The Register

Instead of job offers, victims get MiniJunk backdoor and MiniBrowse stealer Suspected Iranian government-backed online attackers have expanded their European cyber ops with fake job portals and new malware targeting organizations in the defense, manufacturing, telecommunications, and aviation sectors....

Init system update arrives behind schedule while desktop overhaul adds app and HDR polish There are fresh new releases of two of the more controversial and divisive projects in the Linux world for everyone to argue about... and then adopt anyway....

Meanwhile Lotus Notes still lurks in some Office of National Statistics systems, for now A flagship Office for National Statistics project to share data across the UK government appears to be ending several years before its time after failing to make enough progress, getting a "Red" risk rating two years in a row, and never appointing a program director....

Reeves points finger at Moscow in interview when authorities reckon it's local lads UK chancellor Rachel Reeves is blaming Moscow for Britain's latest cyber woes, an attribution that seems about as solid as wet cardboard given the trail of evidence pointing to attackers much closer to home....

The corpse of Lotus Notes keeps twitching Some software is more difficult to kill than a horror movie villain, it seems, as Domino and Notes versions 9.0.x and 10.0.x are now set to limp on until the end of this decade....

Messy ruling details a perfect storm of NAO, MoD, and Aquila contract failures Managed service provider Node4 has won a 2.4 million (c $3.2 million) damages award against the founder of Microsoft Dynamics consultancy Tisski, after the High Court ruled the company was sold with problematic contracts that were collapsing as the deal was being finalized....

Stargates or black holes? Risks and rewards from the B(r)itbarn boom Comment The UK has bitterly expensive power, an energy minister who sees electricity as bad, a lethargic planning system, and a grid with a backlog for connections running to 2039....

Names, emails unplugged in DCS support snafu - but 'billing is safe' An electric vehicle charging point provider is telling users that their data may be compromised, following a recent security "incident" at a service provider....

Cracks down on malicious pessimism and expressions of ennui China's Cyberspace Administration yesterday announced a two-month campaign to quash netizens who maliciously incite negative emotions"....

China-funded research suggests video app's new American operators might byte off 40 percent more traffic than they can chew Before Larry Ellison, Michael Dell and Rupert Murdoch put pen to paper to take over TikTok's US operations from ByteDance, they might want to consider that one of the Chinese company's network boffins thinks the app and others like it create massive data wastage"....

Signatories include 10 Nobel Prize winners ai-pocalypse Ten Nobel Prize winners are among the more than 200 people who've signed a letter calling on the United Nations to define and enforce red lines" that prohibit some uses of AI....

Misalignment risk? That's an area for future study Google DeepMind added a new AI threat scenario - one where a model might try to prevent its operators from modifying it or shutting it down - to its AI safety document. It also included a new misuse risk, which it calls "harmful manipulation."...

Promises, promises analysis OpenAI and Nvidia have signed a letter of intent wherein OpenAI agrees to buy at least 10 gigawatts of Nvidia systems for its datacenters, while the AI arms dealer returns the favor with an investment of up to $100 billion in the house that Altman built....

However, the changes could lead to more offshoring In a surprise announcement on Friday, President Trump issued a proclamation on the H-1B visas many tech companies use to import qualified foreign workers. The headlines mentioning a $100,000 fee caused panic among many visa holders, leading the White House to issue a clarification: Only new applicants will cost their companies this exorbitant price....

Not old enough to drink, old enough to be accused of causing millions in damage A teen surrendered to Las Vegas police and was booked on suspicion of breaking into multiple Las Vegas casino networks in 2023, as part of a series of hacks attributed to Scattered Spider....

Spooky season is nearly here. Want to be scared? There are fresh betas to try Two of the biggest names in fixed-release distros are nearly finished and ready to drop. You can taste them now, but they're not fully baked yet....

Cloud and apps chiefs step up as Safra Catz moves upstairs. Larry remains Larry Oracle on Monday named Clay Magouyrk and Mike Sicilia as its new co-chief executives, replacing Safra Catz, who will shift into the role of executive vice chair of the board after more than a decade as top dog....

Safety watchdog doubts SpaceX can ready HLS in time for 2027 Artemis mission NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) has cast doubt on SpaceX's Starship making the 2027 Artemis III lunar landing deadline....

Long-time contributor Ellen Dash steps down after GitHub access shake-up and governance dispute A decade-long RubyGems maintainer, Ellen Dash (also known as duckinator), has resigned from Ruby Central following what she described as a "hostile takeover" of the open source project....

Ratings agency points out there's a risk of relying on a small number of buyers Ratings agency Moody's has pointed to the dangers inherent in Oracle's $300 billion agreement with OpenAI - one of the deals contributing to a staggering $455 billion pipeline of obligations for Big Red's cloud infrastructure....

Thinnest yet still fixable, though not without effort iFixit has given Apple's slimline new smartphone, the iPhone Air, a thumbs-up for repairability, praising its easy access to key components, despite being the thinnest handset Cupertino has built so far....

Airport staff revert to manual ops as travellers urged to use self-service check-in where possible The EU's cybersecurity agency today confirmed that ransonmware is the cause of continued disruption blighting major airports across Europe....

Protected content in some Blu-ray and DVD applications broken Microsoft has added another entry to its growing list of problematic updates in the Windows Hall of Shame, this time causing Digital TV and Blu-ray applications to stutter and freeze when playing protected content....

Automaker insists only names and emails exposed, no financials Car giant Stellantis is admitting that attackers targeted one of its third-party partners, spilling its own customers' details in the process....

It's one small sip for man... British boffins say they've discovered a way of taking one of the country's favorite pastimes - having a nice cup of tea - into outer space....

Darwin would understand microkernels. We need microkernels that understand Darwin. Opinion The IT industry is not only full of sharks, it has shark nature itself. It must keep moving forward to survive. Not all sharks are obligate ram ventilators, and not all IT changes all the time, but without innovation the sector would curdle and die....

Project rated at 'Red' risk as it struggles to move off obsolete Oracle tech and cloud transition stalls The risk rating of the UK's crime intelligence database is being elevated to "Red" by the governments projects' watchdog as the DB struggles to migrate from a legacy Oracle platform....

Lloyds Data and AI lead doesn't want devs downloading models from the likes of Hugging Face - too risky Lloyds Banking Group is leaning into 21st century tech - yet trying to do so in a way that the data of its 28 million customers is kept away from untested AI models developers might be tempted to deploy....

Revenge on managers who slow things down is a drink best served with floating fungus Who, Me? The world of work can sometimes drive IT pros to drink, leaving them more likely to make the sort of mistakes that The Register celebrates each week in Who, Me? It's our reader-contributed column in which you share stories of making a mess at work, and cleaning up afterwards to the best of your ability....

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....