a near half-billion-pound price hike bringing contract value to 1.4B IBM has secured a deal with the UK Home Office to supply user services for the troubled Emergency Service Network (ESN) upgrade, providing voice and data communications after Motorola withdrew from the project....

Pastes allegedly stolen documents on leak site with 600K demand Another year and yet another UK local authority has been pwned by a ransomware crew. This time it's Gateshead Council in North East England at the hands of the Medusa group....

Home Office, Department for Work and Pensions supplier in hands of FRP Advisory A self-described specialist supplier of "transformational data and AI solutions" to the UK government has called in the administrative receivers....

Fixed the problem anyway - with no approval for a purchase and no permission to use a device On Call When the weekend rolls around, nobody needs permission to do whatever they desire. Unless, of course, they're required to be available to support tech - a restriction we mark each week in On Call, the column that celebrates fine fixing feats achieved despite the footling of flummoxed fools....

If you want a picture of the future, imagine your infosec team stamping on software forever Microsoft brainiacs who probed the security of more than 100 of the software giant's own generative AI products came away with a sobering message: The models amplify existing security risks and create new ones....

Weirdly, this shows the weakness of hosted Windows with an admission about vidchats Amazon Web Services has flicked the switch on a pair of workstation-grade cloud desktops that, ironically, highlight a problem with the tech....

Test flight seven did better on the ground with a successful booster catch SpaceX has again lost a Starship, after the seventh test flight of the spacecraft ended with a rapid unscheduled disassembly", but is nonetheless celebrating the mission as it ended with the second successful catch of its Super Heavy booster....

Some of you have apparently already botched chatbots or allowed shadow AI' to creep in Cisco and Nvidia have both recognized that as useful as today's AI may be, the technology can be equally unsafe and/or unreliable - and have delivered tools in an attempt to help address those weaknesses....

We'll defo ask for permission next time, automaker tells FTC General Motors on Thursday said that it has reached a settlement with the FTC "to address privacy concerns about our now-discontinued Smart Driver program."...

Welcome to a decade where the oligarchs are no longer silent in the shadows US President Joe Biden gave his final address to the nation on Wednesday, and said America was visibly sliding into an oligopoly aided by a flood of online disinformation....

Department of Transportation wants in on last-minute Biden administration action too The Department of Transportation has joined the flurry of last-minute actions by the Biden administration with a lawsuit accusing Southwest Airlines of operating chronically delayed flights....

FSB cyberspies venture into a new app for espionage, Microsoft says Star Blizzard, a prolific phishing crew backed by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), conducted a new campaign aiming to compromise WhatsApp accounts and gain access to their messages and data, according to Microsoft....

You've got to spend money - like $36 billion+ - to make, er, AI chips TSMC is bumping capital expenditure in 2025 to between $38 billion and $42 billion in anticipation of scooping up more chip manufacturing contracts in the field of AI processors....

That's in addition to the $4.5M fine paid to three state AGs last year Enzo Biochem has settled a consolidated class-action lawsuit relating to its 2023 ransomware incident for $7.5 million....

The hyperscale plant is designed to produce tens of thousands of AVs a year Anduril has found a new home in Middle America with confirmation today that the defense tech maker plans to build its first hyperscale manufacturing facility in Columbus, Ohio....

Power-induced glitches, lasers, and electromagnetic fields are all tools of the trade Raspberry Pi has given out prizes for extracting a secret value from the one-time-programmable (OTP) memory of the Raspberry Pi RP2350 microcontroller - awarding a pile of cash to all four entrants....

Chocolate Factory slurps own dogfood, sheds drudgery in specific areas Google, which peddles AI software with as much giddy enthusiasm as Microsoft, reports dogfooding its own AI concoction and leaving the lab with a pleasant taste in its mouth....

Plus: Bit barns' demand for water, land, and power could breed 'growing opposition' from residents The datacenter industry looks set for a turbulent 2025 as AI growth threatens to trump sustainability commitments and authorities are likely to see growing public hostility to new projects....

Regulator asks people to link their credit cards, mobile accounts, or face scans for smut use to protect kids The UK's communications regulator has published guidance for website operators aimed at preventing under-18s from accessing pornographic content online via "highly effective age assurance" techniques....

The eighth point-release of Bookworm - yes, you read that right - and the latest MX with new Xfce Debian 12.9 - the latest point-release of Debian "Bookworm" - emerged at the weekend and coming hot on its heels is one of the more interesting downstreams, MX Linux 23.5....

Jeff Bezos' space company achieves milestone with payload delivered Jeff Bezos joined the orbital elite with the launch of Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket this morning....

Assist Security's client list includes fashion icons, critical infrastructure orgs A London-based private security company allegedly left more than 120,000 files available online via an unsecured server, an infoseccer told The Register....

Free Software Foundation Europe and others urge European Commission to double down on DMA Digital rights advocacy organizations contend that Apple has failed to comply with its interoperability obligations under the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA)....

NAO report highlights 3B cost overruns and 29 years of cumulative delays in IT projects UK government plans its technology purchases with limited assessment of technical feasibility, according to a spending watchdog's analysis of the 14-billion-a-year procurement of digital services....

As the ESA celebrates planned break-up of its solar blotter-spotter India's Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has successfully docked a pair of satellites, making the nation the fourth to achieve the feat....

Sophgo scores a place on Entity List, Indian nuclear boffins taken off Chinese chip designer Sophgo, a suspected supplier of AI silicon to Huawei, has been added to the USA's Entity List" of orgs felt to represent a national security risk and therefore prohibited from working with American companies unless a license is issued to allow such dealings....

In a preview of x86_64 VMs running on Apple silicon, so it's excusable for now Desktop hypervisor specialist Parallels has released an early technology preview of code that allows virtual machines running OSes coded for the x86_64 architecture, such as Microsoft Windows, to run on Apple's Arm-powered silicon....

System to feature hundreds of liquid-cooled Blackwell systems Nvidia is constructing a 30-megawatt research-and-development supercomputer stuffed with its latest-generation Blackwell GPUs in northern Israel at an estimated cost of half a billion dollars....

Watchdog alleged it had no SIEM or MFA, orders rapid adoption of basic infosec tools GoDaddy has failed to protect its web-hosting platform with even basic infosec tools and practices since 2018, according to the FTC, but the internet giant won't face any immediate consequences for its many alleged acts of omission....

Right after one of its drones crashed into an aircraft fighting California wildfires? Great timing Drone maker DJI has decided to scale back its geofencing restrictions, meaning its software won't automatically stop operators from flying into areas flagged as no-fly zones....

Incoming Trump-picked watchdog boss dissents, calls suit 'hasty' and 'deeply imprudent,' so will it stick? Updated America's top consumer watchdog has sued tractor maker John Deere for monopolizing tech repair services for its machinery, though whether the lawsuit will survive the pending presidential transition remains to be seen....

We are only seeing 'the tip of the iceberg,' Easterly warns Beijing's Salt Typhoon cyberspies had been seen in US government networks before telcos discovered the same foreign intruders in their own systems, according to CISA boss Jen Easterly....

Half the number of roles axed, and yes - you can keep blaming AI The IT jobs market has shrunk for a second year in a row, says tech consultancy Janco Associates, but at least things weren't as bad in 2024 as they were in 2023....

You may not need to go full Juggalo for the sake of privacy Researchers at cyber-defense contractor PeopleTec have found that facial-recognition algorithms' focus on specific areas of the face opens the door to subtler surveillance avoidance strategies....

Don't believe the hype? GPU maker jumps on the bandwagon anyway A week after Nvidia chief Jensen Huang demolished the market valuations of listed quantum computing brands by saying the technology is 20 years away from being useful, the GPU maker has confirmed it is hosting a quantum computing day....

Microsoft starts 2025 as it hopefully doesn't mean to go on Devices that have Citrix's Session Recording software installed are having problems completing this month's Microsoft Patch Tuesday update, which includes important fixes....

Babel Fish like ML model emerges after training on 4.5 million hours of multilingual spoken audio Meta has developed a machine learning model its researchers claim offers near-instant speech-to-speech translation between around 36 languages....

Bubble? What bubble? Fears of an AI bubble have yet to scare off venture capitalists and private equity firms from pumping billions of dollars into the GPU-packed datacenters at the heart of the machine-learning craze....

US, Japan, South Korea vow to intensify counter efforts North Korean blockchain bandits stole more than half a billion dollars in cryptocurrency in 2024 alone, the US, Japan, and South Korea say....

She doesn't feel pity, remorse, or fear, but she'll craft a polite email message as she turns you down Interview Mega HR, a Florida-based human resources startup, today launched an AI agent service called Megan that the biz claims can automate most recruiting and hiring tasks while improving communication with job applicants....

Energy consumption set to become a key performance indicator by 2027 Most businesses rushing to adopt AI are unprepared for the energy demands it'll place on their infrastructure, and few have a handle on the power consumption of AI systems or the implications for their datacenters....