The Register

Upgrades on the way for both, with deep-ocean services and programmable sats on the way Two of the world's satellite positioning service constellations reached important milestones this week, after the European Space Agency and China's Satellite Navigation Office each launched its own pair of satellites....

License changes and product bundles aren't going down well, says Gartner's DaaS magical quadrant Citrix has added the ability to control remote macOS machines through its desktop-as-a-service suite, but customers of the product are said to be upset with changed licensing practices....

Also reveals boosted utilization rates, upgraded IaaS and more - all in the name of AI apps Alibaba Cloud has revealed a modular datacenter architecture it claims will help it to satisfy demand for AI infrastructure by improving performance and build times for new facilities....

Write better code, urges Jen Easterly. And while you're at it, give crime gangs horrible names like 'Evil Ferret' Software developers who ship buggy, insecure code are the true baddies in the cyber crime story, Jen Easterly, boss of the US government's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, has argued....

Boasts 'appear to be credible' experts tell El Reg A California city, a Spanish fashion giant, an Indian paper manufacturer, and two pharmaceutical companies are the alleged victims of what looks like a new ransomware gang that started leaking stolen info this week....

Says Lina Khan in latest push to rein in Meta, Google, Amazon and pals Buried beneath the endless feeds and attention-grabbing videos of the modern internet is a network of data harvesting and sale that's perhaps far more vast than most people realize, and it desperately needs regulation....

To be fair, Joe was probably taking a nap The Iranian cyber snoops who stole files from the Trump campaign, with the intention of leaking those documents, tried to slip the data to the Biden camp - but were apparently ignored, according to Uncle Sam....

Fail to comply may cost up to 10% of annual revenue The European Commission intends to force Apple to open its walled garden....

V2 sats beam 10M times brighter noise, hampering telescopes The second generation of Starlink satellites being lobbed into orbit by SpaceX might not reflect as much sunlight as the old ones, yet astronomers say they're leaking up to 32 times the unintended radio waves instead....

Many left reeling from July's IT meltdown, but not to worry, it was all unavoidable Germany's Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) says one in ten organizations in the country affected by CrowdStrike's outage in July are dropping their current vendor's products....

This is like vi vs Emacs with 'religious overtones,' project chief laughs Linux is 33 years old. Its creator, Linus Torvalds, still enjoys an argument or two but is baffled why the debate over Rust has attracted so much heat....

Better check your widgets, people Security researchers say that thousands of companies are potentially leaking secrets from their internal knowledge base (KB) articles via ServiceNow misconfigurations....

Back-end systems fail to get the love given to SaaSy customer-facing counterparts Over the last 20 years, ERP is the category of enterprise software deemed slowest to modernize because of priority given to sexier front office applications and senior decision-makers' aversion to risk....

Concerns over the elimination of a future competitor through acquihiring The Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) has declared it needs fresh powers after the European Commission elected not to investigate Microsoft's acquihire of AI startup Inflection....

4 file complaint with London's Met, alleging malware maker helped autocratic states violate their privacy Four UK-based proponents of human rights and critics of Middle Eastern states today filed a report with London's Metropolitan Police they hope will lead to charges against Pegasus peddler NSO Group....

Kubernetes doyen talks to The Reg about keeping coders coding Interview Acclaimed engineer Kelsey Hightower, who stopped coding for money in 2023, remains an influential figure in the world of software, and he's proposing something that might stir up the open source community....

Poor performers get renewals, new small outfits discouraged from bidding, say researchers UK government IT contracts worth 23.4 billion are due to end during the current five-year Parliament, according to researchers who warn that poor performing suppliers are hardly ever excluded from bidding again....

Seems someone's looking for an Arm wrestle SiFive, having designed RISC-V CPU cores for various AI chips, is now offering to license the blueprints for its own homegrown full-blown machine-learning accelerator....

Hock Tan reckons the silicon sales cycle is about to swing up, sharply, too Broadcom CEO Hock Tan has predicted his hyperscale semiconductor customers will continue building AI clusters for another three to five years, with each generation of machines to double in size....

Outdated software blamed for cracks in the armor The Tor project has insisted its privacy-preserving powers remain potent, countering German reports that user anonymity on its network can be and has been compromised by police....

SimpliZCloud is only for India right now, based on big Blue's LinuxONE The mainframe has found another role, thanks to Japan's IT services giant NTT Data which has decided to build a hybrid cloud service based on the IBM LinuxONE platform....

Another win for the Make In India policy, but a small one in terms of product volume Lenovo revealed on Tuesday that it will manufacture AI servers at its plant in Puducherry, India, and has opened a new infrastructure research and development lab in Bengalaru....

You'll have to opt out if you don't like it - EU and a few others excepted LinkedIn started harvesting user-generated content to train its AI without asking for permission, angering netizens....

Qualcomm, on the other hand, wasn't so lucky Google has some thank-you cards to send, as the European Union's General Court (GC) has nullified a 1.49 billion ($1.66 billion) fine levied against the tech giant for anti-competitive advertising behavior....

Plus: Wray tells how bureau helps certain victims negotiate with ransomware crooks China-backed spies are said to have tore down their own 260,000-device botnet after the FBI and its international pals went after them....

Add 'ransomware' to the list of certainties in life? In an intriguing move, notorious ransomware gang LockBit claims once again to have compromised eFile.com, which offers online services for electronically filing tax returns with the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS)....

US govt, Microsoft report on Kremlin trolls' latest antics to Make America Grate Again Russia really wants Donald Trump to be the next US President, judging by reports from American government agencies and now Microsoft's threat intelligence team....

We did warn you, Big Blue tells The Reg, as Cisco also cuts staff as promised IBM has been laying off a substantial number of employees this week and is trying to keep it quiet, our sources have said....

Second wave of exploding gear kills at least 14 today First it was pagers, now Lebanon is being rocked by Hezbollah's walkie-talkies detonating across the country, leaving more than a dozen dead....

Getting sloppy, Xi Exclusive Chinese state-sponsored spies have been spotted inside a global engineering firm's network, having gained initial entry using an admin portal's default credentials on an IBM AIX server....

Newsom still worried about SB 1047's 'chilling effect' on AI industry tax dollar revenue innovation in the state California Governor Gavin Newsom signed five AI-related bills into law this week, but a pivotal one remains unsigned, and the Democrat politico isn't sure about its future....

What do you mean you don't want Copilot and Microsoft 365 services? Microsoft has released what could be the penultimate perpetual licensed version of Office....

Surely at least one crew will get there in the next ten years? Intuitive Machines has bagged a contract worth up to $4.82 billion to support NASA's lunar relay systems....

Tech is going to need datacenters and power sources, and a lot of 'em Microsoft is joining with BlackRock and other private equity investors in a new AI fund that aims to eventually raise $100 billion for datacenters and their supporting power infrastructure....

Italian mafia mobsters and Irish crime families scuppered by international cops Hours after confirming they had pwned the supposedly uncrackable encrypted messaging platform used for all manner of organized crime, Ghost, cops have now named the suspect they cuffed last night, who is charged with being the alleged mastermind....

AI-coded contributions? Most would rather skip the bot's work The majority of open source project maintainers are not being paid for their work, spend three times as much time on security than they did three years ago, and have become less trusting of contributors following the xz backdoor, according to open source package security firm Tidelift....

Four branches attempt to streamline HR and business processes The UK's Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is leading a 958.7 million ($1.2 billion) search for a supplier to develop business processes for new ERP and HR systems to bring together four central government departments....

Those are some mighty powerful underdogs you've got there Google thinks Microsoft's software licensing is impeding customer choice; Microsoft says AWS has "first mover" advantage; AWS also picks on Microsoft's licensing - but all are against remedies being applied to the cloud market that might impact themselves....

'Lives will be lost' as Moscow ramps up offensive cyber military units Feature As Russian special forces push more overtly into online operations, network defenders should be on the hunt for digital intruders looking to carry out cyberattacks that end in physical destruction and harm....

As AI automates programming, it could be worth exploring the value of bespoke code Part 2 A thought experiment: If the computer business responds to commoditization and globalization like other manufacturing industries do, where does that leave programmers - and users?...

Mac and Android loyals: you can look, but no calculation for now Office power users, rejoice: Python in Excel is now generally available - provided you have the right license and machine....

Something tells us Vlad and Xi probably won't bother reading it The Internet Research Task Force has published a Request For Comments document its authors hope will mean developers of comms protocols and architectures consider the human rights implications of their efforts....

GoTo commits to the Alibaba Cloud, and Alibaba promises not to sell its stake Chinese tech giant Alibaba showed it's not just Meta, Google and Amazon that can use their financial heft to buy a foothold in the developing world by striking a deal with Indonesian superapp firm GoTo Group....

Sting led to cuffing of alleged operator behind Ghost - an app for drug trafficking, money laundering, and violence-as-a-service Australia's Federal Police (AFP) yesterday arrested and charged a man with creating and administering an app named Ghost that was allegedly "a dedicated encrypted communication platform ... built solely for the criminal underworld" and which enabled crims to arrange acts of violence, launder money, and traffic illicit drugs....

The more successful FOSS gets, the more it becomes a target Patent trolls are increasingly targeting cloud native open source projects, leading the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Linux Foundation to make efforts to extend their legal shields over such efforts....

View Forever, more like it, as Meta's privacy feature again revealed to be futile with a little light hacking A fix deployed by Meta to stop people repeatedly viewing WhatsApp's so-called View Once messages - photos, videos, and voice recordings that disappear from chats after a recipient sees them - has been defeated in less than a week by white-hat hackers....

Bug reports made in China Broadcom has emitted a pair of patches for vulnerabilities in VMware vCenter Server that a miscreant with network access to the software could exploit to completely commandeer a system. This also affects Cloud Foundation....

Anthropic Claude 3.5 shines in Chatterbox Labs safety test Feature Anthropic has positioned itself as a leader in AI safety, and in a recent analysis by Chatterbox Labs, that proved to be the case....

Chocolate Factory downgrades risk, citing the need for attacker access Overly permissive settings in Google Cloud's Document AI service could be abused by data thieves to break into Cloud Storage buckets and steal sensitive information....

Send astronauts nice pixel art, or try something a little harder The next round of the European Space Agency's Astro Pi challenge is open, inviting participants to use the diminutive computers aboard the International Space Station (ISS) to calculate the orbiting outpost's speed....