The Register

Continuous track of long awaited AFV hits the ground ... and the terrain is pretty bumpy The British Army just received its first new armored fighting vehicle (AFV) for nearly three decades, but it is years late, hit by rising costs, is still reportedly injuring its crew, and there are questions about whether it remains relevant in the age of drone warfare....

Your real problem: 40kW racks, melting datacenters and rising power bills Opinion In recent discussions with industry vendor sales/marketing types, I've been hearing that HPC demand is falling off while AI system demand is continuing to increase. I've also seen articles implying that AI is somehow displacing HPC. Huh?...

Sachin Katti was one of new Intel CEO Lip Bu Tan's first appointments Sachin Katti, the exec Intel promoted to chief technology and AI officer in April, will leave the x86 giant to join OpenAI after just six months in the job....

Ask 339 people, get 339 answers Experts may be skeptical about corporate AI hype to varying degrees, but they share the view that machine learning models will have a significant effect on society....

Encryption protects content, not context Mischief-makers can guess the subjects being discussed with LLMs using a side-channel attack, according to Microsoft researchers. They told The Register that models from some providers, including Anthropic, AWS, DeepSeek, and Google, haven't been fixed, putting both personal users and enterprise communications at risk....

Microsoft has generated some buzz about generating some buzz Most phones and tablets include little motors that buzz when you perform common actions such as typing, or when apps notify users of important events. Microsoft may be about to bring similar good vibrations to the PC with features that see Windows 11 make your mouse or touchpad tremble when you perform UI actions such as snapping windows into place....

Security biz Wiz says 65% of top AI businesses leak keys and tokens Leading AI companies turn out to be no better at keeping secrets than anyone else writing code....

It sounds a lot like everything else AI slop has reached a new level of ascendancy, as a country song by an AI artist has hit number one on Billboard's Country Digital Song Sales chart....

We can't let supply chain shortages burst the bubble boy's balloon Free money is always better than a loan! OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently said he doesn't want government-backed loans to fuel his AI ambitions, but he's more than okay with the idea of Uncle Sam handing out tax credits under the US CHIPS Act to subsidize AI server production, bit barns, and grid components....

Resolution acquiesced to by 8 Dems includes CISA Act funding, layoff reversals, and could be easily undone The US Senate voted on Sunday to advance a short-term funding bill for the federal government, moving the country closer to ending its longest-ever shutdown. Part of the spending bill also restores critical cybersecurity programs that lapsed as the shutdown began....

One company alone was hit with more than 4,200 emails More than 5,000 businesses that use Facebook for advertising were bombarded by tens of thousands of phishing emails in a credential- and data-stealing campaign....

As Gartner offers another serving of word salad, it's time to know your skillatrophy from your pipeline choke A Gartner survey of 700 CIOs indicates that, by the end of the decade, all business IT work will involve AI, while bots will do 25 percent of that work by themselves. Good news: The analyst firm claims AI causes only one percent of job losses. Bad news: You'll have to learn some new jargon....

There's more to safer systems languages than Rust If you're looking for a Unix-like, POSIX-compatible, real-time kernel, there's no shortage of projects trying to build one. Ironclad stands out for using the Ada programming language and its formally verifiable SPARK subset....

Format declared obsolete by Google Chrome team wins PDF support The PDF Association will add support for the JPEG XL (JXL) image format to the PDF spec, according to a recently published presentation from the org's European conference. This inclusion means that JXL may yet gain mainstream adoption, despite being declared obsolete by the Chromium team....

It's OK to look: New Canary channel build supports specific silicon while 26H2 remains the main 2026 update Microsoft has confirmed that Windows 11 version 26H1 is coming, but only with changes to support "specific silicon" - possibly Qualcomm's latest chips due next year - meaning ordinary users are unlikely to see it soon....

Aleksei Volkov faces years in prison, may have been working with other crews A Russian national will likely face several years in US prison after pleading guilty to a range of offenses related to his work with ransomware crews....

Technical and political obstacles block collaboration following suspected space debris strike on craft SpaceX and Elon Musk are once again being called upon to rescue spacefarers - this time, the Chinese crew of Shenzhou-20, delayed on China's Tiangong space station after suspected space debris damage....

Here come old FlatPak, it comes grooving up slowly... Comment The tendency of Linux developers to reinvent wheels is no secret. It's not so much the elephant in the room, as the entire jet-propelled guided ark ship full of every known and unknown member of the Proboscidea from Ambelodon to Stegodon via deinotheres, elephants, mammoths and other mastodons....

Insurance giant's UK arm says cybercriminals misattributed the real victim Allianz UK confirms it was one of the many companies that fell victim to the Clop gang's Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) attack after crims reported that they had attacked a subsidiary....

We're all out of it. How to get it back is an open secret Opinion When the first generation of microcomputers landed on desktops, they promised many things. Affordability, flexibility, efficiency, all the good things still selling IT to this day. Mostly, though, they offered control....

Major battle field technology refresh will be open to the rest of public sector The UK government is launching a competition for military grade communications hardware and software in a tender worth up to 9.6 billion ($12.5 billion) including tax....

Doubles parameters to over 17 billion, to detect threats and recommend actions Exclusive Cisco is working on a new AI model that will more than double the number of parameters used to train its current flagship Foundation-Sec-8B....

In the dialup age, small mistakes could cost big money Who, Me? Welcome to another week in the world of work, and therefore also to another edition of Who, Me? It's The Register's Monday reader-contributed column in which you admit to the error of your ways....

Licensing expert worries they'll be out of control on day one Microsoft has teased what it's calling a new class" of AI agents that operate as independent users within the enterprise workforce."...

PLUS: India's tech services exports growing fast; South Korea puts the bite on TXT spam; NTT gets into autonomous vehicles; and more! Asia In Brief Chinese infosec blog MXRN last week reported a data breach at a security company called Knownsec that has ties to Beijing and Chinas military....

PLUS: CISA layoffs continue; Lawmakers criticize camera security; China to execute scammers; And more Infosec in brief There's no indication that the brazen bandits who stole jewels from the Louvre attacked the famed French museum's systems, but had they tried, it would have been incredibly easy....

Two different groups want this valuable spectrum, but can they share? A row is brewing in Europe over the 6 GHz part of the wireless spectrum, between those who believe it should be licensed for use by cellular networks and others that want it reserved for Wi-Fi....

Misdirection is the new resolution at major video game house The CEO of the company behind note-taking app Obsidian says the well-known video game house of the same name has sent one of its customer queries to his own team - claiming that "off-the-shelf AI support software" is why the gaming firm gave a user the wrong email address....

Esra'a Al Shafei spoke with The Reg about the spy tech 'global trade' interview Digital rights activist Esra'a Al Shafei found FinFisher spyware on her device more than a decade ago. Now she's made it her mission to surveil the companies providing surveillanceware, their customers, and their funders....

At one point, Microsoft's QC was legendary. Now, it's the wrong kind of legend OPINION I have a habit of ironically referring to Microsoft's various self-induced whoopsies as examples of the company's "legendary approach to quality control." While the robustness of Windows NT in decades past might qualify as "legendary", anybody who has had to use the company's wares in recent years might quibble with the word "quality."...

The Zuck better hope his finance bros have deep pockets and a whole lotta patience to pull this off Meta on Friday floated plans to invest $600 billion in US infrastructure and jobs by 2028 as part of a massive datacenter expansion....

All three acquitted a teen in a mock trial based on a case where a judge ruled guilty Law students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Law last month held a mock trial to see how AI models administer justice....

'Precision espionage campaign' began months before the flaw was fixed A previously unknown Android spyware family called LANDFALL exploited a zero-day in Samsung Galaxy devices for nearly a year, installing surveillance code capable of recording calls, tracking locations, and harvesting photos and logs before Samsung finally patched it in April....

Study finds many tests don't measure the right things AI companies regularly tout their models' performance on benchmark tests as a sign of technological and intellectual superiority. But those results, widely used in marketing, may not be meaningful....

Xi and Trump haven't gotten to discuss the chips, though they were supposed to Nvidia's latest generation of Blackwell accelerators won't be available in China anytime soon, according to CEO Jensen Huang, who said there were no "active discussions" about selling the coveted chips to the Middle Kingdom....

It might have the first-ever version of UNIX written in C A tape-based piece of unique Unix history may have been lying quietly in storage at the University of Utah for 50+ years. The question is whether researchers will be able to take this piece of middle-aged media and rewind it back to the 1970s to get the data off....

Netherlands court still overseeing governance at the chipmaker Tensions between China and the Netherlands over the state of chipmaker Nexperia have begun to ease, but the battle for company control doesn't appear to be entirely resolved yet....

Even with more info, web giant says agent can't be trusted to keep you healthy, wealthy, and wise Google's Gemini Deep Research tool can now reach deep into Gmail, Drive, and Chat to obtain data that might be useful for answering research questions....

Multi-year wait for destruction comes to an end for mystery attackers Security experts have helped remove malicious NuGet packages planted in 2023 that were designed to destroy systems years in advance, with some payloads not due to hit until the latter part of this decade....

MIT researchers offer cure for illegible software A pair of MIT researchers have detailed a proposed new model for software that would help both humans and AI code generators alike create better and more transparent applications. No more vibing!...

Behold the one trillion dollar man Tesla is awarding its CEO Elon Musk a package worth a possible $1 trillion, however, it relies in part on a dramatic increase in the value of the electric vehicle manufacturer....

Respecting users choices and offering a hardcore mode among key suggestions. Retired Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer has waded into the argument over where Microsoft has gone wrong with Windows, suggesting that perhaps the OS needs a hardcore mode to offset some of its fluffier edges....

All good things come to an end, and the outpost is unlikely to reach 30 Anyone turning 25 this week has never known a time when humans weren't living in space. The same might not be true when they're 30....

Under shadow of US CLOUD Act, Redmond releases raft of services to calm customers in the EU Microsoft is again banging the data sovereignty drum in Europe, months after admitting in a French court it couldn't guarantee that data will not be transmitted to the US government when it is legally required to do so....

This kind of material economic impact from online crooks thought to be a UK-first The Bank of England (BoE) has cited the cyberattack on Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) as one of the reasons for the country's slower-than-expected GDP growth in its latest rates decision....

Treasury found 1.6 billion for extra tech investment expecting 15 percent efficiency saving. So far HMRC has underwhelmed The UK's tax collector is yet to reach the levels of efficiency its investment in digital services has led auditors to expect, according to a new report....

Lost packets would be cleaned out of routers, dead gopher servers would be pulled out of holes ... On Call Welcome to another instalment of On Call, The Register's Friday reader-contributed column that celebrates the fine art of tech support....

We're months away from AI building AI Taiwanese contract manufacturer Foxconn has confirmed it will use humanoid robots to make Nvidia servers in America....

Grab tried to virtualize macOS, but Apple doesn't make that easy Singaporean super-app company Grab has dumped 200 cloudy Mac Minis and replaced them with physical machines, a move it expects will save $2.4 million over three years....

Redmond's new AI boss is willing to sacrifice performance for the future of our species Microsoft has joined the ranks of tech giants chasing superintelligent artificial intelligence, but the company's AI chief Mustafa Suleyman's vision is markedly different from that articulated by other industry leaders...