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Plus: China wants to end AI mashups of classic vids; TSMC set to open Japan fab; and more Asia In Brief Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy has once again argued for Indian workers to spend 70 hours a week in paid employment....

Plus: Netscaler brute force barrage; BeyondTrust API key stolen; and more Infosec in brief There's a problem of titanic proportions brewing for users of the Prometheus open source monitoring toolkit: hundreds of thousands of servers and exporters are exposed to the internet, creating significant security risks and leaving organizations vulnerable to attack....

Sometimes two models really are faster than one Hands on When it comes to AI inferencing, the faster you can generate a response, the better - and over the past few weeks, we've seen a number of announcements from chip upstarts claiming mind-bogglingly high numbers....

Take this job and automate it Red Rabbit Robotics made an appearance at the Humanoids Summit this week - a conference for builders making machines resembling people and selling autonomous labor as a service....

Gather around the fire for another retelling of computer networking history Systems Approach A few weeks ago I stumbled onto an article titled "Traceroute isn't real," which was reasonably entertaining while also not quite right in places....

Final curtain call for weird wingman The Microsoft axman just claimed another victim. Less than three years after it appeared in the Windows Insider Dev Channel, the Suggested Actions feature is being deprecated....

IOCONTROL targets IoT and OT devices from a ton of makers, apparently An Iranian government-linked cybercriminal crew used custom malware called IOCONTROL to attack and remotely control US and Israel-based water and fuel management systems, according to security researchers....

'Today's sentencing is more than just a punishment. It's a message' A Texan who ran a forum on the dark web where depraved netizens could swap child sex abuse material (CSAM), and chat freely about abusing kids, has been sentenced to 30 years in prison....

Won't someone think of Elon? Ah, who are we kidding - none of this will matter in a month Ever in the sights of the SEC, Elon Musk is engaged in another public spat with America's financial watchdog, this time in the form of a letter from the billionaire's lawyer published on X (better known as Twitter)....

Privacy measure leaves some mourning lost memories A year ago, Google announced plans to save people's Location History, which it now calls Timeline, locally on devices rather than on its servers....

And the kernel team's patience? AlmaLinux 10 is joining RHEL 10 in public beta testing, and the developers of CentOS Stream 10 have just hit the release button ahead of the festive break....

Workday policy expert suggests NIST framework will save you trouble later The US House and Senate are unlikely to pass federal legislation on the use of AI in business, so users should focus their attention on a new NIST framework in lieu of state-level law, according to Workday's veep for corporate affairs....

Landing hard at an angle not great for the old rotor blades It appears the bland Martian surface triggered a chain of events that left NASA's Ingenuity helicopter permanently grounded on the red planet....

Wider ecosystem still has work to do, though Google is rolling out two new features to help Android users evade stalkers who abuse Bluetooth tags to surreptitiously track them....

'Does it ever fully separate? I think that's an open question for another day,' interim co-CEO says Intel's interim co-CEOs, David Zinsner and Michelle Johnson Holthaus, discussed the possibility of fully spinning off its foundry business while speaking at the Barclays investment banking conference on Thursday....

Holidays come early for distro builders with two init systems to choose from Everyone's favorite Linux component has hit a milestone, while a fresh contender comes of age - with a touch of Lisp....

Same old same old really Cloudflare says that global internet traffic grew by 17.2 percent this year, with Google still the most visited internet service, while the US was the source of over a third of global bot traffic (again)....

ISP deserves criticism too for falling over after script kiddie beefing On Call The silly season is close, but not so close that The Register can't find another instalment of On Call, the Friday feature in which Reg readers share tales of tech support triumphs achieved under uncomfortable circumstances....

Chip side of the biz expects to take lion's share of hyperscalers' $60-90 billion XPU spend in 2027, helped by 3nm models coming next year Broadcom has told investors its integration of VMware is all but done, ahead of schedule, and that it has turned the virtualization giant into an even more prolific money machine than it hoped would be possible....

Couldn't reach out and touch it, but still happy as this attempt was out of mission scope Japanese orbital janitor Astroscale says it has completed the closest ever approach by a commercial operator to space junk when it came within 15 meters of a defunct upper stage rocket....

DoJ thinks it's found the folks that ran it, and some of the 'IT warriors' sent out to fleece employers North Korea's fake IT worker scams netted the hermit kingdom $88 million over six years, according to the US Department of Justice, which thinks it's found the people who run them....

Do we really need to explain why this is a problem? COMMENT AI use by law enforcement to identify suspects is already problematic enough, but civil liberties groups have a new problem to worry about: the technology being employed to draft police reports....

Good news for techies pushing 'education, healthcare, and entertainment' gadgets in the US America's telecoms regulator has opened up the entire 6 GHz frequency band to very low-power devices, alongside other unlicensed applications such as Wi-Fi kit....

General Motors pulling the plug on autonomous taxi biz hits Redmond in the wallet Microsoft is among those in the blast radius of General Motors' decision to wind up its autonomous taxi business, Cruise....

Deal with Intersect Power will see gigawatts of compute capacity come online Google believes the US electricity grid can't deliver the energy needed to power datacenters that deliver AI services, so has formed an alliance to build industrial parks powered by clean energy, at which it will build "gigawatts of datacenter capacity" across the nation....

More details released after devs allowed weeks to apply fixes We now know the remote code execution vulnerability in Apache Struts 2 disclosed back in November carries a near-maximum severity rating following the publication of the CVE....

Holiday cheer comes in the form of three arrests and 27 shuttered domains The Europol-coordinated Operation PowerOFF struck again this week as cross-border cops pulled the plug on 27 more domains tied to distributed denial of service (DDoS) criminality....

High-energy weapon proves its mettle in testing The British Army has successfully destroyed flying drones for the first time using a high-energy laser mounted onan armoredvehicle. If perfected, the technology could form an effective counter-measure against drone attacks....

Few websites actually respect the option, says Mozilla When Firefox 135 is released in February, it'll ship with one less feature: Mozilla plans to remove the Do Not Track toggle from its Privacy and Security settings....

No word from the FBI about where they are hiding aliens or UFOs Unidentified flying objects said to be the size of sports utility vehicles have been spotted flying over parts of the northeastern US, prompting investigations by law enforcement and the FBI as elected officials urge the public not to panic....

If Zuck and other Big Tech players pay news publishers, their bills vanish Australia has created a tax that only big tech companies must pay - but which they can also legally avoid by paying money to Aussie news publishers....

Acquires two companies that help those on the nice list keep naughty list types at bay Citrix has gone on a European shopping trip, and come home with its bag of gifts bulging thanks to a pair of major buys: infosec outfits deviceTRUST and Strong Network....

Long March-8A improves payload by forty percent and comes just a month after Long March 12 debut China is readying an upgraded and more capable rocket for its first launch, to advance its ambition of creating large constellations of satellites....

Did you get your loot box? Consumers tricked into making unwanted purchases in Epic Games' popular Fortnite title should see refunds start to hit their accounts this week, according to the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC)....

Something called 'Baltra' expected to make its debut in 2026, perhaps with tech both already use Apple is reportedly working with chip giant Broadcom to develop a custom server processor to power the AI services and features built into its operating systems....

Sen. Wyden blasts FCC's 'failure' amid Salt Typhoon hacks US telecoms carriers would be required to implement minimum cyber security standards and ensure their systems are not susceptible to hacks by nation-state attackers - like Salt Typhoon - under legislation proposed by senator Ron Wyden (D-OR)....

Finance house finds x86 giant's lack of strategy disturbing Intel's troubles continue to compound after S&P Global on Tuesday downgraded its credit rating, citing concerns about the chipmaker's pace of recovery and management uncertainty....

What's an influencer to do? Updated Meta's techies are likely having a bad day as the internet titan's Facebook, WhatsApp, Threads, and Instagram are suffering some degree of downtime globally....

Belly-busting biz says it's been hit by cowardly custards Doughnut slinger Krispy Kreme has admitted to an attack that has left many customers unable to order online....

Chip imports up more than 14% this year in anticipation of fresh restrictions China's semiconductor imports were up more than 14 percent in 2024 as companies in the country stockpiled ahead of widely expected fresh restrictions from Washington and pressure grows to develop local alternatives instead....

Microsoft squashes eSCL bug There is good news for Microsoft customers seeking to attach a scanner or fax machine to their Windows 11 hardware. Support for eSCL has been fixed, and a compatibility hold will be lifted....

Chocolate Factory's latest multimodal model aims to power more trusted AI agents Google on Wednesday released Gemini 2.0 Flash, the latest addition to its AI model lineup, in the hope that developers will create agentic applications in AI Studio and Vertex AI....

AI assistant goes native - sort of - for Windows Insiders Copilot has gone native for Windows Insiders and comandeered a popular keyboard shortcut in the process....

The Register stumbles upon the place self-driving cabs appear to be rusting away into history Pictures General Motors is winding up its autonomous taxi biz Cruise....

Patch up, everyone - that admin portal is mighty attractive to your friendly cyberattacker Ivanti just put out a security advisory warning of three critical vulnerabilities in its Cloud Services Application (CSA), including a perfect 10....

Hopefully it won't be another 10 years before the capsule is troubled by a crew It is ten years since NASA sent the Orion spacecraft into space on the Exploration Flight Test-1 mission....

Mid-November release will be maintained for 'several years' Last month's new version of the Linux kernel, 6.12, has been confirmed as the newest LTS release... which also marks the end of the line for kernel 4.19....

2025 looming large as Blue Ring pathfinder prepped for liftoff Blue Origin has confirmed its New Glenn rocket is on track for launch before the end of 2024....

Australia's archive, that is - it was an Aussie who wrote it The theme music to iconic British sci-fi TV show Doctor Who has been immortalized by Australia's National Film and Sound Archive....

Also sanctions his employer - an outfit called Sichuan Silence linked to Ragnarok ransomware The US Departments of Treasury and Justice have named a Chinese business and one of its employees as the actors behind the 2020 exploit of a zero-day flaw in Sophos firewalls...