The Register

Expecting a longer storm season this year? Updated Another Beijing-linked cyberspy crew, this one dubbed Salt Typhoon, has reportedly been spotted on networks belonging to US internet service providers in stealthy data-stealing missions and potential preparation for future cyberattacks....

You're doin' fine, Oklahoma! Apple's anti-union posturing is looking like quite the paper tiger: The iPhone goliath has reached an agreement with unionized retail workers in Oklahoma, marking the second time it has caved to organized labor after facing the prospect of a strike....

'Decisions like the one from Jassy are a big reason why I don't want kids' Amazon CEO Andy Jassy last week sent a memo to staff informing them everyone is now expected in the office five days a week from the start of next year, and a poll of staff suggests this hasn't gone down well....

With 2.5 million Blackwell GPUs, would gobble enough energy to power millions of homes OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is reportedly trying to convince the Biden administration that an enormous network of AI datacenters, each consuming up to five gigawatts of power, is imperative to ensuring US national security and maintaining its technological lead over China....

No more cold calls: Recruit 360 pinpoints top prospects from millions Plagued by recruiting shortfalls, the US Army is turning to AI to help it sift through the chaff for fresh recruits....

Design files will be available soon, but no word yet on the software A highly controversial 3D printed suicide pod has been used for the first time, leading to multiple arrests in Switzerland. The device is so DIY-friendly that you could technically build it at home, assuming you've got the right tools and, well, the necessary motivation....

Extorting underfunded public services for $1M isn't a good look Despite being top of the ransomware tree at the moment, RansomHub - specifically, one of its affiliates - clearly isn't that bright as they are reportedly trying to extort Delaware Libraries for around $1 million....

Memory safety flaws used to represent 76% of 'droid security holes. Now they account for 24% Google says its effort to prioritize memory-safe software development over the past six years has substantially reduced the number of memory safety vulnerabilities in its Android operating system....

Fun retro tweaks, App Center facelift, and more as Oracular Oriole moves into view The beta version of Ubuntu 24.10 has just come out, with GNOME 47 as its default desktop and some fun retro touches....

DRACO will be born to die in the fires of atmospheric re-entry The European Space Agency (ESA) has awarded Spanish company Deimos Space a contract for a spacecraft whose sole purpose is to burn up in the Earth's atmosphere so engineers can see what happens....

AC/DC: America's power grid might need to brace itself Analysis The multibillion-dollar gamble of Intel and other semiconductor industry players on US-based chipmaking is shaking a lot more than just technological trees - it seems set to give America's power infrastructure a bit of a headache....

Tracking alternative is less invasive than other methods, but is opt out by default Privacy activist group noyb has filed a complaint against Mozilla over a "Privacy Preserving Attribution" feature that was quietly enabled in the Firefox browser following a July update....

Better or worse than a surprise U2 album? Apple's on-device AI model, dubbed Apple Intelligence, will require 4 GB of device storage space, and more at a later date. That's about the size of an HD movie, for now....

Mountain View versus Redmond: Fight over cloud software licensing policies gets formal Google Cloud Platform has filed a complaint with the European Commission alleging Microsoft software licensing policies are anti-competitive, including claims customers are being charged four times more to run Windows Server in non-Azure clouds....

Officers put in danger when republican dissidents grabbed hold of their names and details Victims have yet to receive any compensation after a document was mistakenly published in 2023 containing data belonging to members of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), however, fresh reports say damages in the case could reach up to 240 million ($320.9 million)....

Think tank warns of sovereignty risks from subsea cable consolidation The dominance of US-based hyperscalers like Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon in subsea cables has reshaped the industry and put critical infrastructure at risk, an Australian think tank claims....

After Telegram CEO was charged in France, Element bosses mull the challenges Interview Not upsetting law enforcement with end to end encryption and finding a sustainable way to fund open source development are challenges facing messaging giants and minnows alike....

Post Office scandal? What scandal? Fujitsu has won a place on a UK tech framework worth up to 600 million ($802 million) despite promising not to bid for public sector contracts while its role in the Post Office Horizon scandal faces scrutiny. The company says bidding for the deal took place before it made that commitment to the UK government....

Buying computers without the tech to get harder as chipmakers compete for cash, say analysts AI PCs are forecast to account for 43 percent of PCs by 2025, says tech market sales number cruncher and consultancy Gartner, and by 2026, an AI device may be the virtually the only laptop a big business can choose....

Prithvi, Prithvi, Prithvi good Researchers at IBM and NASA this week released an open source AI climate model designed to accurately predict weather patterns while consuming fewer compute resources compared to traditional physics-based simulations....

Broadcom's software bundles under scrutiny after perhaps irking Fujitsu Japan's Fair Trade Commission, the nation's anti-monopoly agency, has reportedly commenced an investigation into VMware's software licensing practices....

Wants lunar sample return within three years, Venus launch in 2028, orbiting hab in 2035, boots on Luna five years later India's government last week signed off on three big space missions: a Moon lander, a space station module, and a Venus orbiter....

Turn on home aircon and maybe peer inside the fridge or oven - all from behind the wheel Samsung and fellow South Korean giants Kia and Hyundai have struck up an IoT alliance that will see cars drive home appliances, and smartphones control some operations inside cars....

Service due to roll out later this month, despite fears AI will crash the market AI has driven the stock market into a hype-fueled frenzy, and an Israeli startup has even convinced regulators to let its chatbot hallucinate an investment portfolio on your behalf....

Caroline Ellison thanked for helping take down FTX supremo, ordered to surrender her own billions The former CEO of Alameda Research, Caroline Ellison, has been sentenced to two years in a minimum-security prison after pleading guilty to helping her former boyfriend Sam Bankman-Fried siphon billions out of the FTX exchange....

Taiwan laughs it off - and so does Beijing, which says political slurs hit sites nobody reads anyway Taiwan has dismissed Chinese allegations that its military sponsored a recent wave of anti-Beijing cyber attacks....

Argues worse could happen if it loses kernel access CrowdStrike is "deeply sorry" for the "perfect storm of issues" that saw its faulty software update crash millions of Windows machines, leading to the grounding of thousands of planes, passengers stranded at airports, the cancellation of surgeries, and disruption to emergency services hotlines among many more inconveniences....

Cease'n'desist letter claims top boss demanded tens of millions for trademark license Updated WordPress hosting service WP Engine on Monday sent a cease and desist letter to WordPress maker Automattic, to force the latter's CEO Matthew Mullenweg to stop making allegedly false and misleading claims about WP Engine following a purported trademark license demand....

Still business as usual, we're told Virginia-based public sector IT services giant Carahsoft was raided Tuesday by US government agents....

Four Chocolate Factory trackers cracked the Top 25 in all regions Google, once again, is the "undisputed leader" when it comes to monitoring people's behavior on the internet, according to Kaspersky's annual web tracking report....

Severe incidents may be down, but Putin had to throw one in for good measure Russia's use of malware to support its military efforts in Ukraine is showing no signs of waning while its tactics continually evolve to bypass protections....

If they don't crash first, say government auditors Updated The Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) air traffic control (ATC) systems are perilously out of date, but don't expect replacements anytime soon, says the US Government Accountability Office (GAO)....

Poorly received by investors, the moves comes in a difficult year Cloud-based data warehousing and analytics biz Snowflake has issued $2 billion in bonds with the aim to buy back shares and potentially launch an acquisition strategy....

Thousands of devices remain vulnerable, US most exposed to the threat Tens of thousands of fuel storage tanks in critical infrastructure facilities remain vulnerable to zero-day attacks due to buggy Automatic Tank Gauge systems from multiple vendors, say infosec researchers....

And they didn't even need a bunch of skimpy E-cores to do it Over the past few years, we've grown accustomed to Xeon processors that, generation after generation, come up short of the competition on some combination of core count, clock speeds, memory bandwidth, or PCIe connectivity....

'High time this happened' says Musk Elon Musk has confirmed a change to X that will allow blocked users to view public posts....

Minnow of among government funded whales to double production capacity US-based Polar Semiconductor - the maker of analog and power chip devices and sensors - has bagged $123 million of CHIPS and Science Act funding to nearly double production capacity in the US....

So say our sources, who warn job cuts, outsourcing risk depriving biz of seasoned technical talent IBM's plan to replace thousands of roles with AI presently looks more like outsourcing jobs to India, at the expense of organizational competency....

Mandiant publishes cheat sheet for weeding out fraudulent IT staff Against a backdrop of rising exposure to North Korean agents seeking (mainly) US IT roles, organizations now have a cheat sheet to help spot potential operatives....

Outsourcing firm has been building network for over a decade now - how's that going? The poster child of UK outsourcing, Capita, has won a two-year extension to its license to manage the delivery of the UK's smart meter secure communications platform, a system dogged by delays....

The little computer-that-could benefits as supply chain eases Raspberry Pi has reported a jump in revenue and profit for the first half of 2024, sending the company's shares soaring despite marginally lower volumes than expected....

Lab-based proof-of-concept shows how radiation creates explosive plumes to deflect menacing space rocks US scientists have demonstrated that potentially dangerous asteroids destined for Earth could be deflected from their trajectory using X-rays....

When robots.txt just ain't cutting the mustard Cloudflare on Monday expanded its defense against the dark arts of AI web scrapers by providing customers with a bit more visibility into, and control over, unwelcome content raids....

And it's here to carry your not-very-heavy stuff Researchers from South Korea suggest their Palletrone flying platform may someday be useful for light hauling scenarios....

But work on big ticket items needed to make the combo a contender is yet to commence The effort to bring the Xen hypervisor to the RISC-V instruction set architecture has advanced - a little - but big jobs that would make both projects a contender for more workloads are still on developers' to-do lists....

It only adds up to being as big as Nvidia today, in 2050 The Vietnamese government claims to have found a magical mathematical formula that will elevate its semiconductor industry to an annual turnover of $100 billion by 2050....

Back story to replacement for banned security app isn't enormously reassuring Some US-based users of Kaspersky antivirus products have found their software replaced by product from by a low-profile entity named "UltraAV" - a change they didn't ask for, and which has delivered them untested and largely unknown software from a source with a limited track record....

Maybe a spell in a French cell changed Durov's mind In a volte-face, Telegram CEO Pavel Durov announced that the made-in-Russia messaging platform will become a lot less cozy for criminals....

Still no R' word, but smells like ransomware from here A "cybersecurity issue" has shut down MoneyGram's systems and payment services since Friday, and the fintech leader has yet to update customers as to when it expects to have its global money transfer services back up and running....

11M devices exposed to trojan, Kaspersky says The Necro trojan is once again making a move against Android users, with up to eleven million individuals thought to be exposed to infected apps....