The Register

Hydraulic problems stop the countdown clock at T-44 minutes The launch of the next crew to the International Space Station (ISS) was postponed to no earlier than Friday, March 14, due to a hydraulic issue with a group support clamp arm for the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket during March 12's countdown....

Phishers check in, your credentials check out, Microsoft warns An ongoing phishing campaign disguised as a Booking.com email casts keystroke and credential-stealing malware into hospitality employees' inboxes for financial fraud and theft, according to Microsoft Threat Intelligence....

So much for 'carbon negative by 2030' Microsoft says there is plenty of wind and solar to power datacenters in the US, but it is still eyeing natural gas generation as it juggles the growing energy needs of AI with its own net-zero commitments....

Agency tries to save face as it also pulls essential funding for election security initiatives Uncle Sam's cybersecurity agency is trying to save face by seeking to clear up what it's calling "inaccurate reporting" after a former senior pen-tester claimed the organization axed two red teams....

It might need polishing, but a useful find for any budding cybercrooks out there DeepSeek's flagship R1 model is capable of generating a working keylogger and basic ransomware code, just as long as a techie is on hand to tinker with it a little....

It's called 'SpaceHPC' and it heats the building it lives in The European Space Agency this week inaugurated its new supercomputing facility built with HPE....

If operators are willing to cough up a 'green premium' and tax credits are not repealed An independent research body claims that geothermal power generation could provide an answer to the growing energy requirements of datacenters....

Steering Committee decides against merge of over-complex and largely unloved ALGOL-68 'at this point' Version 15 of the GNU Compiler Collection is getting close to release, and as it does, some changes are not going to make it....

Opposition faults leadership as officers accused of misleading councillors Birmingham City Council voted down proposals to hold a full independent inquiry into its disastrous introduction of an Oracle ERP system, which "effectively crippled" its ability to manage and report on its finances....

New feature on Google Pixel phones hints at a ChromeOS-like VM The March "feature drop" for Android 15 on Google Pixel devices includes an optional Linux session....

Community calls for off-by-default data sharing setting Open source software biz Nextcloud issued fixes to its software this week after bug hunters raised concerns about data collection....

Feds warn gang still rampant and now cracked 300+ victims around the world A crook who distributes the Medusa ransomware tried to make a victim cough up three payments instead of the usual two, according to a government advisory on how to defend against the malware and the gangs who wield it....

Eggheads call for comprehensive rules to govern machine learning in medical settings The tendency of AI models to hallucinate - aka confidently making stuff up - isn't sufficient to disqualify them from use in healthcare settings. So, researchers have set out to enumerate the risks and formulate a plan to do no harm while still allowing medical professionals to consult with unreliable software assistants....

Google apologizes but won't say what went wrong nor when it will make things right Older models of Google's Chromecast media-streaming sticks remain broken, and independent research suggests a fix could take potentially weeks to materialize....

Yeah, yeah ... if we were all exclusively on IPv6, this wouldn't be a thing. But here we are IP address marketplace IPv4.Global has started offering loans on terms that consider public IPv4 network addresses as valid collateral....

Root cert expiry may bring breakage or worse for add-ons, media playback, and more If you're running an outdated version of Firefox, update by Friday or risk broken add-ons, failing DRM-protected media playback, and other errors, due to an expiring root certificate....

Firefox maker: Looming antitrust inferno could burn us, too Mozilla, which in 2023 received about 75 percent of its revenue from royalties paid by Google and other search providers for search engine usage in Firefox, worries that the US Justice Department's proposed ban on the very same Google Search payments would be rather harmful....

Not so much thrown under a bus as under an unwanted electric car Elon Musk is trying yet again to get his $56 billion Tesla pay package reinstated with a fresh appeal to the Delaware Supreme Court....

Restoring x86 giant to its former glory, a job no one will envy Intel has tapped former Cadence CEO and Intel board member Lip-Bu Tan to lead the embattled x86 chipmaker as it struggles to overcome mounting losses stemming from its foundry business....

We're doomba, say Roomba goombas, unless... Troubled robot vacuum-cleaner maker iRobot, abandoned by Amazon after regulators effectively doomed the web giant's takeover offer, has warned investors it may not survive the next 12 months....

When it's all abstracted by an API endpoint, do you even care what's behind the curtain? Comment With the exception of custom cloud silicon, like Google's TPUs or Amazon's Trainium ASICs, the vast majority of AI training clusters being built today are powered by Nvidia GPUs. But while Nvidia may have won the AI training battle, the inference fight is far from decided....

Who still uses a printer anyway? Oh ... quite a lot of you, it seems Has your printer suddenly started spouting gibberish? A faulty Windows 11 23H2 update from Microsoft - rather than a ghost in the machine - could be the cause....

AI doesn't run on fairy dust after all A group of large-scale energy users including Amazon, Meta, and Google has thrown its weight behind efforts to ramp up global nuclear capacity - aiming to triple it by 2050 - to meet increasing energy demands....

Project dubbed 'wasteful' - Musk's lot says under-pressure VA must do it 'in-house' Elon Musk's newly minted US Department of Government Efficiency claims to have helped the Department of Veterans Affairs end a technology contract run by service-disabled veterans....

Artist formerly known as OpenStack to huddle under same umbrella as the Cloud Native Computing Foundation The votes are in, confirming that the Open Infrastructure Foundation intends to join the Linux Foundation....

Fewer than 10 known victims, but Mandiant suspects others compromised, too Chinese spies have for months exploited old Juniper Networks routers, infecting the buggy gear with custom backdoors and gaining root access to the compromised devices....

Yokohama release also adds meta-observabiilty and takes a tilt at CRM ServiceNow has for years used the example of employee onboarding to explain the power of its wares, pointing out that a lot of people around an organization are needed to get new hires on the payroll, registered with HR, equipped with a computer, and assigned appropriate permissions to access applications....

Power utility GM talks to El Reg about getting that call and what happened next Nick Lawler, general manager of the Littleton Electric Light and Water Departments (LELWD), was at home one Friday when he got a call from the FBI alerting him that the public power utility's network had been compromised. The digital intruders turned out to be Volt Typhoon....

Agency willing to take huge risks with human exploration, but not willing to do it for some dirt? Rocket Lab has been on a roll lately, with multiple Electron launches, plans for an ocean platform for its Neutron rocket, and a second mission for in-space manufacturing business Varda under its belt. However, NASA has apparently rejected the company's Mars Sample Return mission proposal. Why?...

Don't, don't, DON'T believe the hype The developer of Free95 says it will be a free Windows 95-compatible OS, but we suspect an elaborate prank. At best, maybe an unknowing one....

Leaders call for fewer contractors and more top talent installed across government Senior officials in the UK's civil service understand that future cyber hires in Whitehall will need to be paid a salary higher than that of the Prime Minister if the government wants to get serious about fending off attacks....

Five years after it launched its first database service, the MySQL fork is trying again MariaDB says it is building a database-as-a-service based on open source principles after offloading its old DBaaS before going into private ownership....

Vendors just don't want machines to live double lives Column My decade-old and very well-travelled 13" MacBook Pro finally died, and I hoped my new-ish M2 iPad Pro could replace it....

Redmond insists it's got this right and has even more impressive results to share soon Microsoft's claim of having made quantum computing breakthroughs has attracted strong criticism from scientists, but the software giant says it's work is sound - and it will soon reveal data that proves it....

Skip the schnitzel with gravy and chips for lunch - this is an experimental device for transplant candidates Australian company BiVACOR has revealed a patient implanted with its artificial heart survived for 100 days - and is still with us after receiving a donated organ....

Election infosec advisory agency also shuttered A penetration tester who worked at the US govt's CISA claims his 100-strong team was dismissed after Elon Musk's Trump-blessed DOGE unit cancelled a contract - and that more staff at the cybersecurity agency have also been let go....

Microsoft tackles 50-plus security blunders, Adobe splats 3D bugs, and Apple deals with a doozy Patch Tuesday Microsoft's Patch Tuesday bundle has appeared, with a dirty dozen flaws competing for your urgent attention - six of them rated critical and another six already being exploited by criminals....

Hold Alt + Spacebar for two seconds, and Clippy 2.0 is all ears Microsoft has added yet another Copilot tweak for Windows Insiders. Hold down Alt + Spacebar for two seconds, and the AI assistant will pop up for a voice chat....

Nothing says 'sustainable AI' like the burps of Appalachian industry Three companies in the US are teaming up to address the burgeoning energy needs of datacenters by using coal mine methane piped to on-site fuel cells at locations that are already hotspots for building bit barns....

Windows App the way ahead as support pulled from May 27 The end is nigh for Microsoft's Remote Desktop application. The IT giant will pull support on May 27 when users must transition to the corp's Windows App, with all the positives and negatives that entails....

Non-password-protected, unencrypted 108GB database ... what could possibly go wrong Exclusive More than 86,000 records containing nurses' medical records, facial images, ID documents and more sensitive info linked to health tech company ESHYFT was left sitting in a wide-open misconfigured AWS S3 bucket for months - or possibly even longer - before it was closed it last week....

Oh wow, just looks at all the scary stuff in your Windows Event Viewer The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is distributing over $25.5 million in refunds to consumers deceived by tech support scammers, averaging about $34 per person....

Researchers claim efficiency boost plus reduction in environmental harm Scientists claim to have made a breakthrough in the search for more powerful and lower-cost lithium-metal batteries by including common polymer nylon in the design....

Folks with LaserJets complain of error code even when using approved supplies Owners of HP laser printers are complaining about a firmware update that stops the hardware from printing, where the toner cartridge is not recognized even when they've got the expensive HP version installed....

Dare mighty things ... as long as we can afford it COMMENT NASA could be in line for severe cuts to its science budget, with a 50 percent reduction floated by folk in the space industry. The consequences would, according to observers, be nothing less than catastrophic....

Plus, startup's inference service makes debut on Hugging Face Cerebras has begun deploying more than a thousand of its dinner-plate sized-accelerators across North America and parts of France as the startup looks to establish itself as one of the largest and fastest suppliers of AI inference services....

First new version in about five years, but it's who did it that matters more The WINE project has put out its first release of Mono, the original FOSS .NET runtime, since it took the project over from Microsoft six months ago....

Cloudy email rises like a zombie, though its digital grave still marked by big red cross Outlook.com users on iOS trying to access their messages via Apple Mail are still struggling more than a week after users first reported service disruption, and Microsoft still hasn't confirmed the root cause....

It took a whistleblower to expose disastrous ERP go-live Birmingham City Council did not tell its official auditors about the disastrous Oracle implementation for ten months after the suite of applications went live, and appeared to obstruct access to the new system needed to complete their work....

1900 MHz band dormant since Y2K, but not available until 2029 Britain's telecoms regulator wants to repurpose unused mobile spectrum for the upcoming Emergency Services Network (ESN) and to overhaul communications in the railway sector....