The Register

Our first look at the default desktop for Fedora 42 and Ubuntu 'Plucky Puffin' The next version of the default desktop for most of the big Linux distros is in beta. Here's what to expect next month, or soon thereafter....

Called it an 'incident' in SEC filing, but encrypted apps and data exfiltration suggest Lee just can't say the R word US newspaper publisher Lee Enterprises is blaming its recent service disruptions on a "cybersecurity attack," per a regulatory filing, and is the latest company to avoid using the dreaded R word....

Scientists refine estimates, but can't yet rule out an impact The latest figures from the European Space Agency (ESA) on the trajectory of asteroid 2024 YR4 show a reduction in uncertainty around the object's orbit while the probability of impact remains low....

Exploit code now available for MitM and DoS attacks Researchers can disclose two brand-new vulnerabilities in OpenSSH now that patches have been released....

Meanwhile, on-prem version of 23ai remains uncertain Oracle has postponed the end of support date for its popular 19c database as users await news of a mainstream on-prem version of its latest database, 23ai....

Lions juggling chainsaws are fun to watch, but you wouldn't want them trimming your trees Opinion Nobody likes The Man. When a traffic cop tells you to straighten up and slow down or else, profound thanks are rarely the first words on your lips. Then you drive past a car embedded in a tree, surrounded by blue lights and cutting equipment. Perhaps Officer Dibble had a point....

Musk's latest attempt at a 'maximally truth-seeking' bot arrives Grok 3 has begun rolling out. xAI founder Elon Musk describes the chatbot as "a maximally truth-seeking AI, even if that truth is sometimes at odds with what is politically correct."...

There's everything to play for, but there ain't no Play Store Huawei is bringing its triple-fold Mate XT smartphone to a global audience, but with an eye-watering reported price tag, the question is - who will want to buy it?...

The science of the appliance and opening the lid of the black box to find... it's just software Interview The tech industry has a habit of reinventing itself every few years. Kelsey Hightower would like someone to come up with a glossary because software is software, no matter what it gets called....

Integrations with third-party software await chosen provider A UK electrical infrastructure biz is seeking a systems integrator to help it migrate from a 25-year-old SAP ERP system to the latest S/4HANA platform in a contract set to be worth almost a quarter of its annual turnover....

Admits it will be saying 'goodbye to talented people' in UK amid fears of jobs being offshored to India Lloyds Banking Group this month launched a review of the technology and engineering professionals working in the UK operation with headcount reductions inevitable and some roles being offshored to Lloyds Technology Center in India....

Customers told to pay up, quit, or wait for promised alternative innovation' coming real soon now Avaya has advised customers and resellers of a planned evolution" of its products that starts with a requirement to license at least 200 seats worth of its SaaS-y contact center wares by June 30, 2025....

Devices containing crypto wallets tracked online, then in the real world Indian authorities seize loot from BitConnect crypto-Ponzi scheme Devices containing crypto wallets tracked online, then in the real world India's Directorate of Enforcement has found and seized over $200 million of loot it says are the proceeds of the BitConnect crypto-fraud scheme....

Nation also orders thousands of GPUs to advance local AI smarts South Korea suspends DeepSeek, which vows to return in better shape Nation also orders enough GPUs to train many more LLMs South Korea's Personal Information Protection Commission has suspended local availability of apps from Chinese LLM-and-chatbot developer DeepSeek....

Penguin Emperor's weekly State Of The Kernel post went astray Next time autocomplete takes over and you accidentally send an email to the wrong person or group, perhaps it will be a little solace to know that one of the world's most accomplished technologists - Linux kernel boss Linus Torvalds - just made that same mistake....

EnCharge claims 150 TOPS/watt, a 20x performance-per-watt edge Interview AI chip startup EnCharge claims its analog artificial intelligence accelerators could rival desktop GPUs while using just a fraction of the power. Impressive - on paper, at least. Now comes the hard part: Proving it in the real world....

If MS-DOS could play Doom, surely a battleship gray button was a possibility? Veteran Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen has responded to suggestions that the Windows 95 setup was overly complicated. People wanted to know: Why not just do that whole thing in MS-DOS?...

Flaky demand for PCs and smartphones blamed NAND flash prices are expected to slide due to oversupply, forcing memory chipmakers to cut production to match lower-than-expected orders from PC and smartphone manufacturers....

Very unlikely, but could make for a neat light show if it does There is a chance, albeit slim, that asteroid 2024 YR4 could hit the Moon, creating a new crater and an explosion that might just be visible from Earth....

Known for popping zero-days of yesteryear, Microsoft puts Apple devs on high alert Microsoft says there's a new variant of XCSSET on the prowl for Mac users - the first new iteration of the malware since 2022....

'Satisfied' the risk to national security is 'a real and significant one' that should not be 'prolonged' The High Court of Justice in the UK has rejected a plea from a China-owned operation for a temporary injunction on a government order requiring it to sell its stake in a Scottish chip design business....

A 'synthesizer for websites' lets you experiment and improvize your way to CSS Interview Loken is a new type of tool which aims to let website designers feel their way towards a design in the same sort of way as musicians do with a software synthesizer....

Old Lady of Threadneedle Street to pay millions for 'amended implementation methodology' The Bank of England has nearly doubled the money it is dedicating to partner spending for an Oracle cloud transformation, which it began imagining in 2020....

Trade body wants recommendations fast-tracked and fabs designated critical national infrastructure Almost two years after the British government published its National Semiconductor Strategy, calls are growing for bolder action and a faster implementation of its recommendations to deliver on its stated goals....

When asked to offer honest feedback, maybe pause to ponder how well you play office politics Who, Me? Welcome to a fresh Monday, and therefore a new installment of "Who, Me?", our reader-contributed column that shares your stories of making workplace mistakes and scraping your way to safety afterwards....

Shhh. Don't tell Hock Tan about those Xeons that unlock functions when you pay a fee Broadcom is reportedly contemplating a play for Intel....

DevOps team did the dirty on a database Data management vendor Veeam has admitted to an embarrassing oopsie: messing up a restoration job and erasing data....

PLUS: DOGE web design disappoints; FBI stops crypto scams; Zacks attacked again; and more! Infosec In Brief A security researcher has found that Google could leak the email addresses of YouTube channels, which wasn't good because the search and ads giant promised not to do that....

PLUS: Pacific islands targeted by Chinese APT; China's new rocket soars; DeepSeek puts Korea in a pickle; and more Asia In Brief The head of Fujitsu's North American operations has warned that the Trump administration's tariff plans will be bad for business....

El Reg shows you how to run Zyphra's speech-replicating AI on your own box Hands on Palo Alto-based AI startup Zyphra unveiled a pair of open text-to-speech (TTS) models this week said to be capable of cloning your voice with as little as five seconds of sample audio. In our testing, we generated realistic results with less than half a minute of recorded speech....

What's next, Crysis-in-a-CSV? First came Tetris, then Doom - and now a bare-bones Linux instance that boots inside a PDF....

Overworked, under pressure, and subjected to abuse - is it really worth it? State Of Open Recent events have brought the plight of open source maintainers front and center, but the problems were brewing for many years....

'In 50 years, I think we'll view these business practices like we view sweatshops today' Interview It has been nearly a decade since famed cryptographer and privacy expert Bruce Schneier released the book Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World - an examination of how government agencies and tech giants exploit personal data. Today, his predictions feel eerily accurate....

Anyone remember when Volkswagen rigged its emissions results? Oh... AI model makers love to flex their benchmarks scores. But how trustworthy are these numbers? What if the tests themselves are rigged, biased, or just plain meaningless?...

Plus: Keep calm and plug Anthropic's Claude into public services Comment The UK government on Friday said its AI Safety Institute will henceforth be known as its AI Security Institute, a rebranding that attests to a change in regulatory ambition from ensuring AI models get made with wholesome content - to one that primarily punishes AI-abetted crime....

Roses aren't cheap, violets are dear, now all your access token are belong to Vladimir Digital thieves - quite possibly Kremlin-linked baddies - have been emailing out bogus Microsoft Teams meeting invites to trick victims in key government and business sectors into handing over their authentication tokens, granting access to emails, cloud data, and other sensitive information....

Roses are red, violets are blue, CVE-2024-53704 is sweet for a ransomware crew Miscreants are actively abusing a high-severity authentication bypass bug in unpatched internet-facing SonicWall firewalls following the public release of proof-of-concept exploit code....

And it's not just datacenters driving the need for 3,500 TWh of new energy generation by 2027 The world is going to need a lot of new electricity generation in the next three years to keep up with an "unprecedented" spike in demand, says the International Energy Agency (IEA) - and it's going to be a tough goal to meet....

Cloud-based revival should come with 'a corresponding discount scale,' customers say SAP users have asked for transparent discounting and commercial arrangements following the business app giant's relaunch of Business Suite and extended alliance with Databricks....

Dominion Energy already eyeing another 26 GW worth of datacenter demand Demand for electricity from datacenters in Virginia nearly doubled in the second half of 2024, power supplier Dominion Energy said of the region, which is home to "Datacenter Alley"....

The hurdles are higher than you might imagine FOSDEM 2025 Getting involved with open source projects is a great way to build experience in development, documentation, internationalization, and more - but it's not as easy as it should be....

High-complexity bug unearthed by infoseccers, as Rapid7 probes exploit further A high-severity SQL injection bug in the PostgreSQL interactive tool was exploited alongside the zero-day used to break into the US Treasury in December, researchers say....

The Cupola continues to offer the best views in the universe It has been 15 years since the ultimate selfie booth, the Cupola, was attached to the International Space Station (ISS)....

... weeks after US titan was outvoted by other members to let Microsoft join the Euro cloud trade association Amazon's Web Services wing has exited the board of CISPE (cloud infrastructure service providers in Europe), following a recent update to the Articles of Association that means only corporations based in the region can serve....

Officer says mistakenly published police details were shared 'a considerable amount of times' Two suspected New IRA members were arrested on Tuesday and charged under the Terrorism Act 2000 after they were found in possession of spreadsheets containing details of staff that the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) mistakenly published online....

Union estimates up to 1,600 job on the line Vodafone and Three have detailed the exec line-up taking the reins of post-merger UK biz, yet there is no word on when the deal will close, what name it will take, or how many staff face the chop to cut role duplication....

Germany's Federal Cartel Office voices concerns iPhone maker may be breaking competition law Apple is feeling the heat over its acclaimed iPhone privacy policy after a German regulator's review of iOS tracking consent alleged that the tech giant exempted itself from the rules it enforces on third-party developers....

Outsourcing is not supposed to involve taking clients' hardware out of their building to your house On Call If it's Friday, it's time for another edition of On Call, our reader-contributed column in which you tell tales of crimes against tech support....

Analyst argues stopping the deal benefits Switchzilla by preventing rise of strong challenger for AI networks HPE has fired back at the US Department of Justice's objection to its takeover of Juniper Networks, with arguments that include an assertion that blocking the deal will benefit Huawei and therefore have national security implications....

New Deep Search' thinking and planning bot to go up against peoples' champion DeepSeek Chinese AI continued to march onto the world stage this week, with Alibaba and Baidu both taking major strides....