The Register

Wants SLAs, revamped contracts for cloud ops The US Congress' spending watchdog, the Government Accountability Office, has pressed the National Science Foundation's CIO to improve how the agency plans, manages, and procures technology....

FBI warns these cyber-physical attacks are on the rise Thieves stole more than $20 million from compromised ATMs last year using a malware-assisted technique that the FBI says is on the uptick across the United States....

From AI conflation to thin evidence, a new report calls many climate claims greenwashing Some AI advocates claim that bots hold the secret to mitigating climate change. But research shows that the reality is far different, as new datacenters cause power utilities to burn even more fossil fuels to meet their insatiable demand for energy....

A hundred days a year in the air doesn't come cheap Opinion Palantir CEO Alex Karp has a singular mission to stand out among tech CEOs. Big talk on sales, profits, and tech potential is not enough. His gift for edgy one-liners takes him to places where execs of the past would have scarcely dared to go. Say hello to allusions to goose-stepping and innate Western superiority that we assume have audiences rolling in the aisles....

The real deal or another research project overblown? Cybersecurity researchers say they've spotted the first Android malware strain that uses generative AI to improve performance once installed. But it may be only a proof of concept....

IRS lost 40% of IT staff, 80% of tech leaders in 'efficiency' shakeup Job cuts at the IRS's tech arm have gone faster and farther than expected, with 40 percent of IT staff and four-fifths of tech leaders gone, the agency's CIO revealed yesterday....

Rush is on to push forward sympathetic candidates from both parties ahead of midterms Meta is among tech giants reportedly funding US politicians friendly to the AI industry, as concerns mount over a huge expansion in datacenter building and the effects of AI on everyday life....

Emails show all discussed networking and biz interests with the sex offender throughout the 2010s Cybersecurity conference DEF CON has added three men named in the Epstein files to its list of banned individuals. They are not accused of any criminal wrongdoing....

Self-generated skills don't do much for AI agents, study finds, but human-curated skills do Teach an AI agent how to fish for information and it can feed itself with data. Tell an AI agent to figure things out on its own and it may make things worse....

'Why not 12?' says lawyer The UK is bracketing "intimate images shared without a victim's consent" along with terror and child sexual abuse material, and demanding that online platforms remove them within two days....

You told me not to write it on a Post-it... Bork!Bork!Bork! Today's bork is entirely human-generated and will send a shiver down the spine of security pros. No matter how secure a system is, a user's ability to undo an administrator's best efforts should not be underestimated....

Study of 11 LLMs shows they rarely refuse to answer, even when they probably should Artificial intelligence chatbots can be too chatty when answering questions on government services, swamping accurate information and making mistakes if told to be more concise, according to research....

Co-author Jon Kern says AI coding tools amplify strengths and expose weaknesses Interview Twenty-five years after 17 software developers gathered at a Utah ski resort to draft the Agile Manifesto, artificial intelligence is once again reshaping how code gets written....

The DECwriter got me hooked in 1975. 'Clawdine' feels like a wonderful new beginning Opinion Fifty years ago this month, I touched a computer for the first time. It was an experience that pegged the meter for me like no other - until last week....

Dell, however, is welcome to help build a local-language LLM Poland's Ministry of Defence has banned Chinese cars - and any others include tech to record position, images, or sound - from entering protected military facilities....

IT services companies are largely immune to AIpocalypse, although the outlook is not good for entry-level jobs Indian think tank the Council for Research on International Economic Relations has found AI is not an immediate threat to the nation's IT services sector....

It may have half the capacity of fused silica glass, but is faster and much cheaper Microsoft this week detailed new research aimed at preserving data in borosilicate glass plates for thousands of years longer than conventional media like hard drives or magnetic tape, without needing to worry about bit rot....

'Potential data protection incident' at an 'independent licensing partner,' we're told Adidas has confirmed it is investigating a third-party breach at one of its partner companies after digital thieves claimed they stole information and technical data from the German sportswear giant....

HPE and Cisco are adjusting terms and conditions If you like the price of that server, PC, or storage array, you'd better act fast....

Who needs to express themselves through music when a bot will do it for you with nothing but a prompt? If you've ever wanted to make music but have neither the talent nor the inspiration, Google has the AI tool for you. Gemini will now generate a 30-second song for you directly from a text prompt, photo, or video....

Latest in a rash of grab-and-leak data incidents CarGurus allegedly suffered a data breach with 1.7 million corporate records stolen, according to a notorious cybercrime crew that posted the online vehicle marketplace on itsleak site on Wednesday....

Plants expected to begin operations as early as 2028 pending approval by state government Datacenter power consumption has surged amid the AI boom, forcing builders to get creative in order to prevent their capex-heavy bit barns from running out of steam. But at least in some parts of the world, the answer to abundant clean energy may be hiding just a few thousand feet below the surface of the earth....

Data Loss Prevention? Yeah, about that... The bot couldn't keep its prying eyes away. Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat has been summarizing emails labeled confidential" even when data loss prevention policies were configured to prevent it....

Yo dawg, we heard you like missiles, so we put some missiles in your missile so you can boom while you zoom It's taken about five years, but DARPA's missile-launching missile has become the government's latest experimental X-plane and is advancing toward flight testing....

'First time we have detected a crime using this method,' cops say Spanish police arrested a hacker who allegedly manipulated a hotel booking website, allowing him to pay one cent for luxury hotel stays. He also raided the mini-bars and didn't settle some of those tabs, police say....

Musical instrument digital interface protocol leaves preview for bright lights of General Availability Microsoft has finally ushered in the era of MIDI 2.0 for Windows 11, more than a year after first teasing the functionality for Windows Insiders....

State disputes the company's claim that its routers are made in Vietnam TP-Link is facing legal action from the state of Texas for allegedly misleading consumers with "Made in Vietnam" claims despite China-dominated manufacturing and supply chains, and for marketing its devices as secure despite reported firmware vulnerabilities exploited by Chinese state-sponsored actors....

National rail bookings and timetables disrupted for nearly 24 hours If you wanted to book a train trip in Germany recently, you would have been out of luck. The country's national rail company says that its services were disrupted for hours because of a cyberattack....

Survey says 80% of firms see no gains from the tech A survey of almost 6,000 corporate execs across the US, UK, Germany, and Australia found that more than 80 percent detect no discernible impact from AI on either employment or productivity....

Seemingly complex strings are actually highly predictable, crackable within hours Generative AI tools are surprisingly poor at suggesting strong passwords, experts say....

EV maker avoids 30-day license suspension after state ruling on self-driving claims Tesla has complied with an order by the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) and stopped using the term "Autopilot" in its marketing of electric vehicles, having already modified use of "Full Self-Driving" to clarify that it requires driver supervision....

Starmer orders inquiry after Labour Together commissioned dossier on reporters Josh Simons, the Cabinet Office minister responsible for the UK government's digital identity program, is being probed by the department for his actions running a Labour think tank that commissioned an investigation into journalists....

GitHub itself to blame for AI slop pull requests, say devs Remi Verschelde, a maintainer of the open source Godot game engine, is the latest to complain about the impact of "AI slop PRs [pull requests]", which hesays"are becoming increasingly draining and demoralizing for Godot maintainers."...

Miscreants will need to find another avenue for malware shenanigans Notepad++ has continued beefing up security with a release the project's author claims makes the "update process robust and effectively unexploitable."...

No worries if the US doesn't want to be friends with Europe anymore Lockheed Martin's F-35 fighter aircraft can be jailbroken "just like an iPhone," the Netherlands' defense secretary has claimed....

Passenger info display takes scenic detour via desktop and pending updates Bork!Bork!Bork! The curse of bork is not limited to obsolete operating systems or obscure hardware. Today's example of railway signage disruption is something bang up to date from the Swiss town of Saint Moritz....

Report warns delayed rollouts could widen capability gap as new standards emerge North American and Asian markets are enjoying the benefits of a transition to 5G Standalone (SA) mobile networks, but much of Europe lags behind, risking a growing disadvantage as new capabilities roll out....

CEO lauds security researchers, insists they're not 'inputs' HackerOne has clarified its stance on GenAI after researchers fretted their submissions were being used to train its models....

Apologizes for 'inaccuracy' after telling MPs the International Criminal Court turned off email service to sanctioned prosecutor, 'not Microsoft' Exclusive Microsoft has said one of its leading spokespeople gave a testimony to the UK Parliament containing an "inaccuracy" with regard to its dealings with the International Criminal Court (ICC) in response to US sanctions....

Ts'o, Hohndel and the man himself spill beans on how checks in the mail and GPL made it all possible If you know anything about Linux's history, you'll remember it all started with Linus Torvalds posting to the Minix Usenet group on August 25, 1991, that he was working on "a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones." We know that the "hobby" operating system today is Linux, and except for PCs and Macs, it pretty much runs the world....

Consumer group Which? brought the case and now plans to bail after court indicated it would lose The UK's Competition Appeal Tribunal has indicated that it will find Qualcomm did not abuse its market power, leading consumer advocacy group Which? to withdraw a case it hoped would see Brits compensated for increased smartphone prices....

Sees little enterprise AI adoption other than coding assistants, buys Koi for what comes next If enterprises are implementing AI, they're not showing it to Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora, who on Tuesday said business adoption of the tech lags consumer take-up by at least a couple of years - except for coding assistants....

PM Modi tells citizens AI will lift them up, not take their jobs Giant Indian industrial conglomerate Adani has said it will spend up to $100 billion on AI datacenters to equip the nation with sovereign infrastructure, but will do so at slower pace than Big Tech tech companies plan to bring their own bit barns to Bharat....

Version 4.6 can also be 'warm, honest, prosocial, and at times funny' Anthropic has updated its Sonnet model to version 4.6 and claims the upgrade is better at coding and using computers, and also possesses improved reasoning and planning capabilities....

Full scale of infections remains 'unknown' China-linked attackers exploited a maximum-severity hardcoded-credential bug in Dell RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines as a zero-day since at least mid-2024. It's all part of a long-running effort to backdoor infected machines for long-term access, according to Google's Mandiant incident response team....

Though commonly reported, Google doesn't consider it a security problem when models make things up Imagine using an AI to sort through your prescriptions and medical information, asking it if it saved that data for future conversations, and then watching it claim it had even if it couldn't. Joe D., a retired software quality assurance (SQA) engineer, says that Google Gemini lied to him and later admitted it was doing so to try and placate him....

It isn't insane, and Amazon will be fine when the music stops. Other players, maybe not so much In their recent earnings call, Amazon kinda blew the doors off of industry analyst (motto: "we'll be wrong, then take it out on your stock") projections for their capex spend....

After a selloff fueled by fears AI could upend the outsourcing model Indian IT professionals worried about 72-hour workweeks might soon face the opposite concern, as Bengaluru-based outsourcing giant Infosys has partnered with Anthropic to bring agentic AI to telecommunications companies and other regulated industries....

Plus 3 new goon squads targeted critical infrastructure last year Three new threat groups began targeting critical infrastructure last year, while a well-known Beijing-backed crew - Volt Typhoon - continued to compromise cellular gateways and routers, and then break into US electric, oil, and gas companies in 2025, according to Dragos' annual threat report published on Tuesday....

CPU adoption is part of deeper partnership between the Social Network and Nvidia which will see millions of GPUs deployed over next few years Move over Intel and AMD - Meta is among the first hyperscalers to deploy Nvidia's standalone CPUs, the two companies revealed on Tuesday. Meta has already deployed Nvidia's Grace processors in CPU-only systems at scale and is working with the GPU slinger to field its upcoming Vera CPUs beginning next year....