The Register

Test flight seven did better on the ground with a successful booster catch SpaceX has again lost a Starship, after the seventh test flight of the spacecraft ended with a rapid unscheduled disassembly", but is nonetheless celebrating the mission as it ended with the second successful catch of its Super Heavy booster....

Some of you have apparently already botched chatbots or allowed shadow AI' to creep in Cisco and Nvidia have both recognized that as useful as today's AI may be, the technology can be equally unsafe and/or unreliable - and have delivered tools in an attempt to help address those weaknesses....

We'll defo ask for permission next time, automaker tells FTC General Motors on Thursday said that it has reached a settlement with the FTC "to address privacy concerns about our now-discontinued Smart Driver program."...

Welcome to a decade where the oligarchs are no longer silent in the shadows US President Joe Biden gave his final address to the nation on Wednesday, and said America was visibly sliding into an oligopoly aided by a flood of online disinformation....

Department of Transportation wants in on last-minute Biden administration action too The Department of Transportation has joined the flurry of last-minute actions by the Biden administration with a lawsuit accusing Southwest Airlines of operating chronically delayed flights....

FSB cyberspies venture into a new app for espionage, Microsoft says Star Blizzard, a prolific phishing crew backed by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), conducted a new campaign aiming to compromise WhatsApp accounts and gain access to their messages and data, according to Microsoft....

You've got to spend money - like $36 billion+ - to make, er, AI chips TSMC is bumping capital expenditure in 2025 to between $38 billion and $42 billion in anticipation of scooping up more chip manufacturing contracts in the field of AI processors....

That's in addition to the $4.5M fine paid to three state AGs last year Enzo Biochem has settled a consolidated class-action lawsuit relating to its 2023 ransomware incident for $7.5 million....

The hyperscale plant is designed to produce tens of thousands of AVs a year Anduril has found a new home in Middle America with confirmation today that the defense tech maker plans to build its first hyperscale manufacturing facility in Columbus, Ohio....

Power-induced glitches, lasers, and electromagnetic fields are all tools of the trade Raspberry Pi has given out prizes for extracting a secret value from the one-time-programmable (OTP) memory of the Raspberry Pi RP2350 microcontroller - awarding a pile of cash to all four entrants....

Chocolate Factory slurps own dogfood, sheds drudgery in specific areas Google, which peddles AI software with as much giddy enthusiasm as Microsoft, reports dogfooding its own AI concoction and leaving the lab with a pleasant taste in its mouth....

Plus: Bit barns' demand for water, land, and power could breed 'growing opposition' from residents The datacenter industry looks set for a turbulent 2025 as AI growth threatens to trump sustainability commitments and authorities are likely to see growing public hostility to new projects....

Regulator asks people to link their credit cards, mobile accounts, or face scans for smut use to protect kids The UK's communications regulator has published guidance for website operators aimed at preventing under-18s from accessing pornographic content online via "highly effective age assurance" techniques....

The eighth point-release of Bookworm - yes, you read that right - and the latest MX with new Xfce Debian 12.9 - the latest point-release of Debian "Bookworm" - emerged at the weekend and coming hot on its heels is one of the more interesting downstreams, MX Linux 23.5....

Jeff Bezos' space company achieves milestone with payload delivered Jeff Bezos joined the orbital elite with the launch of Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket this morning....

Assist Security's client list includes fashion icons, critical infrastructure orgs A London-based private security company allegedly left more than 120,000 files available online via an unsecured server, an infoseccer told The Register....

Free Software Foundation Europe and others urge European Commission to double down on DMA Digital rights advocacy organizations contend that Apple has failed to comply with its interoperability obligations under the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA)....

NAO report highlights 3B cost overruns and 29 years of cumulative delays in IT projects UK government plans its technology purchases with limited assessment of technical feasibility, according to a spending watchdog's analysis of the 14-billion-a-year procurement of digital services....

As the ESA celebrates planned break-up of its solar blotter-spotter India's Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has successfully docked a pair of satellites, making the nation the fourth to achieve the feat....

Sophgo scores a place on Entity List, Indian nuclear boffins taken off Chinese chip designer Sophgo, a suspected supplier of AI silicon to Huawei, has been added to the USA's Entity List" of orgs felt to represent a national security risk and therefore prohibited from working with American companies unless a license is issued to allow such dealings....

In a preview of x86_64 VMs running on Apple silicon, so it's excusable for now Desktop hypervisor specialist Parallels has released an early technology preview of code that allows virtual machines running OSes coded for the x86_64 architecture, such as Microsoft Windows, to run on Apple's Arm-powered silicon....

System to feature hundreds of liquid-cooled Blackwell systems Nvidia is constructing a 30-megawatt research-and-development supercomputer stuffed with its latest-generation Blackwell GPUs in northern Israel at an estimated cost of half a billion dollars....

Watchdog alleged it had no SIEM or MFA, orders rapid adoption of basic infosec tools GoDaddy has failed to protect its web-hosting platform with even basic infosec tools and practices since 2018, according to the FTC, but the internet giant won't face any immediate consequences for its many alleged acts of omission....

Right after one of its drones crashed into an aircraft fighting California wildfires? Great timing Drone maker DJI has decided to scale back its geofencing restrictions, meaning its software won't automatically stop operators from flying into areas flagged as no-fly zones....

Incoming Trump-picked watchdog boss dissents, calls suit 'hasty' and 'deeply imprudent,' so will it stick? Updated America's top consumer watchdog has sued tractor maker John Deere for monopolizing tech repair services for its machinery, though whether the lawsuit will survive the pending presidential transition remains to be seen....

We are only seeing 'the tip of the iceberg,' Easterly warns Beijing's Salt Typhoon cyberspies had been seen in US government networks before telcos discovered the same foreign intruders in their own systems, according to CISA boss Jen Easterly....

Half the number of roles axed, and yes - you can keep blaming AI The IT jobs market has shrunk for a second year in a row, says tech consultancy Janco Associates, but at least things weren't as bad in 2024 as they were in 2023....

You may not need to go full Juggalo for the sake of privacy Researchers at cyber-defense contractor PeopleTec have found that facial-recognition algorithms' focus on specific areas of the face opens the door to subtler surveillance avoidance strategies....

Don't believe the hype? GPU maker jumps on the bandwagon anyway A week after Nvidia chief Jensen Huang demolished the market valuations of listed quantum computing brands by saying the technology is 20 years away from being useful, the GPU maker has confirmed it is hosting a quantum computing day....

Microsoft starts 2025 as it hopefully doesn't mean to go on Devices that have Citrix's Session Recording software installed are having problems completing this month's Microsoft Patch Tuesday update, which includes important fixes....

Babel Fish like ML model emerges after training on 4.5 million hours of multilingual spoken audio Meta has developed a machine learning model its researchers claim offers near-instant speech-to-speech translation between around 36 languages....

Bubble? What bubble? Fears of an AI bubble have yet to scare off venture capitalists and private equity firms from pumping billions of dollars into the GPU-packed datacenters at the heart of the machine-learning craze....

US, Japan, South Korea vow to intensify counter efforts North Korean blockchain bandits stole more than half a billion dollars in cryptocurrency in 2024 alone, the US, Japan, and South Korea say....

She doesn't feel pity, remorse, or fear, but she'll craft a polite email message as she turns you down Interview Mega HR, a Florida-based human resources startup, today launched an AI agent service called Megan that the biz claims can automate most recruiting and hiring tasks while improving communication with job applicants....

Energy consumption set to become a key performance indicator by 2027 Most businesses rushing to adopt AI are unprepared for the energy demands it'll place on their infrastructure, and few have a handle on the power consumption of AI systems or the implications for their datacenters....

Threat to quit still preferred to commuting on packed public transport Years after the pandemic reshaped working practices across the world, many staff are still resisting corporate efforts to get them to return to the office preferring instead to quit in favor of a more flexible employer....

Scheme involving bribes, bid rigging and insider info may have cost US taxpayers $1.3M Four defendants have pleaded guilty in a US government IT procurement fraud case, which prosecutors claim has cost taxpayers at least $1.3 million in losses....

Blue Ghost's first time, and second time lucky for Japanese company ispace? SpaceX has successfully completed the 100th launch of a Falcon rocket from pad 39A and sent two landers on their way to the Moon....

Collective Proceedings Order seeks 1.5B from iGiant Seven weeks of court action began this week as a case over alleged breaches of competition law by Apple is heard at the UK's Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT)....

Rising costs blamed, although any excuse to do more with less British companies are looking to AI as a way of cutting investment in staff, according to new research....

Good ol' spreadsheet data could benefit from 'revolutionary' approach to ML inferences Move over ChatGPT and DALL-E: Spreadsheet data is getting its own foundation machine learning model, allowing users to immediately make inferences about new data points for data sets with up to 10,000 rows and 500 columns....

Azure Local is about hybrid management, not hybrid resource pools, and is catching up with virtual rivals Microsoft's latest on-prem Azure offering is more about unified management than hybrid cloud as an enabler of elasticity or flexible resource pools....

No such problems at Airbus, which cruised at a high level and shipped almost two planes a day last year Beleaguered aerospace outfit Boeing has revealed how many commercial aircraft it shipped in 2024, and the news isn't good....

This'll be good for you, don't you worry, CFO tells venture fund while pulling back the sling Stricken silicon giant Intel has decided it doesn't want to be the sole investor in its venture capital operation, so will spin it out for others to plow money into....

Plus: SpaceX rocket re-entries spark airline delays America's financial watchdog has sued Elon Musk, alleging the billionaire failed to disclose his acquisition of Twitter shares in a timely manner and was therefore able to acquire the social network for $150 million less than would otherwise have been the case....

Plus: Excel hell, angst for Adobe fans, and life's too Snort for Cisco Patch Tuesday The first Patch Tuesday of 2025 has seen Microsoft address three under-attack privilege-escalation flaws in its Hyper-V hypervisor, plus plenty more problems that deserve your attention....

SCOTUS unlikely to save it, no time to find a buyer. Hi, Xiaohongshu! Comment TikTok is just about out of options to save itself from a looming ban in the United States, though that hasn't stopped one US senator from planning a bill to extend the divest-or-dumped deadline another 270 days past this Sunday....

Insurance giant sued by Texas for using surveillance without consent to jack up premiums, deny coverage Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Monday filed a lawsuit against Allstate Corporation and its mobile analytics subsidiary, Arity, alleging the American insurance giant conspired with mobile app developers to collect telematics data on millions of motorists without consent, in violation of consumer protection laws....

Hey, Xi: Zai jian! The FBI, working with French cops, obtained nine warrants to remotely wipe PlugX malware from thousands of Windows-based computers that had been infected by Chinese government-backed criminals, according to newly unsealed court documents....

Watt's the problem? Not enough energy to win the arms race? US President Joe Biden on Tuesday signed an executive order that aims to ensure American AI leadership doesn't lag because of shoddy energy infrastructure....