The Register

Another route to the year of Linux on the desktop. Or the edge Lenovo has entered the Android PC business....

More malware scum using acessibility features to steal personal info Singapore-based infosec outfit Group-IB on Thursday released details of a new Android trojan that exploits the operating system's accessibility features to steal info that enables theft of personal information....

64-qubit system paired with 40-qubit simulator to get some sort of accuracy Development of Japan's first superconducting quantum computer is complete, Fujitsu and the country's scientific research institute RIKEN announced this week....

Actors would get sued for violating their IP, why is the opposite not true? TV and film studios should obtain explicit consent from, give credit to, and compensate actors fairly for using their likeness to train generative AI systems, the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists union argued this week to the US federal government....

Dating app kept sensitive info even after peeps deleted accounts, complaint claims Grindr isn't doing a very good job protecting its users' private information, including their NSFW photos, according to the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), which wants the FTC to investigate potentially unlawful practices by the LGBTQ+ dating app....

Bezos rocket biz not involved this time - now that's a blue origin It's been a long time coming, but Amazon is finally launching its first two Project Kuiper internet-relay satellites into orbit tomorrow, October 6, but don't expect Bezos' Starlink competitor to be ready for customers anytime soon....

Test chip promises crunching on par with 20-year-old chips while sipping power RISC-V's open source instruction set has attracted a lot of attention over the past few years and not just here on Earth - a team at ETH Zurich in Switzerland say they've developed a low power, fault-tolerant microcontroller for cubesats based on the architecture....

Hard-coded credentials strike again Cisco has issued a security advisory about a vulnerability in its Emergency Responder software that would allow an unauthenticated remote attacker to log in to an affected device using the root account....

And in other news, lenders complain Musk needs to go Elon Musk has made good on threats to strip links in Xitter posts of anything but a domain name and image....

Zero day? More like every day, amirite? Apple has demonstrated that it can more than hold its own among the tech giants, at least in terms of finding itself on the wrong end of zero-day vulnerabilities....

Can Booz Allen Hamilton get systems engineered with $630M and 7 years? The US Space Force is doing something about its underdeveloped ability to detect threats with the award of a $630 million contract to Booz Allen Hamilton to help get its tech in order....

Plus: EU is looking its own strategic export controls - and not just to China Taiwan is said to be investigating whether local companies have been helping Huawei to set up chip factories in China, despite US restrictions. Meanwhile, the EU is looking at further export controls on technology to authoritarian regimes, which is likely to include China....

HP and Lenovo developing machines with LLMs - maybe it'll be in the price? Canalys EMEA Forum 2023 Execs at the biggest PC makers seem to be salivating at the prospect of AI computers inflating their margins - even if they are unable or unwilling to define the emerging category....

It's a great advert for Ubuntu anyway Windows 10 may be just over a year away from the ax, but its successor, Windows 11, appears to be as unpopular as ever....

US govt confirms outage, leaves feline in a quantum state of uncertainty Exclusive A four-hour system interruption in September at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Kansas City, Missouri has been attributed to a cat jumping on a technician's keyboard....

And the repair parts will be repairable too. Batteries, SSDs and more will no longer be sealed into casing Canalys EMEA Forum 2023 Lenovo is forecasting that the vast majority of its devices will be repairable by 2025 - as will the repair parts themselves - but it is not intending to specify where customers should have their kit fixed....

Rising number of RaaS baddies drive global attack numbers up 200% Microsoft research says that 80-90 percent of ransomware attacks over the past year originated from unmanaged devices....

Egress fees, interoperability and licensing discounts all in the crosshairs Watch out, Amazon and Microsoft -the UK's competition watchdog this morning confirmed it will investigate the big cloud infrastructure services players....

Study reveals a billion spent to store paper records for 5 years as deadlines come and go It is five years since the UK's National Health Service (NHS) - one of the largest health providers in the world - missed its planned deadline to go paperless....

iPadOS-like distro reaches 7.1 and talks to you on installation The latest release of Elementary OS, version 7.1, is out, based on Ubuntu 22.04.3. We took it for a quick spin....

Data leakers become data leakees The Lorenz ransomware group leaked the details of every person who contacted it via its online contact form over the course of the last two years....

Exiting fab biz was 'turning point' for House of Zen, claims Darren Grasby Canalys EMEA Forum Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger might be giving himself a "passing grade" in his turnaround efforts since moving into the top office at the chipmaker, but an exec at arch-rival AMD isn't being nearly so generous....

Company behind popular in-process OLAP system feels weight of success DuckDB Labs is updating the support policy and flexible commercial support options for its in-process analytical database....

Dirty deed, done in deep space NASA is running late in its efforts to share 4.5-billion-year-old dust samples with researchers, blaming the delay on its OSIRIS-REx spacecraft returning more material than expected....

Maybe this being-ethical-with-creators-and-not-just-ripping-off-their-stuff thing is gathering steam Australian SaaSy graphic design outfit Canva has promised to pay $200 million to creators who agree to have their work shoved into the maw of its newly minted AI....

Kim Jong-un looks at industry's progress with green eyes, says South Korea's spy agency South Korea's National Intelligence Service (NIS) has warned North Korea is attacking its shipbuilding sector....

Hopes to float IoT biz and keep infosec ops, then make a second pressing Blackberry has decided to split into two companies....

Software giant tells partners not to sell it but also happy to take your cash now Microsoft has quietly delayed the delivery of a security service it hoped to add to the E5 license of its flagship Microsoft 365 suite....

Nokia looks a more diplomatic choice at Digicel Digicel Pacific is possibly the world's only telco considered a strategic asset by nine countries. Which makes its decision this week to replace its Huawei networks with kit from Nokia a matter of considerable significance....

AI-made images invisibly watermarked - as academics warn that kind of measure is pointless Microsoft has integrated OpenAI's latest text-to-image model DALL-E 3 into its Bing Image Creator and Chat services, and will add an invisible watermark indicating the date and time an image was originally created and noting it as AI-generated....

Project Nessie named in the antitrust suit, alleging Bezos's bunch pulled in an extra billion-plus A redacted portion of the US Federal Trade Commission's antitrust lawsuit against Amazon last week has come to light, and with it more details of a secret pricing algorithm known as "Project Nessie" - which the FTC argued has "no valid and cognizable justification" other than an attempt to stifle competition....

'Handful' of customers hit so far, public-facing instances at risk Atlassian today said miscreants have exploited a critical bug in on-premises instances of Confluence Server and Confluence Data Center to create and abuse admin accounts within the enterprise colab software....

What's up, Doc? Try elevated permissions Grab security updates for your Linux distributions: there's a security hole that can be fairly easily exploited by rogue users, intruders, and malicious software to gain root access and take over the box....

'No impact on missions,' military powerhouse insists NATO is "actively addressing" multiple IT security incidents after a hacktivist group claimed it once again breached some of the military alliance's websites, this time stealing what's claimed to be more than 3,000 files and 9GB of data....

Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro out, Chrome goliath ups support to seven years Google on Wednesday revealed its Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro model Android phones, and promised to support them in sickness and in health for seven years....

Rules apply to cyber vigilantes and their home nations, but experts cast doubt over potential benefits New guidelines have been codified to govern the rules of engagement concerning hacktivists involved in ongoing cyber warfare....

The 5th Circuit's re-ruling adds CISA to a list of alleged first-amendment violators. Next stop: Supreme Court The US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has modified a ruling from last month to add the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to a list of US government entities prohibited from working with social media outfits to curtail the spread of misinformation....

Big deal, Americans are used to drills :( Updated A short time from now America's Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, will kick off a nation-wide test of its emergency alert system (EAS), so don't be surprised if your cellphone or TV starts buzzing at 1420 ET (1120 PT)....

$526M Jupiter set to rule EU's tech orbit by 2024 The EU's supercomputing initiative, the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU), has awarded a procurement contract for Europe's first exascale system, with installation due to start in early 2024....

NASA will run out of RS-25s to drop into the ocean unless the production line restarts A test run of the engines powering NASA's Moon rocket is due to kick off this week, an essential milestone since the Space Shuttle cast-offs will need to be replaced - beginning with Artemis V....

We hope cloud storage service is ready for this web wingman Microsoft is to overhaul OneDrive in a move that will bring Copilot to the cloud storage service and herd users towards the tool's web interface....

Simulation milestone coincides with NASA's 65th birthday - will it manage the real thing before its centenary? NASA has celebrated its 65th birthday by marking 100 days of its first attempt to simulate a yearlong mission Mars mission....

Sovereignty = you'll run on Azure and you'll be told when our engineers access your resources Microsoft has taken another step to address regulatory worries regarding its cloud ecosystem with a public preview of the Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty....

Flags up enterprise customer adoption 'hesitancy,' though, as data governance worries persist Dell is hoping to make hay while the Generative AI sun shines by cramming its portfolio with options for customizing enterprise AI models....

Profits and revenue increase for Motorola subsidiary challenging regulator price cap ruling British emergency services comms supplier Airwave has posted increased earnings and profits after it challenged authorities seeking to cap its prices....

One version's edgier than the other Whether you prefer your Cinnamon in Ubuntu or Debian flavor, the Mint developers have something new for you to try....

Bringing the language of multi-gigabyte web browsers to a $4 computer Although JavaScript is responsible for some bloated Electron apps, apparently you can still usefully run it in 264kB of RAM....

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? The UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has weighed in on the thorny issue of workplace monitoring with guidance to ensure employers stay on the right side of the law....

Poor security and segregation of duties also worry auditors Massive local authority Birmingham City Council went live with new Oracle Fusion ERP software in April last year, knowing the system was likely to fail....

Plus: Have you updated to the latest version of Bloated Fetal Sacs? Former Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer has taken viewers deep into the source code for Windows Task Manager while debunking a distressing Icelandic sobriquet for Microsoft's flagship operating system....