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Laptop maker says a vendor breach exposed some phone camera code, but not its own systems

Asus has admitted that a third-party supplier was popped by cybercrims after the Everest ransomware gang claimed it had rifled through the tech titan's internal files.…

Netflix says its open AV1 video codec now powers about 30% of all streaming on the platform and is rapidly becoming its primary delivery format thanks to major gains in compression, bandwidth efficiency, HDR support, and film-grain rendering. TVTechnology reports: The blog by Liwei Guo, Zhi Li, Sheldon Radford and Jeff Watts comes at a time when AV2 is on the horizon. [...] The blog revisits Netflix's AV1 journey to date, highlights emerging use cases, and shares adoption trends across the device ecosystem. It noted that since entering the streaming business in 2007, Netflix has primarily relied on H.264/AVC as its streaming format. "Looking ahead, we are excited about the forthcoming release of AV2, announced by the Alliance for Open Media for the end of 2025," said the authors. "AV2 is poised to set a new benchmark for compression efficiency and streaming capabilities, building on the solid foundation laid by AV1. At Netflix, we remain committed to adopting the best open technologies to delight our members around the globe. While AV2 represents the future of streaming, AV1 is very much the present -- serving as the backbone of our platform and powering exceptional entertainment experiences across a vast and ever-expanding ecosystem of devices."

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State-backed attackers started poking flaw as soon as it dropped – anyone still unpatched is on borrowed time

Amazon has warned that China-nexus hacking crews began hammering the critical React "React2Shell" vulnerability within hours of disclosure, turning a theoretical CVSS-10 hole into a live-fire incident almost immediately.…

With seat and usage-based deals back on the table, CRM giant tells investors agent prices are going up

Salesforce has told investors it is upping prices for AI agent platforms, claiming customers will get between three and ten times the value from investment as it introduces new AI charging models.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: New research reveals that AI chatbots can shift voters' opinions in a single conversation -- and they're surprisingly good at it. A multi-university team of researchers has found that chatting with a politically biased AI model was more effective than political advertisements at nudging both Democrats and Republicans to support presidential candidates of the opposing party. The chatbots swayed opinions by citing facts and evidence, but they were not always accurate -- in fact, the researchers found, the most persuasive models said the most untrue things. The findings, detailed in a pair of studies published in the journals Nature and Science, are the latest in an emerging body of research demonstrating the persuasive power of LLMs. They raise profound questions about how generative AI could reshape elections.

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Umpteen other distros just put out new versions, but this one is our favorite

Kernel 6.18 has already been designated the new LTS release – just as we predicted – and Alpine Linux 3.23 has arrived carrying it ahead of a flurry of other year-end distro updates.…

Diarmuid Early takes world title after outpacing 11 rivals

Ireland's Diarmuid Early has won the Excel World Championship. Readers of a certain age may be disappointed to learn he has never used Lotus 1-2-3.…

Plan would create statutory powers for police use of biometrics, prompting warnings of mass surveillance

The UK government has kicked off plans to ramp up police use of facial recognition, undeterred by a mounting civil liberties backlash and fresh warnings that any expansion risks turning public spaces into biometric dragnets.…

Project retires 32-bit ports, embraces pkgbase, and modernizes build process

The latest release of FreeBSD contains a lot of crucial under-the-hood changes – and drops 32-bit support on both x86 and POWER, although ARM-v7 survives.…

Union fields member complaints as it presses outsourcer over botched rollout

Capita has sought Microsoft's help after the launch of the Civil Service Pension Scheme (CSPS) left users facing a malfunctioning website designed to process important financial information.…

The Reg is still standing (this time) despite our best efforts

Updated Routine Cloudflare maintenance went awry this morning, knocking over the company's dashboard and API and sending sites around the world into error screens.…

NASA and CNES's SWOT satellite captured the first high-resolution, wide-swath image of a major tsunami in the open ocean after the July 2025 Kuril-Kamchatka quake. "Instead of a single neat crest racing across the basin, the image revealed a complicated, braided pattern of energy dispersing and scattering over hundreds of miles," reports Earth.com. "These are details that traditional instruments almost never resolve. They suggest the physics we use to forecast tsunami hazards -- especially the assumption that the largest ocean-crossing waves travel as largely "non-dispersive" packets -- need a revision." From the report: Three takeaways emerge. First, high-resolution satellite altimetry can see the internal structure of a tsunami in mid-ocean, not just its presence. Second, researchers now argue that dispersion -- often downplayed for great events -- may shape how energy spreads into leading and trailing waves, which could alter run-up timing and the force on harbor structures. Third, combining satellite swaths, DART time series, seismic records, and geodetic deformation gives a more faithful picture of the source and its evolution along strike. For tsunami modelers and hazard planners, the message is equal parts caution and opportunity. The physics now has to catch up with the complexity that SWOT has revealed, and planners need forecasting systems that can merge every available data stream. The waves won't get any simpler -- but our predictions can get a lot sharper. The findings have been published in the journal The Seismic Record.

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You can improve the odds by combining skepticism, verification habits, and a few technical checks

Opinion Liars, cranks, and con artists have always been with us. It's just that nowadays their reach has gone from the local pub to the globe.…

Medical software maker also had a vastly unhealthy approach to security

On Call Welcome to another installment of On Call, The Register's Friday column that tries to improve the health of the tech support ecosystem by sharing readers' sickening stories of bringing broken tech back from the brink.…

NASA's OSIRIS-REx samples from asteroid Bennu have revealed bio-essential sugars, a never-before-seen "space gum" polymer, and unusually high levels of supernova-origin dust. The findings bolster the RNA-world hypothesis, suggest complex organics formed early on Bennu's parent body, and show preserved presolar grains that escaped alteration for billions of years. "All five nucleobases used to construct both DNA and RNA, along with phosphates, have already been found in the Bennu samples brought to Earth by OSIRIS-REx," said lead scientist Yoshihiro Furukawa of Tohoku University. "The new discovery of ribose means that all of the components to form the molecule RNA are present in Bennu." The findings have been published in three new papers by the journals Nature Geosciences and Nature Astronomy. NASA also published a video on YouTube detailing the discovery.

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New ‘Datacenter Manager’ manages VMs across multiple sites or clusters

Open source virtualization project Proxmox has delivered the first full and stable release of its Datacenter Manager product, making it a more viable alternative as a private cloud platform.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A Donald Trump-backed push has failed to wedge a federal measure that would block states from passing AI laws for a decade into the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) told reporters Tuesday that a sect of Republicans is now "looking at other places" to potentially pass the measure. Other Republicans opposed including the AI preemption in the defense bill, The Hill reported, joining critics who see value in allowing states to quickly regulate AI risks as they arise. For months, Trump has pressured the Republican-led Congress to block state AI laws that the president claims could bog down innovation as AI firms waste time and resources complying with a patchwork of state laws. But Republicans have continually failed to unite behind Trump's command, first voting against including a similar measure in the "Big Beautiful" budget bill and then this week failing to negotiate a solution to pass the NDAA measure. [...] "We MUST have one Federal Standard instead of a patchwork of 50 State Regulatory Regimes," Trump wrote on Truth Social last month. "If we don't, then China will easily catch us in the AI race. Put it in the NDAA, or pass a separate Bill, and nobody will ever be able to compete with America." If Congress bombs the assignment to find another way to pass the measure, Trump will likely release an executive order to enforce the policy. Republicans in Congress had dissuaded Trump from releasing a draft of that order, requesting time to find legislation where they believed an AI moratorium could pass. "The controversial proposal had faced backlash from a nationwide, bipartisan coalition of state lawmakers, parents, faith leaders, unions, whistleblowers, and other public advocates," the NDAA, a bipartisan group that lobbies for AI safety laws, said in a press release. This "widespread and powerful" movement "clapped back" at Republicans' latest "rushed attempt to sneak preemption through Congress," Brad Carson, ARI's president, said, because "Americans want safeguards that protect kids, workers, and families, not a rules-free zone for Big Tech."

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Never mind, says jolly green giant, we’re a networking-centric company now

HPE has revealed its revenue from servers and hybrid cloud products has gone backwards but insisted that’s nothing to worry because it’s now poised to profit from its acquisition of Juniper Networks.…

alternative_right quotes a report from the Guardian: The statue looms and glints at more than 11 feet tall and weighing 3,500 pounds, looking out at the city with, how to put it ... a characteristically stern expression? Despite its daunting appearance and history as a crimefighter of last resort, the giant new bronze figure of the movie character RoboCop is being seen as a symbol of hope, drawing fans and eliciting selfie mania since it began standing guard over Detroit on Wednesday afternoon. It has been 15 years in the making. Even in a snowstorm in the dark, people were driving by to see it, said Jim Toscano, co-owner of the Free Age film production company, where the statue now stands firmly bolted down near the sidewalk. RoboCop hit theaters in 1987, portraying a near-future Detroit as crime-ridden and poorly protected by a beleaguered and outgunned police force, until actor Peter Weller appeared as a nearly invincible cyborg, apparently created by a nefarious corporation bent on privatizing policing. A grassroots campaign to build a RoboCop statue in Detroit began in 2010, eventually raising over $67,000 on Kickstarter and resulting in a completed sculpture in 2017. However, hosting setbacks caused it to get stuck, "stored away from public view," reports the Guardian. The project finally found a home after business owner Mike Toscano agreed to display it in their new open-air product market, calling it "too unique and too cool not to do."

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U.S. regulators are pressing Waymo for answers after Texas officials reported 19 instances of its self-driving cars illegally passing stopped school buses, including cases that occurred after Waymo claimed to have deployed a software fix. Longtime Slashdot reader BrendaEM shares the report from Reuters: In a November 20 letter posted by NHTSA, the Austin Independent School District said five incidents occurred in November after Waymo said it had made software updates to resolve the issue and asked the company to halt operations around schools during pick-up and drop-off times until it could ensure the vehicles would not violate the law. "We cannot allow Waymo to continue endangering our students while it attempts to implement a fix," a lawyer for the school district wrote, citing one incident involving a Waymo that was "recorded driving past a stopped school bus only moments after a student crossed in front of the vehicle, and while the student was still in the road." The letter prompted NHTSA to ask Waymo on November 24 if it would comply with the request to cease self-driving operations during student pick-up and drop-off times, adding: "Was an appropriate software fix implemented or developed to mitigate this concern? And if so, does Waymo plan to file a recall for the fix?" The school district told Reuters on Thursday that Waymo refuses to halt operations around schools and said another incident involving a self-driving car and an actively loading school bus occurred on December 1, which "indicates that those programming changes did not resolve the issue or our concerns." In a statement, Waymo did not answer why it had refused to halt operations around Austin schools or answer if it would issue a recall. "We're deeply invested in safe interaction with school buses. We swiftly implemented software updates to address this and will continue to rapidly improve," Waymo said. NHTSA said in a letter to Waymo on Wednesday that it was demanding answers to a series of questions by January 20 about incidents involving school buses and details of software updates to address safety concerns.

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