The Register

Plan to standardize consent dialogs aims to lighten burden on devs, users, reviewers

Mozilla plans to make life easier for developers of Firefox browser Add-ons, aka extensions, by reducing the burden of presenting custom consent dialogs to those installing extensions.…

PLUS: Qualcomm acquires Vietnamese AI outfit; China claims US hacked winter games; India's browser challenge winner disputed; and more

Asia In Brief  Asian nations and tech companies are trying to come to terms with the USA’s new universal import tariffs and additional “reciprocal tariffs”.…

PLUS: Google re-patches Quick Share flaws; Critical Cisco flaw exploited; WordPress plugin trouble; and more

Infosec in Brief  How did journalist Jeffrey Goldberg’s phone number end up in a Signal group chat? According to The Guardian, US national security adviser Mike Waltz accidentally saved it into the contact file of a campaign staffer who later took a job at the US National Security Council official.…

Pixel Watch 3 boots Microsoft's OS in latest feat of delightful pointlessness

Windows on Arm has been around since the Surface RT – but this is another kind of arm altogether.…

Heads up to those living on lunar base in 2032: DUCK!!

The likelihood of asteroid 2024 YR4 hitting the Moon, during Christmas 2032, has more than doubled.…

'Nonpartisan' intelligence chief booted less than two years into the job

President Trump yesterday fired the head of the NSA and US Cyber Command and his deputy.…

Panel finds plaintiffs should get a chance to prove docs not submitted too late

Updated  IBM may have seen off a lawsuit accusing it of using outdated mortality data to underfund retiree pensions, but an appeals court has now reopened the matter to further litigation.…

But analysts say tariffs could disrupt equipment supply chains

The US Department of Energy (DoE) is looking to co-locate datacenters with energy generation facilities to further America's AI ambitions, and is putting up its own land for this purpose.…

Stamp it out: Infostealer malware at German outfit may be culprit

Updated  Britain's Royal Mail is investigating after a crew calling itself GHNA claimed it was selling 144GB of the delivery giant’s customer data, perhaps after acquiring it with the same stolen credentials it used to siphon info on Samsung Germany's punters.…

Probably still behind western rivals, but improved GPU and higher core count can’t hurt

Chinese chip designer Loongson, whose products have been promoted by Beijing, has teased two new designs that will make it more of a contender for mobile and industrial applications. It may also have a new server up its sleeve.…

Experts in IT services held up while other sectors fell over the last 5 years, says report

Ukraine's technology industry has held up during Russia's invasion, with activity falling markedly less than other industries and increasing as a proportion of national exports since 2019.…

Classification compliance? Records retention requirements? How quaint

A US Department of Defense watchdog has opened an investigation into its own Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, over his use of instant-messaging app Signal to discuss government business.…

We're not Putin up with this alleged industrial espionage, say the Dutch

A Russian national appeared in a Netherlands court on Thursday accused of industrial espionage against ASML, the world’s leading manufacturer of chip factory equipment and a key supplier that helps the likes of TSMC pump out top-drawer processors.…

Prosecutors said individuals were scammed repeatedly until they had nothing left

Five romance scammers-turned-money launderers were convicted in the UK today after police shuttered a multimillion-pound fraud operation.…

Australians checking their pensions are melting down call centers and websites

Australian retirement fund operators are scrambling after reports emerged of unauthorized access to customer accounts leading to theft of cash.…

Market share increase accelerating, but Microsoft's flagship OS not yet at the 50% mark

The gap between Windows 10 and Windows 11 continues to narrow, and Microsoft's flagship operating system is on track to finally surpass its predecessor by summer.…

'Pudgy' might be more apt given the download size

The beta version of Ubuntu 25.04, the next interim release of this Linux OS, has arrived.…

The industry’s approach to keeping quality backups may be masking the importance of other recovery mainstays

Maintaining good-quality backups is often seen as the spine of any organization's ability to recover from cyberattacks quickly. Naturally, given the emphasis placed on them by experts of all stripes, you'd be forgiven for thinking that prioritizing them over anything else would be the way to go.…

The need to scale still battling security worries ... on both sides

Governments continue to adopt cloud services, for better or worse, hoping to modernize their IT services, leading big cloud operators to aggressively court public sector bodies for lucrative contracts.…

'Full benefit' of replacement will not be realized until old one is shut down, projects watchdog warns

The effectiveness of new IT systems designed to speed up asylum claim processing in the UK continues to be held back by the Home Office's failure to decommission its 25-year-old case management database, five years after it promised to retire it.…