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Updated 2025-07-07 05:00
Can't get Minecraft, MongoDB Cloud, others to work today? Blame that Azure outage
Shut the Front Door! If you've had or are having problems using websites and apps today, it might well be due to the Microsoft Azure outage....
Meta to cough up $1.4B to end fight over 'unlawful' facial recognition of friends
Everything's bigger in Texas -even the settlement deals Meta will pay a record $1.4 billion to settle a lawsuit with Texas, which accused the Facebook giant of breaking privacy laws by performing facial recognition on people's photos without their consent....
Delta Air Lines dials up Microsoft's legal nemesis over CrowdStrike losses
Oh, Boies, here we go again Delta Air Lines lost hundreds of millions of dollars due to the CrowdStrike outage earlier this month - and it has hired a high-powered law firm to claw some of those lost funds back, potentially from the Falcon maker and Microsoft itself....
Qualcomm goes budget with Snapdragon 4s Gen 2 5G chipset
Latest silicon aims to bring Gigabit connectivity to sub-$100 handsets Qualcomm has been pushing high-end smartphone platforms recently, but its latest release targets the budget segment, aiming to deliver Gigabit 5G connectivity to sub-$100 handsets....
Zuck dreams of personalized AI assistants for all – just like email
A model finetuned on your social media profile? What could possibly go wrong? SIGGRAPH Big public AI models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot have become near ubiquitous over the past few years - but Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is banking that before long, everyone will have at least one, if not more, personalized AI assistants to call their own....
TSMC confirms it'll dig into Dresden for chip giant's first fab on Euro soil
Partnership with NXP, Infineon, and Bosch finally gets under way TSMC and partners will break ground in Dresden, Germany, to start building the Taiwanese chip maker's first European fab....
Rising costs biggest issue for datacenter operators as demand grows
Not to mention the skills gap, AI skepticism, and the unrelenting quest for power Datacenter operators face multiple challenges such as power and cooling requirements, while staffing issues persist and many are not tracking the right sustainability metrics. On the plus side, they can count on strong and growing demand for digital services....
'LockBit of phishing' EvilProxy used in more than a million attacks every month
Leaves a trail of ransomware infections, data theft, business email compromise in its wake Insight The developers of EvilProxy - a phishing kit dubbed the "LockBit of phishing" - have produced guides on using legitimate Cloudflare services to disguise malicious traffic. This adds to the ever-growing arsenal of tools offering criminals who lack actual technical expertise to get into the digital thievery biz....
Microsoft's Azure networking takes a worldwide tumble
Ready to talk it up to investors today, Redmond? Updated Microsoft's cloud services are having a bad day with users worldwide reporting difficulty connecting to Azure....
W3C says Google's cookie climbdown 'undermines' a lot of work
While some celebrate, the World Wide Web Consortium Technical Architecture Group is not happy The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has published a blog criticizing Google's climbdown over the deprecation of third-party cookies, declaring that the move "undermines a lot of the work we've done together."...
How deliciously binary: AI has yet to pay off – or is transforming business
Calculating ROI of neural networks turns out to be rather complicated Feature The tech industry's enthusiasm for artificial intelligence software - a conveniently amorphous term - has yet to generate much of an economic windfall....
Ransomware gangs are loving this dumb but deadly make-me-admin ESXi vulnerability
Get those patches applied - all the big dogs are abusing it Do you have your VMware ESXi hypervisor joined to Active Directory? Well, the latest news from Microsoft serves as a reminder that you might not want to do that given the recently patched vulnerability that has security experts deeply concerned....
Europe launches 'AI Factories' initiative in hopes of competing globally
Yes, you've heard the term 'AI Factories' before but Europe has its own spin Europe's supercomputing body has officially added a new pillar to its strategy - to develop and operate AI Factories to drive "a more competitive and innovative" European AI ecosystem....
Latest update for 'extremely fast' compression algorithm LZ4 sprints past old versions
New release does something you might have thought it already did The new version of the high-speed compression algorithm LZ4 gets a big speed boost - nearly an order of magnitude....
Revamped UK cybersecurity bill couldn't come soon enough, but details are patchy
Long overdue updates include expanded mandatory security incident reporting Analysis The introduction of fresh UK cybersecurity legislation, though delayed, is timely....
Automation needed to fight army of AI content harvesters stalking the web
Just when you think you've ban-hammered one, it pops up with another name Analysis This month Anthropic's ClaudeBot - a web content crawler that scrapes data from pages for training AI models - visited tech advice site iFixit.com about a million times over a 24-hour period....
South Korea creates $445M bailout fund after payment glitch trips up e-commerce giant
Founder forbidden to leave the country, promises to make things right for out-of-pocket vendors The South Korean government on Monday created a 560 billion ($445 million) rescue package to bail out merchants who used two major e-commerce marketplaces that have failed to pass on payments for several weeks....
Proofpoint phishing palaver plagues millions with 'perfectly spoofed' emails from IBM, Nike, Disney, others
They DKIM here, they DKIM there A huge phishing campaign exploited a security blind-spot in Proofpoint's email filtering systems to send an average of three million "perfectly spoofed" messages a day purporting to be from Disney, IBM, Nike, Best Buy, and Coca-Cola - all of which are Proofpoint customers....
Desktop hypervisors are not dead: Oracle preps major VirtualBox update
Solaris support persists and support for Armed Macs improves Oracle last week debuted a beta for a major update to its VirtualBox desktop hypervisor....
Malaysia is working on an internet 'kill switch', says minister
Follows requirement for social media and messaging platforms to get a license Legislation for an internet "kill switch" will reach Malaysia's Parliament in October, according to the country's minister for Law and Institutional Reform....
Apple Intelligence beta lands in iOS 18.1, macOS 15.1 previews
At last, the world-changing innovation of ML emojis can be yours to enjoy Apple Intelligence, Cupertino's promised suite of generative AI services, has debuted in beta versions of iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1....
Apple agrees to terms with US store union for first time
Funny what threatening to walk off the job and shutter a retail store can do Apple is on the verge of entering its first-ever agreement with a stateside retail employee union, caving to demands from store workers who threatened to walk off the job in May....
Car makers sold people's driving habits, location data for pennies, say US senators
Khaan! Khaaaaaan! Two US senators have urged the FTC to probe and potentially prosecute three automakers that allegedly unlawfully sold motorists' personal data for pennies....
Meta's AI safety system defeated by the space bar
'Ignore previous instructions' thwarts Prompt-Guard model if you just add some good ol' ASCII code 32 Meta's machine-learning model for detecting prompt injection attacks - special prompts to make neural networks behave inappropriately - is itself vulnerable to, you guessed it, prompt injection attacks....
US border cops really must get a warrant in NY before searching your phones, devices
Do we really want to bother SCOTUS with this, friends? Surely they're way too busy to take a look US border agents must obtain a warrant, in New York at least, to search anyone's phone and other electronic device when traveling in or out of the country, another federal judge has ruled....
Tesla asks customers to stop being wet blankets about chargers
Trick appears to speed powering up but could cause damage to cables Tesla has asked owners to stop wrapping wet towels around handles to speed up the recharging process, warning that this can damage its Supercharger stalls....
EU regulator reportedly set to give the nod to HPE-Juniper deal
Aruba, Aruba! Some network pros worry it will lead to less choice The European Commission is set to deliver unconditional approval for HPE's proposed $14 billion purchase of Juniper Networks, according to reports....
Microsoft finds a new way to irritate Windows 11 users – a backup pop-up
Ads in the Start Menu not annoying enough for you? Hold my beer Microsoft is always on the lookout for new and exciting ways to annoy Windows users. Its latest wheeze is a full-screen pop-up in Windows 11 to urge the non-initiated to back up their files....
NASA gives Falcon 9 thumbs-up to launch Crew-9
1. Undock, bring Butch and Suni home on Starliner, 2. Launch Crew-9, 3. Do the handover, 4. Bring Crew-8 home NASA will be launching a crew atop a Falcon 9 in the coming weeks as the SpaceX workhorse returned to flight with three Starlink launches over the weekend....
French internet cables cut in act of sabotage that caused outages across country
Axe attack comes just days after arsonists target rail network Fiber optic internet cables across France have been cut in an apparent act of sabotage, resulting in outages across the country....
Intruders at HealthEquity rifled through storage, stole 4.3M people's data
No mention of malware or ransomware - somewhat of a rarity these days HealthEquity, a US fintech firm for the healthcare sector, admits that a "data security event" it discovered at the end of June hit the data of a substantial 4.3 million individuals. Stolen details include addresses, telephone numbers and payment data....
Google apologizes for breaking password manager for millions of Windows users with iffy Chrome update
Happy Sysadmin Day Google celebrated Sysadmin Day last week by apologizing for breaking its password manager for millions of Windows users - just as many Windows admins were still hard at work mitigating the impact of the faulty CrowdStrike update....
The port of the Windows 95 Start Menu was not all it seemed
Fnding your code on the cutting room floor decades after the event Ever thought you'd committed an elegant bit of code, only to find that somebody else decided to drop it because "that's the way we've always done things"? If so, you aren't alone. It happens to Microsoft engineers too....
Inquiry reveals UK government misled MPs over Post Office IT scandal
Former business minister Vince Cable testifies, highlighting misinformation and oversight failures Officials at the government department responsible for the Post Office sent out misleading information to MPs about court cases relating to the Horizon IT system, an inquiry into one of the UK's greatest miscarriage of justice has heard....
Linux Mint 22 'Wilma' still the Bedrock choice for moving off Windows
Outsmarting Ubuntu's midlife crisis and dodging Flintstone-sized bugs Linux Mint 22 "Wilma" debuted late last week and holds on to the crown as the most sensible choice if you're looking to move across from Windows....
Logitech Zone 305 is light on the ears and wallet, maybe a bit too light on quality?
A headset for workers who want to stride around the room bellowing Review Logitech has released a lightweight headset aimed squarely at business users. While there are Bluetooth and connectivity options aplenty, the quality of the materials matches the headset's low price....
Silicon, stars, and sulfur make Apollo's unlikely legacy
Neil stepped on a rock. We're surfing an interstellar wave 9,000 light years long. Go us Opinion Fifty-five years after Neil Armstrong's one small step, and the future it promised has not come to pass. Nobody has gone back to the Moon since the end of the Apollo program, let alone out to Mars. As for Clarke and Kubrick's oh-so-plausible 2001 trip to Jupiter with a hallucinating AI, well, one out of two isn't bad. But while those futures didn't happen, what we have instead is unimaginably better....
Never put off until tomorrow what someone could erase today
When even tape can't save you, procrastination is a problem Who, Me? Greetings once again, gentle reader, and welcome to another instalment of Who, Me? in which Reg readers like yourselves soften the start of the work week with reminders that we all sometimes make mistakes....
Microsoft admits 8.5 million CrowdStruck machines estimate was lowballed
Promises to discourage use of kernel drivers - so they don't crash the world again Microsoft has admitted that its estimate of 8.5 million machines crashed by CrowdStrike's faulty software update was almost certainly too low, and vowed to reduce infosec vendors' reliance on the kernel drivers at the heart of the issue....
China ponders creating a national 'cyberspace ID'
Because clearly it's better for Beijing to know who you are than for every ISP and social service to keep its own records Beijing may soon issue "cyberspace IDs" to its citizens, after floating a proposal for the scheme last Friday....
US claims TikTok shipped personal data to China – very personal data
Not even Oracle could stop it, claims DoJ The US Department of Justice has alleged that TikTok shipped personal information to China and allowed profiling of the short video app's users based on their attitudes to some ticklish topics....
Group of 91 nations agree to continue not taxing cross-border data movement – for now
Promote free use of government data, privacy, canning spam, and more Five years of trade negotiations reached a milestone last Friday with 91 nations agreeing on new norms for e-commerce - among them extension of a moratorium on taxation of cross-border electronic transmissions....
Secure Boot useless on hundreds of PCs from major vendors after key leak
Plus: More stalkerware exposure; a $16M TracFone fine; Ransomware victims don't use MFA, and more Infosec in brief Protecting computers' BIOS and the boot process is essential for modern security - but knowing it's important isn't the same as actually taking steps to do it....
Open source AI helped China catch up to the world, researchers reckon
Plus: Grab drops cab merger, Kakao founder goes to the clink, Alibaba denies Jack Ma cronyism, and more APAC in brief Chinese researchers have told The New York Times that open source software has helped them to accelerate AI development....
The secret to better weather forecasts may be a dash of AI
Google adds machine learning to climate models for 'faster forecasts' Climate and weather modeling has long been a staple of high-performance computing, but as meteorologists look to improve the speed and resolution of forecasts, machine learning is increasingly finding its way into the mix....
No, really, please ban Chinese DJI drones from America's skies, senators are urged
Previous outlawing attempt flew off, will this one stick the landing? US senators have been asked again to consider banning the use of drones made by Chinese manufacturer DJI in American airspace after a previous attempt to outlaw the machines was dropped....
Kamala Harris' $7M support from LinkedIn founder comes with a request: Fire Lina Khan
FTC boss must be doing something right if folks will pay to get her binned LinkedIn cofounder and venture capitalist Reid Hoffman was quick to express support for Kamala Harris' bid for the US presidency this year after incumbent Joe Biden stepped aside, and now the reason has become clear: He's hoping she'll fire FTC boss and Big Tech arch-critic Lina Khan....
Video game actors strike because they fear an attack of the AI clones
You wouldn't download a performer Actors are back on strike for an entirely unsurprising reason: Studios aren't willing to give video game actors enough protection from artificial intelligence....
iPhone kicked out of China’s top 5 smartphone brands as domestic market bounces back
Chinese brands ascendant in the country's phone market, but Apple's exile might only be temporary For the first time in a while, the top five smartphone vendors in China are all native, with Apple's position falling to sixth place....
CrowdStrike meets Murphy's Law: Anything that can go wrong will
And boy, did last Friday's Windows fiasco ever prove that yet again Opinion CrowdStrike's recent Windows debacle will surely earn a prominent place in the annals of epic tech failures. On July 19, the cybersecurity giant accomplished what legions of hackers could only dream of - bringing millions of Windows systems worldwide to their knees with a single botched update....
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