The Register

Binned an e-commerce tax last year so this may not be complete capitulation The lower house of India's parliament on Tuesday passed the nation's budget for 2025, after making a last-minute change that removed a tax on digital ads....

Who needs studies into diseases, virus infections, US mortality rates ... right? Two academic organizations sued the Trump administration Tuesday for the allegedly unlawful withdrawal of $400 million in federal funding from Columbia University and associated demands for policy changes....

Chip guru preaches virtues of 'values-aligned' pray-I, sorry, AI Pat Gelsinger, once CEO of VMware and later Intel, has announced he's taken a new job as executive chair and head of technology at Gloo, a Colorado-based startup offering technology tools for churches and other faith-based organizations....

Officials likely broke Privacy Act by dishing out info without consent A Maryland judge has dealt another blow to Elon Musk's cost-trimming DOGE unit, temporarily blocking the US Treasury, Dept of Education, and Office of Personnel Management from sharing union members' personal data with the billionaire's minions....

The man who helped make Sammy the biggest name in modern tellies Samsung co-CEO Han Jong-hee died this week in the Samsung Medical Center in southern Seoul after a cardiac arrest. He was 63....

An impressive recreation of the Windows golden age The ReactOS project is putting out a point-release for the first time in a few years, and this insanely optimistic effort is making progress....

Customers come forward claiming info was swiped from prod Oracle Cloud's denial of a digital break-in is now in clear dispute. A infosec researcher working on validating claims that the cloud provider's login servers were compromised earlier this year says some customers have confirmed data allegedly stolen and leaked from the database giant is genuine....

We have one, yes - but what about a second death ray? Still shopping for the perfect death ray, the US Army has tapped Huntington Ingalls to build and test a prototype laser weapon designed to fry drones in flight....

User group chairman warns, however, that ERP giant's pace is not feasible for every org Europe's German-speaking SAP user group is reporting a sharp uptick in organizations signing up or planning to sign up for the application vendor's preferred cloud migration route....

Joe Tsai says speculative datacenter builds could exceed actual demand Alibaba is warning of a datacenter spending "bubble" amid the rush to build infrastructure in anticipation of an AI feeding frenzy....

Redmond veteran proposes Zero Sugar and Caffeine Free variants Baffled by the plethora of Outlook options out there? You aren't alone. Microsoft veteran Scott Hanselman posted a list of some more variants that could be used to do the same thing....

16,000 stolen records pertain to former and active mail subscribers Infosec veteran Troy Hunt of HaveIBeenPwned fame is notifying thousands of people after phishers scooped up his Mailchimp mailing list....

Thoughtful and considered ... even if it is based on an American distro EU OS is a proposal for an immutable KDE-based Linux distribution with a Windows-like desktop, designed for use in European public-sector organizations....

'Don't wait for another pandemic or civil challenge,' says US spy-tech biz Comment It might take a particularly shameless company to grasp the opportunity presented by the UK's coronavirus pandemic and step in with a sales pitch. US spy-tech biz Palantir is willing to give it a go....

Microsoft and Dell keeping quiet on their work-life-balance trials A four-day working week pilot programme is being squarely aimed at the UK tech sector with the final results to be assessed by academics....

Other cities either started with rival kit, or had Chinese vendor core already built before any bans, says expert Interview Recent research found that London is ranked at the foot of the table when it comes to 5G mobile service, but why should that be? The answer is a combination of issues, including available spectrum, investment and the great Huawei replacement....

Just an FYI, like Generative AI assistants packaged up as browser extensions harvest personal data with minimal safeguards, researchers warn....

There's only one rule - don't attack Russia, duh Check Point has spotted a fresh ransomware-as-a-service crew in town: VanHelsing, touting a cross-platform locker targeting Microsoft Windows, Linux, and VMware ESXi systems, among others. But so far, only Windows machines have fallen victim, we're told....

Time to update your firmware, if you can, to one with the security fixes, cough cough DrayTek router owners in the UK and beyond had a pretty miserable weekend after some ISPs began to notice a lot of their customers' gateways going offline....

It's just pure incompetence' confesses penguin emperor Linux kernel development boss Linus Torvalds has admitted his own pure incompetence" led him to forget to deliver version 6.14 of the project....

How many K8s systems are sat on the internet front porch like that ... Oh, thousands, apparently Cloudy infosec outfit Wiz has discovered serious vulnerabilities in the admission controller component of Ingress-Nginx Controller that could allow the total takeover of Kubernetes clusters - and thinks more than 6,000 deployments of the software are at risk on the internet....

Kari, OK, we'll see you in court An organization that bankrolls various internet security projects has asked a Washington DC court to prevent the Trump administration from cancelling its federal funding - and expressed fears that if the cash stops flowing, the tools it supports could become harder to access....

Massive OPSEC fail from the side who brought you 'lock her up' Senior Trump administration officials used the messaging app Signal to discuss secret government business - including detailed plans to attack Houthi rebels in Yemen - and accidentally invited a journalist to join the group in which they chatted....

Be vewy vewy quiet, I'm hunting rackets The FCC is investigating whether Chinese manufacturers black-listed on its so-called Covered List - including Huawei - are still somehow doing business in America, either by misreading the rules or willfully ignoring them....

Ex-US Air Force officer says companies shouldn't wait for govt mandates Interview Former US Air Force cyber officer Sarah Cleveland worries about the threat of a major supply-chain attack from China or another adversarial nation. So she installed solar panels on her house: "Because what if the electric grid goes down?"...

Capital costs of creating document-relational serverless database take their toll FaunaDB - the database that promised relational power with document flexibility - will shut down its service at the end of May. The biz says it plans to release an open-source version of its core tech....

Official PoE+ HAT+ for the Pi 5 still MIA The Raspberry Pi team has launched a Power-over-Ethernet Injector aimed at users who are seeking to add some juice to their network but who lack a network switch capable of doing so....

$280M of excess spending makes for a ripe - and reasonable - DOGE target After blowing deadlines and budgets for years, the Pentagon has finally pulled the plug on a troubled project to overhaul its outdated civilian HR IT systems....

Looking to sort through large volumes of security info? Redmond has your backend Microsoft's Security Copilot is getting some degree of agency, allowing the underlying AI model to interact more broadly with the company's security software to automate various tasks....

The answer to the ultimate question of Linux, the Universe, and Everything? Fedora 42 is now in beta testing, with more desktops and editions than ever....

CEO steps down after multiple failed attempts to take the DNA testing company private Beleaguered DNA testing biz 23andMe - hit by a massive cyber attack in 2023 - is filing for bankruptcy protection in the US following years of financial uncertainty....

First woman and first person of color pledges dropped The purge of DEI language from US federal websites has claimed another victim. This time, it is NASA's pledge to land the first woman and the first person of color on the Moon as part of the Artemis program....

Return to office, hours and intensity of work cited as reasons to walk Two in five techies quit in the past year because their employer didn't offer requisite flexibility with respect to hours, location and the "intensity of work."...

It's been a very busy week for Digicash Donald's administration Analysis Is the US retreating from its hardline stance on crypto? On Friday, the US Treasury Department lifted sanctions imposed on notorious crypto mixer Tornado Cash, once accused of washing billions in illicit crypto for criminals and nation-states alike....

Tweaks mean smoother operation even on low-end kit GNOME 48 is here, with some under-the-hood tweaks to improve performance even on low-end kit....

Education authority still searching for an alternative after 13 years A public body in Northern Ireland has granted Capita 208 million in additional contracts and extensions without competition after ditching a 485 million Fujitsu deal last November....

Throw a spanner in the works, best get good at fixing things. Now, where did you put that spanner? Opinion Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. This works well in sane times, less so when "but it's both" is the default. Apply it to Microsoft's decision to make bug reports include not only a working example but a video of the same, and the meter oscillates wildly. What were they thinking? What did they expect?...

And got away with it when someone else broke it even more comprehensively Who, Me? Welcome to another working week, and therefore to another instalment of Who, Me? It's The Register's reader-contributed Monday column that shares stories of your worst moments at work, and how you kept your career alive once the extent of the damage was discerned....

PLUS: Russian bug-buyers seeks Telegram flaws; Another WordPress security mess; NIST backlog grows; and more! Infosec In Brief Organized crime networks are now reliant on digital tech for most of their activities according to Europol, the European agency that fights international crime on the continent and beyond....

Maps Timeline info wanders off forever for users without encrypted backups Google has admitted it lost some customer data, possibly forever....

PLUS: Zoho's Ulaa anointed India's most patriotic browser; Typhoon-like gang targets Taiwan; Japan debates offensive cyber-ops; and more Asia In Brief China's Cyberspace Administration and Ministry of Public Security have outlawed the use of facial recognition without consent....

Despite evidence to the contrary as alleged pilfered info goes on sale Oracle has straight up denied claims by a miscreant that its public cloud offering has been compromised and information stolen....

GPU goliath claims tech can boost throughput by 2x for Hopper, up to 30x for Blackwell GTC Nvidia's Blackwell Ultra and upcoming Vera and Rubin CPUs and GPUs dominated the conversation at the corp's GPU Technology Conference this week. But arguably one of the most important announcements of the annual developer event wasn't a chip at all but rather a software framework called Dynamo, designed to tackle the challenges of AI inference at scale....

Plus AI in the infosec world, why CISA should know its place, and more Interview Russia appears to be having second thoughts on how aggressively, or at least how visibly, it attempts to influence American elections, according to a former head of the NSA....

Remembering the fallen giant's first UK office Reading Museum is hosting an exhibition marking more than 60 years since Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) opened its first UK office....

White House touts massive savings, agencies brace for shake-up President Trump's latest executive order takes aim at federal IT procurement, moving to centralize how Uncle Sam buys tech across agencies....

'Flawless' team boss claims she was axed after raising alarm over shrinking female leadership ranks A former senior product manager at Amazon Web Services has sued the cloud colossus in the US, claiming she faced retaliation from bosses and was ultimately laid off due to her gender and age....

Measuring all the dirty work of the supply chain and other indirect influences? Ugh, just give us the fine Half of European businesses fear they'll lose customers if they come clean about their greenhouse gas emissions, a third lack confidence in the accuracy of their carbon data, and and 40 percent will just take a fine as they can't be bothered with it....

Consumer price hikes come amid interrogation of why customers have to opt out of added AI features The UK's Science, Innovation, and Technology Committee is pressing Microsoft for answers about the recent Microsoft 365 price hikes and why customers are forced to opt out of the more expensive Copilot version....

Share price list slides for top ten consultant to US government Accenture says federal procurement projects are continuing to slow since Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency began reviewing ways to cut costs last month, and this is directly impacting its business....