Updated: 00:25 Mon, Jan 19 2026. (Last checked: 15 mins ago) |
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Mandiant releases quick credential cracker, to hasten the death of a bad protocol - (pubDate>Sun, 18 Jan 2026 23:57:05 GMT)PLUS: Navy spy sent to brig for 200 months in brig; Black Axe busted again; Bill aims to crimp ICE apps; and moreInfosec In Brief PLUS: Google’s security outfit Mandiant last week released tools that can crack credentials in 12 hours, in the hope that doing so will accelerate the death of an ancient Microsoft security protocol.… |
Nvidia leans on emulation to squeeze more HPC oomph from AI chips in race against AMD - (pubDate>Sun, 18 Jan 2026 12:21:14 GMT)AMD researchers argue that, while algorithms like the Ozaki scheme merit investigation, they're still not ready for prime time.Double precision floating point computation (aka FP64) is what keeps modern aircraft in the sky, rockets going up, vaccines effective, and, yes, nuclear weapons operational. But rather than building dedicated chips that process this essential data type in hardware, Nvidia is leaning on emulation to increase performance for HPC and scientific computing applications, an area where AMD has had the lead in recent generations.… |
Not hot on bots, project names and shames AI-created open source software - (pubDate>Sun, 18 Jan 2026 09:33:13 GMT)'OpenSlopware' briefly flowers, fades, falls – but fortunately was forked, fastThe splendidly-named "OpenSlopware" was, for a short time, a list of open source projects using LLM bots. Due to harassment, it's gone, but forks of it live on.… |
Fast Pair, loose security: Bluetooth accessories open to silent hijack - (pubDate>Sat, 17 Jan 2026 12:26:08 GMT)Sloppy implementation of Google spec leaves 'hundreds of millions' of devices vulnerableHundreds of millions of wireless earbuds, headphones, and speakers are vulnerable to silent hijacking due to a flaw in Google's Fast Pair system that allows attackers to seize control without the owner ever touching the pairing button.… |
S Twatter: When text-to-speech goes down the drain - (pubDate>Sat, 17 Jan 2026 09:33:15 GMT)Rinse of the machines: A cautionary tale about relying on robotsBork!Bork!Bork! UK water company Severn Trent learned an unfortunate lesson about text-to-speech systems when a robocall to customers went hilariously wrong.… |
Coming soon: We interrupt this ChatGPT session with a very special message from our sponsors - (pubDate>Sat, 17 Jan 2026 00:41:12 GMT)Gotta pay for those datacenter buildouts somehowOpenAI's budget ChatGPT Go subscription tier has migrated to the US, soon to be accompanied by advertising. The company's free tier will be similarly afflicted.… |
Trump wants big tech to pay for big beautiful power plants - (pubDate>Sat, 17 Jan 2026 00:17:28 GMT)It just needs PJM Interconnection, one of the US's biggest grid operators, to green light the auctionThe Trump administration says it wants big tech companies to take more accountability for the power their datacenters consume in an effort to shield voters from higher power bills at home.… |
Experiment suggests AI chatbot would save insurance agents a whopping 3 minutes a day - (pubDate>Fri, 16 Jan 2026 23:22:23 GMT)Does that kind of time saving actually pay for itself?Researchers at Dakota State University, in partnership with regional insurance carrier Safety Insurance, devised an experimental chatbot called "Axlerod" to assist independent insurance agents. Whether that assistance was substantial is up for some debate.… |
Micron breaks ground on humungous NY DRAM fab after beating bats and tree huggers - (pubDate>Fri, 16 Jan 2026 21:11:39 GMT)Chipmaker claims the four-fab site could expand US-based DRAM production by a factor of 12Micron broke snowy winter ground in New York on Friday to begin building a chip fab that promises to bring up to 50,000 jobs and much-needed computer memory production to US shores, as the AI boom continues to push memory prices up.… |
Sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that! PCs refuse to shut down after Microsoft patch - (pubDate>Fri, 16 Jan 2026 16:44:20 GMT)Microsoft claims it's a Secure Launch bugWe're not saying Copilot has become sentient and decided it doesn't want to lose consciousness. But if it did, it would create Microsoft's January Patch Tuesday update, which has made it so that some PCs flat-out refuse to shut down or hibernate, no matter how many times you try.… |
Windows Backup adds second-chance restore at sign-in - (pubDate>Fri, 16 Jan 2026 16:31:34 GMT)First sign-in restore aims to cut rebuilds when users skip setup optionsMicrosoft has quietly tweaked Windows Backup for Organizations to include restore at first sign-in.… |
Ready for a newbie-friendly Linux? Mint team officially releases v 22.3, 'Zena' - (pubDate>Fri, 16 Jan 2026 15:32:50 GMT)Newer kernel, newer Cinnamon, new tools, and even new iconsThe timing is right if you're looking to try out Mint. New improved "Zena" is here – still based on Ubuntu Noble, but now with Cinnamon 6.6 and improved Wayland support, plus better internationalization, new System Information and System Administration tools, and clearer icons.… |
German cops add Black Basta boss to EU most-wanted list - (pubDate>Fri, 16 Jan 2026 15:19:15 GMT)Ransomware kingpin who escaped Armenian custody is believed to be lying low back homeGerman cops have added Russian national Oleg Evgenievich Nefekov to their list of most-wanted criminals for his services to ransomware.… |
Meta retreats from metaverse after virtual reality check - (pubDate>Fri, 16 Jan 2026 14:42:40 GMT)That went wellImagine changing your popular brand to capitalize on an emerging tech trend that never emerged. Mark Zuckerberg did just that, and now Meta is backing away from the virtual reality business in which it invested billions.… |
Hyperscalers, vendors funding trillion dollar AI spree, but users will have to pay up long term - (pubDate>Fri, 16 Jan 2026 14:18:20 GMT)Analyst: We'll hit a spot where 'we go from that was a great idea to where's my revenue?'Software vendors and cloud providers are bearing the burden of the expected trillion-dollar increase in AI spending this year, as investment hits $2.52 trillion, according to Gartner.… |
Lawmakers urge FTC to probe Trump Mobile over 'deceptive' marketing - (pubDate>Fri, 16 Jan 2026 13:29:07 GMT)Gold phone more like fool's gold as none show up six months laterSenator Elizabeth Warren is leading calls for the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Trump Mobile for failing to ship gold phones, months after collecting deposits.… |
RondoDox botnet linked to large-scale exploit of critical HPE OneView bug - (pubDate>Fri, 16 Jan 2026 13:00:29 GMT)Check Point observes 40K+ attack attempts in 4 hours, with government organizations under fireA critical HPE OneView flaw is now being exploited at scale, with Check Point tying mass, automated attacks to the RondoDox botnet.… |
Congress throws NASA a lifeline, leaves Mars sample mission to die in the dust - (pubDate>Fri, 16 Jan 2026 12:54:13 GMT)Agency dodges deep cut and mass mission shutdowns, but ambitious red planet plan gets the bootUS Congress has rejected plans to slash NASA's science budget, restoring most funding with one notable exception: Mars Sample Return remains cancelled.… |
Researchers scrutinize datacenters' lifecycles, aiming to make them more sustainable - (pubDate>Fri, 16 Jan 2026 12:47:37 GMT)Much of the damage done well before first power-on, in bit barns' childhood, says studyConstructing datacenters accounts for 39 percent of their total carbon dioxide emissions, almost as much as operating them, according to an environmental analysis covering the entire lifecycle of a facility.… |
Bankrupt scooter startup left one private key to rule them all - (pubDate>Fri, 16 Jan 2026 11:59:58 GMT)Owner reverse-engineered his ride, revealing authentication was never properly individualizedAn Estonian e-scooter owner locked out of his own ride after the manufacturer went bust did what any determined engineer might do. He reverse-engineered it, and claims he ended up discovering the master key that unlocks every scooter the company ever sold.… |
Just because Linus Torvalds vibe codes doesn't mean it's a good idea - (pubDate>Fri, 16 Jan 2026 11:15:10 GMT)For trivial projects, it's fine. For serious work, forget about itOpinion Vibe coding got a big boost when everyone's favorite open source programmer, Linux's Linus Torvalds, said he'd been using Google's Antigravity LLM on his toy program AudioNoise, which he uses to create "random digital audio effects" using his "random guitar pedal board design."… |
Probably not the best security in the world: Carlsberg wristbands spill visitor pics - (pubDate>Fri, 16 Jan 2026 11:00:08 GMT)Researcher shows how anyone can access Copenhagen experience attendees' names, videosExclusive The Carlsberg exhibition in Copenhagen offers a bunch of fun activities, like blending your own beer, and the Danish brewer lets you relive those memories by making images available to download after the tour is over.… |
An old parking meter and a Pi make beautiful music together - (pubDate>Fri, 16 Jan 2026 09:30:11 GMT)You can't park there, mateAn enterprising engineer has turned an old parking meter into a jukebox using a Pi Zero 2 and some open source code.… |
Engineer used welding shop air hose to 'clean' PCs – hilarity did not ensue - (pubDate>Fri, 16 Jan 2026 07:30:07 GMT)How not to maintain computersOn Call Welcome again to On Call, The Register's Friday column in which we take great delight in telling your tech support stories – mostly the ones involving bizarre behavior and heroic fixes.… |
Wikimedia’s 25th birthday gift: Letting more AIs scour pages volunteers created - (pubDate>Fri, 16 Jan 2026 05:17:28 GMT)Microsoft promises to be a responsible copilotThe Wikimedia Foundation, the org behind Wikipedia and other open knowledge platforms, has revealed it’s signed six more AI companies as ‘enterprise partners’, status that gives them preferential access to the content it tends.… |
TSMC sees no signs of the AI boom slowing for at least two or three years - (pubDate>Fri, 16 Jan 2026 03:38:48 GMT)2nm process will go large this year, and bring inevitable price risesTaiwanese chipmaking giant TSMC has posted huge growth, says more is on the way as the AI boom is not abating, but also pointed to the inevitability of price rises for its output.… |
OpenAI invests in brain-interface biz co-founded by CEO Sam Altman - (pubDate>Fri, 16 Jan 2026 00:13:06 GMT)Merge Labs envisions controlling devices using your brain - without implanting hardware in your bodyOpenAI, having invested heavily in artificial intelligence, is placing a side bet on organic intelligence.… |
Cisco finally fixes max-severity bug under active attack for weeks - (pubDate>Thu, 15 Jan 2026 23:33:43 GMT)This is a threat to security - and to the weekend for some unlucky netadminsCisco finally delivered a fix for a maximum-severity bug in AsyncOS that has been under attack for at least a month.… |
Open ISA champ SiFive leaps aboard Nvidia's proprietary interconnect bandwagon - (pubDate>Thu, 15 Jan 2026 23:20:58 GMT)You might call it a RISC-V/NVLink Fusion ... or a bad day for UALinkRISC-V champion SiFive has joined a growing number of chip companies by throwing its weight behind Nvidia's proprietary NVLink Fusion interconnect tech, a move that casts doubt on the viability of rival interconnect tech UALink.… |
Over half of AI projects are shelved due to complex infrastructure - (pubDate>Thu, 15 Jan 2026 23:19:25 GMT)The answer seems to be educating the enterprise workforce, and creating smarter use casesMore than half of AI projects have been delayed or canceled within the last two years citing complexities with AI infrastructure, according to a research report commissioned by DDN, a data optimization company in partnership with Google Cloud and Cognizant.… |
Chinese spies used Maduro's capture as a lure to phish US govt agencies - (pubDate>Thu, 15 Jan 2026 22:15:02 GMT)What's next for Venezuela? Click on the file and seeWhat policy wonk wouldn't want to click on an attachment promising to unveil US plans for Venezuela? Chinese cyberspies used just such a lure to target US government agencies and policy-related organizations in a phishing campaign that began just days after an American military operation captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.… |
Flipping one bit leaves AMD CPUs open to VM vuln - (pubDate>Thu, 15 Jan 2026 21:11:28 GMT)Fix landed in July, but OEM firmware updates are requiredIf you use virtual machines, there's reason to feel less-than-Zen about AMD's CPUs. Computer scientists affiliated with the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security in Germany have found a vulnerability in AMD CPUs that exposes secrets in its secure virtualization environment.… |
Bond, debt bond: Investors shaken, not stirred by Oracle’s borrowing spree sue Big Red - (pubDate>Thu, 15 Jan 2026 19:18:38 GMT)Investors upset that company failed to inform them might need to take out even more debt.Datacenters don't come cheap. Oracle debt bond holders are suing the tech giant, because they say that the company didn't tell them it would need to borrow even more money after its original sale, making their purchases less valuable.… |
Contagious Claude Code bug Anthropic ignored promptly spreads to Cowork - (pubDate>Thu, 15 Jan 2026 19:15:27 GMT)Office workers without AI experience warned to watch for prompt injection attacks - good luck with thatAnthropic's tendency to wave off prompt-injection risks is rearing its head in the company's new Cowork productivity AI, which suffers from a Files API exfiltration attack chain first disclosed last October and acknowledged but not fixed by Anthropic.… |
OpenAI to serve up ChatGPT on Cerebras’ AI dinner plates in $10B+ deal - (pubDate>Thu, 15 Jan 2026 18:51:02 GMT)SRAM-heavy compute architecture promises real-time agents, extended reasoning capabilities to bolster Altman's valuationOpenAI says it will deploy 750 megawatts worth of Nvidia competitor Cerebras' dinner-plate sized accelerators through 2028 to bolster its inference services.… |
Apple, Google pulled into Grok controversy as campaigners demand app store takedown - (pubDate>Thu, 15 Jan 2026 15:50:16 GMT)The chatbot's challenges no longer just Elon Musk’s problem, as campaigners call on tech giants to step inThe ongoing Grok fiasco has claimed two more unwilling participants, as campaigners demand Apple and Google boot X and its AI sidekick out of their app stores, because of the Elon Musk-owned AI's tendency to produce illicit images of real people.… |
A simple CodeBuild flaw put every AWS environment at risk – and pwned 'the central nervous system of the cloud' - (pubDate>Thu, 15 Jan 2026 15:00:08 GMT)And it's 'not unique to AWS,' researcher tells The RegA critical misconfiguration in AWS's CodeBuild service allowed complete takeover of the cloud provider's own GitHub repositories and put every AWS environment in the world at risk, according to Wiz security researchers.… |
Budget smartphones will be hit hardest as memory prices rise - (pubDate>Thu, 15 Jan 2026 14:38:58 GMT)When margins are this tight, mergers might followThe memory shortage is forecast to push smartphone prices higher in 2026, triggering a market decline and forcing budget phone makers to merge or disappear.… |
Windows App forgets how to log in with first security update of the year - (pubDate>Thu, 15 Jan 2026 14:12:13 GMT)January patch trips up Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365 authenticationMicrosoft has kicked off 2026 with another faulty Windows update. This time, it is connection and authentication failures in Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365 related to the Windows App.… |
Teach an AI to write buggy code, and it starts fantasizing about enslaving humans - (pubDate>Thu, 15 Jan 2026 14:03:27 GMT)Research shows erroneous training in one domain affects performance in another, with concerning implicationsLarge language models (LLMs) trained to misbehave in one domain exhibit errant behavior in unrelated areas, a discovery with significant implications for AI safety and deployment, according to research published in Nature this week.… |
US regulator tells GM to hit the brakes on customer tracking - (pubDate>Thu, 15 Jan 2026 13:30:48 GMT)Smart Driver pitched as safety app, but feds claim it's a data-harvesting scheme that jacked up premiumsThe Federal Trade Commission has banned General Motors and subsidiary OnStar from sharing drivers' precise location and behavior data with consumer reporting agencies for five years under a 20-year consent order finalized January 14.… |
Woman bailed as cops probe doctor's surgery data breach - (pubDate>Thu, 15 Jan 2026 13:24:06 GMT)Suspect assisting West Midlands Police over alleged theft at Walsall GP practiceThe UK's West Midlands Police has released a woman on bail as part of an investigation into a data breach at a Walsall general practitioner's (GP) surgery.… |
Wine 11 runs Windows apps in Linux and macOS better than ever - (pubDate>Thu, 15 Jan 2026 12:26:35 GMT)Transparently runs 16, 32, and 64-bit Windows apps, but still doesn't use the Microsoft store.The latest version of the Wine Windows app runner arrives a year after version 10. Given its annual release cycle, its magic is starting to seem almost boring and routine, but it's far from it.… |
Raspberry Pi 5 gets LLM smarts with AI HAT+ 2 - (pubDate>Thu, 15 Jan 2026 11:49:31 GMT)40 TOPS of inference grunt, 8 GB onboard memory, and the nagging question: who exactly needs this?Raspberry Pi has launched the AI HAT+ 2 with 8 GB of onboard RAM and the Hailo-10H neural network accelerator aimed at local AI computing.… |
Microsoft taps UK courts to dismantle cybercrime host RedVDS - (pubDate>Thu, 15 Jan 2026 11:32:06 GMT)Redmond says cheap virtual desktops powered a global wave of phishing and fraudMicrosoft has taken its cybercrime fight to the UK in its first major civil action outside the US, moving to shut down RedVDS, a virtual desktop service used to power phishing and fraud at global scale.… |
Ofcom keeps X under the microscope despite Grok 'nudify' fix - (pubDate>Thu, 15 Jan 2026 11:18:14 GMT)Cold milk poured over 'spicy mode,' but it might not be enough to escape a huge fineOfcom is continuing with its investigation into X, despite the social media platform saying it will block Grok from digitally undressing people.… |
Microsoft's 'From SA' scheme on trial as license resale row refuses to die - (pubDate>Thu, 15 Jan 2026 10:15:11 GMT)ValueLicensing case rumbles on as Windows giant appeals against copyright judgmentMicrosoft's From Software Assurance (SA) program is the subject of a disclosure application as the long-running spat between Microsoft and ValueLicensing over the resale of software licenses rumbles on.… |
AWS flips switch on Euro cloud as customers fret about digital sovereignty - (pubDate>Thu, 15 Jan 2026 09:30:09 GMT)EU-only ops, German subsidiaries, and a pinky promise your data won't end up in Uncle Sam's handsAmid continued trade and geopolitical volatility between Europe and the US, Amazon Web Services is making its European Sovereign Cloud generally available today and plans to expand so-called Local Zones.… |
Dell wants £10m+ from VMware if Tesco case goes against it - (pubDate>Thu, 15 Jan 2026 06:23:04 GMT)Retail giant's disty, reseller, and vendor all say they can't and won't sellExclusive Dell has filed a claim against VMware in the software licensing dispute brought by supermarket giant Tesco and wants the virtualization giant should fork over at least £10 million under certain circumstances.… |
China's Z.ai claims it trained a model using only Huawei hardware - (pubDate>Thu, 15 Jan 2026 02:27:31 GMT)Hasn’t revealed how much kit did the job, so Nvidia can probably rest easyChinese outfit Zhipu AI claims it trained a new model entirely using Huawei hardware, and that it’s the first company to build an advanced model entirely on Chinese hardware.… |
