Huey
February 18, 2025

The Register

Even Linus Torvalds can have trouble with autocycle … autocracy… AUTOCOMPLETE!

Next time autocomplete takes over and you accidentally send an email to the wrong person or group, perhaps it will be a little solace to know that one of the world’s most accomplished technologists – Linux kernel boss Linus Torvalds – just made that same mistake. During most weeks of the kernel development cycle, Torvalds posts to the Linux Kernel Mailing list with an update on the previous week’s development activities. The posts usually announce new release candidates of the...

about 1 hour ago

The Register

The future of AI is ... analog? Upstart bags $100M to push GPU-like brains on less juice

Interview AI chip startup EnCharge claims its analog artificial intelligence accelerators could rival desktop GPUs while using just a fraction of the power. Impressive — on paper, at least. Now comes the hard part: Proving it in the real world. The outfit boasts it has developed a novel in-memory compute architecture for AI inferencing that replaces traditional transistors with analog capacitors to achieve a 20x performance-per-watt advantage over digital accelerators, like GPUs. According to CEO Naveen Verma, EnCharge's inference chip...

about 5 hours ago

The Register

Why did the Windows 95 setup use Windows 3.1?

Veteran Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen has responded to suggestions that the Windows 95 setup was overly complicated. People wanted to know: Why not just do that whole thing in MS-DOS? Chen's response came after his November explanation of how the Windows 95 setup was three applications that would eventually lead to the Start Menu in Microsoft's modern operating system. The setup process differed based on the environment in which the application was run. If starting in MS-DOS, the setup program...

about 8 hours ago

The Register

NAND flash prices plunge amid supply glut, factory output cut

NAND flash prices are expected to slide due to oversupply, forcing memory chipmakers to cut production to match lower-than-expected orders from PC and smartphone manufacturers. The superabundance of stock is putting a financial strain on suppliers of NAND flash, according to TrendForce, which says growth rate forecasts are being revised down from 30 percent to 10-15 percent for 2025. "NAND flash manufacturers have adopted more decisive production cuts, scaling back full-year output to curb bit supply growth. These measures are...

about 9 hours ago

The Register

There's a slight chance Asteroid 2024 YR4 could hit Moon in 2032

There is a chance, albeit slim, that asteroid 2024 YR4 could hit the Moon, creating a new crater and an explosion that might just be visible from Earth. The possibility was floated by space boffins in a New Scientist article, and would leave the Moon with a crater measuring anywhere from 500 to 2,000 meters across. The Moon lacks the Earth's atmosphere, so asteroids impact the lunar surface unimpeded. According to the discussion, this would result in "an explosion 343...

about 11 hours ago

The Register

XCSSET macOS malware returns with first new version since 2022

Microsoft says there's a new variant of XCSSET on the prowl for Mac users – the first new iteration of the malware since 2022. XCSSET has been seen in limited attacks thus far, but Apple devs should be especially vigilant since the main infection vector is via Xcode projects. The malware's main capabilities from 2022 remain. It still chases after digital wallet contents and gathers data from Notes and other system files as well. The main updates come in the...

about 12 hours ago

The Register

UK court says Chinese operation must sell Scottish chip biz stake without delay

The High Court of Justice in the UK has rejected a plea from a China-owned operation for a temporary injunction on a government order requiring it to sell its stake in a Scottish chip design business. The London court this month handed down a judgment refusing an application for interim relief from FTDI Holding Ltd, while a judicial review is carried out on the order requiring it to dispose of its 80.2 percent share of FTDI, a fabless semiconductor company...

about 12 hours ago

The Register

Loken: An easy interactive way to better looking websites

Interview Loken is a new type of tool which aims to let website designers feel their way towards a design in the same sort of way as musicians do with a software synthesizer. Loken is a bit of a departure from the Reg FOSS desk's usual fare, but then again, so was the Ardour FOSS DAW that we looked at a few years ago. Ardour is a software-based synthesizer, letting someone create music without playing physical instruments or using traditional...

about 13 hours ago

The Register

Bank of England Oracle Cloud bill balloons – but when you print money, who's counting?

The Bank of England has nearly doubled the money it is dedicating to partner spending for an Oracle cloud transformation, which it began imagining in 2020. According to a recently published procurement note, the 330-year-old institution said it was increasing the contract value awarded to its Oracle implementation partner Version 1 to £13.8 million. This is a significant increase from the £8.7 million awarded and nearly double the £7 million originally advertised. Still, if you're printing the money, who's counting?...

about 15 hours ago

The Register

TechUK demands that Britain's chip strategy is crisped up

Almost two years after the British government published its National Semiconductor Strategy, calls are growing for bolder action and a faster implementation of its recommendations to deliver on its stated goals. Those bolder actions include setting up new national bodies to help chipmakers collaborate, secure financing, and access export markets, as well as classifying fabs as critical national infrastructure (CNI), like datacenters. The UK's plan to nurture its beleaguered chip industries was published in May 2023 after a protracted delay....

about 16 hours ago

The Register

Techie pointed out meetings are pointless, and was punished for it

Who, Me? Welcome to a fresh Monday, and therefore a new installment of "Who, Me?", our reader-contributed column that shares your stories of making workplace mistakes and scraping your way to safety afterwards. This week, we venture into the realm of office politics with a reader we'll Regomize as "Palmer." Palmer once worked under a newly minted manager who considered Dilbert comics as useful training, and the Pointy-Haired Boss as an inspiration. His big managerial innovation was to stage a...

about 17 hours ago

The Register

Broadcom reportedly investigates acquiring Intel’s chip design biz

Broadcom is reportedly contemplating a play for Intel. The Wall Street Journal reports that Broadcom has closely examined Intel’s chip design and marketing businesses with a view to a possible acquisition, conditional upon someone else taking on Intel’s foundry business. Broadcom already has a very substantial chip design business of its own but prefers to outsource manufacturing. It’s hard to imagine the company would change that strategy. The Hock Tan-led company also has a history of acquiring outfits whose products...

about 18 hours ago

The Register

Backup software vendor Veeam deleted forum data after restoration SNAFU

Data management vendor Veeam has admitted to an embarrassing oopsie: messing up a restoration job and erasing data. The good news is this wasn’t a mission-critical mistake, or the result of problems with the company’s products. The company’s error was disclosed on its forums in a February 11 thread in which a product management chap reported “we have noticed some topics and comments from the past 24 hours are currently missing.” As is often the case with vendor forums, Veeam’s...

about 20 hours ago

The Register

Twin Google flaws allowed researcher to get from YouTube ID to Gmail address in a few easy steps

Infosec In Brief A security researcher has found that Google could leak the email addresses of YouTube channels, which wasn’t good because the search and ads giant promised not to do that. A security researcher who goes by Brutecat last week explained he found two vulnerabilities that, when chained, make it possible to sniff out the email addresses, despite Google’s promises of privacy. It all started when Brutecat was digging through Google's People API and found out that a function...

about 23 hours ago

The Register

Fujitsu worries US tariffs will see its clients slow digital spend

Asia In Brief The head of Fujitsu’s North American operations has warned that the Trump administration’s tariff plans will be bad for business. In remarks shared with Japanese outlet Nikkei, Asif Poonja, chief executive of Fujitsu's Americas business, said he expects tariffs to impact spending on technology at manufacturers, retailers and the public sector. Poonja warned that Fujitsu’s forecast double-digit revenue growth target may therefore be hard to achieve. That's unwelcome news for investors given Fujitsu is trying to turn...

1 day ago

The Register

This open text-to-speech model needs just seconds of audio to clone your voice

Hands on Palo Alto-based AI startup Zyphra unveiled a pair of open text-to-speech (TTS) models this week said to be capable of cloning your voice with as little as five seconds of sample audio. In our testing, we generated realistic results with less than half a minute of recorded speech. Founded in 2021 by Danny Martinelli and Krithik Puthalath, the startup aims to build a multimodal agent system called MaiaOS. To date, these efforts have seen the release of its...

1 day ago

The Register

The Doom-in-a-PDF dev is back – this time with Linux

First came Tetris, then Doom – and now a bare-bones Linux instance that boots inside a PDF. Yes, the humble PDF – thanks to its ability to run limited JavaScript – has been coaxed into booting a stripped-down 32-bit RISC-V Linux buildroot environment in a suitable PDF viewer. This is made possible by compiling the C-based TinyEMU emulator into JavaScript, and then embedding that into a PDF so that it is executed by the document viewer, and it in turn...

1 day ago

The Register

Open source maintainers are really feeling the squeeze

State Of Open Recent events have brought the plight of open source maintainers front and center, but the problems were brewing for many years. The theme cropped up repeatedly during 2025's State Of Open Conference, with speakers from tech giants and volunteer maintainers laying out the challenges. Much of the open source ecosystem relies on volunteers putting in too many hours for too little support and the cracks are growing. four hours a month... does not come close to meeting...

1 day ago

The Register

Nearly 10 years after Data and Goliath, Bruce Schneier says: Privacy’s still screwed

Interview It has been nearly a decade since famed cryptographer and privacy expert Bruce Schneier released the book Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World - an examination of how government agencies and tech giants exploit personal data. Today, his predictions feel eerily accurate. At stake, he argued then, was a possibly irreversible loss of privacy, and the archiving of everything. As he wrote, science fiction author Charlie Stross described the situation as...

2 days ago

The Register

Why AI benchmarks suck

AI model makers love to flex their benchmarks scores. But how trustworthy are these numbers? What if the tests themselves are rigged, biased, or just plain meaningless? OpenAI's o3 debuted with claims that, having been trained on a publicly available ARC-AGI dataset, the LLM scored a "breakthrough 75.7 percent" on ARC-AGI's semi-private evaluation dataset with a $10K compute limit. ARC-AGI is a set of puzzle-like inputs that AI models try to solve as a measure of intelligence. Google's recently introduced...

3 days ago

The Register

UK's new thinking on AI: Unless it's causing serious bother, you can crack on

Comment The UK government on Friday said its AI Safety Institute will henceforth be known as its AI Security Institute, a rebranding that attests to a change in regulatory ambition from ensuring AI models get made with wholesome content – to one that primarily punishes AI-abetted crime. "This new name will reflect its focus on serious AI risks with security implications, such as how the technology can be used to develop chemical and biological weapons, how it can be used...

3 days ago

The Register

If you dread a Microsoft Teams invite, just wait until it turns out to be a Russian phish

Digital thieves – quite possibly Kremlin-linked baddies – have been emailing out bogus Microsoft Teams meeting invites to trick victims in key government and business sectors into handing over their authentication tokens, granting access to emails, cloud data, and other sensitive information. According to Microsoft, this con job have been ongoing since August 2024 and is attributed to a group it tracks as Storm-2372, a bunch of miscreants "working toward Russian state interests." Other such Kremlin-orchestrated crews, including Cozy Bear...

3 days ago

The Register

SonicWall firewalls now under attack: Patch ASAP or risk intrusion via your SSL VPN

Miscreants are actively abusing a high-severity authentication bypass bug in unpatched internet-facing SonicWall firewalls following the public release of proof-of-concept exploit code. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-53704, is a flaw in the SSL VPN authentication mechanism in SonicOS, the operating system that SonicWall firewalls use. If exploited, it allows remote attackers to bypass authentication on vulnerable SonicOS equipment, hijack the devices' active SSL VPN sessions, and gain unauthorized access to affected networks. "Shortly after the proof-of-concept was made public, Arctic...

3 days ago

The Register

Our world faces 'unprecedented' spike in electricity demand

The world is going to need a lot of new electricity generation in the next three years to keep up with an "unprecedented" spike in demand, says the International Energy Agency (IEA) – and it's going to be a tough goal to meet.  The IEA's report examines the current state of the electricity market and how it's likely to change between 2025 and 2027, forecasting that the world is going to need an additional 3,500 terawatt-hours of energy generation to...

3 days ago

The Register

Users await the fine print on SAP Business Suite reboot

SAP users have asked for transparent discounting and commercial arrangements following the business app giant's relaunch of Business Suite and extended alliance with Databricks. Under the strategy Business Unleashed, SAP this week announced the relaunch of Business Suite as a "truly modular, composable" set of cloud applications. Through its agreement with Databricks, the analytics and machine learning platform provider, SAP is also launching a managed set of analytics products across all business processes including finance, procurement, and HR, integrating data...

3 days ago

The Register

Datacenter energy demand in bitbarn 'capital of the world' Virginia nearly doubled in second half of 2024

Demand for electricity from datacenters in Virginia nearly doubled in the second half of 2024, power supplier Dominion Energy said of the region, which is home to "Datacenter Alley". "We now have approximately 40 gigawatts in various stages of contracting as of December 2024, which compares to around 21 gigawatts as of July 2024, an increase of 19 gigawatts or 88 percent," CEO Robert Blue said during his company's Q4 earnings call with Wall Street on Wednesday. Virginia has the...

3 days ago

The Register

Why do younger coders struggle to break through the FOSS graybeard barrier?

FOSDEM 2025 Getting involved with open source projects is a great way to build experience in development, documentation, internationalization, and more – but it's not as easy as it should be. Last year, our own Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols wrote that the graying open source community needs fresh blood. That prompted Swedish developer Jesper Olsson to get in touch, and we met up with him at the FOSDEM conference in Brussels. Olsson is a member of the team reviving the SchemaSpy...

3 days ago

The Register

Critical PostgreSQL bug tied to zero-day attack on US Treasury

A high-severity SQL injection bug in the PostgreSQL interactive tool was exploited alongside the zero-day used to break into the US Treasury in December, researchers say. Rapid7's principal security researcher, Stephen Fewer, disclosed CVE-2025-1094 (8.1) on Thursday, saying it was a key part of the exploit chain that also included the BeyondTrust zero-day (CVE-2024-12356). In fact, CVE-2025-1094 was so important to the chain that the BeyondTrust attack couldn't have been pulled off without it, we're told. "Rapid7 discovered that in...

3 days ago

The Register

International Space Station's out-of-this-world selfie booth turns 15

It has been 15 years since the ultimate selfie booth, the Cupola, was attached to the International Space Station (ISS). The Cupola, delivered with the Tranquility Module (AKA Node 3), was carried to orbit as a payload on STS-130, flown by Space Shuttle Endeavour. The mission lasted nearly 14 days and began with a launch on February 8, 2010. ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti enjoys a beverage in the ISS Cupola Liftoff was delayed from February 7 due to unfavorable weather,...

4 days ago

The Register

AWS vacates its board seat at European cloud crew CISPE

Amazon's Web Services wing has exited the board of CISPE (cloud infrastructure service providers in Europe), following a recent update to the Articles of Association that means only corporations based in the region can serve. "Non-European cloud vendors with annual revenues exceeding of €10 billion can participate as adherent members – without influencing the Association's governance," a spokesperson at the trade association told The Register. READ MORE In conjunction with this change - which was voted through "without opposition" –...

4 days ago

The Register

2 charged over alleged New IRA terrorism activity linked to cops' spilled data

Two suspected New IRA members were arrested on Tuesday and charged under the Terrorism Act 2000 after they were found in possession of spreadsheets containing details of staff that the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) mistakenly published online. Brian Francis Cavlan, 49, and Rory Martin Logan, 43, appeared in Strabane Magistrates' Court on February 13, where the court heard that Cavlan had two spreadsheets containing the particulars of police officers and civilian staff. The spreadsheet data would have orginally...

4 days ago

The Register

Voda-Three name post-merger top team, keep schtum on layoffs

Vodafone and Three have detailed the exec line-up taking the reins of post-merger UK biz, yet there is no word on when the deal will close, what name it will take, or how many staff face the chop to cut role duplication. The proposed amalgamation of Britain's third and fourth biggest mobile networks was given the all-clear by regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) in December, with some strings attached. Those conditions were that both telcos sign binding commitments...

4 days ago

The Register

Watchdog ponders why Apple doesn't apply its strict app tracking rules to itself

Apple is feeling the heat over its acclaimed iPhone privacy policy after a German regulator's review of iOS tracking consent alleged that the tech giant exempted itself from the rules it enforces on third-party developers. In a preliminary legal assessment of Apple's App Tracking Transparency framework (ATTF), Germany's competition watchdog said the "strict requirements under the ATTF only apply to third-party app providers, not to Apple itself." It is a common tactic to track users across devices – sometimes by...

4 days ago

The Register

Techie cleaned up criminally bad tech support that was probably also an actual crime

On Call If it's Friday, it's time for another edition of On Call, our reader contributed column in which you tell tales of crimes against tech support. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Dean" who once worked for a very large IT services provider and was assigned to a contract for a law enforcement agency. Dean got the gig because he was an excellent chap, and because he had experience with the slightly odd database the client employed....

4 days ago

The Register

HPE says blocking Juniper buy is a sure Huawei to ensure China and Cisco thrive

HPE has fired back at the US Department of Justice’s objection to its takeover of Juniper Networks, with arguments that include an assertion that blocking the deal will benefit Huawei and therefore have national security implications. The enterprise tech giant this week filed a riposte [PDF] to the DoJ’s argument that a combined HPE/Juniper would reduce competition and lead to higher prices. In HPE’s view, the DoJ has erred in considering the acquisition is mostly about wireless LANs and the...

4 days ago

The Register

Chinese AI marches on as Baidu makes its chatbot free, Alibaba scores Apple deal

Chinese AI continued to march onto the world stage this week, with Alibaba and Baidu both taking major strides. Let’s start with Baidu, which on Thursday announced its intention to make its Ernie Bot chatbot free, everywhere, from April 1st. The bot draws on the ERNIE 4.0 model which debuted in 2023 and was launched without details of the corpus used to train it, but the assertion that it can go toe-to-toe with GPT4. Baidu’s since added the ERNIE 4.0...

4 days ago

The Register

Lawyers face judge's wrath after AI cites made-up cases in fiery hoverboard lawsuit

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. The lawsuit began with a complaint filed in June, 2023, against Walmart and Jetson Electric Bikes over a fire allegedly caused by a hoverboard [PDF]. The blaze destroyed the plaintiffs' house and caused serious burns to family members, it is said. Last week, Wyoming District Judge...

4 days ago

The Register

Chinese spies suspected of 'moonlighting' as tawdry ransomware crooks

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. According to Symantec’s research team, miscreants broke into “a medium-sized software and services company in South Asia” in late November by compromising a critical Palo Alto Networks authentication bypass flaw (CVE-2024-0012). The attackers then swiped admin credentials from the company intranet and used them to access a Veeam...

4 days ago

The Register

After clash over Rust in Linux, now Asahi lead quits distro, slams Linus' kernel leadership

Hector Martin, project lead of Asahi Linux, resigned 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. In a lengthy post, Martin explained his decision, partly blaming a lack of support from the Linux chief. Torvalds' critique of Martin's "social brigading" during a disagreement about Rust drivers prompted Martin to quit his role as a maintainer of the upstream Linux kernel code for Apple's...

4 days ago

The Register

Reddit’s first public year shows growth, but Wall Street’s still not happy

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. Reddit posted its fourth quarter and 2024 full year results yesterday, reporting a net income of $71 million for Q4, up from $18.5 million the previous year. Earnings per share hit $0.36, surpassing analyst estimates, along with quarterly revenue of $428 million. Global...

4 days ago

The Register

More victims of China's Salt Typhoon crew emerge: Telcos just now hit via Cisco bugs

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 intrusions happened between December 2024 and January 2025 with the Chinese government snoops attempting to exploit more than 1,000 Cisco-made boxes before successfully breaking into at least seven, according to Recorded Future's Insikt Group. Salt Typhoon previously compromised at least nine US telecommunications companies and government networks. In...

4 days ago

The Register

Analysts welcome ACID transactions on real-time distributed Aerospike

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. Analysts have backed the release, saying it overcomes a "significant challenge" among distributed NoSQL databases. Aerospike is a fully in-memory database that supports key-value, JSON document, graph, and vector search models. It began as Citrusleaf in 2010, rebranding as Aerospike in 2012 before going open source under Apache and AGPL in...

4 days ago

The Register

US lawmakers press Trump admin to oppose UK's order for Apple iCloud backdoor

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. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Representative Andy Biggs (R-AZ) sent a letter [PDF] to Gabbard today arguing that if Apple complies with the unconfirmed demand from the UK Home Office, it would jeopardize the security of both US citizens and...

4 days ago

The Register

WD told to pay half a billion in patent damages before biz splits

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. The US storage biz was found by a jury in California to have infringed on data encryption patents owned by SPEX Technologies in October of last year, and told to pay $316 million in damages....

4 days ago

The Register

SAP snared in revenue trap unless it extends legacy ERP support

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. So daunting is the prospect of switching providers for the largest customers, if SAP sticks to its plan to end legacy system support in 2030, it could lose a huge chunk of high-margin revenue to that competition unless it opts to delay the deadline again. Gartner makes the case that despite SAP, the...

4 days ago

The Register

Diversity, equity, and inclusion is not an illusion, but it soon might be

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. The subject matter appears to be something many tech titans prefer not to publicly discuss, with numerous calls for comment from El Reg being either ignored, actively declined, or a "background briefing" offered to influence this article. The White House wants Uncle Sam to...

5 days ago

The Register

North Korea targets crypto developers via NPM supply chain attack

North Korea has changed tack: its latest campaign targets the NPM registry and owners of Exodus and Atomic cryptocurrency wallets. Carrying out a financially motivated string of attacks isn't the news here – North Korea's primary objective has long been to siphon money from enemy economies. The fresh finding is a JavaScript implant that hides itself in GitHub repositories and node package manager (NPM) packages typically used by crypto devs. According to SecurityScorecard's research, 233 individual victims have been confirmed...

5 days ago

The Register

Undergrad and colleagues accidentally shred 40-year hash table gospel

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. That assumption refers to hash tables, and a conjecture based on work from the 1980s regarding the optimal way to store and query the data in them. The student, formerly of Rutgers University in New Jersey, came up with a new kind of hash table that is faster and...

5 days ago

The Register

LibreOffice still kicking at 40, now with browser tricks and real-time collab

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. The open-source office suite had its own program stream at FOSDEM, including the pre-announcement of the new LibreOffice release 25.2. It has been around in some form since 1985, so this version marks its 40th year. It's middle-aged and, almost inevitably, that means it's big, a bit...

5 days ago

The Register

Insurance giant finds claims rep that gives a damn (it's AI)

It doesn't sleep, it doesn't eat, and it doesn't get sick of dealing with incompetent customers. Even if it's fundamentally strings of ones and zeroes, US insurance biz Allstate is finding that generative AI crafts more empathetic and customer-friendly emails than its human claims reps, though anyone who has had dealings with insurance providers might not be surprised. Allstate has some 23,000 insurance reps sending out around 50,000 communications to claimants every day, gathering information for negotiating settlements and the...

5 days ago

The Register

WordPress war latest: Ploy to trademark Hosted WordPress, Managed WordPress derailed

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. The foundation has a mission to democratize online publishing through software released under the GPL. As its name implies, it is especially keen on the open source WordPress CMS. The org’s HOSTED WORDPRESS and MANAGED WORDPRESS trademark applications are currently of interest due to licensing demands made by WordPress...

5 days ago

The Register

Mysterious Palo Alto firewall reboots? You're not alone

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. Multiple customers have reported that some hardware running version 11.1.4-h7/h9 of PAN-OS, the software that powers Palo Alto’s firewalls, reboot at random moments. "We have had three of our eight firewalls unexpectedly reboot in the past few months," observed one netizen. We know having firewalls mysteriously spontaneously reboot is not ideal. These strange failures can...

5 days ago

The Register

Cisco says it’s already dug in to protect itself – and customers – if trade war breaks out

Cisco has prepared for trade war and thinks it can ride things out by reconfiguring its supply chain if that becomes necessary. CFO Scott Herren on Wednesday volunteered info on Cisco’s preparations for the imposition of increased tariffs by the Trump administration during the company’s Q2 FY 2025 earnings call. In our guidance, we have accounted for the added cost driven by the increased tariffs on China, and proposed tariffs on Mexico and Canada,” he told investors. “This is a...

5 days ago

The Register

Have I Been Pwned likely to ban resellers from buying subs, citing 'sh*tty behavior' and onerous support requests

Troy Hunt, proprietor of data breach lookup site Have I Been Pwned, is likely to ban resellers from the service. Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) has gathered data stolen in 866 breaches and appearing at thousands of paste sites, and allows anyone to search for email addresses or text that trove contains. If personal info is present in a data breach or paste site, HIBP advises users of the fact. Folk who find their addresses were pwned hopefully go on...

5 days ago

The Register

Feds want devs to stop coding 'unforgivable' buffer overflow vulnerabilities

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. Buffer overflow vulnerabilities occur when software unexpectedly writes more data to memory storage than has been allocated for that data. The extra information spills into other memory, altering it. Smart attackers can feed carefully crafted data into software with these...

5 days ago

The Register

Sophos sheds 6% of staff after swallowing Secureworks

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. In a statement to The Register, the infosec outfit told us the staff it’s let go are no longer needed now that Secureworks is no longer a public company. Sophos has also cut some roles that were duplicated across the two companies. "Staff changes and redundancies are difficult at any time, and we deeply appreciate...

5 days ago

The Register

Larry Ellison wants to put all America's data, including DNA, in one big Oracle system for AI to study

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. Ellison shared his take on what governments need to do to succeed with AI during a discussion with his buddy former UK prime minister Tony Blair at the World Governments Summit in Dubai today. The world's fourth-most-richest man – a good friend also...

5 days ago

The Register

IBM return-to-office order hits finance, ops teams amid push to dump staff for AI

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. Workers in that organization in the US, at least, have been told to move close to one of two hubs, or face the ax. "Managers are being instructed to reach out to their reports and ask that they relocate to Raleigh, North Carolina, or Poughkeepsie, New York," we're told. "They must be within 50...

5 days ago

The Register

Trump’s cyber chief pick has little experience in The Cyber

President Trump has reportedly chosen a candidate for National Cyber Director — another top tech appointee with no professional experience in that role. Citing non-public documents listing multiple planned Trump nominations, Politico reports the President intended to nominate Sean Cairncross to take over the Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD) following the departure of Biden appointee Harry Coker.  We've contacted the White House to confirm the news.  Cairncross, a lawyer by profession, began his career at the prestigious Covington...

5 days ago

The Register

Arizona laptop farmer pleads guilty for funneling $17M to Kim Jong Un

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. Christina Marie Chapman pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, aggravated identity theft, and conspiracy to launder monetary instruments in a US District Court on Tuesday. She is scheduled to be sentenced on June 16, and under the terms of her plea deal,...

5 days ago

The Register

Ransomware isn't always about the money: Government spies have objectives, too

Feature Ransomware gangsters and state-sponsored online spies fall on opposite ends of the cyber-crime spectrum. The former move fast, make a lot of noise, and then intentionally draw attention to say "Hi, we've broken into your network," usually sending the victim some encrypted files and a ransom note. The latter often play the long game, moving stealthily and making seemingly innocuous moves to maintain a silent presence on your network, allowing them to snoop for as long as possible. As...

5 days ago

The Register

DARPA skips the lab, will head to orbit to test space manufacturing tech

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.  DARPA's Novel Orbital and Moon Manufacturing, Materials, and Mass-efficient Design (NOM4D) program kicked off in 2022 with the aim of developing methods to ship raw materials to orbit for manufacturing in space. According to the program's manager, Andrew Detor, the first two phases of the project went so swimmingly that additional...

5 days ago

The Register

Russia's Sandworm caught snarfing credentials, data from American and Brit orgs

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. Sandworm, the offensive cyber operations group that works for the Russian Military Intelligence Unit 74455 (GRU), has previously been linked to attacks on water facilities in the US and EU, the 2018 Winter Olympics, NotPetya, and various other destructive attacks on Ukraine's critical infrastructure. In a report...

5 days ago

The Register

James Webb Space Telescope to size up asteroid 2024 YR4 before it rocks our world

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. The asteroid is not particularly large – the best guess is that it measures somewhere between 40 and 90 meters (130-295 feet) – and there is an approximately 98 percent chance it will safely pass the Earth on December 22, 2032, but if it impacts the planet, the consequences for the...

5 days ago

The Register

Running hot? Server shipments forecast to cool in 2025

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. Taiwan-based market watcher TrendForce says shipments of AI-configured systems grew 46 percent last year on the back of orders from cloud service providers (CSPs). This trend was also noted by Synergy Research Group, which published stats last month showing that anticipated customer demand for AI drove a 48 percent surge in spending on public cloud infrastructure during...

5 days ago

The Register

SpaceX Crew Dragons swapped so ISS crew can go home early

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. The flight carrying Crew-10 – NASA astros Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, commander and pilot; and mission specialists JAXA 'naut Takuya Onishi and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov – was originally slated to launch no earlier than this month. After a handover period, Crew-9, which consists of astronauts Suni Williams,...

5 days ago

The Register

Crimelords and spies for rogue states are working together, says Google

Google says the the world's lawmakers must take action against the increasing links between criminal and state-sponsored cyber activity. In a fresh report published today, the company's Threat Intelligence Group listed a range of recommendations to help fend off the threat presented by cyber spies in the "Big Four" - Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea - as they deepen their ties with cybercriminals. It said governments must designate cybersecurity as a national security priority where it isn't already, and...

5 days ago

The Register

EU plans to 'mobilize' €200B to invest in AI to catch up with US and China

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen says the EU will top up a continental AI push to hit €200 billion ($207 billion). The funding comes as Europe looks over its shoulder nervously at the US's $500 billion Stargate Project and new Chinese AI contender DeepSeek. The €150 billion ($155 billion) in the European AI Champions initiative pot so far was placed there by backers led by venture capitalist General Catalyst, and includes Dutch photolithography giant ASML, France's Airbus, Germany's...

6 days ago

The Register

Why SAP may be mulling 2030 end of maintenance for legacy ERP

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. Or so says business consultancy Gartner. In 2020, SAP put back the mainstream support deadline for customers using its Business Suite 7 (BS7) applications – including the ERP software SAP ECC 6.0 – from 2025 until 2027, with extended support available until 2030 at a 2 percent premium....

6 days ago

The Register

UK government insiders say AI datacenters may be a pricey white elephant

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." Local and regional authorities were asked this week to put their communities forward to become "dedicated hotbeds for AI infrastructure development" and "attract millions in private investment," as part of the AI Opportunities Action Plan first detailed last month. READ MORE In particular, the game plan is to...

6 days ago

The Register

AI summaries turn real news into nonsense, BBC finds

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. In January, Apple's on-device AI service generated a headline of a BBC news story that appeared on iPhones claiming that Luigi Mangione, a man arrested over the murder of healthcare insurance CEO Brian Thomson, had shot himself. This was not true and the public broadcaster complained to the tech giant. Apple...

6 days ago

The Register

Murena boss says customers about to wake up from its cloud storage nightmare

Interview How long can a cloud storage 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. Murena founder and CEO Gaël Duval took the stage at the 2025 State of Open to push ethical mobile OSes and The Register caught up with him to ask the obvious question that customers no doubt want answered. The outage began when...

6 days ago

The Register

Oxford researchers pull off quantum first with distributed gate teleportation

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. Published in Nature, the study doesn't claim to be the first to achieve quantum teleportation - after all, scientists have been teleporting quantum states for years. What is new is the deterministic (e.g., once entanglement is established, the teleportation always succeeds) and repeatable teleportation of a quantum logic gate. "Previous demonstrations of...

6 days ago

The Register

Ignorance really is bliss when you’re drowning in information

Column I've never seriously accepted the maxim "ignorance is bliss". Now I'm less sure. Everyone I've talked to recently seems to have developed their own highly personalized strategies for dealing with the world news that now surrounds us. It wasn't always like this. At the start of my nearly 45-year career in tech, everyone had the same four sources of news: TV, radio, newspapers and magazines. A lucky few might have accounts with early online services like Compuserve or Prodigy...

6 days ago

The Register

After Copilot trial, government staff rated Microsoft's AI less useful than expected

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. The Department conducted a 14-week trial of Microsoft 365 Copilot during 2024 and asked for volunteers to participate. 218 put up their hands and then submitted to surveys about their experiences using Microsoft’s AI helpers. Those surveys are the basis of an evaluation report...

6 days ago

The Register

February's Patch Tuesday sees Microsoft offer just 63 fixes

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. Of the 63 patches (including six released earlier in the month) Microsoft announced, two are already being exploited. Both require attackers to be local and authenticated. One is CVE-2025-21418: A CVSS 7.8-scored elevation of privilege vulnerability in the Windows Ancillary Function Driver for Winsock that allows an attacker...

6 days ago

The Register

A win at last: Big blow to AI world in training data copyright scrap

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. "We are pleased that the court granted summary judgment in our favor and concluded that Westlaw’s editorial content created and maintained by our attorney editors, is protected by copyright and cannot be used without our consent," a spokesperson for Thomson Reuters told The Register today....

6 days ago

The Register

Microsoft wants to quit building Army VR goggles, hand contract to Anduril

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. The software giant’s AR-for-Army project is called the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) and began in 2018 using hardware based on Microsoft's now-discontinued HoloLens headsets. It hasn’t gone well. The Army signed a $22 billion deal with Microsoft for custom-made kit in 2021, but later that year delayed a roll-out of the headsets without providing much explanation...

6 days ago

The Register

Probe finds US Coast Guard has left maritime cybersecurity adrift

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. A newly released audit from the GAO, succinctly titled "Coast Guard: Additional Efforts Needed to Address Cybersecurity Risks to the Maritime Transportation System," highlights these shortcomings. The probe was conducted between December 2023 and December...

6 days ago

The Register

Yup, AMD's Elba and Giglio definitely sound like they work corporate security

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. Unveiled at Cisco Live Amsterdam on Tuesday, these latest DPU-infused "smart switches" join Switchzilla's existing Nexus 9300 family of appliances. At the heart of the equipment is an all-new in-house ASIC from Cisco's Silicon One family called the E100 that'll provide up to 4.8 Tbps of network capacity. That bandwidth will be divvied up...

6 days ago

The Register

'Key kernel maintainers' still back Rust in the Linux kernel, despite the doubters

The Rust for Linux project is alive and well, despite suggestions to the contrary, even if not every Linux kernel maintainer is an ally. On Sunday, Miguel Ojeda, who contributes to Rust for Linux and to Linux kernel maintenance, published a "Rust kernel policy" clarifying the status of efforts to integrate Rust code into the open source kernel's largely C codebase. The document acknowledges the elephant in the room by posing the question, "Do kernel maintainers support Rust in the...

6 days ago

The Register

Triplestrength hits victims with triple trouble: Ransomware, cloud hijacks, crypto-mining

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. Google's threat intelligence group has been tracking Triplestrength since 2023, and only recently started talking about this financially motivated criminal crew. It's a small-ish group, "probably focused around a handful of individuals," Kristen Dennesen, a Google threat intel analyst told The Register.  But, despite lacking in numbers, the gang is very active...

6 days ago

The Register

UK, US, Oz blast holes in LockBit's bulletproof hosting provider Zservers

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. Headquartered in Barnaul, Russia, Zservers provided BPH services to a number of LockBit affiliates, the three nations said today. On numerous occasions, affiliates purchased servers from the company to support ransomware attacks. The trio said the link between Zservers and LockBit was established as early as 2022, when...

6 days ago

The Register

Final cumulative update for Exchange Server 2019 lands at last

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. CU15 is the final CU Microsoft will release for Exchange Server 2019, and it is running months late, a concern for some admins as the update is needed to help organizations with the transition. Lest we forget, Exchange Server 2019 reaches its end of life on October 14, 2025, so time was running out...

6 days ago

The Register

Man who binned 7,500 Bitcoin drive now wants to buy entire landfill to dig it up

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. Howells inadvertently discarded a hard drive in 2013 containing what he claimed was 7,500 Bitcoins (though some reports suggest it may have been 8,000), and has spent the past 12 years trying to convince Newport City Council to grant him access to the landfill to search for the lost...

6 days ago

The Register

Man who SIM-swapped the SEC's X account pleads guilty

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. Twenty-five-year-old Eric Council Jr was charged with the offense in October and the Justice Department said at the time he was part of a group who attempted to manipulate the price of cryptocurrencies to their advantage. Announcing Council's guilty plea on Monday, the department did not mention the motives behind the incident, but once again noted...

6 days ago

The Register

Oracle makes Fusion apps available on EU Sovereign Cloud

Oracle is launching a Fusion Cloud Applications Suite (FCAS) on its Oracle EU Sovereign Cloud in a move designed to offer app users greater assurance in compliance with the region's data law. The EU implemented its General Data Protection Regulation in 2018, making it one of the strictest regimes in the world for the handling of personal data. The UK, which initially adopted the laws while a member of the EU trading and political bloc, now has legislation which is...

6 days ago

The Register

I'm a security expert, and I almost fell for a North Korea-style deepfake job applicant …Twice

Twice, over the past two months, Dawid Moczadło has interviewed purported job seekers only to discover that these "software developers" were scammers using AI-based tools — likely to get hired at a security company also using artificial intelligence, and then steal source code or other sensitive IP. Moczadło is a security engineer who co-founded Vidoc Security Lab, a San Francisco-based vulnerability management company, in 2021.  "If they almost fooled me, a cybersecurity expert, they definitely fooled some people," Moczadło told...

6 days ago

The Register

Google confirms Gulf of Mexico renamed to appease Trump – but only in the US

Google has changed the name of the Gulf of Mexico on Google Maps to comply with a Donald Trump whim – but only for American users. The Mountain View megacorp had already signaled a couple of weeks ago that it would fall in line with an executive order from the newly inaugurated president to officially rename the body of water bounded by Mexico and the US to the Gulf of America. Now the Chocolate Factory has confirmed in an online...

7 days ago

The Register

Microsoft open sources PostgreSQL extensions to muscle in on NoSQL

Analysis When Microsoft rolled out an open source extension stack for PostgreSQL to handle document-style data, it wasn't just taking aim at MongoDB – the dominant NoSQL player – but also blurring the lines between relational and non-relational databases, according to one expert. Despite the tech giant having built a multitrillion-dollar valuation largely on proprietary software, its latest bid to back open source systems and compete in the document database market promises a schema-light approach popular with developers. READ MORE...

7 days ago

The Register

DeepMind working on distributed training of large AI models

Is distributed training the future of AI? As the shock of the DeepSeek release fades, its legacy may be an awareness that alternative approaches to model training are worth exploring, and DeepMind researchers say they've come up with a way of making distributed training much more efficient. DeepSeek caused an element of panic in the US tech industry, as its AI appeared to perform as well those from OpenAI and Meta, while the company claimed to have trained its models...

7 days ago

The Register

Already three years late, NHS finance system replacement delayed again

The UK's largest NHS management body has postponed the replacement of its aging Oracle finance system again following more than three years of delays. The Integrated Single Financial Environment (ISFE) processes around £170 billion ($211 billion) in health spending every year for NHS England, which is responsible for running the health service in England. Plans to upgrade the Oracle E-Business Suite 12.2 system have been afoot since 2018, when the quango under the Department of Health and Social Care said...

7 days ago

The Register

Euro cloud crew says we-won't-sue deal with Microsoft is 'off-track'

Microsoft is not on track to meet technical commitments that form the basis of a settlement agreement intended to resolve a legal dispute over software licensing with a gaggle of cloud providers in Europe. The Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers of Europe (CISPE) trade association agreed in July to call off the lawyers on the proviso Microsoft made technical concessions that, as they saw it, levelled the playing field. READ MORE The points of contention in a complaint CISPE filed with...

7 days ago

The Register

UK government using AI tools to check up on roadworthy testing centers

The UK's Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) has produced a list showing how the country uses AI technologies to perform tasks ranging from speeding up the planning process to prioritizing the inspection of MOT testing centers. Most vehicles more than three years-old are assessed annually by an MOT (Ministry of Transport) test road worthiness, as required by local law. The test requires examiners at approved testing centers to check areas such as vehicle safety and emissions. There are...

7 days ago

The Register

RIP Raymond Bird: Designer of UK's first mass-produced business computer dies aged 101

Obit Raymond Bird, who developed the UK's first mass-produced business computer, the Hollerith Electronic Computer (HEC), has died at the digitally apropos age of 101. The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC) announced Bird's passing. A museum spokesperson, who was not immediately available to provide further details, told The Register family members had conveyed the news. Prototyped near the end of 1951 but not publicly demonstrated until 1953, the HEC1, Bird explained in a 2011 video interview, "was the first electronic...

7 days ago

The Register

Only 4 percent of jobs rely heavily on AI, with peak use in mid-wage roles

Workers in just four percent of occupations use AI for three quarters of their tasks, according to research from Anthropic that explores how its Claude model is used. The research found that roughly 36 percent of occupations incorporate AI for at least 25 percent of their tasks. These findings align with previous reports showing that few businesses have fully embraced the technology. Of those seeking AI assistance, about 37 percent work in software engineering roles, 10 percent toil in fields...

7 days ago

The Register

NASA’s radiation tolerant computer lives up to its name after surviving Van Allen belts

NASA has revealed its experimental Radiation Tolerant Computer has made it through the famously and furiously radiating Van Allen belts in one piece. The computer, known as the “RadPC”, went into space on January 15th atop a SpaceX Falcon launcher. NASA bought the machine a ticket on a mission run by Firefly Aerospace, which hopes to land a craft called “Blue Ghost” on Luna. Before travelling to the Moon, Blue Ghost spent more than three weeks in Earth orbit. During...

7 days ago

The Register

January earthquake shook $165M off TSMC’s revenue forecast

Taiwanese chipmaking champion TSMC has revealed that a January earthquake will cost it millions. The January 21st tremblor and its aftershocks peaked with a shake that rated 6.4 on the Richter scale and was followed by several aftershocks. At the time, TSMC asked workers to leave its buildings to ensure their safety. On Monday the company published a report on the quake’s impact that revealed “no structural damage to our fabs, and the water supply, power, workplace safety systems, and...

7 days ago

The Register

Apple warns 'extremely sophisticated attack' may be targeting iThings

Apple has warned that some iPhones and iPads may have been targeted by an “extremely sophisticated attack” and has posted patches that hopefully prevent it. The patches fix a flaw in USB Restricted Mode, a feature Apple introduced in 2018 and which disables the Lightning or USB ports on iPhones and iPads if they’re locked for more than hour. Apple locks the ports to prevent attacks that involve connecting a cable to the ports. Once a user authenticates and unlocks...

7 days ago

The Register

Some workers already let AI do the thinking for them, Microsoft researchers find

Some knowledge workers risk becoming over-reliant on generative AI and their problem-solving skills may decline as a result, according to a study penned by researchers from Microsoft Research and Carnegie Mellon University. In a paper titled “The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking”, the seven researchers report and analyze a survey in which they asked 319 knowledge workers who use generative AI at least weekly how and if they apply critical thinking when using tools such as Copilot and...

7 days ago