The Register

And developers should be confident it won't kill the craft Secret CEO In 1991, when I was 16, a Norwegian Exchange student gave an inspirational performance of the Three Billy Goats Gruff, in the original Norwegian, at my high school talent night. She delivered this performance with such gusto that every word of her performance stuck in my mind and, to this day, I can recite the Three Billy Goats Gruff in Norwegian....

Alcohol turns up in most floral nectar, meaning pollinators are drinking tiny cocktails without ever getting drunk Bees and hummingbirds are effectively day-drinking on the job because their lunch is quietly fermenting....

The maker of Claude faces headwinds as it rushes to go public Anthropic, riding a wave of goodwill after resisting demands from the US Defense Department to soften model safeguards, is reportedly planning to go public as soon as Q4 2026....

Famous blue screens remind conference of security pros that this OS sometimes has bad days Bork!Bork!Bork! When is a bork not a bork? Perhaps when it's on a Microsoft stand at a US security conference....

New campus to include on-site power generation Bitcoin farmer turned bit barn builder Crusoe revealed plans to add 900 megawatts of capacity to its Abilene Texas datacenter campus on Friday to support Microsoft's AI ambitions....

Sycophantic bots coach users into selfish, antisocial behavior, say researchers, and they love it AI can lead mentally unwell people to some pretty dark places, as a number of recent news stories have taught us. Now researchers think sycophantic AI is actually having a harmful effect on everyone....

Farewell, Mac Pro: Increasing integration means the end of expandable computers Apple has discontinued the Mac Pro - but it's just the first of the tower computers to go. The rest will follow soon....

Ratepayer Protection Pledge is unenforceable without hard numbers, Warren and Hawley argue US senators are pushing to require datacenters and other large energy customers to report consumption, arguing the data is essential to hold them accountable to local communities....

Cross-signed code gets the cold shoulder as Redmond tightens trust Microsoft is removing trust for kernel drivers that haven't been through the Windows Hardware Compatibility Program (WHCP) in a bid to further secure the Windows kernel....

Private station hopefuls say ISS rethink is shaking confidence NASA's new Moon plan isn't the only policy shift causing concern. Parts of the commercial space industry are also uneasy about the agency's latest change of direction....

Vulns in Dutch football club's systems didn't just expose data - they let outsiders play with accounts, and even lift stadium bans Dutch football giant AFC Ajax has admitted to a data breach after an attacker gained access to its internal systems, in an incident that looks less like a stray pass and more like the gates left wide open....

US and UK forces seeking tech tender with an April 3 deadline The UK and US are looking for technology to counter the threat posed by underwater drones to ships, harbors and other critical maritime infrastructure, and are asking industry for answers....

A botched update mixed up transaction data across accounts, with thousands now receiving goodwill payouts A botched overnight software update at Lloyds Banking Group left up to 447,000 customers briefly seeing other people's transactions in its mobile apps, with the bank now acknowledging the scale of the incident and compensating affected users....

PAC grilling reveals 239M bought a system that couldn't handle the work, the volumes, or placeholder text A UK government official has admitted Capita did not reach the expected level of performance following the disastrous launch of the Civil Service Pension Scheme (CSPS) web portal late last year....

The 600 km drive to fix the mess was a special treat On Call Every week is special in its own way, and The Register celebrates that fact by using Friday mornings to deliver a fresh installment of On Call, our weekly reader-contributed column that shares your memories of managing IT messes someone else made....

Global bank's devs have some cleaning up to do after cloud creds found in website code Computer security boffins have conducted an analysis of 10 million websites and found almost 2,000 API credentials strewn across 10,000 webpages....

Satnav systems aren't well, IP is being sold too cheap, and thousands of roles remain open India's space program has thousands of vacant roles it's struggled to fill, isn't spending money fast enough to meet its mission timelines, and may be undervaluing intellectual property it sells to the private sector....

Urges scientists to avoid major conference, and looks unkindly on Meta's Manus acquisition China appears to be unhappy about its brightest AI talent going offshore, either to visit or to sell their wares....

AI biz makes some Claude conversations more costly to manage capacity Anthropic on Wednesday adjusted its opaque usage limits for Claude customers by reducing the power of the services it delivers during times of peak demand, in an effort to balance demand with its capacity to deliver service....

You actually think companies are going to pay Americans to take customer service calls in the AI age? Uncle Sam is trying to make American call centers great again. The question is whether they will be great because they're filled with local workers or whether this will provide yet another excuse for companies to turn customer service jobs over to AI....

Cloud giant waives an entire month of charges, then erases the billing data. There is literally nothing to see here. I received an email / billing notification from AWS this week that may be the most diplomatically crafted communication in the history of cloud computing. Here it is, stripped of the usual boilerplate around it:...

Turns out massive caches are good for more than games. House of Zen boasts 5-13% perf boost over prior-gen part AMD aims to extend its lead in desktop gaming with a new CPU, dubbed the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition. This top-of-the-line part has 16 cores fed by an absolutely massive 208 MB pool of cache, with memory spread across both CCDs....

I'm sorry, Dave. I can't give you your job back, but here's the form you fill out to collect benefits There's a joke in Boston that goes: the people in Southie will steal your wallet and help you look for it....

Use of AI coding assistants has surged, but so has the number of vulnerabilities in AI-generated code As more people use AI tools to write code, the tools themselves are introducing more vulnerabilities....

Maybe that's why Tim didn't get an invitation to the President's tech bro club? Apple's American Manufacturing Program (AMP) is expanding, with new suppliers signed on to produce iPhone components - though those parts will still be shipped overseas for final assembly. Tim Apple may continue avoiding tariffs but he probably won't win a lot of brownie points with President Trump....

Your AI rollout isn't failing - your employees just hate it If your company isn't seeing great returns from its investment in AI, you might want to look at the humans tasked with deploying it and how you can motivate them. Right now, many employees fear AI-driven job losses and aren't well trained to use the tech, according to Forrester....

Agent will capture issues and eventually debug code The Linear cloudy issue tracker and project manager has introduced an AI agent and plans to add AI coding assistance, with CEO and co-founder Karri Saarinen declaring that "issue tracking is dead."...

Greg Kroah-Hartman can't explain the inflection point, but it's not slowing down or going away Interview I was at a press luncheon at KubeCon Europe this week when, to my surprise, who should sit down next to me but long-term Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman. Greg, who lives in the Netherlands these days, was there to briefly comment on AI, Linux, and security. We spoke about how, over the last month, AI-driven activity around Linux security and code review has "really jumped" in a way no one in the open source world saw coming....

Prosecutors say trio used Thai front companies to reroute high-end AI servers The US has collared three more people for allegedly attempting to smuggle Nvidia GPUs to China, days after a Supermicro co-founder faced similar accusations....

Appearing before Parliament, Meta, Google and X struggle to explain how fake political video circulated for so long A member of the UK Parliament's lower house who was the victim of a deepfake AI campaign this week had a rare chance to confront the Big Tech executives who helped spread it. Their answers disappointed....

Central bank turns to homegrown providers to underpin virtual cash push Europe is taking a small step toward breaking its reliance on US Big Tech by hiring only cloud operators headquartered in the EU to work on the backbone of the digital euro project....

Microsoft's Clippy for 21st century deployed to evaluate returns? Industry Wales chair brands it just 'wrong' The Welsh government used Microsoft's Copilot to help write a review of an industry liaison body that it then scrapped, its chairman has told a Senedd committee....

300 families undergo 6-week trial to test impact on sleep, school, and home life The UK government will trial different levels of restrictions on social media for under-16s with the help of 300 families, alongside a public consultation that has already gathered nearly 30,000 responses....

CarStation/PlayMobile won't hit the road after pile-up of tax and competition issues in China and the USA Sony and Honda have broken up, meaning their joint vision to deliver a revolutionary electric vehicle won't happen....

Police found cameras pointing at infrastructure Indian authorities have reportedly ordered an audit of the nation's CCTV cameras, after police uncovered what they claim was a Pakistan-backed surveillance operation....

Shifting production from automotive to compute and working on supercapacitors as another way to protect workloads Major memory makers have already sold all the kit they can make this year, creating shortages and price increases. Datacenter infrastructure buyers may soon face the same issues when trying to get their hands on backup batteries....

As of April 24 you'll be feeding the Octocat unless you opt out Microsoft's GitHub next month plans to begin using customer interaction data - "specifically inputs, outputs, code snippets, and associated context" - to train its AI models....

A proof-of-concept attack on Context Hub suggests there's not much content santization A new service that helps coding agents stay up to date on their API calls could be dialing in a massive supply chain vulnerability....

They cleverly mimic most traits of a real phone Smartphones have fast become the basis of our digital identities, securing payment systems and bank accounts. Now virtual devices that pretend to be real handsets have become a key tool for financial scammers, according to one company....

Ex-CISA boss also says no reason to panic about AI and security RSAC 2026 "Everybody feels massive FOMO if they don't get to RSAC," Jen Easterly says....

Four former NSA bosses walk onto the stage at RSAC... rsac 2026 There's a theoretical red line with cyber warfare. Cross it, and the US will respond with a physical attack like missile strikes. And that line "is whatever the President says it is," according to former NSA boss retired General Paul Nakasone....

Forget the metaverse Meta has begun laying off employees as it focuses more of its cash on building out datacenters, training its own large language models, and recruiting talent for AI....

Fusion Agentic Applications promise autonomous enterprise decisions. Gartner urges caution Oracle says it's building a suite of AI agents into its cloud-based enterprise applications, claiming they can make and execute decisions autonmomously within business processes. But analysts are urging caution given unresolved questions around data integration and liability....

Plus one actual physicist Donald Trump has named the first members of his President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), largely comprising Trump allies in the tech industry and one actual scientist....

AWS, Google, Broadcom, or Netscape? OpenAI on Wednesday announced the death of its controversial Sora video creation tool, just two days after publishing a guide on how to use it well....

In other browser news, Opera now caters to penguinista gamers Firefox 149 is here, and although we've already talked about one of the big new features on the way, the release version has some others that will be very welcome....

Effort includes permitting and planning Microsoft is working with Nvidia on nuclear power. Not to build it, but to offer AI-driven tools to deal with all the red tape, help with the design work, and optimize operations for nuclear projects....

Exactly how will astronauts get to and from that moonbase? Opinion NASA's Ignition presentation was heavy on space hardware, but light on details. Not least of which was how astronauts are supposed to get from Earth to its moonbase and back....

Bye-bye Code With Me as company focuses on other areas Dev tooling biz JetBrains has previewed Central for agentic AI software development but will retire the Code With Me human pair programming feature....

Pro line gets new naming convention and some serious upgrades Dell's upcoming 2026 commercial laptops won't leave recent buyers kicking themselves - but they do bring meaningful upgrades, including a thinner Pro 7, larger batteries, and improved thermals....