TheRegister
Aid groups use AI-generated ‘poverty porn’ to juice fundraising efforts
The starving child whose picture broke your heart when you saw it on a charity website may not be real. Global health researchers say that stock image companies like Adobe are profiting from AI-generated "poverty porn" that non-profits are using to drum up donations.…
Windows 11 tiptoes further into dark mode with new dialogs
Windows 11 launched way back in October 2021 and has become Microsoft’s must-have OS thanks to the impending end-of-life for Windows 10. After all that time, there are still significant portions of the OS that don’t do dark mode. However, Redmond is making significant progress, bringing a couple of key dialog boxes into compliance.…
Today is when the Amazon brain drain finally sent AWS down the spout
column "It's always DNS" is a long-standing sysadmin saw, and with good reason: a disproportionate number of outages are at their heart DNS issues. And so today, as AWS is still repairing its downed cloud as this article goes to press, it becomes clear that the culprit is once again DNS. But if you or I know this, AWS certainly does.…
Xubuntu downloads section injection threatens users with crypto infection
Someone managed to insert a compromised file into the downloads section of the website for Xubuntu, the official Ubuntu flavor with the Xfce desktop environment. The malware was designed to steal cryptocurrency, but so far, there are no reports of actual theft.…
Nvidia still needs Taiwan even as TSMC ramps Blackwell production in Arizona
US manufacturing of Nvidia GPUs is underway and CEO Jensen Huang is celebrating the first Blackwell wafer to come out of TSMC's Arizona chip factory. However, to be part of a complete product, those chips may need to visit Taiwan.…
China blames US for cyber break-in, claims America is world's biggest bit burglar
China has blamed the US for a "major cyberattack" against its National Time Service Center, alleging it could have disrupted the country's communications, financial, and transportation networks, and even caused power outages.…
AWS outage exposes Achilles heel: central control plane
Analysis Amazon's US-EAST-1 region outage caused widespread chaos, taking websites and services offline even in Europe and raising some difficult questions. After all, cloud operations are supposed to have some built-in resiliency, right?…
In '90s Microsoft, you either shipped code or shipped out
Microsoft has made headlines for mass layoffs in recent times, but former company engineer Dave Plummer has explained how things were done a quarter of a century ago – and what it was like living through the tech giant's notorious stack ranking system.…
UK rethinks offshoring ban for £8M online procurement system
The UK government has signaled its intention to allow a supplier providing maintenance to its online procurement platform to subcontract offshore, having previously said that this was off-limits due to security concerns.…
Windows 11 update knocks out USB mice, keyboards in recovery mode
Microsoft has confirmed a bug that disables USB mice and keyboards in the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) after installing security update KB5066835, released October 14.…
Like Apollo before them, ESA astronauts hone lunar landing skills in helicopters
European Space Agency (ESA) astronauts have completed a helicopter training course to prepare them for upcoming lunar landings.…
Benioff backs off: Salesforce chief says sorry for Trump troop talk
Salesforce co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff has apologized for backing President Donald Trump's proposals to send the National Guard to San Francisco, where the company is based and holds its annual conference.…
Lloyds Banking Group claims Microsoft Copilot saves staff 46 minutes a day
Lloyds Banking Group claims employees save 46 minutes daily using Microsoft 365 Copilot, based on a survey of 1,000 users among nearly 30,000 deployed licenses.…
The real insight behind measuring Copilot usage is Microsoft's desperation
Opinion The quantum theory of management includes an analogy for the physical law of the observer effect, where observing a system changes its state. When you make a metric a target, it is not useful as a metric. Instead of reflecting whatever underlying behavior it was intended to measure, the metric becomes a measure of how well the benchmark is being gamed.…
Major AWS outage across US-East region breaks half the internet
A major outage is affecting Amazon Web Services (AWS), with even Amazon's own web page reported to be offline and dozens of other online services and websites affected, including disruption in the UK.…
A simple AI prompt saved a developer from this job interview scam
INFOSEC IN BRIEF Engineer David Dodda says he was just "30 seconds away" from running malware on his own computer after nearly falling victim to a North Korea-type job interview scam with a "legitimate" blockchain company. …
Tribunal wonders if Microsoft has found a legal hero after pivot to copyright gambit
The long-running legal battle between ValueLicensing and Microsoft over the resale of software licenses has taken another turn following Microsoft's attempt to make the case about copyright.…
UK calls up Armed Forces veterans for digital ID soft launch
The UK's Armed Forces veterans are being tasked with one last mission – proving the government can successfully roll out a digital ID card scheme.…
Company that made power systems for servers didn’t know why its own machines ran out of juice
Who, Me? Each new Monday ushers in a week during which you might shine or flatline. The Register celebrates the times you end up doing the latter with a new instalment of Who, Me? It's the column in which you admit to making mistakes and execute cunning escapes.…
Ruby Central tries to make peace after 'hostile takeover'
Ruby Central, the non-profit that recently seized some Ruby open source tools from maintainers, is transferring the repository ownership of RubyGems and Bundler to the Ruby core team. The move appears to be an attempt to mollify the Ruby community following a divisive power grab, but it does not restore the control of those tools to the maintainers who previously oversaw them.…