The Register

WordPress supremo Mullenweg channels Churchill: Never let a good crisis go to waste Matthew Mullenweg, CEO of WordPress biz Automattic and co-creator of the open source software, says he feels "much lighter" after 159 employees departed in the wake of his controversial attempt to pressure WP Engine to license trademarks the rival has used for years....

Cable giant says ransomware involved, FBCS keeps schtum Comcast says data on 237,703 of its customers was in fact stolen in a cyberattack on a debt collector it was using, contrary to previous assurances it was given that it was unaffected by that intrusion....

10 seconds to Elon blaming this on Kamala or something Tesla has submitted another safety recall for the Cybertruck, this time over problems with its backup camera - an essential feature, considering the bulky vehicle's barely functional rearview mirror....

Activists, ex-insider sound the alarm as operator says all is under control Analysis A shuttered Michigan nuclear power plant is going to need a lot of work to get back online, according to atomic watchdogs. But its operators say the project is still on track despite extensive steam tube damage....

AST SpaceMobile partners 'provide zero technical support for their opposition,' letter to FCC rages The competition to deliver satellite-based phone connections is getting nasty, with SpaceX accusing AST SpaceMobile of a misinformation campaign....

Arizona looks like the place to be for US semiconductor manufacturing Taiwan's TSMC has inked a deal with US semiconductor outfit Amkor Technology to beef up advanced chip packaging on American soil....

Not a great look when the iGiant just launched its first password manager Apple just fixed a duo of security bugs in iOS 18.0.1 and iPadOS 18.0.1, one of which might cause users' saved passwords to be read aloud. It's hardly an ideal situation for the visually impaired....

No spaceplane in the payload, but it won't be a wasted mission Updated United Launch Alliance's (ULA) Vulcan Centaur is ready to blast off from Florida this morning, the second flight to space for the rocket....

For the IT professional who has to take work home The Long Term Service Channel (LTSC) version of Microsoft Office 2024 is being joined by a version aimed at consumers and small businesses that want to avoid paying subscription fees....

Self-proclaimed Swiss Army knife of embedded Linux moves slow and fixes things in latest release Busybox is tiny, unobtrusive, and runs quite a lot of routers and other key bits of the internet - somewhat like Linux itself used to be....

Why yes, I will help you again - for a price On Call The exchange of labor for currency can be a grim business, which is why The Register ends each working week with a new instalment of On Call - the reader contributed column in which you tell cathartic tales of Working For The Man....

'You can build this in a few days - even as a very naive developer' A pair of inventive Harvard undergraduates have created what they believe could be one of the most intrusive devices ever built - a wake-up call, they tell The Register, for the world to take privacy seriously in the AI era....

Bundles free government apps to help digital diplomacy - and maybe find some new customers Google Cloud will help India to spread its Digital Public Infrastructure - the suite of government apps it offers to help other nations - through the development of a "DPI in a box" tool....

Argument that it didn't inherit Twitter's legal obligations did not hit the spot Australia's Federal Court has rejected Elon Musk's assertion that X/Twitter does not need to comply with local requirements to provide information about how it detects, removes and prevents the spread of child sexual abuse material....

Gangs hit 5% of all Adobe Commerce, Magento-powered stores, Sansec says Ray-Ban, National Geographic, Whirlpool, and Segway are among thousands of brands whose web stores were reportedly compromised by criminals exploiting the CosmicSting flaw in hope of stealing shoppers' payment card info as they order stuff online....

California utilities couldn't deliver for hyperscalers' favorite hardware slinger It's not just datacenters running AI that need their own energy sources. Taiwanese hardware manufacturer to the clouds Quanta has revealed the purchase of three sets of fuel cell microgrid systems to power one of its California plants, after purchasing two in April of this year....

Datacenters coming online in the next 15 months will need to supply at least some of their own power As the saying goes, everything is bigger in Texas, but as datacenter footprints explode amid the AI boom, regulators fear even the Lone Star state's utilities won't be able to keep up for much longer....

Networking giant pockets $225K, foe promises to stop suing and abandons IP Cloudflare on Thursday celebrated a victory over Sable Networks, which the former described as a "patent troll."...

Duo must also cough up $1.5M for pulling off multi-million-dollar exchange swindle Two fraudsters will spend nearly five years behind bars each and pay a combined $1.5 million for bilking Apple out of millions of dollars worth of iPhones....

Tractor maker has only turned over shoddy tools, half-baked info, may be breaking the law, says senator US Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has sent a letter to John May, CEO of agricultural equipment maker Deere & Company, questioning whether John Deere is living up to the promises it made to support the right to repair....

Is that a Mixed Reality headset, or just a complicated paperweight? Oh and farewell WordPad With the release of Windows 11 24H2, it is time to pay our respects to the features and functions removed from Microsoft's flagship operating system....

Intruder pored over medical records, insurance details, Social Security numbers in some cases An Alabama hospital is officially informing more than 61,000 patients that their personal data was accessed by a miscreant during a cyberattack in October 2023....

Because they're most likely to share crappy misinformation online Since Elon Musk bought Twitter nearly two years ago - a $44 billion acquisition he tried to pull out of - the mogul has driven a narrative that moderation of the microblogging website disproportionately targeted conservatives, libertarians, and Trump supporters....

AI Overviews get links to referenced websites - and ads Almost two decades ago, the head of Google's then nascent enterprise division referred to the firm's search service as "an uber-command line interface to the world."...

Winter is coming The US Department of Justice and Microsoft have seized 107 websites used by Russian cyberspies in a phishing campaign to steal sensitive information from US government agencies, think tanks, and other victims....

Distro behind the handheld console announces corporate sponsorship Valve is officially sponsoring the Linux distro that powers the gaming giant's Steam Deck console....

Liquid cooling on the mind Fujitsu and server maker Supermicro are jointly working on a platform featuring Fujitsu's upcoming Arm-based high-performance MONAKA processor, as well as liquid cooling systems....

Best way to boost your package is to leave, or pretend to A survey of nearly 700 CISOs in the US and Canada has found their pay has risen over the past year to an average of $565,000 and a median of $403,000, with the top 10 percent of execs pulling in over $1 million....

Tech's consumption of water and energy driving interest in liquid cooling Cooling specialist Submer has scored $55.5 million in a fresh funding round to fuel expansion, touting its tech as part of a more sustainable way to operate datacenters - something sorely needed in the era of AI....

Fraudsters targeted local government, colleges, and construction firms in Texas and North Carolina Two British-Nigerian men were sentenced for serious business email compromise schemes in the US this week, netting them millions of dollars from local government entities, construction companies, and colleges....

Veteran probe set to score a half-century while still doing science Engineers have turned off Voyager 2's plasma science instrument in an effort to eke out the veteran probe's dwindling power supply....

Former Apple engineer and Apache PMC member Russell Spitzer describes efforts to unite around a single format Interview In June, Databricks shelled out $1 billion for Tabular, a startup backer of the open source Apache Iceberg table format, signalling just how important the rather niche topic had become. It was a move which shocked the Iceberg community....

Crooks 'like a sysadmin, with a malicious slant' Exclusive An extortionist armed with a new variant of MedusaLocker ransomware has infected more than 100 organizations a month since at least 2022, according to Cisco Talos, which recently discovered a "substantial" Windows credential data dump that sheds light on the criminal and their victims....

Managing the endless stream of cookie banners leaves little energy for anything else Fewer than one in five Brits report being happy with the way their personal data is handled by big tech companies, yet the furthest many will go is to reject optional cookies on the web....

British retailer Asda admits tech divorce from former owner Walmart has been delayed again Exclusive Asda, the UK's third largest retailer, discovered a multi-million pound discrepancy between its distribution system and SAP ERP tech installed earlier this year, according to an internal Major Incident report seen by The Register....

Shifting battle-hardened systems to document model - are your skills and tools ready? MongoDB has used the release of version 8.0 to defend its viability as the underpinning of business-critical transactional systems....

MONAKA processor due in 2027 to be worked into liquid-cooled rackscale hardware Fujitsu on Wednesday announced a collaboration that Supermicro to build liquid-cooled servers based on the Japanese giant's forthcoming Arm-based MONAKA processor....

For version 2025, out on November 1st and adding various modern goodies Microsoft has revealed that the 2025 edition of its System Center management tool will debut on November 1st, at prices ten percent higher that it charged for its predecessor....

It's called Cosmos' and Nvidia, Cisco, X, SuperMicro and VAST Data all think it will help - them and you A group of top enterprise vendors feel that AI is changing so fast it's undigestible" to many, so they've created an org they hope will function like the Open Compute Project so you don't make a meal of it....

If you think VMware has gone to the dogs, maybe check it out? OpenStack Dalmatian, the 30th edition of the open source cloud stack, has bounded out of the kennel....

Time to see if industry learned anything from the last shortage crisis Dockworkers at American ports from Maine to Texas have gone on strike, and experts are warning it won't be long before the tech sector feels a supply chain pinch that could easily stretch into the beginning of next year....

Just two of the gang of eleven remain as safety concerns swirl Anthropic has hired yet another of OpenAI's founders, this time bringing on Durk Kingma in an unspecified role....

Trademark royalties is one way to force support of open source, we guess Updated WordPress developer Automattic on Wednesday published details of its efforts to pressure rival WP Engine to sign a trademark license agreement costing millions of dollars....

With 14 serious security flaws found, what a gift for spies and crooks Fourteen newly found bugs in DrayTek Vigor routers - including one critical remote-code-execution flaw that received a perfect 10 out of 10 CVSS severity rating - could be abused by crooks looking to seize control of the equipment to then steal sensitive data, deploy ransomware, and launch denial-of-service attacks....

Poor use of PHP include() strikes again Two trivial but critical security holes have been found in Optigo's Spectra Aggregation Switch, and so far no patch is available....

Unidentified tech issues now resolved Updated Some US customers using the Bank of America app to keep an eye on their accounts got a shock Wednesday morning when their checking and savings accounts were unexpectedly empty or out of date....

It's easy being Elon Tesla has managed to persuade a California judge to throw out a lawsuit that claimed the automaker misled shareholders about its Full Self-driving (FSD) system's true capabilities....

Support stretches to end of 2029, no more maintenance beyond 2026 Networking giant Cisco is getting out of the LoRaWAN market for IoT device connectivity, announcing end-of-availability and end-of-life dates for its gateways and associated products, with no planned migration pathway for customers....

Set to bring mighty performance in a small BGA package Infineon is rolling out its next generation of USB controller designed specifically for peripherals. Simply named the EZ-PD FX20, it will support 20 Gbps Type-C devices, including the latest USB4 standard - though USB 3.2 and Thunderbolt 3 are also supported....

Has someone told all the direct-to-cell investors? Two out of five mobile phone subscribers are unwilling to pay any extra for direct-to-cell satellite services, which may give operators pause for thought as they continue to pump cash into scaling the infrastructure....