The Register

iBiz shifts data to iPhone in patent workaround Apple will deliver a software update for recent US Apple Watch models to reimplement the ability to measure blood oxygen levels, a process known as pulse oximetry....

Some custom malware, some legit software tools At least a dozen ransomware gangs have incorporated kernel-level EDR killers into their malware arsenal, allowing them to bypass almost every major endpoint security tool on the market, escalate privileges, and ultimately steal and encrypt data before extorting victims into paying a ransom....

Chinese AI model dev still plans to use homegrown silicon for inferencing Unhelpful Huawei AI chips are reportedly why Chinese model dev DeepSeek's next-gen LLMs are taking so long....

Pilots may soon have to compete against frakking toasters for the title of Top Gun That autonomous fighter jet from DARPA is so 2023 that the agency is already well into a bid to give future combat jets autonomy for multi-ship missions over the horizon....

Government and police employee credentials sold at bargain-basement prices on underground forums Criminals are selling access to FBI and other law enforcement and government email accounts to other criminals via dark web marketplaces for as little as $40....

Datacenter giant looks for energy sources outside the grid Updated Equinix is doing deals with alternative energy providers to support the needs of its datacenters globally, including nuclear options and fuel cell deployments, as the AI fad continues to push a bit barn build boom....

Researchers had to notify over 100 vendors of flaw that builds on 2023's Rapid Reset with neat twist past usual mitigations Security researchers Gal Bar Nahum, Anat Bremler-Barr, and Yaniv Harel have published details of a "common design flaw" in implementations of the HyperText Transfer Protocol 2 (HTTP/2) allowing those with ill intent to create "massive Denial of Service attacks"....

The agency offered some tips for operational technology environments, where attacks are rising CISA is urging companies with operational technology environments to set a better cybersecurity posture, and not just by adopting some new best practices and purchasing some new software....

Lessons of Windows 8 unlearned as software giant gives users what it thinks they need COMMENT Microsoft Windows and Devices boss, Pavan Davuluri, has shed light on plans for the flagship OS. Voice, touch, and pen control will all be part of a multimodal future, alongside a raft of inevitable AI features....

Turkish exchange is the latest victim of a recent spate of major crypto thefts Turkish cryptocurrency exchange BtcTurk is halting all deposits and withdrawals amid fears that blockchain bandits succeeded in significantly compromising its hot wallets....

Windows 11 24H2 fixes fail from Windows Server Update Services Microsoft has admitted that the August patch Tuesday update might fail to install through Windows Server Update Services (WSUS), but it's ok, admins. Home users are "unlikely to experience this issue."...

US DoE names firms for Pilot Program to show how it could be done America's Department of Energy (DoE) has named ten companies it will work with to test advanced atomic reactor projects outside of the agency's world-famous national laboratories, in line with President Trump's Nuclear Reactor Pilot Program....

Making apps is as easy as selling t-shirts, claims vibe coding startup Hands On Create has declared its vibe coding platform, now called Anything, production-ready at version 1.0, with support for both web and mobile applications - although our quick hands-on generated a host of errors....

Brits wake to a beeping nightmare as Amazon's AI assistant forgets how to set - or stop - alarms Amazon's Alexa is on the fritz, bungling alarms and timers and leaving some UK users trapped in an endless wake-up call....

Moscow-linked miscreants accused of swiping sealed US court files and fiddling with a Norwegian dam's floodgates Russian attackers reportedly spent months rummaging through the US federal court's creaky case-management system, while Norway reckons the same Kremlin-friendly miscreants took control of a dam's controls - a transatlantic double-act in legal files and floodgates....

Microsoft cap-ex larger than output of Uganda and Google trumps Slovenia... all in the name of AI The level of investment pouring into new infrastructure from datacenter operators is comparable to the turnover of some mid-sized economies....

Nearly 100,000 records allegedly up for sale after apparent breach at booking system Italy's digital agency (AGID) says a cybercriminal's claims concerning a spate of data thefts affecting various hotels across the country are genuine....

WebSocket connections wrapped as streams, MAUI fixes and more as latest LTS version nears release candidate stage Microsoft has released Preview 7 of its .NET 10 runtime and frameworks, with new features including wrapping WebSocket connections as streams, improved passkey authentication in ASP.NET, and new features and fixes for MAUI (Multi-platform App UI)....

Intruders accessed important systems but tells customers their data is safe A UK-based multinational that provides tech stock availability tools is telling customers that its website outage is due to a cyber attack....

Social media marketeers getting better at concealing promos in posts Boffins have peered deep into the eyes of social media users and come to the conclusion that they're not great at spotting when an influencer is trying to sell them something....

Success does not guarantee succession Opinion The Linux kernel is a remarkable creation. It has achieved a fundamental status in the industry, and thus the world, unmatched in scope, stability, and reputation. It powers lightbulbs to supercomputers, not to mention the billion-plus global army of Android. It covers a host of processors, a massive array of supported devices and an unparalleled choice of distributions....

Are UK taxpayers getting real value from SPA24 - or just high cost convenience? Register debate series The UK government's five-year Strategic Partnership Agreement (SPA24) with Microsoft is set to see public sector bodies spend around 1.9 billion each year-nearly 9 billion in total over half a decade. It's a vast sum for software and services, and one that deserves close scrutiny....

Meanwhile, the clock's ticking for the previous FOSS Redis Redis 8.2 is FOSS again, albeit under a different license, and has multiple performance enhancements. Meanwhile, Redis 7.2, the last of the old FOSS versions, is nearing its end of life. New version, or new Valkey?...

Human usage set to double, AI agents might need them too Analyst firm Gartner has declared hosted PCs are now often cheaper to operate than on-prem laptops, and two years away from being cost-effective for 95 percent of workers....

$79 million is a small price to pay to keep China at bay Australia will help to fund the development of two datacenters in the Pacific island nation Vanuatu, an example of tech infrastructure becoming an important diplomatic consideration....

Big Tech is spending vastly more on AI infrastructure but Switchzilla thinks its piece of the pie will be fat and juicy Cisco sold twice as much AI kit as it forecast during its 2025 fiscal year and expects the market for binary brainboxes will continue to boost its bank balance in future....

A tool can become a crutch When doctors use AI image recognition technology to spot and remove precancerous growths known as adenomas during colonoscopies, the detection rate is higher. But take the AI away, and their rate drops to below where it was in the first place....

The world's most powerful known supercomputer stretches its legs with some life-saving science Eggheads working on El Capitan, the world's most powerful publicly known supercomputer, have developed a new tsunami forecasting system that could dramatically improve response times in coastal communities....

Never mind the errors, we've had it with "You're absolutely right!" Developers using Anthropic's Claude Code wish that the AI coding assistant would stop being so effusively supportive....

OPM is the fourth federal agency to get a list of outstanding items from GAO in past two weeks Uncle Sam's HR department has become the latest agency to get a nastygram from federal auditors, who are hoping its recently-appointed director can get his house in order better than his predecessor....

If there's smoke? Fortinet warned customers about a critical FortiSIEM bug that could allow an unauthenticated attacker to execute unauthorized commands, and said working exploit code for the flaw has been found in the wild....

Gotta pay for all those GPUs somehow Comment For all the superlative-laden claims, OpenAI's new top model appears to be less of an advancement and more of a way to save compute costs - something that hasn't exactly gone over well with the company's most dedicated users....

Early 2000s joke now serious problem for coffee shops in the Land of the Morning Calm Take a look at the internet of decades past, and you'll find plenty of jokes about bringing a desktop computer to a coffee shop. For South Korean Starbucks stores, however, that old-time meme is anything but in the past....

Hurricane data, schmurricane data: Have you heard about that Sun burp? The more our Earth-bound society learns to rely on electronics, the greater the risk that weather from the stars shatters our reality. That's why US government space watchers are seeking a company to help them operate the next generation of space weather satellites....

Redmond let dev code loose in production Windows, leading to the bug Microsoft is having difficulty keeping development code out of the Windows event log after another message that users are advised to ignore turned up in the... event log....

How to pick the news sources you want to see more (and less) hands on Even if you have your favorite sites bookmarked or type their URLs in through muscle memory, you probably still spend a lot of time looking for info on Google. Now, you can exert some control over which publishers appear in your results for news stories....

Users want their customizations and their old models back There has been more furious backpedalling from OpenAI following the company's ill-judged launch of GPT-5 and the removal of previous model selection....

CVE-2017-11882 in discontinued Equation Editor still attracting keylogger campaigns despite software being killed off in 2018 Very few people are immune to the siren song of nostalgia, a yearning for a "better time" when this was all fields and kids respected their elders - and it looks like cyber criminals are no exception....

Reliant on two mega customers? Who says GPU-for-rent kingpin is a not a sustainable biz model? Rent-a-GPU biz CoreWeave is still racking up eyewatering debts amid mounting net losses as it continues to burn cash on expanding datacenter capacity....

Hit the button and then go on your own voyage of printer discovery Microsoft has made the "Pull Print" feature of Universal Print generally available, which means confidential print jobs should no longer appear in unintended locations....

But despite the differences, all models excel at making errors and shouldn't be trusted Generative AI coding models have common strengths and weaknesses, but express those characteristics differently due to variations in coding style....

The vendor hops aboard GSA's OneGov train, offering models from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and more Not to be left behind in the flurry of government-wide AI purchasing deals, Box has signed a deal with the feds that'll inject some agentic AI into federal government systems....

Windows 365 Reserve offers 10-day cloud PCs when your machine goes kaput - but you'll still need another device to access them Microsoft is so confident in the reliability and security of its Windows 11 OS that it's now offering businesses the ability to quickly dump users onto temporary VMs in its cloud when, not if, their desktops and laptops break....

Seven additional regions across England will now have access to the controversial tech A fresh expansion of UK crimefighters' access to live facial recognition (LFR) technology is being described by officials as "an excellent opportunity for policing." Privacy campaigners disagree....

Shock news: billionaire techpreneur is not a fan Geek-turned-venture-capitalist Marc Andreessen has weighed in on the arguments surrounding the UK's Online Safety Act, accusing the UK government of leaking his input....

For now at least, even though government buying can improve, open source is not all it's cracked up to be Debate Not for the first time, Microsoft is in the spotlight for the UK government's money it voraciously consumes - apparently 1.9 billion a year in software licensing, and roughly 9 billion over five years. Not surprisingly, there are plenty of voices challenging whether this is good use of public money. After all, aren't there plenty of open source alternatives?...

Foundation warns federated servers face biggest risk, but single-instance users can take their time Updated The maintainers of the federated secure chat protocol Matrix are warning users of a pair of "high severity protocol vulnerabilities," addressed in the latest version, saying patching them requires a breaking change in servers and clients....

You guessed it: looks like it's a so-called AI People are noticing Firefox gobbling extra CPU and electricity, apparently caused by an "inference engine" built into recent versions of Firefox. Don't say El Reg didn't try to warn you....

An encounter with the healthcare system reveals sickening decisions about data Column We already live in a world where pretty much every public act - online or in the real world - leaves a mark in a database somewhere. But how far back does that record extend? I recently learned that record goes back further than I'd seriously imagined....

Agency asks for ideas from US industry as orbit decays NASA is seeking solutions for a way to raise the orbit of the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory despite the spacecraft being marked for termination after FY2026 under the agency's budget proposal....