The Register

Talk about court red-handed Demonstrating yet again that uncritically trusting the output of generative AI is dangerous, attorneys involved in a product liability lawsuit have apologized to the presiding judge for submitting documents that cite non-existent legal cases....

Some employees steal sticky notes, others 'borrow' malicious code A crew identified as a Chinese government-backed espionage group appears to have started moonlighting as a ransomware player - further evidence that lines are blurring between nation-state cyberspies and financially motivated cybercriminals....

I fought the Torv and ... the Torv won Hector Martin, project lead of Asahi Linux, resigned from that effort early Friday, Japan Standard Time, citing developer burnout, demanding users, and Linus Torvalds's handling of the integration of Rust code into the open source kernel....

User numbers fall short, triggering investor sell-off Reddit's first year as a public company delivered solid results by most earnings metrics, but try telling that to Wall Street: Falling short on one key growth target sent shares tumbling despite an otherwise upbeat year-end report....

Networks in US and beyond compromised by Beijing's super-snoops pulling off priv-esc attacks China's Salt Typhoon spy crew exploited vulnerabilities in Cisco devices to compromise at least seven devices linked to global telecom providers and other orgs, in addition to its previous victim count....

The little database company with big users gaining fans as it adds consistency to speed and scale With its 8.0 release, distributed multi-model database Aerospike has added ACID transactions to support large-scale online transaction processing (OLTP) applications in a move it claims is an industry first....

Senator, Congressman tell DNI to threaten infosec agreements if Blighty won't back down US lawmakers want newly confirmed Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard to back up her tough talk on backdoors. They're urging her to push back on the UK government's reported order for Apple to weaken iCloud security for government access....

With drivemaker poised to become 2 publicly traded companies, judge says he has 'concerns' over restructuring Western Digital has less than a week to file a bond or stump up the $553 million it owes in a patent infringement case, after a federal judge on Tuesday denied the company a stay of execution while it tries to get the ruling overturned....

User can still push for perpetual licenses despite vendor's craving for subscription deals In the sizeable global ERP market, SAP's biggest threat is not some other software giant like Oracle. It is its own legacy software supported by other vendors....

Global tech corps wrestle with policy disparity on either side of the Atlantic Google may be the latest big tech corporation to scale back diversity, equity, and inclusion programs - but Arm, HPE, and Apple are going against the current direction of travel in their hiring and training policies....

Yet another cash grab from Kim's cronies and an intel update from Microsoft North Korea has changed tack: its latest campaign targets the NPM registry and owners of Exodus and Atomic cryptocurrency wallets....

Student shows 'Uniform hashing is optimal' was just wishful thinking It isn't often that a decades-old assumption underpinning modern technology is overturned, but a recent paper based on the work of an undergraduate and his two co-authors has done just that....

Standard FOSS office suite continues to evolve in interesting new directions FOSDEM 2025 LibreOffice is a big, mature chunk of code now, but that doesn't make it impossible to teach it impressive new tricks. Some of them could make it more important than ever....

Tech shows customers more humanity than its human staff It doesn't sleep, it doesn't eat, and it doesn't get sick of dealing with incompetent customers....

Objection from open source community heralded as 'great victory for the ecosystem' The WordPress Foundation's effort to trademark the terms HOSTED WORDPRESS and MANAGED WORDPRESS has been thwarted, for now, following a petition from a dissenting member of the open source WordPress community....

Limited-edition hotfix to get wider release before end of month Administrators of Palo Alto Networks' firewalls have complained the equipment falls over unexpectedly, and while a fix has bee prepared, it's not yet generally available....

Also reckons it can dodge DOGE Cisco has prepared for trade war and thinks it can ride things out by reconfiguring its supply chain if that becomes necessary....

What are customers actually getting from resellers other than massive price markups?' asks Troy Hunt Troy Hunt, proprietor of data breach lookup site Have I Been Pwned, is likely to ban resellers from the service....

FBI, CISA harrumph at Microsoft and VMware in call for coders to quit baking avoidable defects into stuff US authorities have labelled buffer overflow vulnerabilities "unforgivable defects", pointed to the presence of the holes in products from the likes of Microsoft and VMware, and urged all software developers to adopt secure-by-design practices to avoid creating more of them....

De-dupes some roles, hints others aren't needed as the infosec scene shifts Nine days after completing its $859 million acquisition of managed detection and response provider Secureworks, Sophos has laid off around six percent of its staff....

From the billionaire who said real-time surveillance is good for keeping us in check If governments want AI to improve services and security for their citizens, then they need to put all their information in one place - even citizens' genomic data - according to Larry Ellison, the Oracle database tycoon....

Demand described as a 'soft layoff' IBM has begun what a source describes as a soft layoff for its Finance & Operations business unit, in the form of a return-to-office (RTO) order....

GOP lawyer Sean Cairncross will be learning on the fly, as we also say hi to new intelligence boss Tulsi Gabbard President Trump has reportedly chosen a candidate for National Cyber Director - another top tech appointee with no professional experience in that role....

300+ US companies, 70+ individuals hit by the fraudsters An Arizona woman who created a "laptop farm" in her home to help fake IT workers pose as US-based employees has pleaded guilty in a scheme that generated over $17 million for herself... and North Korea....

Analysts tell El Reg why Russia's operators aren't that careful, and why North Korea wants money AND data Feature Ransomware gangsters and state-sponsored online spies fall on opposite ends of the cyber-crime spectrum....

Previous NOM4D experiments have gone so well, says project leader, that it's time to get real After several years of lab-testing ideas for orbital manufacturing technology, the US Department of Defense's research arm has decided to head into orbit for the latest round of experiments....

'Near-global' initial access campaign active since 2021 An initial-access subgroup of Russia's Sandworm last year wriggled its way into networks within the US, UK, Canada and Australia, stealing credentials and data from "a limited number of organizations," according to Microsoft....

40 m or 90 m? The difference matters in the case of impact The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is to be pointed at asteroid 2024 YR4 to reduce uncertainty regarding the chances of the object impacting Earth in the coming years....

Supply chain and regulatory hurdles likely to shrink figures US tech sanctions and supply chain readiness for racks of Nvidia's latest gear will likely cause AI server sales to cool-off in 2025....

'Stranded' Starliner astronauts set for a March homecoming The crew of the Boeing Starliner test mission is set to return to Earth ahead of schedule after managers decided to swap the Crew Dragon originally planned for the Axiom-4 flight with Crew-10....

Only lawmakers can stop them. Plus: software needs to be more secure, but what's in it for us? Google says the the world's lawmakers must take action against the increasing links between criminal and state-sponsored cyber activity....

Captain's Log, Stardate 3529.7 - oh yeah, Commish also withdrawing law that would help folks sue over AI harms European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen says the EU will top up a continental AI push to hit 200 billion ($207 billion)....

Users' sluggish migration of critical apps mean current deadline not workable, says analyst By 2030, 40 percent of SAP customers currently using its legacy ERP systems will still not have migrated to the latest software, prompting the business apps giant to rethink its support deadline....

Economy-boosting bit barn? Not in my back yard, some locals expected to say The British government is pressing ahead with "AI Growth Zones" amid fears the rush to build datacenters to power AI could backfire and leave the countryside littered with expensive high-tech "white elephants."...

Research after Apple Intelligence fiasco shows bots still regularly make stuff up Still smarting from Apple Intelligence butchering a headline, the BBC has published research into how accurately AI assistants summarize news - and the results don't make for happy reading....

Four months since cloud drive kicked the bucket, but resolution comes today... hopefully Interview How long can a cloud storage outage continue before customers finally give up the ghost? Management at Murena - /e/OS maker - must have wrestled with this at night, though they hope a fix is around the corner....

Einstein's spooky action at a distance just got an upgrade Oxford University researchers have taken a significant step toward large-scale distributed quantum computing by demonstrating the first successful quantum teleportation of a controlled quantum gate between two modules....

If only the joy of missing out was easier to achieve Column I've never seriously accepted the maxim "ignorance is bliss". Now I'm less sure....

Not all bad news for Redmond as Australian agency also found strong ROI and some unexpected upsides Australia's Department of the Treasury has found that Microsoft's Copilot can easily deliver return on investment, but staff exposed to the AI assistant came away from the experience less confident it will help them at work....

Don't relax just yet: Redmond has made some certificate-handling changes that could trip unprepared admins Patch Tuesday Microsoft's February patch collection is mercifully smaller than January's mega-dump. But don't get too relaxed - some deserve close attention, and other vendors have stepped in with plenty more fixes....

You gotta fight ... for your Reuters ... to party Thomson Reuters has won a partial summary judgment in a copyright case against shuttered AI firm Ross Intelligence, a decision that disallows fair use as a defense for training models on proprietary data without permission....

Will the Pentagon get Luckey with a new IVAS vendor? Microsoft plans to quit developing augmented-reality headsets for the US Army and have Oculus founder Palmer Luckey's Anduril Industries take over the gig....

Numerous systemic vulnerabilities could scuttle $5.4T industry Despite the escalating cyber threats targeting America's maritime transportation system, the US Coast Guard still lacks a comprehensive strategy to secure this critical infrastructure - nor does it have reliable access to data on cybersecurity vulnerabilities and past attacks, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) warns....

Which is why Cisco is adding these Pensando DPUs to more switches Cisco is cramming into more of its switches Pensando data processing units (DPUs) from AMD, which will be dedicated to handling security, storage, and other tasks....

Rustaceans could just wait for unwelcoming C coders to slowly SIGQUIT... The Rust for Linux project is alive and well, despite suggestions to the contrary, even if not every Linux kernel maintainer is an ally....

These crooks have no chill A previously unknown gang dubbed Triplestrength poses a triple threat to organizations: It infects victims' computers with ransomware, then hijacks their cloud accounts to illegally mine for cryptocurrency....

Huge if true: Brit Foreign Sec says Putin running a 'corrupt mafia state' One of the bulletproof hosting (BPH) providers used by the LockBit ransomware operation has been hit with sanctions in the US, UK, and Australia (AUKUS), along with six of its key allies....

End of the road in sight for venerable server Administrators rejoice! The 2025 H1 Cumulative Update (aka CU15) for Exchange Server 2019 has finally arrived, marking the end of an era for the server application....

More than a decade on, waste experts say the odds of finding those coins are next to nil Denied permission to excavate a landfill in search of his missing Bitcoin, Newport, Wales resident James Howells has a new plan: buy the soon-to-be-capped dumping site outright from the city council....

Said to have asked search engine 'What are some signs that the FBI is after you?' An Alabama man is pleading guilty after being charged with SIM swapping the Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC) X account in January last year....