The Register

Framework deal set to run until 2029 as central govt transitions to new ERP SaaS model The UK government has gone to market shopping for back office software in a tender which could be worth up to 5 billion ($6.4 billion)....

The eventful launch of STS-93 and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory Twenty-five years ago, Space Shuttle Columbia launched the Chandra X-ray observatory and nearly ended in catastrophe. As the then-ascent flight director John Shannon observed: "Yikes. We don't need another one of those."...

There's a difference between a warranty and insurance. In this story the latter could fight back On Call Friday is the day the working week goes to die for most people - unless, like many a Reg reader, they're on call to provide tech support at all hours. Which is why we use this day to celebrate those hardy souls with a fresh instalment of On Call - the reader-contributed column that celebrates survival in the face of stupidity, mendacity, and substandard manners....

Management drank the Kool Aid but staff can't cope with new demands Bosses expect artificial intelligence software to improve productivity, but workers say the tool does the opposite, according to a survey by find-a-workplace research org the Upwork Research Institute, a limb of talent-finding platform Upwork....

Pick a hot market - AI, quantum, chips, 6G - and the pair have a plan to work on it together The UK and India agreed on Wednesday to a broad "Technology Security Initiative" that will see the two nations collaborate in ways it's hoped will unlock investment....

We think this means easier-to-administer virtual desktops with extra shiny Omnissa, the newly independent business created by Broadcom's spinoff of VMWare's end-user compute arm, has proclaimed it will become a source of "AI-infused autonomous workspaces"....

Microsoft, Mandiant, weigh in with info about methods used by Andariel gang alleged to have made many, many, heists The US Department of Justice on Thursday charged a North Korean national over a series of ransomware attacks on stateside hospitals and healthcare providers, US defense companies, NASA, and even a Chinese target....

May even have targeted other malware gangs, and infosec researchers Infosec researchers have discovered a network of over three thousand malicious GitHub accounts used to spread malware, targeting groups including gamers, malware researchers, and even other threat actors who themselves seek to spread malware....

We offer this formula instead: RND(100.0)*(10^9) The cost of CrowdStrike's apocalyptic Falcon update that brought down millions of Windows computers last week may be in the billions of dollars, and insurance isn't covering most of that....

Team America AI Police? Sam Altman has called for a US-led coalition of nations to ensure AI remains a vehicle for freedom and democracy, and not a tool for authoritarians to keep themselves in power and dominate others....

PSA: Only accept updates via official channels ... ironically enough CrowdStrike is the latest lure being used to trick Windows users into downloading and running the notorious Lumma infostealing malware, according to the security shop's threat intel team, which spotted the scam just days after the Falcon sensor update fiasco....

Launching in Beta is so 2014. We're in the prototype limited sign-up era now After months of speculation, shy and retiring OpenAI has showed the world a glimpse of its very own web search engine powered by AI....

And the forking Microsoft-owned code warehouse doesn't see this as much of a problem Researchers at Truffle Security have found, or arguably rediscovered, that data from deleted GitHub repositories (public or private) and from deleted copies (forks) of repositories isn't necessarily deleted....

900 Mbps from Earth to orbit, and I still can't get reliable Wi-Fi in my backyard Jealous of the fact that the International Space Station has better internet than you do? Well, here's one more benchmark to envy: NASA has successfully streamed 4K video from an in-flight aircraft to the ISS and back again....

Following licensing changes, 86% of users head for the door. Coincidence? Only 14 percent of Oracle Java subscribers plan to stay on Big Red's runtime environment, according to a study following the introduction of an employee-based subscription model....

Beijing has a long history of recruiting US residents to carry out various espionage activities The US is looking to prosecute a Chinese immigrant over claims he has been drip-feeding information of interest to Beijing since at least 2012....

Looks a lot like Google's AI Overviews, hopefully without some of the early unfortunate summaries Microsoft is adding generative search to Bing despite the search engine's market share showing no increase after prior AI tech additions....

Chrome and Edge on Windows can now join the fun Apple has introduced its mapping technology to devices outside its ecosystem with a web version that works in Chrome and Edge on Windows PCs....

NXP Semiconductors and Texas Instruments also hit by slowdown Euro chipmaker STMicroelectronics saw revenue and net income slump in Q2 of this year, blaming low demand in the automotive sector while orders elsewhere failed to meet expectations, in a hint that the semiconductor industry is still in a rough patch....

For some unknown reason, initial patch was omitted from later versions Docker is warning users to rev their Docker Engine into patch mode after it realized a near-maximum severity vulnerability had been sticking around for five years....

Read the unredacted complaint against Photoshop giant and its software plans Adobe's controversial billing practices and punitive fees for those terminating their subscriptions early follow from the software titan's addiction to revenue, the FTC has said....

Those national security threat claims? 'No evidence,' VP tells The Reg Exclusive Despite the Feds' determination to ban Kaspersky's security software in the US, the Russian business is moving forward with another proposal to open up its data and products to third-party review - and prove to Uncle Sam that its code hasn't been compromised by Kremlin spies....

Recursive training leads to nonsense, study finds Researchers have found that the buildup of AI-generated content on the web is set to "collapse" machine learning models unless the industry can mitigate the risks....

X11 isn't dead while people still keep working on it It isn't quite XKCD 2347, but it's close. At least one developer is still working away on the X.org codebase with an effort to improve variable refresh rate supportin several different OSes....

Bit barns binge on Emerald Isle power Datacenters consumed more than a fifth of Ireland's electricity supply during 2023, according to the latest figures from the republic's Central Statistics Office (CSO). The news comes amid growing concerns over the expanding energy demands of the bit barn industry....

If you want a simple step-by-step, this is the best we've seen French BSD enthusiast Joel Carnat has written a how-to guide on setting up a laptop with OpenBSD for general use. It's worth a go for the Unix-curious....

Are your security and ops teams fighting to pass the buck? Comment Patching: The bane of every IT professional's existence. It's a thankless, laborious job that no one wants to do, goes unappreciated when it interrupts work, and yet it's more critical than ever in this modern threat landscape....

Big Blue brings in more cash and profit than predicted Generative AI's powers extend to helping the ancient concept of a proprietary enterprise OS and hardware stack to thrive, if IBM's Q2 2024 results are any guide....

Stakeholders found it an 'ambiguous' compliance burden and the world has moved on - or tried to India will eliminate its equalization levy - a charge imposed on digital services provided by non-resident companies, known as the "Google Tax."...

But the books look good, because of real AI ServiceNow has parted ways with president and chief operating officer Chirantan "CJ" Desai after an internal investigation found he had violated company policy when hiring the former CIO of the US Army as the workflow vendor's public sector boss....

Reports hint they'll be here by Christmas Huawei has reportedly developed a tri-fold smartphone that can be formed into a Z-shape, and will mass produce the machine before the end of 2024....

This one weird trick saved countless hours and stress - no, really Not long after Windows PCs and servers at the Australian limb of audit and tax advisory Grant Thornton started BSODing last Friday, senior systems engineer Rob Woltz remembered a small but important fact: When PCs boot, they consider barcode scanners no differently to keyboards....

It's not the size that matters, it's how you use it Mistral AI on Wednesday revealed a 123-billion-parameter large language model (LLM) called Mistral Large 2 (ML2) which, it claims, comes within spitting distance of the top models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta....

'In the short term, they're going to have to do a lot of groveling' Analysis The great irony of the CrowdStrike fiasco is that a cybersecurity company caused the exact sort of massive global outage it was supposed to prevent. And it all started with an effort to make life more difficult for criminals and their malware, with an update to its endpoint detection and response tool Falcon....

QA? In 2024? In this economy? How quaint! AMD has delayed the launch of its Ryzen 9000 desktop processors after discovering that production units initially shipped to channel partners weren't up to snuff....

Yes, you can be fingerprinted and tracked via Privacy Sandbox - tho the risk isn't as high as feared Apple last week celebrated a slew of privacy changes coming to its Safari browser and took the time to bash rival Google for its Topics system that serves online ads based on your Chrome history....

Is this what the kidz call a glow-up? Microsoft has tasked network operator Lumen Technologies - formerly CenturyLink - with scaling up its network capacity as the Windows giant looks to grow its burgeoning AI services business, the duo revealed Wednesday....

What a Trump-appointed judge taketh away, a Biden judge giveth The Federal Trade Commission's ban on noncompete agreements has been upheld after a second legal challenge, with a Philadelphia judge deciding that the FTC was well within its legal authority to prohibit such contract clauses....

Concerns abound over why it has taken so long to recover compared to competitors The US Department of Transportation (DoT) is investigating Delta Air Lines over its handling of the global IT outage caused by CrowdStrike's content update....

Claims 'everyone on Earth is going to want one' Tesla profits were nearly halved in the second quarter of 2024, extending a run of woe for the company, lightened only by a surge in energy generation and storage....

Not now, Microsoft Some Windows devices are presenting users with a BitLocker recovery screen upon reboot following the installation of July's Patch Tuesday update....

US national lab expects Discovery to deliver 'three to five times more computational throughput' Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has issued a request for proposals (RFP) for a successor to the Frontier supercomputer, just a couple of years after the world's first exascale system came online....

With numerous US government agency customers, any leak could be serious Updated Internal documents stolen from Leidos Holdings, an IT services provider contracted with the Department of Defense and other US government agencies, have been leaked on the dark web....

China is playing a long game, which could pay off on an enormous scale Analysis Some of the common arguments for moving away from proprietary operating systems are about increasing personal (or corporate) freedom and decreasing expenditure, but there are bigger things at stake....

Redmond comes out swinging as it files response to Competition and Markets Authority Updated Microsoft has responded to the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) probe into public cloud services and licensing by insisting that its terms "do not meaningfully raise cloud rivals' costs."...

At least that's what the app says... BORK!BORK!BORK! One criticism frequently leveled at electric vehicles is about their batteries: "Won't they wear out?"...

A new mission: Securing funding for Brits in orbit Former European Space Agency astronaut Tim Peake has joined Axiom Space's astronaut team as a strategic advisor supporting a potential all-UK human spaceflight mission....

Remembering when laptops could be fun and fixable It is 25 years since Apple's Clamshell iBook G3 arrived, replete with iMac styling and an innovation - optional Wi-Fi connectivity via Apple's AirPort....

Watchdog reprimand follows similar cases in 2021 The UK's data protection watchdog has reprimanded a school in Essex for using facial recognition for canteen payments, nearly three years after other schools were warned about doing the same....

Scratch the surface and they look more like a sales pitch - or a soft power play Embassies are bubbles of sovereignty that local authorities cannot freely enter and in which certain communications are privileged - an arrangement that is generally agreed as essential to facilitate international relations. And now the same protections are being suggested as needed to create a "data embassy" - datacenters that local authorities can't access and in which nations can store info and run software on foreign shores....