The Register

Study finds 4 out of 6 providers don't do enough to stop impersonation Four out of six companies offering AI voice cloning software fail to provide meaningful safeguards against the misuse of their products, according to research conducted by Consumer Reports....

Experts say that the way you handle things after the criminals break in can make things better or much, much worse Feature Experiencing a ransomware infection or other security breach ranks among the worst days of anyone's life - but it can still get worse....

Staff warned that for Q1, non-compliance = 'Disciplinary action' Exclusive Vodafone is warning staff in the UK to work onsite at least eight days a month or be subject to disciplinary action from April....

Insiders say board members must be held accountable and drive positive change from the top down Analysis Walk into any hospital and ask the same question - "Which security system should we invest in?" - to both a doctor and a board member, and you may get different answers. The doctor chooses the system that leads to the most positive patient outcomes, while the board member chooses whichever solution is best for their increasingly stretched budget....

Mission-critical app migration, 'if it ain't broke...' and more. All that glitters isn't gold when it comes to biz needs Comment Administrators tend to be a conservative lot, which is bad news for tech vendors such as Microsoft that are seeking to pump their latest and greatest products into enterprises customers via subscriptions....

Space is the place? Not if you're nuts about neutrinos Opinion High energy neutrinos are the coolest particles in astrophysics. Born in distant cosmic cataclysms, they speed through the universe almost as if it wasn't there. With no charge and a truly tiny rest mass - perhaps a million times lighter than an electron, but who knows - they interact with virtually nothing....

Using one green screen to manage multiple machines needs more than a Friday afternoon brain Who, Me? Shifting focus from weekend fun to the reality of a return to work can be hard, so The Register tries to ease the transition with a fresh instalment of "Who, Me?", our reader-contributed column that tells your stories of making mistakes and making it out alive afterwards....

Likening memory safety bugs to smallpox may not soothe sensitive C coders Rust is alive and well in the Linux kernel and is expected to translate into noticeable benefits shortly, though its integration with the largely C-oriented codebase still looks uneasy....

Prompts see it scour the web for info and turn it into decent documents at reasonable speed Chinese researchers' AI prowess is again a hot topic after a startup called Monica.im last week revealed Manus", a service it bills as a general agent" that might improve on tools offered by Western companies....

It's just one of 6,000 apps that New Zealand thinks might be best tamed with ERP The body that runs New Zealand's public health system uses a single Excel spreadsheet as the primary source of data to consolidate and manage its finances, which aren't in great shape perhaps due to the sheet's shortcomings....

Also, phone cleaner apps are a data-sucking scam, Singapore considering the literal rod for scammers, and more Infosec in Brief Microsoft has spotted a malvertising campaign that downloaded nastyware hosted on GitHub and exposed nearly a million devices to information thieves....

PLUS: Malaysia teams with Arm for local chip designs; NTT warns of possible breach; Samsung strikers settle; and more Asia in Brief India's government has proposed giving its tax authorities sweeping powers to access private email systems and applications....

Meta says it cut CPU usage by 20% through kernel-level profiling. Just FYI Meta says it has managed to reduce the CPU cycles of its top services by 20 percent through its Strobelight profiling orchestration suite, which relies on the open source eBPF project....

iPhone giant compartmentalizes OS for the sake of security Apple has been working to harden the XNU kernel that powers its various operating systems, including iOS and macOS, with a feature called "exclaves."...

Researchers find AI isn't ready to help with moral decision making Is AI an appropriate source of moral guidance about which patients should be given kidney transplants?...

Mozilla sells ads, Google limits blocking them - it's time for stricter measures A new, lightweight version of Pi-Holeis here. Just how easy is it to block advertising on your home network?...

IsDavisLuEnabledInActiveDirectory? Not any more. IsDavisLuGuilty? Yes. IsDavisLuFacingJail? Also yes A federal jury in Cleveland has found a senior software developer guilty of sabotaging his employer's systems - and he's now facing a potential ten years behind bars....

Second time unlucky for Intuitive Machines, but hey, at least we got 250MB of data from it The Athena lander, which touched down on the Moon on Thursday and promptly fell over, has been declared dead by its operators....

With no allowance to sell and little room to buy, and markets on the slide, it's UB40 time: Red, red, whine Comment It's official: President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday to create a US Bitcoin reserve and stockpile of related digital assets, though instead of boosting the value of the coins, the market reacted negatively to the news....

To boldly go where HPE and Raspberry Pi have been for a while Axiom Space plans to send a shoebox-sized node running Red Hat Device Edge to the International Space Station (ISS)....

$96B in transactions, some even labeled 'dirty funds,' since 2019, say prosecutors The Feds today revealed more details about the US Secret Service-led Garantex takedown, a day after seizing websites and freezing assets belonging to the Russian cryptocurrency exchange in coordination with German and Finnish law enforcement agencies....

Trying to find a middle ground between spinning rust and performant TLC Facebook parent Meta is exploring the use of QLC flash as an additional storage tier in its datacenters to address growing volumes of data as it juggles performance maintenance and energy efficiency....

Moved from Windows or Linux? Smooth some of the rough edges Friday FOSS fest There are some idiosyncrasies about macOS that long term Mac users may never notice, but cause frustration in people more used to how Windows does things - or the much more customizable Linux desktop experience. Here are a few of The Reg FOSS desk's favorite tools we routinely install on new machines to make life a little more comfortable or convenient....

Big Red pushes restart button after users locked out of apps across Veterans Affairs hospitals, other govt departments Oracle's Federal electronic health records software suffered a US-wide outage this week, causing Veterans Affairs hospitals to invoke "standard contingency procedures."...

I knew you were trouble, Queens DA might have said Police have made two arrests in their quest to start a cybercrime crew's prison eras, alleging the pair stole hundreds of Taylor Swift tickets and sold them for huge profit....

Now that's sticker shock Eggheads have taken a look at previously developed techniques that can be used to trick self-driving cars into doing the wrong thing - and found cheap stickers stuck on stop and speed limit signs, at least, are pretty effective....

Thousands brace for layoffs as shares slide 20% HPE is feeling the effects of the Trump administration's gamesmanship, seeing shares slide after lowering earnings expectations due to uncertainty over how tariffs may affect the cost of imported parts....

PDFs and Powerpoint also lie in wait as 2026 looms Microsoft is suggesting alternatives to its doomed Publisher product ahead of the software's demise in 2026....

Which is why taking down chiefs and infra behind big name brand operations isn't working Interview There's a handful of cybercriminal gangs that Jason Baker, a ransomware negotiator with GuidePoint Security, regularly gets called in to respond to these days, and a year ago only one of these crews - Akira - was on threat hunters' radars and infecting organizations with the same ferocity as it is today....

Increasingly shaky relationship with the States has Europe considering options Talks are underway between European leaders and Eutelsat about a possible replacement for Starlink in Ukraine....

Difficulties unpicking 25 years of technical entanglement secure 474.4M without competition Following protracted negotiations, French outsourcer Atos has scooped up a 474.4 million ($612 million) contract without competition to build systems for a UK state bank at nearly three times the annual rate initially advertised three years ago....

When 'pickup' means more than just a ride On Call The week has ebbed away with embarrassing speed, so here we are again with a fresh installment of On Call, The Register's reader-contributed column that immortalizes tech support stories....

240M found for three-year sprint to develop three chiplets for HPC, AI A 38-strong group of tech players have founded a project with the snappy name Digital Autonomy with RISC-V in Europe, aka DARE, that aims to develop processor units to power the continent's supercomputers and other high-performance machines....

'Energetic event' did for Flight 8 after a few minutes. Super Heavy Booster recovered again, so there's that SpaceX's latest attempt to fly its Starship has again ended in a rapid unscheduled disassembly....

Now working with seven hyperscalers for custom AI silicon. Not working on acquiring bits of Intel Broadcom's acquisition of VMware appears to be a big success, on the balance sheet at least, after the company announced a big majority of its top 10,000 customers have decided to acquire its Cloud Foundation stack and posted strong growth....

Space is hard. Hopefully not so hard the three rovers on this spaceship are lost For the second time this week, a privately operated spacecraft has touched down on the Moon - but this one landed badly....

Best not to buy cheap hardware and use third-party app stores if you want to stay clear of this vast ad fraud effort Human Security's Satori research team says it has found a new variant of the remote-controllable Badbox malware, and as many as a million infected Android devices running it to form a massive botnet....

Did US Secret Service not get the memo, or? A coalition of international law enforcement has shut down Russian cryptocurrency exchange Garantex, a favorite of now-defunct ransomware crew Conti and others criminals for money laundering....

It's just an opt-in Labs curio for now, but so were those ever-present Overviews It was inevitable, really, but now it's official: Google is testing a new all-AI web search mode that leaves users entirely beholden to what Gemini thinks they'll want....

President ordered immigration officials to ramp up vetting of foreigners 'to the maximum degree' The US government's Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) is considering monitoring not just the social media posts of non-citizens coming into the country, but also all those already in America going through an immigration or citizenship process....

Startup needs tips on fitting its flying surfboard into existing infrastructure Airlines around the world continue to look for ways to be more sustainable and efficient without needing to reinvent the wheel - but in the case of Delta Air Lines' new partnership with JetZero, reinventing the wing is definitely on the table....

Interface and branding changes arrive to more clearly separate users' work and play lives Google Chrome Enterprise is rolling out browser changes designed to separate people's professional and personal activities, in addition to management enhancements....

That's Mutual Assured AI Malfunction in the race for superintelligence ANALYSIS Former Google chief Eric Schmidt says the US should refrain from pursuing a latter-day "Manhattan Project" to gain AI supremacy, as this will provoke preemptive cyber responses from rivals such as China that could lead to escalation....

No 'zero days without incident' sign for Microsoft thanks ongoing problems Problems with Outlook.com are continuing, with users reporting being unable to access their emails or authenticate themselves....

Akira really wasn't horsing around with this one Toronto Zoo's final update on its January 2024 cyberattack arrived this week, revealing that visitor data going back to 2000 had been compromised....

Attacks strike, facilities go bust, patients die. But it's preventable It will cost upward of $75 million to address the cybersecurity needs of rural US hospitals, Microsoft reckons, as mounting closures threaten the lives of Americans....

Veteran probes close in on the half century More science instruments are being shut down on the Voyager probes as engineers attempt to eke out the power and keep them running for years to come....

Global giants shouldn't be allowed to make 'committed spend' public sector deals and make discounts we cannot match Britain's competition regulator is facing biting criticism from local cloud providers for declining to act on Committed Spend Agreements (CSAs), the sales tools that AWS and Microsoft use to lure customers....

You were supposed to destroy the Sith, not join them! Brother is the latest printer manufacturer to come under fire over alleged sharp practices around the use of third-party consumables versus its own ink supplies....

Jailbreak it, or even gut it and turn its screen into a low-power portable display with a Modos e-ink controller FOSDEM 2025 Amazon's Kindle e-readers just got a bit less useful, but help is at hand, from jailbreaking to making one of the devices into a monitor....