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The vendor hops aboard GSA’s OneGov train, offering models from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and more

Not to be left behind in the flurry of government-wide AI purchasing deals, Box has signed a deal with the feds that'll inject some agentic AI into federal government systems. …

Windows 365 Reserve offers 10-day cloud PCs when your machine goes kaput – but you'll still need another device to access them

Microsoft is so confident in the reliability and security of its Windows 11 OS that it's now offering businesses the ability to quickly dump users onto temporary VMs in its cloud when, not if, their desktops and laptops break.…

Seven additional regions across England will now have access to the controversial tech

A fresh expansion of UK crimefighters' access to live facial recognition (LFR) technology is being described by officials as "an excellent opportunity for policing." Privacy campaigners diagree.…

Shock news: billionaire techpreneur is not a fan

Geek-turned-venture-capitalist Marc Andreessen has weighed in on the arguments surrounding the UK's Online Safety Act, accusing the UK government of leaking his input.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Experts at the University of Edinburgh carried out a post-mortem brain examination on 25 cats which had symptoms of dementia in life, including confusion, sleep disruption and an increase in vocalization. They found a build-up of amyloid-beta, a toxic protein and one of the defining features of Alzheimer's disease. The discovery has been hailed as a "perfect natural model for Alzheimer's" by scientists who believe it will help them explore new treatments for humans. Dr Robert McGeachan, study lead from the University of Edinburgh's Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies, said: "Dementia is a devastating disease -- whether it affects humans, cats, or dogs. Our findings highlight the striking similarities between feline dementia and Alzheimer's disease in people. This opens the door to exploring whether promising new treatments for human Alzheimer's disease could also help our ageing pets." [...] Previously, researchers have studied genetically-modified rodents, although the species does not naturally suffer from dementia. "Because cats naturally develop these brain changes, they may also offer a more accurate model of the disease than traditional laboratory animals, ultimately benefiting both species and their caregivers," Dr McGeachan said. [...] Prof Danielle Gunn-Moore, an expert in feline medicine at the vet school, said the discovery could also help to understand and manage feline dementia. The findings have been published in the European Journal of Neuroscience.

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For now at least, even though government buying can improve, open source is not all it's cracked up to be

Debate Not for the first time, Microsoft is in the spotlight for the UK government's money it voraciously consumes – apparently £1.9 billion a year in software licensing, and roughly £9 billion over five years. Not surprisingly, there are plenty of voices challenging whether this is good use of public money. After all, aren't there plenty of open source alternatives?…

Foundation warns federated servers face biggest risk, but single-instance users can take their time

The maintainers of the federated secure chat protocol Matrix are warning users of a pair of "high severity protocol vulnerabilities," addressed in the latest version, saying patching them requires a breaking change in servers and clients.…

You guessed it: looks like it's a so-called AI

People are noticing Firefox gobbling extra CPU and electricity, apparently caused by an "inference engine" built into recent versions of Firefox. Don't say El Reg didn't try to warn you.…

An encounter with the healthcare system reveals sickening decisions about data

Column We already live in a world where pretty much every public act - online or in the real world - leaves a mark in a database somewhere. But how far back does that record extend? I recently learned that record goes back further than I'd seriously imagined.…

United Launch Alliance's Vulcan Centaur rocket successfully completed its first-ever national security mission, launching the U.S. military's first experimental navigation satellite in 48 years. Space.com reports: The mission saw the company's powerful new Vulcan Centaur rocket take off from Space Launch Complex 41 (SLC-41) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. Vulcan launched with four side-mounted solid rocket boosters in order to generate enough thrust to send its payload directly into geosynchronous orbit on one of ULA's longest flights ever, a seven-hour journey that will span over 22,000 miles (35,000 kilometers), according to ULA. The payload launching on Tuesday's mission was the U.S. military's first experimental navigation satellite to be launched in 48 years. It is what's known as a position, navigation and timing (PNT) satellite, a type of spacecraft that provides data similar to that of the well-known GPS system. This satellite will be testing many experimental new technologies that are designed to make it resilient to jamming and spoofing, according to Andrew Builta with L3Harris Technologies, the prime contractor for the PNT payload integrated onto a satellite bus built by Northrop Grumman. The satellite, identified publicly only as Navigation Technology Satellite-3 (NTS-3), features a phased array antenna that allows it to "focus powerful beams to ground forces and combat jamming environments," Builta said in a media roundtable on Monday (Aug. 11). GPS jamming has become an increasingly worrisome problem for both the U.S. military and commercial satellite operators, which is why this spacecraft will be conducting experiments to test how effective these new technologies are at circumventing jamming attacks. In addition, the satellite features a software architecture that allows it to be reprogrammed while in orbit. "This is a truly game-changing capability," Builta said.

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Agency asks for ideas from US industry as orbit decays

NASA is seeking solutions for a way to raise the orbit of the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory despite the spacecraft being marked for termination after FY2026 under the agency's budget proposal.…

Minnesota’s capital is the latest to feature on Interlock’s leak blog after late-July cyberattack

The Interlock ransomware gang has flaunted a 43GB haul of files allegedly stolen from the city of Saint Paul, following a late-July cyberattack that forced the Minnesota capital to declare a state of national emergency.…

First came the fireball, then a hole in the roof and a dent in the floor

In late June media speculated that a meteor entering Earth’s atmosphere caused widespread sightings of a celestial fireball during daylight hours across the southeast USA. Scientists have now confirmed space rocks caused the phenomenon, citing as evidence a meteorite they found in a resident’s living room.…

Federal Court finds Big Tech players abused their market power

Australia’s Federal Court has given Epic Games another win in its global fight against the way Apple and Google run their app stores.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: You can't say Linux creator Linus Torvalds didn't give the kernel developers fair warning. He'd told them: "The upcoming merge window for 6.17 is going to be slightly chaotic for me. I have multiple family events this August (a wedding and a big birthday), and with said family being spread not only across the US, but in Finland too, I'm spending about half the month traveling." Therefore, Torvalds continued, "That does not mean I'll be more lenient to late pull requests (probably quite the reverse, since it's just going to add to the potential chaos)." So, when Meta software engineer Palmer Dabbelt pushed through a set of RISC-V patches and admitted "this is very late," he knew he was playing with fire. He just didn't know how badly he'd be burned. Torvalds fired back on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML): "This is garbage and it came in too late. I asked for early pull requests because I'm traveling, and if you can't follow that rule, at least make the pull requests good." It went downhill from there. Torvalds continued: "This adds various garbage that isn't RISC-V specific to generic header files. And by 'garbage," I really mean it. This is stuff that nobody should ever send me, never mind late in a merge window." Specifically, Torvalds hated the "crazy and pointless" way in which one of the patch's helper functions combined two unsigned 16-bit integers into a 32-bit integer. How bad was it? "That thing makes the world actively a worse place to live. It's useless garbage that makes any user incomprehensible, and actively *WORSE* than not using that stupid 'helper.'" In addition to the quality issues, Torvalds was annoyed that the offending code was added to generic header files rather than the RISC-V tree. He emphasized that such generic changes could negatively impact the broader Linux community, writing: "You just made things WORSE, and you added that 'helper' to a generic non-RISC-V file where people are apparently supposed to use it to make other code worse too... So no. Things like this need to get bent. It does not go into generic header files, and it damn well does not happen late in the merge window. You're on notice: no more late pull requests, and no more garbage outside the RISC-V tree." [...] Dabbelt gets it. He replied, "OK, sorry. I've been dropping the ball lately, and it kind of piled up, taking a bunch of stuff late, but that just leads to me making mistakes. So I'll stop being late, and hopefully that helps with the quality issues."

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Tells court 'What I did was wrong and I want to apologize for my conduct'

Terraform Labs founder Do Kwon has pled guilty to committing fraud when promoting the so-called "stablecoin" Terra USD and now faces time in jail.…

Cornell University researchers have developed an "invisible" light-based watermarking system that embeds unique codes into the physical light that illuminates the subject during recording, allowing any camera to capture authentication data without special hardware. By comparing these coded light patterns against recorded footage, analysts can spot deepfake manipulations, offering a more resilient verification method than traditional file-based watermarks. TechSpot reports: Programmable light sources such as computer monitors, studio lighting, or certain LED fixtures can be embedded with coded brightness patterns using software alone. Standard non-programmable lamps can be adapted by fitting them with a compact chip -- roughly the size of a postage stamp -- that subtly fluctuates light intensity according to a secret code. The embedded code consists of tiny variations in lighting frequency and brightness that are imperceptible to the naked eye. Michael explained that these fluctuations are designed based on human visual perception research. Each light's unique code effectively produces a low-resolution, time-stamped record of the scene under slightly different lighting conditions. [Abe Davis, an assistant professor] refers to these as code videos. "When someone manipulates a video, the manipulated parts start to contradict what we see in these code videos," Davis said. "And if someone tries to generate fake video with AI, the resulting code videos just look like random variations." By comparing the coded patterns against the suspect footage, analysts can detect missing sequences, inserted objects, or altered scenes. For example, content removed from an interview would appear as visual gaps in the recovered code video, while fabricated elements would often show up as solid black areas. The researchers have demonstrated the use of up to three independent lighting codes within the same scene. This layering increases the complexity of the watermark and raises the difficulty for potential forgers, who would have to replicate multiple synchronized code videos that all match the visible footage. The concept is called noise-coded illumination and was presented on August 10 at SIGGRAPH 2025 in Vancouver, British Columbia.

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Terraform Labs founder Do Kwon pleaded guilty in U.S. federal court to conspiracy to defraud and wire fraud over the $40 billion collapse of TerraUSD and Luna in 2022. Reuters reports: Kwon, 33, who co-founded Singapore-based Terraform Labs and developed the TerraUSD and Luna currencies, entered the plea at a court hearing in New York before U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer. He had pleaded not guilty in January to a nine-count indictment charging him with securities fraud, wire fraud, commodities fraud and money laundering conspiracy. Accused of misleading investors in 2021 about TerraUSD - a so-called stablecoin designed to maintain a value of $1 - Kwon pleaded guilty to the two counts under an agreement with the Manhattan U.S. Attorney's office, which brought the charges. He faces up to 25 years in prison when Engelmayer sentences him on December 11, though prosecutor Kimberly Ravener said the government had agreed to advocate for a prison term of no more than 12 years provided he accepts responsibility for his crimes. "I made false and misleading statements about why it regained its peg by failing to disclose a trading firm's role in restoring that peg," Kwon said in court. "What I did was wrong."

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ole_timer shares a report from the New York Times: Investigators have uncovered evidence that Russia is at least partly responsible for a recent hack of the computer system that manages federal court documents, including highly sensitive records with information that could reveal sources and people charged with national security crimes, according to several people briefed on the breach. It is not clear what entity is responsible, whether an arm of Russian intelligence might be behind the intrusion or if other countries were also involved, which some of the people familiar with the matter described as a yearslong effort to infiltrate the system. Some of the searches included midlevel criminal cases in the New York City area and several other jurisdictions, with some cases involving people with Russian and Eastern European surnames. Administrators with the court system recently informed Justice Department officials, clerks and chief judges in federal courts that "persistent and sophisticated cyber threat actors have recently compromised sealed records," according to an internal department memo reviewed by The New York Times. The administrators also advised those officials to quickly remove the most sensitive documents from the system. "This remains an URGENT MATTER that requires immediate action," officials wrote, referring to guidance that the Justice Department had issued in early 2021 after the system was first infiltrated. Documents related to criminal activity with an overseas tie, across at least eight district courts, were initially believed to have been targeted. Last month, the chief judges of district courts across the country were quietly warned to move those kinds of cases off the regular document-management system, according to officials briefed on the request. They were initially told not to discuss the matter with other judges in their districts.

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None under active exploit…yet

Microsoft’s August Patch Tuesday flaw-fixing festival addresses 111 problems in its products, a dozen of which are deemed critical, and one moderate-severity flaw that is listed as being publicly known.…