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Remember Salt Typhoon? Anyone? A group of Democratic senators has urged Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to reestablish the Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB), which had been investigating how China's Salt Typhoon hacked US government and telecommunications networks....

NAACP claims that 'temporary' gas turbines were an attempt to get around environmental laws Elon Musk's smog-belching Colossus AI datacenter in Memphis, Tennessee, is once again catching heat, this time from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which urges local authorities to halt operations and fine the startup for what it sees as a "clear" violation of the Clean Air Act....

$100 million+ deals are beholden to enterprises' on-prem upgrade cycles Snowflake's ability to grow in the market for larger enterprise customers is hampered by the renewal cycle for older, on-prem data warehouse and analytics tech....

Is that 'best' for customers or for shareholders? Any vendors that think they've got this 'all figured out is kidding themselves' A senior Salesforce exec says users need to be flexible about AI pricing models while vendors determine which one works best....

White House withdraws Isaacman pick amid potential $6B funding drop More details are emerging about potential NASA budget cuts alongside the abrupt withdrawal of the nomination of Jared Isaacman as the agency's new administrator....

It's a bold strategy, Cotton. Let's see if it pays off for them Microsoft is updating Notepad again. The latest indignity for the veteran Windows text wrangler? Text formatting....

29M customers, four radio suppliers, and one hell of a network headache Network engineers can take solace from the completed merger of Three and Vodafone announced today, as the difficult technical work now starts to unify their separate networks over the next several years....

Disclosure at MainStreet Bancshares comes as American finance orgs beg for looser reporting requirements Community bank MainStreet Bancshares says thieves stole data belonging to some of its customers during an attack on a third-party provider....

Vision AI won't be part of sale but strategic supercomputers will Stumbling Euro tech giant Atos looks set to finally sell its Advanced Computing assets to the French state....

Fancy getting rolling with something Qt and Italian? OpenMamba is an independent Italian distribution which uses Fedora's packaging tools and offers a choice of KDE Plasma or LXQt....

The word Microsoft does not appear in this article. Why would you think otherwise? Opinion Congratulations! As CEO of a giant tech company, head of a sovereign wealth fund, or a VC bored with megayacht leapfrog, you have billions of dollars of other people's cash to spend. You want to make a difference. You want to be a success....

So much for cushy public sector roles - a non-IT manager at McDonalds makes more How much is an IT manager worth? Well, if you're working for a government agency, the answer seems to be about 60k (about $81k), according to a new vacancy being advertised....

Some people will do anything to avoid an all-nighter Who, Me? Welcome once again to Who, Me?", the reader contributed column in which we invite Reg reader to tell tales of the times when they got things very wrong....

Birthdays for ESA (50) and Johann Strauss (200) marked with music of the spheres What did you do on Saturday? We ask because the Vienna Symphony Orchestra spent some of it playing a waltz that the European Space Agency (ESA) transmitted in the general direction of the Voyager X probe....

PLUS: Equinix Singapore outage; Japan and India explore geocoding; APAC datacenter shortage predicted Asia In Brief Intel and Japan's SoftBank have reportedly teamed up to develop low-power memory for AI....

PLUS: Ransomware gang using tech support scam; Czechia accuses China of infrastructure attack; And more! Infosec In Brief Despite last week's FBI announcement that it helped to take down the crew behind the Lumma infostealer, the malware continues to operate....

Wants channel to be all in on private cloud as more details emerge on VCF 9 licensing and hardware Broadcom's VMware business unit has dropped the lowest tier of its channel program, a move one analyst told The Register will benefit its rivals....

'It's a high-stakes intelligence war' he told El Reg exclusive A mystery whistleblower calling himself GangExposed has exposed key figures behind the Conti and Trickbot ransomware crews, publishing a trove of internal files and naming names....

Move should help government track infections and plan new legislation Australia now requires large companies to inform the government if they have paid off ransomware perps....

National Science Foundation FY 2026 budget cut by more than 60% To make America great again, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) aims to get by with less....

Its driverless cars are already testing in Austin - good luck Video Tesla has been testing self-driving Model Ys on the streets of Austin, Texas. But according to the automaker's bete noire, the Dawn Project, kids should keep clear....

System promises a 10x increase in 'scientific output' - not necessarily performance The US Department of Energy's next supercomputer will be built by Dell Technologies and powered by Nvidia's next-gen Vera-Rubin accelerators - a notable switch from the usual Cray-AMD tag teams that build such machines. It's the first DOE win for Nvidia since the Venado system in 2022....

Generate modest interactive apps, spiffy charts, and bland screenplays as needed Perplexity, an AI search biz, has launched Perplexity Labs, a project automation service capable of generating basic apps and digital assets on demand, with example workflows and project samples to help first-timers get started....

Pen tester on ScreenConnect bug: This one terrifies' me ConnectWise has brought in the big guns to investigate a "sophisticated nation state actor" that broke into its IT environment and then breached some of its customers....

28-year-old alleged to have made multiple drops to folks who turned out to be undercover FBI agents A Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) IT specialist is scheduled to appear in court today after being caught by the FBI trying to surreptitiously drop top secret information to a foreign government in a public park....

Cash splashed on damages, infrastructure improvements, and fraud monitoring A Seattle cancer facility has agreed to fork out around $52.5 million as part of a class action settlement linked to a Thanksgiving 2023 cyberattack where criminals directly threatened cancer patients with swat attacks....

Giving people the power to build community and bring the world closer together so we can shoot them Meta has partnered with Anduril Industries to build augmented and virtual reality devices for the military, eight years after it fired the defense firm's founder, Palmer Luckey....

Liberation Day not freeing consumers or businesses of their hard earned disposable income World War Fee Trump's tariffs may have been ruled unlawful, but they are still in place and continue to affect the market, with the threat of price hikes on smartphones causing prospective buyers to hold off until the situation becomes less volatile....

High-profile logo win for AI? Weeks ahead of year-end and with investors twitchy about returns? Impeccable timing Microsoft yesterday used a town hall meeting to leak details tell staff about a 100,000 license contract signed with Barclays to use Copilot....

Can't build a datacenter overnight, argues tech giant Dell has confirmed an order backlog of $14.4 billion for AI optimized servers, yet it is tempering investors' expectations for future sales by talking about demand being lumpy and dependencies in the pipeline....

Latest project gets the green light although Brexit-era brainchild faces spending review The UK's version of Darpa - a US government blue-sky research body - has invested 23.3 million (c $32 million) into nine teams working to transform "robotic dexterity."...

Take care when downloading AI freebies, researcher tells The Register Criminals are using installers for fake AI software to distribute ransomware and other destructive malware....

Greater Manchester Police reprimanded over hours of video that went AWOL The UK's data watchdog has reprimanded Greater Manchester Police (GMP) force for losing CCTV footage the cop shop was later requested to retain....

War in Ukraine causes major rethink in policy and spending The UK is spending more than 1 billion ($1.35 billion) setting up a new Cyber and Electromagnetic Command and is recruiting a few good men and women to join up and staff it....

After three service calls, user reflected on their utter stupidity On Call As the door closes on another working week, The Register brings you another edition of On Call, our reader-contributed column that recounts your amazing stories from the frontlines of tech support....

Light is faster than copper, which is important with rack scale architecture Analysis AMD officially entered the co-packaged optics race with the acquisition of photonic chip startup Enosemi, announced this week....

Thank whoever decided to make the Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey public for this discovery A trio of scientists have published a paper that explains how they found a dwarf planet in a database....

Cadence Systems, Synopsys, and Siemens among those subject to export licenses targeting Middle Kingdom In the latest assault on China's burgeoning semiconductor industry, the Trump administration has erected new curbs on the sale of chip design software in the region....

Probably not a cyber-incident, but definitely not a good look Security services vendor SentinelOne experienced a major outage on Thursday....

Philippines company allegedly run by Chinese national has form running scams The US Treasury has sanctioned a Philippine company and its administrator after linking them to the infrastructure behind the majority of so-called "pig butchering" scams reported to the FBI....

Yet more juicy data for the all-seeing eye Trump administration darling Palantir has scored another data-guzzling win by partnering with Fannie Mae to detect mortgage fraud using AI....

'The operating system couldn't be loaded' is never a great message Microsoft's latest Patch Tuesday update is failing to install on some Windows 11 machines, mostly virtual ones, and dumping them into recovery mode with a boot error. Its only recommendation to avoid the problem for now is to dodge the update....

It's hard to predict the future, but trying might get Amodei a seat at the regulatory table Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is worried that AI could eliminate half of entry-level white collar jobs in five years....

House Homeland Security Committee takes a field trip to Silicon Valley Chinese government spies burrowed deep into American telecommunications systems and critical infrastructure networks for one reason, according to retired US Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster....

18F says the whole thing was political Former employees of the US government's 18F tech modernization team have filed an appeal of their termination, arguing that the DOGE-led shuttering of their entire unit was illegal....

Banks and Warren accuse chip maker of habitual 'disregard for US national security and support for autocratic regimes' Nvidia is reportedly planning to open a new research and development facility in Shanghai, China, drawing sharp criticism from a pair of US lawmakers....

Businesses need to adopt AI, says WEF, but uncertainty is a blocker There are two things keeping chief economists awake around the globe, if the World Economic Forum's latest survey is any indicator: US President Donald Trump's trade policies and AI....

No formal attribution made but two separate probes hint at the same suspect Thousands of Asus routers are currently ensnared by a new botnet that is trying to disable Trend Micro security features before exploiting vulnerabilities for backdoor access....

One of the new smaller monthly releases - and how to tweak it Mozilla subsidiary MZLA has released the latest version of its messaging client, with some handy extras....

No, that's not someone on your team who doesn't pull their weight Salesforce is promising every Slack user a "digital teammate" to help with tasks such as providing summaries of channels and taking notes from meetings. And responding to office banter on the user's behalf, The Register can only assume....