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Screens sprayed with coffee after techies find Microsoft's latest OS in unexpected places Administrators are reporting unexpected appearances of Windows Server 2025 after what was published as a security update turned out to be a complete operating system upgrade....

Changes at the telco giant called for to prevent future abuse AT&T settled with the FCC over claims it submitted false information to obtain funding from US broadband subsidy programs for low-income customers....

Government invokes National Security and Investment Act The British government has ordered a China-owned entity to sell its stake in a Scottish chip company under the authority of the National Security and Investment Act 2021....

Experts say incident has 'all the hallmarks of ransomware' Telematics tech biz Microlise says an attack that hit its network likely did not expose customer data, although staff aren't so lucky....

Need to know how to set up a business? There's an (experimental) AI for that From the department of "this will go well" comes confirmation UK government is trialling an experimental chatbot with 15,000 business users, who can use it to ask questions about tax and available support....

'First impressions matter' but a KDE flavor is in the making - and more publicly at that Ubuntu Summit 2024 At this year's Ubuntu Summit in The Hague, we were really hoping to hear some news about Canonical's new immutable desktop distro....

Won't make a difference for institutional investors, but retail traders be warned, analyst tells El Reg On Friday, Nvidia will supplant Intel after 25 years as the semiconductor sector's representative on the Dow Jones Industrial Average....

Change of mind follows discovery China was playing with it uninvited? Meta has historically restricted its LLMs from uses that could cause harm - but that has apparently changed. The Facebook giant has announced it will allow the US government to use its Llama model family for, among other things, defense and national security applications....

Jakarta who? Indonesia's new capital, Nusantara, is packed with tech If an entire major city was designed from scratch today, what technologies would be built into its fabric? We're discovering as we watch Indonesia erect a new capital with tech at its heart....

Alleged intrusion spotted in June Chinese government cyberspies Volt Typhoon reportedly breached Singapore Telecommunications over the summer as part of their ongoing attacks against critical infrastructure operators....

Firefox overlord to 'revisit' advocacy mission The Mozilla Foundation is laying off about a third of its staff. The non-profit org, which oversees the corporation that develops the Firefox web browser, insists it will continue its advocacy mission, though its approach may change....

NP-hard to NP at all Southeast Asia's Uber-esque superapp, Grab, has developed a tool that allows its employees to build large language model (LLM) apps without coding....

Data pinched from pwned outside supplier, thief claims IntelBroker, a notorious peddler of stolen data, claims to have pilfered source code, private keys, and other sensitive materials belonging to Nokia....

Report shines light on unexpected ways your devices sell you out UK consumer champion Which? wants you to know that your air fryer might be spying on you and sharing your data with third parties for marketing purposes....

Hellcat crew claimed to have gained access via the company's Atlassian Jira system Schneider Electric confirmed that it is investigating a breach as a ransomware group Hellcat claims to have stolen more than 40 GB of compressed data -and demanded the French multinational energy management company pay $125,000 in baguettes or else see its sensitive customer and operational information leaked....

FBI recovers just $8M after scam crashes Heartland Tri-State Bank The FBI has recovered $8 million in funds from a cryptocurrency scam that netted $47 million and devastated the Kansas city of Elkhart....

Lock it up. Lock it up Google Cloud is the latest to take the decision away from customers and enforce the use of multi-factor authentication (MFA) for all users to improve the security of the minority that don't already have it enabled....

Why? Because that's where the money is Business email compromise scammers are trying to up their success rate by using a DocuSign API....

Smuggler busted on the border carrying naughty items Vadim Yermolenko, 43, a dual US-Russian national and resident of New Jersey, has pleaded guilty to multiple charges related to his role in sanctions busting as part of a gang that operated in the US and Europe for nearly eight years....

America PAC tells judge winners were preselected, raising a whole new set of legal questions It's a bit of a moot point given the US presidential election is today, but a Pennsylvania judge has declined to stop Elon Musk's $1M election lottery despite the billionaire's America PAC seemingly admitting the whole thing was rigged from the start....

Puppeteer or Pupeter? One of them will snoop around on your machine and steal your credentials An ongoing typosquatting campaign is targeting developers via hundreds of popular JavaScript libraries, whose weekly downloads number in the tens of millions, to infect systems with info-stealing and snooping malware....

Wooden datacenters? Japan can build spacecraft out of the stuff Japan's wooden satellite has been launched into space aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with a mission to prove that wood can be a viable material for use in space....

Justice still being served, but many systems are down A statewide IT outage attributed to "unauthorized activity" is affecting the availability of services provided by all courts in Washington....

Don't do that, or risk a memory error Microsoft has confirmed that opening too many emails at once in Classic Outlook could result in the application displaying an error before crashing. But don't worry; there's a registry change to fix it....

12-layer HBM3E hardly off the manufacturing line Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang asked Korean chipmaker SK hynix to pull forward delivery of 12-layer HBM4 chips by half a year, according to the company's group chairman Chey Tae-won....

Game of Phones settles into its final chapter Britain's competition regulator says it is minded to approve the merger of telcos Vodafone and Three UK, if the pair commit to network upgrades and short-term customer safeguards against higher bills....

From meatballs and spaghetti to lasagna - same ingredients, different structure, says analyst For the world's two dominant ERP vendors, the cloud is their future infrastructure. For customers of Oracle and SAP, getting there can mean technology and business process upheaval, but the commercial relationship with the vendor is also transformed....

Who better to watch the watchmen? Updated A former Vice President of Public Policy for Facebook is among the new faces to join the board at Britain's telecoms regulator, Ofcom....

VeloRAIN architecture improves service for fat workloads on the edge VMware Explore Amid all the drama regarding Broadcom's acquisition of VMware, it's been easy to forget that the virtualization giant's SD-WAN outfit, VeloCloud, is now an independent business unit. Broadcom today put it back in the spotlight by revealing it's developed tech to improve networking for AI workloads on the edge....

User group members offered more generous discounts and licenses we're sure nobody would abuse Explore VMware by Broadcom is continuing its pre-acquisition tradition of using its European conference to make public a handful of product updates....

No surrendering of IT giant piece by piece France's Finance Ministry has approved a proposal to nationalize French tech behemoth Atos and has allocated 70 million to explore the deal....

You snooze, you lose, er, win Google claims one of its AI models is the first of its kind to spot a memory safety vulnerability in the wild - specifically an exploitable stack buffer underflow in SQLite - which was then fixed before the buggy code's official release....

Violation of labor rights? By the iTitan? Surely not! The hot water in which the National Labor Relations Board has been boiling Apple is getting deeper, as the US workers' rights body has issued yet another unfair labor practice complaint alleging the constructive termination of developer and labor activist Cher Scarlett in 2021....

Yearly report finds explosion of GenAI projects, new users from outside the coding community responsible for boost There's been an upset in the Octoverse, as Python has unseated JavaScript as the most-used programming language on GitHub....

Back-to-office order forced dating app staff to swipe left The US National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) on Friday issued a complaint against California-based LGBTQ dating app Grindr alleging the biz's return-to-office order for staff amounted to unfair labor practises....

Automaker bets big on startup while other promising eVTOL companies scrape around for funding Joby Aviation - backed by Japanese automotive giant Toyota - conducted Japan's first electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft (eVTOL) flight test over the weekend, edging closer to the reality of flying taxis....

Environmental and regulatory obstacles led to the cancellation of an AI bit farm, report claims Meta's plan to build a nuclear-powered datacenter for AI workloads has been undone by bugs, specifically bees....

Breaking with Trump, Mike Johnson now suggests streamlining regulation out of funding bill UPDATED The US CHIPS and Science Act's future may depend on the outcome of Tuesday's Presidential Election after House Speaker Mike Johnson suggested the GOP would likely move to repeal the $280 billion funding bill if the party wins a majority in Congress....

Meanwhile, even Task Manager is no match for the broken patch Even though Windows 10 has less than a year of support remaining, Microsoft has once again demonstrated its ability to break things with a seemingly innocuous update....

Victims were placed in serious danger following highly sensitive data dump The City of Columbus, Ohio, has confirmed half a million people's data was accessed and potentially stolen when Rhysida's ransomware raided its systems over the summer....

Stuffing it full of AI hasn't helped, so let's try financial incentives We're not saying Microsoft is desperate for people to use Bing, but a $1 million sweepstakes that grants entries to users of the search engine sure quacks like a duck....

Open source tool chooses to become more open than ever Fear not, FOSS fans. Bitwarden isn't going proprietary after all. The company has changed its license terms once again - but this time, it has switched the license of its software development kit from its own homegrown one to version three of the GPL instead....

Thank you, vNext... and yes, there are plenty of updates to keep you busy Windows Server 2025 is officially generally available with some substantial changes for administrators including useful Active Directory Domain tweaks, plus the disappearance of some familiar friends including Wordpad....

Federal Energy Regulatory Commission cites grid stability concerns Amazon has hit a roadblock in its plans for nuclear-powered US datacenters. Federal regulators rejected a deal that would let it draw more power from a Susquehanna plant to supply new bit barns next to the site, on the grounds this would set a precedent which may affect grid reliability and increase energy costs....

Dark alley and a brick in a sock required to accelerate market share growth? With Windows 11 still failing to set the world alight, campaigners are warning that millions of perfectly good PCs could become landfill fodder when support for Windows 10 runs out in eleven and a bit months....

Mondays are for checking months of logs, apparently, if MFA's not enabled In potentially bad news for those with long names and/or employers with verbose domain names, Okta spotted a security hole that could have allowed crims to pass Okta AD/LDAP Delegated Authentication (DelAuth) using only a username....

Is that a walrus in your server logs, or aren't you pleased to see me? Opinion At the start of September, Transport for London was hit by a major cyber attack. TfL is the public body that moves many of London's human bodies to and from work and play in the capital, and as the attack didn't hit power, signaling, or communications systems, most of the effects went unnoticed by commuters. The organization downplayed the damage done to back office ticketing, billing, and other systems. Everything was in hand....

Company fessed up, got off light, says US Commerce Department The US Department of Commerce is issuing a half a million dollar penalty against US-based semiconductor wafer manufacturer GlobalFoundries for violating sanctions and sending chips to SJ Semiconductor (SJS), an affiliate of a blocklisted Chinese chipmaker....

It may be a cliche to say 'Don't rest on your laurels' but you really shouldn't Who, Me? Welcome to another working week, loyal readers, and another dose of Who, Me? - the Reg's weekly safe space in which readers submit stories of times when tech support went not quite so well as they might have hoped....

Plus: China Unicom auctions off old cables; Japan's My Number Card also soon a driver's license; and Hong Kong chief executive warns US investment ban will backfire ASIA IN BRIEF Singapore's Land Transport Authority (LTA) estimated last week that by tracking all vehicles with GPS it will be able to increase road capacity by 20,000 over the next few years....