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PLUS: Malaysia teams with Arm for local chip designs; NTT warns of possible breach; Samsung strikers settle; and more Asia in Brief India's government has proposed giving its tax authorities sweeping powers to access private email systems and applications....

Meta says it cut CPU usage by 20% through kernel-level profiling. Just FYI Meta says it has managed to reduce the CPU cycles of its top services by 20 percent through its Strobelight profiling orchestration suite, which relies on the open source eBPF project....

iPhone giant compartmentalizes OS for the sake of security Apple has been working to harden the XNU kernel that powers its various operating systems, including iOS and macOS, with a feature called "exclaves."...

Researchers find AI isn't ready to help with moral decision making Is AI an appropriate source of moral guidance about which patients should be given kidney transplants?...

Mozilla sells ads, Google limits blocking them - it's time for stricter measures A new, lightweight version of Pi-Holeis here. Just how easy is it to block advertising on your home network?...

IsDavisLuEnabledInActiveDirectory? Not any more. IsDavisLuGuilty? Yes. IsDavisLuFacingJail? Also yes A federal jury in Cleveland has found a senior software developer guilty of sabotaging his employer's systems - and he's now facing a potential ten years behind bars....

Second time unlucky for Intuitive Machines, but hey, at least we got 250MB of data from it The Athena lander, which touched down on the Moon on Thursday and promptly fell over, has been declared dead by its operators....

With no allowance to sell and little room to buy, and markets on the slide, it's UB40 time: Red, red, whine Comment It's official: President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday to create a US Bitcoin reserve and stockpile of related digital assets, though instead of boosting the value of the coins, the market reacted negatively to the news....

To boldly go where HPE and Raspberry Pi have been for a while Axiom Space plans to send a shoebox-sized node running Red Hat Device Edge to the International Space Station (ISS)....

$96B in transactions, some even labeled 'dirty funds,' since 2019, say prosecutors The Feds today revealed more details about the US Secret Service-led Garantex takedown, a day after seizing websites and freezing assets belonging to the Russian cryptocurrency exchange in coordination with German and Finnish law enforcement agencies....

Trying to find a middle ground between spinning rust and performant TLC Facebook parent Meta is exploring the use of QLC flash as an additional storage tier in its datacenters to address growing volumes of data as it juggles performance maintenance and energy efficiency....

Moved from Windows or Linux? Smooth some of the rough edges Friday FOSS fest There are some idiosyncrasies about macOS that long term Mac users may never notice, but cause frustration in people more used to how Windows does things - or the much more customizable Linux desktop experience. Here are a few of The Reg FOSS desk's favorite tools we routinely install on new machines to make life a little more comfortable or convenient....

Big Red pushes restart button after users locked out of apps across Veterans Affairs hospitals, other govt departments Oracle's Federal electronic health records software suffered a US-wide outage this week, causing Veterans Affairs hospitals to invoke "standard contingency procedures."...

I knew you were trouble, Queens DA might have said Police have made two arrests in their quest to start a cybercrime crew's prison eras, alleging the pair stole hundreds of Taylor Swift tickets and sold them for huge profit....

Now that's sticker shock Eggheads have taken a look at previously developed techniques that can be used to trick self-driving cars into doing the wrong thing - and found cheap stickers stuck on stop and speed limit signs, at least, are pretty effective....

Thousands brace for layoffs as shares slide 20% HPE is feeling the effects of the Trump administration's gamesmanship, seeing shares slide after lowering earnings expectations due to uncertainty over how tariffs may affect the cost of imported parts....

PDFs and Powerpoint also lie in wait as 2026 looms Microsoft is suggesting alternatives to its doomed Publisher product ahead of the software's demise in 2026....

Which is why taking down chiefs and infra behind big name brand operations isn't working Interview There's a handful of cybercriminal gangs that Jason Baker, a ransomware negotiator with GuidePoint Security, regularly gets called in to respond to these days, and a year ago only one of these crews - Akira - was on threat hunters' radars and infecting organizations with the same ferocity as it is today....

Increasingly shaky relationship with the States has Europe considering options Talks are underway between European leaders and Eutelsat about a possible replacement for Starlink in Ukraine....

Difficulties unpicking 25 years of technical entanglement secure 474.4M without competition Following protracted negotiations, French outsourcer Atos has scooped up a 474.4 million ($612 million) contract without competition to build systems for a UK state bank at nearly three times the annual rate initially advertised three years ago....

When 'pickup' means more than just a ride On Call The week has ebbed away with embarrassing speed, so here we are again with a fresh installment of On Call, The Register's reader-contributed column that immortalizes tech support stories....

240M found for three-year sprint to develop three chiplets for HPC, AI A 38-strong group of tech players have founded a project with the snappy name Digital Autonomy with RISC-V in Europe, aka DARE, that aims to develop processor units to power the continent's supercomputers and other high-performance machines....

'Energetic event' did for Flight 8 after a few minutes. Super Heavy Booster recovered again, so there's that SpaceX's latest attempt to fly its Starship has again ended in a rapid unscheduled disassembly....

Now working with seven hyperscalers for custom AI silicon. Not working on acquiring bits of Intel Broadcom's acquisition of VMware appears to be a big success, on the balance sheet at least, after the company announced a big majority of its top 10,000 customers have decided to acquire its Cloud Foundation stack and posted strong growth....

Space is hard. Hopefully not so hard the three rovers on this spaceship are lost For the second time this week, a privately operated spacecraft has touched down on the Moon - but this one landed badly....

Best not to buy cheap hardware and use third-party app stores if you want to stay clear of this vast ad fraud effort Human Security's Satori research team says it has found a new variant of the remote-controllable Badbox malware, and as many as a million infected Android devices running it to form a massive botnet....

Did US Secret Service not get the memo, or? A coalition of international law enforcement has shut down Russian cryptocurrency exchange Garantex, a favorite of now-defunct ransomware crew Conti and others criminals for money laundering....

It's just an opt-in Labs curio for now, but so were those ever-present Overviews It was inevitable, really, but now it's official: Google is testing a new all-AI web search mode that leaves users entirely beholden to what Gemini thinks they'll want....

President ordered immigration officials to ramp up vetting of foreigners 'to the maximum degree' The US government's Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) is considering monitoring not just the social media posts of non-citizens coming into the country, but also all those already in America going through an immigration or citizenship process....

Startup needs tips on fitting its flying surfboard into existing infrastructure Airlines around the world continue to look for ways to be more sustainable and efficient without needing to reinvent the wheel - but in the case of Delta Air Lines' new partnership with JetZero, reinventing the wing is definitely on the table....

Interface and branding changes arrive to more clearly separate users' work and play lives Google Chrome Enterprise is rolling out browser changes designed to separate people's professional and personal activities, in addition to management enhancements....

That's Mutual Assured AI Malfunction in the race for superintelligence ANALYSIS Former Google chief Eric Schmidt says the US should refrain from pursuing a latter-day "Manhattan Project" to gain AI supremacy, as this will provoke preemptive cyber responses from rivals such as China that could lead to escalation....

No 'zero days without incident' sign for Microsoft thanks ongoing problems Problems with Outlook.com are continuing, with users reporting being unable to access their emails or authenticate themselves....

Akira really wasn't horsing around with this one Toronto Zoo's final update on its January 2024 cyberattack arrived this week, revealing that visitor data going back to 2000 had been compromised....

Attacks strike, facilities go bust, patients die. But it's preventable It will cost upward of $75 million to address the cybersecurity needs of rural US hospitals, Microsoft reckons, as mounting closures threaten the lives of Americans....

Veteran probes close in on the half century More science instruments are being shut down on the Voyager probes as engineers attempt to eke out the power and keep them running for years to come....

Global giants shouldn't be allowed to make 'committed spend' public sector deals and make discounts we cannot match Britain's competition regulator is facing biting criticism from local cloud providers for declining to act on Committed Spend Agreements (CSAs), the sales tools that AWS and Microsoft use to lure customers....

You were supposed to destroy the Sith, not join them! Brother is the latest printer manufacturer to come under fire over alleged sharp practices around the use of third-party consumables versus its own ink supplies....

Jailbreak it, or even gut it and turn its screen into a low-power portable display with a Modos e-ink controller FOSDEM 2025 Amazon's Kindle e-readers just got a bit less useful, but help is at hand, from jailbreaking to making one of the devices into a monitor....

Physicist and media darling argues partnership with NASA too prone to political whim The UK should hitch its cosmic wagon to the European space agency and contribute more cash to the intergovernmental body, professor Brian Cox, musician, media luvvie and Manchester University particle physicist, told the UK's second Parliamentary chamber this week....

This time we mean it for the Windows chatbot Microsoft has revamped its Copilot app on Windows once again, this time insisting it really has gone native....

No, your car can't navigate in space. But perhaps colonies can find their way without dedicated lunar GPS An experimental module attached to Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost Moon lander successfully used Earth's orbiting satnav systems, a feat that suggests a specialized lunar positioning system may not be needed....

While we're talking open source V12N, meet SEAPATH: A new hypervisor for electricity grids backed by Red Hat The Xen Project has delivered an update to its flagship hypervisor....

Complaint alleges 13 funding proposals foundered amid battle for control Eric Gan is no longer CEO of AI security biz Cybereason after what appears to have been a protracted and unpleasant fight with investors, including the SoftBank Vision Fund and Liberty Strategic Capital....

Xi's freelance infosec warriors apparently paid up to $75K to crack a single American inbox US government agencies announced Wednesday criminal charges against alleged members of China's Silk Typhoon gang, plus internet domain seizures linked to a long-term Chinese espionage campaign that saw Beijing hire miscreants to compromise US government agencies and other major orgs....

If you find Chipzilla's financial figures hard to parse, don't worry, it stumped these folks, too Intel has dodged at least one shareholder lawsuit accusing the chipmaker of misleading investors about the health of its struggling foundry business....

Would 'destroy a pipeline of top talent essential for hunting' Chinese spies in US networks, Congress told Video Looming staffing cuts to America's security and intelligence agencies, if carried out, would "have a devastating effect on cybersecurity and our national security," former NSA bigwig Rob Joyce has told House representatives....

Former allies, take note. This is a WOPR Updated The American military has signed a deal with Scale AI to give artificial intelligence, as far as we can tell, its most prominent role in the Western defense sector to date - with AI agents to now be used in planning and operations....

Desktop family gets chip boost as MacBook Air bags an M4 upgrade, more memory, price cut Apple's newly refreshed Mac Studio has arrived bristling with up to 32 CPU and 80 GPU cores, and as much as 512GB of unified memory on board....

They're good at zero-day exploits, too Updated Silk Typhoon, the Chinese government crew believed to be behind the December US Treasury intrusions, has been abusing stolen API keys and cloud credentials in ongoing attacks targeting IT companies and state and local government agencies since late 2024, according to Microsoft Threat Intelligence....