The Register

Cyber Monitoring Centre issues first severity assessment since February launch Britain's Cyber Monitoring Centre (CMC) estimates the total cost of the cyberattacks that crippled major UK retail organizations recently could be in the region of 270-440 million ($362-591 million)....

MPs hear doubts over efficiency savings that are reliant on speculative gains from IT, machine learning Leading economists have questioned how the UK government's Spending Review can determine exactly 10 percent cuts to admin budgets - partly powered by AI and digital transformation - across central departments when they are starting from different places and have different projects to manage....

Not quite the answer to life, the universe and everything, but not far off Opinion The smaller the org, the better the jobs. Not universally true, but a good rule of thumb. Small organizations have fewer layers of management, and each individual has much more influence. One voice in 50 is 100 times louder than one in 5,000. You get to say what you want to do andgetto do it. Happiness....

And was saved by an even worse meltdown caused by someone else Who, Me? Welcome to another working week and therefore another installment of Who, Me? - The Register's reader-contributed column where you confess to making a mess and somehow find safe egress....

Also points to important markets among the 300 million people who will soon work as delivery riders or influencers Huawei's chairman Xu Zhijun - aka Eric Xu - has called out China's enormous lead in fiber-to-the-room (FTTR) installations....

PLUS: India tries to untangle TXT marketing opt-ins; China's AI crackdown succeeds; Australia and Boeing team AWACS, drones; and more! Asia In Brief Chinese web giant Baidu last week staged a livestream hosted by an AI version of local influencer Yonghao Luo and scored 13 million hits and $7.5 million of sales....

PLUS: 5.4M healthcare records leak; AI makes Spam harder to spot; Many nasty Linux vulns; and more Infosec in brief A former US Army sergeant has admitted he attempted to sell classified data to China....

Turn out the lights, the internet is over Google AI Overviews and other AI search services appear to be starving the hand that fed them....

Skull emoji knife emoji moneybag emoji Seven people, including a 14-year-old, have been arrested or surrendered to Danish authorities after allegedly using encrypted messaging apps to hire other teenagers for contract killings in what Europol calls a "violence-as-a-service" operation....

Don't trust mystery digits popping up in your search bar Scammers are hijacking the search results of people needing 24/7 support from Apple, Bank of America, Facebook, HP, Microsoft, Netflix, and PayPal in an attempt to trick victims into handing over personal or financial info, according to Malwarebytes senior director of research Jerome Segura....

Welcome to bill shock, AI style Microsoft's GitHub this week said paying GitHub Copilot customers will now face monthly limits on certain types of high-powered AI requests, and will have to pay more if they want to surpass those limits....

'The selected vendor must be willing to receive consideration that is primarily non-monetary,' says the USPTO The US Patent and Trademark Office is exploring a plan for using AI at the agency to speed up the process of granting patents - but its initial request for information says that vendors should expect to be paid in exposure rather than cold, hard cash....

DataFusion and WarehousePG meant to deal with AI-related workloads, not to compete with analytics data platforms PostgreSQL exponent EDB has enhanced its new data platform, claiming this will help bring transactional, analytical, and AI workloads into a single environment....

If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck... Aflac is the latest insurance company to disclose a security breach following a string of others earlier this week, all of which appear to be part of Scattered Spider's most recent data theft campaign....

It's a marketing move to lure more affiliates, says infosec veteran The latest marketing ploy from the ransomware crooks behind the Qilin operation involves offering affiliates access to a crack team of lawyers to ramp up pressure in ransom negotiations....

French satellite operator plans capital raise backed by state and key investors including Bharti Satellite biz Eutelsat is looking to raise 1.35 billion ($1.55 billion) to grow its Low Earth Orbit (LEO) network to take on Starlink and benefit from anticipated growth in demand for connectivity....

Q1 revenue jumps to $11.7B, with 400 and 800 GbE driving the spike The long-dormant market for datacenter network switches is booming thanks to AI....

X11 is very far from dead - no matter if some want it to be Comment Considerable new activity is happening both in the established X.org X11 server and around its new fork, Xlibre....

... And then promptly deletes comment. Optimism or an opportunity? Or perhaps both French cloud business, OVHcloud, claimed yesterday that it is in discussions with the European Commission (EC) regarding a possible migration to a sovereign cloud - in an X post that has since been deleted....

Seizures up 830% since 2021, with devices linked to interference in emergency responses The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is concerned about the rate at which outlawed signal-jamming devices are being found across the US....

VCF bundle is worth it if you make the most of every part, says CTO Customers dismayed by Broadcom's move to selling costly bundles such as VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) will realize its value if they'd just use more of the components, the company's CTO says....

What about notebooks, including AI-ready devices? Ah well, still months to go, eh Microsoft With fewer than four months before Microsoft pulls the plug on standard support for Windows 10, businesses are replacing dusty - but in some cases perfectly working - desktop PCs in preparation for the migration to the little loved next generation of the Windows OS....

Third-party provider pledges to support legacy ERP until 2040 Enterprise software support specialist Rimini Street has announced that it will continue to support SAP's ECC 6.0 until 2040, more than ten years after the German vendor plans to retire support for the legacy ERP platform....

Services coming back online after legacy systems compromised Oxford City Council says a cyberattack earlier this month resulted in 21 years of data being compromised....

Framework agreement may rescue some unis from 'financial abyss' after Oracle per-employee Java license, says insider Exclusive Oracle requested Java audits with UK higher education institutions leading up to the negotiation of a national framework agreement - set to be worth up to 9.86 million ($13.33 million) - which aims to save the institutions 45 million when compared to standard commercial pricing....

'Black side down,' Lego style Lego has released another NASA-themed set; this time, a version of the US space agency's Boeing 747-based Shuttle Carrier Aircraft with a Space Shuttle perched on top....

Sometimes the 'R' in RTFM stands for 'Remember' On Call The trek through the working week can be long and tiring, which is why The Register always offers a little Friday morning refresher in the form of On Call - the reader-contributed column in which you share tech support stories....

Probe into how to implement social media ban finds privacy risks, developer overreach, infosec uncertainties Australia's trial of age assurance technology has found it's up to the task of preventing children under 16 years of age from using social media, despite many problems....

Regulator remains concerned about election integrity Elections at troubled regional internet registry the African Network Information Centre (AFRINIC) will continue, after the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers' (ICANN's) attempt to appoint new officials to oversee the poll failed....

Expects Huawei to start exporting AI chips soon, creating global fight for tech stack dominance China's AI and chipmaking prowess lags the USA's by just two years, and America's efforts to slow its progress could be hobbling its own semiconductor industry, according to Trump administration tech czar David Sacks....

Fujitsu picked to build system using 'MONAKA-X' CPUs Fujitsu has bagged the contract to design Japan's next-gen supercomputer to succeed the Fugaku system, and it looks set to be another Arm-based behemoth, using a CPU derived from its upcoming MONAKA datacenter silicon....

Baseball, apple pie, and assisted programming US-based software developers are the world's most prolific users of AI coding assistants, a trend that researchers believe has national economic implications....

To stop AI scam callers, break automatic speech recognition systems Researchers based in Israel and India have developed a defense against automated call scams....

FrontPage Remote Procedure Call and others set to be blocked in the name of 'Secure by Default' Microsoft has warned administrators that legacy authentication protocols will be blocked by default from July, meaning that anyone who hasn't made preparations already could be in for a busy summer....

Case over bundling Play Store with Chrome and Google Search set to continue A European court has advised [PDF] that Google's appeal against a ruling that found it had abused its market dominance should be dismissed....

Feds told they can't demand a haystack to find a needle The United States is requesting [PDF] a month-long extension to the deadline for its final decision regarding an appeal against a judge's ruling that obtaining tower dumps is unconstitutional....

Observatory maps datacenter hubs and power demand worldwide The International Energy Agency (IEA) has unveiled an online platform to closely monitor and analyze the impact of AI across the energy sector worldwide....

Experts note 'major red flags' in donut giant's security as 161,676 staff and families informed of attack details Krispy Kreme finally revealed the number of people affected by its November cyberattack, and it's easy to see why analyzing the incident took the well-resourced company several months....

Veteran X-ray telescope discovery shows that... phew, current model of the cosmos still works Astronomers have found a filament of hot gas, ten times as massive as our galaxy, that they reckon could explain where at least some of the universe's "missing" matter might be lurking....

Good to see government that values its academics (cough cough). Plus: New board criticized for lacking 'ops' people Cybersecurity experts have started a formal review into the UK cybersecurity market, at the government's request, to identify future growth opportunities as it looks to grow the industry that's core to the country's Industrial Strategy....

Test fire trouble means Musk's rocketeers reset the 'days since Starship had a major anomaly' counter to zero SpaceX has made excellent progress with its Starship rocket. The stainless steel vehicle can now explode before even leaving the Earth....

Probably the easiest way to a Google-free smartphone or tablet Murena's /e/ OS is arguably the most mainstream de-Googled Android OS, and the new version catches up with important features....

Startup has already shown how to make drugs in space America's aviation regulator has issued its first license for unmanned spacecraft to reenter the Earth's atmosphere to Varda, a startup that's trying to build a space-based manufacturing business....

Illegal products abound on Chinese site and its processes to stop em are hopeless The European Commission has found Chinese e-tail giant AliExpress in breach of its obligation to assess and mitigate risks related to the dissemination of illegal products as required under the Digital Services Act (DSA)....

Phishing, Python and RATs, oh my A sneaky malware campaign slithers through Cloudflare tunnel subdomains to execute in-memory malicious code and give unknown attackers long-term access to pwned machines....

Windows 365 Reserve' will be usable ten days a year for undisclosed fee Microsoft has announced a preview of Windows 365 Reserve", a service that provides pre-configured cloud PCs it suggests as ideal when physical machines aren't usable....

Bank and crypto outfits hit after Israeli commander mentioned attacks expanding to other areas' The government of Iran appears to have shut down the internet within its borders, perhaps in response to Israel-linked cyberattacks....

$650M funding round aims to bring TerraPower's Natrium power plant in Wyoming online by 2030 Datacenter operators' desire for cheap and clean energy to power their facilities has led to renewed interest in nuclear energy and small modular reactors (SMRs) - a tech Nvidia has just decided is worthy of investment....

Move fast and blow things up Silicon Valley-backed weapons maker Anduril and German armaments biz Rheinmetall have signed a deal to see US-designed drones and missiles integrated into European military platforms....

EEG and recall tests suggest people who use ChatGPT to write essays aren't learning much Using AI chatbots actually reduces activity in the brain versus accomplishing the same tasks unaided, and may lead to poorer fact retention, according to a new preprint study out of MIT....