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Finishing in 4:19:52 makes it a SlowBot - although it did finish without a battery top-up The South Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology has forced one of its robo-dogs to run a marathon....

Claims it was just spotting shoppers who threatened staff at Bluey's favorite big box store Australian hardware chain Bunnings Warehouse will challenge a ruling by local regulators who found it violated shoppers' privacy by checking their identities with facial recognition tech....

Shouldn't have abused messaging dominance, Zuck India's Competition Commission has slapped Meta with a five-year ban on using info collected from WhatsApp to help with advertising on its other platforms....

Loathes Big Tech and is not at all keen on net neutrality President-elect Donald Trump has announced his choice for head of the United States Federal Communications Commission: a current commissioner, Brendan Carr, whom Trump appointed last time he was in there White House....

Plus: Maxar Space Systems confirms employee info stolen in digital intrusion Ford Motor Company says it is looking into allegations of a data breach after attackers claimed to have stolen an internal database containing 44,000 customer records and dumped the info on a cyber crime souk for anyone to "enjoy."...

If you didn't fix this a month ago, your to-do list probably needs a reshuffle Two VMware vCenter server bugs, including a critical heap-overflow vulnerability that leads to remote code execution (RCE), have been exploited in attacks after Broadcom's first attempt to fix the flaws fell short....

Big Tech's big war on American labor watchdog stumbles... bigly Amazon and SpaceX argued in court today that the US National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is an unconstitutional body - but a three-judge panel didn't seem particularly enamored of their arguments....

Un-carrier said to be among those hit by Salt Typhoon, including AT&T, Verizon T-Mobile US said it is "monitoring" an "industry-wide" cyber-espionage campaign against American networks - amid fears Chinese government-backed spies compromised the un-carrier among with various other telecommunications providers....

This was pretty inevitable after its lawyers admitted in court that the giveaway wasn't random Elon Musk and his America PAC have been sued for allegedly lying about their $1 million election lottery after letting slip in a court hearing earlier this month that it wasn't as random as Musk suggested....

You can now glue four H200 PCIe cards together too SC24 Nvidia's latest HPC and AI chip is a massive single board computer packing four Blackwell GPUs, 144 Arm Neoverse cores, up to 1.3 terabytes of HBM, and a scorching 5.4 kilowatt TDP....

GPU giant contends that a little fuzzy math can speed up fluid dynamics, drug discovery SC24 Nvidia on Monday unveiled several new tools and frameworks for augmenting real-time fluid dynamics simulations, computational chemistry, weather forecasting, and drug development with everyone's favorite buzzword: AI....

Uncle Sam tops supercomputer charts, while China recides from public view SC24 Lawrence Livermore National Lab's (LLNL) El Capitan system has ended Frontier's 2.5-year reign as the number one ranked supercomputer on the Top500, setting a new high water mark for high-performance computing (HPC)....

$45K says you can do it without a lunar rover How do you rescue an injured crew member on the lunar surface? NASA is looking for ideas, and a share of a $45,000 prize pot is up for grabs....

First in six years is nearly three times the size of the older, pre-NATO version Residents of Sweden are to receive a handy new guide this week that details how to prepare for various types of crisis situations or wartime should geopolitical events threaten the country....

Likely to look more favorably on Elon's adventures in space-based comms The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC), an agency charged with regulating US media and communications, is about to get a new boss: current commissioner Brendan Carr....

System to serve as a proof of concept for applying API-driven automation to scientific computing SC24 Oxide Computing's 2,500 pound (1.1 metric ton) rackscale blade servers are getting a new home at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LNLL)....

US considers the cases concerning Jetflicks to be the largest of their kind A programmer at the heart of a huge internet piracy website faces a lengthy prison sentence following five years of legal proceedings and a two-week trial....

2-way datalink allows in-flight info updates including retargeting and abort The UK has conducted the first successful guided firing trial of Spear, a mini cruise missile that is set to be the chief strike weapon against ships for the carrier-launched F-35B fighter jets, and can also be used against tanks, target structures and fast-moving vehicles....

SAP and Deloitte winners in transition from legacy software to SaaS, which includes housing and transport ministries The UK's tax collector has awarded contracts worth up to 366 million ($461 million) in an effort to move a cluster of central government departments' ERP, HR and finance systems to the cloud and upgrade legacy software....

You think employee-generated content is bad now? Opinion In 1968's Star Trek episode, "The Ultimate Computer," Captain Kirk had his ship used to test M5, a new computer. A copilot, if you will, for the Starship Enterprise....

One of the braver lightning talks we've seen: Swapping motherboards, live on stage Ubuntu Summit 2024 The modular Framework laptop is moving outside the x86 world with a RISC-V main board now available....

Machine learning used to separate opening a can of soda from something catastrophic Researchers at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have come up with an early warning system for lithium-ion battery fires....

Uni sysadmin who ran the lab he erased was a big part of the problem Who, Me? Another Monday and what a fine one it is here in the lair of Who, Me? - the reader contributed column in which your fellow Reg-admirers admit to the moments they messed up the tech they were supposed to tame....

Stuff from the far side is basalt - but less KREEP-y than expected The first ever samples of soil and rock collected from the far side of the moon has revealed more recent lunar volcanic activity than expected, according to studies published in two journals last Friday....

Execs at Chinese company confident President Trump's trade policies won't present a problem Lenovo's enterprise business has posted 65 percent year on year growth but still posted a loss....

Again defends his belief that 70-hour weeks are essential and work/life balance is bunk Infosys founder Narayama Murthy has tripled down on his previous statements that 70-hour work weeks are what's needed in India and revealed he also thinks weekends were a mistake....

Joins the likes of HPE, Cisco, and VMware in failing to challenge dominant hyperscalers Datacenter giant Equinix will end its foray into infrastructure-a-service by shuttering its Metal" bare metal IaaS offering....

PLUS: Cost of Halliburton hack disclosed; Time to dump old D-Link NAS; More UN cybercrime convention concerns; and more Infosec in brief A teenager has pleaded guilty to calling in more than 375 fake threats to law enforcement, and now faces years in prison....

PLUS: LG struts catwalk in stretchy screen; Samsung's strike nears end; Vietnam warns Chinese e-commerce players; and more ASIA IN BRIEF President Xi Jinping of China and President Joe Biden of the USA have pledged to continue working together to ensure AI does not harm humanity....

Here's why they really should Systems Approach I have been playing around with passkeys, or as they are formally known, discoverable credentials....

Uncultured swine prone to believe complexity of verse is machine-generated babble A study in the US has found that readers can't tell the difference between poems written by famous poets and those written by AI aping their style. To make matters worse - for anyone fostering a love of literature at least - research subjects tend to like AI poetry more than they do verse from human poets....

Proof of concept allows geospatial datasets to be conversationally queried Speculation over where Microsoft would take the Copilot brand next can now end thanks to the announcement of Earth Copilot in partnership with NASA....

It's memory-safe, with a few caveats Developers looking to continue working in the C and C++ programming languages amid the global push to promote memory-safe programming now have another option that doesn't involve learning Rust....

QR codes arrive via an age-old delivery system Switzerland's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has issued an alert about malware being spread via the country's postal service....

Digital money laundering pays, until it doesn't An Ohio man, who operated the Grams dark-web search engine and the Helix cryptocurrency money-laundering service associated with it, has been sentenced to three years in prison....

LLM-controlled droids easily jailbroken to perform mayhem, researchers warn Science fiction author Isaac Asimov proposed three laws of robotics, and you'd never know it from the behavior of today's robots or those making them....

Yank access to management interface, stat A critical zero-day vulnerability in Palo Alto Networks' firewall management interface that can allow an unauthenticated attacker to remotely execute code is now officially under active exploitation....

Names and social security numbers of folks looking for the biggest loan of their lives exposed A major US mortgage lender has told customers looking to make the biggest financial transaction of their lives that an intruder broke into its systems and saw data belonging to 171,000 of them....

First true sign of AGI - blowing a fuse with a frustrating user? When you're trying to get homework help from an AI model like Google Gemini, the last thing you'd expect is for it to call you "a stain on the universe" that should "please die," yet here we are, assuming the conversation published online this week is accurate....

Nearly 21 years since version 2.0 Version 3.0 of the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) is nearly ready for release. It has important new and long-awaited abilities - and you can try it now....

The lightest mainstream Linux desktop joins the tiny handful that support X.org replacement LXQt 2.1 is the latest release of the lightweight Qt-based desktop used in Lubuntu - but this version has a significant edge over its rivals....

House of GPT says suit is 'baseless and overreaching' Elon Musk has added Microsoft and the venture capitalist Reid Hoffman to the list of defendants in his long-running legal dispute with OpenAI. The ChatGPT maker called the claim "baseless and overreaching."...

A nervous wait for rapper wife who also faces a stint in the clink The US is sending the main figure behind the 2016 intrusion at crypto exchange Bitfinex to prison for five years after he stole close to 120,000 Bitcoin....

Flawed patch stops on-premises, hybrid server transport rules in their tracks for some Microsoft is pausing the rollout of an Exchange security update after it became clear that the patch could break transport rules for some customers....

Regulator finds poor planning and overuse of consultants added to costs in ailing rollout UK energy regulator Ofgem is set to disallow current and projected costs of nearly 130 million ($165 million) accrued by Data Communications Company (DCC), the Capita-owned monopoly responsible for the UK's smart meter platform....

Brit mobile network's Daisy has time, patience, and plenty of yarns to spin Watch out, scammers. O2 has created a new weapon in the fight against fraud: an AI granny that will keep you talking until you get bored and give up....

Tunny and Colossus galleries re-roofed The National Museum of Computing has unveiled renovations to keep out the rain and smartening up H block as celebrations take place to mark the 80th anniversary of the Colossus II computer....

Knives and lasers don't mix ... until they do On Call By the end of the working week, many a tech support worker feels like bashing the hardware with which they work. Which is why The Register each Friday offers a less aggressive outlet for any workplace frustrations that have accumulated, in the form of a fresh instalment of On Call - the reader-contributed column in which you share tech support tales....

Mark Z does not like this The European Union has fined Facebook parent Meta 797.72 million ($843 million) for antitrust violations connected to its online classified service Facebook Marketplace....

NHS supplier that leaked employee info fell victim to fiddly access controls that can leave databases dangling online Private businesses and public-sector organizations are unwittingly exposing millions of people's sensitive information to the public internet because they misconfigure Microsoft's Power Pages website creation problem....