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UPSes don't work without power, or well-designed electricals Who, Me? Welcome to Monday morning and another instalment of Who, Me?" - the weekly reader-contributed column in which we share your stories of what not to do at work, and how to get away with it....

Labels Rome's comms regulator a quasi-judicial body' that works on behalf of shadowy, European media cabal' Cloudflare's CEO has threatened to pull the company out of Italy, and to withdraw free services it intends to provide to the Winter Olympic games, after the nation's communications regulator slugged it with a fine equal to one percent of its annual revenue for violating anti-piracy regulations....

Says ongoing talks about security are about understanding best practice, not strong-arming vendors India's government has denied that it is working on rules that would require smartphone manufacturers to provide access to their source code....

PLUS: Cambodia arrests alleged scam camp boss; Baidu spins out chip biz; Panasonic's noodle shop plan; And more! Asia in Brief The governments of Malaysia and Indonesia have suspended access to social network X, on grounds that it allows users to produce sexual imagery without users' consent....

PLUS: Veeam patches critical vuln; Crims bribing dark web insiders; UK school takedown; And more infosec in brief Meta has fixed a flaw in its Instagram service that allowed third parties to generate password reset emails, but denied the problem led to theft of users' personal information....

Poison Fountain project seeks allies to fight the power Alarmed by what companies are building with artificial intelligence models, a handful of industry insiders are calling for those opposed to the current state of affairs to undertake a mass data poisoning effort to undermine the technology....

Call for Evidence casts FOSS as a way to break US dependence The European Commission has launched a fresh consultation into open source, setting out its ambitions for Europe's developer communities to go beyond propping up US tech giants' platforms....

Ministers promise equivalent standards just without the legal obligation ANALYSIS From May's cyberattack on the Legal Aid Agency to the Foreign Office breach months later, cyber incidents have become increasingly common in UK government....

Sandia National Labs cajole Intel's neurochips into solving partial differential equations New research from Sandia National Laboratories suggests that brain-inspired neuromorphic computers are just as adept at solving complex mathematical equations as they are at speeding up neural networks and could eventually pave the way to ultra-efficient supercomputers....

Let the bots figure out what to sell for how much Accenture is betting that the future of retail will run through AI with an investment in Profitmind, an agent-based platform that automates pricing decisions, inventory management, and planning....

Remember when government agents didn't wear masks? While watching us now seems like the least of its sins, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was once best known (and despised) for its multi-billion-dollar surveillance tech budget....

Developer survey from Sonar finds AI tool adoption has created a verification bottleneck Talk about letting things go! Ninety-six percent of software developers believe AI-generated code isn't functionally correct, yet only 48 percent say they always check code generated with AI assistance before committing it....

There's a lot of bad ideas set to create literal waste and be a waste of money From disposable electric candy to voice-activated refrigerators without physical handles, CES was crammed full of enshittified, intrusive, insecure, and wasteful technology this year - just like it is every year....

New nuclear capacity won't show up until around 2030 Meta is writing more checks for nuclear investment, even though the new capacity tied to those deals is unlikely to come online until around 2030. The company says it will need the new power to run its hyperscale datacenters....

Trixie plus a carefully configured MATE setup, and absolutely nothing else The Desktop Classic System is a rather unusual hand-built flavor of Debian featuring a meticulously configured spatial desktop layout and a pleasingly 20th-century look and feel....

Basketball player accused of aiding cybercrime gang extradition blocked in exchange for Swiss NGO consultant France has released an alleged ransomware crook wanted by the US in exchange for a conflict researcher imprisoned in Russia....

State-backed attackers are using QR codes to slip past enterprise security and help themselves to cloud logins, the FBI says North Korean government hackers are turning QR codes into credential-stealing weapons, the FBI has warned, as Pyongyang's spies find new ways to duck enterprise security and help themselves to cloud logins....

No naming that tune and no album covers Microsoft is celebrating the resurgence of interest in physical media in the only way it knows how... by halting the Windows Media Player metadata service....

Medical issue forces mission curtailment and leaves station short-handed NASA is bringing the Crew-11 astronauts back to Earth early after one encountered a medical issue that could not be dealt with aboard the orbiting outpost....

Analysts say production will top out this decade while global electrification keeps ramping Concerns are mounting over copper supplies, with a fresh study warning that demand will likely outstrip production within a decade, threatening to constrain global technological advancement....

Huntress analysis suggests VM escape bugs were already weaponized in the wild Chinese-linked cybercriminals were sitting on a working VMware ESXi hypervisor escape kit more than a year before the bugs it relied on were made public....

The software wasn't actually renamed, but you couldn't be blamed for being confused Opinion Wait? What? I was just cruising along the information superhighway - yes, I'm old, deal with it - when I spotted a Y Combinator story announcing, "Microsoft Office renamed to 'Microsoft 365 Copilot app'." Excuse me!? I looked closer and found that, sure enough, it certainly looked like Microsoft had renamed Office to the God-awful "Microsoft 365 Copilot."...

Extremophile bacteria could help turn Martian dirt into building material for human habitats Tough microbes able to survive extreme environments on Earth could be the key to constructing buildings to allow humans to survive on Mars, according to a research paper....

The queue might move on, but the software never did Bork!Bork!Bork! Today's bork - on a UK border control wait-time screen - is doubly unfortunate. Tired passengers get no clue how long until someone checks their passport, and of all organizations that should keep security certs current, the one responsible for keeping out criminals tops the list....

Image generation paywalled on X after ministers and regulators start asking awkward questions Grok has yanked its image-generation toy out of the hands of most X users after the UK government openly weighed a ban over the AI feature that "undressed" people on command....

Initial 7M estimate proves optimistic after multiple contract uplifts The Bank of England has trebled the amount it is spending on its Oracle systems integrator amid efforts to migrate business applications to the cloud....

As you should, when being told the only remedy is deleting everything and starting again On Call 2025 has ended and a new year is upon us, but The Register will continue opening Friday mornings with a fresh installment of On Call - the reader-contributed column that tells your tales of tech support....

Nobody really needs an AI toothbrush that sends their gums to the cloud Opinion Another Consumer Electronics Show has rolled through Las Vegas, and this year vendors scrawled AI-enabled" on all the kit they hope will find its way into your home - while airbrushing away its immaturity and downsides....

Outages hit Russia and Ukraine, too The authors of a hypothetical manual containing procedures repressive governments can use to stay in power despite restive populations would surely devote its first chapter to turning off the internet, an action the government of Iran appears to have taken in the last 24 hours....

Grab some popcorn for the Xi vs Zuck bout, which may not be the biggest fight on the card Chinese authorities have signalled they'll likely probe Meta's planned acquisition of made-in-China AI platform Manus....

Dark copyright evasion magic makes light work of developers' guardrails Machine learning models, particularly commercial ones, generally do not list the data developers used to train them. Yet what models contain and whether that material can be elicited with a particular prompt remain matters of financial and legal consequence, not to mention ethics and privacy....

Nice idea, because its own cloudy services keep wobbling Analytics outfit Snowflake is buying telemetry data platform Observe to help its customers discover and mitigate IT issues before they cause downtime. It announced the deal on the same day its own services experienced a major outage."...

Memory pricing expected to surge another 60% in Q1 with relief years away While end customers grapple with crushing memory prices, we imagine Samsung execs are breaking out the Champagne. This week the memory titan forecast fourth-quarter operating profit would roughly triple as the South Korean electronics cabal rides the AI wave into the New Year....

Authentication is basically solved. Authorization is another thing entirely... CrowdStrike has signed a $740 million deal to buy identity security startup SGNL. The move underscores the growing threat of identity-based attacks as companies struggle to secure skyrocketing numbers of non-human identities, including AI agents....

It's for less consequential health-related matters, where being wrong won't kill customers Could a bot take the place of your doctor? According to OpenAI, which launched ChatGPT Health this week, an LLM should be available to answer your questions and even examine your health records. But it should stop short of diagnosis or treatment....

Beijing could green-light sales to select customers as soon as this quarter Nvidia's H200 GPUs could begin trickling into China as soon as this quarter, but there's a catch. Due to all the geopolitical turmoil that's ravaged US-China trade relations over the past year, buyers may need to pay up front for the coveted AI accelerators. And they won't get a refund if China decides to block the imports!...

Love Google AI Overviews? Now they're in your inbox We hope you like more AI in your Gmail inbox, because Google is "bringing Gmail into the Gemini era." It'll be on by default, but the good news is that you can disable it....

No reports of active exploitation ... yet Cisco patched a bug in its Identity Services Engine (ISE) and ISE Passive Identity Connector (ISE-PIC) products that allows remote attackers with admin-level privileges to access sensitive information - and warned that a public, proof-of-concept exploit for the flaw exists online....

'Because the AI slop people aren't going to document their patches as such' Today, it is hard to escape LLM bots and the endless slop they emit, but the Linux kernel might be largely safe ... for now....

One wants customers next door, the other wants cheap power Datacenter building decisions tend to fall into two camps with colocation providers plumping for urban areas while hyperscalers seek sites where electricity, land, and construction costs come cheaper....

NASA mulling options, including an early trip home NASA has postponed today's spacewalk outside the International Space Station (ISS) due to an undisclosed "medical concern" with a crew member....

Cop wins hit crime infrastructure, not the people behind it If 2025 was meant to be the year ransomware started dying, nobody appears to have told the attackers....

Just refreshed to avoid 5G interference? Do it again, FAA tells industry, as Upper C-band auction looms Airlines operating in the US may have to upgrade their aircraft radio altimeters again at a cost of billions of dollars, to avoid potential interference with cell networks following the Trump administration's decision last year to auction off additional spectrum to bidders....

Max-severity OneView hole joins a PowerPoint bug that should've been retired years ago CISA has added a pair of security holes to its actively exploited list, warning that attackers are now abusing a maximum-severity bug in HPE's OneView management software and a years-old flaw in Microsoft Office....

Two a year is for your own good, Mountain View insists Google has confirmed there will be two code dumps to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) per year, down from the four developers have become accustomed to....

Lawyers say Musk's platform may face punishment under Online Safety Act priority offenses Elon Musk's X platform is under fire as UK regulators close in on mounting reports that the platform's AI chatbot, Grok, is generating sexual imagery without users' consent....

Unauthenticated RCE means anyone on the network can seize full control A maximum-severity bug in the popular automation platform n8n has left an estimated 100,000 servers wide open to complete takeover, courtesy of a flaw so bad it doesn't even require logging in....

Happy Groundhog Day! Security researchers at Radware say they've identified several vulnerabilities in OpenAI's ChatGPT service that allow the exfiltration of personal information....

They also hallucinate when writing ransomware code Interview With everyone from would-be developers to six-year-old kids jumping on the vibe coding bandwagon, it shouldn't be surprising that criminals like automated coding tools too....

Synthetic cephalopod skin could be used in architecture and computer displays as well as background-matching subterfuge Scientists have developed a synthetic skin capable of mimicking some of the best camouflage skills in nature that could also have applications in soft robotics and advanced displays....