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Updated 2025-12-19 09:00
Senators try to save cyber threat sharing law, sans government funding
Also, DraftKings gets stuffed, Zimbra collab software exploited again, and Apple bug bounties balloon in brief A bipartisan Senate duo has introduced a bill to revive and extend America's cyber threat-sharing law for another ten years after its authorization lapsed during the government shutdown....
Britain's biggest nuclear site looks set to outlast SAP support again
Sellafield considers using legacy ECC software beyond extended 2030 cut-off The government-owned company that runs the UK's most important nuclear site is weighing up whether to keep its legacy SAP software running beyond the vendor's extended support deadline....
Arduino has a new job selling chips for its new owner. Let's not pretend otherwise
Getting swallowed by a whale is a life-changing event no matter what the whale says Opinion The successful, sector-defining, open source Italian embedded platform provider Arduino had a little bash in Turin recently. It made a few announcements, including a new single-board computer (SBC) with a Qualcomm system on a chip (SoC). Oh, and that it had been bought by American dragon-themed mobile chip monster Qualcomm in a deal with total fealty (WTF)....
UK waves £750M supercomputer contract at HPC builders
Pre-market charm offensive begins for Edinburgh's next national number-cruncher The British government is putting out feelers to industry ahead of the procurement process for the country's most powerful supercomputer, set to begin next year....
Techies tossed appliance that had no power cord, but turned out to power their company
Illicit colo cleanup seemed like a good way to get out of the house during Covid Who, Me? Welcome to another week of nimble newsifying from The Register, which as always kicks off the working week with a fresh instalment of Who, Me? It's the reader-contributed column in which you admit to mistakes that almost trashed your career....
Inside the belly of the beast: A technical walk through Intel's 18A production facility at Fab52
Now if Lip Bu Tan can just find a willing customer deep dive Not long after rejoining Intel in 2021, former CEO Pat Gelsinger announced an ambitious plan to reinvent the chipmaker as a contract semiconductor manufacturing powerhouse....
Weird ideas welcome: VC fund looking to make science fiction factual
Nuclear power is getting hot, but don't hold your breath for everlasting batteries A venture capital fund is looking for ideas that are out of bounds for traditional investors, seeding technology that may only come to fruition decades down the line, but where researchers can show real results in the lab....
Who gets a Mac at work? Here's how companies decide
You can't always get what you want Most corporate laptop fleets consist primarily of PCs. However, there's always a contingent of users who beg for Macs. Deciding who gets a Mac in your organization involves balancing IT's need for simplicity, finance's requirement to keep costs under control, and users' desire to work with their preferred tools....
Chinese phishing kit helps scammers who send fake texts impersonate TikTok, Coinbase, others
Researchers tracking 2,158 domains hosting YYlaiyu phishing pages Exclusive A Chinese-developed phishing kit hosted on thousands of domains and boasting 97 different brands to make criminals' scams look more believable is driving a surge in financial fraud around the globe, according to security researchers....
OpenAI GPT-5: great taste, less filling, now with 30% less bias
AI model maker touts effort to depoliticize its product OpenAI says GPT-5 has 30 percent less political bias than its prior AI models....
Managers are throwing entry-level workers under the bus in race to adopt AI
Does it work? Inconclusive. Still, 55% of business leaders say that adopting AI is worth the impact on workers ai-pocalypse Business leaders are racing to jump aboard the AI bandwagon, and a new study from the British Standards Institute suggests young college grads are being hit hardest....
Ransomware crims that exploited SharePoint 0-days add Velociraptor to their arsenal
And they're likely still abusing the same SharePoint flaws for initial access The ransomware gang caught exploiting Microsoft SharePoint zero-days over the summer has added a new tool to its arsenal: Velociraptor, an open-source digital forensics and incident response app not previously tied to ransomware incidents....
Kyndryl sued for firing non-white workers, disabled vet
Security team cuts allegedly targeted workers based on race, national origin, age, and whistleblowing Five former members of Kyndryl's internal IT security team have sued the IBM spinoff alleging that they were terminated as part of a campaign targeting employees based on their race, national origin, age, disability, and whistleblowing activities....
Senate says Nvidia chips are for America first as China tightens import controls
Xi to the left of me, Trump is to the right; Huang I am, stuck in the middle with GPUs The US Senate has passed a provision that would give US firms first dibs on advanced chips, just as China tightens customs checks on Nvidia GPUs, leaving the company caught between competing policies across the Pacific....
Zero-day in file-sharing software leads to RCE, and attacks are ongoing
Usually we'd say patch up... not this time Security research firm Huntress is warning all users of Gladinet's CentreStack and Triofox file-sharing tools to urgently apply an available mitigation, as a zero-day is being actively exploited and there's no patch available....
Microsoft lets bosses spot teams that are dodging Copilot
Viva Insights turns AI guzzling into a leaderboard Microsoft is adding Copilot adoption benchmarks to Viva Insights, a tool that lets managers monitor teams to spot those that are gulping down the AI Kool-Aid fastest....
Pro-Russia hacktivist group dies of cringe after falling into researchers' trap
Forescout's phony water plant fooled TwoNet into claiming a fake cyber victory - then it quietly shut up shop Security researchers say they duped pro-Russia cybercriminals into targeting a fake critical infrastructure organization, which the crew later claimed - via their Telegram group - to be a real-world attack....
Climate goals go up in smoke as US datacenters turn to coal
High gas prices and surging AI demand send operators back to the dirtiest fuel in the stack US datacenters are experiencing a significant shift toward coal-powered energy due to elevated natural gas prices and rapidly growing electricity demand....
Microsoft warns of 'payroll pirate' crew looting US university salaries
Crooks phish campus staff, slip into HR systems, and quietly reroute paychecks Microsoft's Threat Intelligence team has sounded the alarm over a new financially-motivated cybercrime spree that is raiding US university payroll systems....
50 years in deep space, and Voyager still can't escape budget gravity
Probes face 26% funding cut as NASA grapples with shutdown chaos NASA's Voyager project could be facing a 26 percent budget cut while the plug is pulled on other programs, according to insiders familiar with the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory....
Microsoft 364 trips over its own network settings in North America
Outage blamed on misconfigured infrastructure as users report hour-long disruption Microsoft 365 services toppled over in North America last night due to an infrastructure misconfiguration....
UK slaps 'strategic market status' on Google, unlocking power to pry open search
Competition watchdog can now meddle in how the tech giant runs the biggest wing of its organization The UK's competition watchdog has officially slapped Google with "strategic market status," a new legal label that gives the regulator far-reaching powers to rein in how the search giant runs its empire....
Former UK prime minister Sunak becomes human Clippy for Microsoft, Anthropic
Conservative MP told he must not lobby for corporations Rishi Sunak is ready to kick-start his career with a couple of openings in the tech industry, a year after the end of his internship as the prime minister of the world's sixth-largest economy....
Cops nuke BreachForums (again) amid cybercrime supergroup extortion blitz
US and French fuzz pull the plug on Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters' latest leak shop targeting Salesforce US authorities have seized the latest incarnation of BreachForums, the cybercriminal bazaar recently reborn under the stewardship of the so-called Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters, with help from French cyber cops and the Paris prosecutor's office....
UK techies' union warns members after breach exposes sensitive personal details
Prospect apologizes for cyber gaffe affecting up to 160K members UK trade union Prospect is notifying members of a breach that involved data such as sexual orientation and disabilities....
Microsoft hypes PCs with NPUs, still can't offer a good reason to buy one
AI tech not on the hardware compatibility list for now. But future Windows will need it Comment Microsoft has talked up the role played by neural processing units (NPUs) in making Windows more "intelligent," even though the silicon is not currently on the hardware requirements list....
Client defended engineer after oil baron-turned tech support entrepreneur lied about dodgy dealings
Reputations earned over years of service can work wonders On Call Welcome once again to On Call, The Register's weekly reader-contributed column that shares your stories from the frontlines of tech support....
RondoDox botnet fires 'exploit shotgun' at nearly every router and internet-connected home device
56 bugs across routers, DVRs, CCTV systems, web servers ... time to run for cover A new RondoDox botnet campaign uses an "exploit shotgun" - fire at everything, see what hits - to target 56 vulnerabilities across at least 30 different vendors' routers, DVRs, CCTV systems, web servers, and other network devices, and then infect the buggy gear with malware....
It's trivially easy to poison LLMs into spitting out gibberish, says Anthropic
Just 250 malicious training documents can poison a 13B parameter model - that's 0.00016% of a whole dataset Poisoning AI models might be way easier than previously thought if an Anthropic study is anything to go on....
Amazon's Quick Suite is like agentic AI training wheels for enterprises
Slow down there Andy; you wouldn't want to bump into any hallucinations Despite ongoing concerns over the accuracy, reliability, and trustworthiness of AI in the enterprise, Amazon believes that if it can just make building agents easier for the average worker, they'll be automating the boring parts of their job in no time....
Google rearranges Agentspace into Gemini Enterprise
A new spin on workflow automation as Chocolate Factory tries to displace Microsoft as the enterprise go-to Google on Thursday announced the launch of Gemini Enterprise, a platform for automating business workflows using the company's Gemini family of machine learning models....
Crims had 3-month head start on defenders in Oracle EBS invasion
The miscreants started their attack all the way back on July 10 The raid on Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) likely began as early as July - about three months before any public detections - with extortionists compromising "dozens" of organizations, a Google investigation has determined....
This is your brain on bots: AI interaction may hurt students more than it helps
More kids see AI as a friend or romantic interest, but few teachers know how to deal with the fallout, study finds Today's students are using AI for everything from tutoring to therapy to romance. A new study warns the tech may be dulling kids' social skills quietly, like booze on the brain....
Space Shuttle war of words takes off as senator blasts 'woke Smithsonian'
Houston, we have a custody battle Exclusive The war of words over the possible relocation of Space Shuttle Discovery has ratcheted up, with the office of Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) telling The Register that the orbiter belongs in Houston "whether the woke Smithsonian and its cronies in Congress like it or not."...
GitHub Copilot Chat turns blabbermouth with crafty prompt injection attack
AI assistant could be duped into leaking code and tokens via sneaky markdown GitHub's Copilot Chat, the chatbot meant to help developers code faster, could be helping attackers to steal code instead....
Discord says 70,000 photo IDs compromised in customer service breach
No word on why the outsourced supplier was storing this data in the first place Communication platform provider Discord has admitted that around 70,000 users had their government IDs stolen as part of its recent data breach....
US PC shipments hit the buffers as Trump’s tariffs take their toll
Rest of the world surges on Windows 10 end-of-life upgrades WORLD WAR FEE The global PC market is ticking upward as Windows 10's end-of-life nears, except in North America, where tariff shocks and economic jitters have slowed demand....
Gartner warns agentic AI startups: Prepare to be consolidated
Analyst predicts over-supply will trigger a market correction in favor of deep-pocketed incumbents Gartner has signaled that the supply of "agentic AI" in terms of models, platforms, and products far outstrips demand, creating a situation that will lead to consolidation and market correction....
Humans flunk the Turing test for voices as bots get chattier
Coin toss odds for spotting a deepfake, study finds. And that's before the machines learn to sing Think you can distinguish between a human voice and a robot? Think again, because the numbers are starting to say otherwise....
Meta will move React to Linux Foundation to address vendor dominance fears
Independent technical governance will hope to unite fractured ecosystem Meta will contribute React, React Native, and JSX (JavaScript XML) to a new React Foundation, part of the Linux Foundation, and said that "it is important that no single company or organization is overrepresented."...
China moves to extend control over tech industry's critical rare earths
New laws restrict goods that are manufactured outside of China China is hitting back at US export restrictions with some of its own, tightening its control on so-called rare earth minerals and introducing laws that require companies to get licenses before they can ship goods containing rare earths, even those made outside of the country....
Windows 11 gets a fresh Start in latest Canary build
Meanwhile, Microsoft resurrects Edit and kills .NET 3.5 SP1 on demand It's taken a while, but Microsoft has finally made its redesigned Start menu available to Canary Channel Windows Insiders, while also removing .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 as a Feature On Demand, and adding Edit, the command-line text editor....
Kubernetes kicks down Azure Front Door
This time outage was not actually Microsoft's fault If you struggled to access the Azure Portal or Microsoft Entra this morning, you weren't alone - Microsoft has blamed a Kubernetes crash for the outage....
Clearview AI sees red as UK tribunal sides with regulator over $10M GDPR fine
Court says ICO can chase US outfit for unlawfully hoovering up Brits' selfies The UK General Regulatory Chamber's Upper Tribunal (UT) has ruled in favor of the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), which appealed against a 2023 decision that it could not fine Clearview AI over GDPR violations....
SonicWall breach hits every cloud backup customer after 5% claim goes up in smoke
Affects users regardless of when their backups were created SonicWall has admitted that all customers who used its cloud backup service to store firewall configuration files were affected by a cybersecurity incident first disclosed in mid-September, walking back earlier assurances that only a small fraction of users were impacted....
Intel's open source future in question as exec says he's done carrying the competition
Kevork Kechichian says x86 giant's contributions should benefit Intel first Over the years, Intel has established itself as a paragon of the open source community, but that could soon change under the x86 giant's new leadership....
Panther Lake sets stage for Intel's 2 nm comeback, but many details still TBD
Notebook chip promises 8 to16 cores and up to 180 TOPS of total AI performance when it hits shelves in January Intel has begun clawing back production from TSMC with the introduction of its Panther Lake processors, the company's first chip based on its long-awaited 18A process tech....
SoftBank snaps up ABB's robotics biz for $5.4B to fuel 'physical AI' dreams
Japanese tech goliath gets grabby with industrial automation as ABB shelves spin-off plans SoftBank Group has added more arms to its portfolio, this time of the robotic kind....
Nextcloud withdraws European Commission OneDrive bundling complaint
Blames 'lack of interest' from the EU policy enforcer for towel throwing Nextcloud has withdrawn a complaint against Microsoft with the European Commission over OneDrive bundling, citing a lack of progress with the governing body....
Hundreds of millions of business PCs are still on Windows 10 as D-Day nears
It's the end of support as we know it and users feel fine With days to go before Microsoft finally pulls the plug on Windows 10 support, there are hundreds of millions of computers that have yet to upgrade to Windows 11, despite the best efforts of hardware manufacturers and the operating system's marketers....
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