The Register

Plus: AI services, security tools and more from Google Cloud Next this week Google Cloud today said it will start accepting select cryptocurrencies as payment for its online services.…

About to get a lot trickier to justify contractor status for app-hired folks The US Department of Labor today signaled it hopes to make it much harder for companies to argue that gig workers and laborers, among others, are individual contractors rather than employees.…

At $74k, this gear is an odd pitch for TEAC's time to shine again Things are a bit financially tight right now – we get it – but sometimes an audiophile has to treat themselves, and what better way to do it than with a turntable priced higher than a top electric car?…

Hungry microbes blamed for chilling out the party too much Microbial life may have flourished on early Mars but those early Martians may have been the cause of potentially life-ending climate change on the Red Planet.…

Latest version of FOSS hypervisor boasts support for new 3D acceleration tech and encrypted virtual machines VirtualBox 7.0 is the latest version of the FOSS hypervisor that Oracle cquired along with Sun Microsystems in 2009 – barely more than a year after Sun acquired VirtualBox's developers Innovision.…

Which is great news for the single company that makes them California has ended a pilot program and fully legalized digital license plates for private and commercial vehicles, which is great news for the one company that makes them.…

Apache Spark comes to BigQuery while BigLake gets Iceberg support Google is promoting updates to its cloud-based data management portfolio with the ambition of bringing analysis of structured and unstructured data closer together.…

GCHQ spy boss talks up threat of east's tech dominance, says Putin has 'badly misjudged' Ukraine attack UK intelligence agency, GCHQ, boss Jeremy Fleming says China is "learning lessons" from the war in Ukraine and could make use of a centralized digital currency to partly get around the type of sanctions being imposed on Putin's Russia.…

R&D Center focuses on autonomous AI, otherwise known as On-Device AI Samsung's Ukraine headquarters were damaged during a Russian attack on Kyiv that began Monday morning and which killed at least 14, injuring others.…

User group's views are at odds with the software giant's direction SAP users are putting more emphasis on on-premises solutions than the cloud when it comes to future workloads, according to a survey among the German-speaking SAP User Group (DSAG), which represents users in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.…

Mmmmm... smells like Space-BACN Intel has revealed more about its involvement in DARPA's project to build an "internet of satellites" in which the chipmaker will help develop the optical communications subsystem to enable links between satellites.…

More analysts emerge to talk up hefty double digit shrink in unit volumes PC shipments are plunging by record levels as enterprises spend less on devices and sweat assets for longer in the face of a worldwide economic slowdown.…

Automating infosec knowhow, essentially Mandiant, now officially owned by Google, has the scale (not to mention the deep pockets) to be the "brain" across organizations' myriad security products and automate protection on top of these controls, according to the security shop's CEO Kevin Mandia.…

This is despite a history of assistive software being involved in crashes Despite years of headlines about driver assistance systems being involved in horrific car crashes, a study by the US-based Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) suggests motorists continue to use their vehicles as though they are fully self-driving.…

Naturally, they're already under attack – so you know what to do next Security appliance vendor Fortinet has become the subject of a bug report by its own FortiGuard Labs after the discovery of a critical-rated flaw in three of its products.…

As Nvidia hikes prices, Intel is only too happy to profit from your discontent, and AMD remains a wild card Comment For the first time in what feels like an eternity, customers have a third choice when it comes to graphics processors with the launch of Intel's mainstream Arc GPUs. It could be that AMD and Nvidia's long-standing duopoly has come to a close.…

First chunk of mega-frameworks go to market The UK government has kicked off procurement to modernize aging legacy applications used by the national tax collector, HMRC.…

Pinging something missing on a network is frustrating enough, imagine if it's out in space NASA is back in control of its CAPSTONE spacecraft after the lunar orbiter lost power and communications and spent weeks powered down in safe mode while tumbling through the void.…

Monetary Authority director calls current system 'not fit for 21st century' Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) managing director Ravi Menon said on Monday the solution to costly, slow and inefficient cross-border payments is the implementation of industry-led blockchain stablecoin transactions and multi-CBDC platforms.…

As energy prices rise, so does demand for the kind of low-end chips China cranks out Here's an odd side effect of Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine: a small boom in exports of Chinese electric blankets to Europe.…

Data retention requirements to be considered alongside infosec failings Australian carrier Optus's recent data breach will be investigated by two regulators, the double trouble likely an indicator of the nation's displeasure at the incident – which saw almost ten million locals' personal data exposed online.…

Some plan to take a whole hour off The union representing Apple Store workers in Australia has called a strike as part of ongoing negotiations for a new pay and conditions deal.…

And why it's not actually a leak Documents filed in crypto lender Celsius Networks' bankruptcy case have revealed financial info on more than 600,000 users.…

'Oh what a feeling' when your contractor leaks site source code Toyota has admitted it put 296,019 email addresses and customer management numbers of folks who signed up for its T-Connect assistance website at risk of online theft by bungling its security.…

It'll just go back to randomly shutting down accounts PayPal has backed away from fining its own customers up to $2,500 for promoting whatever it determines is "misinformation."…

Wouldn't want anyone to know how much luggage is lost, eh? Lufthansa over the weekend said it is banning Apple AirTags from checked bags, only to subsequently attribute the policy to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).…

How's that boot taste? Updated Russian miscreants claimed responsibility for knocking more than a dozen US airports' websites offline on Monday morning in what appeared to be a large-scale, distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.…

A faulty fastener could leave drivers with wheel in hand and no steering control Beleaguered electric automaker Rivian is facing another setback: the recall of nearly 80 percent of the vehicles it has produced.…

Gurus say source includes secret hardware info, private signing key for Boot Guard protection Source code for the BIOS used with Intel's 12th-gen Core processors has been leaked online, possibly including details of undocumented model-specific registers (MSRs) and even the private signing key for Intel's Boot Guard security technology.…

Keeping the contents of your clusters secure from whoever's hosting them Red Hat is backing a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project that aims to improve the security of containers in Kubernetes clusters by running them inside hardware-enforced enclaves.…

Expect more sequels than Rocky: Europeans' view of 'proportional' very different from US Comment The Trans-Atlantic Data Privacy Framework agreement between the EU and the US is unlikely to settle the issue of sharing personal data between the two economic superpowers, as a set of court cases and legal challenges loom on the horizon.…

While you're having a blast, your mobe could be telling your family you're dead Perhaps "a million hours of crash data, real-world driving and crash test labs" aren't quite enough for Apple's car crash detection feature on the iPhone 14 amid reports that it is being triggered by roller coasters.…

Delays and cancellations thought to have cost Aer Lingus millions Aer Lingus says it is in talks with its IT services supplier, former IBM arm Kyndryl, after the disastrous combo of a sliced fiber optic cable and a faulty network card on the backup line caused an IT systems outage that forced the airline to cancel more than 50 flights.…

China thinks America targets its tech to kill off competition, and some believe economic standoff on way Analysis Nvidia believes it will not be affected by the latest US controls on technology, if only because it is already under similar restrictions. However, the effects on Chinese companies could be dramatic amid fears of a protracted trade war.…

Cupertino managed to buck the trend with year-on-year growth of 40% Global PC shipments declined in calendar Q3 by 15 percent year-on-year thanks to reduced demand and lingering supply chain issues, according to number cruncher IDC.…

US consumers start to get the message about protecting themselves online End users, often viewed by infosec specialists as a corporation's weakest link, appear to be finally understanding the importance of good security and privacy practices.…

Research by Lansweeper shows Microsoft's stringent hardware requirements still at play Nearly 43 percent of millions of devices studied by asset management provider Lansweeper are unable to upgrade to Windows 11 due to the hardware requirements Microsoft set out for the operating system.…

Second of Singapore telco's Australian businesses to be prised open by criminals in weeks Singtel has confirmed that another Australian business it owns, consulting unit Dialog, has fallen victim to a cyber burglary just weeks after the mammoth data leak at telco Optus was revealed.…

Bespoke botnet up for grabs from outfit praised for, er, customer service A Russia based threat group that set up a malware distribution shop earlier this year is behind a Swiss Army knife-like botnet that comes with a range of other malicious capabilities, from stealing information to mining cryptocurrency.…

Challenge your people to try to break into your systems, and see how interesting life gets for your colleagues Opinion People are the biggest problem in corporate infosec. Make them the biggest asset. …

In the immortal words of Shaggy: It wasn't me Who, Me? This week's instalment of Who, Me takes a slightly different turn, as in the end (spoiler alert) it wasn't their fault. But what a lesson to learn, nonetheless.…

Expands into a sector so toxic many won't touch it Supposedly ingenious schemes to revolutionize the finance industry with crypto are not hard to find – nor are their failures. And scarcely a day passes on which a cryptocurrency venture's infosec is not found wanting. That sad situation is causing financial institutions sufficient pain that Mastercard thinks the time is ripe for a service that helps lenders to understand if their customers' crypto purchases are dangerous.…

Posture, posture, posture, posture, posture, posture, mushroom, mushroom Four researchers at the Unconventional Computing Laboratory at the University of West England have enlisted fungi to measure how people walk.…

US software developer Chetu ordered to pay restitution for employee's unlawful termination A telephone sales rep in the Netherlands has won an unfair dismissal court case against his former employer, US software company Chetu, after he was fired for refusing to spend his work day surveilled by his computer camera.…

To get you upgrading faster, vSphere will now be released for Initial Availability before reaching General Availability VMware has acknowledged what most IT pros have learned the hard way – never buy a first-generation product – with a revised release cadence for its flagship vSphere private cloud suite.…

Emperor penguin swipes Intel's attitude to ECC memory and maybe wimpy Mac performance too If the next version of the Linux kernel emerges a little slower than usual, blame a dodgy DIMM in Linus Torvalds's AMD Threadripper-powered PC and the vagaries of the memory market.…

PLUS: SK hynix outgasses Putin; Canon's new litho plant; Equinix into Indonesia; and more! Asia In Brief South Korean chipmakers Samsung and SK hynix have reportedly reacted cautiously to the Biden administration's swingeing bans on certain chip tech reaching China.…

RPKI is supposed to verify network routes. Instead, here's how it could be subverted An internet security mechanism called Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI), intended to safeguard the routing of data traffic, is broken, according to security experts from Germany's ATHENE, the National Research Center for Applied Cybersecurity.…

It's not like the good old days with iffy cryptography and begging for keys Comment It's getting difficult these days to find a ransomware group that doesn't steal data and promise not to sell it if a ransom is paid off. What's more, these criminals are going down the extortion-only route, and not even bothering to scramble your files with encryption.…

Plus: US AI Bill of Rights, and a new framework to run models on AMD and Nvidia GPUs more flexibly In brief America's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is looking into how AI technologies can be used to create a "Digital Police Officer" or "D-PO" in the future.…