The Register

What's next, Crysis-in-a-CSV? First came Tetris, then Doom - and now a bare-bones Linux instance that boots inside a PDF....

Overworked, under pressure, and subjected to abuse - is it really worth it? State Of Open Recent events have brought the plight of open source maintainers front and center, but the problems were brewing for many years....

'In 50 years, I think we'll view these business practices like we view sweatshops today' Interview It has been nearly a decade since famed cryptographer and privacy expert Bruce Schneier released the book Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World - an examination of how government agencies and tech giants exploit personal data. Today, his predictions feel eerily accurate....

Anyone remember when Volkswagen rigged its emissions results? Oh... AI model makers love to flex their benchmarks scores. But how trustworthy are these numbers? What if the tests themselves are rigged, biased, or just plain meaningless?...

Plus: Keep calm and plug Anthropic's Claude into public services Comment The UK government on Friday said its AI Safety Institute will henceforth be known as its AI Security Institute, a rebranding that attests to a change in regulatory ambition from ensuring AI models get made with wholesome content - to one that primarily punishes AI-abetted crime....

Roses aren't cheap, violets are dear, now all your access token are belong to Vladimir Digital thieves - quite possibly Kremlin-linked baddies - have been emailing out bogus Microsoft Teams meeting invites to trick victims in key government and business sectors into handing over their authentication tokens, granting access to emails, cloud data, and other sensitive information....

Roses are red, violets are blue, CVE-2024-53704 is sweet for a ransomware crew Miscreants are actively abusing a high-severity authentication bypass bug in unpatched internet-facing SonicWall firewalls following the public release of proof-of-concept exploit code....

And it's not just datacenters driving the need for 3,500 TWh of new energy generation by 2027 The world is going to need a lot of new electricity generation in the next three years to keep up with an "unprecedented" spike in demand, says the International Energy Agency (IEA) - and it's going to be a tough goal to meet....

Cloud-based revival should come with 'a corresponding discount scale,' customers say SAP users have asked for transparent discounting and commercial arrangements following the business app giant's relaunch of Business Suite and extended alliance with Databricks....

Dominion Energy already eyeing another 26 GW worth of datacenter demand Demand for electricity from datacenters in Virginia nearly doubled in the second half of 2024, power supplier Dominion Energy said of the region, which is home to "Datacenter Alley"....

The hurdles are higher than you might imagine FOSDEM 2025 Getting involved with open source projects is a great way to build experience in development, documentation, internationalization, and more - but it's not as easy as it should be....

High-complexity bug unearthed by infoseccers, as Rapid7 probes exploit further A high-severity SQL injection bug in the PostgreSQL interactive tool was exploited alongside the zero-day used to break into the US Treasury in December, researchers say....

The Cupola continues to offer the best views in the universe It has been 15 years since the ultimate selfie booth, the Cupola, was attached to the International Space Station (ISS)....

... weeks after US titan was outvoted by other members to let Microsoft join the Euro cloud trade association Amazon's Web Services wing has exited the board of CISPE (cloud infrastructure service providers in Europe), following a recent update to the Articles of Association that means only corporations based in the region can serve....

Officer says mistakenly published police details were shared 'a considerable amount of times' Two suspected New IRA members were arrested on Tuesday and charged under the Terrorism Act 2000 after they were found in possession of spreadsheets containing details of staff that the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) mistakenly published online....

Union estimates up to 1,600 job on the line Vodafone and Three have detailed the exec line-up taking the reins of post-merger UK biz, yet there is no word on when the deal will close, what name it will take, or how many staff face the chop to cut role duplication....

Germany's Federal Cartel Office voices concerns iPhone maker may be breaking competition law Apple is feeling the heat over its acclaimed iPhone privacy policy after a German regulator's review of iOS tracking consent alleged that the tech giant exempted itself from the rules it enforces on third-party developers....

Outsourcing is not supposed to involve taking clients' hardware out of their building to your house On Call If it's Friday, it's time for another edition of On Call, our reader-contributed column in which you tell tales of crimes against tech support....

Analyst argues stopping the deal benefits Switchzilla by preventing rise of strong challenger for AI networks HPE has fired back at the US Department of Justice's objection to its takeover of Juniper Networks, with arguments that include an assertion that blocking the deal will benefit Huawei and therefore have national security implications....

New Deep Search' thinking and planning bot to go up against peoples' champion DeepSeek Chinese AI continued to march onto the world stage this week, with Alibaba and Baidu both taking major strides....

Talk about court red-handed Demonstrating yet again that uncritically trusting the output of generative AI is dangerous, attorneys involved in a product liability lawsuit have apologized to the presiding judge for submitting documents that cite non-existent legal cases....

Some employees steal sticky notes, others 'borrow' malicious code A crew identified as a Chinese government-backed espionage group appears to have started moonlighting as a ransomware player - further evidence that lines are blurring between nation-state cyberspies and financially motivated cybercriminals....

I fought the Torv and ... the Torv won Hector Martin, project lead of Asahi Linux, resigned from that effort early Friday, Japan Standard Time, citing developer burnout, demanding users, and Linus Torvalds's handling of the integration of Rust code into the open source kernel....

User numbers fall short, triggering investor sell-off Reddit's first year as a public company delivered solid results by most earnings metrics, but try telling that to Wall Street: Falling short on one key growth target sent shares tumbling despite an otherwise upbeat year-end report....

Networks in US and beyond compromised by Beijing's super-snoops pulling off priv-esc attacks China's Salt Typhoon spy crew exploited vulnerabilities in Cisco devices to compromise at least seven devices linked to global telecom providers and other orgs, in addition to its previous victim count....

The little database company with big users gaining fans as it adds consistency to speed and scale With its 8.0 release, distributed multi-model database Aerospike has added ACID transactions to support large-scale online transaction processing (OLTP) applications in a move it claims is an industry first....

Senator, Congressman tell DNI to threaten infosec agreements if Blighty won't back down US lawmakers want newly confirmed Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard to back up her tough talk on backdoors. They're urging her to push back on the UK government's reported order for Apple to weaken iCloud security for government access....

With drivemaker poised to become 2 publicly traded companies, judge says he has 'concerns' over restructuring Western Digital has less than a week to file a bond or stump up the $553 million it owes in a patent infringement case, after a federal judge on Tuesday denied the company a stay of execution while it tries to get the ruling overturned....

User can still push for perpetual licenses despite vendor's craving for subscription deals In the sizeable global ERP market, SAP's biggest threat is not some other software giant like Oracle. It is its own legacy software supported by other vendors....

Global tech corps wrestle with policy disparity on either side of the Atlantic Google may be the latest big tech corporation to scale back diversity, equity, and inclusion programs - but Arm, HPE, and Apple are going against the current direction of travel in their hiring and training policies....

Yet another cash grab from Kim's cronies and an intel update from Microsoft North Korea has changed tack: its latest campaign targets the NPM registry and owners of Exodus and Atomic cryptocurrency wallets....

Student shows 'Uniform hashing is optimal' was just wishful thinking It isn't often that a decades-old assumption underpinning modern technology is overturned, but a recent paper based on the work of an undergraduate and his two co-authors has done just that....

Standard FOSS office suite continues to evolve in interesting new directions FOSDEM 2025 LibreOffice is a big, mature chunk of code now, but that doesn't make it impossible to teach it impressive new tricks. Some of them could make it more important than ever....

Tech shows customers more humanity than its human staff It doesn't sleep, it doesn't eat, and it doesn't get sick of dealing with incompetent customers....

Objection from open source community heralded as 'great victory for the ecosystem' The WordPress Foundation's effort to trademark the terms HOSTED WORDPRESS and MANAGED WORDPRESS has been thwarted, for now, following a petition from a dissenting member of the open source WordPress community....

Limited-edition hotfix to get wider release before end of month Administrators of Palo Alto Networks' firewalls have complained the equipment falls over unexpectedly, and while a fix has bee prepared, it's not yet generally available....

Also reckons it can dodge DOGE Cisco has prepared for trade war and thinks it can ride things out by reconfiguring its supply chain if that becomes necessary....

What are customers actually getting from resellers other than massive price markups?' asks Troy Hunt Troy Hunt, proprietor of data breach lookup site Have I Been Pwned, is likely to ban resellers from the service....

FBI, CISA harrumph at Microsoft and VMware in call for coders to quit baking avoidable defects into stuff US authorities have labelled buffer overflow vulnerabilities "unforgivable defects", pointed to the presence of the holes in products from the likes of Microsoft and VMware, and urged all software developers to adopt secure-by-design practices to avoid creating more of them....

De-dupes some roles, hints others aren't needed as the infosec scene shifts Nine days after completing its $859 million acquisition of managed detection and response provider Secureworks, Sophos has laid off around six percent of its staff....

From the billionaire who said real-time surveillance is good for keeping us in check If governments want AI to improve services and security for their citizens, then they need to put all their information in one place - even citizens' genomic data - according to Larry Ellison, the Oracle database tycoon....

Demand described as a 'soft layoff' IBM has begun what a source describes as a soft layoff for its Finance & Operations business unit, in the form of a return-to-office (RTO) order....

GOP lawyer Sean Cairncross will be learning on the fly, as we also say hi to new intelligence boss Tulsi Gabbard President Trump has reportedly chosen a candidate for National Cyber Director - another top tech appointee with no professional experience in that role....

300+ US companies, 70+ individuals hit by the fraudsters An Arizona woman who created a "laptop farm" in her home to help fake IT workers pose as US-based employees has pleaded guilty in a scheme that generated over $17 million for herself... and North Korea....

Analysts tell El Reg why Russia's operators aren't that careful, and why North Korea wants money AND data Feature Ransomware gangsters and state-sponsored online spies fall on opposite ends of the cyber-crime spectrum....

Previous NOM4D experiments have gone so well, says project leader, that it's time to get real After several years of lab-testing ideas for orbital manufacturing technology, the US Department of Defense's research arm has decided to head into orbit for the latest round of experiments....

'Near-global' initial access campaign active since 2021 An initial-access subgroup of Russia's Sandworm last year wriggled its way into networks within the US, UK, Canada and Australia, stealing credentials and data from "a limited number of organizations," according to Microsoft....

40 m or 90 m? The difference matters in the case of impact The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is to be pointed at asteroid 2024 YR4 to reduce uncertainty regarding the chances of the object impacting Earth in the coming years....

Supply chain and regulatory hurdles likely to shrink figures US tech sanctions and supply chain readiness for racks of Nvidia's latest gear will likely cause AI server sales to cool-off in 2025....

'Stranded' Starliner astronauts set for a March homecoming The crew of the Boeing Starliner test mission is set to return to Earth ahead of schedule after managers decided to swap the Crew Dragon originally planned for the Axiom-4 flight with Crew-10....