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A long and strange tech support story that starts in Africa and ends in a Presidential Suite On Call Welcome yet again to On Call, the reader-contributed column in which The Register immortalizes readers' stories of escaping tech support traumas....

NYU doc died from allergic reaction after eating at Florida resort pub Walt Disney Parks and Resorts wants a wrongful death lawsuit filed against it and one of its tenants, an Irish pub, to be booted from court into arbitration....

The CMP boasts to be the orchestration platform behind GreenLake since 2022 Hewlett Packard Enterprise has announced the acquisition of yet another partner, this time scooping up cloud management biz Morpheus Data for an unspecified sum....

Teams wanting the cash have to commit to handing their models to OpenSSF after next year's final One year after it began, the DARPA AI Cyber Challenge (AIxCC) has whittled its pool of contestants down to seven semifinalists....

Hype is peaking now and digital employee experience stuck in trough of disillusionment Mainstream adoption of AI in the office and among employees remains around two years off, according to analysis from consultancy Gartner....

US politicians and Israeli officials among the top targets for the IRGC's cyber unit Google has joined Microsoft in publishing intel on Iranian cyber influence activity following a recent uptick in attacks that led to data being leaked from the Trump re-election campaign....

If you guessed Beijing, sorry - but it is number 2, according to Synergy Research figures If the internet can be said to have a geographic location, then perhaps it is Northern Virginia, which has the largest share of the hyperscale datacenter capacity within which the world's data is stored....

When is a mishap not really a mishap? NASA has continued to twist itself into a pretzel over whether Boeing's CST-100 Starliner -now two months past its original return date - can be used to bring back its crew to Earth and whether a failure to do so would be classed as a mishap....

Eric Schmidt blamed WFH and work-life balance policies for Google's stumbles in AI race Eric Schmidt, Google's ex-CEO and executive chairman has had to row back on remarks he made that linked the megacorp's poor showing in the AI race with the company's flexible working policies....

He'll also have to pay back $1.2 million from fraudulent transactions he facilitated A Russian national is taking a trip to prison in the US after being found guilty of peddling stolen credentials on a popular dark web marketplace....

A business breakup may be coming - but what comes after may not be better Comment After more than 15 years of insisting that "competition is only a click away," Google's antitrust mantra is no longer keeping the regulators at bay....

Anydesk is its access tool of choice A new extortion gang called Mad Liberator uses social engineering and the remote-access tool Anydesk to steal organizations' data and then demand a ransom payment, according to Sophos X-Ops....

Remember the 'go hardcore or go home' email? Turns out: not super compatible with Irish employment law Twitter has been ordered to pay 550,000 ($607,000) compensation for unfair dismissal to a former senior executive in Ireland, said to be a record amount awarded in the country over such a case....

Reorg of entire biz as tech giant addresses downturn in core networking segment Networking titan Cisco has confirmed in a filing with the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) that it is eliminating 7 percent of its global workforce as it embarks upon a restructuring plan....

Everyone knows automation will happen, which is why everyone needs proof of human involvement Column Earlier this year I got fired and replaced by a robot. And the managers who made the decision didn't tell me - or anyone else affected by the change - that it was happening....

Payment arm of Korean messaging app denies any illegal activity Kakao Pay, a subsidiary of Korea's WhatsApp analog Kakao, handed over data from more than 40 million users to the Singaporean arm of Chinese payment platform Alipay, without user consent, Korea's financial watchdog revealed Tuesday....

No, no, go ahead, don't let us stop you, Xi Cyber-spies suspected of connections with China have infected "dozens" of computers belonging to Russian government agencies and IT providers with backdoors and trojans since late July, according to Kaspersky....

Thesps at least get final say on what their doppelgangers will say AI-generated voices in ads might become more common thanks to an agreement between SAG-AFTRA and an AI cloning upstart....

Git blame an infrastructure update If you can't or couldn't access GitHub today, it's because the site broke itself....

Treasury questions the retirement of the, er, Technology Retirement Office A shuttered IRS office focused on retiring and replacing legacy technology should be reopened, an audit has concluded, so that the US tax collection agency can get a firm grip on replacing its aging tech stack....

Don't use LLMs for anything important and don't try to reverse engineer it Microsoft is notifying folks that its AI services should not be taken too seriously, echoing prior service-specific disclaimers....

Production ramp won't kick off until Q1 2025 Nvidia's alleged Blackwell supply problem may not be as bad as first thought, according to Foxconn executives who claimed they would begin shipping a small volume of GB200 systems in the fourth quarter....

Citizen Lab also spots a COLDWASTREL swimming in the Rivers of Phish Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) cyberspies, joined by a new digital snooping crew, have been conducting a massive online phishing espionage campaign via phishing against targets in the US and Europe over the past two years, according to the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab....

Lone Star State alleges GM cashed in with "millions in lump sum payments" from the sale Texas has sued General Motors for what it said is a years-long scheme to collect and sell drivers' data to third parties - including insurance companies - without their knowledge or consent....

Three state attorneys general probed the company and found plenty to chastise Biotech biz Enzo Biochem is being forced to pay three state attorneys general a $4.5 million penalty following a 2023 ransomware attack that compromised the data of more than 2.4 million people....

Intuitive Machines tosses hat into the ring for NASA's canceled trundlebot Intuitive Machines has submitted a bid to save NASA's VIPER rover, describing the $84 million savings claimed by the US space agency when cutting it as "a government number."...

Sited in Reykjavik, datacenter running on geothermals and hydropower A consortium of companies is running a proof-of-concept for a turnkey cloud service delivered from a datacenter located in Iceland, powered entirely by renewable energy to help clients meet their Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) obligations....

A patch to fix the patch that caused admins to scamper for their recovery keys Microsoft has fixed a problem that sent affected Windows PCs scurrying into BitLocker recovery....

Chip upstart takes aim at Arm with design that can scale up to 256 cores SiFive has announced the launch of its latest core for datacenters, the P870-D, and claims it has a leg up on Arm's Neoverse N2 in density for AI....

Biz admits turning human women into faceless, sexualized furniture was a 'tone deaf' marketing ploy If you attended the Black Hat conference in Vegas last week and found yourself over in Palo Alto Networks' corner of the event, you may have encountered a marketing gimmick that has since been heavily criticized for misogyny....

Investors still shovelling money into AI but 'path to monetization' still far Is the Gen AI bubble about to burst? You'd better hope not, as it appears to be one of the only major growth areas in the US tech economy, according to S&P Global....

iPhone version of mobile browser sees surge of interest in wake of EU competition rules Browser maker Opera has released an iOS version of Opera One, a variant of its AI-infused desktop browser that complies with the strictures of Apple's mobile ecosystem....

500 km transmission cable promises enough power for two million homes, or a heck of a lotta GPUs Britain's Office of Gas and Electricity Markets (Ofgem) on Tuesday signed off on a 3.4 billion project to construct an "electricity superhighway" between Scotland and Yorkshire....

Questions raised as one of the world's largest PC makers joins America's critical defense team Opinion Lenovo's participation in a cybersecurity initiative has reopened old questions over the company's China origins, especially in light of the growing mistrust between Washington and Beijing over technology....

The team knows you want one, but in the meantime why not make one yourself? Raspberry Pi enthusiasts unable to wait for the shelves to fill up with Pi-500 stock are starting to get creative....

Is it an ad? Or serious infosec advice? In its ongoing effort to boost the usage of its Edge browser, Microsoft is marketing the software to users of its Defender security suite with an unusual prompt - and drawn criticism for blurring a line between advising and advertising....

There's a blockchain involved so it's totally going to stop you getting those calls India's Telecom Regulatory Authority (TRAI) on Tuesday directed telcos to stop calls from unregistered telemarketers - and prevent them from using networks again for up to two years - as part of an effort to curb spam and scams....

Sells stake in rival chip designer, keeps its MariaDB shares Intel has sold its stock in chip design firm Arm - probably netting around $147 million and a tidy profit, given the price of Arm scrip has risen 96 percent in the ten months since it returned to public trading....

Online celebs might find that flattering - but not if it means a committee must approve their next livestream India's Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB) has withdrawn a flagship bill after criticism that it would require online content creators to register and be subject to the same laws as broadcasters....

Nicely ahead of that always-a-decade-away moment when all our info becomes an open book The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) today released the long-awaited post-quantum encryption standards, designed to protect electronic information long into the future - when quantum computers are expected to break existing cryptographic algorithms....

Plus more pain for Intel which fixed 43 bugs, SAP and Adobe also in on the action Patch Tuesday Microsoft has disclosed 90 flaws in its products - six of which have already been exploited - and four others that are listed as publicly known....

Targets impossible unsubscribes, elusive human assistance, and other wallet-draining time sinks Businesses that use labyrinthine subscription cancellation procedures, flaky customer service bots and other cynical schemes used to give customers the run around have been put on notice by the Biden administration....

And four more phones. Woo. Yay. Video Today, Google said it will add more Gemini AI features to Android smartphones - though what's said to be best of that functionality will be exclusive to its new Pixel 9 line of handhelds....

Whatever happened to the team behind Marvell's ThunderX2 chips? Oh, hello Akeana, which has secured over $100 million in funding over the past few years, has now launched its long-awaited lineup of RISC-V CPU designs, which are aimed at applications from embedded to datacenter systems....

Biz set sights beyond just another rent-an-accelerator cluster provider Yet another GPU cloud has coalesced amid the ongoing AI boom. Today, AI infrastructure startup Foundry announced its Cloud Platform is now available for limited access....

Plus many more newbies waiting in the wings Despite a law enforcement takedown six months ago, LockBit 3.0 remains the most prolific encryption and extortion gang, at least so far, this year, according to Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42....

Pay no attention to web giant's whining about the cost of compliance, watchdog argues The US Federal Trade Commission has urged the California judge overseeing Epic Games' antitrust claim against Google to take strong action to correct the company's anticompetitive management of the Android app market. This follows a recent ruling by another federal judge that the tech giant violated US antitrust laws with its search business....

There's water in them thar hills, but it'll be really hard to get to Data from the late Mars InSight lander continues to pay dividends, with the latest findings suggesting liquid water is abundant in the Martian mid-crust (about 7 to 12 mile depths)....

Authorities allege 'J.P. Morgan' practiced extreme operational and online security' The US has charged a suspect they claim is a Belarusian-Ukrainian cybercriminal whose offenses date back to 2011....

Penguins reiterate commitment to 'fostering open, collaborative' development, licensing The Open Model Initiative (OMI) has joined orgs under the Linux Foundation's umbrella as it continues to push open standards for training and developing AI models....