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Good riddance to another pesky tribe of miscreants Updated Researchers at Avast have provided decryptors to DoNex ransomware victims on the down-low since March after discovering a flaw in the crims' cryptography, the company confirmed today....

Birmingham struggles to get current version of Fusion fit for purpose Troubled Birmingham City Council, which was declared effectively bankrupt last year owing in part to a disastrous Oracle implementation, has awarded the tech giant 10 million ($12.8 million) for additional professional services....

Attorney for families of victims files objection Boeing has agreed to plead guilty to criminal fraud charges related to deadly 737 Max crashes, according to a Sunday night court filing from the US Department of Justice (DoJ)....

Apache Iceberg support makes it a good option for a transactional layer over data lakes, he tells The Register SingleStore, the database that promises analytics and transactions on a single system, took three attempts to get its technology working in the cloud, CEO Raj Verma admitted to The Register....

They're cranking 'em out like there's no tomorrow The European Commission is said to be sounding out chipmakers in the region about China's expanding production of commodity silicon, which has sparked concerns that it could flood the global market....

Microsoft: All your data are belong to us? World: That's so last century Opinion Microsoft's journey through intellectual property has been a multi-year saga that makes Game of Thrones look like a haiku....

That's not an outage ... that's an outage Who, Me? G'day readers, and welcome once again to The Register's reader-submitted column of cold comfort that we call Who, Me? where you find out that everyone - even clever clogs like you - makes mistakes....

Samsung warned users, but the PC industry's big players hardly mention the possibility of problems Buyers worried a Copilot+ PC based on Qualcomm's Snapdragon X SoCs might not run software that matters to them are being directed to two community-run sites that crowdsource lists of incompatible code....

Vietnam now requires it for some purchases. It may be a fraud risk in Singapore. Or ML could be making it safe The use of selfies to verify identity online is an emerging trend in some parts of the world since the pandemic forced more business to go digital. Some banks - and even governments - have begun requiring live images over Zoom or similar in order to participate in the modern economy. The question must be asked, though: is it cyber smart?...

From 230 Exaflops to 300, with Tesla a part of the plan for energy storage, - and cars China has offered a glimpse at the processing power of its national compute capacity, and pointed to plans to grow it by 30 percent this year alone....

Also: F1 authority breached; Prudential victim count skyrockets; a new ransomware actor appears; and more security in brief It's been a week of bad cyber security revelations for OpenAI, after news emerged that the startup failed to report a 2023 breach of its systems to anybody outside the organization, and that its ChatGPT app for macOS was coded without any regard for user privacy....

Plus: Samsung strike; India likely upping chip subsidies; Asian nations link payment schemes Asia In Brief Mt Gox, the Japanese crypto exchange that dominated trading for a brief time in the early 2010s before collapsing amid the disappearance of nearly half a billion dollars worth of the digicash, likely as a result of its own shoddy software, has said it will start to repay some investors - in Bitcoin....

Save the headaches, ship your dependencies Hands on One of the biggest headaches associated with AI workloads is wrangling all of the drivers, runtimes, libraries, and other dependencies they need to run....

What's in the box! No seriously, what's in there that sets our wages Interview Algorithmic wage discrimination, as described in an academic paper last year by UC Irvine law professor Veena Dubal, involves "the use of granular data to produce unpredictable, variable, and personalized hourly pay."...

After button brouhaha, CEO rages Cupertino 'must be stopped' Apple has twice unfairly blocked Epic Games from opening its iOS app portal in the EU, the Fortnite maker claims, and thus is in violation of the continent's Digital Markets Act (DMA)....

Mozilla shows guts with its extensions - but that's the way the Cook, he crumbles Updated At least two VPNs are no longer available for Russian iPhone users, seemingly after the Kremlin's internet regulatory agency Roskomnadzor demanded Apple take them down....

Assurance Wireless must sort out accessibility after handing customer a phone without a screen reader In January 2021, Kenneth Geaniton, a blind consumer who subscribed to the Lifeline service provided by T-Mobile US offshoot Assurance Wireless, found he couldn't access the service after his feature phone died....

That was quick: Supremes' gutting of Chevron deference is already paying dividends Regulatory dominoes have begun to fall in the wake of the US Supreme Court's gutting of federal agency rulemaking authority, with the Federal Trade Commission's ban on noncompete agreements the first to be stayed using the SCOTUS decision as justification....

Skin-sparing mastectomy and breast reconstruction scrapped as result of ransomware at supplier Exclusive The latest figures suggest that around 1,500 medical procedures have been canceled across some of London's biggest hospitals in the four weeks since Qilin's ransomware attack hit pathology services provider Synnovis. But perhaps no single person was affected as severely as Johanna Groothuizen....

Company's sales in the region have dropped under US plan to curb country's AI hopes Nvidia is forecast to make $12 billion from selling GPUs into China this year despite US trade restrictions aimed at curbing Beijing's AI ambitions....

Customers seek alternatives after claiming costs up from perpetual Exclusive Fears that VMware's switch to subscription-based licensing would lead other vendors to follow suit may be coming true after Paessler confirmed to The Reg it has introduced new subscription pricing for its network monitoring tool, PRTG....

There's also chatter about whether medium severity scare is actually code red nightmare Infosec circles are awash with chatter about a vulnerability in Ghostscript some experts believe could be the cause of several major breaches in the coming months....

Looming train wrecks face winning party after it promises investment and innovation Analysis The United Kingdom woke up to the prospect of a new government this morning, but it faces old problems in tech projects, policy, and investment....

UEK-next is bleeding edge - unlike most CentOS-alikes Oracle's Linux engineers have released their build of kernel 6.9 for Oracle Linux - and they're already planning for 6.10 and beyond....

Privacy measures apparently helping criminals evade capture Top Eurocops are appealing for help from lawmakers to undermine a privacy-enhancing technology (PET) they say is hampering criminal investigations - and it's not end-to-end encryption this time. Not exactly....

Hello, hello ... what have we here? One very dangerous storage admin, if I'm not mistaken On Call As Friday rolls around, The Register knows many readers are a little fatigued. Which is why we use this day to bring a fresh instalment of On Call - the weekly reader contributed column we hope amuses you enough to shake off a week of tech support torpor and traipse into the weekend with a smile on your dial....

Let's not get ahead of ourselves, even if Earth is spinning out The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS) announced on Thursday there will be no leap second added to 2024....

Bad news: It's probably because you have to pay more for RAM Samsung Electronics has advised investors it is set to post bumper profits and notch a big jump in revenue for the quarter ended June 30....

Support line reports 'high volume of contacts' about the problem Owners of Amazon's Kindle e-reader devices looking for something new to read may have had to pick up an actual book - the old-school kind, made of dead trees - for a day or so this week, as their devices would not download content....

DJI builds a power pack for off-road two-wheelers Nations worried about China's ability to use its tech companies for more than trade now have a new class of kit to fret over: mountain bikes, thanks to Middle Kingdom drone-maker DJI's arrival in the field with an electric drive system....

Investors will be hoping so anyway Crisis-prone IT services outfit Atos says it is among the top 11 percent of companies in the industry - at least when it comes to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) risks - as it reaches what many investors will be hoping is its final restructuring deal....

Promise of AI features, but Big Blue won't reveal much more about next steps of its highly regarded relational database Opinion Last week, I committed a crime. No, I did not defraud the IRS/HMRC or steal some Snyder's Pretzels/Cheesy Wotsits. It was much worse. A keen reader pointed out that I had miscounted the number of versions of Db2, IBM's relational database....

Yet all its birds remain resolutely earthbound AST SpaceMobile has reiterated its plans to enable a satellite phone service covering the entire continental US that will work seamlessly with existing devices, thanks to spectrum sharing agreements with AT&T and Verizon....

Miracle-WM takes several more steps forward The Miracle-WM tiling window manager for Canonical's Mir display server has hit 0.3 - and also reaches places you may not expect to find Canonical code....

Not content with drinking up all our water, now we'll compete with DCs for power Demand for datacenter space is currently at a high in many markets around the globe because of the AI boom, despite issues with securing adequate power, at least according to commercial real estate firm CBRE....

Union advises members to turn off features government introduced to allow third parties to update records The UK's doctors' union has advised members running GP surgeries to turn off certain functionality in their IT system to prevent outside organizations adding to their workloads....

Private sector helped out with week-long operation - but didn't touch China Europol just announced that a week-long operation at the end of June dropped nearly 600 IP addresses that supported illegal copies of Cobalt Strike....

Who could have guessed that giant magnets capable of constraining mini-suns would be hard to build? The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), a 35-nation effort to create electricity from nuclear fusion, has torn up its project plans and pushed operations of its tokamak back by at least eight years....

Brain Cipher was never getting the $8 million it demanded anyway Brain Cipher, the group responsible for hacking into Indonesia's Temporary National Data Center (PDNS) and disrupting the country's services, has seemingly apologized for its actions and released an encryption key to the government....

Interoperability with US infrastructure a big selling point Australia's government has announced its intention to build a Top Secret-rated cloud, with help from Amazon Web Services....

You think the US leads the field? Wrong - OpenAI is way down WIPO's charts The World Intellectual Property Organization has counted the patents and scientific publications related to generative AI it could find between 2014 and 2023, and found 54,000 GenAI-related inventions and over 75,000 scientific publications - and that China utterly dominates the field....

Now even the 'droids are being laid off - sheesh! Amazon is axing its Astro for Business robotic security sentry just seven months after announcing the thing....

'We're not there yet' on development of motors without them Comment China tightening its stranglehold on rare earth elements (REEs) makes now the perfect time for the automotive industry to start thinking about alternatives for EV motors, but not a single proposed solution appears ready for reality....

Take that for ignoring robots.txt! Cloudflare on Wednesday offered web hosting customers a way to block AI bots from scraping website content and using the data without permission to train machine learning models....

Zuckerborg's justification isn't good enough, says watchdog Meta's plan to expand its AI presence in South America has been hamstrung, with Brazilian officials today banning the Facebook parent company from using its citizens' data to train AI algorithms....

AEP and Exelon challenge electricity arrangement between power plant and colo DC Utility firms American Electric Power (AEP) and Exelon have filed an official objection with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) over Talen Energy's nuclear power deal with Amazon....

Never risk it when it comes to brisket - make sure those updates are applied Keen meatheads better hope they haven't angered any cybersecurity folk before allowing their Traeger grills to update because a new high-severity vulnerability could be used for all kinds of high jinks....

Late fees? Don't worry, the credit union has you covered San Francisco-based Patelco Credit Union confirms its service outage was the result of ransomware and has pulled systems offline....

Taste at your own risk The Linux Mint project has released the beta version of version 22, codenamed "Wilma" and featuring the latest Cinnamon desktop....

There's a lot of room for improvement in modern computing, from the low end to the very high Two separate development efforts are improving both Raspberry Pi power management and memory efficiency - one using tools built for massive clusters....