The Register

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."...

Jonathan Cirtain at the helm as revolving door swings for private corp Updated Axiom Space has ousted its CEO after just six months, hiring Jonathan Cirtain to replace Tejpaul Bhatia....

Alert says financial account information lifted from systems Auction house Sotheby's says it was breached on July 24, and those behind the intrusion stole an unspecified amount of data, including Social Security numbers and financial account information....

GenAI meets Gen Z - only one gets the job ai-pocalypse The UK tech sector is cutting graduate jobs dramatically - down 46 percent in the past year, with another 53 percent drop projected, according to figures from the Institute of Student Employers (ISE)....

Mozilla hardens its browser and toys with AI search while closing the door on legacy systems New versions of both Mozilla's browser and its subsidiary MZLA's messaging client are here - with some bad news for users of older kit....

The AI gold rush is so large that even third place is lucrative Feature The generative AI revolution has exposed a brutal truth: raw computing power means nothing if you can't feed the beast. In sprawling AI datacenters housing thousands of GPUs, the real chokepoint isn't processing speed - it's memory bandwidth....

Musk's moonshot still missing orbit, refueling, landing Comment SpaceX is celebrating two consecutive Starship launches without unplanned explosions, yet the business faces a daunting path forward before the spacecraft can deliver astronauts to the lunar surface....

Oracle slurps your data whether you like it or not... for the good and bad of the planet Comment If you're an Oracle customer - throw a pebble into a crowd of 100 CIOs and you're bound to hit one - then Big Red has vectorized you. Or, more accurately, it has vectorized your data, according to Larry Ellison, co-founder and CTO, who lobbed about the terminology in this week's conference keynote as if it conferred some sort of mystical technological incantation....

Windows 10 is the least of some people's problems Windows 10's free support has shuffled off this mortal coil for most customers - but that's merely the headline act in Microsoft's October support massacre. Older versions of Office and Windows Server have also been shown the door....

Minister pins hopes on low Earth orbit satellites to plug crap rail connectivity Data-hungry rail passengers will have to wait until at least 2030 before getting something like universal mobile data coverage across the UK, a minister confirmed this week....

No custom Arm CPUs to speak of yet Meta on Wednesday entered into a partnership with Arm Holdings with the aim of helping its software run more efficiently on the British chip designer's CPUs....

Free Software Foundation project aims to reverse-engineer non-freedom respecting firmware To bridge the gap between Android distributions and true mobile phone freedom, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has launched an initiative called Librephone....

Federal agencies have seven days to patch F5 products An unidentified nation-state hacking crew targeting vulnerable F5 products to break into US government networks poses an "imminent risk" to federal agencies, American cyber officials warned on Wednesday - while also blaming Democrats for the ongoing government shutdown and insisting that the staffing cuts haven't hurt cyber defenses at all....

Meet [user] from [location] In an effort to help human readers figure out whether they can trust the source of information (or opinion) posted on X, Elon Musk's social network plans to add a new "About this account" screen with metadata from each user, including their location, how long they've had the account, and how many times they've changed their usernames....

If you build it, they will come and expect the service to be free OpenAI is losing about three times more money than it's earning, and 95 percent of those using ChatGPT, which generates roughly 70 percent of the company's recurring revenue, aren't paying a dime to help stem the losses....

Oh and the CPU is up to 15% faster for those that could care less about articifically intelligent Apple products and more about getting work done Apple's fifth-generation of M-series silicon is starting to trickle out with the launch of the M5 MacBook, iPad, and Vision Pros this week....

Tokyo cries foul over Sora slop abusing 'irreplaceable treasures' of anime, manga - oh, and copyright law OpenAI's Sora 2 video generator has gone viral, particularly among users churning out anime that looks suspiciously like Studio Ghibli and other copyrighted works. Alarmed by the threat to one of its prized cultural exports, Japan has reportedly lodged a formal request that the American firm knock it off....

Big Tech and big money unite to back world's biggest bit-barn buyout The AI bubble just keeps getting bigger. A consortium featuring BlackRock, Microsoft, Nvidia, xAI, and MGX is buying Aligned Data Centers in a deal valuing the operator at around $40 billion, in what is reportedly the biggest datacenter acquisition to date....

Only 13% are AI-ready; the rest are bolting it on and hoping for ROI Contrary to popular belief, you can't succeed in business (or AI) without really trying. Many orgs are jumping on the AI bandwagon without the infrastructure they need to make it work or track results, Cisco says. Most haven't even defined what they want their AI agents to do....

And they swiped a limited amount of customers' config data Security shop F5 today said "highly sophisticated nation-state" hackers broke into its network and stole BIG-IP source code, undisclosed vulnerability details, and customer configuration data belonging to a "small percentage" of its users....

Vibe coding may have played a role in what took researchers months to fix Developers of VS Code extensions are leaking sensitive secrets left, right and center, according to researchers who worked with Microsoft to combat an issue that could have led to some nasty supply chain attacks....

Raymond Chen says the OS used green-screen overlays to fake video playback - with curious side effects Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen has answered a lingering Windows question - why did video screenshots keep playing in Paint?...

Beijing's self-reliance push and US export limits hit orders Europe's tech darling ASML has warned Chinese demand for its chipmaking kit will plummet next year, as Beijing doubles down on home-grown alternatives in response to Uncle Sam's export restrictions and trade war shenanigans....