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This malware is FREE for EVERY crook ($300 decryption keys sold separately) A Russian citizen has been extradited from South Korea to the United States to face charges related to his alleged role in the Phobos ransomware operation....

Chatbot seems to choke when fed tricky less-than character Microsoft 365 Copilot appears to have developed an allergy to the less-than typographical symbol, which is preventing users from pasting HTML markup and programming code into the text area for Copilot prompts....

More than 100M rely on gear rife with vulnerabilities, says EPA OIG Nearly a third of US residents are served by drinking water systems with cybersecurity shortcomings, the Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Inspector General found in a recent study - and the agency lacks its own system to track potential attacks....

Control Panel hobbles to the rescue! As its Ignite conference kicks off, Microsoft is admitting there is another known issue with Windows 11 24H2. If you try to change the time zone, you might find it a challenge....

Windows giant also improving Iceberg support after throwing lot in with Delta Parquet Ignite Microsoft is set to launch a database service that can manage transactional and analytical workloads in the same system....

Server maker tries accounting reboot amid reports of customers bailing Server maker Supermicro has appointed a new independent auditor and submitted a compliance plan to the Nasdaq stock exchange to avoid being delisted amid reports it is losing customers because of uncertainty over its future....

Amazing that these two bugs got into a production appliance, say researchers Palo Alto Networks (PAN) finally released a CVE identifier and patch for the zero-day exploit that caused such a fuss last week....

Just as good as Apple at making squat boxes, but this one doesn't do very much Ignite Microsoft is having a go at the terminal market with a device purpose-built to connect to Windows 365, imaginatively named "Windows 365 Link."...

Better locking, improved query optimization, and... Copilot Ignite A new version of Microsoft's database warhorse, SQL Server, is on the way, with some useful improvements squeezed between the inevitable artificial intelligence additions....

They can learn, adapt, and make decisions - but don't worry, they're not coming for your job Ignite Microsoft has fresh tools out designed to help businesses build software agents powered by foundation models - overenthusiastically referred to as artificial intelligence, or AI....

Fastidious attacker then tidied up email trail behind them A Maryland AI company has confirmed to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that it lost $250,000 to a misdirected wire payment....

Probe continues into disruption affecting Germany, Sweden, Finland, Lithuania Two optical fiber internet cables under the Baltic Sea appear to have been disrupted, Germany and Finland confirmed, prompting fresh concerns over possible Russian interference with technology infrastructure....

'Mutual agreement' sees end of contract Updated Fujitsu and a UK public authority have ended a 485 million ($613 million) contract the pair announced in the weeks following a national scandal around the Post Office computer system implemented by the Japanese tech services giant....

MS-DOS, a minimal Windows 3.1, and finally the teal delight of Windows 95 awaited installers Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen has settled once and for all the question of why the Windows 95 setup program went on a tour of GUIs before finally introducing the user to the concept of the Start Menu....

Security researcher's reverse engineering effort reveals undocumented reboot timer that will make life harder for attackers Apple's latest mobile operating system, iOS 18, appears to have added an undocumented security feature that reboots devices if they're not used for 72 hours....

Admins promised they can get stuff done with fewer clicks this year ... or maybe next Citrix has delivered a little of what it promised in March, when it bundled its software into a "Platform," in the form of new management tools and a revamped user interface....

Finishing in 4:19:52 makes it a SlowBot - although it did finish without a battery top-up The South Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology has forced one of its robo-dogs to run a marathon....

Claims it was just spotting shoppers who threatened staff at Bluey's favorite big box store Australian hardware chain Bunnings Warehouse will challenge a ruling by local regulators who found it violated shoppers' privacy by checking their identities with facial recognition tech....

Shouldn't have abused messaging dominance, Zuck India's Competition Commission has slapped Meta with a five-year ban on using info collected from WhatsApp to help with advertising on its other platforms....

Loathes Big Tech and is not at all keen on net neutrality President-elect Donald Trump has announced his choice for head of the United States Federal Communications Commission: a current commissioner, Brendan Carr, whom Trump appointed last time he was in there White House....

Plus: Maxar Space Systems confirms employee info stolen in digital intrusion Ford Motor Company says it is looking into allegations of a data breach after attackers claimed to have stolen an internal database containing 44,000 customer records and dumped the info on a cyber crime souk for anyone to "enjoy."...

If you didn't fix this a month ago, your to-do list probably needs a reshuffle Two VMware vCenter server bugs, including a critical heap-overflow vulnerability that leads to remote code execution (RCE), have been exploited in attacks after Broadcom's first attempt to fix the flaws fell short....

Big Tech's big war on American labor watchdog stumbles... bigly Amazon and SpaceX argued in court today that the US National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is an unconstitutional body - but a three-judge panel didn't seem particularly enamored of their arguments....

Un-carrier said to be among those hit by Salt Typhoon, including AT&T, Verizon T-Mobile US said it is "monitoring" an "industry-wide" cyber-espionage campaign against American networks - amid fears Chinese government-backed spies compromised the un-carrier among with various other telecommunications providers....

This was pretty inevitable after its lawyers admitted in court that the giveaway wasn't random Elon Musk and his America PAC have been sued for allegedly lying about their $1 million election lottery after letting slip in a court hearing earlier this month that it wasn't as random as Musk suggested....

You can now glue four H200 PCIe cards together too SC24 Nvidia's latest HPC and AI chip is a massive single board computer packing four Blackwell GPUs, 144 Arm Neoverse cores, up to 1.3 terabytes of HBM, and a scorching 5.4 kilowatt TDP....

GPU giant contends that a little fuzzy math can speed up fluid dynamics, drug discovery SC24 Nvidia on Monday unveiled several new tools and frameworks for augmenting real-time fluid dynamics simulations, computational chemistry, weather forecasting, and drug development with everyone's favorite buzzword: AI....

Uncle Sam tops supercomputer charts, while China recides from public view SC24 Lawrence Livermore National Lab's (LLNL) El Capitan system has ended Frontier's 2.5-year reign as the number one ranked supercomputer on the Top500, setting a new high water mark for high-performance computing (HPC)....

$45K says you can do it without a lunar rover How do you rescue an injured crew member on the lunar surface? NASA is looking for ideas, and a share of a $45,000 prize pot is up for grabs....

First in six years is nearly three times the size of the older, pre-NATO version Residents of Sweden are to receive a handy new guide this week that details how to prepare for various types of crisis situations or wartime should geopolitical events threaten the country....

Likely to look more favorably on Elon's adventures in space-based comms The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC), an agency charged with regulating US media and communications, is about to get a new boss: current commissioner Brendan Carr....

System to serve as a proof of concept for applying API-driven automation to scientific computing SC24 Oxide Computing's 2,500 pound (1.1 metric ton) rackscale blade servers are getting a new home at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LNLL)....

US considers the cases concerning Jetflicks to be the largest of their kind A programmer at the heart of a huge internet piracy website faces a lengthy prison sentence following five years of legal proceedings and a two-week trial....

2-way datalink allows in-flight info updates including retargeting and abort The UK has conducted the first successful guided firing trial of Spear, a mini cruise missile that is set to be the chief strike weapon against ships for the carrier-launched F-35B fighter jets, and can also be used against tanks, target structures and fast-moving vehicles....

SAP and Deloitte winners in transition from legacy software to SaaS, which includes housing and transport ministries The UK's tax collector has awarded contracts worth up to 366 million ($461 million) in an effort to move a cluster of central government departments' ERP, HR and finance systems to the cloud and upgrade legacy software....

You think employee-generated content is bad now? Opinion In 1968's Star Trek episode, "The Ultimate Computer," Captain Kirk had his ship used to test M5, a new computer. A copilot, if you will, for the Starship Enterprise....

One of the braver lightning talks we've seen: Swapping motherboards, live on stage Ubuntu Summit 2024 The modular Framework laptop is moving outside the x86 world with a RISC-V main board now available....

Machine learning used to separate opening a can of soda from something catastrophic Researchers at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have come up with an early warning system for lithium-ion battery fires....

Uni sysadmin who ran the lab he erased was a big part of the problem Who, Me? Another Monday and what a fine one it is here in the lair of Who, Me? - the reader contributed column in which your fellow Reg-admirers admit to the moments they messed up the tech they were supposed to tame....

Stuff from the far side is basalt - but less KREEP-y than expected The first ever samples of soil and rock collected from the far side of the moon has revealed more recent lunar volcanic activity than expected, according to studies published in two journals last Friday....

Execs at Chinese company confident President Trump's trade policies won't present a problem Lenovo's enterprise business has posted 65 percent year on year growth but still posted a loss....

Again defends his belief that 70-hour weeks are essential and work/life balance is bunk Infosys founder Narayama Murthy has tripled down on his previous statements that 70-hour work weeks are what's needed in India and revealed he also thinks weekends were a mistake....

Joins the likes of HPE, Cisco, and VMware in failing to challenge dominant hyperscalers Datacenter giant Equinix will end its foray into infrastructure-a-service by shuttering its Metal" bare metal IaaS offering....

PLUS: Cost of Halliburton hack disclosed; Time to dump old D-Link NAS; More UN cybercrime convention concerns; and more Infosec in brief A teenager has pleaded guilty to calling in more than 375 fake threats to law enforcement, and now faces years in prison....

PLUS: LG struts catwalk in stretchy screen; Samsung's strike nears end; Vietnam warns Chinese e-commerce players; and more ASIA IN BRIEF President Xi Jinping of China and President Joe Biden of the USA have pledged to continue working together to ensure AI does not harm humanity....

Here's why they really should Systems Approach I have been playing around with passkeys, or as they are formally known, discoverable credentials....

Uncultured swine prone to believe complexity of verse is machine-generated babble A study in the US has found that readers can't tell the difference between poems written by famous poets and those written by AI aping their style. To make matters worse - for anyone fostering a love of literature at least - research subjects tend to like AI poetry more than they do verse from human poets....

Proof of concept allows geospatial datasets to be conversationally queried Speculation over where Microsoft would take the Copilot brand next can now end thanks to the announcement of Earth Copilot in partnership with NASA....

It's memory-safe, with a few caveats Developers looking to continue working in the C and C++ programming languages amid the global push to promote memory-safe programming now have another option that doesn't involve learning Rust....

QR codes arrive via an age-old delivery system Switzerland's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has issued an alert about malware being spread via the country's postal service....