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LibDem leader Sir Ed Davey calls Elon Musk a threat to national security

The leader of the UK's Liberal Democrat party is opposing a Tesla subsidiary being granted a license to supply electricity in Britain, calling Elon Musk a threat to national security.  …

BrianFagioli writes: Google is preparing to bring its television platforms in line with the rest of Android. Starting August 1, 2026, both Google TV and Android TV will require app updates that include native code to provide 64-bit support. The move follows similar requirements for phones and tablets, and it paves the way for upcoming 64-bit TV devices.

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Hmm, six, well, that's going to make Russia worry ...

Britain's threadbare defenses are getting a small boost. The UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) just announced that it's purchasing six new Land Ceptor anti-aircraft missile systems.…

Users told to switch protocols or delay installation while Redmond investigates

Microsoft has admitted to yet another issue in the Windows 11 August 2025 Security Update: streaming apps might be disrupted by the changes.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is narrowing the capabilities and reducing the number of next-generation weather and climate satellites it plans to build and launch in the coming decades, two people familiar with the plans told CNN. This move -- which comes as hurricane season ramps up with Erin lashing the East Coast -- fits a pattern in which the Trump administration is seeking to not only slash climate pollution rules, but also reduce the information collected about the pollution in the first place. Critics of the plan also say it's a short-sighted attempt to save money at the expense of understanding the oceans and atmosphere better. Two planned instruments, one that would measure air quality, including pollution and wildfire smoke, and another that would observe ocean conditions in unprecedented detail, are no longer part of the project, the sources said.

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The attack first affected an upstream provider of bespoke software

Exclusive A leading UK provider of criminal record checks for employers is handling a data breach stemming from a third-party development company.…

ClickFix tricks

Microsoft's security team has published an in-depth report into ClickFix, the social engineering attack which tricks users into executing malicious commands in the guise of proving their humanity.…

Remote work policies designed to attract top talent are becoming security vulnerabilities as state-sponsored hackers seek employment at cryptocurrency firms. Coinbase has implemented mandatory in-person orientation and US citizenship requirements for sensitive roles after detecting North Korean IT workers attempting to infiltrate the company through remote positions. CEO Brian Armstrong revealed on Stripe cofounder John Collison's podcast that the exchange now requires fingerprinting and live video interviews after discovering coordinated efforts involving US-based facilitators who reship laptops and attend virtual interviews on behalf of foreign operatives.

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Update finally gives coders control over when – and if – AI butts in

Good news for developers growing tired of Copilot's helpful suggestions. Microsoft has announced that it is now possible to make the programming assistant a little less irritating.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: As it tries to unseat Google, OpenAI is relying on search data from an unlikely source: Google. OpenAI has been using Google search results scraped from the web to help power ChatGPT responses, according to two people with knowledge of it. The Google search data helps answer ChatGPT queries on current events, such as news, sports and equity markets, one of the people said. OpenAI is getting the data from SerpApi, an eight-year-old web-scraping firm, which listed OpenAI as a customer on its website as recently as May last year. It removed the reference for reasons that couldn't be learned.

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Crypto mines, BEC scams, fake passports, and a $300M fraud empire allegedly brought down during Serengeti 2.0

Interpol's latest clampdown on cybercrime resulted in 1,209 arrests across the African continent, from ransomware crooks to business email compromise (BEC) scammers, the agency says.…

Professional services firms are engineering AI agents through massive prompt documents to automate complex knowledge work. KPMG Australia developed a 100-page prompt that transforms tax legislation and partner expertise into an agent producing comprehensive tax advice within 24 hours rather than the traditional two-week timeline. The TaxBot searches distributed internal documents and Australian tax code to generate 25-page draft reports after collecting four to five inputs from tax agents. Chief Digital Officer John Munnelly said the system operates on KPMG Workbench, a global platform combining retrieval-augmented generation with models from OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Anthropic, and Meta.

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Windows giant takes aim at spammers exploiting new 365 tenants

Microsoft has issued a warning to companies using the onmicrosoft.com domain for emails: get your domain sorted out or face throttling.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Denmark is to stop charging VAT on books in an attempt to get more people reading. At 25%, the country's tax rate on books is the highest in the world, a policy the government believes is contributing to a growing "reading crisis." The culture minister, Jakob Engel-Schmidt, announced on Wednesday that the government would propose in its budget bill that the tax on books be removed. The move is expected to cost 330 million kroner ($51 million) a year. "This is something that I, as minister of culture, have worked for, because I believe that we must put everything at stake if we are to end the reading crisis that has unfortunately been spreading in recent years," Engel-Schmidt told the Ritzau news agency . "I am incredibly proud. It is not every day that one succeeds in convincing colleagues that such massive money should be spent on investing in the consumption and culture of the Danes." [...] "It is also about getting literature out there," said Engel-Schmidt. "That is why we have already allocated money for strengthened cooperation between the country's public libraries and schools, so that more children can be introduced to good literature." [...] If prices do not fall as a result of the measure, Engel-Schmidt said he would reconsider whether it was the right course of action. "I will of course monitor how prices develop. If it turns out that abolishing VAT only means that publishers' profits grow and prices do not fall, then we must consider whether it was the right thing to do," he said. Further reading: Denmark Ending Letter Deliveries Is a Sign of the Digital Times

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Coweta County stalls bit barn vote as residents revolt

A county in the US state of Georgia is facing opposition to the construction of a massive hyperscale datacenter campus, reflecting the growing concerns of communities in America and elsewhere over the rush to build more cloud and AI infrastructure.…

Project scrambles for mitigation as AUR, forums, and main site feel the strain

Some joyless ne'er-do-well has loosed a botnet on the community-driven Arch Linux distro, with a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack now in its second week of sustained disruption.…

Graphics API, crash reporting and more: Making low-level code cross-platform for Windows is a challenge

Zed co-founder Max Brunfield has explained why the Windows port of the Rust-based editor is taking so long – illustrating the friction facing developers of cross-platform applications when including Microsoft's operating system.…

Davis Lu, a former Eaton Corporation developer, has been sentenced to four years in prison for sabotaging his ex-employer's Windows network with malware and a custom kill switch that locked out thousands of employees once his account was disabled. The attack caused significant operational disruption and financial losses, with Lu also attempting to cover his tracks by deleting data and researching privilege escalation techniques. BleepingComputer reports: After a corporate restructuring and subsequent demotion in 2018, the DOJ says that Lu retaliated by embedding malicious code throughout the company's Windows production environment. The malicious code included an infinite Java thread loop designed to overwhelm servers and crash production systems. Lu also created a kill switch named "IsDLEnabledinAD" ("Is Davis Lu enabled in Active Directory") that would automatically lock all users out of their accounts if his account was disabled in Active Directory. When his employment was terminated on September 9, 2019, and his account disabled, the kill switch activated, causing thousands of users to be locked out of their systems. "The defendant breached his employer's trust by using his access and technical knowledge to sabotage company networks, wreaking havoc and causing hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses for a U.S. company," said Acting Assistant Attorney General Matthew R. Galeotti. When he was instructed to return his laptop, Lu reportedly deleted encrypted data from his device. Investigators later discovered search queries on the device researching how to elevate privileges, hide processes, and quickly delete files. Lu was found guilty earlier this year of intentionally causing damage to protected computers. After his four-year sentence, Lu will also serve three years of supervised release following his prison term.

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Open source Surya system promises early alerts for space weather that can fry satellites and grids

Boffins at IBM and NASA have concocted an AI model to help predict the weather, but this time it is taking on space weather that might disrupt satellites and spacecraft, possibly even terrestrial power grids and the internet.…

Escort's forgotten cap left techie facing rifles and a debrief

On Call Welcome once again to On Call, The Register's reader-contributed column that tells tales of your tech support misadventures.…