The Register

Not quite the answer to life, the universe and everything, but not far off

Opinion  The smaller the org, the better the jobs. Not universally true, but a good rule of thumb. Small organizations have fewer layers of management, and each individual has much more influence. One voice in 50 is 100 times louder than one in 5,000. You get to say what you want to do and get to do it. Happiness. …

And was saved by an even worse meltdown caused by someone else

Who, Me?  Welcome to another working week and therefore another installment of Who, Me? – The Register's reader-contributed column where you confess to making a mess and somehow find safe egress.…

Also points to important markets among the 300 million people who will soon work as delivery riders or influencers

Huawei’s chairman Xu Zhijun – aka Eric Xu – has called out China’s enormous lead in fiber-to-the-room (FTTR) installations.…

PLUS: India tries to untangle TXT marketing opt-ins; China’s AI crackdown succeeds; Australia and Boeing team AWACS, drones; and more!

Asia In Brief  Chinese web giant Baidu last week staged a livestream hosted by an AI version of local influencer Yonghao Luo and scored 13 million hits and $7.5 million of sales.…

PLUS: 5.4M healthcare records leak; AI makes Spam harder to spot; Many nasty Linux vulns; and more

Infosec in brief  A former US Army sergeant has admitted he attempted to sell classified data to China.…

Startup has already shown how to make drugs in space

UPDATED  America's aviation regulator has issued its first license for unmanned spacecraft to reenter the Earth's atmosphere to Varda, a startup that's trying to build a space-based manufacturing business.…

Skull emoji knife emoji moneybag emoji

Seven people, including a 14-year-old, have been arrested or surrendered to Danish authorities after allegedly using encrypted messaging apps to hire other teenagers for contract killings in what Europol calls a "violence-as-a-service" operation.…

Don’t trust mystery digits popping up in your search bar

Scammers are hijacking the search results of people needing 24/7 support from Apple, Bank of America, Facebook, HP, Microsoft, Netflix, and PayPal in an attempt to trick victims into handing over personal or financial info, according to Malwarebytes senior director of research Jérôme Segura.…

Welcome to bill shock, AI style

Microsoft's GitHub this week said paying GitHub Copilot customers will now face monthly limits on certain types of high-powered AI requests, and will have to pay more if they want to surpass those limits.…

'The selected vendor must be willing to receive consideration that is primarily non-monetary,' says the USPTO

The US Patent and Trademark Office is exploring a plan for using AI at the agency to speed up the process of granting patents - but its initial request for information says that vendors should expect to be paid in exposure rather than cold, hard cash.…

DataFusion and WarehousePG meant to deal with AI-related workloads, not to compete with analytics data platforms

PostgreSQL exponent EDB has enhanced its new data platform, claiming this will help bring transactional, analytical, and AI workloads into a single environment.…

If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck...

Aflac is the latest insurance company to disclose a security breach following a string of others earlier this week, all of which appear to be part of Scattered Spider's most recent data theft campaign.…

It's a marketing move to lure more affiliates, says infosec veteran

The latest marketing ploy from the ransomware crooks behind the Qilin operation involves offering affiliates access to a crack team of lawyers to ramp up pressure in ransom negotiations.…

French satellite operator plans capital raise backed by state and key investors including Bharti

Satellite biz Eutelsat is looking to raise €1.35 billion ($1.55 billion) to grow its Low Earth Orbit (LEO) network to take on Starlink and benefit from anticipated growth in demand for connectivity.…

Q1 revenue jumps to $11.7B, with 400 and 800 GbE driving the spike

The long-dormant market for datacenter network switches is booming thanks to AI.…

X11 is very far from dead – no matter if some want it to be

Comment  Considerable new activity is happening both in the established X.org X11 server and around its new fork, Xlibre.…

... And then promptly deletes comment. Optimism or an opportunity? Or perhaps both

French cloud business, OVHcloud, claimed yesterday that it is in discussions with the European Commission (EC) regarding a possible migration to a sovereign cloud – in an X post that has since been deleted.…

To stop AI scam callers, break automatic speech recognition systems

Researchers based in Israel and India have developed a defense against automated call scams.…

Seizures up 830% since 2021, with devices linked to interference in emergency responses

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is concerned about the rate at which outlawed signal-jamming devices are being found across the US.…

VCF bundle is worth it if you make the most of every part, says CTO

Customers dismayed by Broadcom's move to selling costly bundles such as VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) will realize its value if they'd just use more of the components, the company's CTO says.…