The Register

PLUS: Microsoft ends no-MFA Azure access; WorkDay attack diverts payments; FreePBX warns of CVSS 10 flaw; and more

Infosec In brief  A flaw in Meta's WhatsApp app “may have been exploited in a sophisticated attack against specific targeted users.”…

Sites at yourcountry.gov may also not bother with HTTPs

Internet traffic to government domains often flows across borders, relies on a worryingly small number of network connections, or does not require encryption, according to new research.…

We are drowning in code, but at least some folks are swimming

opinion  To fight the enshittification of software, the first step is to pinpoint why and how it happens. Some observers are trying to do that.…

PLUS: Spain cancels Huawei deal; Sony wants to use only recycled gold; Video of Alibaba’s uncanny FOSS digital humans; and more

Asia In Brief  China’s State Council last week announced a new IT policy called “AI +”, the successor to 2015’s “Internet +”.…

Nor is its Arm port

When VMware delivered its Cloud Foundation 9 suite in June, it marked the end of a two-year push to integrate its compute, storage, and networking products. What’s next for the Broadcom business unit? At the VMware Explore conference this week, The Register sniffed out a few other items on its to-do list.…

Running AIs on your own machine lets you stick it to the man and save some cash in the process

Feature  After a decade or two of the cloud, we're used to paying for our computing capability by the megabyte. As AI takes off, the whole cycle promises to repeat itself again, and while AI might seem relatively cheap now, it might not always be so.…

All good things must come to an end

All good things must come to an end, and so too must the blocky glory of the Kilopixel. As the wood and robotic marvel crested the 200,000-pixel mark, its creator pulled the metaphorical plug.…

The controls were left wide open on Pudu's robots

A researcher caught the world’s leading supplier of commercial service robots using shoddy admin security that let attackers redirect the delivery machines to anywhere and make them follow any command.…

End of verified end user status means South Korean memory vendors will need licenses to bring restricted chipmaking tech into Chinese fabs

The US government already has a lot to say about what products chipmakers can and can't sell in China. This week the Commerce Department moved to make it harder for South Korean memory vendors Samsung and SK Hynix to continue manufacturing in the region.…

But the cure may ruin the web....

Opinion  With AI's rise, AI web crawlers are strip-mining the web in their perpetual hunt for ever more content to feed into their Large Language Model (LLM) mills. How much traffic do they account for? According to Cloudflare, a major content delivery network (CDN) force, 30% of global web traffic now comes from bots. Leading the way and growing fast? AI bots.…

Chinese cloud provider reportedly joins the homegrown silicon party

Alibaba has reportedly developed an AI accelerator amid growing pressure from Beijing to curb the nation's reliance on Nvidia GPUs. …

Bias, a lack of safety reporting, and the whole 'MechaHitler' thing are all the evidence needed, say authors

Public advocacy groups are demanding the US government cease any use of xAI's Grok in the federal government, calling the AI unsafe, untested, and ideologically biased.…

GMP library test meltdown has AMD looking for answers

Chipmaker AMD is looking into a report from the GMP project about two Ryzen processors that failed during testing. Could too much math be to blame?…

Platform's staffer complains security review was 'rushed'

Microsoft-owned collaborative coding platform GitHub is deepening its ties with Elon Musk's xAI, bringing early access to the company's Grok Code Fast 1 large language model (LLM) into GitHub Copilot. However, a whistleblower has claimed that the rollout suffers from inadequate security testing and an engineering team operating under duress.…

Look who's visiting the watering hole these days

Amazon today said it disrupted an intel-gathering attempt by Russia's APT29 to trick Microsoft users into unwittingly granting the Kremlin-backed cyberspies access to their accounts and data.…

'It blows my mind,' says SecDef

The Pentagon has formally kiboshed Microsoft's use of China-based employees to support Azure cloud services deployed by US government agencies, and it's demanding Microsoft do more of its own digging to determine whether any sensitive data was compromised. …

Chocolate Factory says people keep marking them as such, so QED

The Trump administration has accused Google of discriminating against Republicans' emails and warned that the tech giant could be in line for a crackdown.…

A remarkable mixture of different components, but it works

RefreshOS is a Debian and KDE-based distro with a difference: it casts its net a lot wider for tools and components.…

Limited Run Games swaps in silicon to emulate Super FX chip and hit 20 fps

Forget Windows 95, it's 30 years since Doom was released on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. And thanks to the Raspberry Pi RP2350 microcontroller, the game is back in cartridge form.…

Up to 29,000 organizations and potentially 370,000 security and IT pros affected

Australian development house Click Studios has warned users of its Passwordstate enterprise password management platform to update immediately if not sooner, following the discovery of an authentication bypass vulnerability that opens the doors to an emergency administration account with nothing more than a "carefully crafted URL."…