The Register

What happens at Black Hat... While trying to escape the Las Vegas heat during Black Hat last month, watchTowr Labs researchers decided to poke around for weaknesses in the WHOIS protocol. They claim to have found a way to undermine certificate authorities, which the world trusts to keep the internet safe by verifying the identity of websites....

How kind. Now how about looking at the corporation tax bill... Those kindly philanthropists at Amazon Web Services (AWS) plan to invest 8 billion ($10.4 billion) on datacenters in Britain between now and 2028, a move welcomed by the UK's finance minister who tried to take credit and spin it as part of the country's economic revival....

ISC2 argues security training needs to steer toward what hiring managers want The shortfall between the number of working security professionals and the number of security job openings has reached 4.8 million - a new high, according to cyber security non-profit ISC2....

Service with endless scalability, at least that's the plan Enterprises that need to worry about compliance have yet another fresh option, as Civo enters the appliance game with its FlexCore private cloud solution....

Ofcom research shows TV remains more trusted news source in social media age TV has lost its crown as the most popular source of news in the UK, according to research from Ofcom....

Brush up on your Delvish' - the lingo that flatters LLMs into a sort of submission Despite growing evidence that generative AI creates more work for humans than it saves, organizations are deploying it in frontline roles like customer service chatbots and CV-screeners....

Alternaleaf now has an outsized tech team, a build-not-buy mentality, and a love of FOSS When Myles Lawlor took the job as chief technology officer at Alternaleaf, Australia's largest online alternative health clinic, he started calling industry contacts to talk about the startup's tech needs - and they would hang up on him....

Trying for 3 grams, only 880 tons to go! Video On Tuesday, a robot began entering the Unit 2 reactor at the defunct Fukushima nuclear power plant, in an attempt to retrieve a tiny piece of the fuel that melted down in 2011....

Minister reckons dedicated cops necessary to protect digital transactions India has announced a plan to train a specialized wing of 5000 "Cyber Commandos" in the next five years, as part of its efforts to address cyber crime....

Foxcon and Sharp imagine a sofa and television in a connected electric van Japanese electronics giant Sharp and its majority stakeholder, Foxconn, have unveiled an electric vehicle that features, among other mod cons, an "extended living room."...

CISA wants you to leap on Citrix and Ivanti issues. Adobe, Intel, SAP also bid for patching priorities Patch Tuesday Another Patch Tuesday has dawned, as usual with the unpleasant news that there are pressing security weaknesses and blunders to address....

Isn't saying how much they'll cost or when they'll fire up Oracle is going nuclear over growing demand for AI datacenters, and that's not a metaphor for Larry Ellison's mood....

Chinese giant claims lithium batteries exploded, now one server hall is waterlogged At least a portion of Chinese web giant Alibaba's online services have been disrupted by a fire at a Singapore datacenter following what's said to be an Li-ion battery explosion....

Correction, no one wanted - well, except perhaps these patent filers at Ford Someday soon, if Ford has its way, drivers and passengers may be bombarded with infotainment ads tailored to their personal and vehicle data....

Chatbots, generative models 'in many ways the next step in the surveillance economy' Web browsers now commonly sport AI services provided by on-device or cloud-based models. However, a few holdouts remain convinced it's a bad idea....

Duo accused of stealing $3.2B of 20nm tech and secrets Two former Samsung employees have reportedly been arrested in South Korea on suspicion they stole more than $3.2 billion in intellectual property to build their own chip factory in China....

AI infra startup serves up Llama 3.1 405B at 100+ tokens per second Not to be outdone by rival AI systems upstarts, SambaNova has launched inference cloud of its own that it says is ready to serve up Meta's largest models faster than the rest....

Not even the venerable expertise of the US Space Force is enough to push progress Despite more than two decades of work, the US military's GPS modernization efforts are still so muddled that uninterrupted operation of a secure network of GPS satellites could be at risk....

Kyndryl survey suggests there's life in big iron yet Even mainframes can't escape the AI bug, with a report finding that big iron is becoming a prime candidate to host and run AI workloads, while enterprises are increasingly integrating their mainframes with modern infrastructure rather than seeking an off-ramp....

Post-IPO chapter ends after SQL biz shed jobs, products in bid to find buyer A private equity biz has succeeded in its takeover of MariaDB 18 months after its disastrous IPO....

Analyst suggests Redmond's internal distro may one day fly the coop Azure Linux is Microsoft's take on the open source operating system. It is primarily used for internal purposes, but could it become (yet another) distribution option?...

Elderly people report the greatest losses The FBI just dropped its annual report examining the costs of crypto-related cybercrime, painting a predictably grim picture as total losses in the US exceeded $5.6 billion in 2023 - a 45 percent year-on-year increase....

Final judgment handed down by Court of Justice of the European Union Following an eight-year legal tussle, Europe's highest court has ruled in a "final judgment" that Apple benefited from massive tax breaks after Ireland contravened EU state aid rules....

Xanadu release also adds a Pro tier, along with lots more AI SaaSy workflow vendor ServiceNow has opted for a different database to back its applications, and will introduce it this week along with the new "Xanadu" release....

Plus: CTO Larry says Big Red uses hardware 'efficiently' but 'labor sparingly because labor is a security risk' Oracle beat investment analysts' estimates with a Q1 revenue haul of $13.3 billion, up 7 percent year-on-year, a feat one market watcher chalked up to "several large deals being signed" in the period....

Altitude record within grasp and in-house spacesuits to be put through their paces SpaceX has launched the Polaris Dawn mission, which is set to surpass the altitude record set by Gemini 11 and feature a commercial spacewalk using SpaceX-designed Extravehicular Activity (EVA) spacesuits....

Users warned to get off 3.x releases as support ends The Apache Software Foundation Cassandra project has released the 5.0 iteration of the wide-column store database boasting new features to improve vector search, a Java update and enhanced performance....

After years of legal wrangling, judges say Chocolate Factory played dirty The European Union's Court of Justice (ECJ) has dismissed Google's appeal of a 2.4 billion ($2.65 billion) 2017 antitrust ruling, finding it had abused its dominance in favor of its own Google Shopping service, diverting traffic that would otherwise have gone to rival comparison services....

When is maintenance maintenance, and when is it 'we've been pwned'? Sometimes, an extended period of "maintenance" can mean a cyber incident. Other times, it can mean an IT team is struggling to make one system talk to another. The travails of Transport for London (TfL) and pensions manager Aegon are examples at both ends of the spectrum....

Peer says government needs to learn lessons from Post Office scandal The UK Parliament's second chamber is set to launch a bill designed to regulate the use of algorithms and automated decision-making by public bodies....

Gartner thinks generative AI is right for only five percent of workloads AI techniques that require specialist hardware are "doomed," according to analyst firm Gartner's chief of research for AI Erick Brethenoux - who included GPUs in his definition of endangered kit....

$7.5 billion needed, the kind of cash Apple makes without trying Video After six years of sea trials, environmental group The Ocean Cleanup claims it has proved that the Great Pacific Garbage Patch - a floating mass of plastic waste twice the size of Texas - could be cleaned up in ten years using current technology, at a cost of a mere $7.5 billion....

Beijing aimed research at immediate needs - like blocking leaks - while the US sought abstract knowledge China has an undeniable lead in quantum networking technology - a state of affairs that should give the US pause, despite its lead in quantum computing....

Starting with an analysis of what India has to offer, which is plenty The US has decided to partner with India and its Semiconductor Mission (ISM) to grow and diversify global chip supply chains....

Minister orders regulator to slow down following immediate backlash Malaysia's telecom regulator has abandoned a plan to block overseas DNS services a day after announcing it, following a sharp backlash and accusations of government overreach....

Washington wants to know what the biggest model-makers are up to The US Commerce Department has proposed a fresh set of reporting requirements for developers of cutting-edge AI models and those renting the infrastructure required to train them....

As its other monopoly trial - the one brought by the DoJ and eight states - begins in Virginia Google defended its advertising technology businesses in the court of public opinion on Sunday, just as its attorneys prepared similar arguments against US antitrust allegations now being heard in a Virginia courtroom....

DoJ, ATF target MCDs, but what about the printers? The US Department of Justice is turning to the 3D printing industry to help combat the scourge of machine gun conversion devices (MCDs) used by criminals to turn semi-automatic firearms into deadly bullet sprayers....

It promised vanishing messages, but now 'it's privacy theater' Video A popular privacy feature in WhatsApp is "completely broken and can be trivially bypassed," according to developers at cryptowallet startup Zengo....

Setting the stage for pending AI feature while doubling down on health tech Apple just introduced its iPhone 16 line, Watch Series 10, and assorted AirPods, and also set formal release dates next week for its iOS 18 and watchOS 11 software....

The kind of thing the big names should be doing instead of working with proprietary vendors OneFileLinux is a very different sort of distro that runs entirely from your UEFI system partition, without a bootable USB key or any other partitions on the disk....

US alarmed by heightened Kremlin naval activity worldwide Russia's naval activity near undersea cables is reportedly drawing the scrutiny of US officials, further sparking concerns that the Kremlin may be plotting to "sabotage" underwater infrastructure via a secretive, dedicated military unit called the General Staff Main Directorate for Deep Sea Research (GUGI)....

Challenges span energy efficiency, memory, programmability, and national security The US Department of Energy has launched a $23 million program aimed at overcoming a litany of supercomputing performance bottlenecks....

But then again is LiDAR even on the radar in 2024? Mobileye is axing its light detection and ranging (LiDAR) research team, noting the tech has fallen out of favor in the automated driver assist space though to the keen observer it might be looking for any way to save money....

Nvidia, Equinix clearly making a killing over costs, confusion, and cold feet Enterprises are still struggling with the business case for generative AI projects more than a year after the craze started, and we may have to wait until the end of 2025 to see if they're seen through to completion....

'Insider wrongdoing' to blame for the breach Avis Rent A Car System has alerted 299,006 customers across multiple US states that their personal information was stolen in an August data breach....

Criminals with plenty of time on their hands may now have credit card details Around 1.7 million people will receive a letter from Florida-based Slim CD, if they haven't already, after the company detected an intrusion dating back nearly a year....

Salsa's final act: Reminding us it was the humans all along The European Space Agency (ESA) has bid farewell to the Cluster II spacecraft with a final set of commands to show that engineers are indeed human....

Japanese government has also earmarked $6.4B for the project Japanese chip upstart Rapidus has only worked on its 2nm wafer fab in Hokkaido for a year, yet the company is reportedly already seeking 100 billion ($699 million) in additional funding for the project....

The latest of many attempts to stifle perceived threats to Putin's regime A pro-democracy NGO in Russia says it looks like the Kremlin-linked COLDRIVER group was behind last month's hack-and-leak job that saw files and inboxes dumped online....