The Register

Azure Blob Storage, AWS, and Twilio keys all up for grabs An analysis of widely used mobile apps offered on Google Play and the Apple App Store has found hardcoded and unencrypted cloud service credentials, exposing millions of users to major security problems....

Meanwhile, Infinera snags up to $93M of the dwindling subsidies The lion's share of the CHIPS Act funding has already been allocated, but Uncle Sam still has tax breaks to hand out, and it's not even being that picky about which kind of chips are eligible....

TaxSlayer, H&R Block, TaxAct, and Ramsey Solutions accused of sharing info with Meta and Google A quartet of lawmakers have penned a letter to the Department of Justice asking it to prosecute tax preparation companies for sharing customer data, including tax return information, with Meta and Google....

From hell's heart I stab at thee Fake review writers are officially on watch - the US is now enforcing a new rule to ban the practice and is promising a crackdown....

Appen points to, among other problems, a lack of high-quality training data labeled by humans The deployment of AI projects and associated return on investment (ROI) have declined, according to a large survey of IT decision-makers....

New flagship SoC drops Arm and grows its own legs with Oryon During day one of Qualcomm's Snapdragon Summit in Maui, Hawaii, it unveiled its latest flagship SoC, dubbed the Snapdragon 8 Elite. This marks a pivotal swing into harnessing the technical prowess of its acquired Nuvia team....

Microsoft blocks updates to avoid giving admins another headache In yet more problems for this month's Windows 11 24H2 update, Microsoft has warned the new code will cause a Blue Screen of Death on some Asus systems due to hardware compatibility issues....

Chip giant tells Uncle Sam someone could be making orders on the sly TSMC has reportedly tipped off US officials to a potential attempt by Huawei to circumvent export controls and obtain AI chips manufactured by the Taiwanese company....

If the first patches don't work, try, try again VMware has pushed a second patch for a critical, heap-overflow bug in the vCenter Server that could allow a remote attacker to fully compromise vulnerable systems after the first software update, issued last month, didn't work....

Unisys, Avaya, Check Point, and Mimecast settled with the agency without admitting or denying wrongdoing Four high-profile tech companies reached an agreement with the Securities and Exchange Commission to pay millions of dollars in penalties for misleading investors about their exposure to the 2020 SolarWinds hack....

Crooks revert to old ways for greater efficiency Experts believe the Akira ransomware operation is up to its old tricks again, encrypting victims' files after a break from the typical double extortion tactics....

Have recent troubles finally humbled Chipzilla? Opinion This week, Intel and AMD set their decades-old rivalry aside to ensure x86 remains relevant amid growing adoption of competing architectures....

Premier indicates possible shift in post-Fukushima policy The global surge in AI is placing unprecedented pressure on energy resources, with chipmakers such as TSMC consuming vast amounts of electricity to meet growing demand for advanced silicon. In response, Taiwan's government is signaling a potential shift in its longstanding opposition to nuclear energy to address its mounting power needs....

Biz aims to scrub unnecessary dependencies from npm packages in the name of security Security-focused developer Socket announced on Tuesday it has connected with another $40 million in funding to further its efforts to safeguard the software supply chain....

Exec Chris Bergey tells us what the chip designer is doing to stay competitive Interview Arm Holdings has long been the primary architecture for mobile chips since the advent of modern smartphones - its Cortex is quietly humming away inside almost every phone or tablet you can think of. However, with Apple and Qualcomm producing their own custom silicon designs, Arm's market dominance appears less secure....

11% of databases still on aging version with a month of support left Users of PostgreSQL 12 have less than a month to prepare for the database to enter end of life and become unsupported....

More senior than Windows itself, and still runs the world Microsoft Excel, the true successor to the throne of COBOL. Version 1.0 was released on the last day of September 1985, four decades ago....

Carriers consume less than half the cloud they committed to use Telecom companies have consumed only 48 percent of the cloud they have committed to, yet seek to secure more, according to a report released late last week by Infosys....

We sell that to OpenAI - how dare you steal it and make stuff up Major US news publishers Dow Jones & Co and NYP Holdings have sued AI search engine startup Perplexity for scraping their content without paying for it....

Could organoid-driven computing be the future of AI power? Researchers affiliated with the neuroscience platform FinalSpark have devised a 3D simulation depicting a butterfly that's directed by human brain cells....

Miscreants combine it with an equally tricky piece of social engineering The Ghostpulse malware strain now retrieves its main payload via a PNG image file's pixels. This development, security experts say, is "one of the most significant changes" made by the crooks behind it since launching in 2023....

Current capabilities mean local manufacturing is not likely - but a chip tuned to Indian needs could work India's government is reportedly in talks with Nvidia to co-develop AI silicon....

Intel and AMD left scrapping over about a third of the deal, and license fees Most years, China Telecom posts a tender for new servers to help it run the apps it needs to serve its hundreds of millions of customers. This year, its 150,000-plus orders will mostly go to domestic manufacturers who use local tech....

No losses caused - except the intern's job - says TikTok parent ByteDance has terminated an intern for "maliciously interfering" with a large language model training project....

Tokyo between a rock and a hard place as Beijing threatens to retaliate The "chip wars" between the US and China have taken a new turn with members of a House Select Committee threatening action against Japanese companies if the country does not do more to restrict sales of chipmaking kit to China....

Pending CCP drone ban could render the suit irrelevant Chinese drone maker DJI has sued the US Department of Defense, alleging it was added to a list of companies affiliated with the Chinese military and denied the opportunity to protest its innocence....

Biden's Executive Order finally getting its day in the sun, soonish The US federal government is poised to implement an Executive Order that would ban data brokers selling significant amounts of information to buyers in six countries....

Note to Xi: Marco and Ted Cruz aren't the same person China's Spamouflage disinformation crew has been targeting US Senator Marco Rubio (R-Florida) with its fake news campaigns over the past couple of months, trolling the Republican lawmaker's official X account and posting negative stories about Rubio on Reddit and Medium....

Private equity giant Thoma Bravo adds another trophy to its growing collection British security biz Sophos has announced a plan to gobble up competitor Secureworks in an $859 million deal that will make Dell happy....

Let bots manage your supply chain? What could possibly go wrong? Since announcing Copilot Studio last year, Microsoft claims it has achieved significant efficiency gains across multiple business units using its tools. Starting next month, customers will be able to put those claims to the test....

Dan O'Dowd tells El Reg about the OS secrets and ongoing clash with Musk Interview This month, presidential hopeful Donald Trump got a tool in his arsenal, some allegedly "unhackable" communications kit, and The Register has talked to the man behind the operating system, who also ran for the US Senate on a campaign to get self-driving Teslas off the road and is on something of a crusade about the matter....

AI innovation and geopolitical tensions push Middle Kingdom filings up 42% China's semiconductor industry is speeding up in response to US export controls, according to research by a specialist in intellectual property....

C'mon, do you really think ol' Elon's handing out all that cash, day after day? Elon Musk's plan to give $1 million each day to a random registered "swing state" voter who has signed his election petition could merit a look for election law violations, Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro said over the weekend....

Broader December release promises Ubuntu support and enhanced features Prominent RISC-V protagonist SiFive has announced early access to its anticipated development board, built around the firm's P550 core design, with a broader release scheduled for December....

'I am deeply concerned about how creative work is essentially being stolen at scale' Interview Gary Marcus, professor emeritus at New York University and serial entrepreneur, is the author of several books, the latest of which takes the tech industry to task for irresponsibly developing generative AI and putting democracy at risk....

Samsung halts fab orders, deliveries slow, China restrictions continue - but company expects Beijing sales bounce Analysis ASML, the sole provider of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines, is navigating market and geopolitical challenges that are hammering its business operations....

Like keeping your camera and microphone private? Patch up In revealing details about a vulnerability that threatens the privacy of Apple fans, Microsoft urges all macOS users to update their systems....

Mozilla and Google complicate life for users of uBlock Origin and uBlock Lite Both uBlock Origin and its smaller sibling, uBlock Origin Lite, are experiencing problems thanks to browser vendors that really ought to know better....

37signals CTO claims cost of new hardware was 'entirely recouped' as contracts expired after AWS exit The web software biz that decided to exit the cloud after racking up a huge bill says it has saved almost $2 million in its first "clean year" after making the switch to on-prem, and has already recouped the costs of the extra hardware it needed....

CEO tells The Reg customers are facing same challenges, not ruling out full-time RTO Exclusive SCC, one of Europe's largest resellers, is ordering staff to return to the office for three days a work from the start of next month, and terminating its flexible hours trial....

Gloucestershire continues with legacy system as SaaS replacement delayed by more than a year A South West England authority continues to suffer control weaknesses in its ERP system after the council delayed the project by more than a year and more than doubled the expected costs....

Stylish Artemis spacesuit design revealed last week should never fly, billionaire argues Private sector space outfit Axion and Italian fashion house Prada last week revealed the space suit that will be used on the Artemis III mission....

In science, every day is about testing hypotheses. Such as: 'You did what to the network?' Who, Me? Welcome, gentle reader, to another exciting week at the coalface of tech and therefore the anticipation of five joyous productive days ahead and a fresh edition of Who, Me? - The Register's reader-contributed tales of tech gone awry....

For general-purpose and memory-optimized workloads Microsoft's Cobalt 100 Arm CPUs have reached general availability in its Azure cloud, creating another non-x86 option for running VMs in the Redmondian cloud....

As TSMC defends itself against report it may have helped Huawei Tesla has denied it was involved in illegal-map making activities in China after Beijing asserted an unnamed foreign firm working on a smart car project had done so - and even stolen state secrets - through a collaboration with a local business....

Claims forthcoming chip catches up to Alder Lake and Xen 2 Chinese chip designer Loongson last week teased products that it claimed will deliver the same performance that Intel and AMD achieved around five years ago....

Org turns its woes into a fundraising opportunity Despite the Internet Archive's assurances it's back on its feet after a recent infosec incident, the org still appears to be in trouble after parties unknown claimed to hold access tokens to its Zendesk implementation and to have used them to send a mass email blast....

Plus: Australian bank glitch empties accounts; China online slang crackdown; Toshiba teams with Airbus; and more Asia In Brief Baidu CEO Robin Li has proclaimed that hallucinations produced by large language models are no longer a problem, and predicted a massive wipeout of AI startups when the "bubble" bursts....

Not as clumsy or random as a streamer, an elegant player for a more civilized age Opinion Yup, I called that one wrong. Twenty years ago. I bid farewell to WinAmp, the PC music player of choice. It had been made redundant by Windows Media Player getting better, WinAmp's owners getting bored, and the iPod blowing the doors off everything....

The static analyzer uses Claude AI to identify vulns and suggest exploit code Researchers with Seattle-based Protect AI plan to release a free, open source tool that can find zero-day vulnerabilities in Python codebases with the help of Anthropic's Claude AI model....