Satellite slinger AST reckons newer birds won't outshine stars in night sky
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.…
Samsung admits Galaxy devices can leak passwords through clipboard wormhole
Infosec in brief Samsung has warned that some of its Galaxy devices store passwords in plaintext.…
From 112K to 4M folks' data – HR biz attack goes from bad to mega bad
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".…
Windows profanity filter finally gets a ******* off switch
Customer feedback wins – Microsoft is adding a toggle to turn off the Windows 11 profanity filter.…
Back online after 'catastrophic' attack, 4chan says it's too broke for good IT
Clearweb cesspit 4chan is back up and running, but says the damage caused by a cyberattack earlier this month was "catastrophic."…
Fujitsu and its no public sector bids promises... what happened to them?
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.…
Even untouched by tariffs, UK financial IT braces for the blow
The ripple effects of recent US tariffs could hit sectors well beyond those currently in the firing line, or so warns TechMarketView.…
Elon Musk's X revenues in the UK crashed in 2023, down 66%
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.…
Build your own antisocial writing rig with DOS and a $2 USB key
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.…
Windows isn't an OS, it's a bad habit that wants to become an addiction
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.…
What the **** did you put in that code? The client thinks it's a cyberattack
Who, Me? Welcome to another Monday morning! We hope your weekend could be described in pleasant terms. That's what The Register strives for at this time of week in each installment of "Who, Me?" – the column that shares your stories of making decidedly unpleasant mistakes and somehow mopping up afterwards.…
Google admits depreciation costs are soaring amid furious bit barn build
Google says the mega capital splurge on datacenters in recent years is putting more strain on its balance sheet due to rising depreciation costs, yet it still plans to splash $75 billion on bit barns in 2025.…
Google goes cold on Europe: Stops making smart thermostats for continental conditions
Google has given up on smart thermostats in Europe.…
Toyota picks Huawei’s Android-killer HarmonyOS for its Chinese electric sedan
Asia In Brief Toyota last week launched a range of electric vehicles in China, one of which use Huawei’s HarmonyOS…
New APNIC director general steps up to steer the internet for 4 billion users
Interview Before you get to know Jia Rong Low, the recently appointed director general of the Asia Pacific Network Information Center (APNIC), you might want to check your definition of "the internet."…
Trump’s 145% tariffs could KO tabletop game makers, other small biz, lawsuit claims
WORLD WAR FEE The Trump administration's tariffs are famously raising the prices of high-ticket products with lots of chips, like iPhones and cars, but they're also hurting small businesses like game makers. In this case, we're not talking video games, but the old-fashioned kind you play at your kitchen table.…
UK bans game controller exports to Russia in bid to ground drone attacks
The British government is banning the export of video game controllers to Russia, claiming these can be repurposed for piloting drones on the frontline in Ukraine.…
Signalgate lessons learned: If creating a culture of security is the goal, America is screwed
Opinion Just when it seems they couldn't be that careless, US officials tasked with defending the nation go and do something else that puts American critical infrastructure, national security, and troops' lives in danger.…
Amid CVE funding fumble, 'we were mushrooms, kept in the dark,' says board member
Kent Landfield, a founding member of the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) program and member of the board, learned through social media that the system he helped create was just hours away from losing funding.…
More Ivanti attacks may be on horizon, say experts who are seeing 9x surge in endpoint scans
Ivanti VPN users should stay alert as IP scanning for the vendor's Connect Secure and Pulse Secure systems surged by 800 percent last week, according to threat intel biz GreyNoise.…
