The Register

Prince Mohammed bin Bone Saw will take a few hundred thousand GPUs with his missiles and fighter jets The Saudi government on Tuesday announced a massive $600 billion investment in US defense, transportation, energy, and IT infrastructure....

Plus: All the fun and frolic of fixes from Adobe, SAP, Ivanti Patch Tuesday It's that time of the month again, and Microsoft has made it extra spicy by revealing five flaws it says are under active exploitation - but rates as important rather than critical fixes....

Court orders halt to layoffs - as folks steering American innovation wonder how long injunction will last Employees at Uncle Sam's National Science Foundation (NSF) are relieved that the Trump administration's plan to downsize the federal government collided with the US court system on Friday - but they're worried that the relief is only temporary....

Ding dong, diffusion is dead Biden's controversial AI Diffusion rules, which were set to restrict the sale of American GPUs and AI accelerators beginning this week, are officially dead....

ETH Zurich boffins exploit branch prediction race condition to steal info from memory, fixes have mild perf hit Researchers at ETH Zurich in Switzerland have found a way around Intel's defenses against Spectre, a family of data-leaking flaws in the x86 giant's processor designs that simply won't die....

Air Force Dumb The Trump administration is set to accept a $400 million luxury 747-8 from the royal family of Qatar - a lavish "palace in the sky" meant as a temporary Air Force One. But getting it up to presidential security standards could take years and cost hundreds of millions more....

Redmond talks up new technologies, capabilities for productivity ... just don't call it AI Microsoft is axing 3 percent of its global workforce - its biggest purge since chopping 10,000 jobs in early 2023 - this time to flatten its management structure....

Pay-to-play security on CVSS 10 issue is now fixed An update that fixed a critical flaw in data protection biz Commvault's Command Center was initially not available to a significant user subset - those testing out a free trial version of the product. That is, until a security researcher pointed out the problem....

But the government may be ignoring it anyway The Trump administration's ongoing mass firing of government employees has been put on hold, with a federal judge calling the move "likely illegal" and ordering the government to hand over evidence to prove it didn't violate the law....

Stop us if you've heard this one before A legal claim has been brought against Microsoft over alleged licensing practices that could result in a multibillion-pound payout for UK customers....

Both agencies seem unbothered despite tech world's clear concerns for US infoseccers CYBERUK The top brass from the UK's cyber agency say everything is business as usual when it comes to the GCHQ arm's relationship with CISA, amid growing unease about the current administration's treatment of its US equivalent....

The House of Zen's low-end enterprise strategy is badge engineering at its best AMD on Tuesday revealed its latest chips to get a Zen 5 refresh with the launch of its itty bitty Epyc 4005-series CPUs....

Research flags rise in one-dimensional health research fueled by large language models A report from a British university warns that scientific knowledge itself is under threat from a flood of low-quality AI-generated research papers....

The Soviet Union aimed for Venus, but hit the Indian Ocean instead The odyssey of the Soviet Union's failed attempt to reach Venus came to an end over the weekend with the probe either disintegrating during reentry or what remained of it splashing harmlessly into the ocean....

Market cap down by more than 1B since April 22 Marks & Spencer has confirmed that customer data was stolen as part of its cyberattack, fueling conjecture that ransomware was involved....

EUVD comes into play not a moment too soon The European Vulnerability Database (EUVD) is now fully operational, offering a streamlined platform to monitor critical and actively exploited security flaws amid the US struggles with budget cuts, delayed disclosures, and confusion around the future of its own tracking systems....

Labour health secretary's vision for one record to rule 'em all, for each patient, set to come to market The state health service for England has asked tech suppliers to submit ideas to help it build an online service for a single health record, as promised by the country's Health Minister last year....

Claims policy change is really just a way to squeeze out competition Exclusive European software vendor Nextcloud has accused Google of deliberately crippling its Android Files application, which it says has more than 800,000 users....

'MarbledDust' gang has honed the skills it uses to assist Ankara Turkish spies exploited a zero-day bug in a messaging app to collect info on the Kurdish army in Iraq, according to Microsoft, which says the attacks began more than a year ago....

CEO Sam Altman has no master plan but imagines custom models built on everything you've ever said or read OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says his company doesn't have a master plan but does hope to develop a product that's akin to a subscription operating system, but for AI, and models that ingest every experience you have in your life...

Linux 6.15 is coming along nicely too, unless autocorrect messes things up Linux kernel project boss Linus Torvalds has re-joined the ranks of full-size mechanical keyboard aficionados....

Chinese and Australian boffins ask what else could be slowing down seismic waves as they pass through the Red Planet? Mars may still be home to oceanic quantities of liquid water, according to a recent paper published by the National Science Review....

Rise of the machines postponed ... for now Robots in Amazon's fulfillment warehouse can pick and stow products well enough that the e-tail giant is happy to begin beta testing, but not well enough to leave human workers behind....

One problem down, x - 1 problems go There are plenty of reasons why fusion energy has yet to become reality, but according to a group of researchers from the University of Texas at Austin and their collaborators, we may be one modeling breakthrough closer....

Support for the underlying OS is another story Microsoft has pledged to support and issue security fixes for M365 apps on Windows 10 into late 2028. That's well past a cut-off point of October 14 this year, when Redmond's support for Windows 10 officially ends unless you buy an extended support package....

All those return to office mandates make a lot more sense now Companies with higher levels of remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic saw more of their employees launch startups, economists have found. They argue this entrepreneurial spillover is a factor policymakers and firms should weigh when shaping remote work policies....

Cripes, we were only joking when we called Elon's social network the new state media The US government's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) announced Monday that going forward, only urgent alerts tied to emerging threats or major cyber activity will appear on its website. Routine updates, guidance, and other notifications will instead be shared via email, RSS, and X....

Community fork picks up where TrueNAS CORE left off TrueNAS is alive and well, but iXsystems has shifted its focus to the Linux-based SCALE edition. For the FreeBSD faithful left clinging to CORE, a new contender is limbering up: zVault....

Intruders claim they stole GlobalX's flight records and manifests GlobalX, a charter airline used for deportations by the US government, has admitted someone broke into its network infrastructure....

So alchemists had the right idea - they just lacked a 27 km particle accelerator The dream of every medieval alchemist - turning lead into gold - has finally come true thanks to some impractical physics at CERN's Large Hadron Collider....

IT projects may remain in limbo due to deal being far from final, but markets are up, so Trump'll declare a win world war fee The impending disaster of trade-freezing tariffs on Chinese imports to the US has been averted, but like a Chinese cargo ship anchored off the coast of California, it's not gone entirely....

Canary fans told it hurts functionality to the point that it makes 'using your PC to do even basic things difficult' The Windows team has come up with a bug so bad that Microsoft has had to postpone some Insider builds until the issue is dealt with....

Musicians, artists, writers, actors urge government to protect copyright More than 400 of the UK's leading media and arts professionals have written to the prime minister to back an amendment to the Data (Use and Access) Bill, which promises to offer the nation's creative industries transparency over copyrighted works ingested by AI models....

As long as those fit into a 20 x 20 x 20 grid and can be built from 8 basic bricks At last, an AI model we can really get behind: LegoGPT takes a text prompt and spits out a physically stable design....

Providers argue that if end users prioritized security, they'd get it CYBERUK Intervention is required to ensure the security market holds vendors to account for shipping insecure wares - imposing costs on those whose failures lead to cyberattacks and having to draft in cleanup crews. The security market must properly incentivize security vendors to do security better....

We need to make taking IT systems 'off the books' a problem for corporate types Opinion It's been a devastating few weeks for UK retail giants. Marks and Spencer, the Co-Op, and now uber-posh Harrods have had massive disruptions due to ransomware attacks taking systems down for prolonged periods....

It was acceptable in the '80s Who, Me? Sometimes, a favor done for friends years ago can come back to bite you in a very corporate way. Welcome to another cautionary tale from the files of Who, Me?...

Some see an action to benefit Elon. The White House sees an agency obsessed with DEI The head of the US Copyright Office has reportedly been fired, the day after agency concluded that builders of AI models use of copyrighted material went beyond existing doctrines of fair use....

PLUS: Celsius scammer sent to slammer; Death-by-hacking victim warns you're never safe; and more Infosec in brief Good cybersecurity habits don't appear to qualify anyone to work at DOGE, as one Musk minion seemingly fell victim to infostealer malware....

PLUS: Huawei's Windows-free PC appears; Robo-car rentals come to China; Europe, India, collab in space; and more Asia In Brief Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, has struck trouble at home after a user falsely claimed a retailer sold inferior jade products at enormous and unjustified markups....

Rapid7 threat hunter wrote a PoC. No, he's not releasing it RSAC If Rapid7's Christiaan Beek decided to change careers and become a ransomware criminal, he knows exactly how he'd innovate: CPU ransomware....

The FBI also issued a list of end-of-life routers you need to replace Earlier this week, the FBI urged folks to bin aging routers vulnerable to hijacking, citing ongoing attacks linked to TheMoon malware. In a related move, the US Department of Justice unsealed indictments against four foreign nationals accused of running a long-running proxy-for-hire network that exploited outdated routers to funnel criminal traffic....

France's share of MOD cash is growing while the US's shrinks The UK's Ministry of Defence (MOD) is gradually shifting its spending from the US to Europe, according to research from Tussell....

MIT research team proves pop science eggsplanation wrong It might sound like common sense - and it's echoed by science communicators and even ChatGPT - but it's wrong. New research shows eggs are less likely to crack when they land on their side than on their end....

AI phone home Despite stiff export controls on the legitimate sale of AI accelerators to China, stemming the flow of gray market GPUs streaming into the Middle Kingdom remains a point of concern for American lawmakers....

DEI another day: Trump priorities bite as $1B in grants vanish, layoffs loom The US government's National Science Foundation (NSF) is reportedly axing more than three dozen divisions, including its equity-in-STEM unit, while prepping staff layoffs and yanking over a billion dollars in recently awarded grants. The purge has already sparked legal action and congressional scrutiny....

Price tag unknown US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has unveiled an ambitious plan to yank American air traffic control systems out of the 1960s - and he wants Congress to fund the whole project up front so it doesn't get derailed by political wind shifts....

And if it's your first time around, there's a whole new free book on FreePascal Lazarus 4 is the latest version of the all-FOSS but Delphi-compatible IDE for the FreePascal compiler....

Weapons-grade fuel for fraud Insight Partners, a mega venture capital firm with more than $90 billion in funds under management, fears network intruders got their hands on internal sensitive data about employees, portfolio companies, investors, and more....

NASA cancels solicitation to get a partner to launch, land, and operate the bot for free NASA has quietly scrapped a plea for third parties to take its VIPER rover to the lunar surface....