The Register

Digital money laundering pays, until it doesn't An Ohio man, who operated the Grams dark-web search engine and the Helix cryptocurrency money-laundering service associated with it, has been sentenced to three years in prison....

LLM-controlled droids easily jailbroken to perform mayhem, researchers warn Science fiction author Isaac Asimov proposed three laws of robotics, and you'd never know it from the behavior of today's robots or those making them....

Yank access to management interface, stat A critical zero-day vulnerability in Palo Alto Networks' firewall management interface that can allow an unauthenticated attacker to remotely execute code is now officially under active exploitation....

Names and social security numbers of folks looking for the biggest loan of their lives exposed A major US mortgage lender has told customers looking to make the biggest financial transaction of their lives that an intruder broke into its systems and saw data belonging to 171,000 of them....

First true sign of AGI - blowing a fuse with a frustrating user? When you're trying to get homework help from an AI model like Google Gemini, the last thing you'd expect is for it to call you "a stain on the universe" that should "please die," yet here we are, assuming the conversation published online this week is accurate....

Nearly 21 years since version 2.0 Version 3.0 of the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) is nearly ready for release. It has important new and long-awaited abilities - and you can try it now....

The lightest mainstream Linux desktop joins the tiny handful that support X.org replacement LXQt 2.1 is the latest release of the lightweight Qt-based desktop used in Lubuntu - but this version has a significant edge over its rivals....

House of GPT says suit is 'baseless and overreaching' Elon Musk has added Microsoft and the venture capitalist Reid Hoffman to the list of defendants in his long-running legal dispute with OpenAI. The ChatGPT maker called the claim "baseless and overreaching."...

A nervous wait for rapper wife who also faces a stint in the clink The US is sending the main figure behind the 2016 intrusion at crypto exchange Bitfinex to prison for five years after he stole close to 120,000 Bitcoin....

Flawed patch stops on-premises, hybrid server transport rules in their tracks for some Microsoft is pausing the rollout of an Exchange security update after it became clear that the patch could break transport rules for some customers....

Regulator finds poor planning and overuse of consultants added to costs in ailing rollout UK energy regulator Ofgem is set to disallow current and projected costs of nearly 130 million ($165 million) accrued by Data Communications Company (DCC), the Capita-owned monopoly responsible for the UK's smart meter platform....

Brit mobile network's Daisy has time, patience, and plenty of yarns to spin Watch out, scammers. O2 has created a new weapon in the fight against fraud: an AI granny that will keep you talking until you get bored and give up....

Tunny and Colossus galleries re-roofed The National Museum of Computing has unveiled renovations to keep out the rain and smartening up H block as celebrations take place to mark the 80th anniversary of the Colossus II computer....

Knives and lasers don't mix ... until they do On Call By the end of the working week, many a tech support worker feels like bashing the hardware with which they work. Which is why The Register each Friday offers a less aggressive outlet for any workplace frustrations that have accumulated, in the form of a fresh instalment of On Call - the reader-contributed column in which you share tech support tales....

Mark Z does not like this The European Union has fined Facebook parent Meta 797.72 million ($843 million) for antitrust violations connected to its online classified service Facebook Marketplace....

NHS supplier that leaked employee info fell victim to fiddly access controls that can leave databases dangling online Private businesses and public-sector organizations are unwittingly exposing millions of people's sensitive information to the public internet because they misconfigure Microsoft's Power Pages website creation problem....

Will stop accepting ads instead before TTPA comes into force Google has decided the European Union's Regulation on Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising will be so hard to comply with it's better off not trying....

Emails and tool-tracking software weren't heeded, but nothing scary happened - except to the nylon tool An Airbus A380 operated by Australian airline Qantas clocked over 290 hours of flight time despite a tool having been left inside one of its engines, according to a report from the Australian Transport Safety Bureau....

Four-core crawler can't beat current - or ancient - AMDs or Intels Lenovo's Chinese operation has created a premium laptop based around a slow and out-of-date x86-compatible processor - but at least it's locally designed....

Revised sueball over WordPress brawl tries Sherman Antitrust Act on for size WP Engine, a hosting provider for websites running open source WordPress software, has revised its legal complaint against rival Automattic and its CEO Matthew Mullenweg to include antitrust allegations....

Because life's not weird enough in the United States these days Video The US government has known about aliens since the 1940s, but kept the truth from us all, according to testimony offered at a Wednesday session of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability....

Plus a bonus hard-coded local API key A now-patched, high-severity bug in Fortinet's FortiClient VPN application potentially allows a low-privilege rogue user or malware on a vulnerable Windows system to gain higher privileges from another user, execute code and possibly take over the box, and delete log files....

And there's no OTA patching your way out of faulty drive inverter MOSFETs The Tesla Cybertruck is closing in on an average of a recall every two months this year, as it notified the NHTSA last week of a sixth fix that can't be software patched away....

Serial extortionist of medical facilities stooped to cavernous lows in search of small payouts A rampant cybercrook and repeat attacker of medical facilities in the US is being sentenced to a decade in prison, around seven years after the first of his many crimes....

Good news for supporting Windows on Arm devices and adding new ones Microsoft is making ISO images of Windows 11 on Arm available at last, years after the hardware architecture made its debut....

Yes, the heat shield has been tweaked. But there's also a banana for scale SpaceX has transported its Starship spacecraft to the launchpad in preparation for a scheduled flight test on November 18....

Despite 49% surge in shipments, buyers seem unconvinced Warehouses in the IT channel are stocking up with AI-capable PCs - industry watcher Canalys claims these made up 20 percent of all shipments during Q3 2024, amounting to some 13.3 million units worldwide....

Until compatibility issues are properly addressed, it'll never stand up to x86 Analysis Qualcomm has set its sights on Arm-based Windows laptops, which, in theory, offer notable advantages. The company's Arm-powered Snapdragon processors promise exceptional battery life that puts x86 machines to shame, fanless designs, and integrated 5G connectivity that leave Intel and AMD looking dated. By betting on a mobile and connected world, Qualcomm aims to position Arm-based Windows laptops as the future....

And yes, that does include commercial use in production Broadcom has made its desktop hypervisors freeware - even for production use. Not open source, but free stuff is still good, right?...

Out with the old, in with the nucleus ... if ever finished Increasingly, datacenter operators are putting their faith in the promise of miniaturized nuclear power plants - better known as small modular reactors (SMRs) - to fuel their ever-growing energy demands....

Other subscriptions also set for updates in the name of 'cash flow flexibility' Microsoft is introducing flexible billing for Microsoft 365 Copilot starting next month to spread the cost of an annual subscription. For a price....

It's the Heinz of Linux - but that only boasted 57 varieties At the end of October, Fedora 41 came out, with more different variants than ever before: 29 by our count, not including all the architectures and download options....

Full details exposed, putting shoppers at serious risk of fraud Updated Children's shoemaker Start-Rite is dealing with a nasty "security incident" involving customer payment card details, its second significant lapse during the past eight years....

From guidance to firm action... no more WhatsApp, Meta's Messenger, Signal, Telegram and more The full list of messaging apps officially blocked by Brit banking and insurance giant NatWest Group is more extensive than WhatsApp, Meta's Messenger, and Skype - as first reported....

British grocer's workers called back to office as clock ticks for contractors The head of tech security at Asda, the UK's third-largest food retailer, has left amid an ongoing tech divorce from US grocery giant Walmart....

Slack patching remains a problem - which is worrying as crooks increasingly target zero-day vulns The cyber security agencies of the UK, US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have issued their annual list of the 15 most exploited vulnerabilities, and warned that attacks on zero-day exploits have become more common....

Dam, the consequences Updated An academic journal has retracted two papers because it determined their authors used unlicensed software....

Consumer champion Which? not amused by fruit-based giant's alleged preference for its own cloud storage service UK consumer group Which? has filed a 3 billion action against Apple over alleged competition law breaches related to its iCloud service....

Probably a relic of a Japanese WWII naval site TSMC has confirmed that workers were evacuated from one of its construction sites in Taiwan after discovery of an unexploded bomb....

Government both excited and cautious about benefits of Muskband Starlink is in the process of procuring clearances for operation in India according to the nation's telecom minister, Jyotiraditya Scindia....

Don't worry, existing users have another year to use 'em or lose 'em Amazon Web Services is pulling the plug on its Snowcone data migration devices and will sunset all but the latest crop of its Snowball edge appliances....

Feds don't name Salt Typhoon, but describe Beijing band's alleged deeds The US government has confirmed there was "a broad and significant cyber espionage campaign" conducted by China-linked snoops against "multiple" American telecommunications providers' networks....

'Department of Government Efficiency' expected to do little more than suggest changes, Congress will still decide Comment Well, it's official(ish): US president-elect Donald Trump has made good on a campaign promise to appoint Elon Musk to the head of "the Department of Government Efficiency" - or DOGE....

Plus: CISA's ScubaGear dives deep to fix M365 misconfigs Bitdefender has released a free decryption tool that can unlock data encrypted by the ShrinkLocker ransomware....

Anything could happen in the next half ... decade Kettle Despite countless warnings that the US presidential election would lead to a months-long battle, with a decisive win by Donald Trump and his party, we can immediately look ahead to how the next four years of Republican rule might change the tech industry....

Allegedly it's hard to get ahead at the chipmaker unless you speak Mandarin Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has been accused of pervasive discrimination" against some of its workers in the USA....

We call this lead degeneration What's claimed to be more than 183 million records of people's contact details and employment info has been stolen or otherwise obtained from a data broker and put up for sale by a miscreant....

Budget constraints result in 'painful but necessary adjustments' NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) will need to lose hundreds more workers as managers seek to meet the current FY'25 budget allocation....

Cortex-powered front end for easier access to insights across multiple sources Snowflake is set to preview a new platform it claims will help organizations build chatbots that can serve up data from its own analytics systems and those external to the cloud data platform vendor....

American Associated Pharmacies yet to officially confirm infection American Associated Pharmacies (AAP) is the latest US healthcare organization to have had its data stolen and encrypted by cyber-crooks, it is feared....