The Register

What's that Lassie? The IRS hopes to offer free direct tax filing for everyone next year? Intuit has announced plans to lay off 1,800 people, which is roughly 10 percent of its workforce....

Analysts hoping Windows 11 refresh adds fuel to fire, as OS market share finally on rise Typical demand for new and faster PCs is returning to the market, Canalys principal analyst Ishan Dutt tells The Register after he totted up a third straight quarter of growth following several woeful years in the sector....

Company announces intent following Ticketmaster, Santander break-ins A month after incident response giant Mandiant suggested the litany of data thefts linked to Snowflake account intrusions had the common component of lacking multi-factor authentication (MFA) controls, the cloud storage and data analytics company is offering a mandatory MFA option to admins....

ADRAS-J avoids adding to debris problem with autonomous collision avoidance Astroscale Japan has shown off images of orbital debris and demonstrated the ability of its spacecraft to avoid adding to the problem thanks to an autonomous collision avoidance system....

Pays 'lump sum,' setting up new Azure Stack for hosters and more but some concerned about the private deal A group of 27 cloud providers have agreed to settle the complaint they lodged with the European Commission over alleged anti-competitive behavior related to the cost they pay to run Microsoft's software in their datacenters....

Redmond 'confident in the company's direction' says withdrawal letter Microsoft is giving up its non-voting observer seat on OpenAI's board, citing progress in the company's direction - yet fear of regulatory scrutiny no doubt also played some part in the decision-making process....

Company says data exfiltration was extremely difficult to detect Fujitsu Japan says an unspecified "advanced" malware strain was to blame for a March data theft, insisting the strain was "not ransomware", yet it hasn't revealed how many individuals are affected....

'Supply chains still powered by coal and gas' scoffs Greenpeace Microsoft has inked a contract with Occidental Petroleum to buy 500,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) "credits" over six years to support its overall carbon strategy. The move follows a dramatic rise in Microsoft's CO emissions due to datacenter construction....

X co-designer David Rosenthal looks back at why his other project failed A couple of weeks after its anniversary, one of the original engineers behind X has explored why it succeeded where rivals - one of which he co-developed - failed....

Lenders bet you're willing to rent GPUs Datacenters-for-AI outfit CyrusOne has scored another $7.9 billion loan to build more bit barns to fill full of GPUs....

Market share increases for Microsoft's latest operating system There is finally some good news for Microsoft in the operating system market share stakes: use of Windows 11 continues to rise as Windows 10 falls....

BlackByte, LockBit among the criminals using bespoke tools As ransomware crews increasingly shift beyond just encrypting victims' files and demanding a payment to unlock them, instead swiping sensitive info straight away, some of the more mature crime organizations are developing custom malware for their data theft....

Sounds better than a British summer At the time of year when thoughts naturally turn to a much-earned vacation, news arrives of a planet with temperatures of 920C (1,688F), raining glass blown horizontal by 5,000 mph (8,047 kph) winds, and the constant smell of rotten eggs....

A handy standalone translator, but you'll need deep pockets, both figuratively and literally, if you want one Review One of the more useful applications of AI technology is translation and interpreting. The Timekettle X1 AI Interpreter hub attempts to move things forward with a pleasing industrial design....

Fixes have been made, it appears, but disclosure or discussion is invisible Column Found a bug? It turns out that reporting it with a story in The Register works remarkably well ... mostly. After publication of my "Kryptonite" article about a prompt that crashes many AI chatbots, I began to get a steady stream of emails from readers - many times the total of all reader emails I'd received in the previous decade....

Freeware AutoIt also used to hide entire PowerShell environments in scripts A rapidly-changing infostealer malware known as ViperSoftX has evolved to become more dangerous, according to security researchers at threat detection vendor Trellix....

Everything went fine, except the experimental re-ignition The European Space Agency's new launcher, the Ariane 6, completed its maiden flight on Tuesday....

Almost 800 million use the protocol, with more to come as Wi-Fi mandate arrives China's adoption of IPv6 - a goal the government in Beijing has prioritized - appears to have slowed....

450 Excelmax Technologies employees to get new badges Global professional services company Accenture on Monday announced the acquisition of India-based semiconductor design services provider Excelmax Technologies....

If someone can do a little MITM'ing and hash cracking, they can log in with no valid password needed Cybersecurity experts at universities and Big Tech have disclosed a vulnerability in a common client-server networking protocol that allows snoops to potentially bypass user authentication via man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks....

Citrix, SAP also deserve your attention - because miscreants are already thinking about Exploit Wednesday Patch Tuesday Clear your Microsoft system administrator's diary: The bundle of fixes in Redmond's July Patch Tuesday is a doozy, with at least two bugs under active exploitation....

RT News snarks back after it's accused of building social nyet-work for Kremlin The FBI and cybersecurity agencies in Canada and the Netherlands say they have taken down an almost 1,000-strong Twitter bot farm set up by Russian state-run RT News that used generative AI to spread disinformation to Americans and others....

No doubt thanks to Vladi5555, KremLinda1776, RealAmericanPat22, etc etc Growth of X's userbase has reportedly flatlined since Elon Musk took over the thing formerly known as Twitter....

Minuteman replacement to hit $141B as officials promise good ol' 'restructure' The price tag for the Pentagon's next-generation nuclear-tipped Sentinel ICBMs has ballooned by 81 percent in less than four years, triggering a Congressionally-mandated justify-or-die review....

Access, deletion requests go ignored, and consumer profiles contradict themselves, complaint alleges Updated Microsoft's advertising subsidiary is the target of a complaint from EU privacy advocates accusing it of "highly intrusive data processing" as well as breaking several General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) rules....

How does sub-0.6 mW sound? Boffins in South Korea claim to have developed an energy-efficient system for low-power Internet of Things (IoT) applications that uses "backscattering" to harvest energy from a wireless signal for its communications....

Not unreasonably, nearly half worried it would give them the 'wrong answers' Customers would prefer companies to ignore AI when it comes to providing aftersales service, according to a report published today....

Printers were locked into HP+ cloud service, which is also getting the chop HP is discontinuing its e-series LaserJet printers due to customer complaints, along with the HP+ and the "Instant Ink" toner subscription services tied to the hardware....

Understanding the power needs of the UK begins with knowing when renewals are due Certificate Watch Demonstrating that Microsoft is not alone in its inability to keep track of certificates is UK power market biz Elexon....

Making cyberattack among the largest ever recorded in finance industry Evolve Bank & Trust says the data of more than 7.6 million customers was stolen during the LockBit break-in in late May, per a fresh filing with Maine's attorney general....

Because trusting your kid with 300 horsepower should come with a curfew If you owned a Tesla, would you let your kid drive it? The electric vehicle marque seems to think you might with the addition of "Parental Controls" in a July update....

After 28 years' service, Mark Simpson departs 'by mutual agreement' The UK's third-largest supermarket chain, Asda, has parted company with its digital transformation chief amid delays in separating IT systems from former owner Walmart, the US retail giant....

Expletives fly as admins deal with recommendation to move to Power Automate workflows Microsoft has thrown some enterprises into a spin after confirming that, with only a few months' notice, Office 365 connectors within Teams will be cut....

Fairly 'low budget', unsophisticated malware, say researchers, but it can collect the same data as Pegasus Interview When it comes to surveillance malware, sophisticated spyware with complex capabilities tends to hog the limelight - for example NSO Group's Pegasus, which is sold to established governments. But it's actually less polished kit that you've never heard of, like GuardZoo - developed and used by Houthi rebels in Yemen - that dominates the space....

Why go outside in the sunshine when you could play with tiny computers in a darkened room? Perhaps hoping to mark independence from x86 PCs, there's a new July 4th release of the official Raspberry Pi OS, although it remains coy of giving a version number....

Deputy leader to act after promise of more business-friendly planning process The UK's deputy prime minister is set to recall two planning decisions which have held up datacenter investment in the UK....

US orgs bear the brunt of attacks by probably-Russian crew A ransomware-as-a-service operation dubbed Eldorado" that encrypts files on both Linux and Windows machines has infected at least 16 organizations - primarily in the US - as of June....

Google's absence creates software distribution issues not even mighty Microsoft can handle Microsoft China will provide staff with Apple devices so they can log on to the software giant's systems....

Scum keep databases of the people they've already skimmed Australia's Competition and Consumer Commission has warned that scammers are targeting scam victims with fake offers to help them recover from scams....

'A generation will have to do penance' says Bhavish Aggarwal Indian tech entrepreneur Bhavish Aggarwal - founder of Ola Cabs, Ole Electric and AI unicorn Ola Krutrim - doubled down on support for 70-hour work weeks during an interview posted last Sunday....

Lax patching and vulnerable small biz kit make life easy for Beijing's secret-stealers Law enforcement agencies from eight nations, led by Australia, have issued an advisory that details the tradecraft used by China-aligned threat actor APT40 - aka Kryptonite Panda, GINGHAM TYPHOON, Leviathan and Bronze Mohawk - and found it prioritizes developing exploits for newly found vulnerabilities and can target them within hours....

Chinese slinger's kit still no match for Nvidia's sanction-evading cards Chinese GPU vendor Moore Threads says its datacenter-focused AI systems can now support clusters of up to 10,000 accelerators - a tenfold increase from tech it offered last year....

A few devs versus the powerful forces of Redmond - who did you think was going to win? Claims by developers that GitHub Copilot was unlawfully copying their code have largely been dismissed, leaving the engineers for now with just two allegations remaining in their lawsuit against the code warehouse....

Purists needn't worry - you can turn it off As text editors go, Microsoft's Notepad has never been big on creature comforts. But after more than 41 years, Redmond has finally seen fit to bestow its humblest of utilities with spell check and auto-correct....

Chat widget allegedly fed data to third party, which used it to train AI without telling customers Peloton is pedaling toward a court date after a California judge denied its bid to dismiss a lawsuit that alleges the pandemic darling violated the US state's privacy laws - by allowing a third party to intercept and record chat records between Peloton reps and customers without their consent....

Arguments over buttons set to continue while European Commission looks on Apple performed an abrupt U-turn over the weekend to approve the Epic Games Store in the European Union....

CUDA, woulda, shoulda be first port of call for AI slingers, but does it respect its own dominance? The European Union's Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager reckons there is a "huge bottleneck" in the supply of Nvidia's GPUs - but her department has yet to make any decision on whether it needs to take regulatory action over this....

Power failure rather than lawyers to blame for Wayback Machine wandering off The Internet Archive took a tumble overnight after "environmental factors" downed the Wayback Machine, leaving archive.org wobbling in a way that might bring a smile to the faces of certain publishers wishing for its demise....

Injecting Copilot branding will not make TLS certificates auto-renew Another Microsoft certificate has expired, leaving SwiftKey users that are seeking support faced with an alarming certificate error....

And it'll be decades before things settle down again Former ASML boss Peter Wennink says the US-China "chip wars" are mainly ideological in nature, and is warning it will likely take decades for the dispute to play out....