The Register

Sell your soul to the orb Sam Altman has cooked up a plan to make his cryptocurrency/identity/eyeball-scanning-orb venture more useful by - you guessed it - adding agentic AI to the mix. Now the technology behind it will be used to identify the human behind bots....

Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by one very large org chart Earlier this month, AWS ended standard support for PostgreSQL 13 on RDS. Customers who want to stay on a supported database - as AWS is actively encouraging them to do - need to upgrade to PostgreSQL 14 or later....

Formal code verification and testing offer a way around AI blind spots Your AI may need AI to oversee its work. Gallic AI biz Mistral is leaning into making AI code generation more reliable with Leanstral, a coding agent for proofs constructed using the open source Lean programming language....

The Space-1 Vera Rubin Module will solve all your in-space computing needs gtc Space could be the final frontier for datacenters. Never mind that some analysts have described orbital bit barns as "peak insanity" - Nvidia has designed a new Vera Rubin module specifically to operate above the Earth's atmosphere....

Plus: Object storage gets stamp of approval, and it intros network linked 'AI Grid' GTC HPE has expanded its Nvidia-based AI portfolio with new systems built on Blackwell and upcoming Rubin GPUs, alongside updates to its Alletra Storage MP X10000, which it claims is the first object storage platform to achieve Nvidia-Certified Storage validation....

State-sponsored attackers joined by Chinese snoops and hackers-for-hire in latest round of economic penalties The Council of the European Union sanctioned Emennet Pasargad on Monday, a company used as a front for a series of Iranian cyberattacks....

Still aiming for April 1 if the weather plays ball The rollback to the launchpad for NASA's monster Moon rocket has slipped by a day, though the agency is optimistic that the long-delayed return of humans to lunar space will still happen in early April....

Big Red bets on native runtimes over reimplementations to tackle edge cases JavaOne Oracle has shipped Java 26, a short-term release, and introduced Project Detroit, which promises faster interop between Java, JavaScript, and Python....

Regulator nudges broadband market, hopes competition will turn up in 2031 Ofcom is laying out its pathway for fiber broadband almost everywhere across the UK in five years, but concedes that BT still dominates the market....

Second emergency fix in days targets Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2 Microsoft has pushed out yet another out-of-band hotpatch, this time to fix Bluetooth issues in Windows 11 25H2 and 24H2....

Civilians relying on Dutch shortwave radio broadcast for outside information Iran's internet blackout is entering day 18, according to monitoring outfit NetBlocks, which says the vast majority of the country has been offline for more than 400 consecutive hours....

Linux still can't mount or read APFS volumes by default ... but that's about to change Linux 7.0 is approaching and there's a new version of bcachefs to go with it... as well as green shoots of support for Apple's new disk format....

SCION: Proven in banking and healthcare, slow to spread everywhere else Feature BGP, the Border Gateway Protocol, was not designed to be secure. It was designed to work - to route packets between the thousands of autonomous systems that make up the internet, quickly and at scale....

A wearable sensor designed to monitor intestinal gas suggests the average person may let rip around 32 times a day For decades, Reg readers have demanded to know exactly how often humans let rip - and at last science may have produced an answer....

MPs say the Beeb closed broadcast services expecting audiences to migrate online, but digital reach has fallen instead Britain's push to drag the BBC World Service into the digital age hasn't gone quite to plan, with MPs warning the broadcaster's "digital-first" strategy has shrunk audiences rather than growing them....

Results from Ryugu suggest the the Solar System produced the building blocks of life Scientists have found that all five of the substances that make up DNA and RNA in samples from Ryugu, the asteroid Japan's Aerospace Exploration Agency visited in 2020....

Admins may be even more exhausted by then, because securing Microsoft's AI helper is not a trivial job Gartner analyst Dennis Xu has half-jokingly suggested banning use of Microsoft's Copilot AI on Friday afternoons, because he fears at that time of week users may be too lazy to properly check its possibly offensive output....

AI helped send weekly threat signal count from 80 million to 400 billion, then helped response time shrink from two days to 30 minutes Australia's Commonwealth Bank built its own agentic AI threat hunting tools, because vendors are too slow to develop tools that can cope with emerging AI-powered threats, according to General Manager of Cyber Defence Operations Andrew Pade....

Codestrap founders say we need to dial down the hype and sort through the mess interview Enterprise organizations are still struggling to figure out how AI fits into their business, and that may be for the best because it will take time to understand any problems caused by AI-generated code and content....

'We want to use our capital correctly, and I think debt is a great way to do that,' says CEO Benioff Here today; here tomorrow. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff's stock buyback will saddle the company with debt until 2066, when he turns 102 years old....

The latest generation of Nvidia's AI image enhancer brings characters to life GTC Computer graphics have come a long way from chasing Donkey Kong around a 2D board and fragging 3D demons in Doom. However, even with the most powerful graphics cards, human faces in games still look surreal and lifeless, with dead eyes,saran-wrap-smooth faces, and beards that blend into their chins. With Nvidia's upcoming DLSS 5, you can play with characters that look like they're stepped out of a movie screen - and we're not talking about a Pixar movie either....

'OpenClaw is the operating system for personal AI,' insists Nvidia CEO gtc In Pixar's Toy Story, a trio little green aliens explain, "The claw chooses who will go and who will stay." The claw in that instance was a mechanical claw in a vending machine....

Operations and hospital networks not affected, we're told Robotics-assisted surgical tech firm Intuitive said that unauthorized intruders gained access to some of its internal IT business applications after stealing an employee's credentials during a phishing attack....

The cubicals of the agentic AI age are cores GTC Intel and AMD take notice. At GTC on Monday, Nvidia unveiled its latest liquid-cooled rack systems. But unlike its NVL72 racks, this one isn't powered by GPUs or even Groq LPUs, but rather 256 of its custom Vera CPUs....

GPUzilla's $20B acquihire paves to way to AI agents that halucinate faster than ever GTC Nvidia will use Groq's language processing units (LPUs), a technology it paid $20 billion for, to boost the inference performance of its newly-announced Vera Rubin rack systems, CEO Jensen Huang revealed during his GTC keynote on Monday....

Hacktivists use proxy services from Russia, China for 'billions of designed-for-abuse connection attempts' Cybercrime has skyrocketed since the start of the Iran war, according to Akamai, which reports a 245 percent increase in everything from credential harvesting attempts to automated reconnaissance traffic aimed at banks and other critical businesses....

Native code build tools now dominate for TypeScript or JavaScript projects Vite 8.0 has been released, and it uses Rust-built Rolldown as its single bundler, replacing both esbuild and Rollup, to enable faster builds....

Former Microsoft dev trains a model to survive the arcade's most chaotic stress test A former Microsoft engineer is training AI to beat 1982's Robotron: 2084, an arcade game where a lone human must overcome endless waves of robots following a cybernetic revolt....

Interpol says fraud schemes using the tech are 4.5x more profitable AI is apparently good for the bottom line if your business is crime. Financial fraud schemes carried out with the help of artificial intelligence are 4.5 times more profitable than those that aren't enhanced, according to Interpol's latest estimates....

Early demo hints at a future sci-fi writers warned us about San Francisco startup Eon Systems claims that it has created the first digital simulation of a fruit fly brain that can control a virtual body and produce recognizable behaviors....

F is for Free, FSF, and fat chance Updated The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has rattled a saber at Anthropic over the use of its materials in training the AI vendor's models, urging it to set its LLMs free....

iFixit opens Apple's budget system, discovers something missing from MacBooks: replaceable components Apple's latest MacBook may be cheap, but it also comes with something modern MacBooks haven't offered in years: a fighting chance of being repaired....

McDermott argues digital workers will handle much of the grunt work once used to train junior staff Unemployment rates among recent graduates could climb above 30 percent because so many early career routine tasks will be performed by AI agents, ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott has said....

Toothbrushes, Turing and the truth give the lie to California's legal lunacy Opinion There are two ways to look at the California Assembly Bill 1043, known as The Digital Age Assurance Act or DAAA. One is to say it is a 2025 law requiring operating systems and app stores to implement age verification during account setup to protect minors online. The other is to note that the law is all the worst things a law can be....

Back button blunder in WebFiling service run by Companies House revealed confidential paperwork Companies House was forced to pull down its record-filing platform for the entire weekend to rectify a "security issue" that exposed the personal details of company directors and other data to any logged in users....

'Access denied' errors hit certain Windows 11 machines running vendor utility Microsoft has blamed Samsung for some devices suffering C:\ drive access problems coincidentally close to March's Patch Tuesday....

'Sunrise' beast will run AI-heavy simulations of plasma behavior and reactor physics The UK government is splashing out 45 million (c $60 million) on a new AI-driven supercomputer designed to help scientists model the chaotic physics of nuclear fusion, with the system expected to come online this summer at the UK Atomic Energy Authority's (UKAEA) Culham campus....

Already five years late, project delayed another six months after price tag swells from 2.6M to 41M West Sussex County Council has once again delayed the implementation of Oracle Fusion for HR and payroll - set to replace an aging SAP system - following a series of setbacks that have seen expected costs swell to more than 15 times the original estimate....

System compensating victims of the Post Office Horizon scandal still slow, thousands of ex-subpostmasters waiting for payments More than a year after MPs warned that victims of the Post Office Horizon scandal were still waiting for compensation, Parliament says the system meant to pay them remains slow, bureaucratic, and flawed - meaning thousands of sub-postmasters are still fighting for payouts while taxpayers pick up the bill....

Client omissions caused the problem, so guess who was thrown under the bus Who, Me? The world of work can be thankless, which is why The Register tries to brighten up the Monday return to toil by bringing you a fresh installment of Who, Me? It's the reader-contributed column where you confess to your IT screw-ups and tell us how you got away with it....

Cloudy storage service's scale gave it a hefty cultural footprint Amazon Web Services on Saturday celebrated the 20th birthday of its Simple Storage Service (S3) and revealed a few little secrets about the service....

Dark Dalek drama to stream this April Film preservation organization Film Is Fabulous! has found a pair of Doctor Who episodes thought to have been lost forever....

PLUS: SAP expands Japanese cloud; SK hynix close to shipping LPDDR6; Lenovo's biggest ever IaaS deal; and more Asia in brief India's Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change last week staged a two-day national workshop titled Policy Implementation for Minimizing Elephant Mortalities on Railway Track" - and one of the ideas discussed was using AI to protect the beasts and workers....

PLUS: Citrix CISO urges patch blitz; Mandiant founder reveals AI red-teaming tech; Bitter privacy news for Starbucks; And more Infosec In Brief Canadian outsourcer Telus Digital has admitted it fell victim to a cyberattack....

Join Brandon Vigliarolo, Tobias Mann, and Avram Piltch to discuss our predictions for this week's GTC Kettle It's The Most Wonderful Time of the Year - if you're an AI aficionado, that is, as chip giant Nvidia, now the most valuable company in the world, is kicking off its GPU Technology Conference (GTC) on Monday....

Most don't think they are good for the environment. Three-quarters of the American public have heard of datacenters, but they haven't quite made their minds up yet about whether they approve of them or not....

Cornell Uni researchers pivot to pluck low-hanging fruit to optimize bandwidth Workers who believe "leveraging cross-functional synergies" sounds profound may want to rethink their career trajectory because a new study suggests people who fall for corporate word salad also tend to perform worse at their jobs....

Biological computing is messy and gassy - It's now cloudy, too At the start of the working day at Cortical Labs' datacenter in Melbourne, Australia, technicians top up the resident computers with a liquid modelled on the cerebrospinal fluid that surrounds the human brain....

Conversations with Anthropic's models may now be accompanied by interactive apps Seeing is believing, or so it was said up until AI required questioning everything. But even when braced to resist the slop roulette of online interaction, pictures are worth a thousand tokens....

Coding education may become a bit more challenging, but the economics lesson is free You don't get what you don't pay for! Microsoft's GitHub is dialing back on expenses by removing several costly premium models from its free GitHub Copilot Student plan....