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The Register looks forward to learning more about a possible Dell hyperscale sovereign social SaaS platform Dell CEO Michael Dell is part of the consortium that intends to acquire TikTok's US operations, according to US president Donald Trump....

Cyber-attack' on ticketing outfit Collins and cable cuts at Dallas ground hundreds of flights Technology problems hit the commercial aviation industry hard over the weekend, leading to hundreds of cancelled flights and myriad delays on both sides of the Atlantic....

PLUS: India ponders tax breaks for datacenters; Samsung plans hiring spree; Taliban bans fiber internet; and more Asia In Brief Huawei last week revealed that China's Zhejiang University used its Ascend 1000 accelerators to create a version of DeepSeek's R1 model that improves on the original by producing fewer responses that China's government would rather avoid....

PLUS: Luxury brands under fire; FBI warns crims are spoofing it again; ICE buys phone cracking software Infosec in brief Online criminals prefer to deal in digital assets, but a side effect of a ransomware attack has seen a French museum robbed of $705,000 in physical gold nuggets....

Optus was unaware network changes caused a problem, and ignored some customer complaints Australian telco Optus says its staff may not have followed established processes when a firewall upgrade they conducted resulted in customers not being able to call emergency services for 14 hours - a period during which it is thought three of the carrier's customers died after trying to seek help, according to the company's CEO....

From pain-free shutdowns to crap-free search, these tweaks will improve your experience hands on Windows 11 has a number of puzzling or annoying UI changes from Windows 10 that power users might wish to change. But you can't make these tweaks from the Settings menu or even the legacy Control Panel. To make these changes, you'll need to edit the Registry....

And also force them to improve resilience SaaS vendors are increasing prices faster than both inflation and the typical growth rate of corporate IT budgets, but Gartner VP analyst Jo Liversidge thinks that canny buyers can reduce their bills by anticipating price hikes and planning to negotiate hard....

Arrangement follows big tech tie-ins claiming to offer 31B investment The UK has struck a defense deal with US spy-tech biz Palantir, which the government says will unlock 1.5 billion ($2 billion) of investment in Britain....

It will hit outsourcing companies hardest On Friday, President Trump signed a presidential proclamation to sharply raise the cost of employing H-1B workers by restricting entry unless employers make a $100,000 payment with the petition....

With new electricity sources for AI datacenters, the company will have some juice left over AI model training and serving require vast quantities of power, but not necessarily all at once. With the first of several gigawatt-scale datacenters due to come online next year, Meta is looking at ways to offload excess energy capacity by selling it on the wholesale market....

Could this bot-prevention technique now be obsolete? ChatGPT can be tricked via cleverly worded prompts to violate its own policies and solve CAPTCHA puzzles, potentially making this human-proving security mechanism obsolete, researchers say....

Training costs detailed in R1 training report don't include 2.79 million GPU hours that laid its foundation Chinese AI darling DeepSeek's now infamous R1 research report was published in the Journal Nature this week, alongside new information on the compute resources required to train the model. Unfortunately, some people got the wrong idea about just how expensive it was to create....

Unnamed org compromised with two malware sets An unknown attacker has abused a couple of flaws in Ivanti Endpoint Manager Mobile (EPMM) and deployed two sets of malware against an unnamed organization, according to the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency....

Latest marketing blitz for a solution seeking a problem... and a killer app Comment Microsoft suspects that a "transformative shift" is being driven in personal and enterprise computing by its Copilot+ PCs and an expanding Windows on Arm ecosystem....

It's also spinning twice as fast than thought, making a tricky rendezvous even trickier Japan's Hayabusa2 probe faces a tougher mission after new measurements revealed its target asteroid is nearly three times smaller and spinning about twice as fast as originally estimated....

Outside experts say the vulnerability has probably already been exploited Budding ransomware crooks have another shot at exploiting Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT product now that a new 10/10 severity vulnerability needs patching....

Judge rules there's no quick fix for 1,700+ axed grants, leaving labs scrambling for cash while the lawsuit plays out A US court has cleared the way for the National Science Foundation to press ahead with the cancellation of more than 1,700 research grants worth upwards of $1 billion....

Bad opsec Thalha Jubair, one of the two UK teens arrested on Tuesday and accused of being members of the notorious Scattered Spider cybercrime gang, allegedly played a role in bilking more than 100 organizations out of at least $115 million in ransom payments. The cops nabbed him after following a number of clues, including paying for gift cards from a wallet on the same server that also held wallets receiving extortion payments....

Until Microsoft lobbed it into a virtual volcano A security researcher claims to have found a flaw that could have handed him the keys to almost every Entra ID tenant worldwide....

Leo XIV voices concerns about AI taking jobs - and not just his own Pope Leo XIV has crucified the idea of creating an AI version which would've allowed Catholics around the world to have a virtual audience with him - without the need for a trip to Vatican City....

DSAG criticizes separate regimes for public, private cloud, says users need more time to upgrade in uncertain times SAP's German-speaking user group has warned that the enterprise software giant's current licensing regime is creating unwanted difficulties in launching cloud migration and upgrade projects....

Radware says flaw enabled hidden email prompts to trick Deep Research agent into exfiltrating sensitive data ChatGPT's research assistant sprung a leak - since patched - that let attackers steal Gmail secrets with just a single carefully crafted email....

Another blow for the legislation as Parliament continues to hear stakeholder views As UK ministers continue to quiz stakeholders over the effectiveness of the Online Safety Act, one charity chief raised concerns over the robustness of Ofcom's enforcement of the controversial legislation....

Q: How many Excel users do you need to correctly set the number formatting of a cell? A: Monday, January 1st, 1900 The inaugural finals of the UK Excel Championship have come and gone, and there is now one spreadsheet wrangler to rule them all, at least in the United Kingdom....

Contractor sneakily fired after pointing out odious ignorance On Call Welcome to another installment of On Call, The Register's Friday frolic through your tales of delightful tech support encounters....

YouTube vids explain digital tradecraft to reach spooks over Tor or VPN without blowing your cover The UK's Secret Intelligence Service, aka MI6, has created a dark web portal called Silent Courier" that it hopes would-be foreign informants will find a suitably secure means of sharing secrets....

Collaborationware CEO tried to smooth things over, but Hack Club now plans a strategy shift Slack sent a nonprofit hacking club for teens a demand for $50,000, payable within a week, and threatened to delete the club's message archive if it did not pay....

Teams with UAV operator Flytrex for service that moves meals in minutes Flying pigs may soon be on their way to some US households, after rideshare and food delivery behemoth Uber teamed with drone operator Flytrex for food delivery services....

Thanks for the memories, Akatsuki Japan's Aerospace Exploration Agency has decided to abandon its Akatsuki Venus orbiter, after losing contact with the craft last year....

In a state known for dairy, football, and broken tech dreams Microsoft's CEO has claimed the operating system-slinger is building the "world's largest datacenter."...

But still no hero customer for Chipzilla's Foundry biz Nvidia is set to become one of Intel's largest shareholders after the GPU giant announced on Thursday it would invest $5 billion in the struggling chipmaker under a co-development agreement targeting PCs and datacenter infrastructure....

Why browse the web yourself when an AI sidekick can spoon-feed it to you? Now that it knows it won't be forced to sell its browser, Google is cramming AI into every vacant corner of Chrome it can find, whether you like it or not....

Sixth such Chrome flaw this year spotted by the Chocolate Factory, already in play Google pushed an emergency patch for a high-severity Chrome flaw, already under active exploitation. So it's time to make sure you're running the most recent version of the web browser....

Aussie CEO promises AI everywhere, and clearer views of what your devs are up to Atlassian has continued its AI spending spree with a $1 billion takeover of developer analysis biz DX, a move it promised would give devs "less friction and more flow."...

Inject this synthetic phage into E. coli and it kills better than the real thing A group of Stanford bioengineers claim that they've created synthetic bacteriophages using AI-generated designs that not only work in the real world, but are far more infectious than their naturally-occurring counterparts....

Vendor pulls plug on cloud backup feature, urges admins to reset passwords and re-secure devices SonicWall is telling some customers to reset passwords after attackers broke into its cloud backup service and accessed firewall configuration data....

Copilot+ PC users can run the AI models locally. Others may need a subscription. Microsoft is continuing to shovel AI functionality into its Notepad application, with Windows Insiders the first test subjects....

Three US medical centers fess up to serious breaches Cybercriminals broke in and stole nearly a million Americans' data in the space of a week, in the course of three digital burglaries at healthcare providers....

Layoffs to stand following $1.1B AI acquisition Activist investors have taken a $2 billion stake in Workday, signaling approval of its direction and saying they "look forward to continued collaboration with the company."...

Decisive action comes nearly a year after the attack and first arrest took place Two teenagers are set to appear in court today after being charged with offences related to the cyberattack on Transport for London (TfL) in August 2024....

Dashboard loop caused API outage that was hard to troubleshoot Cloudflare has confessed to a coding error using a React useEffect hook, notorious for being problematic if not handled carefully, that caused an outage for the platform's dashboard and many of its APIs....

Wake-up call for dozed and confused chap who had to turn on runway lights In the high-stress and safety-critical world of air traffic control, "don't fall asleep" probably comes pretty far toward the top of the rule book, and yet that's apparently the reason for the landing delay of an Air Corsica Airbus A320 this week....

VC giant rebuilt boxes, patched holes, and says it's beefed up security - but won't say who did it Venture capital giant Insight Partners has confirmed that a January ransomware attack compromised the personal data of more than 12,000 people, including employees, former staff, and the firm's usually-secretive limited partners....

Proofpoint spots efforts to spy on US economic policy nerds Chinese state-aligned online attackers are back at it, targeting US trade policy wonks as Washington and Beijing spar over economic ties....

Model can also explain its answers, researchers find Chinese AI company DeepSeek has shown it can improve the reasoning of its LLM DeepSeek-R1 through trial-and-error based reinforcement learning, and even be made to explain its reasoning on math and coding problems, even though explanations might sometimes be unintelligible....

And knits a graph DB out of LinkedIn cast-offs Microsoft is extending its Fabric cloud-based data platform by including Oracle and Google's BigQuery data warehouse in its mirroring capability, and launching a new graph database based on an in-house LinkedIn project....

'Just a hobby, won't be big and professional like GNU...' Open Source Summit At OSS EU, LWN editor and long-time kernel developer Jonathan Corbet shared a long-term perspective on how and why Linux has thrived for a third of a century....

LEGO Mindstorms, PlayStation 2 and Furby all resonate today in their own way Column Twenty-five years ago this month I published a book called The Playful World that explored a simple idea: that the seeds of the future can be found in the present by considering the dazzling toys we started giving our children at the turn of the millennium....

On the same day that fellow Chinese giant Tencent says its overseas cloud clientele doubled Chinese tech giant Huawei has kicked off its annual Connect" conference by laying out a plan to deliver increasingly powerful AI processors that look to have enough power that Middle Kingdom users won't need to try getting Nvidia parts across the border....

As old-school virtual desktop player Omnissa distances itself further from VMware Microsoft thinks cloudy PCs might be overkill for some users, so has started streaming individual apps instead as part of its Windows 365 service....