The Register

Web browsing belongs to the people, not the bots Jon von Tetzchner, CEO of Norway-based browser maker Vivaldi, believes the tech industry's efforts to automate web browsing using generative AI models have gone too far....

$6.4M VerifTools marketplace offline The FBI and Dutch police today said that they seized two domains and a blog tied to VerifTools, an international criminal marketplace that sold identity documents for as little as $9....

'The homeland is no longer secure,' says Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency leader The Pentagon outfit responsible for preventing foriegn agents from infiltrating defense agencies says the US isn't doing a very good job of preventing state secrets from falling into Chinese hands....

Only a few Android phones will be able to support the service Users of Google Pixel and Samsung Galaxy phones could soon find themselves able to make voice calls via a satellite connection, if Skylo Technologies can get all its ducks in a row....

Media multitool taps Vulkan for GPU encoding, adds VVC support, and dusts off some ancient formats FFmpeg 8.0 brings GPU-accelerated video encoding via Vulkan - and can now subtitle your videos automatically using integrated speech recognition....

Also, not one but two new models of the classic 1200 The new native 68K AmigaOS web browser leans on the machines' underlying emulation system to offer modern facilities on a retro OS....

Think BYOC will solve all your sovereignty and privacy worries? You might be missing the point INTERVIEW Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) is a concept gaining traction as companies seek ways to resolve sovereignty and privacy issues, but its implementation can vary widely depending on interpretation....

Because not every bot wants to live inside Microsoft's walled garden Google and code editor company Zed Industries have introduced the Agent Client Protocol (ACP) as a standard way for AI agents to integrate with an IDE, with the idea that this will prevent developers getting locked into VS Code....

Regulator points to lack of 'basic access controls' between internet-facing systems, internal network South Korea's privacy watchdog has slapped SK Telecom with a record 134.5 billion ($97 million) fine after finding that the mobile giant left its network wide open to hackers through a catalog of bungles....

Company cleared to launch again after April failure Firefly Aerospace has been given the green light to resume launches after its April failure....

Credit agency offers own services as compensation Credit scoring and monitoring biz TransUnion says that it recently suffered a breach affecting nearly 4.5 million individuals....

Shadowserver counts more than 13,000 appliances still wide open - including thousands in US, Germany, and UK Thousands of Citrix NetScaler appliances remain exposed to a trio of security flaws that the vendor patched this week, one of which is already being actively exploited in the wild....

Miljodata meltdown leaves 200 local authorities scrambling over 1.5 BTC Sweden's municipal governments have been knocked offline after ransomware crooks hit IT supplier Miljodata, reportedly demanding the bargain-basement sum of $168,000....

Microsoft blames incoming UK Online Safety Act, says you have until 2026 Microsoft has begun emailing users of its Xbox gaming platform with likely unwelcome news: users will need to verify their age if they want to keep access to the company's various social services, and it's blaming the UK Online Safety Act....

US payments platform back in action, says it's informing affected customers Shoppers and merchants in Germany found themselves dealing with billions of euros in frozen transactions this week, thanks to an apparent failure in PayPal's fraud-detection systems....

Apology issued after names tied to redress scheme revealed in mass mailing A London law firm leaked the details of nearly 200 people who requested to receive updates about the redress scheme set up for victims of abuse at the hands of the Church of England (CoE)....

Labor group says new technologies could increase inequality if we're not careful AI-Pocalypse Over half of the British public are worried about the impact of AI on their jobs, according to employment unions, which want the UK government to adopt a "worker first" strategy rather than simply allowing corporations to ditch employees for algorithms....

UK starts early warning system combing through stuff that folks flush away The UK Health Security Agency is looking to set up an early warning system ahead of future pandemics, launching a 1.3 million (around $1.75 million) program to identify "cutting-edge technologies" which could turn people's pee and poop into valuable data on the spread of viruses....

Idit Levine on going from startup to a billion-dollar valuation Interview "I feel that a founder always needs to be a little bit stupidly optimistic." Solo.io CEO Idit Levine has been on an interesting journey in cloud computing since starting the networking and API management company in 2017....

13 governments sound the alarm about ongoing unpleasantness China's Salt Typhoon cyberspies continue their years-long hacking campaign targeting critical industries around the world, according to a joint security alert from cyber and law enforcement agencies across 13 countries....

Stolen painting still mising, sadly Police in Argentina reportedly raided a home in a coastal town on Monday after someone spotted a real estate ad that included images of art the Nazis looted in the Second World War....

If regulators heed the lessons of Fukushima, testing will have to jump Godzilla-sized hurdles Japan's Nuclear Regulation Authority has requested extra funds to experiment with AI-powered nuclear plant inspectors....

Harvard researchers find model guardrails tailor query responses to user's inferred politics and other affiliations OpenAI's ChatGPT appears to be more likely to refuse to respond to questions posed by fans of the Los Angeles Chargers football team than to followers of other teams....

China would be a $50 billion a year market for Nvidia if Uncle Sam would let us sell competitive products, says Jensen Huang Nvidia's top brass urged Washington to approve the sale of Blackwell accelerators to China during the GPU giant's Q2 earnings call on Wednesday....

VMware tweaked its licenses to suit submarines VMware has tweaked its software licensing so submarines can keep their computers running when they're beneath the waves....

Starting at $2,999, tiny doesn't mean cheap Hot Chips Back in 2023, Nvidia's superchip architecture introduced a new programming model for accelerated workloads by coupling the CPU to the GPU via a high-speed NVLink fabric that makes PCIe feel positively glacial....

There's also a rogue Russian on the list The US Treasury Department has announced sanctions against two Asian companies and two individuals for allegedly helping North Korean IT workers fake their way into US jobs....

AI lowers the bar for cybercrime, Anthropic admits comment Anthropic, a maker of AI tools, says that AI tools are now commonly used to commit cybercrime and facilitate remote worker fraud....

Not a disaster recovery option, but good enough for a migration Microsoft continues to take what's familiar to ordinary users and offer it to enterprises. The latest functionality is Windows Backup for Organizations....

Fast-glob is widely used in government, security lab says updated A Node.js utility used by thousands of public projects - and more than 30 Department of Defense ones - appears to have a sole maintainer whose online profiles identify him as a Yandex employee living in Russia....

Feature rolls out to Microsoft 365 Insiders, stashing unnamed files in OneDrive by default Ever get that sinking feeling when Word crashes before you've made your first save? An application update is set to save the day by automatically enabling autosave to the cloud for new documents, before you've even given them a filename....

Feature bloat, or added value for this JavaScript toolkit? The Bun team has released version 1.2.21 of its JavaScript bundler and runtime, written in Zig, adding features including built-in drivers for MySQL and SQLite, a YAML parser, and a secrets manager for tools and local development....

Stolen dev credentials posted to GitHub as attackers abuse CLI tools for recon Nx is the latest target of a software supply chain attack in the NPM ecosystem, with multiple malicious versions being uploaded to the NPM registry on Tuesday evening....

No stew on the stove, but plenty of heat as devs compete to flag suspect Medicare data Seeking to rein in healthcare fraud, the US Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is seeking explainable AI models that can identify patterns suggestive of malfeasance....

Don't let it happen to you Storm-0501, a financially motivated cybercrime crew, recently broke into a large enterprise's on-premises and cloud environments, ultimately exfiltrating and destroying data within the org's Azure environment. The criminals then contacted the victim via a Microsoft Teams account that they'd also compromised in the attack, demanding a ransom payment for the stolen files....

Chipmaker keen to protect assets as race for 2nm process heats up Taiwanese prosecutors have charged three people over the alleged theft of TSMC's trade secrets....

Vintage computing boffinry to please palmtop enthusiasts Vintage computing enthusiast Colin Hoad has released a gift to anyone who fondly remembers Psion's classic EPOC-based palmtops and their Open Programming Language (OPL): a language server which brings modern quality-of-life features to the OPL programmer, regardless of their development environment....

French provider seizes on Redmond's admission that US law could override local protections Interview European cloud provider OVHcloud has long warned about the risks of relying on foreign tech giants for critical infrastructure - especially when it comes to data sovereignty....

Hybrid of GNUstep and Xfce channels classic NeXT vibes The latest release of GhostBSD, an easy graphical FreeBSD distribution, includes a brand new macOS-like desktop environment, "Gershwin."...

Attackers steal OAuth tokens to access third-party sales platform, then CRM data in 'widespread campaign' Google says a recent spate of Salesforce-related breaches was caused by attackers stealing OAuth tokens from the third-party Salesloft Drift app....

Because the DBaaS has lately become AI-tastic, among other things It's less than two years since MariaDB spun out SkySQL, but it's already unspinning the database-as-a-service outfit, which has since been marinated in AI sauce....

$23B deal with AT&T shows where the money is US telco EchoStar, valued around $14.5 billion on Wednesday morning, has sold its American spectrum allocation to AT&T for $23 billion....

The DevOps dance has new steps, but Virtzilla thinks it can teach ops folks to tango Private clouds are all about keeping developers happy and productive, according to Krish Prasad, senior veep and general manager of Broadcom's VMware Cloud Foundation division....

Explosions all expected and on schedule this time SpaceX has finally managed a test flight of Starship without anything creating an impromptu firework display....

Vendor insists passkeys are the future, but getting workers on board is proving difficult Infosec pros are losing confidence in their identity providers' ability to keep attackers out, with Cisco-owned Duo warning that the industry is facing what it calls "an identity crisis."...

Analysts warn cooling demands could outstrip supplies as heatwaves intensify Water scarcity is rising up the agenda as one of the major concerns for datacenters in Europe following an unusually hot and dry summer, marked by intense heatwaves in southern parts of the continent....

Quick, get some investment money before the bubble bursts The number of companies developing AI processor chips now numbers well over a hundred, according to new research....

Chipzilla's first datacenter part to use 18A process tech is another core-packed monster Hot Chips The first datacenter silicon to use Intel's two-nanometer-class 18A process tech won't arrive for a while yet, but that's not stopping the struggling x86 giant from making its sales pitch early....

Securing internet infrastructure remains a challenging endeavour Systems Approach I've been working on a chapter about infrastructure security for our network security book....

Suspects this was Beijing-backed Typhoon and/or Panda crew targeting diplomats in Asia Google has warned customers of a suspected state-backed attack after observing a web traffic hijacking campaign....