The Register

Minnesota's capital is the latest to feature on Interlock's leak blog after late-July cyberattack The Interlock ransomware gang has flaunted a 43GB haul of files allegedly stolen from the city of Saint Paul, following a late-July cyberattack that forced the Minnesota capital to declare a state of national emergency....

First came the fireball, then a hole in the roof and a dent in the floor In late June media speculated that a meteor entering Earth's atmosphere caused widespread sightings of a celestial fireball during daylight hours across the southeast USA. Scientists have now confirmed space rocks caused the phenomenon, citing as evidence a meteorite they found in a resident's living room....

Federal Court finds Big Tech players abused their market power Australia's Federal Court has given Epic Games another win in its global fight against the way Apple and Google run their app stores....

Tells court 'What I did was wrong and I want to apologize for my conduct' Terraform Labs founder Do Kwon has pled guilty to committing fraud when promoting the so-called "stablecoin" Terra USD and now faces time in jail....

None under active exploit...yet Microsoft's August Patch Tuesday flaw-fixing festival addresses 111 problems in its products, a dozen of which are deemed critical, and one moderate-severity flaw that is listed as being publicly known....

Could the most popular browser change hands? AI search biz Perplexity has offered to pay about twice as much as it is worth to acquire Chrome from Google....

And yes, there's the usual credit monitoring Global staffing firm Manpower confirmed ransomware criminals broke into its Lansing, Michigan franchise's network and stole personal information belonging to 144,189 people, months after the extortionists claimed that they pilfered "all of [the company's] confidential data."...

Keep calm and clear out that inbox. Also maybe lay off the GenAI With many parts of England grappling with a water shortage, the UK's National Drought Group (NDG), which includes both government and non-government agencies, has suggested citizens can help by... clearing out their inboxes....

Don't need to give Uncle Sam any more reason to think kill switches are a good idea Nvidia may have the Trump administration's blessing to resume shipments of its H20 AI accelerators to China, but in Beijing, government officials are now pressuring companies to use what they describe as less-advanced semiconductors....

Last year's attempt failed, but increased concern over the state of the BIS might make the second time the charm The US government agency in charge of keeping advanced technology out of the hands of America's enemies desperately needs an IT modernization to accomplish its mission. So a group of elected officials is trying (again) to get the funds it needs to do so....

Deal could give legislative and judicial agencies access to AI that hallucinated legal citations in a court filing Anthropic has become the latest company to benefit from the US government's frenetic AI adoption pace, inking a deal to get its software into the hands of federal agencies at a deep discount....

Enter a prompt and get back a copyright infringement More and more US companies are using generative AI as a way to save money they might otherwise pay creative professionals. But they're not thinking about the legal bills....

Website, emails, and phones are down for a second day The Pennsylvania's Office of Attorney General (OAG) is blaming a digital blackout of its services on a "cyber incident."...

Efforts to build easier off-ramps are ... err ... ramping up Private cloud platform vendor Platform9 has a new lure for disaffected VMware users: A tool that allows migrations without requiring extra hardware....

'Hung' is out and 'Unresponsive' is in, according to the Academy Software Foundation and the Alliance for OpenUSD A Linux Foundation project has published an Inclusive Language Guide to recommend replacements for common tech terms deemed potentially offensive to some users....

US cops yank servers, domains, and crypto from the Russia-linked gang - but the crooks remain at large In a display of bureaucratic bravado, US law enforcement agencies say they've disrupted" the BlackSuit ransomware gang (also known as Royal), freeing millions of dollars in virtual currency from its clutches....

Long-term support release candidate arrives, general availability comes next month Java 25, an LTS (long-term support) version, is now at release candidate (RC) stage with general availability scheduled for September 16....

Designs scheduled for launch in 2026, developer kit for programmers out today Chip designer Arm is bringing dedicated neural accelerator hardware to its GPU blueprints used in phones. It expects this to deliver higher quality visuals while boosting AI performance....

Aside from glam, includes cool features like standalone GNOME Flashback session with no GNOME shell Debian 13 has arrived, now with RISC-V and preconfigured "blends" right in the main installer....

Chip giant praises 'president's strong leadership,' promises to 'restore this great American company' US President Donald Trump has now reversed his opinion of Intel chief Lip-Bu Tan following their meeting at the White House yesterday, hinting that the two will work more closely together....

Scattered Spider, ShinyHunters, and Lapsus$ spent the weekend bragging to each other on a Telegram channel Prolific cybercrime collectives Scattered Spider, ShinyHunters, and Lapsus$ appear to be working together to break into businesses' networks, steal their data, and force an extortion payment....

Automaker's answer to spate of car thefts is to charge customers for extra Hyundai is charging UK customers 49 ($66) for a security upgrade to prevent thieves from bypassing its car locks....

UK online reseller bought out of administration in -pre-pack agreement, say sources London Stock Exchange-listed Fraser Group is understood to have bought struggling UK online tech bazaar Ebuyer from administrators in a pre-pack agreement, sources have told The Register....

Microsoft's AI-centric code editor and IDE adds the ability to rollback misguided AI prompts The Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code) team has rolled out version 1.103 with new features including GitHub Copilot chat checkpoints....

Joburg and Warsaw among the hotspots for sprawling server farm construction Lagos, Warsaw and Dubai are among the fastest growing cities for colocation services - with metro areas in the Asia-Pacific and EMEA regions expanding more rapidly than traditional datacenter hotspots....

Legacy tech for nation's farmers must migrate ... contract swells to 245M The UK's government department for agriculture and the countryside has upped the potential contract value on offer for cloud and datacenter hosting by more than 100 million....

Home Office officials reportedly concede Brit government on back foot as Trump moves to protect US Big Tech players Analysis The Home Office's war on encryption - its most technically complex and controversial aspect of modern policymaking yet - is starting to look like battlefield failure after more than ten years of skirmishes....

Taskforce delivers damning interim report on next generation of energy generation An independent taskforce commissioned by the UK government has warned of the nation's "unnecessarily slow, inefficient, and costly" approach to nuclear power (and weaponry)....

Sysadmins, your job is safe Automating IT operations using AI may not be the best idea at the moment....

Don't laugh, a French nuclear power plant just shut down for a while after invertebrates overwhelmed its intakes Proponents of increased use of nuclear energy to power datacenters have a new foe: Jellyfish....

Outages, degraded service, and login troubles hit 10 regions and 27 services IBM Cloud experienced a Severity One outage on Monday that left customers unable to access resources....

70W TDP means the new RTX Pro 4000 SFF and RTX Pro 2000 won't blow power budgets Nvidia's latest Blackwell GPUs are a pair of itty-bitty workstation cards that aim to deliver the highest performance possible for professional visualization and local AI workloads within a 70-watt energy diet....

Biden-era program has reduced FedRAMP processing times to just five weeks from previous year or more The US Government's process for certifying cloud services safe for official use has long been slow, but that's no longer the case. Approvals so far this fiscal year are more than double the total for all of FY 2024....

And shave 15% of the top no doubt. Nerfed versions of Nvidia's Blackwell GPUs could soon join its H20 on the list of AI accelerators approved for sale in China....

A few weeks earlier 'zeroplayer' advertised an $80K WinRAR 0-day exploit Russia-linked attackers found and exploited a high-severity WinRAR vulnerability before the maintainers of the Windows file archiver issued a fix....

Code hosting biz takes a back seat within Microsoft's CoreAI division GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke plans to leave the company and corporate parent Microsoft will not appoint a successor....

The alleged perpetrators remain at large The US Department of Justice is trying to recoup around $1 million that three IT specialists secretly working for the North Korean government allegedly stole from a New York company....

He wants Microsoft to keep supporting Windows 10 until its market share drops below 10% Many are unhappy about Microsoft's Windows 10 retirement plans, but a California man appears to be angrier than most. He's sued Redmond over the matter, and is demanding continued free Win 10 updates until the OS's popularity wanes....

The bad news? The machines, and their operators, are coming on fast Black Hat/DEF CON At the opening of Black Hat, the largest security shindig in the Hacker Summer Camp week ahead of DEF CON and BSides, the opening keynote speaker suggested the current state of AI slightly favors defenders over attackers, but he warned that was not a given for much longer....

But it can contest if it lands up in 'Category 1,' and the move hurts operations, says judge Wikipedia today lost a legal battle against the UK's tech secretary to tighten the criteria around the Online Safety Act 2023 (OSA), as it seeks to exclude itself from the strictest regulations....

Making a bit of a FOSS with Virtual Environment update Viennese virtualization veteran Proxmox has updated its hypervisor and its storage offering to new, Debian 13 versions....

A symphony of screeching come to an end! Parent Yahoo! confirms! From the department of "Want to feel old?" comes news that AOL is finally pulling the plug on dial-up Internet access....

Tech biz tweaks GPT-5, brings back 4 and others as options after customer backlash OpenAI has brought back GPT-4o after a weekend of user protests - mostly about removal of model choice - following the rollout of GPT-5....

Amid hints by president he may announce 100% tariffs on imported chips, semiconductors Intel boss Lip-Bu Tan reportedly has an appointment at the White House today, just days after President Donald Trump called for his resignation. The move comes as Intel's former CEO Craig Barrett weighs in on the troubled chipmaker's future....

By video, picture, and voice - the fakers are coming for your money DEF CON While AI was on everyone's lips in Las Vegas this week at the trio of security conferences in Sin City - BSides, Black Hat, AND DEF CON - there were a lot of people using the F-word too: fraud....

Veteran of four spaceflights dies at 97 Obit Jim Lovell, the former US astronaut and commander of the Apollo 13 mission, has died at the age of 97....

Many core offerings now back in action, says retailer British retailer Marks and Spencer updated its website today, confirming its Click & Collect service is once again available to customers....

Well, at least he didn't drop the F-bomb Linux head honcho Linus Torvalds has put a kernel developer "on notice" for waiting until the eleventh hour to supply a patch set for Linux on RISC-V systems which "makes the world actively a worse place to live" - in a scathing missive harkening back to his invective-laden tirades of old....

Pressure difference between the space station, space suits increases congestion, say boffins In space, no one can hear you sneeze - but that hasn't stopped a team of boffins researching exactly what happens when an astronaut gets a case of the sniffles, and why. The key takeaway, should you find yourself on board a space station and in need of a tissue: maybe skip the spacewalk....

AR games mingle with underground assets in the data plan for 200-year-old Ordnance Survey Feature Britain's Ordnance Survey (OS), founded in 1791, is interloping in the digital age. Minecraft, AR gaming, and EV charger locations have all become part of its portfolio, alongside the paper-based maps beloved by the nation's legion of cagoule-clad outdoor types....