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Switchzilla says flaws could allow file overwrites or privilege escalation

Just when network admins thought the Cisco SD-WAN patch queue might finally be shrinking, Switchzilla has confirmed miscreants are exploiting more vulnerabilities in its SD-WAN management software.…

The National Videogame Museum has acquired an extremely rare MSF-1 development kit, believed to be the oldest surviving prototype of the canceled Nintendo PlayStation. Engadget reports: Nicknamed the Nintendo PlayStation, the idea was that a new CD-ROM format backed by Sony would be added to the cartridge-based Super NES, resulting in a hybrid console that could play both. The partnership didn't last long, though, with Nintendo backing out before it ever really got off the ground, announcing that it would instead be working with Philips. Sony decided to make the PlayStation on its own instead, in an act of revenge that you have to say paid off in the long run, and we never did get to see Crash Bandicoot running around the Mushroom Kingdom. Still, the short-lived Nintendo PlayStation remains a fascinating what-if scenario in video game history, and the USA's National Video Museum has acquired the original development kit.

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Brands Trump administration decision 'legally unsound' and has 'no choice but to challenge it in court'

AI giant Anthropic says that it has "no choice" but to sue the US government after being officially designated a supply chain risk to national security.…

Humanity and its neighbor safe from this menace at least

Scientists have ruled out the possibility that the near-Earth asteroid 2024 YR4 might hit the Moon on December 22, 2032.…

A Florida woman was sentenced to 22 months in federal prison and fined $50,000 for illegally trafficking thousands of Microsoft certificate-of-authenticity labels used to activate Windows and Office. Prosecutors said she bought genuine labels cheaply from suppliers and resold them without the accompanying licensed software, wiring over $5 million during the scheme. TechRadar reports: The indictment details how [52-year-old Heidi Richards] purchased tens of thousands of genuine COA labels from a Texas-based supplier between 2018 and 2023 for well below the retail value, before reselling them in bulk to customers globally without the licensed software. "COA labels are not to be sold separately from the license and hardware that they are intended to accompany, and they hold no independent commercial value," the US Attorney's Office wrote. Richards was found to have wired $5,148,181.50 to the unnamed Texas company during the scheme's operation. Some examples include the purchase of 800 Windows 10 COA labels in July 2018 for $22,100 (under $28 each) and a further 10,000 Windows 10 Pro COA labels in December 2022 for $200,000 ($20 each). Ultimately fined $50,000 and given a near-two-year sentence, prosecutors had sought to get Richards to pay $242,000, "which represents the proceeds obtained from the offenses."

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Draft rules could force Nvidia and AMD to seek government approval before selling abroad

The Trump administration is reportedly planning new restrictions on GPU exports, aimed not only at controlling who gets them, but at driving AI investment back into the US.…

Crooks tweak familiar copy-paste ruse so that victims run malicious commands themselves

A new twist on the long-running ClickFix scam is now tricking Windows users into launching Windows Terminal and pasting malware into it themselves – handing the credential-stealing Lumma infostealer the keys to their browser vault.…

House of Lords committee says ministers must not trade a £124B sector for promises of future tech growth

Britain's creative industries will face significant damage unless the government strengthens AI copyright law, according to a House of Lords committee.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Wikipedia editors have implemented new policies and restricted a number of contributors who were paid to use AI to translate existing Wikipedia articles into other languages after they discovered these AI translations added AI "hallucinations," or errors, to the resulting article. The new restrictions show how Wikipedia editors continue to fight the flood of generative AI across the internet from diminishing the reliability of the world's largest repository of knowledge. The incident also reveals how even well-intentioned efforts to expand Wikipedia are prone to errors when they rely on generative AI, and how they're remedied by Wikipedia's open governance model. The issue centers around a program run by the Open Knowledge Association (OKA), a nonprofit that was found to be "mostly relying on cheap labor from contractors in the Global South" to translate English Wikipedia articles into other languages. Some translators began using tools like Google Gemini and ChatGPT to speed up the process, but editors reviewing the work found numerous hallucinations, including factual errors, missing citations, and references to unrelated sources. "Ultimately the editors decided to implement restrictions against OKA translators who make multiple errors, but not block OKA translation as a rule," reports 404 Media.

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Admins get another year before migration pressure ramps up

Microsoft has delayed the opt-out phase for the new enterprise version of Outlook to 2027, giving administrators another 12 months to get ready for migration.…

FBI and French GIGN swoop on Saint Martin, John Daghita in cuffs

The son of a government contractor was arrested in the Caribbean after allegedly stealing more than $46 million in seized cryptocurrency from the US Marshals Service, the FBI says.…

Its aim is wide, covering everything from social networks to genAI

Norway's Forbrukerrådet consumer council is taking aim at the creeping enshittification of modern life in a 100-page report – and a splendid four-minute video which we highly recommend.…

Released from the curse of the update bork fairy

Microsoft has finally fixed a Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) bug it introduced in Windows 10's final update.…

It promised £1.15B… but finance ministry yet to show 'formal commitment' to adopt Workday SaaS, watchdog says

The UK's Treasury is yet to fully commit to joining a multi-billion pound ERP and HR shared services program it has agreed to fund, potentially slashing any resulting savings, according to a report from the National Audit Office.…

Attackers accessed systems holding data tied to millions of Oyster and contactless users

Transport for London has confirmed that a 2024 breach exposed the data of more than 7 million people – a far larger crowd than the few thousand customers originally warned that their details might be at risk.…

BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: An international team of scientists has done something chemistry has never seen before. IBM, working alongside researchers from the University of Manchester, Oxford University, ETH Zurich, EPFL, and the University of Regensburg, has created and characterized a molecule whose electrons travel through its structure in a corkscrew-like pattern, fundamentally altering its chemical behavior. The findings were published today in Science. The molecule, known as C13Cl2, is the first experimental observation of what scientists call a half-Mobius electronic topology in a single molecule. To the researchers' knowledge, nothing like it has ever been synthesized, observed, or even formally predicted. And proving why it behaves the way it does required something equally extraordinary -- a quantum computer. The whole thing started at IBM, where the molecule was assembled atom by atom from a custom precursor synthesized at Oxford. Working under ultra-high vacuum at near-absolute-zero temperatures, researchers used precisely calibrated voltage pulses to remove individual atoms one at a time. The result is an electronic structure that undergoes a 90-degree twist with each circuit through the molecule, requiring four complete loops to return to its starting phase. That is a topological property that has no counterpart anywhere in chemistry's existing record. What makes it even more interesting to folks who follow materials science is that this topology can be switched. The molecule can move reversibly between clockwise-twisted, counterclockwise-twisted, and untwisted states. That means electronic topology is not just a curiosity to be stumbled upon in nature -- it can be deliberately engineered. That is a big deal. The quantum computing angle here is not just a supporting role. Electrons within C13Cl2 interact in deeply entangled ways, each influencing the others simultaneously. Modeling that requires tracking every possible configuration of those interactions at once -- something that causes computational demands to grow exponentially and can quickly overwhelm classical machines. A decade ago, researchers could exactly model 16 electrons classically. Today that number has crept to 18. Using IBM's quantum computer, the team was able to explore 32 electrons. Quantum computers can represent these systems directly rather than approximate them, because they operate according to the same quantum mechanical laws that govern electrons in molecules. In this case, that capability helped reveal helical molecular orbitals for electron attachment -- a fingerprint of the half-Mobius topology -- and exposed the mechanism behind the unusual structure: a helical pseudo-Jahn-Teller effect.

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Seven-year Freedom of Information battle heads to tribunal

Exclusive The UK's Department for Transport (DfT) is assembling government lawyers to fight the Information Commissioner's decision that it must release a document summarizing the lessons from the 2018 Gatwick drone chaos.…

OpenAI CEO's principles lasted about 12 hours before $200M check arrived

Opinion A week ago today, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he'd draw the same lines as Anthropic. By that night, he'd signed a Department of Defense deal that included no such AI protections. What's going on here?…

Discovering, and explaining, the bizarre cause was harder than the job he was sent to do

On Call Welcome to another instalment of On Call, The Register's weekly reader-contributed column that tells tales of times when tech support turned troublesome.…

A recently-revised Senate authorization bill (PDF), co-sponsored by Senate Commerce Committee Chair Ted Cruz, would extend the International Space Station's lifespan from 2030 to 2032 while pushing NASA to accelerate plans for commercial space stations to replace it. Ars Technica's Eric Berger reports: Regarding NASA's support for the development of commercial space stations, the bill mandates the following, within specified periods, of passage of the law: - Within 60 days, publicly release the requirements for commercial space stations in low-Earth orbit - Within 90 days, release the final "request for proposals" to solicit industry responses - Within 180 days, enter into contracts with "two or more" commercial providers for such stations Cruz is trying to inject urgency into NASA as several private companies -- including Axiom Space, Blue Origin, Vast, and Voyager -- are finalizing designs for space stations. All have expressed a desire for clarity from NASA on how long the space agency would like its astronauts to stay on board, the types of scientific equipment needed, and much more. These are known as "requirements" in NASA parlance. [...] Cruz and other senators on the committee appear to share those concerns, as their legislation extends the International Space Station's lifespan from 2030 to 2032 (an extension must still be approved by international partners, including Russia). Moreover, the authorization bill states, "The Administrator shall not initiate the de-orbit of the ISS until the date on which a commercial low-Earth orbit destination has reached an initial operational capability." With this legislation, the U.S. Senate is making clear that it views a permanent human presence in low-Earth orbit as a high priority. This version of the authorization legislation must still be passed by the full Senate and work its way through the House of Representatives.

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