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But question marks remain over the tech's biases London's Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) says the hundreds of live facial recognition (LFR) deployments across the Capital last year led to 962 arrests, according to a new report on the controversial tech's use....

Does Discord need some stars for when Management is watching? The maker of the Grand Theft Auto game series, Rockstar Games, has fired more than 30 coders and graphic designers in an act described by the Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain (IWGB) as "the most blatant and ruthless act of union busting in the history of the games industry."...

Christmas is coming, the GNOME is getting fat... please put a penny in the old red hat? Ubuntu Summit System76's POP!_OS is one of the more substantially modified Ubuntu based distros out there, and so it was something of a surprise to see the company's substantial presence at the Ubuntu Summit. And its stable release along with version 1.0 of its custom desktop, COSMIC, is imminent....

Ukraine first to demo open source security platform to isolate incidents, stop lateral movement Feature It was a sunny morning in late April when a massive power outage suddenly rippled across Spain, Portugal, and parts of southwestern France, leaving tens of millions of people without electricity for hours....

Boffins say outsourcing your homework leaves you sounding less knowledgeable, short on facts A study of how people use ChatGPT for research has confirmed something most of us learned the hard way in school: to be a subject matter expert, you've got to spend time swotting up....

Jon Seager, VP of Engineering, talks exclusively to The Reg Ubuntu Summit The Register FOSS desk sat down with Canonical's vice-president for engineering, Jon Seager, during Ubuntu Summit earlier this month. This is a heavily condensed version of our conversation....

Taking belief in LLMs very literally indeed Opinion It's not been a year since his ouster as Intel's CEO, but Pat Gelsinger is firmly back on the tech leadership pony. He's done hardware with Intel, software with VMWare. This time, it's faithware....

One SQL slip-up is survivable. Not learning from the first mess meant change Who, Me? Another Monday is upon us and The Register therefore presents a fresh instalment of Who, Me? It's the reader-contributed confessional column in which you admit to making mistakes, and explain how you made it out alive afterwards....

It's less bonkers than it sounds given the challenges of wiring Africa African carrier Seacom is investigating the feasibility of building a submarine cable that would run across the heart of Africa, on land....

When operators see danger, innocent users are dragged down along with bad actors Before the potential of the internet was appreciated around the world, nations that understood its importance managed to scoop outsized allocations of IPv4 addresses, actions that today mean many users in the rest of the world are more likely to find their connections throttled or blocked....

PLUS: Google's massive AI giveaway in India; Raid on Australian software company; Alleged scam camp owner's assets seized; and more! Asia In Brief Last week's trade talks between the USA and China have seen the two countries ease some trade restrictions....

PLUS: Cyber-exec admits selling secrets to Russia; LastPass isn't checking to see if you're dead; Nation-state backed Windows malware; and more Infosec in brief Australia's Signals Directorate (ASD) last Friday warned that attackers are installing an implant named BADCANDY" on unpatched Cisco IOS XE devices and can detect deletion of their wares and reinstall their malware....

No datacenters required Fortytwo, a Silicon Valley startup, was founded last year based on the idea that a decentralized swarm of small AI models running on personal computers offers scaling and cost advantages over centralized AI services....

The Sunseeker Elite X5 can mow on its own, but it doesn't come cheap The tentacles of AI seem to be reaching everywhere, even to the humble lawnmower. We tested the Sunseeker Elite X5, a robotic mower that uses machine learning to steer around your lawn, to see what happens when artificial intelligence meets whirling blades of doom....

AI promises to find bugs and gaps in your apps After helping expand the modern software attack surface with the rise of AI services prone to data poisoning and prompt injection, OpenAI has thrown a bone to cyber defenders....

The bit barn will run on gas power first. Texas is set to get another nuclear-powered datacenter project thanks to Blue Energy and Crusoe, but any atomic action isn't likely until the next decade....

You click and think you're getting a download page, but get malware instead Imagine searching for Microsoft Teams, seeing a text link at the top of the results, visiting it, and then getting hit with malware. The Rhysida ransomware gang, an especially insidious criminal organization that has stolen millions of people's info, has been placing fake ads for Microsoft Teams in search engines and then infecting victims who make the mistake of clicking them....

Creators baffled as videos on local accounts, unsupported PCs vanish under harmful acts' rule Is installing Windows 11 with a local account or on unsupported hardware harmful or dangerous? YouTube's AI moderation system seems to think so, as it has started pulling videos that show users how to sidestep Microsoft's setup restrictions....

Our house, our rules One of the biggest surprises of my tenure at El Reg so far is the activity in our forums and article comments. Reg readers are engaged, opinionated, and unafraid to express themselves. I love this. Thank you for reading, and for commenting....

The once fearsome process killer is now a leaker of resources Microsoft's ability to add bugs in the most unexpected of places has continued into its latest update to Windows 11, which spawns multiple copies of Task Manager, sucking down resources you'd normally use Task Manager to kill....

Rare case of the state turning on its own, but researchers say it may be doing so more often Russia's Interior Ministry says police have arrested three suspects it believes helped build and spread the Meduza infostealer....

Trim down for obsolete operating system leaves it booting, but not much else Stripping Windows to the bare essentials is a favorite hobby among enthusiasts, especially as Microsoft continues loading its OS with unwanted bloat. The latest achievement is Windows 7 being reduced to 69 MB....

Rough justice? Redmond out as Germany's openDesk judged a better fit The International Criminal Court (ICC) is ditching Microsoft Office for a European software alternative amid mounting fears about being reliant on US technology....

Bitcoin bridge biz offers 10 percent reward to attackers if they play nice Blockchain company Garden admits it was compromised and temporarily shut down its app after approximately $11 million worth of assets were stolen....

Zuckcorp will gladly pay you in 2065 for the eyewatering sums it is borrowing today Even the world's richest companies need outside help to fulfill their datacenter dreams. Now, Meta is selling $30 billion in bonds to build out its infrastructure estate and support its ambition in AI markets. Some of these won't mature for 40 years....

NASA is short of options when it comes to alternatives SpaceX has published an update on its lunar Starship progress, and it still has a long way to go before the impressive-looking renders are translated into reality....

Percona says more than half of installs remain on version set to lose support in 2026 Users have six months to migrate from MySQL 8.0 if they are to stay on a supported version of the open source database, or face security and reliability risks....

Price hikes, politics, and platform fatigue drive organizations back toward open alternatives OpenInfra Summit Sovereignty might be the word of the hour, but the OpenStack community has another - resilience....

Ubuntu's much-maligned format may be finally reaching critical mass Ubuntu Summit More than one Linux-adjacent vendor presented at the Ubuntu Summit, and a small but recurring theme is offering official Snap packages....

TUPE or not TUPE? Not for roles being sent overseas amid a push to meet post-merger rollout targets Exclusive VodafoneThree has told some staff their roles may be offshored to India under new contracts with Ericsson and Nokia - and that employment protections won't apply....

Surrey to be divided into two new councils in first phase of countrywide reorg The UK government will replace Surrey County Council and its 11 borough and district councils with two new unitary councils, which will provide most local services to the area's 1.2 million residents....

Ofcom 'disappointed' by decision that 'goes against the spirit of our rules' Updated Britian's comms regulator has criticized O2 for hiking prices beyond what customers agreed to, exploiting a loophole in rules designed to end unpredictable mid-contract increases....

Hospitals told to upgrade, but some medical device makers haven't prescribed compatibility yet NHS hospitals are being blocked from fully upgrading to Windows 11 by a small number of suppliers that have yet to make their medical devices compatible with Microsoft's latest operating system....

When tech support collides with Halloween, the results are scary On Call Happy Halloween, dear reader! The Register wishes you a wonderfully scary day. To kick things off, we've twisted On Call, our weekly reader-contributed column about keeping computers alive despite the best efforts of zombie coworkers and demonic bosses, to bring tales of times tech support turned spooky....

Because fewer people like banknotes, and payment sovereignty is a problem The Governing Council of the European Central Bank (ECB) has decided the bloc needs a digital version of the Euro, and ordered work that could see it enter circulation in 2029....

HTV-X capsule is designed to hang around in space after delivering cargo to ISS Japan's Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is celebrating after its new cargo carrier docked at the International Space Station....

The spending will continue until AI revenue improves Despite a trickle of bad news from Amazon in recent weeks, the company's business is thrumming along, with AWS leading the way....

No costume idea? We've got you covered Hacking makes the holidays so much more enjoyable, and nothing says trick or treat quite like pwning LED Halloween masks belonging to every neighborhood kid during candy-collection hours....

Company tells users concerned about exfiltration to 'stop it if you see it' A researcher has found a way to trick Claude into uploading private data to an attacker's account using indirect prompt injection. Anthropic says it has already documented the risk, and its foolproof solution is: keep an eye on your screen....

Expired security cert, real Brussels agenda, plus PlugX malware finish the job Cyber spies linked to the Chinese government exploited a Windows shortcut vulnerability disclosed in March - but that Microsoft hasn't fixed yet - to target European diplomats in an effort to steal defense and national security details....

People, Files, and Calendar companion apps gain an auto-installed dose of AI Just when you thought Microsoft had run out of Windows apps to stuff with Copilot, it's cramming the AI into your taskbar companions - People, Files, and Calendar are next....

Microsoft also ramping up spending, but investors concerned about overshooting demand Alphabet, Google's parent company, expects capital expenditures to hit $93 billion in 2025, largely to meet demand from cloud customers, according to its recent financial report....

Service will tell on compromised organizations, even if they didn't plan on doing so themselves Some orgs would rather you not know when they've suffered a cyberattack, but a new platform from privacy-focused tech firm Proton will shine a light on the big breaches that might otherwise stay buried....

State cries foul over "crooked elections" claim in Alabama move The State of Colorado has thrown a sueball at the Trump administration over the president's decision to relocate the headquarters of the US Space Command from Colorado Springs to Alabama....

Windows Desktop installer also fixed after DLL hijack flaw rated 8.8 severity Docker Compose users are being strongly urged to upgrade their versions of the orchestration tool after a researcher uncovered a flaw that could allow attackers to stage path traversal attacks....

US President did discuss chip exports with his counterpart, but made no breakthroughs Talks between US President Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping in South Korea yielded a modest thaw, with the two agreeing to trim tariffs and pause new rare-earth export curbs. But whether Nvidia can sell its latest GPUs to China remains an open question....

Enterprise software giant lifts guidance but adds 'prudence' as federal contracts stall ServiceNow has built some "prudence" into its earnings guidance due to the ongoing US government shutdown....

Big release with a lot of new features - and a few inevitable glitches The KDE Plasma 6.5 graphical shell arrived last week for Unix-like operating systems, and now 6.5.1 is here for the more cautious. The team's squashed over 60 bugs - and they're by no means all new....

PhantomRaven slipped over a hundred credential-stealing packages into npm A new supply chain attack dubbed PhantomRaven has flooded the npm registry with malicious packages that steal credentials, tokens, and secrets during installation. The packages appear safe when first downloaded, making them particularly difficult for security apps to identify....

Dial-up dinosaur finds yet another corporate home as Yahoo waves goodbye Bending Spoons, an Italian tech biz, is buying AOL from Yahoo, funded by a $2.8 billion debt financing package that will also bankroll future acquisitions....