The Register

Web puzzles don't protect against bots, but humans have spent 819 million unpaid hours solving them Google promotes its reCAPTCHA service as a security mechanism for websites, but researchers affiliated with the University of California, Irvine, argue it's harvesting information while extracting human labor worth billions....

Something called 'Content Validator' did not validate the content, and the rest is history CrowdStrike has blamed a bug in its own test software for the mass-crash-event it caused last week....

If it can happen to folks that run social engineering defence training, what hope for the rest of us? Security awareness and training provider KnowBe4 hired a fake North Korean IT worker for a software engineering role on its AI team, and only realized its mistake once the worker started using his company-provided computer for evil....

A nice surprise, but some other vAdmins have an August 1 deadline to sort out subscriptions VMware users have had a little win, as the Broadcom business unit has extended the supported life of its flagship vSphere software....

As the G-Cloud brings in big bucks and plentiful profit Google has managed to cap the costs it incurs when using AI to generate results....

President apologizes in advance for job losses The Philippines has decided to dismantle the worst of its offshored industries: the bits that run gambling and scam operations....

Zuck says he wants to mimic Linux and go open source, kind of Meta today released Llama 3.1 405B, its largest and most capable large language model yet, which the social network claims can go toe-to-toe with OpenAI and Anthropic's top models....

Maybe next time some staged rollouts? A bit of QA too? Analysis Last week, at 0409 UTC on July 19, 2024, antivirus maker CrowdStrike released an update to its widely used Falcon platform that caused Microsoft Windows machines around the world to crash....

Ever had to shop in incognito mode to avoid paying more? This one's for you The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has launched an investigation into "surveillance pricing," a phenomenon likely familiar to anyone who's had to buy something in an incognito browser window to avoid paying a premium....

How could this happen to us? We were supposed to be two versions behind? If administrators have learned anything from the CrowdStrike chaos, it's to understand exactly what delayed updates mean - or don't mean - in the anti-malware world....

But not necessarily health The results of the largest universal basic income (UBI) trial program in the United States - this one backed by billionaire Sam Altman, no less - are in and entirely unsurprising....

The presumptive Democratic nominee has gone back and forth with Big Tech Analysis With Joe Biden out of the US Presidential race, his VP Kamala Harris is poised to become the Democratic Party's nominee, but whether her history with Silicon Valley will help is far less assured....

Latest trend follows various malware campaigns that began just hours after IT calamity Thousands of typosquatting domains are now registered to exploit the desperation of IT admins still struggling to recover from last week's CrowdStrike outage, researchers say....

Cybersecurity outfit to go its own way to IPO and $1B ARR On the day of Alphabet's Q2 earnings call, cybersecurity firm Wiz has walked from a $23 billion takeover bid by Google's parent company....

America's second largest wireless carrier taking steps to prevent a repeat of 12-hour downtime in February An AT&T cellular outage lasting more than 12 hours that prevented subscribers from accessing services including 911 was caused by misconfigured hardware and a failure to follow standard procedures when deploying....

Revenue and underlying profit please markets in Q2 as German software giant retains focus on costs SAP has expanded the number of jobs affected by its restructuring program by up to 20 percent after generating higher revenue but lower operating profit in the most recent full quarter....

Boss faces grilling over disastrous software snafu The US House Committee on Homeland Security has requested public testimony from CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz in the wake of the chaos caused by a faulty update....

Strictly for performance fiends with ultra-modern kit who want a distro to match Hands-on CachyOS is a performance-optimized rebuild of Arch Linux, with a simpler installer and dozens of desktops and options to tweak. Stable reliability, not so much....

In space, no one can hear you scream when you step on one ESA's space brick has landed in LEGO(R) stores, but you can't buy the 3D-printed items to add to your own creations....

For now it's Capgemini to the rescue (again) Updated The UK's Treasury ministry is to determine the fate of aging SAP software that runs the nation's tax system - processing 750 billion ($968 billion) of transactions a year - over the coming weeks....

First nasty to exploit Modbus to screw with operational tech devices A previously unseen malware, dubbed FrostyGoop, able to disrupt industrial processes was used in a cyberattack against a district energy company in Ukraine last northern winter, resulting in two days without heat for hundreds of people during sub-zero temperatures....

Proprietary code goes unpublished - but no FOSS package ever dies Opinion One of the delicious promises of open source software is eternal life. In literature from Gilgamesh on, this has been a classic trap for the careless and greedy, but this is FOSS so it must be true. No package ever dies. Proprietary code goes unpublished: if its host company dies, it probably dies with it the moment the servers are wiped....

But does it matter when all Grace needs to is to babysit GPUs? Comment AMD has claimed its current datacenter silicon is already more than twice as fast, and up to 2.75 times more efficient, than Nvidia's Grace CPU Superchips....

Government doesn't seem to mind - and business is into it, claims report Hong Kong's government and local businesses undermine sanctions by deliberately facilitating the transfer of restricted and sensitive technology to naughty regimes, according to a report released on Monday by the nonprofit Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation....

Put those pesky crashes in the past with a fun microcode upgrade! Intel has promised to deliver a fix for some of its recent desktop processors suffering "stability issues."...

Another sign of China's technological turn inwards - but not, sadly, a SPARC revival Tencent Cloud has launched a version of its homebrew cut of Linux distribution CentOS....

Wagering boomed - and so did the quantity of money heading offshore Indonesia has an online gambling problem. Despite having blocked access to wagering content over 2.5 million times last year, the nation's Ministry of Communications and Information (KomInfo), believes it can only break the habit with further blocks and assistance from the private sector....

Ad giant promises to protect privacy, as critics say surveillance continues Google no longer intends to drop support for third-party cookies - the online identifiers used by the ad industry to track people and target them with ads based on their online activities....

After 24 years, bug report finally gets fixed Mozilla's Thunderbird team has fixed a 24-year-old feature bug, bringing system tray mail notifications to GNOME and KDE desktop environments for Linux users....

One arrest was made weeks ago but no word on the suspect's identity yet A DDoS-for-hire site described by the UK's National Crime Agency (NCA) as the world's most prolific operator in the field is out-of-action following a law enforcement sting dubbed Operation Power Off....

You can't offer a better deal in exchange for silence, argues NLRB Separation agreements Meta gave to employees during mass 2022 layoffs are illegal, a US judge has decided, and the reasoning could have implications far beyond Zuckercorp....

Big misconception is that data ingestion is occurring, we're told Google, after facing accusations about its AI model ingesting private files, says Gemini can read and summarize this type of sensitive data in real time -but only with Workspace users' express permission....

But will they ship before the Biden administration tightens export controls? Comment US trade restrictions on the sale of AI accelerators to China haven't detered Nvidia from bringing its latest Blackwell architecture to the Middle Kingdom....

Some rest for the wicked? Los Angeles County Superior Court, the largest trial court in America, closed all 36 of its courthouses today following an "unprecedented" ransomware attack on Friday....

More baddies go it alone as trust in big gangs withers, claims Europol A fresh report from Europol suggests that the recent disruption of ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) groups is fragmenting the threat landscape, making it more difficult to track....

And you thought rolling back a borked update on a server down the hall was hard? The European Space Agency (ESA) has shared the story of how engineers brought a mission back from the brink after a micrometeoroid strike, an equipment failure, and an impressive solar storm....

Shrinks training pool, but hurts services like the Internet Archive The internet is becoming significantly more hostile to webpage crawlers, especially those operated for the sake of generative AI, researchers say....

Big Red agrees not to capture personal details after two-year class action Oracle has agreed to cough up $115 million to settle a two-year class action lawsuit that alleged misuse of user data....

Was a 2009 agreement on interoperability to blame? Did the EU force Microsoft to let third parties like CrowdStrike run riot in the Windows kernel as a result of a 2009 undertaking? This is the implication being peddled by the Redmond-based cloud and software titan....

Supposed hacktivist efforts previously linked to the Kremlin's GRU Flying under the radar on Clownstrike day last week, two members of the Cyber Army of Russia Reborn (CARR) hacktivist crew are the latest additions to the US sanctions list....

Impressively home-made, this is the sort of laptop we wish we could buy new A Thinkpad Yoga, modded with a mechanical keyboard, may serve as a wake-up call to both Lenovo and Framework....

UK university users face migration path following plan to withdraw support for product some build 1M solutions around Exclusive Software used to cost the University of Oxford's Covid vaccine research has become the subject of an end-of-life announcement from enterprise application developer Unit4....

Cloud group companies free of Redmond's compliance cops for 2 years in return for ditching EC antitrust complaint EXCLUSIVE Part of Microsoft's settlement with a bunch of cloud providers in Europe to make an antitrust complaint disappear is a two-year moratorium on software audits, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter....

Read also served at UK's MoJ, where outsourcer paid fine over electronic tagging fiasco UK outsourcing provider Serco has appointed Tom Read, head of central government's digital agency, to the role of group chief digital and technology officer....

When someone kicks a chair across the room out of fear they'll be fired it's stopped being funny Who, Me? It's another Monday, dear reader, which means the working week has begun anew. On the bright side, it also means another dose of the reader-submitted tales of IT hijinks we call Who, Me?...

Indian tech workers' union calls for a strike over 14-hour day proposal HCL Technologies has devised a measure to make sure its India-based employees change out of their pajamas and head into the office: making on-premises attendance a condition of eligibility for leave....

An unexpected splash of yellow on the red planet The Curiosity rover has found something surprising: rocks made of pure sulfur....

New instance types and discounts galore, and Broadcom all smiles as its preferred licensing finds more friends Google Cloud has delivered a Broadcom-compliant version of its cloudy VMware offering, and pitched it as a keenly priced migration target....

Also: Second-string Russian hackers sanctioned; Senators demand answers from Snowflake, and more Infosec in brief Unable to access the Samsung smartphone of the deceased Trump shooter for clues, the FBI turned to a familiar - if controversial - source to achieve its goal: digital forensics tools vendor Cellebrite....

Plus: Former Samsung worker jailed for leaking secrets; Robo-cabs reach Shanghai airport; and more Asia in brief Chinese researchers have created a drone that weighs just over four grams - less than a sheet of printer paper - and may be able to fly indefinitely....