The Register

The lesser of two REvils? There’s a relationship there, but not enough to say one evolved into the other It has been almost a year since the emerging ransomware gang Ransom Cartel was first detected and the group over that time has racked up a steady drumbeat of victims in such countries as the United States and France and from a broad array of industry sectors.…

Now selling vehicles others can brand, plus software any auto-maker can access Hon Hai Technology Group, the electronics manufacturer to the stars better known as Foxconn, has debuted two new electric vehicle models and production models of a prototype due to roll on Taiwanese roads in 2023.…

E-Walker is a 'seven degrees-of-freedom fully dexterous end-over-end walking robot' Although large in-space construction projects are the stuff of science fiction, they will have to become science fact as missions grow ever more ambitious. Researchers at the University of Lincoln have decided to get a head start.…

Also recommends age verification as Meta tells The Reg it's working on parental controls UK coroner Andrew Walker has sent a report to Meta, Pinterest, Twitter, Snapchat, and the government itself recommending that adults and children each have their own parts of the platform to prevent harm to youngsters.…

Then again, imagine being invaded by Russia Organizations hit earlier by the HermeticWiper malware have reportedly been menaced by ransomware unleashed this month against transportation and logistics industries in Ukraine and Poland.…

NTT Communications and Toyota’s parts maker Denso plan a ‘Security Operation Centre for Vehicles’ Japanese industrial giants NTT Communications Corporation and Denso Corporation have decided to start a business “to respond to the threat of increasingly sophisticated cyber-attacks against vehicles.”…

Hotwiring is so 2021 Europol this week said it has arrested 31 people in a crackdown on a car-theft ring that developed and used a technique to steal keyless vehicles.…

Wang and Li appointed following death of Ryan Ding Beleaguered Chinese tech giant Huawei has named two execs to run its enterprise and carrier businesses following the death of Ryan Ding Yun, who had managed both units.…

Citrix can do this too. Hyperconverged infrastructure's salad days serving virtual PCs might be ending Amazon Web Services is moving to bring desktop virtualization (VDI) into the age of desktop-as-a-service.…

What? Sanctions-busting sellers aren't interested in your complaints? That's a shame The failure rate of semiconductors shipped from China to Russia has increased by 1,900 percent in recent months, according to Russian national business daily Коммерсантъ (Kommersant).…

Thermonuclear warheads, so hot right now America's Sandia National Labs this week said it will investigate using Cerebras' wafer-sized accelerator chips to determine that the nation's nuclear weapons will work as intended, should global annihilation ever be desired.…

Wild story of a multinational law firm, cyber-mercenaries, a sheikh, and more A former Wall Street Journal reporter has sued a multinational law firm, some of its attorneys, and others for allegedly stealing his emails and spreading the messages to wrongly discredit him, leading to his firing.…

Spacecraft coming through, outta the way, watch your step, we're heading to Jupiter NASA's Lucy spacecraft has successfully performed its first gravity-assist flyby of Earth, dodging tens of thousands of satellites and bits of debris.…

Chip giant flutters eyelashes at Europe in hope of early acqusition Broadcom hopes to convince European antitrust regulators to greenlight its $61 billion takeover of VMware early – by claiming it will boost competition with public cloud giants Microsoft, Amazon, and Google.…

Space scientists lament loss, say it won't be the same without actual working instruments The US National Science Foundation (NSF) has decided not to rebuild Puerto Rico's Arecibo Observatory, shut down in August 2020 due to damage accrued three years earlier.…

Used to tweeting? Get ready for Yeeting After public spats with Twitter and Instagram, Rapper Ye – formerly known as Kanye West – is buying social network Parler, an alternative micro-blogging site often associated with far-right extremists, conspiracy theorists, and others booted from mainstream platforms.…

The funding will continue, until the atoms fuse The US Department of Energy is handing out more fusion power funding, this time doling out $47 million to 38 projects that are exploring the feasibility of tokamak reactors. …

75 collars felt, $1.2m seized in bid to cut off crime network’s financial lifeline Interpol arrested 75 suspected members of the Black Axe West African crime syndicate, and intercepted over $1 million in various bank accounts as part of a wide-ranging multi-country operation aimed at thwarting the group's cyber-fraud efforts that fund its criminal operations.…

The company already sells penguin-infested laptops and desktops, but an x86 Linux fondleslab is new Linux kit shifter, Juno, has a new gadget available for pre-order: a $425 x86-64 tablet with a choice of Linux distros on it. In the UK, that's £449 including VAT.…

Search giant's 'Shopping Units need to go,' say coalition of 43 online comparison tools A group of European comparison shopping service (CSS) companies say Google hasn't been true to the terms of a 2017 settlement requiring it to be more fair to competitors. The coalition now wants EU antitrust regulators to force Google's hand.…

Complaint filed by Daedalus Prime – wasn't he a Transformer? Samsung and TSMC are facing an investigation by the US International Trade Commission (USITC) over allegations of patent infringement involving chips and mobile devices containing those chips.…

Based on Rust, on top of seL4 – a big deal in the microkernel world Google, one of very few tech companies willing to experiment with new operating systems, has unveiled KataOS for embedded machine learning devices.…

'Even though Starlink is still losing money & other companies are getting billions of taxpayer $' One problem of dealing with a prolifically tweeting billionaire is that the subjects of those mind burps can have the rug pulled from beneath them.…

Also, Senator Warren says banks need to grow the Zelle up, an AirTag does some good – if you’re a Democrat, and more In brief Advanced persistent threat group (APT) Budworm has shifted targets after hitting the Middle East, Europe and Asia, and was caught this week trying to break into the systems of an unnamed US state legislature.…

Latest U-turn follows a series of clown-car maneuvers that spooked financial markets The UK government has reversed its decision to axe IR35 tax reforms — announced little more than three weeks ago — following a volatile market reaction to its planned tax cuts.…

Some estimates say the sector will have contracted by as much as 23% by the end Shares in key Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC may have been up in the past few days after it reported better than expected Q3 results, but many financial analysts have downgraded their forecasts for the company amid warnings the tech downturn is likely to be deeper than feared.…

Spare a thought for the techies hauling on-prem mega-platform of one of world's biggest mobile companies to the fluffy stuff Vodafone has announced it is migrating its SAP S/4HANA ERP platform from an on-premises installation to Google Cloud.…

Home Office and emergency services appear to be locked in with monopoly provider, market watchdog says The UK's competition watchdog is proposing price controls on Motorola's role in running a controversial communications network for emergency services.…

Diversification much? Datacenter energy arm part of larger $50m+ battery test center, electric vehicle lab Castrol – the oil lubrication company – is planning to build development and test facilities for datacenter immersion cooling technology at its UK HQ to support validation programs for its products, and customers.…

Jam today, jam tomorrow? Opinion On October 7, Ukrainian soldiers fighting on the front line reported outages on the Starlink satellite internet service. The outages were most notable in the southern Kherson region, where the most intense fighting was taking place.…

Local outlet claims to have insider docs that prove takedown powers. Meta says they're fake. And around and around they go Meta's complex relationship with India's citizens and government is again in the spotlight after allegations it rolled out the red carpet for government censors.…

Release candidate one for Linux 6.1 has appeared Linux kernel boss Linus Torvalds has released the first release candidate for version 6.1 of the project and added an appeal for developers to make his life easier by adding code earlier in the development cycle.…

This wasn't WarGames – it was far more serious Who, Me? The working week is upon us again, so what better way to mark it than with another of The Reg's weekly tales of readers getting away with it after perhaps not having done their very best work.…

Azure Stack HCI and Azure Kubernetes Service can be free for Windows Server customers. Microsoft hopes that price will encourage you to stick around Microsoft last week extended its Azure Hybrid Benefit to some on-prem workloads.…

People reveal passwords if you ask nicely, so AI panic is overblown Panic over the risk of deepfake scams is completely overblown, according to a senior security adviser for UK-based infosec company Sophos.…

Sub-par disaster recovery plans leave Naver and Kakao with savage service interruptions South Korea's two largest domestic internet companies, Naver and Kakao, have experienced significant service interruptions after the datacenter that hosts much of their infrastructure was shut down by a Sunday fire.…

Samsung and TSMC hit with chip tech patent suit; Ant Group's DB hits AWS; PayPal drops Hong Kong rights group; and more Asia In Brief Chinese president Xi Jinping has opened the 20th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party with a call for the nation he leads to win the race for development of “core technologies” and to become self-reliant in strategic tech.…

Plus: Listen to Fake Joe Rogan interviewing Bogus Steve Jobs in bizarre podcast episode In brief A freaky-looking humanoid robot wearing dungarees and named Ai-Da became the first machine to speak at a House of Lords committee hearing on AI art this week.…

Lucy in the sky, with good-byes, then Space watchers hoping to get a glimpse of a near-Earth object of the NASA kind will want to look to the skies this weekend as Jupiter-bound probe Lucy makes a close pass of our planet for a gravity assist, just in time for its first anniversary.…

Women who do join get paid and promoted less, leave faster. What can be done to stop that? Feature The infosec industry remains mostly a boys club. And while there are some indications that it's becoming more diverse, bringing women into the room continues to move at a glacial pace.…

How software can help some grieve, perturb others Feature Death is inescapable. Everyone experiences grief at some point in their lives, whether it's when a relative, friend, or pet passes away.…

Never mind, still plenty of time to that 2023 orbital test Scottish space startup Skyrora's first attempt to launch its Skylark L rocket ended in failure after it unexpectedly came crashing down into the Norwegian sea.…

Too young to drive, old enough to bribe AT&T staff, apparently A man who lost $24 million in cryptocurrency in an elaborate SIM swapping scam has won a multi-million-dollar judgment against the thief, who was 15 at the time of the hustle.…

Nothing like medical orders routed into /dev/null and other problems to hold up a roll out The US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) this week announced it is delaying pending deployments of the Oracle Cerner electronic health record (EHR) system until June 2023 because of ongoing problems with the system.…

The cheapest 40-series card now starts at [checks notes] $1,199 Just weeks after unveiling its 40-series cards powered by the all-new Ada Lovelace architecture, Nvidia said Friday it was pulling the plug on the RTX 4080 12GB before the card had even hit store shelves.…

A contract is a contract, says Brit CPU designer Qualcomm has painted Arm as a greedy, capricious bully that's fixated on extracting more and more licensing fees for its designs.…

Redmond says OME isn't supposed to be used for security, just for something else Microsoft Office 365 Message Encryption claims to offer a way "to send and receive encrypted email messages between people inside and outside your organization."…

That's roughly 300,000 Shein crop tops Online retailer Zoetop will fork out $1.9 million after account data belonging to 46 million customers was stolen in 2018.…

How can Elon mess up geopolitics today? The Starlink-Ukraine honeymoon period appears to be at an end: SpaceX reportedly wants the US to begin picking up the tab for more of its war-zone services, while CEO Musk's tweets have only served to upset the situation.…

But you get a super practical patch that prints CPU, core, and socket when you get a segfault The merge window for contributions to Linux 6.1 is still open and incoming features include Wi-Fi security fixes and hardware tests.…