The Register

What was screwing with minds of US diplomats - wait, is that a black helicopt... An inquiry by the US government's National Institutes of Health (NIH) into Havana Syndrome - the seemingly mysterious illness that struck down American and Canadian diplomats in Cuba and then around the world - has been halted after it was found the study's participants had been coerced into taking part....

Better late than never The White House on Tuesday indicated it hopes to shore up the weak security of internet routing, specifically the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP)....

The group bragged they could steal one-time passwords from Apply Pay and 30+ sites A trio of men have pleaded guilty to running a multifactor authentication (MFA) bypass ring in the UK, which authorities estimate has raked in millions in less than two years....

And all it took was some good old fashioned outsourcing to TSMC Intel's first chips to exceed Microsoft's lofty Copilot+ performance target have arrived, promising up to 120 TOPS of AI performance across an improved CPU, GPU and NPU. This development brought to you by the move to jump ship to TSMC....

No, Abbey is not really a "pure patriotic girl" Spamouflage, the Beijing-linked trolls known for spreading fake news about American politics, is back with new accounts on X and TikTok that claim to be frustrated US voters in "more aggressive" attempts to influence the upcoming presidential election....

Trajectory tweak means a delay of almost a year, though 165 km flyby should produce eye candy The BepiColombo spacecraft is to make a closer-than-planned flyby of Mercury this week, whizzing past the planet at approximately 165 km from the surface after the European Space Agency's (ESA) Flight Dynamics team tweaked the trajectory to compensate for malfunctioning thrusters....

27 days to get your users' third-party apps on Google's sign-in Google Workspace administrators, consider yourselves on notice: In less than a month, many third-party apps (mail, calendar, etc.) will stop connecting to Workspace accounts....

50% dive in market cap during 2024 forcing CEO Pat Gelsinger to revisit strategy Intel could lose a longstanding seat on the Dow Jones Industrial Average due to the slump in its share price, adding to the chipmaker's existing troubles....

Selfie-scraper again claims European law does not apply to it The Dutch Data Protection Authority (DPA) has fined controversial facial recognition company Clearview AI 30.5 million ($33 million) over the "illegal" collation of images....

First major version in two decades is worth getting to know GNU screen is included in most Linux distros, but newer, fancier tools such as tmux often outshine it....

Now the Numbat has been neatened, you can replace your Jellyfish - if you dare Ubuntu 24.04.1 is here, which means that users of the previous LTS release, 22.04 "Jammy Jellyfish," will be offered the update....

$25B semiconductor shopping spree leaves rivals in the dust China spent more in the first half of this year on chipmaking equipment to expand its semiconductor capacity than the US, Taiwan, and South Korea combined, indicating how serious the country is about self-reliance in silicon and building its own industry....

Other options considered too as the power draw on electricity grids continues unabated Analysis Cloud computing is one of the few areas of the tech industry to show continual growth, even during the pandemic and the subsequent inflation-driven curb on spending. Yet one thing that might hinder cloud's inexorable expansion is finding the power for the infrastructure it depends on....

Board member offers apology for 'inappropriate' behavior SAP CTO and executive board member Jurgen Muller is set to depart the German software corporation over an "incident" at a company event....

It's going to take more than CAPTCHA to prove you're real Researchers at Microsoft and OpenAI, among others, have proposed "personhood credentials" to counter the online deception enabled by the AI models sold by Microsoft and OpenAI, among others....

Government body claims there is no evidence of customer data being compromised Transport for London (TfL) - responsible for much of the public network carrying people around England's capital - is battling to stay on top of an unfolding "cyber security incident."...

Fusion biz wants to break superconducting tech into other sectors Brit nuclear fusion firm Tokamak Energy has formed a separate division to commercialize the superconducting magnet tech it developed for reactors in other markets including renewable energy or transport....

Appeal panel upholds ban as Musk Xeets up a rage-storm Brazil's Supreme Court has backed an earlier decision to force local carriers to block Elon Musk's social network, X, as the dispute between the billionaire and the South American nation widens....

The GSMA and its friends are looking for ways to bring those within mobile range onto the 'net In 2015 Google gave itself a mission: connect the "next billion" people to the internet. That plan more-than-succeeded, but also left three billion people offline - a situation that other orgs are trying to address....

Machine learning helps, but more data catches more faults - so Chinese champ has shared its data Alibaba Cloud has revealed homebrew tech it used to improve server fault prediction and detection, which it claims saw its ability to detect problems beat comparable tech by ten percent....

Needs new investors to get beyond current modest products Chinese GPU-maker Xiangdixian Computing Technology has admitted it has not met its development targets and let go of some staff as part of a restructuring plan....

VP Adam Meyers to testify about that faulty software update which ruined July and some of August Crowdstrike is to be hauled before the US House Homeland Security Committee this month to explain why its faulty software update - the one that took down millions of computer systems worldwide - ever happened....

CEO Pavel Durov charged in France, messaging platform insists it abides by EU laws Telegram CEO Pavel Durov, who was cuffed and charged by the French police last week, was "too free" in his approach to managing the global messaging platform, according to Russia's foreign minister....

Meanwhile, strange noises emanate from Starliner NASA has confirmed the names of the two crew members who will be flying to the International Space Station (ISS) on the next SpaceX mission: NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov....

A Firefox fork aimed at power surfers The Zen Browser is a new effort to modernize web browsing by bringing tiling, workspaces, and so on - and it's blissfully free of Google code....

Almost three years on and many customers have yet to make the move Windows 11 continues to nibble at the market share of Windows 10, although has a way to go before finally surpassing its predecessor....

Despite mogul's US acquittal and recent death, IT giant will follow UK fraud case to its 'conclusion' HPE will pursue the widow of Mike Lynch for the $4 billion in damages it sought from him over the Autonomy merger following the Brit tech tycoon's recent death in a sailing tragedy off the coast of Sicily....

Customers report inability to view transactions Updated UK banking giant Lloyds is struggling to account for malfunctioning online services today as customers report being unable to view transactions through the app or website....

Gadget gladiators line up to supply world's largest healthcare org The NHS has launched a competition worth up to 1.5 billion for suppliers to provide a variety of computer hardware to the world's biggest healthcare organization, including PCs, printers, and peripherals....

Shipments held up following warehouse migration tech glitches, can't cancel orders either Google's Pixel 9 phone appears to be made of pure unobtainium if the experience of some O2* customers is anything to go by....

Set the Control Panel for the heart of the Sun Opinion We may not know exactly when or how, but we do know that the Windows Control Panel is gasping its last. Hurrah....

The technology was willing, but the cache was weak Who, Me? Greetings, gentle reader, and may peace be upon you, for yea verily it is once again Monday and unto Monday we render another instalment of Who, Me? in which Reg readers unburden themselves with confessions of technical mishap....

Community seems to C Rust more as a burden than a benefit Efforts to add Rust code to the Linux kernel suffered a setback last Thursday when one of the maintainers of the Rust for Linux project stepped down - citing frustration with "nontechnical nonsense."...

More help for Nutanix, too Data protection software vendor Veeam has delivered its promised support for open source virtualization contender Proxmox....

Resources hosted at Tencent Cloud involved in Cobalt Strike campaign Chinese web champ Tencent's cloud is being used by unknown attackers as part of a phishing campaign that aims to achieve persistent network access at Chinese entities....

Plus: Alibaba exits regulatory purgatory; India slows CBDC rollout; China creates eight new datacenter hubs ASIA IN BRIEF Chinese academics have suggested nuclear weapons are the only effective way to destroy an asteroid that threatens to collide with Earth - if it's detected at short notice....

Good things come to those who wait - and have deep pockets Review It's no secret that this vulture is partial to an adult beverage or two. But brewing your own? That way lies madness due to the complexities involved. However, the iGulu F1 seeks to make home-brew disasters a thing of the past thanks to automation and idiot-proof ingredients....

Also, US offering $2.5M for Belarusian hacker, Backpage kingpins jailed, additional MOVEit victims, and more in brief A series of IP cameras still used all over the world, despite being well past their end of life, have been exploited to create a new Mirai botnet....

Tim Boucher objects to the mischaracterization of his work in authors' copyright claim Interview Tim Boucher, a Canadian artist, author, and AI activist, sent a letter to the San Francisco judge overseeing an authors' lawsuit against AI firm Anthropic to object to the way the legal filing characterizes his work....

Researchers say that implementing Actions omit privacy details and expose info Many of the GPT apps in OpenAI's GPT Store collect data and facilitate online tracking in violation of OpenAI policies, researchers claim....

The ransomware gang recruits high-profile affiliates from LockBit and ALPHV As RansomHub continues to scoop up top talent from the fallen LockBit and ALPHV operations while accruing a smorgasbord of victims, security and law enforcement agencies in the US feel it's time to issue an official warning about the group that's gunning for ransomware supremacy....

The platform 'has provided sufficient allegations to survive dismissal,' judge says Elon Musk's X Corp and Media Matters for America are headed to trial next year following a judge's refusal to toss the billionaire's lawsuit....

Relax, it's just a drill. This time at least. US Army Special Forces, aka the Green Berets, have been demonstrating their hacking chops in the recent Swift Response 24 military exercises in May, the military has now confirmed....

An ignominious, uncrewed end to Boeing's misfire Boeing's troubled Starliner spacecraft is set to return to Earth just over a week from now with managers setting a date of no earlier than September 6 for undocking from the International Space Station (ISS) and September 7 to land at White Sands in New Mexico....

The term was mentioned over 140 times during the earnings call Few companies have tied their fortunes to AI as much as Dell Technologies has, with the technology giant seeing a rise in server and networking revenue of 80 percent thanks to AI infrastructure sales, while eyeing potential AI PC dividends coming down the pike....

Open source competitor is still the most popular database among devs, though NoSQL database vendor MongoDB says it is making significant gains against open source relational rival PostgreSQL in a claim that seems to fly in the face of recent research....

From spinoffs to layoffs and a boardroom revolt, 2024 isn't going great for Chipzilla Intel chief Pat Gelsinger has acknowledged the chip giant's financial woes and said he is working to address investor concerns amid talk that the company is considering spinning off its foundry business and delaying expansion of its fabrication plants....

Failure has become rare, but the FAA needs to look into it regardless SpaceX's Falcon 9 has been grounded following a rare mishap during the landing of a veteran booster....

Infosec hounds say they spotted vulnerability during routine travel in the US Updated Cybersecurity researchers say they've found a vulnerability that allowed them to skip US airport security checks and even fly in the cockpit on some scheduled flights....

Besides sanity, of course The CSS Day conference may have come and gone, but Google's Chrome team is keen to keep the spirit alive with a list of what attendees felt was missing from the web....