The Register

• CISA: Wow, that election had a lot of foreign trolling. Trump's Homeland Sec pick: And that's none of your concern 2025-01-18
  Cyber agency too 'far off mission,' says incoming boss Kristi Noem America's lead cybersecurity agency on Friday made one final scream into the impending truth void about election security and the role CISA plays in maintaining it.…
  Jessica Lyons
• Capital One two-day outage leaves customers in free-fall 2025-01-17
  Third-party supplier blamed as folks left unable to access funds Capital One is still battling to fix whatever brought down its systems on Wednesday, which has left people unable to access their money.…
  Iain Thomson
• FCC to telcos: By law you must secure your networks from foreign spies. Get on it 2025-01-17
  Plus: Uncle Sam is cross with this one Chinese biz over Salt Typhoon mega-snooping Decades-old legislation requiring American telcos to lock down their systems to prevent foreign snoops from intercepting communications isn't mere decoration on the pages of law books – it actually means carriers need to secure their networks, the FCC has huffed.…
  Jessica Lyons
• Biden signs sweeping cybersecurity order, just in time for Trump to gut it 2025-01-17
  Ransomware, AI, secure software, digital IDs – there's something for everyone in the presidential directive Analysis  Joe Biden, in the final days of his US presidency, issued another cybersecurity order that is nearly as vast in scope as it is late in the game.…
  Jessica Lyons
• China to probe US chip subsidies as export curbs rattle allies 2025-01-17
  Beijing investigating claims of unfair competition in mature semiconductors The "chip wars" between the US and China show no sign of cooling off as Beijing prepares to examine whether America is unfairly subsidizing its own semiconductor companies. Meanwhile, Washington's latest export restrictions have angered even some of its allies.…
  Dan Robinson
• Fortinet: FortiGate config leaks are genuine but misleading 2025-01-17
  Competition hots up with Ivanti over who can have the worst start to a year Fortinet has confirmed that previous analyses of records leaked by the Belsen Group are indeed genuine FortiGate configs stolen during a zero-day raid in 2022.…
  Connor Jones
• Clock ticking for TikTok as US Supreme Court upholds ban 2025-01-17
  With Biden reportedly planning to skirt enforcement and kick the can to Trump, this saga might still not be over Updated  The US Supreme Court has upheld a law requiring TikTok to either divest from its Chinese parent ByteDance or face a ban in the United States. The decision eliminates the final legal obstacle to […]
  Brandon Vigliarolo
• EU demands a peek under the hood of X's recommendation algorithms 2025-01-17
  Commission insists the timing has nothing to do with Musk meddling in German politics ahead of election The European Commission is stepping up its ongoing investigation of Elon Musk's X with a request to examine recent changes made to the platform's recommendation algorithms.…
  Brandon Vigliarolo
• Six vulnerabilities in ubiquitous rsync tool announced and fixed in a day 2025-01-17
  Turns out tool does both file transfers and security fixes fast Don't panic. Yes, there were a bunch of CVEs, affecting potentially hundreds of thousands of users, found in rsync in early December – and made public on Tuesday – but a fixed version came out the same day, and was further tweaked for better […]
  Liam Proven
• Germany unleashes AMD-powered Hunter supercomputer 2025-01-17
  €15 million system to serve as testbed for larger Herder supercomputer coming in 2027 Hundreds of AMD APUs fired up on Thursday as Germany's High-Performance Computing Center (HLRS) at the University of Stuttgart announced the completion of its latest supercomputer dubbed Hunter.…
  Tobias Mann
• Copilot invades Microsoft 365 Personal and Family for an extra three bucks a month 2025-01-17
  Many users less than impressed by unexpected arrival of AI assistant in Word Copilot is coming to Microsoft 365 Personal and Family, and Vulture Central has had some hands-on experience with the generative AI assistant's attempts to be helpful.…
  Richard Speed
• Apple solves broken news alerts by turning off the AI 2025-01-17
  Summaries will return when Apple Intelligence has 'improved' Apple has released a new beta of iOS 18.3 and tacitly admitted that, yes, its AI-generated notification summaries need a bit more work.…
  Richard Speed
• IBM swoops in to rescue UK Emergency Services Network after Motorola shown the door 2025-01-17
  With a near half-billion-pound price hike bringing contract value to £1.4B IBM has secured a deal with the UK Home Office to supply user services for the troubled Emergency Service Network (ESN) upgrade, providing voice and data communications after Motorola withdrew from the project.…
  Lindsay Clark
• Medusa ransomware group claims attack on UK's Gateshead Council 2025-01-17
  Pastes allegedly stolen documents on leak site with £600K demand Another year and yet another UK local authority has been pwned by a ransomware crew. This time it's Gateshead Council in North East England at the hands of the Medusa group.…
  Connor Jones
• Brit government contractor CloudKubed enters administration 2025-01-17
  Home Office, Department for Work and Pensions supplier in hands of FRP Advisory A self-described specialist supplier of "transformational data and AI solutions" to the UK government has called in the administrative receivers.…
  Paul Kunert
• Tech support fill-in given no budget, no help, no training, and no empathy for his plight 2025-01-17
  Fixed the problem anyway – with no approval for a purchase and no permission to use a device On Call  When the weekend rolls around, nobody needs permission to do whatever they desire. Unless, of course, they're required to be available to support tech – a restriction we mark each week in On Call, the […]
  Simon Sharwood
• Microsoft eggheads say AI can never be made secure – after testing Redmond's own products 2025-01-17
  If you want a picture of the future, imagine your infosec team stamping on software forever Microsoft brainiacs who probed the security of more than 100 of the software giant's own generative AI products came away with a sobering message: The models amplify existing security risks and create new ones.…
  Thomas Claburn
• AWS adds 32-vCPU option and an easier on-ramp to its cloudy desktops 2025-01-17
  Weirdly, this shows the weakness of hosted Windows with an admission about vidchats Amazon Web Services has flicked the switch on a pair of workstation-grade cloud desktops that, ironically, highlight a problem with the tech.…
  Simon Sharwood
• SpaceX resets ‘Days Since Starship Exploded’ counter to zero 2025-01-17
  Test flight seven did better on the ground with a successful booster catch – as aircraft divert from falling debris Updated  SpaceX has again lost a Starship, after the seventh test flight of the spacecraft ended with a “rapid unscheduled disassembly”, but is nonetheless celebrating the mission as it ended with the second successful catch […]
  Simon Sharwood
• Just as your LLM once again goes off the rails, Cisco, Nvidia are at the door smiling 2025-01-17
  Some of you have apparently already botched chatbots or allowed ‘shadow AI’ to creep in Cisco and Nvidia have both recognized that as useful as today's AI may be, the technology can be equally unsafe and/or unreliable – and have delivered tools in an attempt to help address those weaknesses.…
  Tobias Mann and Simon Sharwood