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And it only took four months, tut WhatsApp has fixed a problem with its View Once feature, designed to protect people's privacy with automatically disappearing pictures and videos....

Wants to defer shutdown order that takes effect a day before the presidential inauguration Made-in-China social network TikTok has appealed the decision to shut it down in the US, arguing that the deadline for its destruction should be deferred to give another regime a chance to review its case....

'I am carefree, I like to joke,' says guy who fines workers if they glance at phones during meetings The CEO of Chinese tech giant Alibaba's entertainment division fines his staff if they look at their phones during meetings - a little nugget he revealed during a speech that included insults sprayed at both colleagues and customers....

'Navix' follows OpenELA rules, comes with ten years support, and is already used in production at scale Korean web giant Naver has gone into the operating system business, releasing its very own Linux distribution....

If this were a US scandal, we'd cal it 'Gategate' Malaysia's automated border control equipment - known as e-gates or automates - glitched out over the weekend, leaving travelers crossing the very busy border between Johor Bahru and Singapore required to spend hours waiting in line....

McDonald's worker called it in, cops swooped, found 'gun, suppressor, manifesto' Police in Pennsylvania have arrested a man suspected of shooting dead the CEO of insurer UnitedHealthcare in New York City, thanks to a McDonald's employee who recognized the suspect in a burger joint - and largely without help from technology....

Starlink satellites might annoy astronomers, but at least they're easy to spot Space debris tracking specialist Neuraspace added another optical telescope to extend satellite tracking over the Southern Hemisphere....

Many users unhappy with current state of search, want to know why this got priority Reddit's internal search engine is often criticized as one of the site's weakest features but the platform claims AI integration will make it "faster, smarter, and more relevant."...

No word yet on who was snooped on. Any bets? Chinese cyberspies recorded "very senior" US political figures' calls, according to White House security boss Anne Neuberger....

More Windows Insiders get to see if the snapshotter is fixed Microsoft is widening the rollout of the Recall Preview to include Dev Channel Windows Insiders running AMD and Intel-based Copilot+ PCs....

Is the industry ready to be tested if the unidentified deadly pathogen spreads beyond rural Kwango Province? A mystery disease with a fatality rate higher than COVID-19 has broken out in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and while the global pandemic risk is currently considered to be low, some of the world's biggest tech giants may want to dust off those pandemic supply chain disruption plans....

ShinyHunters-linked heist thought to have been ongoing since March Exclusive A massive online heist targeting AWS customers during which digital crooks abused misconfigurations in public websites and stole source code, thousands of credentials, and other secrets remains "ongoing to this day," according to security researchers....

Beijing cites GPU giant's Mellanox merger conditions from four years ago Updated Nvidia has been slapped with an antitrust probe by China's state regulator, likely a response to US export restrictions as part of the ongoing chip wars between the two countries....

A couple of bugs lead to a potentially bad time OpenWrt users should upgrade their images to the same version to protect themselves from a possible supply chain attack reported to the open source Wi-Fi router project last week....

Meanwhile, 365 Enterprise users have a date for new Outlook rollout Microsoft has admitted that an issue in Windows 11 24H2 could stop Outlook from starting. It has also been confirmed that Microsoft 365 Enterprise users will switch to the new Outlook in April 2026....

Outsmart an AI, win a little Christmas cash Microsoft and friends have challenged AI hackers to break a simulated LLM-integrated email client with a prompt injection attack - and the winning teams will share a $10,000 prize pool....

Pat Gelsinger has unexpectedly quit. Gore dump follows Opinion In the dystopian world of Blade Runner, the killing of rogue superhuman replicants wasn't called that. Rather, they were "retired." Pat Gelsinger is far more human than many of the current crop of cyborg-lite tech execs, and the Intel board is no Harrison Ford, but they "retired" him just the same....

Faster, whiter, a tad more expensive - and a little baffling Hands On The Raspberry Pi 500 and monitor have been released just in time for Christmas. The machine itself is an undeniably impressive bit of hardware, but the monitor is slightly puzzling....

Misplaced shortcut led to communication breakdown Who, Me? Rejoice, dear reader, for it is Monday - the day to which everyone looks forward. No? Well, the silver lining to this particular cloud is another instalment of Who, Me? - The Reg's weekly tales of techies who thought they were fixing something, but flamed out....

Proba-3's Occulter will blot out the sun to create eclipse-like effect Coronagraph can observe India's space agency last week launched a pair of European Space Agency satellites that will hopefully demonstrate high-precision formation flight techniques that make it possible to create virtual satellites"....

Meanwhile, Sauron secures funding. Really Two tech businesses that were independently named after objects from The Lord of the Rings have formed a partnership - or should that be a fellowship?...

Also: Mystery US firm compromised by Chinese hackers for months; Safe links that aren't; Polish spy boss arrested, and more Infosec in brief Still smarting over that grocery disruption caused by a ransomware attack on supply chain SaaS vendor Blue Yonder? Well, now you have someone to point a finger at: the Termite ransomware gang....

PLUS: Politician thought Korea's martial law declaration was a deepfake; Apple finds a billion for Indonesia; China worries about open source intel; and more Asia In Brief Chinese web and AI giant Baidu last week teamed with government communications organ Xuexi to create a tool that generates politically correct documents for bureaucrats....

Insiders say it's largely a matter of labeling Special report Kyndryl has bet on becoming a consulting-led business, but among those who recently left the IT biz there's skepticism about the corporation's claims....

'It's a double-edged sword,' security researchers tell The Reg Feature Chinese tech company employees and government workers are siphoning off user data and selling it online - and even high-ranking Chinese Communist Party officials and FBI-wanted hackers' sensitive information is being peddled by the Middle Kingdom's thriving illegal data ecosystem....

Maybe start getting better at sorting your trash before these ML garbage bots gain sentience? If our AI robot slaves ever decide to revolt, they might start in the most thankless place possible: The municipal solid waste facilities where AMP Robotics is using them to sort recyclables from all the rest of the municipal solid waste (MSW) that us meatbags regularly fail to separate properly....

Carbon-14 decay could be coming to an implant in you Video The UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) and the University of Bristol have built a diamond battery capable of delivering power, albeit a tiny amount, for thousands of years....

Edge-exclusive tool promises 'second set of eyes' for browsing Microsoft has rolled out a Copilot Vision preview that says more about how poorly websites are designed rather than justifying the need to bring more AI into users' lives....

Wine-tasting seems to be an essential part of an EU-friendly Azure Local Exclusive Microsoft and the Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers of Europe (CISPE) trade body this week kicked off their technical summit to assess the Windows maker's progress in making available a version of Azure Local for hosters....

Fantasizing about leaving the mess at home behind? Pretty island packed with medieval ruins promotes itself as a venue for e-business The Isle of Man Government runs an annual conference to promote the tiny nation as a destination for online businesses....

Plus, xAI scores another $6B to fuel Tesla tycoon's war on OpenAI Elon Musk gave more than $270 million to political groups supporting Donald Trump's 2024 presidential campaign and others on the American right running for office, according to donation figures released by the Federal Election Commission this week....

Microsoft's OS sure loves throwing your creds at remote systems Updated Acros Security claims to have found an unpatched bug in Microsoft Windows 7 and onward that can be exploited to steal users' OS account credentials....

Video slinger looks to Supremes for salvation, though anything could happen under Trump A US federal appeals court has rejected a challenge to the law that prevents popular apps that collect data on Americans from being controlled by a foreign adversary....

Crashing stock, plummeting reputation, but yeah, of course, let's focus on office usage Boeing has paused its efforts to install and use employee-monitoring sensors, including at its office in Everett, Washington, after media inquiries followed an employee's leak of the plans....

How much AI does one subscriber need? OpenAI says it will charge $200 per month for ChatGPT Pro, a new premium tier that costs ten times the Plus subscription price....

Proposal pushes stricter infosec safeguards after Chinese state baddies expose vulns The head of America's Federal Communications Commission (FCC) wants to force telecoms operators to tighten network security in the wake of the Salt Typhoon revelations, and to submit an annual report detailing measures taken....

Calling everything SageMaker is confusing - but a new name would have been worse says AWS re:Invent Amazon has introduced a new generation of SageMaker at the re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, bringing together analytics and AI, though with some confusion thanks to the variety of services that bear the SageMaker name....

Return to flight almost two years since the previous endeavor failed Arianespace has finally managed to return the Vega-C to flight carrying a Sentinel payload for the European Space Agency (ESA)....

Interim chief David Zinsner claims core strategy intact, will stay the course to contract manufacturer Intel wants to be "the western provider of leading-edge silicon," according to interim co-chief executive David Zinsner, but needs a successful products division for this to be possible....

Threatened with life in prison, Kyiv charity worker gives middle finger to state spies A Russian programmer defied the Federal Security Service (FSB) by publicizing the fact his phone was infected with spyware after being confiscated by authorities....

Schools taken out of scope, but 108M plan still dwarfs initial 20M Europe's largest local authority has settled on a 108 million ($137 million) bill for its disastrous replacement of SAP with Oracle until 2026, five times the sum initially predicted and five years late....

How to tell a customer they're an idiot without telling them they're an idiot Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen revealed another product support trick from within the corridors of Microsoft. This time, it's not about blowing on connectors but about avoiding casting some embarrassing shade on a customer's purchasing decisions....

Lunar flights therefore set for seven-month delay and change re-entry approach, but redesign not needed NASA's investigation into damage found on the heatshield of the Artemis Mission's Orion module two years ago has concluded that the technique used to re-enter Earth's atmosphere meant gas became trapped in the shield's outer ablative material, causing concerning cracks....

Call the boss instead. He's not a big fan of sleep On Call Welcome once again to On Call, The Register's reader-contributed column in which each Friday we share your tales of fun and frolics at the frontline of tech support....

Still unpatched 100+ days later, watchTowr says updated A zero-day arbitrary file read vulnerability in Mitel MiCollab can be chained with a now-patched critical bug in the same platform to give attackers access to sensitive files on vulnerable instances....

That's 2.56 decillion of them, destined for use in CDNs and the cloud - and APNIC needed 83 decillion more to handle the request Huawei has been allocated 2.56 decillion IPv6 addresses by regional internet registry the Asia Pacific Network Information Center (APNIC). That's a lot....

Redmond threat intel maven talks explains this persistent pain to The Reg A Chinese government-linked group that Microsoft tracks as Storm-0227 yesterday started targeting critical infrastructures organisations and US government agencies, according to Redmond's threat intel team....

Damage likely limited to those running bots with private key access Malware-poisoned versions of the widely used JavaScript library @solana/web3.js were distributed via the npm package registry, according to an advisory issued Wednesday by project maintainer Steven Luscher....

Louisiana facility's three natural gas turbine plants to churn out 2,262 MW Richland Parish, an idyllic rural area in northeast Louisiana, USA, is set to host a gigantic new Meta datacenter....

OpenAI chief says he doesn't think Elon will unleash political powers to zap AI competition OpenAI boss Sam Altman has expressed hope that Elon Musk won't use his political clout to hurt his competitors, describing such activity as "un-American."...