The Register

And got away with it when someone else broke it even more comprehensively Who, Me? Welcome to another working week, and therefore to another instalment of Who, Me? It's The Register's reader-contributed Monday column that shares stories of your worst moments at work, and how you kept your career alive once the extent of the damage was discerned....

PLUS: Russian bug-buyers seeks Telegram flaws; Another WordPress security mess; NIST backlog grows; and more! Infosec In Brief Organized crime networks are now reliant on digital tech for most of their activities according to Europol, the European agency that fights international crime on the continent and beyond....

Maps Timeline info wanders off forever for users without encrypted backups Google has admitted it lost some customer data, possibly forever....

PLUS: Zoho's Ulaa anointed India's most patriotic browser; Typhoon-like gang targets Taiwan; Japan debates offensive cyber-ops; and more Asia In Brief China's Cyberspace Administration and Ministry of Public Security have outlawed the use of facial recognition without consent....

Despite evidence to the contrary as alleged pilfered info goes on sale Oracle has straight up denied claims by a miscreant that its public cloud offering has been compromised and information stolen....

GPU goliath claims tech can boost throughput by 2x for Hopper, up to 30x for Blackwell GTC Nvidia's Blackwell Ultra and upcoming Vera and Rubin CPUs and GPUs dominated the conversation at the corp's GPU Technology Conference this week. But arguably one of the most important announcements of the annual developer event wasn't a chip at all but rather a software framework called Dynamo, designed to tackle the challenges of AI inference at scale....

Plus AI in the infosec world, why CISA should know its place, and more Interview Russia appears to be having second thoughts on how aggressively, or at least how visibly, it attempts to influence American elections, according to a former head of the NSA....

Remembering the fallen giant's first UK office Reading Museum is hosting an exhibition marking more than 60 years since Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) opened its first UK office....

White House touts massive savings, agencies brace for shake-up President Trump's latest executive order takes aim at federal IT procurement, moving to centralize how Uncle Sam buys tech across agencies....

'Flawless' team boss claims she was axed after raising alarm over shrinking female leadership ranks A former senior product manager at Amazon Web Services has sued the cloud colossus in the US, claiming she faced retaliation from bosses and was ultimately laid off due to her gender and age....

Measuring all the dirty work of the supply chain and other indirect influences? Ugh, just give us the fine Half of European businesses fear they'll lose customers if they come clean about their greenhouse gas emissions, a third lack confidence in the accuracy of their carbon data, and and 40 percent will just take a fine as they can't be bothered with it....

Consumer price hikes come amid interrogation of why customers have to opt out of added AI features The UK's Science, Innovation, and Technology Committee is pressing Microsoft for answers about the recent Microsoft 365 price hikes and why customers are forced to opt out of the more expensive Copilot version....

Share price list slides for top ten consultant to US government Accenture says federal procurement projects are continuing to slow since Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency began reviewing ways to cut costs last month, and this is directly impacting its business....

A lone voice cries out from reply-all chaos: 'Someone tell DOGE to rehire whoever maintains this email list' EXCLUSIVE Everybody loves a good email storm. But an insecure email distribution list accidental spamming space agencies across the planet is undoubtedly one for the record books....

Attorney General warns people tempted to join 'wave of domestic terrorism' Three individuals face federal arson charges labeled as domestic terrorism after a spate of Molotov cocktail attacks on Tesla properties in the US....

Regulator reviews wholesale telecoms markets and decides healthy fiber is its biggest concern Britain's telecoms watchdog is giving itself a pat on the back for overseeing the UK's fiber broadband rollout thus far, so doesn't want to rock the boat by making any drastic changes to the regulations at this point, despite admitting there is no effective competition for BT....

With only BASIC knowledge to fall back on, and a typing pool in tears, the OFF switch looked very attractive On Call Welcome once again to On Call, The Register's Friday column that tells your stories of tech support jobs performed under stress, duress, and all sorts of mess....

Made up revenue and pretended to use non-existent data The former CEO of Kubient, an advertising tech company that developed a cloudy product capable of detecting fraudulent ads, has been jailed for fraud....

Plus: Customer info stolen from 'parental control' software slinger SpyX; F-35 kill switch denied Infosec newsbytes Israeli spyware maker Paragon Solutions pitches its tools as helping governments and law enforcement agencies to catch criminals and terrorists, but a fresh Citizen Lab report claims its software has been used to target journalists, activists, and other civilians....

Power outage means no flights for 24 hours. And chaos. Lots of chaos London's Heathrow Airport will close on Friday after a fire in an electricity substation it relies on caused a power outage - but nearby datacenters seem not to be unaffected....

Slop-making machine will feed unauthorized scrapers what they so richly deserve, hopefully without poisoning the internet Cloudflare has created a bot-busting AI to make life hell for AI crawlers....

Feds want book thrown at Paige Thompson, who pinched 100M customer records Paige Thompson, the perpetrator of the Capital One data theft, may be sent back behind bars - after an appeals court ruled her sentence of time served plus five years of probation was too lenient....

Broken commitment to deliver hyped Intelligence upgrade branded false advertising Apple on Wednesday was sued in a US federal court for allegedly misrepresenting the AI capabilities of its Siri personal digital assistant....

So much for that vacation A US Department of Defense electrical engineer has turned his world upside down after printing 155 pages from 20 documents, all of which were marked top secret and classified, from his DoD workspace, brought them home with him - and was collared on his way to Mexico....

Tough Euro rules on data accuracy apply to AI yammering, formal complaint to watchdog argues A Norwegian man was shocked when ChatGPT falsely claimed in a conversation he murdered his two sons and tried to kill a third - mixing in real details about his personal life....

Palming off the blame using an unknown' best practice didn't go down well either In patching the latest critical remote code execution (RCE) bug in Backup and Replication, software shop Veeam is attracting criticism from researchers for the way it handles uncontrolled deserialization vulnerabilities....

Not even the parts want to be associated with Elon's steel monster Tesla has issued its eighth Cybertruck recall, this time over exterior trim panels that risk detaching while driving - the second time loose body trim has triggered a safety fix....

Enterprise Edition to be offered on OCI inside Redmond's cloud Oracle is expanding its database services on hyperscale clouds outside of its muscle-car Exadata system....

Meanwhile, open source video codec Ogg Theora stirs in its crypt After a seven-year nap, version 3.0 of FOSS image editor GIMP is arriving with a splash, while a long-dormant open video format wakes from its slumbers and lumbers into beta....

Fix testing to stretch into the summer. When will aerospace giant decide enough is enough? Comment The return of Crew-9 from the International Space Station (ISS) in a Crew Dragon has raised the question of what the future holds for Boeing's Calamity Capsule, also known as the CST-100 Starliner....

Industry leaders want broader strategy, citing supply chain gaps, investment needs, and global trade uncertainty European chipmakers want local politicians to look beyond the region's Chips Act and do more to support research and development, materials, and design, not just manufacturing....

How to avoid another SolarWinds, Log4j, and XZ Utils situation Organizations concerned about software supply chain attacks should focus on role-based access control, system monitoring, and boundary protection, according to a new preprint paper on the topic....

Wow, a government project that could be on time for once ... cos it's gonna be wayyyy more than a decade The UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) today started the post-quantum cryptography (PQC) countdown clock by claiming organizations have ten years to migrate to a safer future....

Testing? We've heard of it Users of Microsoft's email service might be feeling a distinct sense of deja vu after the web version of Outlook last night blocked access to Exchange Online mailboxes....

You might need that - the file system has some hard-to-squish bugs A new version of the handy all-in-one bootable system toolkit distro is here, now with a whole new file system for you to play with....

VMO2 starts in the north of England, says it's already contacted 'known vulnerable customers' UK telco Virgin Media O2 (VMO2) is preparing to retire its 3G services, and is set to start with the city of Durham in northeast England this April....

Even looming support deadline isn't tempting ECC users to haul themselves over to S/4HANA, say analysts The majority of SAP's ECC users have not purchased licenses for S/4HANA - meaning its unlikely some of the world's largest businesses will migrate before mainstream support for the legancy platform ends in 2027....

Fedora Asahi Remix 42 still scheduled for release in about a month Another developer has dropped out of Asahi Linux, the project to get Linux up and running on Apple silicon....

Begun, preparation for orbital wars has China has practiced co-ordinated satellite maneuvers in space that resemble aerial combat, according to a US Space Force General....

Japanese tech investor expects its own hyperscalers and e-com giants to collaborate, which could take a bite out of x86 market Japanese tech investment house SoftBank Group has announced its intention to acquire Ampere Computing, the chip design firm that makes server-grade silicon based on the Arm architecture....

Chinese giant says locals are more efficient than Western hyperscalers, and has tiny capex to prove it Chinese tech giant Tencent has slowed the pace of its GPU rollout since implementing DeepSeek....

We're told thousands may soon get a pink slip from Big Blue IBM insiders believe Big Blue is laying off thousands of people at various locations around the US, including a quarter of staff the company's Cloud Classic operation....

Dynamic Security update blocks 3rd-party cartridges, but keeps printing money HP Inc. has settled a class action lawsuit in which it was accused of unlawfully blocking customers from using third-party toner cartridges - a practice that left some with useless printers - but won't pay a cent to make the case go away....

SSNs, payment details, and health info too The Pennsylvania State Education Association (PSEA) says a July 2024 "security incident" exposed sensitive personal data on more than half a million individuals, including financial and health info....

Cyber-crime is officially getting out of hand One of the world's largest sperm banks, California Cryobank, is in a sticky situation....

Chrome colossus accused of tilting search results, blocking cheaper purchases, while iTitan told to open iOS A year after kicking off its probe into three American tech giants, the European Union has fired off two sets of preliminary findings accusing Google parent Alphabet of failing to comply with Europe's monopoly-busting Digital Markets Act (DMA)....

Big Blue's workstation workhorse patches hole in network installation manager that could let the bad guys in IBM "strongly recommends" customers running its Advanced Interactive eXecutive (AIX) operating system apply patches after disclosing two critical vulnerabilities, one of which has a perfect 10 severity score....

How much money was going to be saved by ending tech deal with service-disabled veterans, then? Elon Musk's DOGE promoted the decision to terminate a deal with service-disabled veterans supporting the Department of Veterans Affairs 10 days before the contract was set to expire anyway....

Trump administration 'has made the call for tech sovereignty an urgent geopolitical issue' Not content to wait for open letters to influence the European Commission, Dutch parliamentarians have taken matters into their own hands by passing eight motions urging the government to ditch US-made tech for homegrown alternatives....

Qubit awkward, you might say GTC Nvidia is investing in a research center to advance quantum computing development, just weeks after its head honcho torpedoed the share price of quantum firms by declaring the tech is decades away from being useful....