The Register

Just some building blocks for life - in a few billion years, who knows what could develop? Initial analyses of samples collected from the surface of Bennu reveal the ancient asteroid contains water and carbon-based molecules, vital materials needed to create and support life....

Says it has enough cash to foot the demand Microsoft today revealed the IRS last month sent the Windows maker a bill for $28.9 billion in back taxes - and has vowed to contest the charge....

Those are some fat vector registers SiFive today launched a pair of RISC-V CPU cores aimed at high-performance and AI/ML applications....

'Digital emancipation proclamation' praised by tech tinkerers, but info brokers aren't happy On Tuesday, California's Governor Gavin Newsom signed two law bills that give people more control over their devices and their data, the Right to Repair Act and the Delete Act....

Contractor blamed by watchdog for late SPIDER arm work A NASA plan to robotically repair and refuel satellites in orbit is way behind schedule and well over budget, says NASA's Office of the Inspector General (OIG), with most of the blame falling on space tech contractor Maxar....

Worth it for 20 years behind bars? A US Navy service member pleaded guilty yesterday to receiving thousands of dollars in bribes from a Chinese spymaster in exchange for passing on American military secrets....

Added functionality follows BluBracket acquisition earlier this year HashiConf HashiCorp today revealed its latest front in the battle against secrets sprawl with new Vault functionality - plus a first look at the fruits of the company's BluBracket purchase....

Meanwhile, Exchange Online is on the fritz Microsoft has issued a fresh update to address an old vulnerability affecting Exchange Server 2019 and 2016 while its online service has problems of its own....

Meta also told to clean out election-bothering deepfakes from its empire - or face the music Updated The European Commission has publicly rebuked Elon Musk's X for what it says is its role in disseminating disinformation and illegal content surrounding the Hamas/Israel conflict. And the EC is threatening penalties under the Digital Services Act if the platform doesn't take measures to stop it....

Boffins estimate power needed if every Google search became an LLM interaction. Gulp The recent spike of interest in AI thanks to large language models (LLMs) and generative AI is pushing adoption of the tech by a wide variety of applications, leading to worries the processing needed for this will cause a surge in datacenter electricity consumption....

Can I use AI to write me a license that won't annoy the open-source community? HashiConf A host of Terraform features join HashiCorp's flagship product today, including testing and user interface tweaks aimed at cutting errors in infrastructure code....

Dust blocks light from Sun-like star as far-off worlds meet Evidence of a collision between planets outside our solar system was published for the first time today....

We still doubt any infosec leaders will be going without heating this winter The gap between the top and bottom-earning CISOs is growing wider, with the highest-paid execs having their salaries increased at three times the rate of those at the lower echelons....

Email is just so 20th century Comment Red Hat has closed its security advisories mailing list. It will still share the information, just via an RSS feed, with access free for all... at least for now....

IT folks look back on 20 years of what is now infosec tradition Feature Twenty years ago this month, Microsoft did something pretty revolutionary at the time when it formalized the Windows software release schedule....

Analysts 'put stake in the ground' to say tech will hit market in matter of years Smartphones with self-healing displays could be on sale within the next five years, according to the latest predictions from research outfit CCS Insight....

Bhargs Srivathsan also urges enterprises to ditch the tech Lamborghinis for efficient ride The use of generative AI is cutting down cloud migration efforts by 30 percent to 50 percent when done correctly, according to McKinsey's Bhargs Srivathsan, speaking at a conference in Singapore on Wednesday....

You may need it - Windows 10 is no longer a free upgrade Microsoft has published guidance on how to download and install Linux. In other news, Hell freezes over and pigs fly south to their winter feeding grounds....

The coordinated disclosure didn't quite go to plan, though Updated After a week of rampant speculation about the nature of the security issues in curl, the latest version of the command line transfer tool was finally released today....

Britain's privacy watchdog still not happy that agreement 'appropriately' protects sensitive data Opinion The UK Extension to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework (aka Data Bridge) will enter into force on October 12, allowing certifying entities to easily transfer personal data from the UK to the US....

Gartner finds only a third are somewhat prepared for S/4HANA transition Global tech researcher Gartner has found that only 33 percent of SAP users relying on its legacy ECC ERP system have bought or subscribed to licenses to start their transition to S/4HANA....

Or maybe don't let Microsoft's desire to defeat Google dictate your defensive strategy Column I am still amazed how few people - even in IT - have heard of Windows Copilot. Microsoft's deep integration of Bing Chat into Windows 11 was announced with much fanfare back in May....

PhilHealth blames government procurement rules for license expiry and issues phishing warnings A recent ransomware attack on the Philippine Health Insurance Corporation (PhilHealth) occurred while the organization's antivirus software subscription had expired....

Probe goes loopy after mistaking solar rays for stars The European Space Agency's Euclid space telescope is back to normal and will resume its mission, thanks to a software update that was required after its navigation sensors mistakenly identified solar ray signals as stars....

Commercial customers are in the frame, and gamers aren't forgotten, as it takes on Intel's mini PCs Fresh from winning the rights to build machines based on Intel's quirky little Next Unit of Compute (NUC) mini-PC spec, ASUS has cooked up plans to offer custom NUCs to industrial clients, or even for edge deployments by cloud service providers....

Asian internet registry still has 5M 32-bit addresses from different sources - or practically infinite IPv6s The Asia-Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) on Monday announced it is close to delegating the last IPv4 addresses in its final /8 block, bringing the regional internet registry a step closer to IPv4 exhaustion....

Doctored video featured vile false slur, but it wasn't a deepfake ... so that's OK, then? Meta's Oversight Board is probing the social media giant's policies on deepfake content after Facebook decided against taking down a faked video that falsely labelled US President Joe Biden a pedophile....

640K, sorry, 1080p ought to be enough for anybody Intel filled out its Arc graphics portfolio Tuesday with a $179 card aimed at 1080p gamers on a shoestring budget....

The digital town square, but with more pay-to-play curbs On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, you can now opt to allow only paying verified accounts to reply to your tweets. Again, it's more fee speech than free speech for this Elon Musk-owned outfit....

Redmond willing to do its accounts in red ink to get you hooked Analysis Microsoft is reportedly losing up to $80 a month per user on its GitHub Copilot services....

Happy Halloween! Security bugs under attack squashed, more flaws fixed Patch Tuesday Microsoft on Tuesday issued more than 100 security updates to fix flaws in its products, including two bugs that are already under active attack, as well as addressing an HTTP/2 weakness that has also been exploited in the wild....

'It is wrong that our system was used to punish an innovator and to enrich a pretender' A California judge has quashed one of Sonos's legal victories against Google - and the $32.5 million royalty payout that came along with it - declaring Sonos's patents at the heart of the matter were the unenforceable work of a "pretender" attempting to "punish an innovator ... by delay and sleight of hand."...

It's PowerShell or something similar in the not too distant future Microsoft has stopped developing VBScript after a 27-year relationship and plans to remove the scripting language entirely in a future Windows release....

And Caroline Ellison says she was told by Bankman-Fried to take $10B from customer accounts At the fraud trial of former FTX head Sam Bankman-Fried, prosecutors presented the jury with Python code for the FTX backend that allowed flagged client accounts to spend money they didn't have on the cryptocurrency exchange....

Botnet storm drowned last record with 398 million requests per second A zero-day vulnerability in the HTTP/2 protocol was exploited to launch the largest distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on record, according to Cloudflare....

But P-12's production timeline is fuzzy A Swedish technology company thinks it has a solution to the misery of urban commutes, at least for those in cities with good access to waterways: 30-seat, all-electric hydrofoil shuttles that can reach speeds of up to 30 knots, or just shy of 35mph (55kph)....

With 13 new payloads it's the biggest update to the botnet in months The infamous Mirai botnet was spotted by researchers who say it is spinning up again, this time with an "aggressively updated arsenal of exploits."...

Bernstein estimates value of agreement, warns it and similar deals may end if DoJ wins antitrust case Google pays Apple between $18 billion to $20 billion a year to remain the dominant search engine in the iPhone, according to a financial analyst that thinks this deal, and others like it, are now at risk....

Efforts to deny China access will hurt the 'open' part of open standard, says collab body CEO The CEO of RISC-V International is warning US politicos that subjecting the open processor standard to export restrictions could result in the development of incompatible solutions and stifle innovation....

One-click exploit could potentially affect most major distros Researchers discovered a high-severity remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in an inherent component of GNOME-based Linux distros, potentially impacting a huge number of users....

But only if you're ready to cozy up in Azure's abode Microsoft says it plans to keep on supporting Apache Cassandra 3.11 a year past its end-of-life date... just as long as you're running it as an Azure Managed Instance....

It's bad, folks. Pair of CVEs incoming on October 11 Start your patch engines - a new version of curl is due tomorrow that addresses a pair of flaws, one of which lead developer Daniel Stenberg describes as "probably the worst curl security flaw in a long time."...

Community fork delivers first code for more distro-neutral functionality The first version of Incus, the community project working on a fork of Canonical's so-called LXD "containervisor," is here....

Faulty backup radiator is bleeding coolant into the black The International Space Station just sprung another leak. And you can give yourself a pat on the back if your first guess at the source was the Russian Nauka module....

But why would a simulation create El Reg? Mmm... pizza Going by the fact that Elon Musk said there was only one in a billion chance that the world was not simulated, we might save ourselves a lot of time and assume that on this occasion, as on so many others, the 52-year-old rocket bro has made a beeline for the wrong end of the stick....

Working with Ampere and others in modular approach Telecoms giant Vodafone is backing more than one horse in the OpenRAN arena, confirming a collaboration with Arm on energy efficient silicon for 5G base stations and continuing to work with Intel on OpenRAN silicon....

When German vendor promised service until 2027, not everyone qualified Half of SAP clients relying on ECC - used by the majority of ERP customers - will fail to qualify for extended support beyond 2025, according to the German vendor's own figures....

Perpetual license case perpetually rumbles on Documents from Microsoft's 270 million ($331 million) legal spat with Brit reseller ValueLicensing have revealed squabbling behind the scenes over what can be disclosed and who should be in the circle of trust....

Articulating use cases? Erm, yes but customers are captivated Business interest in AI PCs is fizzing, at least according to IDC, even though the analyst admits use cases have yet to be fully articulated."...

Dwell times drop to hours rather than days for the first time The time taken by cyber attackers between gaining an initial foothold in a victim's environment and deploying ransomware has fallen to 24 hours, according to a study....