The Register

AI arms dealer relies on Taiwanese advanced packaging plants for top-specced GPUs US manufacturing of Nvidia GPUs is underway and CEO Jensen Huang is celebrating the first Blackwell wafer to come out of TSMC's Arizona chip factory. However, to be part of a complete product, those chips may need to visit Taiwan....

'US is ... the greatest source of chaos in cyberspace' China has blamed the US for a "major cyberattack" against its National TimeService Center, alleging it could have disrupted the country's communications, financial, and transportation networks, and even caused power outages....

Too many services depend not just on one cloud provider, but on one location Analysis Amazon's US-EAST-1 region outage caused widespread chaos, taking websites and services offline even in Europe and raising some difficult questions. After all, cloud operations are supposed to have some built-in resiliency, right?...

Hiring and firing at the Windows giant more The Bachelor than Survivor Microsoft has made headlines for mass layoffs in recent times, but former company engineer Dave Plummer has explained how things were done a quarter of a century ago - and what it was like living through the tech giant's notorious stack ranking system....

Cabinet Office signals it might let supplier ship work abroad after 'unforeseeable' event The UK government has signaled its intention to allow a supplier providing maintenance to its online procurement platform to subcontract offshore, having previously said that this was off-limits due to security concerns....

October security patch leaves users unable to fix their PCs Microsoft has confirmed a bug that disables USB mice and keyboards in the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) after installing security update KB5066835, released October 14....

Now try a jet engine in a bedstead before strapping into a Starship European Space Agency (ESA) astronauts have completed a helicopter training course to prepare them for upcoming lunar landings....

Tech billionaire apologizes after endorsing plan to deploy National Guard in San Francisco Salesforce co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff has apologized for backing President Donald Trump's proposals to send the National Guard to San Francisco, where the company is based and holds its annual conference....

That's 46 minutes in which more work can be done, not an extended lunch Lloyds Banking Group claims employees save 46 minutes daily using Microsoft 365 Copilot, based on a survey of 1,000 users among nearly 30,000 deployed licenses....

Citizen! You are falling short in your AI usage targets! Strive harder for the revolution! Opinion The quantum theory of management includes an analogy for the physical law of the observer effect, where observing a system changes its state. When you make a metric a target, it is not useful as a metric. Instead of reflecting whatever underlying behavior it was intended to measure, the metric becomes a measure of how well the benchmark is being gamed....

Amazon reports DNS issues hitting DynamoDB, leaving services from Roblox to McDonald's struggling A major outage is affecting Amazon Web Services (AWS), with even Amazon's own web page reported to be offline and dozens of other online services and websites affected, including disruption in the UK....

Plus: Ransomware posing as Teams installer, Cisco 0-day exploit to drop rootkit, and European cops bust SIM-box service INFOSEC IN BRIEF Engineer David Dodda says he was just "30 seconds away" from running malware on his own computer after nearly falling victim to a North Korea-type job interview scam with a "legitimate" blockchain company....

ValueLicensing dispute probes whether Office counts as a creative work The long-running legal battle between ValueLicensing and Microsoft over the resale of software licenses has taken another turn following Microsoft's attempt to make the case about copyright....

Once more into the, er, breach? The UK's Armed Forces veterans are being tasked with one last mission - proving the government can successfully roll out a digital ID card scheme....

Oh ... you mean we shouldn't press that button? Who, Me? Each new Monday ushers in a week during which you might shine or flatline. The Register celebrates the times you end up doing the latter with a new instalment of Who, Me? It's the column in which you admit to making mistakes and execute cunning escapes....

Taps Ruby core to oversee RubyGems, Bundler Ruby Central, the non-profit that recently seized some Ruby open source tools from maintainers, is transferring the repository ownership of RubyGems and Bundler to the Ruby core team. The move appears to be an attempt to mollify the Ruby community following a divisive power grab, but it does not restore the control of those tools to the maintainers who previously oversaw them....

Cleverly concocked deal keeps debt off Social Media empire's books Facebook parent Meta has managed to convince private equity firm Blue Owl Capital to finance its 2.2 gigawatt Hyperion datacenter project in Richland Parish, Louisiana....

Now they just need to get regulatory approval Despite technological and regulatory hurdles, Amazon remains convinced that small modular reactors (SMRs) are the answer to the cloud titan's power woes....

Not a good week for Big Red Envoy Air, an American Airlines subsidiary, has confirmed that it was among the dozens of organizations compromised via Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) security flaws, following claims by Clop extortionists that its parent company was one of its victims....

'AI is a tool', Pope tells attendees Recently, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff warned investors to avoid the "false prophets" of AI. Now, the Pope has brought real theological weight to the bot debate, hosting a Vatican seminar that called for global AI regulation and fair distribution of the technology's benefits....

Most datacenters to ditch 19-inch standard for 21-inch OCP kit by 2030 Datacenters are set to standardize on the larger, 21-inch rack format by 2030, according to Omdia, as hyperscalers and server makers fully embrace it, leaving enterprises to the existing 19-inch standard....

US biz lobby claims president overstepped his authority with proclamation demanding hefty visa fee The US Chamber of Commerce (CoC) has filed a suit accusing President Trump of exceeding his authority by seeking to slap a $100,000 fee on H-1B visa applications....

P2P lending platform says it could not verify the claims at present Data breach tracker HaveIBeenPwned claims the victim count of peer-to-peer lender Prosper's September cyberattack stands at 17.6 million....

Operating system's D-day resucitates flatlining computer sector It transpires that Windows 11 is indeed good for at least one thing - driving PC upgrades, according to the latest figures from Gartner....

Sharing views POTUS doesn't like? Say goodbye to that visa, First Amendment be damned Updated Lawyers at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) are helping three US labor unions sue the Trump administration over a social media surveillance program that threatens to punish those who publicly express views that are not harmonious with the government's position....

Beijing blocks exports after Netherlands imposes special measures on Chinese-owned chipmaker Major car, van, truck and bus manufacturers are warning that the Dutch government placing semiconductor biz Nexperia under special administrative measures could result in a shortage of automotive chips....

NASA's Earth-watching archives find new home in Redmond's cloud, complete with Copilot hype Microsoft has made NASA's Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 (HLS) dataset available on Azure via the Windows giant's Planetary Computer platform....

A decade later, ERP giant struggles to convince legacy customers to upgrade More than a decade after SAP's S/4HANA in-memory ERP system debuted, 95 percent of legacy users say building a positive case to migrate requires a big effort or is genuinely challenging....

As OpenAI allows chatbot to spout erotic content, former British prime minister makes true feelings known After a string of marriages and innumerable affairs, former UK prime minister Boris Johnson has come clean about his new squeeze....

Eight-year telco blunder had a profound impact on three wrongly accused in Wales Details have emerged of a troubling case in which a basic engineering mistake wrecked a digital evidence investigation and led to wrongful accusations....

'Global phase spectroscopy' makes ultraprecise optical timekeepers even more precise Researchers at MIT say they have discovered a way to double the precision of optical atomic clocks by quieting the quantum noise that clouds their ticking....

Energy secretary Miliband promises renewable utopia for green and pleasant land... filled with datacenters Energy is essential for delivering the UK governments' AI ambitions, but Britain faces a critical question: how can it supply enough power for rapidly expanding datacenters without causing blackouts or inflating consumer bills?...

What the world's been waiting for: a stapler with wheels to help humans afflicted by RSI It was only a matter of time. Having invaded the software world, AI has now fixed its sights on once-benign household objects and desk fodder....

The 1990s called with a reminder that in the time before ransomware, infosec panics could be quite quaint On Call By Friday it's only natural to look back upon the working week with a certain nostalgia, an emotion The Register celebrates each week in On Call - the reader-contributed column that shares your tales of tech support trauma....

Teaching an old bot new tricks Paying Anthropic customers can now teach their Claude new tricks, which the company calls Skills....

CEO C.C. Wei cites strong demand for AI products. Intel may also be a factor TSMC is accelerating the rollout of advanced process nodes at its Arizona fabs to meet growing demand for American-made AI products....

And potentially 50 times more profitable People receiving an AI phishing email are 4.5 times more likely to click on the malicious link or file, according to Microsoft....

Datacenter hopefuls looking to cash in on AI craze are setting up shop in Lone Star State in search of cheap power Everything is bigger in Texas and that includes the GPU bit barns at the heart of the AI boom....

CVE and CVSS systems suffer from misaligned incentives and inconsistency Aram Hovespyan, co-founder and CEO of security biz Codific, says that the rating systems for identifying security vulnerabilities and assessing threat risk need to be overhauled....

If someone sends you a coding test, be wary of downloading it If you're a software developer looking for a job, North Korean scammers have an offer for you that's off the chain, the blockchain that is. These gangs have recently adopted a technique called EtherHiding, hiding malware inside blockchain smart contracts to sneak past detection and ultimately swipe victims' crypto and credentials, according to Google's Threat Intelligence team....

We've seen this before and it was called Cortana or Clippy As if pulling support for Windows 10 was not punishment enough for long-suffering customers, Microsoft has decided to shove Copilot down everyone's throats with a new voice activation feature and even more control over your PC. Soon, a Copilot box may even replace the search box on your taskbar....

CRM messiah preaches data discipline while rivals chase LLM miracles Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has warned investors to beware "false prophets" peddling AI salvation, as the CRM giant bets on its "agentic enterprise" vision to drive annual revenue past $60 billion by 2030....

Who needs enemies when you have friends like Xi? China's cyberspies quietly broke into a Russian IT service provider in what researchers say is a rare example of Beijing turning its digital gaze on Moscow....

It's all agents and LLMs in Vegas, and even legacy users can partake As Oracle pounds the market with AI announcements across cloud infrastructure, applications, and data analytics, experts have warned that users' path to adoption remains uncertain....

Joins its command-line client from a couple of years ago NordVPN has open sourced another of its Linux VPN client apps under the GPLv3. This time, it's the graphical user interface (GUI) version....

Recovery feature lets trusted contacts help you get back in when other methods fail The latest security feature for Gmail enables users to recover their accounts with a little help from their friends....

AI hype fuels bit barn boom - and utilities are sweating the surge Hyperscale datacenters stateside will consume 22 percent more grid power by the end of 2025 than a year ago, and are forecast to need nearly three times as much electricity by the end of the decade....

Flaw in Kestrel web server allowed request smuggling, impact depends on hosting setup and application code Microsoft has patched an ASP.NET Core vulnerability with a CVSS score of 9.9, which security program manager Barry Dorrans said was "our highest ever." The flaw is in the Kestrel web server component and enables security bypass....

Microsoft's quality control department caught napping again Microsoft's October Windows 11 update has managed the impressive feat of breaking localhost, leaving developers unable to access web applications running on their own machines....

Bill Cassidy letter asks if Switchzilla sat on critical flaws before feds were forced into emergency patching US Senator Bill Cassidy has fired off a pointed letter to Cisco over the firewall flaws that allegedly let hackers breach "at least one federal agency."...