The Register

Redmond insists it's got this right and has even more impressive results to share soon Microsoft's claim of having made quantum computing breakthroughs has attracted strong criticism from scientists, but the software giant says it's work is sound - and it will soon reveal data that proves it....

Skip the schnitzel with gravy and chips for lunch - this is an experimental device for transplant candidates Australian company BiVACOR has revealed a patient implanted with its artificial heart survived for 100 days - and is still with us after receiving a donated organ....

Election infosec advisory agency also shuttered A penetration tester who worked at the US govt's CISA claims his 100-strong team was dismissed after Elon Musk's Trump-blessed DOGE unit cancelled a contract - and that more staff at the cybersecurity agency have also been let go....

Microsoft tackles 50-plus security blunders, Adobe splats 3D bugs, and Apple deals with a doozy Patch Tuesday Microsoft's Patch Tuesday bundle has appeared, with a dirty dozen flaws competing for your urgent attention - six of them rated critical and another six already being exploited by criminals....

Hold Alt + Spacebar for two seconds, and Clippy 2.0 is all ears Microsoft has added yet another Copilot tweak for Windows Insiders. Hold down Alt + Spacebar for two seconds, and the AI assistant will pop up for a voice chat....

Nothing says 'sustainable AI' like the burps of Appalachian industry Three companies in the US are teaming up to address the burgeoning energy needs of datacenters by using coal mine methane piped to on-site fuel cells at locations that are already hotspots for building bit barns....

Windows App the way ahead as support pulled from May 27 The end is nigh for Microsoft's Remote Desktop application. The IT giant will pull support on May 27 when users must transition to the corp's Windows App, with all the positives and negatives that entails....

Non-password-protected, unencrypted 108GB database ... what could possibly go wrong Exclusive More than 86,000 records containing nurses' medical records, facial images, ID documents and more sensitive info linked to health tech company ESHYFT was left sitting in a wide-open misconfigured AWS S3 bucket for months - or possibly even longer - before it was closed it last week....

Oh wow, just looks at all the scary stuff in your Windows Event Viewer The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is distributing over $25.5 million in refunds to consumers deceived by tech support scammers, averaging about $34 per person....

Researchers claim efficiency boost plus reduction in environmental harm Scientists claim to have made a breakthrough in the search for more powerful and lower-cost lithium-metal batteries by including common polymer nylon in the design....

Folks with LaserJets complain of error code even when using approved supplies Owners of HP laser printers are complaining about a firmware update that stops the hardware from printing, where the toner cartridge is not recognized even when they've got the expensive HP version installed....

Dare mighty things ... as long as we can afford it COMMENT NASA could be in line for severe cuts to its science budget, with a 50 percent reduction floated by folk in the space industry. The consequences would, according to observers, be nothing less than catastrophic....

Plus, startup's inference service makes debut on Hugging Face Cerebras has begun deploying more than a thousand of its dinner-plate sized-accelerators across North America and parts of France as the startup looks to establish itself as one of the largest and fastest suppliers of AI inference services....

First new version in about five years, but it's who did it that matters more The WINE project has put out its first release of Mono, the original FOSS .NET runtime, since it took the project over from Microsoft six months ago....

Cloudy email rises like a zombie, though its digital grave still marked by big red cross Outlook.com users on iOS trying to access their messages via Apple Mail are still struggling more than a week after users first reported service disruption, and Microsoft still hasn't confirmed the root cause....

It took a whistleblower to expose disastrous ERP go-live Birmingham City Council did not tell its official auditors about the disastrous Oracle implementation for ten months after the suite of applications went live, and appeared to obstruct access to the new system needed to complete their work....

1900 MHz band dormant since Y2K, but not available until 2029 Britain's telecoms regulator wants to repurpose unused mobile spectrum for the upcoming Emergency Services Network (ESN) and to overhaul communications in the railway sector....

Nothing like an OpenAI-powered agent leaking data or getting confused over what someone else whispered to it AI models with memory aim to enhance user interactions by recalling past engagements. However, this feature opens the door to manipulation....

Big Blue's legal eagles soar on both sides of the pond IBM scored a pair of legal wins this week: The US Supreme Court declined to reinstate a $1.6 billion judgment previously awarded to BMC Software, and the High Court in London, England, ruled in favor of Big Blue in a lawsuit against LzLabs, which was accused of misappropriating IBM's mainframe technology....

The thermosphere usually drags space junk to its doom. As it thins, ruined orbits are a possibility Earth's atmosphere is shrinking due to climate change and one of the possible negative impacts is that space junk will stay in orbit for longer, bonk into other bits of space junk, and make so much mess that low Earth orbits become less useful....

Guessed tax obligations wrong which helped to disappoint Wall Street even as sales boomed Oracle on Monday announced customers committed to $48 billion of future cloud services consumption - just $5 billion less that its annual revenue for FY 2024 - but investors aren't impressed....

Facebook giant allegedly didn't want neural networks to emit results that would give the game away A judge has found Meta must answer a claim it allegedly removed so-called copyright management information from material used to train its AI models....

Oh, and Musk blames Ukraine area' for X downtime Domain registrar, website host, and email provider Gandi.net suffered a major outage over the weekend. The latest update from the French biz, some 14 hours ago, stated it was "still working on resolving all the issues," which we understand to mean it has largely fixed itself by now....

Crooks built bots to exploit astoundingly bad quotation website and made off with data on thousands New York State has sued Allstate Insurance for operating websites so badly designed they would deliver personal information in plain-text to anyone that went looking for it....

Expired SSL cert kerfuffle leaves second-gen, Audio gadgets useless Google's second-generation Chromecast and its Chromecast Audio are suffering a major ongoing outage, with devices failing to cast due to an expired security certificate. The web giant is aware of the breakdown and says a fix is in the works....

$1M donation to inauguration fund and a personal appearance by Pichai appear to have been pointless If Google had hoped a bit of cosying up to President Trump would soften the US government's breakup demands in the wake of its search antitrust conviction, then is was seemingly mistaken....

Phishing and ancient vulns still do the trick for one of the most prolific groups around Researchers say the Sidewinder offensive cyber crew is starting to target maritime and nuclear organizations....

Center will reuse and recondition systems returned from field Chipmaking tool biz ASML plans to open a new facility in China this year amid rising trade tensions between Washington and Beijing....

Terabytes of sensitive info remain available for download Break-ins to systems hosting the data of two US healthcare organizations led to thieves making off with the personal and medical data of more than 300,000 patients....

Study finds 4 out of 6 providers don't do enough to stop impersonation Four out of six companies offering AI voice cloning software fail to provide meaningful safeguards against the misuse of their products, according to research conducted by Consumer Reports....

Experts say that the way you handle things after the criminals break in can make things better or much, much worse Feature Experiencing a ransomware infection or other security breach ranks among the worst days of anyone's life - but it can still get worse....

Staff warned that for Q1, non-compliance = 'Disciplinary action' Exclusive Vodafone is warning staff in the UK to work onsite at least eight days a month or be subject to disciplinary action from April....

Insiders say board members must be held accountable and drive positive change from the top down Analysis Walk into any hospital and ask the same question - "Which security system should we invest in?" - to both a doctor and a board member, and you may get different answers. The doctor chooses the system that leads to the most positive patient outcomes, while the board member chooses whichever solution is best for their increasingly stretched budget....

Mission-critical app migration, 'if it ain't broke...' and more. All that glitters isn't gold when it comes to biz needs Comment Administrators tend to be a conservative lot, which is bad news for tech vendors such as Microsoft that are seeking to pump their latest and greatest products into enterprises customers via subscriptions....

Space is the place? Not if you're nuts about neutrinos Opinion High energy neutrinos are the coolest particles in astrophysics. Born in distant cosmic cataclysms, they speed through the universe almost as if it wasn't there. With no charge and a truly tiny rest mass - perhaps a million times lighter than an electron, but who knows - they interact with virtually nothing....

Using one green screen to manage multiple machines needs more than a Friday afternoon brain Who, Me? Shifting focus from weekend fun to the reality of a return to work can be hard, so The Register tries to ease the transition with a fresh instalment of "Who, Me?", our reader-contributed column that tells your stories of making mistakes and making it out alive afterwards....

Likening memory safety bugs to smallpox may not soothe sensitive C coders Rust is alive and well in the Linux kernel and is expected to translate into noticeable benefits shortly, though its integration with the largely C-oriented codebase still looks uneasy....

Prompts see it scour the web for info and turn it into decent documents at reasonable speed Chinese researchers' AI prowess is again a hot topic after a startup called Monica.im last week revealed Manus", a service it bills as a general agent" that might improve on tools offered by Western companies....

It's just one of 6,000 apps that New Zealand thinks might be best tamed with ERP The body that runs New Zealand's public health system uses a single Excel spreadsheet as the primary source of data to consolidate and manage its finances, which aren't in great shape perhaps due to the sheet's shortcomings....

Also, phone cleaner apps are a data-sucking scam, Singapore considering the literal rod for scammers, and more Infosec in Brief Microsoft has spotted a malvertising campaign that downloaded nastyware hosted on GitHub and exposed nearly a million devices to information thieves....

PLUS: Malaysia teams with Arm for local chip designs; NTT warns of possible breach; Samsung strikers settle; and more Asia in Brief India's government has proposed giving its tax authorities sweeping powers to access private email systems and applications....

Meta says it cut CPU usage by 20% through kernel-level profiling. Just FYI Meta says it has managed to reduce the CPU cycles of its top services by 20 percent through its Strobelight profiling orchestration suite, which relies on the open source eBPF project....

iPhone giant compartmentalizes OS for the sake of security Apple has been working to harden the XNU kernel that powers its various operating systems, including iOS and macOS, with a feature called "exclaves."...

Researchers find AI isn't ready to help with moral decision making Is AI an appropriate source of moral guidance about which patients should be given kidney transplants?...

Mozilla sells ads, Google limits blocking them - it's time for stricter measures A new, lightweight version of Pi-Holeis here. Just how easy is it to block advertising on your home network?...

IsDavisLuEnabledInActiveDirectory? Not any more. IsDavisLuGuilty? Yes. IsDavisLuFacingJail? Also yes A federal jury in Cleveland has found a senior software developer guilty of sabotaging his employer's systems - and he's now facing a potential ten years behind bars....

Second time unlucky for Intuitive Machines, but hey, at least we got 250MB of data from it The Athena lander, which touched down on the Moon on Thursday and promptly fell over, has been declared dead by its operators....

With no allowance to sell and little room to buy, and markets on the slide, it's UB40 time: Red, red, whine Comment It's official: President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday to create a US Bitcoin reserve and stockpile of related digital assets, though instead of boosting the value of the coins, the market reacted negatively to the news....

To boldly go where HPE and Raspberry Pi have been for a while Axiom Space plans to send a shoebox-sized node running Red Hat Device Edge to the International Space Station (ISS)....

$96B in transactions, some even labeled 'dirty funds,' since 2019, say prosecutors The Feds today revealed more details about the US Secret Service-led Garantex takedown, a day after seizing websites and freezing assets belonging to the Russian cryptocurrency exchange in coordination with German and Finnish law enforcement agencies....