The Register

Who could possibly be behind this attack on an ethnic minority China despises?

Researchers at Canada’s Citizen Lab have spotted a phishing campaign and supply chain attack directed at Uyghur people living outside China, and suggest it’s an example of Beijing’s attempts to target the ethnic minority group.…

Florida man altered allergen info, DoSed former colleagues

Former Disney employee Michael Scheuer was sentenced to 36 months in prison and fined almost $688,000 for screwing up a software application the entertainment giant used to cook up its restaurant menus.…

Cyberattack? Bad software update? International oopsie? The cause is unclear, but Iberia is dark

Updated  A massive power outage has left Spain, Portugal and parts of southern France without electricity, and the cause has yet to be identified.…

Demotion of cyberspace policy team, closure of others, not a great look

The US State Department announced a major reorg this month, and the changes could weaken America's ability to counter China's growing technological influence.…

But what it can't do is 'unilaterally claw back a community project and its infrastructure, assets, and branding'

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has filed a petition with the US Patent and Trademark Office to prevent Synadia from using the logo and domain for NATS, the open source messaging system.…

Homeland Security boss Noem added as last-minute keynote, mind you

RSAC  There's a notable absence from this year's RSA Conference that kicked off today in San Francisco: The NSA's State of the Hack panel.…

Now that's a sum of all fears

The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, aka DARPA, believes mathematics isn't advancing fast enough.…

Redmond reckons $1.50/core/month hotpatch service is worth it to avoid eight Patch Tuesday scrambles each year

Microsoft has announced its preview of hotpatching for on-prem Windows Server 2025 will become a paid subscription service in July.…

Dem Sens demand action to stop SpaceX oligarch from turning watchdogs into corporate yes-men

The Trump-blessed DOGE unit could help its boss Elon Musk avoid more than $2.37 billion in potential legal liabilities by stripping power from the regulators tasked with supervising the billionaire's businesses. …

Er, are we sure we want to outsource the welding?

Rise of the machines  Construction workers could soon find themselves laboring alongside 20-foot (6 meter) tall AI-powered autonomous robots capable of welding, carpentry, and 3D printing buildings. What could possibly go wrong?…

As astronomers gripe about sats screwing observations

AST SpaceMobile says it is working with US astronomers and America's National Science Foundation (NSF) to mitigate the impact of satellites on observations, after a prototype became one of the brightest objects in the sky a couple of years back.…

PLUS: Microsoft fixes messes China used to attack it; Mitre adds ESXi advice; Employee-tracking screenshots leak; and more!

Infosec in brief  Samsung has warned that some of its Galaxy devices store passwords in plaintext.…

It took a 1 year+ probe, plenty of client calls for VeriSource to understand just how much of a yikes it has on its hands

Houston-based VeriSource Services' long-running probe into a February 2024 digital break-in shows the data of 4 million people – not just a few hundred thousand as it first claimed - was accessed by an "unknown actor".…

No more asterisks. Voice typing now reflects the true spirit of your rage

Customer feedback wins – Microsoft is adding a toggle to turn off the Windows 11 profanity filter.…

Image board hints that rumors of a poorly maintained back end may be true

Clearweb cesspit 4chan is back up and running, but says the damage caused by a cyberattack earlier this month was "catastrophic."…

Government procurement process is very involved

Comment  It's easy to miss £125 million ($166 million). It could happen to anyone. Take Paul Patterson, for example. In January 2024, the director of Fujitsu Services Ltd emailed the UK government's commercial arm to confirm the Japanese tech services provider would pause bidding for public sector work after the Post Office Horizon scandal became public knowledge.…

Spend will come under scrutiny, but projects with good returns still likely to get backing, analyst says

The ripple effects of recent US tariffs could hit sectors well beyond those currently in the firing line, or so warns TechMarketView.…

Latest profit and loss accounts carry scars of ad spending exodus, but things improving. Maybe not everywhere though

In the months following Tesla CEO and Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, now rebranded to X, business collapsed in the UK, according to recently filed profit and loss accounts for the year ended December 31 2023.…

Reg hack pines for simpler times, then tries to recapture them

Sometimes, the size and complexity of modern OSes – even the FOSS ones – is enough to make us miss the days when an entire bootable OS could fit in three files, when configuring a PC for production meant editing two plain-text files, which contained maybe a dozen lines each. DOS couldn't do very much, but the little it did was enough. From the early 1980s for a decade or two, much of the world ran on DOS. Then Windows 3 came along, which is arguably the point where the rot set in.…

Think that next refresh is going to get better? The first step to freedom is admitting there's a problem

Opinion  Windows is at that awkward stage any global empire has to go through. Around one in five of the world population is a Windows user – 1.5 billion humans. Aside from the relatively small slice that Mac takes, everyone else is happy with smartphones, so until we make contact with credulous aliens, there are no new worlds for Microsoft to conquer. In an industry obsessed with growth, this is untenable.…