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Fledgling band of crooks says it stole 1.2 TB of data The new SafePay ransomware gang has claimed responsibility for the attack on UK telematics biz Microlise, giving the company less than 24 hours to pay its extortion demands before leaking data....

A certain very famous PC manufacturer may not be very good at documenting its legacy tech On Call The effort and application of tech support people are often forgotten, which is why each Friday The Register offers a new instalment of On Call, the reader contributed column that reminds us all of the moments in which you triumph after being asked to unravel the asinine....

People just don't know how to talk to chatbots to get them to do useful things efficiently, Intel says Those using personal computers with built-in AI services are less productive than those using traditional PCs, according to a study conducted by Intel....

Organized crime types tend not to be kind to those who go against them, so this is nasty A local Japanese government agency dedicated to preventing organized crime has apologized after experiencing an incident it fears may have led to a leak of personal information describing 2,500 people who reached out to it for consultation....

Maybe it was crowded layout, inconsistent colors and drop shadows that made cloud so hard? Amazon Web Services pioneered public cloud computing, and by doing so created myriad possibilities that have shaped the world we live in today. But the service has never been notable for offering admins a delightful experience - a negative it appears to be trying to change....

Apparently there's not enough space in space The Indian Space Research Organisation revealed late last week that its Chandrayaan-2 moon orbiter has twice maneuvered to avoid potential collisions with similar craft....

TL;DR: Attackers will break in and pwn you, as a US government red team demonstrated The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency often breaks into critical organizations' networks - with their permission, of course - to simulate real-world cyber attacks and thereby help improve their security. In one of those recent exercises conducted at a critical infrastructure provider, the Agency exploited a web shell left behind from an earlier bug bounty program, scooped up a bunch of credentials and security keys, moved through the network and ultimately pwned the org's domain and several sensitive business system targets....

Blackwell's weaker FP64 performance could give the House of Zen's Instinct accelerators a leg up in future efficiency benchmarks SC24 Nvidia's accelerators are among the most power hungry machines in their class, yet the chips continue to dominate the Green500 ranking of the most sustainable supercomputers in the world....

DoC claims only 4 non-China foundries match GF's scale Semiconductor maker GlobalFoundries, recently fined $500,000 for sanctions violations involving China, has been awarded up to $1.5 billion in funding under the US government's CHIPS and Science Act....

Probably not intentional, but '150 person-hours' of work were still lost The New York Times has filed a letter in its copyright infringement case against OpenAI and Microsoft, alerting the court that the ChatGPT maker accidentally deleted a bunch of data that may have been evidence....

Canadian volunteers wanted for mind-meld trials Elon Musk's brain chip biz, Neuralink, has been given the nod by Health Canada to start recruiting for its CAN-PRIME Study....

VotingWorks, developer of the system, disputes critics' claims An electronic voting project backed by DARPA - Uncle Sam's boffinry nerve center - to improve the process of absentee voting for American military personnel stationed abroad has been slammed by security researchers....

Biden executive orders are as good as dead, and the industry will probably have more say in what comes next Analysis President Biden has taken some steps to create a concrete AI policy in the United States. However, while there's plenty to argue about in terms of how effective the administration's moves have been, experts The Register spoke to agree that there are likely to be more big changes once Donald Trump begins his second term....

Danish military confirms it is monitoring as Swedish police investigate. Cloudflare says impact was 'minimal' The Danish military has confirmed it is tracking a Chinese ship that is under investigation after two optical fiber internet cables under the Baltic Sea were damaged....

Despite parent's financial turbulence, subsidiary continues to secure major contracts Eviden continues to win supercomputer contracts despite the struggles of parent company Atos, announcing a 60 million ($63 million) signing for a Finnish national supercomputer that will triple the performance of the country's existing facilities....

Update now: Qualys says flaws give root to local users, are 'easily exploitable' Researchers at Qualys refuse to release exploit code for five bugs in the Linux world's needrestart utility that allow unprivileged local attackers to gain root access without any user interaction....

It's fixed now, but aside from an error with the Braintree GraphQL API it's not clear what happened If you were planning on sending someone money via PayPal, or use it for business, we've got bad news: It's down around the world....

Never mind ESU... how about that upgrade? Microsoft is encouraging Windows 10 users to move to Windows 11 with more full-screen ads in the doomed operating system that urge users to buy a new Windows 11 PC....

Filing also suggests it flogging off Android, stops scraping content for AI without opt-out The US Department of Justice last night finally filed court documents proposing Google divest itself of Chrome - the most popular browser in the world by a huge margin....

Gartner weighs the pros and cons of the latest enterprise hotness Among the optimism and opportunities perceived around AI agents, Gartner has spotted some risks - namely that organizations might create "thousands of bots, but nobody now remembers what those bots do or why they were built."...

Draft doc struggles to describe how theoretically encryption-busting powers might be used The UK government has set out plans detailing how it will use the new law it has created to control online platforms and social media - with one telling exception....

Now it's up to OEMs and devs to decide whether they want in Arm has published its PC Base System Architecture (PC-BSA) specification, the blueprint for standardizing Arm-based PCs....

Study suggests hiding every Tom, Dick, and Harry's personal info from HR bots In mock interviews for software engineering jobs, recent AI models that evaluated responses rated men less favorably - particularly those with Anglo-Saxon names, according to recent research....

Zomato boss Deepinder Goyal leaves a sour taste in the mouth The CEO of Indian restaurant booking and food deliver app Zomato has posted a job ad in which he seeks a chief of staff who is willing to pay for the privilege of working with him....

Digital end of life planning saves your loved ones from a little extra anguish Japan's National Consumer Affairs Center on Wednesday suggested citizens start "digital end of life planning" and offered tips on how to do it....

After beefing with Elon Musk, comms minister wants to diversify product choice Brazilian telco Telebras signed to resell satellite broadband services from Chinese satellite internet company SpaceSail as an alternative to Starlink - despite the service not having actually commenced....

Low-priced freelancers and call centers are at risk Pakistan's IT Industry Association (P@SHA) - the nation's sole tech biz lobby group - has warned that government policy could lead to business closures and financial losses among its constituents, and damage the nation's IT exports....

DoJ also shutters allleged crimeware and credit card mart PopeyeTools The US Department of Justice has issued an indictment that names five people accused of stealing millions in cryptocurrency - and we are told they are suspected members of cyber-gang Scattered Spider....

Meet Liminal Panda, which prowls telecom networks in South Asia and Africa A senior US senator has warned that American tech companies' activities in China represent a national security risk, in a hearing that saw infosec biz CrowdStrike testify it has identified another cyber-espionage crew it believes is backed by Beijing....

DoJ alleges merely overpriced offers from reseller followed inflated deals from IT giant The US Department of Justice has reached a $4.35 million settlement with Dell and its reseller Iron Bow over claims that the two businesses colluded to rig bids for business with the US Army....

Takeover still expected to close late 2024 or early next year HPE CEO Antonio Neri told The Register today his corporation is working with the US Department of Justice to answer any questions" officials may have about the IT infrastructure giant's $14 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks....

Survey respondents doubt it boosts performance or even lightens the load Despite all the top-down buzz around enterprise AI, most job seekers are unconvinced that it is making their work lives easier....

Change Healthcare's $2 billion recovery is still a work in progress Still reeling from its February ransomware attack, Change Healthcare confirms its clearinghouse services are back up and running, almost exactly nine months since the digital disruption began....

OSS-Fuzz is making a strong argument for LLMs in security research Google's OSS-Fuzz project, which uses large language models (LLMs) to help find bugs in code repositories, has now helped identify 26 vulnerabilities, including a critical flaw in the widely used OpenSSL library....

In-house DPU and HSM silicon also shown off Ignite One of the advantages of being a megacorp is that you can customize the silicon that underpins your infrastructure, as Microsoft is demonstrating at this week's Ignite conference in Chicago....

In-space engine reignition paves way for orbital missions SpaceX has notched up another test flight of its Starship behemoth, but chose not to try catching the Super Heavy Booster this time....

Vendor offers 20% discount on new model, but not patches Owners of older models of D-Link VPN routers are being told to retire and replace their devices following the disclosure of a serious remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability....

IT giant aims to end revenue slide by March, former employees have doubts Special report Kyndryl, the managed infrastructure services business spun out of IBM in 2021, earlier this month repeated its somewhat glum prediction that its revenue will shrink by two to four percent for its fiscal 2025, the year ending March 31....

GreenLake update dangles juicy carrot for VMware refugees HPE is continuing its GreenLake push with availability of its own virtualization product, plus disconnected operations for regulated environments, while touting an object storage platform intended to deliver greater performance and scale for modern workloads....

If only the company in the title knew how to scale servers in the cloud The debut of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 yesterday was met with severe turbulence as servers struggled to keep up with user demand....

Pioneering Dartmouth College mathematician died last week Obit Professor Thomas Eugene Kurtz, co-inventor of the BASIC programming language, has died aged 96....

Don't say you weren't warned The latest Steam client finally delivers on the warning from January, dropping support for several older OS versions....

Significant uptick in visibility for Musk, Republican account posts from July 13 A pair of researchers say they've determined that July 13 was likely the day that X, formerly known as Twitter, made platform-level algorithm changes that increased the visibility of posts made by Elon Musk and Republican-leaning accounts in the run-up to the US election....

CISOs are quietly wishing they had less data, because the cost of management sometimes exceeds its value Column I recently got to play a 'fly on the wall' at a roundtable of chief information security officers. Beyond the expected griping and moaning about funding shortfalls and always-too-gullible users, I began to hear a new note: data has become a problem....

Initiative follows Microsoft settlement with CISPE consortium Exclusive The Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe (CISPE) consortium has launched the European Cloud Competition Observatory (ECCO) to keep an eye on software licensing practices in the sector....

Seeks grand alliance between manufacturers, developers and content providers - all in the name of socialism The Cyberspace Administration of China last week released guidelines that suggest mobile devices be equipped with "minors mode" that enforces both censorship and automatic usage time limits....

Version 16 developer preview starts the new cycle, with warnings for devs to test sooner rather than later Google on Monday delivered the first developer preview of Android 16 - a release notable for both its status as the first step towards a new version and its release date signalling a change in the release cycle for the OS....

Shuttered reactor's operator says it's needed - once giant seawall is finished The president of Japanese energy company Hokkaido Electric Power wants to restart one of its nuclear reactors due to a surge in demand from local datacenters....

Ransomware scum LockBit claims it did the dirty deed Equinox, a New York State health and human services organization, has begun notifying over 21 thousand clients and staff that cyber criminals stole their health, financial, and personal information in a "data security incident" nearly seven months ago....

No word on when or if the issue will be fixed Chinese government-linked snoops are exploiting a zero-day bug in Fortinet's Windows VPN client to steal credentials and other information, according to memory forensics outfit Volexity....