The Register

Yes, the law that needs to be harmonized with Europe for tech businesses' data to flow freely The UK government has begun to introduce its latest update to data protection laws it claims will boost economic growth and public sector efficiency. The government said it expects it will keep the UK in line with the EU's GDPR....

Doesn't quite confirm eight-week license cancellation deadline, but does strap on the gloves The Arm/Qualcomm spat just got a little spicier, after the UK chip designer repeated its allegation the US SoC giant has breached its licenses....

Arguments continue but change suggests it's not Free Software anymore The Bitwarden online credentials storage service is changing its build requirements - which some commentators feel mean it's no longer FOSS....

389 US healthcare orgs infected this year alone Ransomware infected 389 US healthcare organizations this fiscal year, putting patients' lives at risk and costing facilities up to $900,000 a day in downtime alone, according to Microsoft....

Only two EU members have completed the transposition into domestic law The European Union's NIS2 Directive came into force on January 16, 2023, and member states had until October 17, 2024, to transpose it into national law. Yet many organizations still don't meet the required standards two years after it was approved....

Everybody needs more widgets in their life, right? Vivaldi has updated its eponymous browser - it now has a refreshed user interface and a dashboard packed with widgets....

Turns out its application can work with databases other than its own The sales pitch for software-as-a-service is that you get powerful applications without having to worry about their underlying infrastructure. But SaaSy workflow vendor ServiceNow will, quietly, let you run its wares on-prem....

All for the low, low price of a mere dollar Scammers, rejoice. OpenAI's real-time voice API can be used to build AI agents capable of conducting successful phone call scams for less than a dollar....

Red Hat still glowing, but Big Blue's been bruised by investors In its last few quarterly results announcements, IBM has trumpeted unexpectedly strong growth in its mainframe business, and that's helped the technology titan to just-about deliver promised mid-single-digit revenue growth in constant currency. But in its Q3 results announcement on Wednesday, Big Blue revealed mainframe revenue fell 19 percent - and that overall growth came in at just one percent or two percent in constant currency....

Google and WhatsApp also binned, which is far easier to explain than canning a local hero Hong Kong's government has updated infosec guidelines to restrict the use of Chinese messaging app WeChat, alongside Meta and Google products like WhatsApp and Google Drive, on computers it operates....

For starters, it could launch a prompt injection attack on itself... The latest version of AI startup Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet model can use computers - and the developer makes it sound like that's a good thing....

Third quarter results recharge Tesla's stock price Tesla stock is on the up after America's most valuable automaker reported its third quarter results - including the news that the beleaguered Cybertruck "achieved a positive gross margin for the first time."...

Attacks on unprotected servers reach 'critical level' An unknown attacker is abusing exposed Docker Remote API servers to deploy perfctl cryptomining malware on victims' systems, according to Trend Micro researchers....

'Powered-lift' becomes first new category of aircraft in nearly 80 years The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) this week released the final regulations for tiltrotors and other vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft, including electric variants, the first time the org has established a new category of aircraft since it permitted helicopters to fly....

Don't ignore this nasty zero day exploit says TAG A nasty bug in Samsung's mobile chips is being exploited by miscreants as part of an exploit chain to escalate privileges and then remotely execute arbitrary code, according to Google security researchers....

Fight On, State? Not this time Pennsylvania State University has agreed to pay the Justice Department $1.25 million to settle claims of misrepresenting its cybersecurity compliance to the federal government and leaving sensitive data improperly secured....

Security shop and CISA urge rapid action Fortinet has gone public with news of a critical flaw in its software management platform....

Save America's most important manufacturer? More like save our portfolio and let Uncle Sam pick up the pieces Comment A gaggle of ex-Intel board directors have called on the chipmaker to spin off its floundering foundry business while glossing over the fact that a company bleeding billions each quarter is unlikely to survive on its own....

Removal of kernel maintainers linked to Russia attributed to sanctions Linux creator Linus Torvalds on Wednesday affirmed the removal last week of about a dozen kernel maintainers associated with Russia....

We know where you got your skinny jeans - big deal A data thief calling themselves Satanic claims to have purloined the records of around 350 million customers of fashion retailer Hot Topic....

Plus, a POC to make it extra easy for attackers A Microsoft SharePoint bug that can allow an attacker to remotely inject code into vulnerable versions is under active exploitation, according to the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)....

Cassette-bursting medium revived for latest Alien chest-burster flick POLL: Is VHS back? If Alien: Romulus were a zombie movie, The Register could understand why 20th Century Studios has announced that it will release the film on VHS - the video cassette format that hasn't been relevant for two decades and had a crap reputation even in its heyday....

No longer an underdog - it now challenges Arm and x86 Comment The ratification of the RVA23 profile for RISC-V marks a monumental moment for the architecture, and anyone who's been following RISC-V knows that this isn't just a checkbox....

Earnings reported the same day striking union workers vote on a new contract If Boeing's second quarter was dismal, its Q3 numbers are abysmal, giving recently ensconced CEO Kelly Ortberg the perfect opportunity to fly to the rescue with a revitalization plan....

Former Nvidia engineer's discovery shows graphics compute can kick some serious ass A former Nvidia engineer has found the largest known prime number - a whopping 41 million digits long - using an A100 GPU made by his previous workplace to do the grunt work....

Absence makes the cloud grow fonder Rackspace, one of the original creators of OpenStack, has been welcomed back into the fold with a seat on the Board of Directors for the OpenInfra Foundation, which oversees the project after apparently losing interest for several years....

Team sends a flying cooler packed with DIY tech 15 miles up for the test Faced with growing threats to aviation GPS systems, researchers at Sandia National Labs argue we're overlooking a readily available alternative that could work effectively with further research: cellular signals....

As another government yet again seeks to reform UK GDPR, legislators say data must continue to flow UK lawmakers have warned the government that if it doesn't continue to harmonize its post-Brexit data rules with the EU, the consequences could be dire....

Alliance commits to Integrating the architecture into all high-tech products Processor design outfit Codasip is donating an SDK it developed for the CHERI security architecture to the industry body that promotes the technology, saying this will allow its unrestricted use by anyone implementing CHERI on RISC-V....

Author would like to see a switch back to plain old static HTML. Us too Developer Loris Cro reckons his LSP language server for HTML is a world first, and that the absence of such tools up to now has had grave consequences for the web....

Dad, why does this button say ABC? It's a short term trend, says analyst Sales of "dumb" phones are on the rise in the UK, according to telco Virgin Media O2 (VMO2), with parents choosing them instead of smartphones to try and spare their kids from the perils of social media and instant messaging....

GenAI poster child is a 100-story-tall baby with simple infrastructure but extreme demands Interview When OpenAI launched GPT-4 in March last year, it was coy about the model's size and what went into making it. Nonetheless, the current focus of AI-obsessed media and investors is understood to have employed a diverse dataset of around 1 petabyte. Aside from the challenge of getting that data to provide meaningful output, the company was tasked with getting the data in the right place....

There was always more pressing work to do than migrate, and CDNs have changed the rules The chief scientist of the Asia Pacific Network Information Center has a theory about why the world hasn't moved to IPv6....

Congress urged to act before year's end to support US competitiveness More than 60 commercial orgs, non-profits, and academic institutions have asked Congress to pass legislation authorizing the creation of the US AI Safety Institute within the National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST)....

Another step toward tech independence for China - on the day Tim Cook came to town Huawei formally launched its home-brewed operating system, HarmonyOS NEXT, on Wednesday, marking its official separation from the Android ecosystem....

Emergency services had to move a boulder to get her out If you're out and about in nature and drop your phone down a three-meter crevice between some boulders, maybe don't try to retrieve it....

Qualcomm brands ploy as 'unfounded' cash grab Chip designer Arm has reportedly warned chipmaker Qualcomm it will soon cancel its license to produce processors using its IP....

Middleware aimed at softening the shortage of AI accelerators Fujitsu has started selling middleware that optimizes the use of GPUs, so that those lucky enough to own the scarce accelerators can be sure they're always well-used....

Azure Blob Storage, AWS, and Twilio keys all up for grabs An analysis of widely used mobile apps offered on Google Play and the Apple App Store has found hardcoded and unencrypted cloud service credentials, exposing millions of users to major security problems....

Meanwhile, Infinera snags up to $93M of the dwindling subsidies The lion's share of the CHIPS Act funding has already been allocated, but Uncle Sam still has tax breaks to hand out, and it's not even being that picky about which kind of chips are eligible....

TaxSlayer, H&R Block, TaxAct, and Ramsey Solutions accused of sharing info with Meta and Google A quartet of lawmakers have penned a letter to the Department of Justice asking it to prosecute tax preparation companies for sharing customer data, including tax return information, with Meta and Google....

From hell's heart I stab at thee Fake review writers are officially on watch - the US is now enforcing a new rule to ban the practice and is promising a crackdown....

Appen points to, among other problems, a lack of high-quality training data labeled by humans The deployment of AI projects and associated return on investment (ROI) have declined, according to a large survey of IT decision-makers....

New flagship SoC drops Arm and grows its own legs with Oryon During day one of Qualcomm's Snapdragon Summit in Maui, Hawaii, it unveiled its latest flagship SoC, dubbed the Snapdragon 8 Elite. This marks a pivotal swing into harnessing the technical prowess of its acquired Nuvia team....

Microsoft blocks updates to avoid giving admins another headache In yet more problems for this month's Windows 11 24H2 update, Microsoft has warned the new code will cause a Blue Screen of Death on some Asus systems due to hardware compatibility issues....

Chip giant tells Uncle Sam someone could be making orders on the sly TSMC has reportedly tipped off US officials to a potential attempt by Huawei to circumvent export controls and obtain AI chips manufactured by the Taiwanese company....

If the first patches don't work, try, try again VMware has pushed a second patch for a critical, heap-overflow bug in the vCenter Server that could allow a remote attacker to fully compromise vulnerable systems after the first software update, issued last month, didn't work....

Unisys, Avaya, Check Point, and Mimecast settled with the agency without admitting or denying wrongdoing Four high-profile tech companies reached an agreement with the Securities and Exchange Commission to pay millions of dollars in penalties for misleading investors about their exposure to the 2020 SolarWinds hack....

Crooks revert to old ways for greater efficiency Experts believe the Akira ransomware operation is up to its old tricks again, encrypting victims' files after a break from the typical double extortion tactics....

Have recent troubles finally humbled Chipzilla? Opinion This week, Intel and AMD set their decades-old rivalry aside to ensure x86 remains relevant amid growing adoption of competing architectures....