The Register

What's next for Venezuela? Click on the file and see What policy wonk wouldn't want to click on an attachment promising to unveil US plans for Venezuela? Chinese cyberspies used just such a lure to target US government agencies and policy-related organizations in a phishing campaign that began just days after an American military operation captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro....

Fix landed in July, but OEM firmware updates are required If you use virtual machines, there's reason to feel less-than-Zen about AMD's CPUs. Computer scientists affiliated with the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security in Germany have found a vulnerability in AMD CPUs that exposes secrets in its secure virtualization environment....

Investors upset that company failed to inform them might need to take out even more debt. Datacenters don't come cheap. Oracle debt bond holders are suing the tech giant, because they say that the company didn't tell them it would need to borrow even more money after its original sale, making their purchases less valuable....

Office workers without AI experience warned to watch for prompt injection attacks - good luck with that Anthropic's tendency to wave off prompt-injection risks is rearing its head in the company's new Cowork productivity AI, which suffers from a Files API exfiltration attack chain first disclosed last October and acknowledged but not fixed by Anthropic....

SRAM-heavy compute architecture promises real-time agents, extended reasoning capabilities to bolster Altman's valuation OpenAI says it will deploy 750 megawatts worth of Nvidia competitor Cerebras' dinner-plate sized accelerators through 2028 to bolster its inference services....

The chatbot's challenges no longer just Elon Musk's problem, as campaigners call on tech giants to step in The ongoing Grok fiasco has claimed two more unwilling participants, as campaigners demand Apple and Google boot X and its AI sidekick out of their app stores, because of the Elon Musk-owned AI's tendency to produce illicit images of real people....

And it's 'not unique to AWS,' researcher tells The Reg A critical misconfiguration in AWS's CodeBuild service allowed complete takeover of the cloud provider's own GitHub repositories and put every AWS environment in the world at risk, according to Wiz security researchers....

When margins are this tight, mergers might follow The memory shortage is forecast to push smartphone prices higher in 2026, triggering a market decline and forcing budget phone makers to merge or disappear....

January patch trips up Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365 authentication Microsoft has kicked off 2026 with another faulty Windows update. This time, it is connection and authentication failures in Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365 related to the Windows App....

Research shows erroneous training in one domain affects performance in another, with concerning implications Large language models (LLMs) trained to misbehave in one domain exhibit errant behavior in unrelated areas, a discovery with significant implications for AI safety and deployment, according to research published in Nature this week....

Smart Driver pitched as safety app, but feds claim it's a data-harvesting scheme that jacked up premiums The Federal Trade Commission has banned General Motors and subsidiary OnStar from sharing drivers' precise location and behavior data with consumer reporting agencies for five years under a 20-year consent order finalized January 14....

Suspect assisting West Midlands Police over alleged theft at Walsall GP practice The UK's West Midlands Police has released a woman on bail as part of an investigation into a data breach at a Walsall general practitioner's (GP) surgery....

Transparently runs 16, 32, and 64-bit Windows apps, but still doesn't use the Microsoft store. The latest version of the Wine Windows app runner arrives a year after version 10. Given its annual release cycle, its magic is starting to seem almost boring and routine, but it's far from it....

40 TOPS of inference grunt, 8 GB onboard memory, and the nagging question: who exactly needs this? Raspberry Pi has launched the AI HAT+ 2 with 8 GB of onboard RAM and the Hailo-10H neural network accelerator aimed at local AI computing....

Redmond says cheap virtual desktops powered a global wave of phishing and fraud Microsoft has taken its cybercrime fight to the UK in its first major civil action outside the US, moving to shut down RedVDS, a virtual desktop service used to power phishing and fraud at global scale....

Cold milk poured over 'spicy mode,' but it might not be enough to escape a huge fine Ofcom is continuing with its investigation into X, despite the social media platform saying it will block Grok from digitally undressing people....

ValueLicensing case rumbles on as Windows giant appeals against copyright judgment Microsoft's From Software Assurance (SA) program is the subject of a disclosure application as the long-running spat between Microsoft and ValueLicensing over the resale of software licenses rumbles on....

EU-only ops, German subsidiaries, and a pinky promise your data won't end up in Uncle Sam's hands Amid continued trade and geopolitical volatility between Europe and the US, Amazon Web Services is making its European Sovereign Cloud generally available today and plans to expand so-called Dedicated Local Zones....

Retail giant's disty, reseller, and vendor all say they can't and won't sell Exclusive Dell has filed a claim against VMware in the software licensing dispute brought by supermarket giant Tesco and wants the virtualization giant should fork over at least 10 million under certain circumstances....

Hasn't revealed how much kit did the job, so Nvidia can probably rest easy Chinese outfit Zhipu AI claims it trained a new model entirely using Huawei hardware, and that it's the first company to build an advanced model entirely on Chinese hardware....

Forrester principal analyst JP Gownder says jobs eaten by bots don't come back Interview Analyst firm Forrester's vice president and principal analyst J. P. Gownder remains unconvinced that AI will revolutionize productivity....

Adafruit claims SparkFun aims to shoot the messenger for criticizing corporate tolerance of intolerance Retailer SparkFun Electronics last month said it would no longer do business with electronics kit-maker Adafruit Industries, citing violations of SparkFun's Code of Conduct during online interactions....

Investors didn't present a valid claim, says judge, but they're welcome to try again A group of CrowdStrike shareholders who sued the company over losses sustained following its 2024 global outage will have to head back to the drawing board if they hope to recoup losses, as a Texas judge has deemed they failed to adequately state a claim....

But private data will stay private and won't be used for training, Google says Google on Wednesday began inviting Gemini users to let its chatbot read their Gmail, Photos, Search history, and YouTube data in exchange for possibly more personalized responses....

Cloud-native, 37 plugins ... an attacker's dream A brand-new Linux malware named VoidLink targets victims' cloud infrastructure with more than 30 plugins that allow attackers to perform a range of illicit activities, from silent reconnaissance and credential theft to lateral movement and container abuse....

Grid and generation capacity are not being added fast enough to support the scale of growth many forecasts assume A looming shortage of electrical power is set to constrain datacenter expansion, potentially leaving many industry growth forecasts looking overly optimistic....

Had it been around in 2020, it could have flagged tens of billions before payouts, PRAC tells Congress A fraud-detection AI model trained on COVID-19 loan data could have flagged potentially tens of billions of dollars in payments before they went out, reducing the feds' pay-and-chase cleanup, the US government's Pandemic Response Accountability Committee told Congress on Tuesday....

Three major GDPR violations, including a lack of basic security controls, lead to hefty dent in profits The French data protection regulator, CNIL, today issued a collective 42 million ($48.9 million) fine to two French telecom companies for GDPR violations stemming from a data breach....

Support expires for Windows Server 2008, and the codebase released to manufacturing in 2006 Microsoft has quietly maintained support for an OS that's nearly 18 years old, but its time has finally passed - the Windows Vista-powered Windows Server 2008 took its last breath this week....

New crooks on the block get crafty with blockchain to evade defenses Researchers at Group-IB say the DeadLock ransomware operation is using blockchain-based anti-detection methods to evade defenders' attempts to analyze their tradecraft....

Investment in datacenters to peak by 2029, place your bets please The AI-driven datacenter construction frenzy shows no signs of slowing, but neither do concerns that the whole edifice could collapse under the weight of its own hype and mounting investment demands....

Latest update focuses on hardware acceleration, security tightening, and a handful of quality-of-life tweaks The latest Firefox is here with some handy changes - most of which differ depending on what OS and type of CPU you run it on....

Attack enters second day with major disruption to healthcare provision Two hospitals in Belgium have cancelled surgeries and transferred critical patients to other facilities after shutting down servers following a cyberattack....

Travel biz tells customers to change passwords beyond its own services Eurail has confirmed customer information was stolen in a data breach, according to notification emails sent out this week....

U-turn leaves questions on costs, funding, and benefits unanswered The UK government has backed down from making digital ID mandatory for proof of a right to work in the country, adding to confusion over the scheme's cost and purpose....

Committee raises concerns over delays and loopholes in proposed law The Science, Innovation and Technology Committee has criticized the UK government's handling of AI nudification tools, saying it is taking too long to ban apps, and that expedited legislation does not encompass multi-purpose platforms used to create nude images....

Component up 63% since September, more pricey memory coming to a supply chain near you Enterprise IT infrastructure buyers are bracing for hefty price hikes across servers, storage systems, and networking kit, driven by steep inflation in memory component costs that industry analysts warn will soon cascade through the supply chain....

Endesa says payment info stolen after alleged crook boasted of 1 TB-plus haul Spanish energy giant Endesa is warning customers about a data breach after a cybercrim claimed to have walked off with a vast cache of personal information allegedly tied to more than 20 million people....

When salty coastal air meets memory errors in one of Portugal's rail ticket machines Bork!Bork!Bork! It's back to the railways of Portugal for today's bork. Remember how we called Windows 2000 the unkillable cockroach of the IT world? Seems it's been upset by software peeking at memory where it shouldn't....

AI upstart also upscales its Labs to find the next frontier The Python Software Foundation (PSF) has an extra $1.5 million heading its way, after AI upstart Anthropic entered into a partnership aimed at improving security in the Python ecosystem....

One payload out of fifteen survived and sent home some useful data India's Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has commenced an investigation into the failure of a PSLV launcher....

America first, for sales and access to foundries The Trump administration will only allow exports of Nvidia and AMD GPUs to China if local buyers can get all the kit they want....

Chromium commit adds support for image decoder after the Big G ditched it a few years back Google has added support for the JPEG XL (JXL) image format to the open source Chromium code base, reversing a decision in 2022 to drop the technology....

First Patch Tuesday of 2026 goes big Microsoft and Uncle Sam have warned that a Windows bug disclosed today is already under attack....

Could be back to 2016 levels The rising cost of memory due to shortages is likely to persist into late 2027, driving higher device prices and lackluster configurations for PCs, tablets, and phones, IDC research manager Jitesh Ubrani told The Register....

The open-source libraries were created by Salesforce, Nvidia, and Apple with a Swiss group Vulnerabilities in popular AI and ML Python libraries used in Hugging Face models with tens of millions of downloads allow remote attackers to hide malicious code in metadata. The code then executes automatically when a file containing the poisoned metadata is loaded....

Just be careful not to entrust the AI model with your sensitive data Anthropic on Monday announced the research preview of Claude Cowork, a tool for automating office work that comes with the now familiar recitation of machine learning risks....

Step 1: Ask for deposit. Step 2: ??? Step 3: Build Moon hotel empire Everest has been turned into a run-of-the-mill tourist attraction. Space tourism is over now that any celebrity can blast off into orbit. Next up: a hotel on the Moon, now taking reservations for only about six years from now, if you're willing to make a small deposit....

Great news for AMD and Nvidia, less so for cash-strapped consumers Memory makers just can't churn out their DRAM fast enough. On the heels of an AI-driven shortage, SK Hynix on Tuesday announced a new 19 trillion Korean won (about $13 billion) advanced packaging and test facility in South Korea that could offer some relief - just not for consumer products like laptops and phones....

US House backs bill to regulate remote access to export-controlled chips Chinese companies may be unable to import the best US GPUs, but they have found a workaround: renting access to that hardware via cloud services. Now, the US House of Representatives is moving to bring that loophole under the export-control law....