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I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that The last commands have been sent to the ESA's Gaia satellite and, after a dozen years scanning the galaxy, the spacecraft is shutting down its computers and boosting out into a retirement orbit around the Sun....

Crims are disabling security tools early in attacks, Talos says interview Antivirus and endpoint security tools are falling short as ransomware crews increasingly deploy "EDR killers" to disable defenses early in the attack - a tactic Cisco Talos observed in most of the 2024 cases it handled....

FCA still splashing on customizing, integrating HR and finance system way after 2021 go-live The UK's financial regulator is signing a deal worth up to 12.3 million ($15.9 million) with tech services biz Cognizant to make "enhancements" to a Workday HR and finance system it implemented several years ago....

Make things that work for the billions, not the billionaires Opinion Since it is currently fashionable to make laws by whim and decree, here are three that should apply immediately across techdom. The following are banned: DoNotReply messages, updates that reset your configuration choices to default, and forced incomprehensible choices....

'I'm glad you asked that question. We'll get to that tomorrow' (After I research the answer) Who, Me? Wait, what? It's Monday again? That means it's time for another instalment of Who, Me? What's that, you ask? It's The Register's Monday column in which we tell your tales of technological messes and celebrate your escapes....

NHS boffins think there's a connection, but snot all good news: Swallowing batteries is even more dangerous Researchers from the UK's National Health Service believe increasing adoption of cashless payments may be having an unexpected payoff: Fewer kids are swallowing coins and seeking medical help to remove them....

11 companies, including SMIC, accused of disguising outposts so they can illicitly serve Beijing Chinese tech companies created entities in Taiwan and disguised them so they had no connections to China, so they could lure top tech talent to work on significant projects....

PLUS: Indonesia crimps social media, allows iPhones; India claims rocket boost; In-flight GenAI for Japan Airlines Asia In Brief China last week commenced a crackdown on inappropriate collection and subsequent use of personal information....

PLUS: OpenAI bumps bug bounties bigtime; INTERPOL arrests 300 alleged cyber-scammers; And more! Infosec in brief Oracle Health appears to have fallen victim to an info stealing attack that has led to patient data stored by American hospitals being plundered....

There's also a new release of the Zorin OS distro The handy GNOME extension Dash to Panel will live on, under its present maintainer, after winning financial backing from one of the distros that uses it....

More silicon, more power, more pain for datacenter operators Comment As Jensen Huang is fond of saying, Moore's Law is dead - and at Nvidia GTC this month, the GPU-slinger's chief exec let slip just how deep in the ground the computational scaling law really is....

Miscreants warming to Delphi, Haskell, and the like to evade detection Malware authors looking to evade analysis are turning to less popular programming languages like Delphi or Haskell....

Airbus UK wins 150M contract to revive long-delayed rover project Airbus UK, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the European aerospace giant, has won the 150 million contract to complete a landing system for the long-delayed ExoMars rover....

A peek behind the curtain in one corner of online advertising AppLovin, which provides a way for software developers to make money by embedding ads in their mobile apps, has been sued for a third time this month - after short-seller reports accused the biz of fraud and deceptive revenue practices....

SAMOSA digested by House last year, but choked on in Senate. Second time's a charm? A bipartisan group of US lawmakers is once again pushing legislation aimed at reining in the federal government's fragmented and wasteful software licensing practices....

That stands for I Probably Overestimated? CoreWeave has pared back the scope of its initial public offering amid growing investor uncertainty in an overheating AI marketplace and risks posed by the GPU cloud specialist's exposure to a small number of customers....

More than 70 percent of anomalies closed out, but those pesky thrusters are still a problem Updated NASA says Boeing's Starliner - dubbed the Calamity Capsule - could fly again, but not before the end of 2025 or start of 2026....

Thanks to Collabora's work on Zink and NVK... and indirectly to GPU-maker's FOSS release, too Not one but two new drivers for some Nvidia GPUs is a promising, if indirect, offshoot of the GPU maker's open-saucy moves....

How's that for Platform-as-a-Service? You've seen small 3D printed models, heard about 3D printers being used to make guns, and even read news about printed food, but a 3D printed train station? Where else could this be but Japan?...

Microsoft promises clarity, gets partway there Microsoft has introduced a roadmap for Windows 11 that takes customers all the way to ... April 2025....

JWST trio awarded IEEE Simon Ramo medal: 'I'm proud of the whole damn team' Interview The team behind the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) just scored the Simon Ramo Medal, given by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for exceptional achievement in systems engineering and systems science....

Department director admits Welsh capital's council still trying to get heads around threat of dark web leaks Cardiff City Council's director of children's services says data was leaked or stolen from the organization, although she did not clarify how or what was pilfered....

Similar issue in Windows 11 resolved as of Wednesday Microsoft is warning that a faulty patch pushed out in February is causing Windows Server 2025 Remote Desktop sessions to freeze under certain circumstances....

Despite pockets of excellence, many wouldn't make the grade in business, AI advisor implies A former director of data science at the UK prime minister's office has told MPs that people working with data in government are not typically technical and would be unlikely to get a similar job in the private sector....

Project sees 7-year delay and budget swell to 1.5B, but nuclear leadership 'confident' it has an alternative The center of the UK's nuclear industry has agreed on alternatives for how it will process waste into the next decade after delays and overspending hit a lab project....

Self-described 'visionary' made life hell for our hero, then some oily vids returned the favor On Call The working week can be ugly, which is why The Register beautifies each Friday morning with a new instalment of On Call, the reader-contributed column in which we tell your tales of tech support splendor....

Claims Broadcom will levy 20 percent penalty for customers who don't pay before renewal deadlines The French limb of global tech distributor Arrow has emailed VMware partners it serves with news of big price increases....

Single click on a phishing link in Google browser blew up sandbox on Windows Google pushed out an emergency patch for Chrome on Windows this week to stop attackers exploiting a sandbox-breaking zero-day vulnerability, seemingly used by snoops to target certain folks in Russia....

As this year's buyers rush to beat Trump's tariffs Korean chipmaker SK hynix has told investors the future looks bright thanks to strong demand for its memory products and early delivery of its first HBM4 samples....

Argues making stuff using foreign-designed tech isn't leadership, as x86 giant shakes up board Intel ex-CEO Pat Gelsinger has thrown shade on Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC's plans to build fabrication plants in the USA, saying the factories will do nothing to advance American semiconductor leadership....

WOW! DID! SOMEONE! REALLY! STEAL! DATA! ON! 400K! USERS?! A cyber-crime ring calling itself Arkana has made a cringe music video to boast of an alleged theft of subscriber account data from Colorado-based cableco WideOpenWest (literally, WOW!)...

DoJ suggests it sure looks like collusion when several big players use the same cost-saving software The US Justice Department on Thursday weighed into an antitrust legal war that alleges algorithmic price fixing by healthcare services by MultiPlan and its health insurance clients....

Crew also cooked up two fresh SparrowDoor backdoor variants, says ESET The China-aligned FamousSparrow crew has resurfaced after a long period of presumed inactivity, compromising a US financial-sector trade group and a Mexican research institute. The gang also likely targeted a governmental institution in Honduras, along with other yet-to-be-identified victims....

Big Blue 'might as well move its headquarters' to Bengaluru since it 'no longer prioritizes' America Following our report last week on IBM's ongoing layoffs, current and former employees got in touch to confirm what many suspected: The US cuts run deeper than reported, and the jobs are heading to India....

Warning of possible problems sparks controversy: Was it OverDAtop? Rachel Kroll has clarified the Atop alarm: Turns out it was just a weird little bug, and it's probably already been fixed....

Concerns over whether Bureau of Industry and Security, which maintains entity list, would be able to do its job Keeping critical tech out of the hands of US adversaries is about to get harder for the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) with the Trump administration seemingly poised to slash its already meager budget by $20 million....

Researchers say 'proactive' approach is needed to combat global cybercrime Here's one you don't see every day: A cybersecurity vendor is admitting to breaking into a notorious ransomware crew's infrastructure and gathering data it relayed to national agencies to help victims....

All eyes on SpaceX's April cargo mission to the orbital outpost Northrop Grumman's Cygnus cargo freighter, the NG-22, is being delayed indefinitely after engineers confirmed the Pressurized Cargo Module (PCM) had sustained damage in its shipping container....

Vendors with millions in federal contracts are watching nervously Tech vendors are awaiting the outcome of a constitutional battle to decide the fate of government contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars after US President Donald Trump issued an executive order calling for the federal Department of Education to be dismantled....

Screenshot shows company head unhappy, claiming 'real CVE is pending' CrushFTP's CEO is not happy with VulnCheck after the CVE numbering authority (CNA) released an unofficial ID for the critical vulnerability in its file transfer tech disclosed almost a week ago....

'This was not good dog food' Retired Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer has taken to his YouTube channel to explain Redmond's missteps with Windows Longhorn and the background to the company's failed attempt at an XP follow-up....

Britain's biggest semiconductor plant to produce EV chips that can take the heat The former Newport Wafer Fab (NWF) facility in South Wales is getting 250 million ($323 million) to start making silicon carbide semiconductors, a year after the sale of the site was approved by UK government....

Your mouse once understood two protocols. What's your excuse? Before Bluetooth and USB, computers had PS/2 ports. Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen took another trip down memory lane this week to explain just how dumb the USB-to-PS/2 adapters that shipped with Microsoft Mouse devices really were....

As if living in Croydon wasn't bad enough The Metropolitan Police has confirmed its first permanent installation of live facial recognition (LFR) cameras is coming this summer and the lucky location will be the South London suburb of Croydon....

Data stolen included checklist for medics on how to get into vulnerable people's homes The UK's data protection watchdog is dishing out a 3.07 million ($3.95 million) fine to Advanced Computer Software Group, whose subsidiary's security failings led to a ransomware attack affecting NHS care....

If coworkers cranking out biz strategies and fussing over balance sheets seem robotic, you ain't seen nothing yet Microsoft on Wednesday introduced out two "reasoning agents" it claims can handle research and analysis projects....

Desktop users get free access - assuming they're cool with logging in and limited speeds Vivaldi has become the latest browser to include a virtual private network (VPN) option with its product, working with Proton VPN to up user privacy....

Beating a dead horse to a 4-4 beat Napster, the original file-sharing troublemaker that shook the music industry, is about to change hands once again in yet another attempt to drag the brand into relevance....

Reveals it dramatically improved IOPS and throughput' of its own storage with homebrew 'L4' automation and cache Google has revealed that it still relies on hard disk drives for most of its storage needs, but has been able to dramatically' improve the performance of its storage systems with a homebrew automated data tiering system....

Confirmed: 12,000 people let go over 12 months Rumours of swingeing layoffs at Dell were not exaggerated, a statement The Register offers after reading the hardware giant's most recent annual report which reveals its workforce shrank by 12,000 in the year to January 31st, 2025....