The Register

Feds say $970K scheme defrauded 13+ companies

A Maryland man has pleaded guilty to fraud after landing a job with a contractor working on US government software, and then outsourcing the work to a self-described North Korean developer in China.…

Did we says offshore? We meant, er, hardcore. Amirite, DOGE bros?

Comment  IBM – a company understood to employ at least one-third of its global workforce in India and Bangladesh – is pledging to spend $150 billion over the next half decade on making America great again.…

Whistleblowing, email is evidential mail, HR is not your friend, and more discussed by CxO panel

RSAC  Chief security officers should negotiate personal liability insurance and a golden parachute when they start a new job – in case things go sideways and management tries to scapegoat them for a network breach.…

Asus implements droop detector for PCIe slots as GPUs now so heavy they risk toppling out

Graphics cards are now getting so bulky and heavy that device maker Asus has decided customers need a way to detect any sagging or movement of the GPU in its PCIe slot.…

We'll see if messaging client can keep up with sibling browser

Mozilla has lobbed out Firefox 138, and subsidiary MZLA's Thunderbird 138 isn't far behind. The venerable messaging client is picking up the pace and finally syncing its stride with the browser that spawned it.…

No specific law against it yet, but that's set to change

A spate of high-profile swatting incidents in the US recently forced the FBI into action with its latest awareness campaign about the occasionally deadly practice.…

Go ahead, please do Bash static analysis

Shell scripting may finally get a proper bug-checker. A group of academics has proposed static analysis techniques aimed at improving the correctness and reliability of Unix shell programs.…

Sycophantic update to GPT-4o rolled back after AI gets over-enthusiastic with the 'glaze'

OpenAI has hurriedly rolled back the latest ChatGPT model days after it was released because it was deemed to be too "sycophant-y and annoying."…

The tryhard's favorite distro wins an approved home in Microsoft's OS

There have been unofficial versions for years, but Arch Linux is now officially on the menu for people using Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).…

Snappy surfer eyes Apple's EU engine requirements

Alternative browser Flow now passes 90 percent of web-platform-tests.…

The OS refresh brings Ryzen AI and Arrow Lake compatibility

Fresh from their respective bunkers, OpenBSD 7.7 and a new version of Plan 9 fork 9Front have dropped, bringing hardened security, obscure charm, and, oddly enough, artwork from the same designer.…

Minister, platform providers disagree on whether law would have helped avoid last summer's riots

MPs heard a range of interpretations of UK law when it comes to the spread of misinformation online, a critical factor in the riots across England and Northern Ireland sparked by inaccurate social media posts about the fatal stabbings at a children's dance class on 29 July last year.…

And of course – sigh – they look like women with long blonde hair

Chinese carmaker Chery has started using its own humanoid robots as sales staff in its showrooms.…

Yet more strife for server-maker sees its share price slump by 15 percent

Supermicro shares slumped 15 percent in after-hours trading as the company warned next week’s quarterly results will see it miss forecast revenue by up to $1.5 billion.…

Kirsty Noem argues cyber-agency's job is defending America, not becoming 'Ministry of Truth'

RSAC  Uncle Sam's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, aka CISA, has gone off the rails by trying to dispel disinformation, according to US Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.…

If Lip Bu Tan can't sell you his LLM accelerator, he's more than willing to build yours

Direct Connect  Intel has revealed a pair of variants of its long-awaited 18A process node to make it better suited for, one, manufacturing mass-market processors and, two, complex multi-die semiconductors for – of course – AI.…

Revealing import taxes would be 'hostile and political' to Dear Leader

World War Fee  On Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt denounced Amazon after it was reported the tech giant intended to show how much President Trump's import tariffs would inflate the price of stuff sold through its internet souk.…

Sharing is caring when your entire business is built on it

Meta is scrambling to grab some of that ChatGPT and Grok buzz with the launch of its own standalone AI app. Built on its Llama 4 LLM, the assistant touts personalization and smoother voice chats, but the most visible feature is a Discover feed showing off how other users interact with it, and even that feels more like a gimmick than a game-changer.…

Cryptographers' panel a bit gloomy this year

RSAC  It was a somewhat gloomy Cryptographers' Panel at the RSA Conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, with two of the industry's sages in a pretty grim mood.…

As Big Tech gets used to the pain, smaller vendors urged to up their game

Google says that despite a small dip in the number of exploited zero-day vulnerabilities in 2024, the number of attacks using these novel bugs continues on an upward trend overall.…