The Register

PLUS Vietnam's massive infosec push; Philippines telco fight; Australia dumps COVID app; and more Asia in Brief Elon Musk has written an article for the Cyberspace Administration of China's flagship magazine.…

NIST-led engineers are working on building a real-time alert system AI could help save firefighters' lives by predicting fire flashovers before they occur, according to new research published this week. …

Do we want to recognise machines as authors? The creative nature of neural networks is leading some to consider whether it might be worth changing current US laws that only grant copyright protection for works created by humans.…

Plus: How Google is using language models to improve search, and watch Heinz's AI ketchup advert In-brief Another day, another rogue AI chatbot on the internet.…

FDA says yes to the tests AI software capable of mapping tumor tissue more accurately to help surgeons treat and shrink prostate cancer using a laser-powered needle will soon be tested in real patients during clinical trials.…

Tl;DR - the news isn't good Black Hat In Brief Victor Zhora, Ukraine's lead cybersecurity official, made an unannounced visit to Black Hat in Las Vegas this week, where he spoke to attendees about the state of cyberwarfare in the country's conflict with Russia. The picture Zhora painted was bleak.…

Don't have the budget or customer base for Graviton-class silicon? Intel thinks it can help In a quest to deliver better application performance and greater efficiency, many software and hardware vendors are turning to custom silicon to achieve their goals.…

Six years on web devs finally settle on sensor privacy defenses Six years after web security and privacy concerns surfaced about ambient light sensors in mobile phones and notebooks, browser boffins have finally implemented defenses.…

There goes the weekend... A high-severity Palo Alto Networks denial-of-service (DoS) vulnerability has been exploited by miscreants looking to launch DDoS attacks, and several of the affected products won't have a patch until next week.…

Once the modchip plans are live, you can, too Black Hat A security researcher has shown how to, with physical access at least, fully take over a Starlink satellite terminal using a homemade modchip.…

Company insists it's doing so 'to honor people’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) choices' Meta's Instagram and Facebook apps on iOS devices have been injecting JavaScript code into third-party websites from their custom in-app browser, gaining access to data that would be unavailable were those pages loaded in a stand-alone, WebKit-based iOS browser.…

Don't feed the trolls? Users deem policy an attack on conservatives, dystopian, and election manipulation Twitter has announced its plans to fight misinformation during the 2022 US midterm elections, including activating its Civic Integrity Policy (CIP).…

Fashion Police chipping in on the bounty related to costliest strain of ransomware on record The US government is putting a face on a claimed member of the infamous Conti ransomware group as part of a $10 million reward for information about five of the gang's crew.…

The discovery could help scientists further understand the origins of life Moon meteorites found on Earth contain trace gasses that lend further support to the widely held belief that our largest natural satellite formed from chunks of our planet that were ejected in a massive impact.…

Another $13.7m handed out to researchers, but then again it does have an awful lot of attack surfaces Microsoft appears to have beat Google on the bug bounty front, with $13.7 million in rewards spread out over 335 researchers.…

Well, more like 4G LTE right now, and you'll probably need someone to put up the radio Amazon Web Services has waded into the private mobile network marketplace with AWS Private 5G.…

26,000 engineers and call center operators to down tools again this month The union representing upset BT workers has served notice on the one-time UK state owned telco that tens of thousands of engineers and call center operators will down tools for two more days of strikes this month.…

Latest shine on the Jammy Jellyfish brings ton of fixes to keep you working smoothly The first point-release of the newest Ubuntu is here, which marks the stage it formally becomes the new long-term-support release.…

Repurposes logic originally used for spotting variations in voltage, timing in older circuits to help performance Black Hat Intel has disclosed how it may be able to protect systems against some physical threats by repurposing circuitry originally designed to counter variations in voltage and timing that may occur as silicon circuits age.…

Ad behemoth committed to 'providing the most helpful products possible' Google is being ordered to pay A$60 million ($42.5 million) in penalties to Australia's competition and national consumer law regulator regarding the collection and use of location data on Android phones.…

Advanced's infrastructure still down and out, recovery to take weeks or more Advanced, the MSP forced to shut down some of its servers last week after identifying an "issue" with its infrastructure hosting products, has confirmed a ransomware attack and says recovery will be in the order of weeks.…

A new Windows esport event: Opening Outlook Outlook sometimes goes wrong and even Microsoft occasionally can't work out why, judging by a freshly published Microsoft 365 support article.…

Hello customer, can I help you? Ha ha, just kidding, of course I won’t Something for the Weekend "That's it! I've had enough of this! I'm leaving!"…

No Clippy, though, and that philosophy only seems to go so far Microsoft open-sourced most of its emoji library this week.…

Termin-what? Why can't I connect directly to the network On Call Is a Loose Cannon worse than a Big Cheese? What happens when the two are combined? Stir in some overconfidence and you have today's entry in the On Call archives.…

OSIRIS-Rex saw this happening. An odd meteorite suggests why and how In 2019, scientists clocked something they'd never seen before: an asteroid named Bennu appeared to be popping off swarms of pebbles. Research published Thursday may go some way to explain why.…

The renewed agreement more than doubles the DoD's deal with Joby Aviation A flying taxi company with plans to take to the skies by 2024 has just received a $45 million cash infusion from the United States Department of Defense to explore military applications.…

Some got so cranky waiting they made a t-shirt celebrating the 'CLOUD-6999' Jira ticket On July 8, 2011, Atlassian Cloud posted a Jira ticket titled "Allow custom domains for Cloud apps".…

But warns 'upcoming major release of vSphere' will break some plugins It's not often that a double dot release of a product adds significant functionality, but VMware did just that on Thursday with version 4.4.1 of its Cloud Director Availability product, which adds the ability to migrate aged and unsupported versions of vCenter to the cloud.…

Required customers to pay for software they did not receive, among other sins Australia's Federal Court has voided 34,000 contracts that Fuji Xerox's local outposts offered to local small business customers, after they were found to be unfair in many ways.…

Time to call in the legal team Black Hat Dylan Ayrey, a bug hunter and CEO of Truffle Security, discovered a big data company credential dump containing personal information belonging to about 50,000 of its users, and still hasn't fixed it. …

Got thoughts on the online panopticon? The FTC wants to hear The US Federal Trade Commission on Thursday announced an effort to formulate privacy rules to deter unwelcome online monitoring and shoddy data security.…

Most organizations don’t have the financial resources necessary to address ransomware and other cyberattacks, BlackBerry says Black Hat Many organizations are increasingly unprepared to deal with the skyrocketing costs of a ransomware attacks, at a time when the number of incidents and the payments demanded by cybercriminals are rising rapidly.…

'Until someone has to go to jail for doing it wrong the teeth are not going to be the same' Black Hat video The security industry needs to take a leaf from the manual of an industry where smart incident response is literally life and death, if it is to fix systemic problems.…

It can move without anything to push off from, but only via curved spacetime A team of scientists from Georgia Tech say they've built a robot that can move without anything to push against - a discovery that seems to violate the law of conservation momentum. …

The inside scoop on the Ukrainian IT army, and what could happen next Black Hat The hacktivist attacks that have occurred during the ongoing war in Ukraine are setting a dangerous precedent for cyber norms — and infrastructure security, according to journalist and author Kim Zetter.…

OCSF initiative will give enterprise security teams an open standard for moving and analyzing threat data Black Hat AWS and Splunk are leading an initiative aimed at creating an open standard for ingesting and analyzing data, enabling enterprise security teams to more quickly respond to cyberthreats.…

Federal Election Commission votes to let Google allow campaign email through filters The US Federal Election Commission on Thursday voted 4-1 to allow Google to create a program exempting qualified political email from Gmail spam filtering, despite emphatic objections from email users.…

Plus, spoiler alert: ransomware is gonna get a lot worse Black Hat video It turns out that ex-CIA chief information security officers don't spill secrets at bars in Vegas. Or via Zoom, while pretending to be at a Black Hat cocktail party.…

Identity of a real person was used to lend credence to a package that dropped cryptominer in memory Sonatype has unearthed yet more malware lurking on PyPI, this time a fileless Linux nasty designed to mine Monero and using the identity of a real person to lend credibility to the package.…

Don't want the services? You'll still have to pay for them, activated or not Drivers in the US and Canada are in for a bit of sticker shock as General Motors has made three years of its OnStar subscription service mandatory in many new vehicles at a cost of $1,500.…

Dell'Oro sees traditional NICs being displaced for most hyperscale cloud infrastructure SmartNICs are expected to play a significant part in growing the Ethernet adapter market, which is forecast to reach $5 billion by 2026, according to research outfit Dell'Oro.…

Failing to fix flaws, a crowded threat group scene, RaaS, and dependencies among crooks are fueling the trend Black Hat Security experts spent years warning enterprises to expect cyberattacks and to plan their defenses accordingly, now Sophos researchers are saying organizations shouldn't be surprised if they get attacked multiple times.…

RHEL SHA-ll speak unto RHEL… except from 9 to 6 If you're running a mixture of new and old RHEL versions, you may have problems SSHing from new to old. Luckily, someone has worked out a handy way around it.…

Welcome to the world of extreme modeling, techie style. How's your day going? Channel surfers seeking refuge from the world might have stumbled across an esport on ESPN2 that is as brilliant as it is horrifying.…

Even those within the agency puzzled by the SpaceX decision when 'we have the technology to improve lives now' The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has rejected Starlink's application for subsidies under the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund program.…

Technically the chip giant already owned the tech due to real inventor’s contract, according to DoJ The US Department of Justice has charged four people with conspiring to fraudulently sell a startup for $150 million to a San Diego based multinational tech company that The Reg has identified as Qualcomm.…

You might need to free up 24GB. A bug for now, but might be sign of way things are going Remember when you could run Windows from a floppy disk? The latest Windows 11 Dev Channel Insider build could need at least 24GB of free space to download and install.…

Ahmad Abouammo is facing 10-20 years in prison for leaking PII from 6,000 Twitter accounts A former Twitter employee faces up to 20 years in prison after being convicted of spying for Saudi Arabia and its royal family.…

Paving the way for the role of AI in the future of nuclear waste processing UK telephony outfit British Telecom has won a five-year deal for networking at the Sellafield nuclear site in northwest England.…