The Register

Researchers accuse tech firms of profiting from exploitative AI imagery

The starving child whose picture broke your heart when you saw it on a charity website may not be real. Global health researchers say that stock image companies like Adobe are profiting from AI-generated "poverty porn" that non-profits are using to drum up donations.…

Some portions of the OS are still stuck on light

Windows 11 launched way back in October 2021 and has become Microsoft’s must-have OS thanks to the impending end-of-life for Windows 10. After all that time, there are still significant portions of the OS that don’t do dark mode. However, Redmond is making significant progress, bringing a couple of key dialog boxes into compliance.…

Attempted exploit was a feeble effort to target Windows users

Someone managed to insert a compromised file into the downloads section of the website for Xubuntu, the official Ubuntu flavor with the Xfce desktop environment. The malware was designed to steal cryptocurrency, but so far, there are no reports of actual theft.…

AI arms dealer relies on Taiwanese advanced packaging plants for top-specced GPUs

US manufacturing of Nvidia GPUs is underway and CEO Jensen Huang is celebrating the first Blackwell wafer to come out of TSMC's Arizona chip factory. However, to be part of a complete product, those chips may need to visit Taiwan.…

Too many services depend not just on one cloud provider, but on one location

Analysis  Amazon's US-EAST-1 region outage caused widespread chaos, taking websites and services offline even in Europe and raising some difficult questions. After all, cloud operations are supposed to have some built-in resiliency, right?…

Cabinet Office signals it might let supplier ship work abroad after 'unforeseeable' event

The UK government has signaled its intention to allow a supplier providing maintenance to its online procurement platform to subcontract offshore, having previously said that this was off-limits due to security concerns.…

Now try a jet engine in a bedstead before strapping into a Starship

European Space Agency (ESA) astronauts have completed a helicopter training course to prepare them for upcoming lunar landings.…

Operating system's D-day resuscitates flatlining computer sector

It transpires that Windows 11 is indeed good for at least one thing – driving PC upgrades, according to the latest figures from Gartner.…

Tech billionaire apologizes after endorsing plan to deploy National Guard in San Francisco

Salesforce co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff has apologized for backing President Donald Trump's proposals to send the National Guard to San Francisco, where the company is based and holds its annual conference.…

That's 46 minutes in which more work can be done, not an extended lunch

Lloyds Banking Group claims employees save 46 minutes daily using Microsoft 365 Copilot, based on a survey of 1,000 users among nearly 30,000 deployed licenses.…

Citizen! You are falling short in your AI usage targets! Strive harder for the revolution!

Opinion  The quantum theory of management includes an analogy for the physical law of the observer effect, where observing a system changes its state. When you make a metric a target, it is not useful as a metric. Instead of reflecting whatever underlying behavior it was intended to measure, the metric becomes a measure of how well the benchmark is being gamed.…

Amazon reports DNS issues hitting DynamoDB, leaving services from Roblox to McDonald's struggling

A major outage is affecting Amazon Web Services (AWS), with even Amazon's own web page reported to be offline and dozens of other online services and websites affected, including disruption in the UK.…

Alert says financial account information lifted from systems

Auction house Sotheby's says it was breached on July 24, and those behind the intrusion stole an unspecified amount of data, including Social Security numbers and financial account information.…

Plus: Ransomware posing as Teams installer, Cisco 0-day exploit to drop rootkit, and European cops bust SIM-box service

INFOSEC IN BRIEF  Engineer David Dodda says he was just "30 seconds away" from running malware on his own computer after nearly falling victim to a North Korea-type job interview scam with a "legitimate" blockchain company. …

Once more into the, er, breach?

The UK's Armed Forces veterans are being tasked with one last mission – proving the government can successfully roll out a digital ID card scheme.…

It's all agents and LLMs in Vegas, and even legacy users can partake

As Oracle pounds the market with AI announcements across cloud infrastructure, applications, and data analytics, experts have warned that users' path to adoption remains uncertain.…

ValueLicensing dispute probes whether Office counts as a creative work

The long-running legal battle between ValueLicensing and Microsoft over the resale of software licenses has taken another turn following Microsoft's attempt to make the case about copyright.…

Oh … you mean we shouldn’t press that button?

Who, Me?  Each new Monday ushers in a week during which you might shine or flatline. The Register celebrates the times you end up doing the latter with a new instalment of Who, Me? It's the column in which you admit to making mistakes and execute cunning escapes.…

Taps Ruby core to oversee RubyGems, Bundler

Ruby Central, the non-profit that recently seized some Ruby open source tools from maintainers, is transferring the repository ownership of RubyGems and Bundler to the Ruby core team. The move appears to be an attempt to mollify the Ruby community following a divisive power grab, but it does not restore the control of those tools to the maintainers who previously oversaw them.…

Now they just need to get regulatory approval

Despite technological and regulatory hurdles, Amazon remains convinced that small modular reactors (SMRs) are the answer to the cloud titan's power woes.…