The Register

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.…

More customers also adopting the server maker's green computing products, CEO says Supermicro, server provider to the hyperscale cloud providers, has delivered better than expected figures for its fiscal Q4 2022, attributing it to a growing number of customers adopting its rack-scale solutions.…

A fork of Redo Rescue that outdoes the original – and beats Clonezilla too Version 2.4 of Rescuezilla - which describes itself as the "Swiss Army Knife of System Recovery," - is here and based on Ubuntu 22.04.…

The collaborative effort pits supercomputers against the agency's corrosive reactor research After more than 50 years, molten salt nuclear reactors might be making a comeback. The US Department of Energy (DoE) has tapped Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) to lead a $9.25 million study into the structural properties and materials necessary to build them at scale.…

Internetwork of satellite networks advances to 'actually building' stuff stage DARPA's attempt to build an internetwork of communications satellites – which operates under the fabulous name Space-BACN – has tapped Intel, SpaceX and others to build kit that will make its planned "Space-Based Adaptive Communications Node" a reality.…

Voice-phished their way in, but Switchzilla claims no damage done Cisco disclosed on Wednesday that its corporate network was accessed by cyber-criminals in May after an employee's personal Google account was compromised – an act a ransomware gang named "Yanluowang" has now claimed as its work.…

Invested $20 million in 2000 and will pocket $34 billion and keep a slice worth more than that – for now Japan's SoftBank Group will offload almost half its holdings in Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, netting over $20 billion to help it record a profit but casting doubts over Alibaba's prospects.…

You may have had your fill of chips – but AWS, GCP, and Azure are still hungry, analyst tells El Reg The hyperscalers and public cloud providers are barreling ahead, unfazed by a rapidly deteriorating economic outlook, according to a recent Dell'Oro Group report.…

The Open Network for Digital Commerce could hardly ask for a more credible participant Microsoft has decided to open a store in India's Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) – an effort the nation hopes will make it harder for the likes of Amazon and Walmart-controlled Flipkart to dominate e-commerce in the world's second most populous nation.…

Ethical hackers, but for privacy programs Black Hat Miscreants aren't only working to exploit flaws in an enterprise's security posture, they're also looking for holes in organizations' privacy programs to steal user data, according to Meta's Scott Tenaglia.…

Guess what? Open source security still has gaps The Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF), as its name plainly states, aims to help make open source software more secure, but improvements flowing from its efforts are hard to find.…

Lawyers at Google are unsure if they can patent chip floorplans created by machines The question of whether AI-generated outputs can be patented is impacting how technology companies can protect their intellectual property.…

Black Hat kicks off with call for single infosec agency with real clout and less confused crossover Black Hat It's time to reorganize the US government and create a new agency focused solely on on digital risk management services, according to former CISA director Chris Krebs.…

iMessage talks to Android users via outdated SMS/MMS, ad giant complains Google has launched a campaign to pressure Apple to adopt Rich Communications Services (RCS), a protocol used by most mobile industry vendors but not the iPhone maker.…

Katie Moussouris tells it like it is Black Hat With the world's largest collection of security folk gathering in Las Vegas for the Black Hat conference there are encouraging signs that the US government might actually be getting smarter about hiring.…

'If your business model depends on more aggressive surveillance, maybe you need a new business model' Private Facebook chats between a Nebraska mother and her daughter has been used by law enforcement to build a criminal case against the teen for getting a now-illegal abortion in her home state.…

Attack origins point to April 2021 first strike on Japanese target The Maui ransomware that has been used against US healthcare operations has been linked to Andariel, a North Korean state-sponsored threat with links to the notorious Lazarus Group.…

Leave it to the economy to throw another wrench into the semiconductor supply chain In the US, chipmakers and suppliers are scrambling to find a place in line for the more than $52 billion in subsidies and tax breaks up for grabs but that surge in semiconductor demand appears to be faltering.…

Supermaterial created from heated scales. Sorry about the smell Scientists in Japan have figured out a new way to create sustainable LEDs: by microwaving fish.…

Well, until they find out that you've left, but at least they won't be immediately notified of your every move Many years ago, in the bowels of Silicon Valley, some genius realized that people enjoy getting notifications through social media – those little pings of dopamine that make you feel like you matter.…

Disclosing exploits, however, will earn you $100k Simply finding vulnerabilities and patching them "is totally useless," according to Google's Eduardo Vela, who heads the cloud giant's product security response team.…

Older operating systems excluded from the 4.8.1 release party Microsoft has updated its venerable .NET Framework once more, this time to add native Arm64 support while also removing support for some older operating systems.…

Market immediately reacts as tech titan looks to free up cash for 'unlikely' Twitter deal Tesla supremo Elon Musk has sold $6.88 billion worth of shares in the auto company, saying it is in case some equity partners exit ahead of an eventual Twitter deal, with both events deemed "unlikely."…