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If you like it to keep working, don't put a ring on it Who, Me? Reg readers are so dedicated it seems some of you are married to the job, although you also admit that no relationship is perfect when you send stories to Who, Me? It's the column in which we share your tales of making massive mistakes and somehow staying together with your employer afterwords....

1.19MHz eight-bit CPU trounced modern GPUs - can you do better with your retro-tech? The Atari 2600 gaming console came into the world in 1977 with an eight-bit processor that ran at 1.19MhZ, and just 128 bytes of RAM - but that's apparently enough power to beat ChatGPT at chess....

Plus: Hitachi turns graybeards into AI agents, Tiananmen anniversary censorship, AWS in Taiwan, and more! Asia in brief China's space agency has revealed its Tianwen 2 probe has unfurled a "solar wing."...

PLUS: Doxxers jailed; Botnets bounce back; CISA questioned over app-vetting program closure; And more Infosec in Brief If a cyberattack hit critical infrastructure in the US, it would likely crumble, former deputy national security adviser and NSA cybersecurity director Anne Neuberger said last week....

Security, not model performance, is what's stalling adoption Interview Before AI becomes commonplace in enterprises, corporate leaders have to commit to an ongoing security testing regime tuned to the nuances of AI models....

Don't worry, only 100 more years of Sellafield nuclear site cleansing to go The center for the UK's nuclear industry wasted 127 million ($172 million) during delays and replanning as it scrambled to find alternatives for facilities which treat and repackage plutonium, a Parliamentary report found....

It's boom time for the next generation of fast travel On Friday, President Trump signed an executive order telling the FAA to lift its 52-year ban on supersonic flight over the US and told the FAA to devise a scheme to limit noise pollution from such aircraft....

DOGE moves fast and breaks things, and now our data is at risk, security guru warns in hearing Security guru Bruce Schneier played the skunk at the garden party in a Thursday federal hearing on AI's use in the government, focusing on the risks many are ignoring....

FAIR Package Manager project aims to prevent political power plays The Linux Foundation on Friday introduced a new method to distribute WordPress updates and plugins that's not controlled by any one party, in a bid to "stabilize the WordPress ecosystem" after months of infighting....

OpenAI boots accounts linked to 10 malicious campaigns Fake IT workers possibly linked to North Korea, Beijing-backed cyber operatives, and Russian malware slingers are among the baddies using ChatGPT for evil, according to OpenAI's latest threat report....

They're fighting like cats and DOGEs Fire up those popcorn makers. The bromance between tech mogul Elon Musk and US President Donald Trump has come to an ignominious end as the billionaires feud on their respective social media platforms....

Destructive malware has been a hallmark of Putin's multi-modal war A new strain of wiper malware targeting Ukrainian infrastructure is being linked to pro-Russian hackers, in the latest sign of Moscow's evolving cyber tactics....

The world has changed. EU hosting CTO says not considering alternatives is 'negligent' Interview European cloud providers and software vendors used this week's Nextcloud summit to insist that not only can workloads be moved from the US hyperscalers, not considering it is "negligent" on behalf of IT bosses....

The cash has been frozen for more than two years The US is looking to finally capture the $7.74 million it froze over two years ago after indicting alleged money launderers it claims are behind North Korean IT worker schemes....

Don't negotiate unless you must, and if so, drag it out as long as you can Feature So, the worst has happened. Computer screens all over your org are flashing up a warning that you've been infected by ransomware, or you've got a message that someone's been stealing information from your server....

Concerns over lack of commercial expertise with big tech suppliers as country implements digital 'Blueprint' The UK government employs just 15 commercial staff with direct expertise in digital procurement dedicated to dealing with the largest technical suppliers, according to a Parliamentary spending watchdog....

Jared Isaacman reveals how space agency might have looked under his watch Jared Isaacman, former NASA Administrator nominee, has shared how the US space agency might have looked under his leadership and blamed his connections with Elon Musk for the abrupt withdrawal of his nomination....

Doctor? Why does this hospital network run in such strange places? On Call Welcome once again to On Call, The Register's Friday column that shares reader-contributed tales of tech support terror and triumph....

One Dutch developer called it a 'nothingburger' European leaders on Thursday announced an International Digital Strategy designed to help the bloc address technological change at a time of global political realignment....

Show us another company that builds power plants, semiconductors, and hard disks Japanese industrial giant Toshiba has created an internal organization to make itself more attractive to datacenter builders and operators....

Chip biz surging too as CEO Hock Tan predicts optical GPU interconnects are a year or two away Broadcom's takeover of VMware continues to deliver strong revenue and margin growth, and the company expects demand for AI hardware will do likewise in coming years....

Rangefinder broke during descent so lander didn't slow down UPDATED Japanese firm ispace's latest attempt to land a craft on the Moon appears to have failed, after its Hakuto-R lander, dubbed Reliance, went dark while approaching the lunar surface....

Any info on Maxim Rudometov and his associates? There's $$$ in it for you The US government is offering up to $10 million for information on foreign government-backed threat actors linked to the RedLine malware, including its suspected developer, Maxim Alexandrovich Rudometov....

Re-selling info from an earlier breach? Probably. But which one? AT&T is investigating claims that millions of its customers' data are listed for sale on a cybercrime forum in what appears to be a re-release from an earlier hack....

House version of software license management bill introduced in March has yet to budge amid distractions Sloppy government software licensing practices are back on the menu in the US Senate....

Commerce secretary wants bigger bang for taxpayers' buck Chipmakers waiting on billions of dollars of CHIPS Act funding should be prepared to return to the negotiating table, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick suggested during a Senate hearing this week....

Trump-pardoned hacker Chris Wade will join the company as CTO Cellebrite has announced a $170 million deal to buy Corellium, bringing together two companies that have made names for themselves by helping law enforcement break into encrypted devices....

Plus: Plankey's confirmation process 'temporarily delayed' Sean Cairncross, President Donald Trump's nominee to serve as national cyber director, doubled down on taking offensive cyber actions against foreign adversaries during a Senate homeland security committee nomination hearing on Thursday, and refused to condemn the president's proposed cuts to the main US cyber defense agency....

OpenAI CEO enjoys speculative love-in with Snowflake boss as critics worry over what 1,000X compute would do to the planet OpenAI CEO Sam Altman this week speculated that most people" would have assumed Artificial General Intelligence had arrived if they'd they seen ChatGPT in action before its arrival in 2020....

No matter who wins, the US EV industry is likely to lose, expert tells us Elon Musk has publicly broken with Donald Trump over the latter's budget reconciliation bill, calling it a "pork-filled ... abomination" that would undermine the work his DOGE cost-cutting unit has done. But the bill also hits close to Tesla tycoon's pocketbook, and at least one expert thinks it spells terrible news for the US electric vehicle industry overall....

Dark web crime platform raked in $17M+ over three years of operation Uncle Sam has seized 145 domains tied to BidenCash, the notorious dark web market that trafficked in more than 15 million stolen credit cards....

Mini computer house comes out against 'vibe coding' fad Raspberry Pi, a company started with the aim of democratizing computing and recreating the programming frenzy of the 1980s and 1990s, is warning that "vibe coding" cannot replace the skills picked up during the process of learning to code....

Someone went to great lengths to prey on the next generation of cybercrooks Sophos thinks a single person or group called "ischhfd83" is behind more than a hundred backdoored malware variants targeting novice cybercriminals and video game cheaters looking to get their hands on malicious code....

Redmond doubles down on AI by doubling Ryan Roslansky's workload LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky is to lead the Microsoft Office and Microsoft 365 Copilot teams in the latest Redmond reshuffle....

'Most people are f**king scared of AI, like we're feeding a monster' The current craze for AI has helped drive a wave of datacenter building, but the industry has run into opposition from local communities in many areas, something it is understandably keen to address....

Excitement over DuckLake, but momentum is with Iceberg as players at AWS, Snowflake weigh in It's been a year since Databricks bought Tabular for $1 billion, livening up the sleepy world of table formats....

It's definitely not a cyberattack though! Really! The UK's tax collections agency says cyberbaddies defrauded it of 47 million ($63 million) late last year, but insists the criminal case was not a cyberattack....

Accenture points to AI hiring spree, with London dominating demand UK tech vacancies are up by 21 percent to hit their highest levels since before the pandemic, according to research from Accenture....

Freshly acquired cloud darling talks mainframes, Ansible, and influencing Big Blue at HashiDays event HashiCorp is now an IBM company, with one staffer remarking: "We're actually quite happy for it, most of us sitting in this room at least."...

Water, water everywhere, but it would just make it worse US Coast Guard and civilian vessels have rescued 22 sailors off the coast of Alaska after some of the electric cars they were transporting caught fire....

Researchers have come up with a fix for a path traversal bug first spotted in 2010 A security bug that surfaced fifteen years ago in a public post on GitHub has survived developers' attempts on its life....

Who can begrudge them? Maybe all of us if IP brokers send them to loose operators Ukrainian telcos and ISPs have leased their IPv4 holdings to stay afloat during the nation's war with Russia....

The authors who claimed America hacked itself to discredit Beijing are back with another report Beijing complains it's under relentless attack by the equivalent of an ant trying to shake a tree China's National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center on Thursday published a report in which it claims Taiwan targeted it with a years-long but feeble cyber offensive, backed by the USA....

To make matters worse, IBM's security software has a critical vuln caused by an exposed password IBM isn't having its best week after the company experienced another cloudy outage and a critical-rated vulnerability....

All the cool kids signed licensing deals with the recently-listed forum site Reddit, the popular internet discussion forum, sued Anthropic on Wednesday, alleging that the AI biz scraped content generated by its users in violation of contractual terms and technical barriers....

New products must show potential for 50% gross margin to get the greenlight Mounting losses and financial turmoil has Intel cutting the deadweight, an effort that won't end with axing staff....

Recompiled binaries and phone threats used to boost the pressure Groups linked with the Play ransomware have exploited more than 900 organizations, the FBI said Wednesday, and have developed a number of new techniques in their double-extortion campaigns - including exploiting a security flaw in remote-access tool SimpleHelp if orgs haven't patched it....

Silicon photonics and gallium nitride a major focus GlobalFoundries plans to funnel another $3 billion into US semiconductor production, bringing its total investment to $16 billion, the New York-based foundry operator said on Wednesday....

Drones are not enough Following a daring drone attack on Russian airfields, Ukrainian military intelligence has reportedly also hacked the servers of Tupolev, the Kremlin's strategic bomber maker....

Login.gov hasn't shown its backup testing policy is working, GAO warns The US government's Login.gov identity verification system could be one cyberattack, or just a routine IT hiccup, away from serious trouble, say auditors, because it hasn't shown its backup testing policy is actually in use or effective....