The Register

Someone has got to keep those back end systems running The beleaguered UK Post Office has begun conversations with suppliers to help support its controversial Horizon system in a set of contracts which could total 100 million ($131 million) as it works to replace the EPOS and back-end finance technology....

Co-creator of the Computerized Bulletin Board System heads for big forum in the sky Obit Ward Christensen, co-founder of the Computerized Bulletin Board System (CBBS) and developer of the XMODEM file transfer protocol, has died aged 78....

Who needs climate goals and planning permission anyway? Just weeks after the British government designated datacenters as critical national infrastructure (CNI), a quartet of US tech firms have committed to the UK as the place to invest in their data facilities....

What could possibly go wrong? UK prime minister Keir Starmer promised to make the nation's competition regulator more inclined toward economic growth the day after a Microsoft executive was appointed chair of the government's Industrial Strategy Advisory Council....

Plus: We chat about going to the Moon and keeping the ISS running for a few more years Interview The first Dane to fly in space, Andreas Mogensen, thinks there's every chance the International Space Station (ISS) might last for a few more years and harbors hopes of visiting the Moon....

Commits to molten salt small modular reactors it thinks can come online in 2035 Google has become the latest tech giant to seek nuclear power as a source for its datacenters and other operations....

As Matt Mullenweg and David Heinemeier Hansson feud over FOSS, community worries about the fallout WordPress has banned its user groups from accepting sponsorship from WP Engine - or even allowing its employees to attend events....

Who also worries misinformation on social media could threaten liquidity The governor of India's Reserve Bank, Shri Shaktikanta Das, yesterday warned that AI - and the platforms that provide it - could worsen systemic risk to the nation's financial system....

Enough with the racist-sounding 'dragons' and 'pandas', Beijing complains - then points the finger at koalas Chinese authorities have published another set of allegations that assert the Volt Typhoon cyber-crew is an invention of the US and its allies, and not a crew run by Beijing....

Wants 'super-large capacity, super-wide bandwidth' datacenters - and more submarine cables Vietnam will convert all local networks to IPv6, under a sweeping digital infrastructure strategy announced last week....

It waited till just before Columbus Day weekend to make mandated filing, but don't worry, we saw it A Houston-based services provider to healthcare organizations says a crook may have grabbed up to 400,000 people's information after the miscreant accessed the systems of one of its customers....

Market rivals settle on open table format, while Microsoft and Databricks go their own way Apache Iceberg has secured renewed momentum in the last week after leading vendors in data warehousing and analytics all announced new features around the open source table format....

White House official makes case for ending extortion reimbursements Ransomware attacks are costing businesses and governments billions of dollars and putting people's lives at risk - in some cases, reportedly causing their deaths....

Microsoft's hardware compatibility gamble still hasn't paid off Windows 10 is now just a year from its end of support date, and it is clear that Microsoft's hardware compatibility gamble has yet to pay off....

Liftoff after dodging hurricanes and paranoia scrub SpaceX has sent NASA's Europa Clipper on its mission to the Jupiter moon atop its Falcon Heavy rocket....

Florida man gets his hands on 'the best ever' With less than a month to go before American voters head to the polls to choose their next president, the Trump campaign has been investing in secure tech to make sure it doesn't get hacked again....

So much for reducing our reliance on fossil fuels More evidence has emerged that AI-driven demand for energy to power datacenters is prolonging the life of coal-fired plants in the US....

No excuses for not patching this nine-month-old issue More than 86,000 Fortinet instances remain vulnerable to the critical flaw that attackers started exploiting last week, according to Shadowserver's data....

PC makers might not be able to sell the idea - big iron has a better chance Analysis Anyone wondering what the target market is for manycore monster chips - like AMD's newly unveiled 5th Gen Epyc processors - won't have to wait long: server vendors reckon that more and beefier AI systems are just the ticket....

German ERP vendor entices users to cloud, but be aware of how the system works, ITAM experts warn SAP's tiered pricing sometimes means it is cheaper for users to buy more software licenses than they need under its RISE with SAP package....

Will it also plug into some common sense? UK government has kicked off a consultation on whether the country should have a common standard for charging electrical devices, and if this needs to be the same as the USB-C connector the EU adopted....

How many Reg hacks does it take to change a light fitting...? Opinion Smart homes aren't smart. Simultaneously sinister and stupid, maybe, but not smart. We have been sold a pup, a nice shiny pup hyped as both miraculous and inevitable. It is neither. From the simplest appliance to the most sophisticated, they steal what they want and deny what we need....

The only thing worse than a Reply All storm is a Send All storm Who, Me? There's nothing like a bit of schadenfreude to ease the pain of re-entering the working week, which is why The Reg kicks off every Monday morning with an instalment of Who, Me? in which readers share tales of tech support gone not so well. Hopefully it will make you feel better about yourselves....

With an off-the-shelf D-Wave machine Chinese researchers claim they have found a way to use D-Wave's quantum annealing systems to develop a promising attack on classical encryption....

Also warns it will fire thousands and keep making losses in space Aerospace outfit Boeing has again delayed its 777X jet - a product on which it has hung all its hopes to help it turn around years of trouble - and warned of job cuts and further losses in its defence and space businesses....

WP Engine seems to be excluded from sponsoring events, too The fight between WordPress co-creator Matthew Mullenweg and CMS hosting outfit WP Engine escalated over the weekend, with the latter seemingly made persona non grata in the WordPress community - or at least the parts of it run by Mullenweg ....

Mechanical chopsticks on the launch tower grab a returning rocket and Starship splashes down on target SpaceX's engineers performed two significant feats on Saturday: catching Starship's Super Heavy Booster with mechanical arms on the rocket's launch tower, and achieving a pinpoint landing of Starship itself in the Indian Ocean....

Plus: Infosys stops sending job offer emails; Singtel outage; Australia to require ransomware payment reveals Indonesia's government last week ordered Apple and Google to remove Chinese e-commerce app Temu from their app stores....

Reading, writing, and cyber mayhem, amirite? If we were to draw an infosec Venn diagram, with one circle representing "sensitive info that attackers would want to steal" and the other "limited resources plus difficult-to-secure IT environments," education would sit in the overlap....

The Space Force craft will attempt aerobraking for the first time After nearly a year in orbit, the US Space Force's secretive X-37B is prepped to perform some fancy new maneuvers to alter its orbit and dump its service module before carrying on with more mysterious work....

AI model safety only goes so far Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet, despite its reputation as one of the better behaved generative AI models, can still be convinced to emit racist hate speech and malware....

Also, phishing's easier over the phone, and your F5 cookies might be unencrypted, and more in brief If you need an excuse to improve your patching habits, a joint advisory from the US and UK governments about a massive, ongoing Russian campaign exploiting known vulnerabilities should do the trick....

Researchers point to evidence that scumbags visited the strategy boutique Researchers at Palo Alto's Unit 42 believe the INC ransomware crew is no more and recently rebranded itself as Lynx over a three-month period....

Cyberspies abusing a backdoor? Groundbreaking Lawmakers are demanding answers about earlier news reports that China's Salt Typhoon cyberspies breached US telecommunications companies Verizon, AT&T, and Lumen Technologies, and hacked their wiretapping systems. They also urge federal regulators to hold these companies accountable for their infosec practices - or lack thereof....

The 24.10 release offers fun and freshness, but not immutability The first interim release of Ubuntu since the somewhat troubled Noble Numbat is a smooth upgrade - but not all of the new hotness is here yet....

When the 'cleanup' option stubbornly refuses Windows 11 24H2 users are finding there is undeletable data that remains on their devices after installing the recently released feature update....

'Self-taught hacker' facing a possible 15 years in the slammer A 28-year-old Ukrainian is facing up to 15 years in prison for allegedly operating what the war-torn nation's cyber police are calling an illegal VPN service that facilitated access to sanctioned Russian websites....

Demand for electricity to outstrip supply soon, warns Bain US energy companies must adapt to the AI-driven datacenter boom with power use forecast to outstrip supply within the next few years....

We're sure colleagues will find your lookalike, soundalike avatar's missive very warm and human Zoom Video Communications intends to offer office workers the ability to communicate with colleagues using an AI lookalike that speaks from a script using a lip-synced, cloned voice....

But what does that mean? Explainer Apple's latest OS release is the newest member of the Open Group list of officially verified UNIX variants - by quite some margin....

WCGW? Plus: Automous Robovan also makes surprise appearance at Cybercab's coming out party Complete with Back to The Future style folding doors, Tesla is showing off its Robotaxi at last, along with an autonomous minibus and the Optimus robot....

Roadside assistance biz praised for deploying security monitoring software and reporting workers to cops Two former workers at roadside assistance provider RAC were this week given suspended sentences after illegally copying and selling tens of thousands of lines of personal data on people involved in accidents....

What's harder? Convincing people to invest in a beleaguered security business or a tiny island everybody hates? Keir Starmer's decision to appoint Poppy Gustafsson as the UK's new investment minister is being resoundingly praised despite the former Darktrace boss spending years failing to fully rebuild investor confidence in the embattled company....

Director General on being a good partner and developing rockets Interview The European Space Agency (ESA) had to use a SpaceX rocket to send its Hera spacecraft to Dimorphos. After the delays of the Ariane 6, what will the Ariane 7 look like? And is the first European on the Moon already in ESA's astronaut corps?...

This is why every admin loves to hate Windows On Call As Friday rolls around Reg readers can start to contemplate pressing the Shut Down button for the working week. And to amuse you as the moment at which you can make that magic click draws near, we always offer a fresh instalment of On Call - our reader-contributed column of tech support tasks that went in interesting directions....

Scientists undecided about possible flavor After observing Jupiter's Great Red Spot (GRS) with the Hubble Space Telescope for 90 days, scientists have determined that it behaves like a "bowl of gelatin."...

It worked - alleged pump and dump schemers arrested in UK, US and Portugal this week The FBI created its own cryptocurrency so it could watch suspected fraudsters use it - an idea that worked so well it produced arrests in three countries....

Tamed DB sprawl and saved cloudy resources with 'X-Stor' Exclusive Chinese web giant Tencent has revealed it created a NoSQL database that it believes can handle multiple data models more elegantly than other attempts to do so, and has used it to consolidate its database fleet and improve resource utilization....

Acknowledges bulk customer data leak weeks after Telegram channels dangled it online Leading Indian health insurance provider Star Health has admitted to being the victim of a cyber attack after criminals claimed they had posted records of 30-milion-plus clients online....

It can also type, so the robo-doctor can heal you and write legibly Robot hands are commonplace, but their sense of touch is crude compared to that of a human. A design proposed by a group of scientists in the Middle Kingdom may change that....