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Talk about an inside job Google confirmed that miscreants created a fraudulent account in its Law Enforcement Request System (LERS) portal, which police and other government agencies use to ask for data about Google users....

250 people now have the chance to sell their freelance services on the site ai-pocalypse Freelance services marketplace Fiverr has told around 250 staffers that they are back on the market as it pivots to having "a modern, clean, AI-focused infrastructure from the ground up."...

Mastercard, American Express, Coinbase, and PayPal sign up at launch Google has given the go-ahead to a plan that lets AI agents make purchases on your behalf and, on Tuesday, released its Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) to make it happen. The system comes with touted safeguards that are intended to prevent thieves from draining bank accounts....

That's optimistic based on progress so far US Energy Secretary Chris Wright believes that the country will have at least one small nuclear rector up and running by July 2026, despite the fact that not a single one has been built to date, after multiple failed attempts....

May have been used in 'extremely sophisticated' attacks against 'specific targeted individuals' Apple backported a fix to older iPhones and iPads for a serious bug it patched last month - but only after it may have been exploited in what the company calls "extremely sophisticated" attacks....

Former head of Kubuntu and neon says adios after 25 years Sad news for KDE: one of the core people guiding the project for the whole century so far has left the building....

Intrusions bear the same hallmarks as recent Nx mess The npm platform is the target of another supply chain attack, with crims already compromising 187 packages and counting....

DSAG players grappling with cloud migration want more consistency with commercial models DSAG, the SAP user group for Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, has called for greater transparency in cloud licensing to enable the migration and upgrade of on-prem systems to the cloud....

The Microsoft Axman Cometh While Windows 10 might seem to be the biggest casualty as a result of Microsoft's ax-swinging, Office and recent versions of Windows 11 are also set to be chopped....

Safe C++ proposal author claims that 'will not ever work' The C++ standards committee abandoned a detailed proposal to create a rigorously safe subset of the language, according to the proposal's co-author, despite continuing anxiety about memory safety....

Tech evolved from PoC to global campaign in under two months An attack called FileFix is masquerading as a Facebook security alert before ultimately dropping the widely used StealC infostealer and malware downloader....

Nothing says circular economy' like Microsoft stranding 400 million PCs on International E-waste Day European e-waste campaigners are calling on EU leadership to force tech vendors to provide 15 years of software updates, using Microsoft's plan to end Windows 10 support next month - which may make an estimated 400 million PCs obsolete - as a textbook case of avoidable e-waste....

Latest extension to factory closures takes incident response into fourth week Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) has announced a further extension to its multi-site global shutdown, bringing its cyber-related downtime to nearly four weeks....

Beware the meeting room zombies Beware the meeting room zombies. We don't mean you when you're listening to a colleague reading out a 100-slide PowerPoint presentation, but some expensive Microsoft meeting room hardware that may be obsolete in a few short weeks....

Tech giant confirms facility next to the M25 is its latest AI-fueled server farm Google today confirmed it is the mystery hyperscaler behind another European datacenter campus as it cut the ribbon on a facility situated on the outskirts of the M25 in Hertfordshire....

Startup slots into CI/CD pipelines to warn engineers when a change could wreck production Exclusive How big could the blast radius be if that change you're about to push to production goes catastrophically wrong? Overmind is the latest company to come up with ways to stop the explosion before it happens....

Devs sketch plans for two more releases this year, blending Debian foundations with modern display tech The Linux Mint team plans to speed up its release cycle and get two more versions out in the next few months....

Cyberspace watchdog tightens reporting regime, leaving little time to hide incidents Beijing will soon expect Chinese network operators to 'fess up to serious cyber incidents within an hour of spotting them - or risk penalties for dragging their feet....

Microsoft reminds holdouts they've got less than a month before the update tap runs dry Start the countdown! For any administrators living under a rock, Microsoft has posted another warning that Windows 10 22H2 will reach end of servicing on October 14....

Study that used actual input to OpenAI's chatbot finds personal use surging Users of individual accounts for OpenAI's ChatGPT mostly use it for research and to help with writing, according to a new study into the kind of queries fed into the service....

Did you hear the one about the thin-skinned barrister? The High Court of the Indian State of Madhya Pradesh has stopped live-streaming hearings to protect local lawyers from ridicule on social media....

Nice plans for US manufacturing you had there, shame if something was to happen to them Analysis On Sunday, President Trump took to his personal social media channel to calm a growing diplomatic storm with one of America's closest allies, South Korea....

Regional internet registry faces numerous critics and isn't out of the legal woods The African Network Information Center (AFRINIC) last week held elections and announced the appointment of eight directors, which means it has a chance to convene a board for the first time since 2022....

Secretive app + unreliable tech + Trump administration policies = ANGRY LETTER A group of senators has penned a sternly-worded letter to the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) saying that they're very worried about the agency's use of facial recognition in its mission to cleanse the nation of immigrants with improper documents....

Cautionary tale from the recent SonicWall attacks Failing to encrypt sensitive data leaves you wide open to attack. During the recent SonicWall attack spree, intruders bypassed multi-factor authentication (MFA) in at least one case, because a user's recovery codes were left sitting in a plaintext file on their desktop....

Breathe deep on internet fumes Discarded vapes are becoming the new cigarette butts in pollution terms, but a hacker has found a novel way to repurpose the chips they contain to build a web server....

Study also finds M&A and changes to operating model on the way for sector More than half of tech companies are considering a complete restructure or changing their operating model in response to AI, according to research from the consulting sector....

We remind the world yet again that science fiction is usually a warning, not an aspiration Look to science fiction and you'll find plenty of pathways to create super soldiers. There's cloning or genetic engineering. If that fails, you could try in-utero enhancements, or maybe some cybernetic augmentation. DARPA has a different idea for the real world: inject 'em up with super blood....

'Wow this is dangerous' says Django co-creator, while others call feature a 'game-changer' OpenAI has added a beta of Developer mode to ChatGPT, enabling full read and write support for MCP (Model Context Protocol) tools, though the documentation describes the feature as dangerous....

Microsoft removes safeguard hold thanks to updated drivers Microsoft has resolved a Windows 11 24H2 problem with devices using Dirac audio as the 25H2 update waits in the wings....

As doubts grow over who will pay to stuff Oracle's cloud pipeline, the octogenarian spreads his wings Opinion When does imaginary money come before real? If you had bought Oracle shares on Tuesday last week and sold them on Friday, you might have some real cash. But everything else lives in a gray area....

Bank says incident went undetected for over a year before discovery in June A US fintech biz is writing to nearly 700,000 customers because a former employee may have accessed or acquired their data after leaving the company....

Kimsuky gang proves that with the right wording, you can turn generative AI into a counterfeit factory North Korean spies used ChatGPT to generate a fake military ID for use in an espionage campaign against a South Korean defense-related institution, according to new research....

Chip giant accused of breaching conditions of $6.9B Mellanox takeover China has dealt Nvidia another blow, finding the chipmaker in violation of the country's anti-monopoly Law and escalating a long-running regulatory headache into a full investigation....

Downdetector logged 40,000 reports before service flickered back Elon Musk's Starlink satellite broadband network went dark today as thousands of users around the globe reported connectivity issues....

As post-cyberattack layoffs begin, labor org argues UK goverment should step in The UK's chief automotive workers' union is calling on the government to establish a Covid-esque furlough scheme for the thousands of individuals who face losing their jobs due to the cyber-related downtime at Jaguar Land Rover....

Sign 'relationship agreement' as Bharti Mittal and Vittal take non-exec directorships BT - Britain's former state-owned telecoms monopoly - has confirmed that execs from Bharti Global, its largest shareholder, are joining the board with immediate effect....

Ministers concerned Treasury governance team may be distracted about supervising vital efforts UK ministers have questioned the government's decision to seemingly downgrade huge public sector tech projects as HM Treasury takes a greater role in so-called "mega-projects."...

Peers will quiz campaigners on whether Ofcom's new measures will actually work, or just add more compliance pain The House of Lords is about to put the latest child-protection plans of UK regulator the Office of Communications (Ofcom) under the microscope....

There's more than warm power supplies and wonky capacitors Opinion The Voyager space probes are dear to the hearts of every geek who can remember the 1980s....

Student thought she had the hang of this 'Linux' thing and its kooky CLI Who, Me? It's Monday morning, and a week of possibilities presents itself to IT pros everywhere. Which is why The Register brings you another edition of Who, Me? It's the reader-contributed column in which we remind you what not to do with your day, your week, and your career, by sharing stories of your worst workplace mistakes and the contortions you made to survive them....

Virtualization tool for hyperscalers now scales to 8,192 vCPUs The Cloud Hypervisor project has introduced a No AI code policy....

PLUS: Japan woos Micron, again; China launches chip dumping probe; Mitsubishi expands opsec empire; and more! Criminals appear to be moving cyber-scam centers to vulnerable countries....

PLUS: China's Great Firewall springs a leak; FBI issues rare 'Flash Alert' of Salesforce attacks; $10m bounty for alleged Russian hacker; and more Infosec In Brief 15 ransomware gangs, including Scattered Spider and Lapsus$, have announced that they are going dark, and say no more attacks will be carried out in their name....

Doing a simple system reset may not be enough to save you from fines and lawsuits With the end of Windows 10's regular support cycle fast approaching, and a good five years since the COVID pandemic spurred a wave of hardware replacements to support remote work, many IT departments are in the process of refreshing their fleets. But what they do with decommissioned systems is just as important as the shiny new ones they buy....

The hardware is now compelling, sales are rising, and there's the chance to create a new experience hands on Folding smartphones have been with us for six years without winning much market share, but after two weeks using Samsung's latest model, and recent reports of surging sales in the category, it feels to me like dual-screened devices are something developers now need to consider....

Newer OSes for unsupported kit, and new browsers for older OSes. There's always a way Any day now, a new version of Apple's macOS is due to launch, and it will exclude the bulk of the Intel-powered models the company has ever sold. However, there are multiple ways to breathe new life into Macs that go back as far as 10 or even 15 years....

Scott LaValley, CEO of Cartwheel Robotics, says robot makers should prioritize social acceptance over capabilities interview Scott LaValley, founder and CEO of Cartwheel Robotics, suspects he may have helped encourage Elon Musk to get into the humanoid robot business....

Although it hasn't been seen in the wild yet A new ransomware strain dubbed HybridPetya was able to exploit a patched vulnerability to bypass Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) Secure Boot on unrevoked Windows systems, making it the fourth publicly known bootkit capable of punching through the feature and hijacking a PC before the operating system loads....

Climate change? No worry - we can solve that later, argues Doug Burgum You would think that the government official responsible for safeguarding the US' natural resources would be opposed to abandoning climate change mitigation pledges in favor of firing up fossil fuels to power AI development....