The Register

Cupertino kicks off the year with a zero-day Apple has plugged a security hole in the software at the heart of its iPhones, iPads, Vision Pro goggles, Apple TVs andmacOS Sequoia Macs, warning some miscreants have already exploited the bug....

Police relied on unreliable tech for search warrant, omitted details ... so judge has disallowed evidence A murder case in Cleveland, Ohio, could collapse because the city's police relied on AI-based facial recognition software to obtain a search warrant....

Crouching tiger, hidden layer(s) Barely a week after DeepSeek's R1 LLM turned Silicon Valley on its head, the Chinese outfit is back with a new release it claims is ready to challenge OpenAI's DALL-E 3....

Despite impressive benchmarks, the Chinese-made LLM is not without some interesting issues DeepSeek's open source reasoning-capable R1 LLM family boasts impressive benchmark scores - but its erratic responses raise more questions about how these models were trained and what information has been censored....

Uncle Sam will 'no longer blindly dole out money,' State Dept says US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has frozen nearly all foreign aid cash for a full-on government review, including funds to defend America's allies from cyberattacks as well as steer international computer security policies....

Maxwell, Pascal and Volta, oh my! But fear not, driver support is still safe The end of the road is nearing for a range of aging Nvidia graphics cards, as support for several architectures was marked as feature-complete in the latest release of its CUDA runtime this month....

VC Summer units 2 and 3, abandoned in 2017, are looking for a buyer; owners say tech industry needs are a perfect fit Abandoned in 2017, a pair of incomplete South Carolina nuclear reactors may get a new lease on life due to the growing need to power AI datacenters....

We're not in Kansas anymore Microsoft has launched a document database platform constructed on a relational PostgreSQL back end....

Chinese AI startup grapples with consequences of sudden popularity Updated China's DeepSeek, which shook up American AI makers with the debut of its V3 and reasoning-capable R1 LLM families, has limited new signups to its web-based interface to its models due to what's said to be an ongoing cyberattack....

Latest trope is tricky enough to fool even the technical crowd... almost Google says it's now hardening defenses against a sophisticated account takeover scam documented by a programmer last week....

Advocates also cut as company focuses on 'priorities of our key customers' Citrix is winding up its Citrix Technology Professional (CTP) program, a move described as "a short-sighted decision that reflects a lack of vision for the future."...

Boxes stuck in boot loops and various other malfunctions Zyxel customers are dealing with a range of issues including reboot loops after an update on Friday went awry....

OpenAI's Operator a solution in search of a problem Opinion The "agentic era," as Nvidia's Jim Fan and others have referred to the current evolutionary state of generative artificial intelligence (AI), is going to be a huge disappointment....

Chinese startup DeepSeek rolls out open LLMs to rival Meta, OpenAI at fraction of cost Share prices for some of the biggest American tech brands that crested the AI hype waves crashed this morning on the rocks of DeepSeek, a Chinese startup that last week released LLMs that challenges US dominance....

NATO increasing patrols in the Baltic as region awaits navy drones Swedish authorities have "seized" a vessel -believed to be the cargo ship Vezhen - "suspected of carrying out sabotage" after a cable running between Sweden and Latvia in the Baltic Sea was damaged on the morning of January 26....

Without central repository for artificial objects, it'll only get worse Scientists mistook Elon Musk's Tesla roadster for an asteroid in a debacle that highlights the problem of tracking near-Earth objects....

Also, Subaru web portal spills user deets, Tornado Cash sanctions overturned, a Stark ransomware attack, and more Infosec in brief Using a custom-built tool, a 15-year-old hacker exploited Cloudflare's content delivery network to approximate the locations of users of apps like Signal, Discord, and others....

Oxford Circus space closed after six years Microsoft is shuttering its only UK retail store, less than six years after the doors of the Oxford Circus location were first opened to the public....

West Sussex helplessly watches price tag go from 2.6M to 'oh my God' A UK council is set to use up to 25 million ($31 million) from the sale of capital assets such as property to fund an Oracle-based transformation project that has seen expected costs mushroom from 2.6 million to around 40 million ($50 million)....

Former freelancer cuffed a week after being dismissed by UK's top visitor attraction The British Museum was forced to temporarily close some galleries and exhibitions this weekend after a disgruntled former tech contractor went rogue and shuttered some onsite IT systems....

Epic late-night road trip would have been an awesome if not for a secret change of plans Who, Me? Welcome once again to Who, Me? The Register's reader-contributed column in which you admit to the occasional failure, and we celebrate your escapes....

Bot manufacturers should think outside the box of humanoid form - unless those makers are Engineered Arts Interview The robotics business is booming, thanks to the hype surrounding artificial intelligence and the demonstrated capabilities of robotaxis like Waymo....

El Reg digs its claws into Middle Kingdom's latest chain of thought model Hands on Chinese AI startup DeepSeek this week unveiled a family of LLMs it claims not only replicates OpenAI's o1 reasoning capabilities, but challenges the American model builder's dominance in a whole host of benchmarks....

Who could be so interested in chips, manufacturing, and more, in the US, UK, Europe, Russia... Someone has been quietly backdooring selected Juniper routers around the world in key sectors including semiconductor, energy, and manufacturing, since at least mid-2023....

Spinner says crim's claims 'very significantly overstated' UK broadband and TV provider TalkTalk says it's currently investigating claims made on cybercrime forums alleging data from the company was up for grabs....

GameOn? It's looking more like game over for that biz The co-founder and former CEO of AI startup GameOn is in a pickle. After exiting the top job last year under a cloud, he's now in court - along with his wife - for allegedly bilking his company and its investors out of more than $60 million....

Can't keep the drama Llama out of this race Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed plans on Friday to blow through as much as $60 to 65 billion in 2025 on plenty more AI resources for his social media mega-corp - and signaled his intention to continue the spending spree for years to come....

Your workout warm-up instructions didn't say anything about setting wrists on fire - allegedly! Years after recalling one of its smartwatches over overheating batteries that burned people, Fitbit has agreed to pay a $12.25 million civil penalty to the US government to settle allegations it knew about the risk but failed to immediately report it as required by law....

If you have a 'significantly out of date' Exchange Server, emergency mitigation might stop working Exchange Server administrators lagging on their cumulative and security updates be warned: Microsoft has stated that the Exchange Emergency Mitigation Service (EEMS) might stop working on "significantly out of date" versions of the software....

Schematics, repair manuals, part numbers still out of reach for many industries The US Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) has released a report on the state of Right to Repair. The good news is that things seem to be going in the right direction for some gadgets. The bad news is that progress is not equal, and there has been no improvement for some gizmos....

But what the heck should it do? Great news, Linux fans! Support for the Copilot key is coming in the 6.14 kernel. What do you think it should do?...

We stitch together enormous supercomputers from other smaller supercomputers of course Feature Generative AI models have not only exploded in popularity over the past two years, but they've also grown at a precipitous rate, necessitating ever larger quantities of accelerators to keep up....

At $25.91M, CEO is worth 261 employees Qualcomm's top dog Cristian Amon enjoyed a ten percent year-on-year bump in total financial compensation for fiscal 2024 that amounted to $25.91 million....

Could a post-Brexit romance be on the cards? The UK and EU must decide whether to coordinate a response to Donald Trump's proposed tariffs on stuff imported into the United States, or cut separate deals with the new president, the House of Lords heard this week....

SYSTEM-level command injection via API parameter *chef's kiss* A now-fixed command-injection bug in Kubernetes can be exploited by a remote attacker to gain code execution with SYSTEM privileges on all Windows endpoints in a cluster, and thus fully take over those systems, according to Akamai researcher Tomer Peled....

Calamity Capsule continues to be calamitous for the bottom line Boeing is warning of another hit to its bottom line, at least partly at the hands of the company's Calamity Capsule, the CST-100 Starliner....

5 indicted as FBI warns North Korea dials up aggression, plus Russian devs allegedly get in on the act The US is indicting yet another five suspects it believes were involved in North Korea's long-running, fraudulent remote IT worker scheme - including one who changed their last name to "Bane" and scored a gig at a tech biz in San Francisco....

Hyperscaler mystery deepens as Hertfordshire braces for bit barn blitz Approval was last night granted for a mega datacenter in Hertfordshire, close to London's M25 orbital motorway, clearing the way for construction to begin. The identity of the eventual occupier, said to be a hyperscale operator, has yet to be disclosed....

New double-digit vintage goes well with all sorts of things After 32 years of maturation, even now, WINE is Not an Emulator, but it can work alongside them to run Windows apps on Arm Linux....

28nm and fatter processes first, says minister, as semiconductor supply chain players move to cash in India's ambition to become a semiconductor manufacturing player will bear fruit later this year with the debut of the first silicon designed and built in the nation....

Then suggested a bloke down the pub might be able to help fix it On Call Friday brings the prospect of spending time with loved ones. But before we get there, The Register offers another instalment of On Call, the column that chronicles experiences from the global family of readers who have traumatic tech support tales to tell....

Paint a target on Myanmar, pledge more info-sharing to get the job done A group established by six Asian nations to fight criminal cyber-scam slave camps that infest the region claims it's made good progress dismantling the operations....

'Public interest alone does not justify warrantless querying' says judge It was revealed this week a court in New York made a landmark ruling that sided against the warrantless state surveillance of people's private communications in America....

Who guards the guardrail makers? Not the bosses who hire them, it's alleged Scale AI, which labels training data for machine-learning models, was sued this month, alongside labor platform Outlier, for allegedly failing to protect the mental health of contractors hired to protect people from harmful interactions with AI models....

But we mean, you've had nearly four years to patch One of the critical security flaws exploited by China's Salt Typhoon to breach US telecom and government networks has had a patch available for nearly four years - yet despite repeated warnings from law enforcement and private-sector security firms, nearly all public-facing Microsoft Exchange Server instances with this vulnerability remain unpatched....

Hello Operator? Can you give me number nine? Can I see you later? Will you give me back my dime? OpenAI on Thursday launched a human-directed AI agent called Operator that can use a web browser by itself to accomplish various online tasks, or at least try to do so....

No in-the-wild exploits ... yet Cisco has pushed a patch for a critical, 9.9-rated vulnerability in its Meeting Management tool that could allow a remote, authenticated attacker with low privileges to escalate to administrator on affected devices....

x86 behemoth calls the approach 'innovative' - DIY builders may disagree Intel claims a more modular approach to PC design could make systems easier to repair and reduce electronic waste - and it has some proposals for you....

OpenAI boss tell world's richest man money is there to fund infrastructure project Updated The world has been treated to tech bros squabbling over Stargate, the alleged $500 billion artificial intelligence infrastructure project led by OpenAI, while the grown-ups look on....

Big organizations and governments are main users of these gateways SonicWall is warning customers of a critical vulnerability that was potentially already exploited as a zero-day....