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Ohm, for flux sake China's Volt Typhoon crew and its botnet are back, compromising old Cisco routers once again to break into critical infrastructure networks and kick off cyberattacks, according to security researchers....

Jack Teixeira, 22, talked of 'culling the weak minded' - hmm! A former Air National Guard member who stole classified American military secrets, and showed them to his gaming buddies on Discord, has been sentenced to 15 years in prison....

Throwing novel hardware at academia. It's a tale as old as time Amazon wants more people building applications and frameworks for its custom Trainium accelerators and is making up to 40,000 chips available to university researchers under a $110 million initiative announced on Tuesday....

A Canadian and an American living in Turkey 'walk into' cloud storage environments... Two men allegedly compromised what's believed to be multiple organizations' Snowflake-hosted cloud environments, stole sensitive data within, and extorted at least $2.5 million from at least three victims....

No mention of how to get the tools to bypass software locks means owner still legally beholden to OEMs Digital software locks have just become flimsier in Canada with the passage of a pair of laws allowing for their bypass for repair and interoperability purposes....

Stores still open, but customers report delayed deliveries, invoicing issues, and more at Stop & Shop and others Retail giant Ahold Delhaize, which owns Food Lion and Stop & Shop, among others, is confirming outages at several of its US grocery stores are being caused by an ongoing "cybersecurity issue."...

T-Mobile US and Comcast also stutter slightly The holiday weekend in the US ended badly for Verizon FiOS users on the East Coast after over 40,000 customers reported being forced offline....

Moon, Mars, and Mayhem? President-elect Donald Trump is set to return to the US White House. What does this mean for the US space program, NASA, and a return to the Moon?...

Satya Claus has something special for all the good little girls and boys Microsoft's next deadline for shipping its controversial Recall technology to Windows Insiders is fast approaching. Following a privacy outcry and mushrooming conspiracy theories, will the service ever be ready for users?...

'Once again, we've lost a little more faith in the internet,' researcher says Researchers are publicizing a proof of concept (PoC) exploit for what they're calling an unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in Citrix's Virtual Apps and Desktops....

Memory-safe variant is planned for next year Exclusive C and C++ programmers may not need to learn Rust after all to participate in the push for memory safety....

Over 5 million records from 25 organizations posted to black hat forum Amazon employees' data is part of a stolen trove posted to a cybercrime forum linked to last year's MOVEit vulnerability....

Arm-powered PCs are still nowhere AMD now accounts for 25 percent of all x86 processor shipments, but only made a slight increase in the past quarter against industry leader Intel in servers - the main gains came from the desktop market....

Europe boss also speaks of 'nervousness' in any extension to the use of the controversial, ageing system Fujitsu's Europe boss has told a public inquiry into the Post Office scandal - one of the widest miscarriages of justice in UK history - that the company does not trust the UK public body in its use of Horizon system data to support future police prosecutions....

Somewhere to find AI settings, or just a button to uninstall the operating system once and for all? Microsoft seems set to rebrand the AI-powered features in Windows to "Windows Intelligence" even if some of the more controversial elements, such as Recall, are to remain as they are....

Enough to knit a sweater, in fact The UK's competition watchdog is doubtful Vodafone and Three will fulfill post-merger promises unless forced to, and wants safeguards put in place so the telcos don't hike consumer prices or water down the 11 billion network infrastructure upgrade they commited to....

Chinese firm poised for (short) commercial flights by 2025 China's urban air mobility biz, EHang, has announced its EH216-S pilotless electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft has completed debut passenger flights in Thailand....

Simplifies licenses and adds more 'included value' such as compulsory support Cisco, tired of designing and building two discrete sets of Wi-Fi products, has merged its Catalyst and Meraki kit under the new "Cisco Wireless" moniker....

It's not the first time the embedded microkernel OS has changed its terms Version 8 of the Software Development Platform for the QNX microkernel real-time OS has gone freeware - but there are some strings attached....

Demonstration paves way for more reboosts before station's eventual deorbit NASA and SpaceX have demonstrated the Dragon spacecraft's ability to reboost the International Space Station (ISS) with a 12-minute, 30-second burn of the freighter's Draco thrusters....

Just because it's .gov doesn't mean that email is trustworthy Cybercrooks abusing emergency data requests in the US isn't new, but the FBI says it's becoming a more pronounced issue as the year draws to a close....

Lock your doors and windows, say police, but these should be disease-free We regret to inform you that the United States may soon collapse into a state of lawless anarchy: 18 of 43 monkeys that escaped from a South Carolina biomedical research facility remain at large - and we all know a horror story or two that starts like that....

No sign of 'rollback' yet Microsoft has finally admitted that some instances of Windows Server 2019 and 2022 were unexpectedly upgraded to Windows Server 2025....

Tech for tech's sake with niche uses that traditional hardware can handle Opinion If you haven't heard of neural processing units (NPUs) by now, you must have missed a year's worth of AI marketing from Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm....

Prosecutors hand Russo-Swede a half-billion bill The operator of the longest-running money laundering machine in dark web history, Bitcoin Fog, has been sentenced to 12 years and six months in US prison....

Talking to the distro's self-appointed benevolent dictator for life about 20 years of Ubuntu Ubuntu Summit 2024 Canonical founder and CEO Mark Shuttleworth spoke to The Reg FOSS desk at Ubuntu Summit 2024 in The Hague about the Linux distribution's success, its missteps, his regrets, and what he'd tell his younger self....

Tech companies, not users, to be punished for violations of social media time-out The Australian government has confirmed it will create legislation that bans access to social media for people under the age of 16....

What's the difference between a broken update system and a malware injection engine? Opinion A seemingly simple, single mistake in metadata that auto-trashes a critical, major component in the Windows ecosystem sounds bad. And it is, in so many ways....

Those old operating systems had awesome power - you had to be careful wielding it who, me? Good morning and welcome, once again, to Who, Me? in which Register readers share tales of tech support moments they might prefer to forget. But forgetting is not a way to learn from mistakes, is it?...

Also: Crypto hacks will continue; CoD hacker gets thousands banned, and more in brief One of the suspected masterminds behind the widespread Snowflake breach has been arrested in Canada - but the saga isn't over, eh....

Plus: A premium minimum wage for Malaysian datacenter workers; N Koreans maybe discover spicy content; S Korea fines Meta for data misuse, and more Asia In Brief Taiwanese silicon wafer provider GlobalWafers said last week it expects its award from the CHIPS and Science Act to continue, despite a change in the US presidency and direction....

Got a modern Nvidia or AMD graphics card? Custom Llamas are only a few commands and a little data prep away Hands on Large language models (LLMs) are remarkably effective at generating text and regurgitating information, but they're ultimately limited by the corpus of data they were trained on....

Dwindling power and problematic communications, but the spacecraft just keeps on going "We're definitely going to make the 50th anniversary," says Professor Garry Hunt, one of the scientists responsible for NASA's Voyager mission, as Voyager 1 recovers from an unexpected pause in communications....

Now that's a brew-haha Struggling chip giant Intel has rescinded a cost-cutting plan to abolish free coffee and tea for its staff....

The new normal The feud between Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg and rival web hosting firm WP Engine has led Automattic to create a website that lists WordPress customers who have moved their site hosting away from WP Engine and those who haven't....

Raw Story and AltNet allowed to amend complaint A US judge has thrown out a case against ChatGPT developer OpenAI which alleged it unlawfully removed copyright management information (CMI) when building training sets for its chatbots....

Move to suspend 7 nm and smaller processes follows US pressure Semiconductor giant TSMC is expected to stop supplying chips made with 7 nm or smaller processes to customers in China that are developing AI processors or GPUs. The move is reportedly to ensure it remains compliant with US export restrictions....

And separately, alleged ex-military traitor also arrested in Frankfurt The US is moving forward with its prosecution of a man who is accused of illegally shipping semiconductors to sanctioned businesses in Russia after he pleaded guilty to the multi-million-dollar scheme....

Does anyone want to tell Linus Torvalds? No? I didn't think so Opinion I must be a glutton for punishment. Not only was my first programming language IBM 360 Assembler, my second language was C. Programming anything in them wasn't easy. Programming safely in either is much harder....

Affected business calls situation 'mindbogglingly dangerous' as sysadmins reminded to check backup and restore strategies Microsoft remains silent over Windows Server 2025 turning up in the guise of a security update earlier this week, much to the chagrin of affected administrators....

We all know by now that monsters never die, right? Two high-profile criminal gangs, Scattered Spider and BlackCat/ALPHV, seemed to disappear into the darkness like their namesakes following a series of splashy digital heists last year, after which there were arrests and website seizures....

Printed around 4,000 pages of tech before leaving for a job at Huawei, claims court A Chinese national was sentenced to 18 months in prison and fined 20 million ($14,400) for allegedly stealing semiconductor manufacturing technology from SK hynix, according to a South Korean court ruling....

Government-appointed commissioners say Birmingham severely lacked Oracle skills during disastrous implementation UK government-appointed commissioners have labeled Birmingham City Council's Oracle Fusion rollout as "the poorest ERP deployment" they have seen....

'It helps Euro organizations to avoid lock-in and design the cloud strategy they want' European cloud consortium CISPE has unveiled a framework to help members and their customers automate compliance with the EU Data Act's obligations around data portability and switching....

UK data regulator says some devs and providers are operating without a 'lawful basis' The UK's data protection watchdog finds that AI recruitment technologies can filter candidates according to protected characteristics including race, gender, and sexual orientation....

Your very fastest resolution, delivered in a flash - even in The Time Before Google On Call The working week can be a trek. And so can a holiday, which the On Call author has taken this week - but not before preparing a new installment of The Register's Friday column that recounts tech support tales kindly contributed by readers....

Nanopore DNA screening technology may identify novel pathogens, propose treatments in as little as six hours A public-private partnership in the UK is constructing what the government said is "the world's first real-time surveillance system" to track and prevent future pandemics....

A try called Quesst Vid The aircraft NASA hopes will usher in a new generation of transport that's supersonic but also relatively quiet has fired up its engines for the first time as a test....

Govt order destroys 'hundreds of well-paying local jobs', eh Canada has ordered the dissolution of TikTok's Canadian business - without banning the app itself - citing national security risks associated with ByteDance's operations in the country....

'Multiple' malware samples likely targeting education orgs Criminals are using game-related applications to infect Windows systems with a malicious software framework called Winos4.0 that gives the attackers full control over compromised machines....