The Register

Supply chains, 13M jobs and $649B a year at risk, so Uncle Sam is fighting back - with a request for info The US Department of Homeland Security is seeking help to assess the security of tech at maritime ports, to safeguard the 13 million jobs and $649 billion of economic activity generated by the nation's docks....

Now do your patriotic duty and fill one of those 500k open roles, please? The White House has unveiled a new strategy to fill some of the hundreds of thousands of critical cybersecurity vacancies across the US: Pitch cyber as a national service....

Problems also afflict the Pi Pico 2's chip Fedora 41 is approaching the home stretch, but is currently beset by problems around Raspberry Pi support....

Sorry, no, you can't just digitize, share copyrighted books without permission The US Second Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday affirmed a lower court ruling that the Internet Archive's digitization and electronic distribution of copyrighted print books violates American law....

knowledge workers, overwhelmed by knowledge tasks? We know what you need Adobe recently surveyed more than 1,000 employed Americans about their view of AI, and found that they could overcome their concerns about losing their jobs to AI if it saved them a substantial amount of time....

Feds post $10M bounty for each of the six's whereabouts The US today charged five Russian military intelligence officers and one civilian for their alleged involvement with the data-wiping WhisperGate campaign conducted against Ukraine in January 2022 before the ground invasion began....

Two critical holes including hardcoded admin credential If you're running Cisco's supposedly Smart Licensing Utility, there are two flaws you ought to patch right now....

Marking yet another round of telecom consolidation Verizon is buying Frontier Communications for $20 billion in an all-cash deal that the Tier 1 carrier says will bolster its fiber network across 31 states and Washington DC, as the industry undergoes yet another round of telecommunications consolidation....

'Potential issue' in infrastructure of network monitoring tool results in lengthy, ongoing downtime Today's the day. Maybe. Kaseya's Traverse platform is scheduled to finally be up and running again after a lengthy period of "maintenance."...

No, Russia and China are not on the list The US, EU, UK, and other nations have signed up to a legal framework setting out a treaty for the implementation of AI that is underpinned by human rights and democratic values....

Judge clears path for 149 ex-Twitters over 50 to sue collectively Thousands of people were caught up in the mass Twitter layoffs following Elon Musk's acquisition/deconstruction of the platform. Now, according to a judge, 150 of them can collectively sue the social media giant for age discrimination in its decision to lay them off....

Good news? Security is still getting a growing part of IT budget It looks like security budgets are coming up against belt-tightening policies, with chief security officers reporting budgets rising more slowly than ever and over a third saying their spending this year will be flat or even reduced....

No product? No problem! Wondering if the AI bubble is set to pop? Safe Superintelligence (SSI) has just scored more than $1 billion in investor funding....

Meanwhile, Broadcom reportedly displeased with 18A wafers Surprising news about Intel continues to emerge with the chipmaker vowing to use an external foundry in place of its own 20A process to make the upcoming Arrow Lake processors, amid talk that Broadcom has rejected Intel's 18A process as not ready for mass production....

ESA and Arianespace now twiddling thumbs until Vega-C returns to flight The European Space Agency (ESA) has bid a fond farewell to the Vega rocket with the successful launch of the Copernicus Sentinel-2C spacecraft....

Web services souk celebrates 'leader' designation for Q Developer Amazon Web Services on Tuesday took a moment to pat itself on the back for being thought of inside the box, specifically, the upper right-hand square that's part of Gartner's trademarked Magic Quadrant....

Microsoft's Copilot+ machines suck at one of computing's oldest use cases Comment A significant cadre of computer users is waking up to the fact that Microsoft's first volley of Copilot+ machines - notebooks capable of local AI processing - simply aren't very good at a bog-standard use case....

Network admins take a ride on the Fright Bus The Transport for London (TfL) "cyber incident" is heading into its third day amid claims that a popular appliance might have been the gateway for criminals to gain access to the organization's network....

Unless solution found, patients must be allowed to opt out Exclusive NHS England has received advice from lawyers saying key aspects of its controversial Federated Data Platform (FDP) lack a legal basis, meaning that unless a solution is found, it must allow citizens to opt out of sharing their data....

Its energy addiction, on the other hand, only seems to get worse Comment Once an abstract subject of science fiction and academic research, the concept of artificial intelligence has become the topic of dinner table conversations over the past two years....

Mac maker denial of Safari self-preferencing called out by OWA Apple appears to have misled the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) in a regulatory filing that attempts to downplay competition concerns, according to Open Web Advocacy (OWA)....

Telco giant slams silicon-and-software shop for trying to bully it into buying software it doesn't want or need, at huge prices US telecoms giant AT&T has alleged Broadcom has reneged on an extended support deal it struck with VMware, and warned the consequences could be massive outages for customer support operations - and even the US president's office....

Allowed access to 150k cameras, some in sensitive spots, but has been done for spamming Physical security biz Verkada has agreed to cough up $2.95 million following an investigation by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) - but the payment won't make good its past security failings, including a blunder that led to CCTV footage of Tesla, Cloudflare, and others being snooped on. Instead, the fine is about spam....

Russia has seemingly decided who it wants Putin the Oval Office The Biden administration on Wednesday seized 32 websites and charged two employees of a state-owned media outlet connected to a $10 million scheme to distribute pro-Kremlin propaganda, and claimed the actions were necessary to counter Russia's attempts to influence the upcoming US presidential election....

Feds warn of 'highly tailored, difficult-to-detect social engineering campaigns' The FBI has warned that North Korean operatives are plotting "complex and elaborate" social engineering attacks against employees of decentralized finance (DeFi) organizations, as part of ongoing efforts to steal cryptocurrency....

The mass layoffs that follow tech acquisitions are likely to attract greater scrutiny Tech companies are forever acquiring each other, but future buys will likely face more scrutiny after four US federal regulators decided to share data that they hope will help antitrust investigators assess whether an acquisition impacts labor markets - not just the market for tech....

Big Blue also shifts to Prisma SASE to secure its 250,000 workforce Palo Alto Networks has completed its purchase of IBM's QRadar SaaS offering, spending $500 million to buy up the service's customers and hopefully shift them into its own Cortex platform....

Loads of governance issues to worry about, and the chance it might spout utter garbage Microsoft has published a Transparency Note for Copilot for Microsoft 365, warning enterprises to ensure user access rights are correctly managed before rolling out the technology....

93GB of info feared pilfered in Montana by heartless crooks Planned Parenthood of Montana's chief exec says the org is responding to a cyber-attack on its systems, and has drafted in federal law enforcement and infosec professionals to help investigate and rebuild its IT environment....

'Giant step' in research could unlock a bunch of crazy science stuff An international team of researchers has, for the first time, coupled an atomic nucleus to an atomic clock to compare differences in their timekeeping frequencies....

It's set to slice up the AI PC competition at $700-$900 Not to be outshined by Intel's Lunar Lake launch, Qualcomm on Wednesday rolled out a pair of slimmed-down X chips aimed at cheaper Copilot+ PCs....

The upcoming version might bring tab previews, cookie banner block, and vertical tabs Firefox 130 is landing on users' machines, while version 131 enters beta - with a feature we've all been waiting for....

Bot shouldn't have political opinions, says Amazon It would be perfectly reasonable to expect Amazon's digital assistant Alexa to decline to state opinions about the 2024 presidential race, but up until recently, that assumption would have been incorrect....

It'll also do computery stuff Nordic datacenter operator atNorth says its next facility - the biggest to date - is to feature a heat reuse scheme for large-scale greenhouses and local housing....

Deal can't lessen competition if AI minnow wasn't much of a competitor Microsoft's "acquihire" of Inflection AI was today cleared by UK authorities on the grounds that the startup isn't big enough for its absorption by Microsoft to affect competition in the enterprise AI space....

Researchers find many similarities, and nasty new customizations such as embedded compromised user credentials The Cicada3301 ransomware, which has claimed at least 20 victims since it was spotted in June, shares "striking similarities" with the notorious BlackCat ransomware, according to security researchers at Israeli outfit endpoint security outfit Morphisec....

Communications agency now passing on the order to operators The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has woken up and issued a ban on Kaspersky software being used in telecoms kit, months after Washington deemed it a national security risk and blockaded future sales....

It won't generate hundreds of million of dollars for customers tomorrow, and there's a 'lot of noise' from tech industry ServiceNow is trying to assure investors that payback for enterprise GenAI investment is coming, but it may not be soon and biz customers shouldn't expect to get huge returns "tomorrow"....

Musk fought the law and the law won... for now The sound of a screeching rubber on road was heard in South America last night as Elon Musk's satellite broadband operation, Starlink, agreed to comply with an order in Brazil to block the billionaire's social media mouthpiece, X....

But Bullseye's days are numbered and it's time to think about upgrading The latest update to Debian "Bookworm" arrives at the same time as the last ever update to "Bullseye," and there's trouble ahead for Nvidia legacy users....

60 years after Arthur C Clarke wrote Sunjammer, space agency catches up NASA has successfully extended into orbit an 80 m (860 square foot) sail that is designed to catch emissions from the Sun and convert them into propulsion for space exploration....

As AWS, Microsoft, and Google hike some prices, it's time to open up the ROI calculator After an initial euphoric rush to the cloud, administrators are questioning the value and promise of the tech giant's services....

The train on platform 4 is destined for networking hell BORK!BORK!BORK! Strange things are afoot at Brighton Station as football fans keen to make the journey to London to see their team take on England's finest instead found themselves destined for Addr = 67 (43h)....

And you may ask yourself, 'How do I work this?' And you may ask yourself, 'Where is that large computer?' Part 3 This is the third part of The Register FOSS desk's roundup of some of the more memorable missteps and could-have-beens from the beginnings of the microcomputer industry until today....

The signal may not rot your mind, we can't say the same for the content Time to take off the tin foil hat: A review of 28 years of research into the health effects of radio wave exposure from cellphones has found no evidence to link the handhelds to brain cancer, or negative effects on health more generally....

Last year's 43B was a nice snack. Now for a feast of regulatory capture Sixteen months after the European Union signed off on its 43 billion Chips Act in the hope it would stimulate semiconductor manufacturing in the bloc, semiconductor trade group the European Semiconductor Industry Association (ESIA) has asked for more public money - and more say over policy decisions impacting local chipmakers....

Unclear if this is a sign controversial service is cleaning up its act everywhere Controversial social network Telegram has co-operated with South Korean authorities and taken down 25 videos depicting sex crimes....

Another job for Broadcom, then OpenAI's first custom-designed silicon chips allegedly will be manufactured by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the same outfit churning out processors for Nvidia, Apple, AMD, Intel, and others....

Uncle Sam apparently worried GPU giant may be punishing customers who shop around The US Department of Justice on Tuesday is said to have stepped up its antitrust investigation into Nvidia, issuing subpoenas seeking evidence for its case against the AI chip giant....

Bagging two posh properties, three luxury cars on a govt salary a bit of a giveaway - allegedly The US Department of Justice has accused a now-former senior official of the New York State government of illegally advancing the interests of the Chinese government and communist party....