The Register

Breaking with Trump, Mike Johnson now suggests streamlining regulation out of funding bill UPDATED The US CHIPS and Science Act's future may depend on the outcome of Tuesday's Presidential Election after House Speaker Mike Johnson suggested the GOP would likely move to repeal the $280 billion funding bill if the party wins a majority in Congress....

Meanwhile, even Task Manager is no match for the broken patch Even though Windows 10 has less than a year of support remaining, Microsoft has once again demonstrated its ability to break things with a seemingly innocuous update....

Victims were placed in serious danger following highly sensitive data dump The City of Columbus, Ohio, has confirmed half a million people's data was accessed and potentially stolen when Rhysida's ransomware raided its systems over the summer....

Stuffing it full of AI hasn't helped, so let's try financial incentives We're not saying Microsoft is desperate for people to use Bing, but a $1 million sweepstakes that grants entries to users of the search engine sure quacks like a duck....

Open source tool chooses to become more open than ever Fear not, FOSS fans. Bitwarden isn't going proprietary after all. The company has changed its license terms once again - but this time, it has switched the license of its software development kit from its own homegrown one to version three of the GPL instead....

Thank you, vNext... and yes, there are plenty of updates to keep you busy Windows Server 2025 is officially generally available with some substantial changes for administrators including useful Active Directory Domain tweaks, plus the disappearance of some familiar friends including Wordpad....

Federal Energy Regulatory Commission cites grid stability concerns Amazon has hit a roadblock in its plans for nuclear-powered US datacenters. Federal regulators rejected a deal that would let it draw more power from a Susquehanna plant to supply new bit barns next to the site, on the grounds this would set a precedent which may affect grid reliability and increase energy costs....

Dark alley and a brick in a sock required to accelerate market share growth? With Windows 11 still failing to set the world alight, campaigners are warning that millions of perfectly good PCs could become landfill fodder when support for Windows 10 runs out in eleven and a bit months....

Mondays are for checking months of logs, apparently, if MFA's not enabled In potentially bad news for those with long names and/or employers with verbose domain names, Okta spotted a security hole that could have allowed crims to pass Okta AD/LDAP Delegated Authentication (DelAuth) using only a username....

Is that a walrus in your server logs, or aren't you pleased to see me? Opinion At the start of September, Transport for London was hit by a major cyber attack. TfL is the public body that moves many of London's human bodies to and from work and play in the capital, and as the attack didn't hit power, signaling, or communications systems, most of the effects went unnoticed by commuters. The organization downplayed the damage done to back office ticketing, billing, and other systems. Everything was in hand....

Company fessed up, got off light, says US Commerce Department The US Department of Commerce is issuing a half a million dollar penalty against US-based semiconductor wafer manufacturer GlobalFoundries for violating sanctions and sending chips to SJ Semiconductor (SJS), an affiliate of a blocklisted Chinese chipmaker....

It may be a cliche to say 'Don't rest on your laurels' but you really shouldn't Who, Me? Welcome to another working week, loyal readers, and another dose of Who, Me? - the Reg's weekly safe space in which readers submit stories of times when tech support went not quite so well as they might have hoped....

Plus: China Unicom auctions off old cables; Japan's My Number Card also soon a driver's license; and Hong Kong chief executive warns US investment ban will backfire ASIA IN BRIEF Singapore's Land Transport Authority (LTA) estimated last week that by tracking all vehicles with GPS it will be able to increase road capacity by 20,000 over the next few years....

Also, ecommerce fraud ring disrupted, another Operation Power Off victory, Sino SOHO botnet spotted, and more in brief The US Department of Justice has charged six people with two separate schemes to defraud Uncle Sam out of millions of dollars connected to IT product and services contracts....

Turns out it's perfectly legal to waste applicants' time, use posts to squeeze more productivity out of employees If you didn't hear back about that great-looking tech position you applied for, it might not be because there were too many applicants scrambling to find a job amid rolling layoffs. There's a distinct possibility the posting was fake to begin with....

Hopefully watching it'll be less painful than dying of dysentery GenXers and elder millennials, rejoice - or maybe don't: An Oregon Trail movie is on the way from Apple....

Have you seen this dome? It's full of stars British police are investigating an unusual theft: the UK's largest mobile, inflatable planetarium, a regular feature at schools and music festivals.....

Calls for improvements will soon turn into demands when new rules come into force The UK's finance regulator is urging all institutions under its remit to better prepare for IT meltdowns like that of CrowdStrike in July....

Before you get too excited, Fujitsu's next-gen chips won't ship till 2027 Fujitsu and AMD announced plans on Friday to develop a new, more energy-efficient AI and HPC compute platform that will pair the Japanese tech vendor's next-gen CPUs with the House of Zen's Instinct accelerators....

The two hybrid datacenters promise 35% less embodied carbon than steel builds, 65% less than concrete Microsoft is experimenting with datacenters made out of wood in a bid to cut the growing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that result from constructing its expanding network of bit barns....

Now, can someone come up with an emulator for the things, please? Good news, everyone - well, everyone who's still onboard the Itanic, anyway. GCC 15 will de-deprecate Linux support for Intel's original 64-bit chip....

60% tariffs on all Chinese goods are going to slam the IT sector Tariffs have become a major issue in the current US election, with former president Donald Trump claiming his plans to put a 10-20 percent tax on imports, rising to 60 percent with China, would fill government coffers for tax cuts and make American manufacturing great again. His rival Kamala Harris called the plans a sales tax on the American people.'...

Despite extending server lifespans, AI's power demands drive more datacenter builds Amazon expects to spend $75 billion on capital expenditure in 2024 and even more in 2025 - mostly on its cloud computing business - due to rising demand for generative AI and as more customers ditch their on-premises workloads....

173 jobs gone after air-breathing rocket project loses lift Updated Aerospace specialist Reaction Engines has gone into administration, potentially taking with it the dreams of hypersonic aircraft powered by its hybrid air-breathing rocket engine tech....

Local authority websites downed in response to renewed support for Ukraine Multiple UK councils had their websites either knocked offline or were inaccessible to residents this week after pro-Russia cyber nuisances added them to a daily target list....

ASWF is the open source foundation run by the folks who give out Oscars, and you've probably seen the results Ubuntu Summit 2024 One of the things we didn't expect to see at this year's Ubuntu get-together was a chart showing Rocky Linux's dominance. Another was demos of whizz-bang special movie effects with open source componentry at their heart....

How 'Gary' defeated Bowser broke into the interactive alarm clock A hacker who uses the handle GaryOderNichts has found a way to break into Nintendo's recently launched Alarmo clock, and run code on the device....

Lunch can be surprisingly dangerous. So can tea On Call By the time Friday rolls around, The Register understands readers might just want to toss the rest of the working week away without a care for the consequences. That sense of ennui is why we ease you into the last day of the working week with a new instalment of On Call, the reader-contributed column that celebrates the sometimes-silly side of working in tech support....

India saw an all-time revenue record and is poised for four more physical stores Apple released its fourth quarter results for FY 2024 on Thursday, revealing that its sales in China were starting to slide and hinting at market saturation in the face of competition from domestic players like Huawei and Xiaomi....

It's the space economy, stupid Japan's space agency announced on Thursday it is making an open source digital copy of its International Space Station (ISS) module, in what it is calling the world's first "Space Digital Twin."...

Improving revenue outlook has Chipzilla's shares back on a positive trajectory - for the moment anyway. Intel posted a $16.6 billion loss in the third quarter - the largest in the silicon veteran's history - as it booked more than $18 billion in restructuring and impairment related charges....

Emeraldwhale looked sharp - until it made a common S3 bucket mistake A criminal operation dubbed Emeraldwhale has been discovered after it dumped more than 15,000 credentials belonging to cloud service and email providers in an open AWS S3 bucket, according to security researchers....

Cloudy concern has also spent over $500M buying back its own shares amid multiple rounds of layoffs Cloudy file-shifter Dropbox has axed about 20 percent of its staff, its second round of layoffs in less than two years....

MIcrosoft extends its Extended Security Updates club to consumers, at last Microsoft has thrown a lifeline to Windows 10 users ahead of the OS going end-of-life, by offering an extra year of patches for $30....

Activists press Redmond to come clean on material reputational, legal, and operational risks' Microsoft shareholders may be exposed to the "material financial risks" from its links with the fossil fuel industry, which the megacorp identified as the top growth target for its AI and cloud computing services....

No rush, guys Amazon's cloud-hosted email service for enterprises now offers multifactor authentication, which is great, except that the service launched nearly a decade ago....

Given the cost of EUV litho machines, the Netherlands' ASML might be the real winner here The Biden administration on Thursday announced plans to invest $825 million in US CHIPS and Science Act funding to establish a semiconductor research and development center in Albany, New York....

Unexpected expenses in semiconductor division overshadow revenue gains Samsung Electronics is blaming a quarter-on-quarter plunge in operating profits in its chips division on costs incurred, and says it intends to focus on "high value-added products" for the rest of 2024....

This will both ease and exacerbate price concerns and competitive sniping VMware by Broadcom has upped the storage capacity allowed under licenses for its vSphere Foundation bundle - a move that addresses competitors' attacks, but may also give them new impetus....

Mr X ordered to show at Halloween hearing over election lottery as his lawyers file docs to dodge it Updated Elon Musk has been ordered to attend a Halloween hearing on the legality of his election petition lottery, but a last-minute removal request may have given the billionaire a reprieve to spend the day enjoying quality holiday time with his family or more relentless campaigning to help elect Donald Trump....

A scary few Halloween hours for team behind hugely popular web plugin LottieFiles is overcoming something of a Halloween fright after battling to regain control of a compromised developer account that was used to exploit users' crypto wallets....

Vendors not keen on 'lengthy bureaucracy,' and cost when they try to hire skilled foreigners UK government is to recommend streamlining the visa process for those with AI skills and the creation of special zones where it will be easier to build datacenters and any infrastructure they depend on....

Motherboard missing, leaving space for a million hits of meth Australian police have arrested a man after finding he imported what appear to be tower PC cases that were full of illicit drugs....

Azure's acceleration continues, but so do costs Microsoft has explained that its method of funding the tens of billions it's spending on new datacenters and AI infrastructure is to shun customers who want to rent GPUs to train new AI models....

Busy week for Cupertino sees shrunken Mac minis, updated lappies, and new SoCs With the arrival of its M4 silicon on the Mac this week, Apple wants the world to know that the silicon powering AI PCs is no match for its chips....

India makes it onto list of likely threats for the first time A report by Canada's Communications Security Establishment (CSE) revealed that state-backed actors have collected valuable information from government networks for five years....

It's not like Zuck needs the coin despite increased infrastructure spend, headcount, losses on VR Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg has told investors that open sourcing its Llama AI models is not entirely altruistic - he thinks it will also save his social media conglomerate money....

Another Asian country declares ambition to be a tech hub Thailand has won a pair of high profile investments that boost its ambition to become a hub for datacenters and semiconductor manufacturing....

And what do you know, Google's former CEO just so happens to have a commercial solution Former Google chief Eric Schmidt thinks the US Army should expunge "useless" tanks and replace them with AI-powered drones instead....

Plus a free micropatch until Redmond fixes the flaw There's a Windows Themes spoofing zero-day bug on the loose that allows attackers to steal people's NTLM credentials....