Hey, teacher, leave that cabling alone On Call Welcome once more to On Call, The Register's reader-contributed Friday column in which we share your stories of tech support jobs so wrong, they're right.

Optus gave bad instructions, staff didnt escalate their concerns Technicians working on a firewall upgrade made at least ten mistakes, contributing to two deaths, according to a report on a September incident that saw Australian telco Optus unable to route calls to emergency services.

Beijing wants to 'seize the initiative in the international competition in cyberspace' Chinese authorities on Thursday certified the China Environment for Network Innovation (CENI), a vast research network that Beijing hopes will propel the country to the forefront of networking research.

Plus: Lazarus Group has a brand new BeaverTail Even Amazon isn't immune to North Korean scammers who try to score remote jobs at tech companies so they can funnel their wages to Kim Jong Un's coffers.

Even if Mozilla is going to add an AI kill switch, that may not be enough to reassure many. Waterfox, a popular fork of Firefox, is saying nay to AI. Considering how unpopular Mozilla's plan to botify its browser has become, this could win the alternative some converts.

Customers in 10 of the companys 23 regions had operations fail or take an extended amount of time to complete. Snowflake pushed an update this week that caused a major outage worldwide, leaving many users unable to query data, experiencing failures when ingesting files, and receiving error messages for 13 hours, the company wrote in an impact statement.

Study finds built-in browsers across gadgets often ship years out of date Web browsers for desktop and mobile devices tend to receive regular security updates, but that often isn't the case for those that reside within game consoles, televisions, e-readers, cars, and other devices. These outdated, embedded browsers can leave you open to phishing and other security vulnerabilities.

'Within 10 minutes of gaining initial access, crypto miners were operational' Your AWS account could be quietly running someone else's cryptominer. Cryptocurrency thieves are using stolen Amazon account credentials to mine for coins at the expense of AWS customers, abusing their Elastic Container Service (ECS) and their Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) resources, in an ongoing operation that started on November 2.

NGMN warns fragmented standards leave operators guessing about power use The Next Generation Mobile Networks (NGMN) alliance is calling for standardized ways to measure energy consumption, saying that the industry cannot deliver on its efficiency and sustainability goals without them.

Ambitious timelines dont bend the laws of physics Just when you thought 2025 couldn't get any weirder, Trump Media and Technology Group - best known for Truth Social - is jumping into the still-nascent but heavily funded nuclear fusion industry via a planned merger with TAE Technologies.

ByBit attack doing some seriously heavy lifting North Korea's yearly cryptocurrency thefts have accelerated, with Kim's state-backed cybercriminals plundering just over $2 billion worth of tokens in 2025.

Around 2,000 GP practices use its products Updated An NHS tech supplier is investigating a cyberattack that affected its systems in the early hours of Sunday.

Flaw in remote-access appliance lets attackers chain bugs for root-level takeover SonicWall has warned customers of a zero-day flaw in its SMA 1000 remote-access appliance that's being actively exploited, potentially allowing attackers to escalate privileges and take over boxes.

Justice Department claims unlicensed exchange funneled ransomware profits US feds have dismantled a crypto laundering service that they say helped cybercrooks wash tens of millions of dollars in dirty digital cash, seizing its servers and unsealing charges against an alleged Russian operator.

Billionaire space tourist inherits troubled agency facing budget chaos, workforce cuts, and a Moon race against China NASA has a new administrator. Billionaire and space tourist Jared Isaacman was confirmed by the US Senate by a vote of 67 to 30.

Security boffins warn flaw is now being used for ransomware attacks against live networks Microsoft says attackers have already compromised "several hundred machines across a diverse set of organizations" via the React2Shell flaw, using the access to execute code, deploy malware, and, in some cases, deliver ransomware.

Gov wants broadcaster to revive 1980s computer literacy magic and maybe flog its archives to tech giants The UK government wants the BBC to help Brits understand AI and develop basic technology skills as part of the public broadcaster's next charter period.

18-year-old platform crumbles under 94M daily requests while resellers flog 62 tests for 500 The UK's Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) has appointed a new chief exec to tackle spiraling waits for practical driving tests with bots overrunning its aging booking system.

Investigatory Powers Commissioner says reforms have failed to close oversight gaps The UK's Investigatory Powers Act 2016 (IPA) has several regulatory gaps that must be plugged in future legislative reforms, according to Investigatory Powers Commissioner (IPC) Sir Brian Leveson.

MPs press minister for answers and get few If UK readers are perplexed by the country's seemingly shambolic state of broadband and telecoms, relative to other European nations, insight can be gleaned from a one-off evidence session conducted by Parliament.

World Summit on the Information Society resolves the world needs a permanent forum to discuss how we manage the 'Net The United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday reached consensus on a review of the worlds internet governance arrangements and preserved the current multi-stakeholder model that means governments are just one of many voices that debate the future of the internet.

Even with its new fabs coming online, demand will exceed supply Memory-maker Micron Technology has predicted that RAM shortages are here to stay, meaning higher prices for servers probably are, too.

Believes it can translate workflow smarts into AI ROI In October, Salesforce debuted Agentforce IT in a direct challenge to ServiceNows ITSM product, and analyst firm Forresters vice president and principal analyst Charles Betz rated it the most credible threat ServiceNow has ever faced.

GPT-before-GPA plan has faculty and students scratching their heads Purdue University last week said it will require incoming undergraduate students to meet an "AI working competency" requirement in order to graduate.

Amazon bets that by making AI its own group, it can outpace Microsoft and Google In today's episode of "Amazon Kremlinology," AWS has put out a press release that shows a significant shuffle of one of AWS's most storied leaders.

No timeline for a patch Suspected Chinese-government-linked threat actors have been battering a maximum-severity Cisco AsyncOS zero-day vulnerability in some Secure Email Gateway (SEG) and Secure Email and Web Manager (SEWM) appliances for nearly a month, and there's no timeline for a fix.

Plus: automated SBOMs, $250,000 bounties ahead interview No good idea - like rewarding open source software developers and maintainers for their contributions - goes unabused by cybercriminals, and this was the case with the Tea Protocol and two token farming campaigns.

Folder permission changes cause queue failures and misleading error messages, no real fix yet Microsoft has good news for administrators: while some organizations now pay for security updates on older Windows versions, the inconsistent quality remains free.

Engineers cried foul over plan to charge $0.002/min. updated Following publication of our original article, GitHub reversed its decision. The Microsoft-owned developer site has taken to X to admit it might have made a mistake by unilaterally announcing plans to charge people for using their own hardware to host runners.

Vermont lawmaker proposes DC moratorium to give Congress time to rein in the AI boom US Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is calling for a nationwide moratorium on datacenter construction, saying it would "give democracy a chance to catch up and make sure that the benefits of technology work for all of us, not just the wealthiest people on Earth."

Startup expects its first Kaleidos reactor to power on at Idaho National Lab next year Amid the AI boom, nuclear power is in vogue, with venture capitalists lining up to plow hundreds of millions into small modular reactor (SMR) startups to make their datacenter energy headaches go away.

Spacecraft was 'rotating in an unexpected manner' and might have shifted orbit NASA is still trying to recontact the MAVEN Mars orbiter after it stopped responding earlier this month, with fragmentary tracking data hinting the craft may be tumbling and off its predicted trajectory.

Regulator makes various additional demands over alleged cybersecurity failings In proposing a settlement agreement, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) says that Illusory Systems must repay users funds lost in a 2022 cyberattack.

CodeRabbit review of pull requests shows meatbags beat clankers Generating code using AI increases the number of issues that need to be reviewed and the severity of those issues.

Build a digital backbone faster than adversaries can evolve or lose the information war NATO is in an existential race to develop sovereign cloud- based technologies to underpin its mission, the alliance's Assistant Secretary General for Cyber and Digital Transformation told an audience at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) last week.

Full Self-Driving Capability marketing deemed a 'violation of state law' The California DMV says Tesla's use of the term Autopilot is misleading and violated state law, but has hit the brakes on a proposed 30-day suspension of the car maker's manufacturing and dealer licenses.

Lawsuit concedes the bird is still the word for many X has filed a lawsuit against a social media startup over the Twitter brand, effectively acknowledging that millions still use the Twitter domain, call Elon Musk's platform "Twitter," and their emissions "tweets."

Follows Nick Clegg at Meta and Rishi Sunak at Anthropic in snuggling up to US tech OpenAI has hired former UK finance minister George Osborne, continuing a trend of British politicians whose careers have peaked cozying up to US tech giants.

Six months after expert testimony, no one has yet dialed into promised summit on technical solutions MPs have blasted the UK government for complacency over surging mobile thefts after a "long-delayed" summit on the issue disappeared into the New Year.

Regulator proposes strict limits on screen-based testing, cites infrastructure concerns and lack of evidence for benefits Most students taking school and college GCSE, A-level, and AS-level exams in England will continue to use pen and paper, according to proposals from the sector's regulator for a very limited expansion of screen-based assessments.