The Register

Meanwhile, next-gen script kiddies are levelling up faster thanks to agentic AI Interview Iran's state-sponsored cyber operatives and hacktivists have all increased their activities since the military conflict with Israel erupted last week - but not necessarily in the way that Amazon chief information security officer CJ Moses expected....

Mozilla, at least, has warmed to the Chocolate Factory's attempt to improve mic, camera, and location permissions Google has been testing a new way for websites to ask permission to access sensitive browser controls, such as the microphone and camera, despite longstanding opposition from Mozilla and Apple. Following recent refinements to the proposal, Mozilla now appears to be warming to the changes....

France announced its own effort to build re-usable engines on the same day Japanese automotive giant Honda has successfully launched and landed a small rocket....

Quick reminder: The law that banned the app is called Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act' The Trump administration is set to again waive the 2024 law that requires the made-in-China social network TikTok to either sell its US operations to a local company or stop operating on US soil....

Expect headcount reductions over the next few years, says Andy Jassy Amazon staff on Tuesday got an email from their CEO advising that some of them will probably be replaced by bots....

Little agents everywhere Salesforce is raising prices for a bunch of its products and claims that increasing integration with AI justifies the increased bills, even after one of its own researchers recently said that AI agents are often underdelivered on basic CRM tasks....

Plus adds a ton more security capabilities for cloud customers at re:Inforce Amazon Web Services hit a major multi-factor authentication milestone, achieving 100 percent MFA enforcement for root users across all types of AWS accounts....

They're taking the data from IRSengard, claim Dems; officials tell us that's not true A coalition of House and Senate Democrats has sent an aggressive letter to Palantir CEO Alex Karp questioning whether the controversial data intelligence biz is breaking federal law by allegedly helping the IRS build a searchable "mega database" of taxpayer information, and, likening his firm to US companies accused of aiding human rights violations in apartheid South Africa, Nazi Germany, and the People's Republic of China....

A symbolic political move Taiwan has added China's leading foundry operator Semiconductor Manufacturing International Co. (SMIC) and IT giant Huawei to its export control list. The move effectively blacklists the duo from doing business with the chip manufacturing mecca....

China's 'little dragons' pose big challenge to US AI firms MiniMax, an AI firm based in Shanghai, has released an open-source reasoning model that challenges Chinese rival DeepSeek and US-based Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google in terms of performance and cost....

Third time's a charm? Apple has escaped a $300 million patent infringement damages penalty - for now - due to what a trio of judges said comes down to faulty jury instructions....

Amazon's satellite constellation hits another snag as ULA rocket aborts on pad A hardware glitch on United Launch Alliance's (ULA) workhorse Atlas V rocket delayed the launch of the second batch of Project Kuiper satellites....

Hardcoded passwords and path traversals keeping bug hunters in work Security researchers have issued a warning about a pre-authentication exploit chain affecting a CMS used by some of the biggest companies in the world....

Layoffs loom at Foundry biz despite CHIPS Act relief on the horizon Intel is reportedly set to shed 15 to 20 percent of its fabrication plant staff from next month, blaming company finances for the move, but the chip giant may get a boost from increased tax credits in a draft bill passing through the US Senate....

Promises silos for VMs, storage, and networks are out. Happy cloud-like days are in, without hyperscale complications 573 days after closing the acquisition of VMware, Broadcom has released the product that expresses its vision for the virtualization giant's future and what it claims is the template for a modern private cloud....

Out-of-band getting out of hand Microsoft has released an out-of-band update to deal with a Surface Hub problem introduced with June's Patch Tuesday fixes....

Still buying B200s and MI300Xs? Don't feel bad, Nvidia and AMD's NVL72 and Helios rack systems aren't really for the enterprise anyway Analysis With all the hype around Nvidia's NVL72, AMD's newly announced Helios, and Intel's upcoming Jaguar Shores rack systems, you'd be forgiven for thinking the days of eight-way HGX servers are numbered....

Penalty follows year-long probe into flaws that allowed attack to affect so many The UK's data watchdog is fining beleaguered DNA testing outfit 23andMe 2.31 million ($3.13 million) over its 2023 mega breach....

Forms Library blamed for issues experienced by some users Microsoft is so keen for users to migrate to the New Outlook email client that it has broken Classic Outlook again. This time, affected users are unable to open or create a message....

Parent company Mozilla's not my fave either Opinion I know some people still love Firefox. But, folks, it's a bad relationship, and the problems have been going on for a while now....

GLAM-E Labs report warns of risk to online cultural resources Bots harvesting content for AI companies have proliferated to the point that they're threatening digital collections of arts and culture....

Last of Whitehall-wide ERP overhaul will not kick off until next year The UK's Ministry of Defence has delayed procurement of a 92 million contract to implement Oracle's Fusion cloud-based ERP system....

Preferred and secured creditors walk away with nothing Brit-based ruggedized phone maker Bullitt Group's liquidation has finally wrapped up - and the firm was in such dire straits that none of its creditors received any recovered funds....

As for agentic AI, don't get him started about the enormous challenge of making it work vendors just won't discuss AI is not doing its job today and should leave us alone" according to analyst firm Gartner's global chief of AI research Erick Brethenoux....

Mostly aimed at Europe and its increasingly nervous users Microsoft has created a version of its 365 productivity suite that runs on-premises, as part of a move to satisfy European regulations....

Polling was supposed to start on Monday. Organizers warn situation is fluid A court in Mauritius has postponed the long-awaited election at the African Network Information Centre (AFRINIC)....

DoD says deal covers 'warfighting'. OpenAI merely mentions healthcare and 'supporting proactive cyber defense' The US Department of Defense has contracted OpenAI to run a pilot program that will create "frontier AI," but it's not clear what they're building together....

A moment of panic as some customers thought the free tiers were going away On Monday, Railway, a provider of cloud infrastructure services, decided to throttle software builds by customers in its lowest paying tiers to accommodate unexpected demand for service following the Google Cloud Platform outage last week....

Google threat analysts warn the team behind the Marks & Spencer break-in has moved on Cyber-crime crew Scattered Spider has infected US insurance companies following a series of ransomware attacks against American and British retailers, according to Google, which urged this sector to be on "high alert."...

No need to plagiarize if you can have AI do it for you A series of Freedom of Information requests shows that students in British universities are increasingly getting busted for using AI to cheat....

MAGA MVNO and the gold-plated telephone of destiny The Trump family is getting into the wireless business - and what better way to do it than with a gold-colored Android smartphone that could someday be designed and manufactured in the USA?...

Clock speed of 25 kHz means 2D CMOS system won't run Doom quite yet Gaze into the temporal distance and you might spot the end of the age of silicon looming somewhere out there, as a research team at Penn State University claims to have built the first working CMOS computer entirely from two-dimensional materials....

The group has previously threatened to SWAT cancer patients and leaked pre-op plastic surgery photos An extortion gang claims to have breached Freedman HealthCare, a data and analytics firm whose customers include state agencies, health providers, and insurance companies, and is threatening to dump tens of thousands of sensitive files early Tuesday morning....

For researchers yearning to earn some yen and escape Trump 2.0 Japan is the latest nation hoping to tempt disgruntled US researchers alarmed by the Trump administration's hostile attitude to academia to relocate to the Land of the Rising Sun....

Flights still flying - just don't count on the app or website working smoothly Canadian airline WestJet is warning of "intermittent interruptions or errors" on its app and website as it investigates a cybersecurity incident....

Next version to drop Windows 7 through 8.1, and 32-bit Windows support is on the way out, too The LibreOffice project is preparing to cut some Windows support - and encourages users to switch to Linux....

Evaluation of latest repairs to Russian segment ongoing NASA has pushed back the launch of Axiom Mission 4 to the International Space Station (ISS), citing concerns over persistent leaks aboard the aging orbital outpost. A new No Earlier Than (NET) date is set for June 19....

Marketplace as big as Silk Road had more than 600k users and turnover of 'at least' 250M Operation Deep Sentinel is the latest international law enforcement collaboration against cybercrime, shutting down Archetyp - one of the largest dark web drug marketplaces....

6-in-10 success rate for single-step tasks A new benchmark developed by academics shows that LLM-based AI agents perform below par on standard CRM tests and fail to understand the need for customer confidentiality....

But lose your code and it's gone for good Updated Windows 11 users in the European Economic Area will shortly receive a new Recall Export feature, allowing Recall snapshots to be shared with third-party apps and websites....

As others roll back use of tech due to quality, customers preferring to talk to humans Not content with a corporate blueprint to cut up to 55,000 employees by 2030, UK telecoms giant BT now says even more staff could be replaced with AI, despite the experience of some orgs that have already tried this....

Student 'believed he could finish' software dev 'project alone and therefore that the rules did not apply to him' A former GCHQ intern was jailed for seven-and-a-half years for stealing top-secret files during a year-long placement at the British intelligence agency....

Scandal-hit IT giant said it wouldn't take on new UK.gov contracts or continue bidding on existing ones unless asked Exclusive The Northern Ireland government did not ask Fujitsu to continue bidding for a 125 million ($167 million) contract, yet the Japanese tech giant to continued to do so, despite promising to quit competing for UK government work during the fallout from the Horizon scandal....

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Not a problem with AI hype Opinion Among the forever wars in geekdom, defining the difference between science fiction and fantasy is a hot potato destined to outlive the heat death of the universe....

Custom text fields can be a powerful form of protest Who, Me? The only certainties in life are death, taxes ... and tech causing trouble, a topic that The Register covers each week in this reader-contributed column we call Who, Me?" that celebrates the moments you made trouble at work and somehow escaped....

Promises operational change - and improvements to customer comms when it crashes Google Cloud has explained the massive outage it created last week and, as has happened many times previously, admitted that it broke itself....

German giant wants case heard in Germany, not the USA German giant Siemens AG has tried to convince a US court to throw out the case in which VMware alleged it used unlicensed software....

PLUS: APNIC completes re-org; India cuts costs for chipmakers; Infosys tax probe ends; and more Asia In Brief Australia's Federal Police (AFP) last week announced charges against four suspects for alleged participation in a money-laundering scheme that involved a security company's armored cash transport unit....

PLUS: Discord invite links may not be safe; Miscreants find new way to hide malicious JavaScript; and more! Infosec In Brief A pair of Congressional Democrats have demanded a review of the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) program amid uncertainties about continued US government funding for the scheme....

Academics mull the need for the digital equivalent of low-background steel Feature For artificial intelligence researchers, the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT on November 30, 2022, changed the world in a way similar to the detonation of the first atomic bomb....