The Register

So you want to go to the Red Planet. How deep are your pockets and how much time do you have? Comment "America is going to Mars," said Elon Musk at yesterday's inauguration of US President Donald Trump. America is already there, thanks to decades of robotic exploration....

Under Digital Services Act, monitors will be allowed to report abusive language and platforms should respond in 1 day Online platform companies, including X and Meta, have signed up to a new code of conduct aimed at targeting online hate speech, which the European Commission has now baked into the Digital Services Act....

It's a feature not a bug, and what the US electorate voted for, says analyst As US president Donald Trump's inauguration passes into history, tech leaders face uncertainty as they wait to see if repeated promises of global US import tariffs are put into action....

Incident response protocols engaged following claims of source code burglary Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is probing assertions made by prolific Big Tech intruder IntelBroker that they broke into the US corporation's systems and accessed source code, among other things....

From fighters to friends in six months, despite AWS voting against it Exclusive Microsoft is to become the latest member of CISPE months after negotiating a settlement with the trade association of European cloud providers over alleged anti-competitive software practices. However, not all in the group are happy with the enrollment....

Ring a bell? Suite of tools named after Yes Minister's master of manipulation The UK government is striving to end its checkered record in managing large-scale projects with a "plan to put technology to work across public services."...

Supermarket taking 'pragmatic approach' to 'Europe's largest IT transformation program' Asda has postponed the tech transition of 55 stores to its new systems as US retail giant Walmart continues to support IT at outlets it sold to the new owner in 2021....

Now if only the councils could afford to fill them An oft-repeated myth is that potholes form through a combination of surface cracks, water, and traffic, but they're actually caused by chronic levels of underinvestment in public infrastructure....

And possibly even more so if you don't start planning yours soon If the changes Broadcom brought to VMware have you thinking of a move to an alternative virtualization platform, expect a long, costly, and risky project - and perhaps a longer, costlier, and riskier one if you put off pondering the move....

Geopolitical rumblings one day, geological rumblings the next Taiwan has experienced an earthquake so significant that chipmaking champ TSMC has shuttered plants....

US Digital Service re-named and told to audit government tech and work on data-sharing US President Donald Trump has re-named the US Digital Service the Department of Government Efficiency and given it a mission to modernize government technology....

President Trump allows vid app to keep running for 75 days while he reviews security concerns and develops a policy Updated China appears to have softened its stance on the possible sale of TikTok's US operations and is now perhaps open to the idea....

Semantic indexing does some discreet rifling through local drawers of Insiders Windows Search is improved in the latest Dev Channel Windows Insider build, but you'll need a Snapdragon-powered Copilot+ PC to use it....

Both the Ubuntu and Debian-based editions get Cinnamon 6.4 and other goodies It's a bit later than we were expecting, but the latest Mint is here and should start to be offered as an upgrade soon....

Cloud giant explains its thinking behind support for Apache open table format AWS bet on the Apache Iceberg open table format (OTF) across its analytics, machine learning, and storage stack as a concerted response to demand from customers already using its popular S3 object storage....

Taipei invites infosec bods to come and play on its home turf Picture this: It's 2030 and China's furious with Taiwan after the island applies to the UN to be recognized as an independent state. After deciding on a full military invasion, China attempts to first cripple its rebellious neighbor's critical infrastructure....

Ready or not, here I come Microsoft has begun distributing Windows 11 24H2 to user devices as the company enters the next stage of the operating system's rollout....

Only one called exploding a rocket over the Caribbean 'entertainment' SpaceX is not the only company involved in a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) mishap inquiry. Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin has also come under scrutiny after losing its New Glenn rocket's first stage....

Crypto critics unhappy as BTC hits all-time high and Melania launches her own currency Donald Trump, US president again by the time many of you read this, launched his own cryptocurrency -$TRUMP - on the Solana blockchain network on Friday night. By the weekend, it had hit a market cap of nearly $15 billion, although by Sunday, that value dropped when First Lady Melania Trump launched her own meme coin....

Clear rules and guaranteed consequences concentrate the mind wonderfully. Just ask a Russian Opinion "As obsolete as warships in the Baltic" was a great pop lyric in Prefab Sprout's 1985 gem, Faron Young. Great, but ironically obsolete itself. Sweden has just deployed multiple warships in that selfsame sea to guard against the very modern menace of underwater cable cutting....

Students have work to complete at home in the meantime A UK high school will have to close for at least two days, today and tomorrow, after becoming the latest public-sector victim of ransomware criminals....

Your battery might be flat, but the Wi-Fi signal is going to be great UK telecom giant BT is pulling the plug on its EV charging ambitions after falling a long way short of the 60,000 street cabinets it reckoned could be repurposed....

A whole different kind of 'technical debt' turned into real-world trouble Who, Me? Accidents will happen, and every Monday The Register celebrates them - and your escape from the consequences - in a fresh instalment of Who, Me? It's the reader-contributed column that details the downside of working in tech....

'Minor issue' with showing accounting customers 'unrelated business information' required repairs Sage Group plc has confirmed it temporarily suspended its Sage Copilot, an AI assistant for the UK-based business software maker's accounting tools, this month after it blurted customer information to other users....

While Microsoft pushes AI PC experiences, Nvidia is busy wooing developers Comment Nvidia is the uncontested champion of AI infrastructure - at least in the datacenter. In the emerging field of AI PCs, things aren't so clear cut....

PLUS: Allstate sued for allegedly tracking drivers; Dutch DDoS; More fake jobs from Pyongyang; and more Infosec in brief Hogwarts doesn't teach an incantation that could have saved Harry Potter publisher Scholastic from feeling the power of an online magician who made off with millions of customer records - except perhaps the wizardry of multifactor authentication....

PLUS: Salt Typhoon and IT worker scammers sanctioned; Alibaba Cloud's K8s go global; Amazon acquires Indian BNPL company Asia In Brief When food delivery superapps" started operations in Indonesia, users started putting on weight - and that's not an entirely bad thing....

Incoming president promises to allow ongoing operations for 90 days just as made-in-China app started to go dark US president-elect Donald Trump appears to have proposed the government he will soon lead should acquire half of made-in-China social media service TikTok's stateside operations....

The S in LLM stands for Security OpenAI's ChatGPT crawler appears to be willing to initiate distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on arbitrary websites, a reported vulnerability the tech giant has yet to acknowledge....

Security feature widens out to more Windows 11 users, including those at home Microsoft is trying a new way of enabling Administrator Protection in Windows 11. The latest Windows Insider Canary build adds a setting that removes the requirement for IT admins to activate the feature....

Gaia makes its final science observation The European Space Agency's (ESA) Milky Way mapper Gaia has completed the sky-scanning phase of its mission, racking up more than three trillion observations over the past decade....

With added manga and snark. What's not to like? Opinion Windows 1 and 2 flopped almost as badly as OS/2 did. How did Microsoft stage one of the greatest comebacks ever with Windows 3?...

Cyber agency too 'far off mission,' says incoming boss Kristi Noem America's lead cybersecurity agency on Friday made one final scream into the impending truth void about election security and the role CISA plays in maintaining it....

Third-party supplier blamed as folks left unable to access funds Capital One is still battling to fix whatever brought down its systems on Wednesday, which has left people unable to access their money....

Plus: Uncle Sam is cross with this one Chinese biz over Salt Typhoon mega-snooping Decades-old legislation requiring American telcos to lock down their systems to prevent foreign snoops from intercepting communications isn't mere decoration on the pages of law books - it actually means carriers need to secure their networks, the FCC has huffed....

Ransomware, AI, secure software, digital IDs - there's something for everyone in the presidential directive Analysis Joe Biden, in the final days of his US presidency, issued another cybersecurity order that is nearly as vast in scope as it is late in the game....

Beijing investigating claims of unfair competition in mature semiconductors The "chip wars" between the US and China show no sign of cooling off as Beijing prepares to examine whether America is unfairly subsidizing its own semiconductor companies. Meanwhile, Washington's latest export restrictions have angered even some of its allies....

Competition hots up with Ivanti over who can have the worst start to a year Fortinet has confirmed that previous analyses of records leaked by the Belsen Group are indeed genuine FortiGate configs stolen during a zero-day raid in 2022....

With Biden reportedly planning to skirt enforcement and kick the can to Trump, this saga might still not be over Updated The US Supreme Court has upheld a law requiring TikTok to either divest from its Chinese parent ByteDance or face a ban in the United States. The decision eliminates the final legal obstacle to the federal government forcing a shutdown of the platform for US users on January 19....

Commission insists the timing has nothing to do with Musk meddling in German politics ahead of election The European Commission is stepping up its ongoing investigation of Elon Musk's X with a request to examine recent changes made to the platform's recommendation algorithms....

Turns out tool does both file transfers and security fixes fast Don't panic. Yes, there were a bunch of CVEs, affecting potentially hundreds of thousands of users, found in rsync in early December - and made public on Tuesday - but a fixed version came out the same day, and was further tweaked for better compatibility the following day....

15 million system to serve as testbed for larger Herder supercomputer coming in 2027 Hundreds of AMD APUs fired up on Thursday as Germany's High-Performance Computing Center (HLRS) at the University of Stuttgart announced the completion of its latest supercomputer dubbed Hunter....

Many users less than impressed by unexpected arrival of AI assistant in Word Copilot is coming to Microsoft 365 Personal and Family, and Vulture Central has had some hands-on experience with the generative AI assistant's attempts to be helpful....

Summaries will return when Apple Intelligence has 'improved' Apple has released a new beta of iOS 18.3 and tacitly admitted that, yes, its AI-generated notification summaries need a bit more work....

With a near half-billion-pound price hike bringing contract value to 1.4B IBM has secured a deal with the UK Home Office to supply user services for the troubled Emergency Service Network (ESN) upgrade, providing voice and data communications after Motorola withdrew from the project....

Pastes allegedly stolen documents on leak site with 600K demand Another year and yet another UK local authority has been pwned by a ransomware crew. This time it's Gateshead Council in North East England at the hands of the Medusa group....

Home Office, Department for Work and Pensions supplier in hands of FRP Advisory A self-described specialist supplier of "transformational data and AI solutions" to the UK government has called in the administrative receivers....

Fixed the problem anyway - with no approval for a purchase and no permission to use a device On Call When the weekend rolls around, nobody needs permission to do whatever they desire. Unless, of course, they're required to be available to support tech - a restriction we mark each week in On Call, the column that celebrates fine fixing feats achieved despite the footling of flummoxed fools....

If you want a picture of the future, imagine your infosec team stamping on software forever Microsoft brainiacs who probed the security of more than 100 of the software giant's own generative AI products came away with a sobering message: The models amplify existing security risks and create new ones....

Weirdly, this shows the weakness of hosted Windows with an admission about vidchats Amazon Web Services has flicked the switch on a pair of workstation-grade cloud desktops that, ironically, highlight a problem with the tech....