The Register

It's 2025 so even this networking deal is about AI, which is apparently about to change wide area networks Broadcom has sold VeloCloud, the software-defined WAN business VMware acquired in 2017, to Arista....

Frequent flyers' info takes flight Australian airline Qantas on Wednesday revealed it fell victim to a cyberattack that saw information describing six million customers stolen....

Warns investors its codebase is harder to maintain as it bakes in brainboxes Web design tools developer Figma on Tuesday filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission to propose an initial public offering of company shares....

Google's TPUs might not be on Altman's menu just yet, but he's never been all that picky about hardware Analysis No longer bound to Microsoft's infrastructure, OpenAI is looking to expand its network of compute providers to the likes of Oracle, CoreWeave, and apparently even rival model builder Google....

Up to $150K tier shelved, perks folded into two-track system Microsoft has retired its program that granted incorporated AI startups with a validated business plan up to $150,000 in Azure credits and replaced it with a two-track system....

The bargain between content makers and crawlers has broken down ai-pocalypse Cloudflare has started blocking AI web crawlers by default in a bid to become the internet's gatekeeper....

Customizations not saved with security baseline policy update Microsoft Intune administrators may face a few days of stress after Redmond acknowledged a problem with security baseline customizations....

Trump's budget bill moves back to the House with some mods It took a tie-breaking vote from the Vice President JD Vance to pass Trump's budget reconciliation bill through the Senate on Tuesday, but a controversial section that would have barred states from regulating AI was struck down in a much clearer fashion....

R&D teams are 'separable' says biz, which is open to offers for parts or the whole European RISC-V biz Codasip has put itself up for sale, citing an expression of interest during a recent funding round, and is now openly touting for buyers....

He didn't cover his tracks very well, the iGiant claims in a court filing An ex-Apple employee who allegedly thought he was clever enough to sneak out the back door to a job at Snap loaded up with Cupertino's secrets has instead found himself on the receiving end of a lawsuit....

Body stays coy on details but alludes to similarities with 2023 espionage campaign The International Criminal Court (ICC) says a "sophisticated" cyberattack targeted the institution, the second such incident in two years....

Community vetoes plans to axe i686 compatibility and switch X11 forks The Fedora community has quickly dropped a couple of recent proposed changes - one highly controversial, the other rather less so....

Stricken probe giving US space agency the silent treatment NASA has extended recovery efforts for its stricken Lunar Trailblazer spacecraft to mid-July, but is warning that if the probe remains silent, the mission could end....

176 expressions of interest to erect 'gigafactories' across 16 member states, with 3 million GPUs needed It's pork barrel time in Europe for Nvidia (and possibly AMD) as corporations bid for a slice of the 20 billion ($23.6 billion) fund to build proposed AI Gigafactories to advance the EU's AI credentials....

Copilot's confidence was... misplaced Not content with humiliating ChatGPT at the hands of Video Chess on an Atari 2600 emulator, Robert Caruso has tried again, this time with Microsoft's Copilot....

Plus: Consumers respond to imminent Win 10 cutoff date with collective 'Meh' World War Fee Total PC shipments in the US will increase by just 2 percent this year, thanks to Trump's tariffs and little appetite from consumers for spending on "big-ticket" items, despite the looming end of Windows 10 support....

Kernel 6.16 may be the last with the new disk format The geek titans are clashing once again, and Linux supremo Linus Torvalds has warned: "I think we'll be parting ways" as of kernel 6.17....

Study finds emotional support from chatbots is more readily accepted if participants don't know it's an AI A study of AI chat sessions has shown people tend to have more empathy with a chatbot if they think it is human....

The silly mistakes to the flagrant failures They say that success breeds complacency, and complacency leads to failure. For cybercriminals, taking too many shortcuts when it comes to opsec delivers a little more than that....

Users tired of being 'yanked around' as end of support looms Microsoft's latest attempts to ease the transition to Windows 11 for Windows 10 users "don't go far enough," according to privacy campaigners that worry about the prospect of millions of PCs going to landfill....

Refrigerators and game consoles are the worst, but Apple, surprisingly, rates well A year after the Right to Repair laws passed in California and Minnesota, many product makers still aren't doing much to help consumers fix the gear they bought....

Makes the usual complaints about control and cost, adds argument Apple's practices harm privacy Secure comms biz Proton has joined a lawsuit that alleges Apple's anticompetitive ways are harming developers, consumers, and privacy....

Fears that DDR4 has hit the end of the road and the return of tariffs may be to blame Spot prices for DRAM have doubled in the last week....

America recently extended tech export bans specifically to stop Beijing building this sort of thing China's Northwestern Polytechnical University last week flew a hypersonic craft and claimed the test achieved some world-first feats....

Could it be an AI model builder? A Chinese e-tailer? Perhaps a TikTok mass migration Oracle has landed a mystery customer that will add more than $30 billion to the database giant's annual revenues, more than doubling the size of its current cloud business....

Resulting in two indictments, one arrest, and 137 laptops seized The US Department of Justice has announced a major disruption of multiple North Korean fake IT worker scams....

It could just be the new 'proficient with MS Word' ai-pocalypse For job seekers wondering which AI skills to bone up on, the answer appears to be simple based on a look at the past year of employment data: Just learn to use it....

Ask a model to guess a number from 1 to 50 and it's likely to answer 27 Asked to guess a number between 1 and 50, OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4, Google's Gemini 2.5 Flash, and Meta's Llama 4 all provided the same answer: 27....

Someday, my prince will come Google has agreed to purchase 200 megawatts of fusion energy from Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS). That's assuming, of course, the Massachusetts-based startup can actually get the miniaturized sun to make more power than it consumes, something even the Chocolate Factory admits is a bit of a "moonshot."...

Don't leave the door open to disgruntled workers A judge has sentenced a disgruntled IT worker to more than seven months in prison after he wreaked havoc on his employer's network following his suspension, according to West Yorkshire Police....

Oh, you have to divide by 100? Thousands of Norwegians mistakenly thought they'd won life-changing sums in last week's Eurojackpot after a manual coding slip at state-owned operator Norsk Tipping....

Time ticking for defenders as social engineering pros weave wider web Just a few weeks after warning about Scattered Spider's tactics shifting toward the insurance industry, the same experts now say the aviation industry is now on the ransomware crew's radar....

NASA's future Artemis booster sputters during test video Old Space has shown itself to be just as adept at explosive malfunctions as New Space, with Northrop Grumman encountering an anomaly during a static fire test of an updated solid rocket booster design....

During which he coded Lotus 1-2-3 and co-founded Mozilla and the EFF The man behind Lotus 1-2-3 and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has wrapped up a master's degree at MIT Sloan, decades after dropping out to help kickstart the PC software boom....

Court says State arm cannot be left without maintenance, patches and upgrades because of Broadcom's new licensing model Broadcom's VMware subsidiary must provide a Dutch government organization with continued software support for at least two years while it manages a migration to an alternative platform, according to a court ruling, or else face fines up to 25 million ($29 million)....

Device compromises and deep-seated access to critical infrastructure exposed surveillance vulnerabilities in agency's work A major Mexican drug cartel insider grassed on his fellow drug-peddlers back in 2018, telling the FBI that a cartel "hacker" was tracking a federal official and using their deep-rooted access to the country's critical infrastructure to kill informants....

If you didn't like 24H2, you're probably not going to like 25H2 Microsoft has confirmed that Windows 11 25H2 is almost here. However, the upgrade will be little more than an exercise in feature enablement since Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2 share the same source code....

Server shipments surge 70% in 2025, still shy of datacenter dominance goal Arm-based servers are rapidly gaining traction in the market with shipments tipped to jump 70 percent in 2025, however, this remains well short of the chip designer's ambitions to make up half of datacenter CPU sales worldwide by the end of the year....

Test run offers hope for a rail system long past its best-before date Deutsche Bahn (DB) and Siemens Mobility have managed to get an ICE test train to 405 km/h (251 mph) on the Erfurt-Leipzig/Halle high-speed line....

CISPE floats reforms to avoid new costs, fragmentation, and infrastructure flight The Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers in Europe (CISPE) trade body has put forward recommendations for the EU's Water Resilience Strategy, perhaps mindful that datacenters are perceived as hugely wasteful of precious water resources....

Like being hard to spot? They'd much rather you didn't Opinion There are few tech deceptions more successful than Chrome's Incognito Mode....

Sensible CEO wouldn't let our hero take the blame - a shoddy supervisor got the slap Who, Me? Welcome again to Who, Me? It's the Monday morning column in which readers of The Register admit to making big mistakes and somehow swerving the consequences....

Paying for successful problem resolution is a better business model, argues Dimitri Masin interview Dimitri Masin, CEO of Gradient Labs, argues that companies using AI agents for customer support should only pay when the bot does its job....

Which it will, happily, to create a networking biz that's still far smaller than Cisco's or Nvidia's The US Department of Justice (DoJ) has cleared the way for HPE's $14 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks....

Chipmaker Loongson says server CPUs on par with 2021's Ice Lake, as local press tout kit to manage 1,024-qubit systems Chinese chip designer Loongson last week announced silicon it claims is the equal of western semiconductors from 2021....

PLUS: Broadband blimps to fly in Japan; Starbucks China put ads before privacy; and more! Asia In Brief Canada's government has ordered Chinese CCTV systems vendor Hikvision to cease its local operations....

PLUS: Crooks target hardware crypto wallets; Bad flaws in Brother printers; ,O365 allows takeover-free phishing; and more Infosec in Brief Despite warnings not to pay ransomware operators, almost half of those infected by the malware send cash to the crooks who planted it, according to infosec software slinger Sophos....

More fiction than science Feature IT consultancy Gartner predicts that more than 40 percent of agentic AI projects will be cancelled by the end of 2027 due to rising costs, unclear business value, or insufficient risk controls....

Watch out for supply chain hacks especially interview The ceasefire between Iran and Israel may prevent the two countries from firing missiles at each other, but it won't carry any weight in cyberspace, according to former NATO hacker Candan Bolukbas....

'This is not a copyright message' Before plug and play was blowing up Windows 98 on a Comdex stage, Windows 95 engineers were grappling with the technology - and on one fateful day they found some unusual text in the BIOS of several PCs that they had to work around....