The Register

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....

Nothing like an OpenAI-powered agent leaking data or getting confused over what someone else whispered to it AI models with memory aim to enhance user interactions by recalling past engagements. However, this feature opens the door to manipulation....

Big Blue's legal eagles soar on both sides of the pond IBM scored a pair of legal wins this week: The US Supreme Court declined to reinstate a $1.6 billion judgment previously awarded to BMC Software, and the High Court in London, England, ruled in favor of Big Blue in a lawsuit against LzLabs, which was accused of misappropriating IBM's mainframe technology....

The thermosphere usually drags space junk to its doom. As it thins, ruined orbits are a possibility Earth's atmosphere is shrinking due to climate change and one of the possible negative impacts is that space junk will stay in orbit for longer, bonk into other bits of space junk, and make so much mess that low Earth orbits become less useful....

Guessed tax obligations wrong which helped to disappoint Wall Street even as sales boomed Oracle on Monday announced customers committed to $48 billion of future cloud services consumption - just $5 billion less that its annual revenue for FY 2024 - but investors aren't impressed....

Facebook giant allegedly didn't want neural networks to emit results that would give the game away A judge has found Meta must answer a claim it allegedly removed so-called copyright management information from material used to train its AI models....

Oh, and Musk blames Ukraine area' for X downtime Domain registrar, website host, and email provider Gandi.net suffered a major outage over the weekend. The latest update from the French biz, some 14 hours ago, stated it was "still working on resolving all the issues," which we understand to mean it has largely fixed itself by now....

Crooks built bots to exploit astoundingly bad quotation website and made off with data on thousands New York State has sued Allstate Insurance for operating websites so badly designed they would deliver personal information in plain-text to anyone that went looking for it....

Expired SSL cert kerfuffle leaves second-gen, Audio gadgets useless Google's second-generation Chromecast and its Chromecast Audio are suffering a major ongoing outage, with devices failing to cast due to an expired security certificate. The web giant is aware of the breakdown and says a fix is in the works....

$1M donation to inauguration fund and a personal appearance by Pichai appear to have been pointless If Google had hoped a bit of cosying up to President Trump would soften the US government's breakup demands in the wake of its search antitrust conviction, then is was seemingly mistaken....

Phishing and ancient vulns still do the trick for one of the most prolific groups around Researchers say the Sidewinder offensive cyber crew is starting to target maritime and nuclear organizations....

Center will reuse and recondition systems returned from field Chipmaking tool biz ASML plans to open a new facility in China this year amid rising trade tensions between Washington and Beijing....

Terabytes of sensitive info remain available for download Break-ins to systems hosting the data of two US healthcare organizations led to thieves making off with the personal and medical data of more than 300,000 patients....

Study finds 4 out of 6 providers don't do enough to stop impersonation Four out of six companies offering AI voice cloning software fail to provide meaningful safeguards against the misuse of their products, according to research conducted by Consumer Reports....

Experts say that the way you handle things after the criminals break in can make things better or much, much worse Feature Experiencing a ransomware infection or other security breach ranks among the worst days of anyone's life - but it can still get worse....

Staff warned that for Q1, non-compliance = 'Disciplinary action' Exclusive Vodafone is warning staff in the UK to work onsite at least eight days a month or be subject to disciplinary action from April....

Insiders say board members must be held accountable and drive positive change from the top down Analysis Walk into any hospital and ask the same question - "Which security system should we invest in?" - to both a doctor and a board member, and you may get different answers. The doctor chooses the system that leads to the most positive patient outcomes, while the board member chooses whichever solution is best for their increasingly stretched budget....

Mission-critical app migration, 'if it ain't broke...' and more. All that glitters isn't gold when it comes to biz needs Comment Administrators tend to be a conservative lot, which is bad news for tech vendors such as Microsoft that are seeking to pump their latest and greatest products into enterprises customers via subscriptions....

Space is the place? Not if you're nuts about neutrinos Opinion High energy neutrinos are the coolest particles in astrophysics. Born in distant cosmic cataclysms, they speed through the universe almost as if it wasn't there. With no charge and a truly tiny rest mass - perhaps a million times lighter than an electron, but who knows - they interact with virtually nothing....

Using one green screen to manage multiple machines needs more than a Friday afternoon brain Who, Me? Shifting focus from weekend fun to the reality of a return to work can be hard, so The Register tries to ease the transition with a fresh instalment of "Who, Me?", our reader-contributed column that tells your stories of making mistakes and making it out alive afterwards....

Likening memory safety bugs to smallpox may not soothe sensitive C coders Rust is alive and well in the Linux kernel and is expected to translate into noticeable benefits shortly, though its integration with the largely C-oriented codebase still looks uneasy....

Prompts see it scour the web for info and turn it into decent documents at reasonable speed Chinese researchers' AI prowess is again a hot topic after a startup called Monica.im last week revealed Manus", a service it bills as a general agent" that might improve on tools offered by Western companies....

It's just one of 6,000 apps that New Zealand thinks might be best tamed with ERP The body that runs New Zealand's public health system uses a single Excel spreadsheet as the primary source of data to consolidate and manage its finances, which aren't in great shape perhaps due to the sheet's shortcomings....

Also, phone cleaner apps are a data-sucking scam, Singapore considering the literal rod for scammers, and more Infosec in Brief Microsoft has spotted a malvertising campaign that downloaded nastyware hosted on GitHub and exposed nearly a million devices to information thieves....

PLUS: Malaysia teams with Arm for local chip designs; NTT warns of possible breach; Samsung strikers settle; and more Asia in Brief India's government has proposed giving its tax authorities sweeping powers to access private email systems and applications....

Meta says it cut CPU usage by 20% through kernel-level profiling. Just FYI Meta says it has managed to reduce the CPU cycles of its top services by 20 percent through its Strobelight profiling orchestration suite, which relies on the open source eBPF project....

iPhone giant compartmentalizes OS for the sake of security Apple has been working to harden the XNU kernel that powers its various operating systems, including iOS and macOS, with a feature called "exclaves."...

Researchers find AI isn't ready to help with moral decision making Is AI an appropriate source of moral guidance about which patients should be given kidney transplants?...

Mozilla sells ads, Google limits blocking them - it's time for stricter measures A new, lightweight version of Pi-Holeis here. Just how easy is it to block advertising on your home network?...

IsDavisLuEnabledInActiveDirectory? Not any more. IsDavisLuGuilty? Yes. IsDavisLuFacingJail? Also yes A federal jury in Cleveland has found a senior software developer guilty of sabotaging his employer's systems - and he's now facing a potential ten years behind bars....

Second time unlucky for Intuitive Machines, but hey, at least we got 250MB of data from it The Athena lander, which touched down on the Moon on Thursday and promptly fell over, has been declared dead by its operators....

With no allowance to sell and little room to buy, and markets on the slide, it's UB40 time: Red, red, whine Comment It's official: President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday to create a US Bitcoin reserve and stockpile of related digital assets, though instead of boosting the value of the coins, the market reacted negatively to the news....

To boldly go where HPE and Raspberry Pi have been for a while Axiom Space plans to send a shoebox-sized node running Red Hat Device Edge to the International Space Station (ISS)....

$96B in transactions, some even labeled 'dirty funds,' since 2019, say prosecutors The Feds today revealed more details about the US Secret Service-led Garantex takedown, a day after seizing websites and freezing assets belonging to the Russian cryptocurrency exchange in coordination with German and Finnish law enforcement agencies....

Trying to find a middle ground between spinning rust and performant TLC Facebook parent Meta is exploring the use of QLC flash as an additional storage tier in its datacenters to address growing volumes of data as it juggles performance maintenance and energy efficiency....

Moved from Windows or Linux? Smooth some of the rough edges Friday FOSS fest There are some idiosyncrasies about macOS that long term Mac users may never notice, but cause frustration in people more used to how Windows does things - or the much more customizable Linux desktop experience. Here are a few of The Reg FOSS desk's favorite tools we routinely install on new machines to make life a little more comfortable or convenient....

Big Red pushes restart button after users locked out of apps across Veterans Affairs hospitals, other govt departments Oracle's Federal electronic health records software suffered a US-wide outage this week, causing Veterans Affairs hospitals to invoke "standard contingency procedures."...

I knew you were trouble, Queens DA might have said Police have made two arrests in their quest to start a cybercrime crew's prison eras, alleging the pair stole hundreds of Taylor Swift tickets and sold them for huge profit....

Now that's sticker shock Eggheads have taken a look at previously developed techniques that can be used to trick self-driving cars into doing the wrong thing - and found cheap stickers stuck on stop and speed limit signs, at least, are pretty effective....

Thousands brace for layoffs as shares slide 20% HPE is feeling the effects of the Trump administration's gamesmanship, seeing shares slide after lowering earnings expectations due to uncertainty over how tariffs may affect the cost of imported parts....

PDFs and Powerpoint also lie in wait as 2026 looms Microsoft is suggesting alternatives to its doomed Publisher product ahead of the software's demise in 2026....

Which is why taking down chiefs and infra behind big name brand operations isn't working Interview There's a handful of cybercriminal gangs that Jason Baker, a ransomware negotiator with GuidePoint Security, regularly gets called in to respond to these days, and a year ago only one of these crews - Akira - was on threat hunters' radars and infecting organizations with the same ferocity as it is today....