The Register

Latest in a string of cases that have earned France an unfortunate title A mother and her ten-year-old son are now free after being kidnapped for around 20 hours while the father was being extorted for hundreds of thousands of euros....

Report says authorities are flouting accounting rules by failing to disclose revenue lost to server farm subsidies Many US states and local authorities are violating generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) by failing to disclose revenue lost to datacenter tax subsidy schemes, according to Good Jobs First....

Here comes 'enterprise vibe coding' as CRM giant aims to open development to anyone on the platform Salesforce has introduced what it calls Headless 360 at its developer event TDX, which starts today in San Francisco, designed to expand the reach of its app-building tools beyond traditional developers....

Vuln old enough to drive lands on CISA's exploited list While Microsoft was rolling out its bumper Patch Tuesday updates this week, US cybersecurity agency CISA was readying an alert about a 17-year-old critical Excel flaw now under exploit....

Command prefix will require password by default The latest version of Raspberry Pi OS now requires a password for sudo by default....

Some on the Moon's surface, some in orbit. How does 5 years sound? Do-able, right nerds? The nukes-in-space ambitions of the current US administration have taken a step forward - and the US Office of Science and Technology Policy has just published its hopes for who does what....

Open Rights Group says years of reliance on US giants have left Britain exposed Britain has spent years wiring its public sector into US Big Tech, and a new report says that dependence could quickly become a national security headache....

Armed with 2.5B, UKAEA sets out technical hurdles it wants cracked by end of decade Brit boffins have a 2.5 billion ($3.4 billion) budget for fusion power research and development, and the government agency leading the effort has published a roadmap of targets to hit before the decade is out....

Google sibling takes on the Big Smoke - with a human hand on the wheel Waymo has started letting its software take the wheel on London streets, with trained specialists on standby as it gradually accelerates toward a fully driverless ride-hailing launch....

Researchers who found the flaws scored beer money bounties and warn the problem is probably pervasive Exclusive Security researchers hijacked three popular AI agents that integrate with GitHub Actions by using a new type of prompt injection attack to steal API keys and access tokens, and the vendors who run agents didn't disclose the problem....

Needs SpaceX et al to drop prices and give competitors a ride into space to make it work A startup called Orbital has revealed a plan to build a 10,000-satellite neocloud in space - if Elon Musk delivers on his ambitious plans to increase launch capacity and reduce costs....

The perfect combination of hardware and experiences will arrive, no matter what Zuck and Neal Stephenson think Opinion Could the recent death of Meta's unloved and unused Horizon Worlds signal the demise of the wider metaverse?...

Supply chain and engineering woes keep the supply of new planes sputtering Boeing has delivered more commercial planes in a quarter than Airbus for the first time in seven years....

Analysts reckon 70 percent of projects will fail, and 75 percent of vendors in the field will go away Most mainframe users who turn to AI for help migrating legacy code to alternative platforms are going to be very disappointed, according to analyst firm Gartner....

Plus Anthropic has redesigned its Claude app Anthropic has made it easier to automate Claude-oriented tasks without relying on autonomous agent software....

The company's new software keeps an eye on your agents and backs up data. Keep your agents close and your agent-monitoring software closer. Commvault's new AI Protect can discover and monitor AI agents running inside AWS, Azure, and GCP environments and even roll back their actions when something goes wrong....

One CVE under attack, one already disclosed by angry bug hunter, and 163 more Attackers exploited a spoofing vulnerability in Microsoft SharePoint Server before Redmond issued a fix as part of April's mega Patch Tuesday....

Long languishing API gets love from Mozilla Firefox will soon be able to communicate directly with your 3D printer. Thirteen years after the idea was initially proposed, the Web Serial API has landed in Firefox Nightly, Mozilla's work-in-progress channel for its browser....

One error in every thousand operations is one too many Quantum computers promise major speedups for problems in materials science, logistics, and financial modeling, but first they need to be made reliable, something Nvidia believes its AI models can help with. When you've got a GPU hammer, every problem starts to look like an AI nail....

With grid hookups slow and turbines scarce, on-site power is starting to look less optional Bloom Energy says it has an expanded remit from Oracle to provide the energy for its US datacenter buildout plans with up to 2.8 GW of fuel cell systems....

Proposed law could lock down open source tools and give vendors fresh reasons to inspect print files California's proposed legislation to put the burden of blocking 3D-printed firearms onto printer manufacturers could effectively sideline open source tools and create new surveillance concerns, digital rights activists argue....

Long-familiar workflow lets developers split big code changes into smaller, easier-to-review chunks GitHub has unveiled Stacked PRs, a new feature aimed at making large pull requests easier to review, manage, and move through the pipeline faster....

Paper says a single binary operator could replace a lot of scientific heavy lifting Every now and then, a researcher comes up with something that sounds either wrong or unoriginal to outsiders - yet carries just enough of a chance of being correct, novel, and consequential to demand a closer look....

Deal only comes with 24 operational sats, but also an Apple deal, spectrum licenses, and plenty of IP Amazon has agreed to pay more than $11.5 billion to expand its satellite constellation by about two dozen units with the acquisition of Globalstar. But it's more about the underlying technology that Amazon hopes will help it catch Elon Musk's Starlink....

Honey, the skids are fighting again Two rival ransomware gangs have locked horns after 0APT threatened to expose people affiliated with Krybit....

Veterans think Congress may swat cuts again, but uncertainty could still do lasting damage As NASA's Artemis II mission headed for the Moon, the Trump administration unveiled another attempt to cut the agency's science budget. Yet some insiders, perhaps buoyed by deja vu and a little post-traumatic resilience, are less alarmed than you might expect....

Didn't admit liability, will cough $17M, still fighting age discrimination cases IBM has become the first company to settle with the US government under the Trump administration's Civil Rights Fraud Initiative, a program aimed at ensuring diversity programs don't cross a line and result in discrimination....

Entry-level models jump by up to 220, mirroring steeper hikes in US Microsoft's memory squeeze has reached the shop floor, and Surface prices have been jacked up to match....

20-year-old Texan also allegedly planned to kill everyone inside the OpenAI office building The man accused of attacking Sam Altman's San Francisco home with a Molotov cocktail on April 10 now faces charges of attempted murder....

Contract kicks off design work, but SMRs unlikely to generate power before the mid-2030s The British government has signed a deal with RollsRoyce to carry out the design work on small modular reactors (SMRs)....

Mailbox access in stripped-down Android app ends on May 25 Having blocked new installations of Outlook Lite in October 2025, Microsoft will " complete the retirement" of the app on May 25....

Already 1.3B over budget and 4 years late, NS&I could extend timetable beyond 8 years The UK's state-backed savings bank has set out options for finishing its disastrous transformation program, including busting the current timeline....

Local hero Rapidus is on track to begin production of 2nm semis next year, as TSMC expands its Japanese foothold When IBM PCs set the standard for personal computing and Madonna topped the charts, Japan led the semiconductor industry. But that 1980s dominance faded as the fabless design and foundry model evolved....

Microsoft punishes you for updating infrequently Opinion It's not the first time this has happened to me and it won't be the last. I pulled a laptop that I hadn't used for six months out of a drawer, then waited through three hours and four rounds of reboots for it to update Windows 11 completely....

Tiny variation in temperature weakened a component and when a critical moment arrived, that mattered Japan's space exploration agency (JAXA) thinks a manufacturing process that didn't properly take into account the qualities of an adhesive caused the December 2025 failure of a satellite launch using its locally developed H3 rocket....

Latest report from Stanford's AI boffins finds unsafe usage practices, widespread anxiety about impacts, and China catching up to the USA Artificial intelligence has achieved mass adoption faster than the personal computer or the internet, reaching 53 percent of the population in just three years. The number of harmful AI incidents has increased correspondingly. And both experts and laypeople believe the impact will be felt in two areas: Elections and relationships....

One was patched almost 14 years ago Crooks are exploiting four Microsoft vulnerabilities - one patched 14 years ago and another tied to ransomware activity - according to America's lead cyber-defense agency, which on Monday gave federal agencies two weeks to patch them....

What, you think basic usability is improved just for your benefit, human? Cloudflare is rebuilding Wrangler's command-line tooling by adding commands for products and interfaces that still lack CLI support. And yes, AI agents are a big reason why....

Brief outage follows growing number of quality complaints Once the AI darling of programmers everywhere, Anthropic's Claude has been stumbling mightily, both in terms of cost and perceived quality. The service was down briefly on Monday with "a major outage," service trouble that only amplifies growing discontent from customers that even a bot can see....

'AI is now infused in every package that we offer to our addressable market,' SVP John Aisien told us ServiceNow's latest product announcements show how hardcore the company has become about embedding AI across its go-to-market strategy....

Google Sites lure leads to bogus root certificate Imagine getting asked to do something by a person in authority. An unknown malware slinger targeting open source software developers via Slack impersonated a real Linux Foundation official and used pages hosted on Google.com to steal developers' credentials and take over their systems....

GG noob, who cleared you to land? The Federal Aviation Administration continues to face an air traffic controller shortage, and it's hoping that a new demographic of potential applicants can fill the ranks: Video gamers....

Advisers say fewer staff could mean slower answers and tougher renewals Oracle customers have been warned to watch for changes in support and pricing as Larry Ellison's company makes huge datacenter spending commitments to support its AI ambitions....

Dev reports suggest long sessions now burn through usage much faster Anthropic last month reduced the TTL (time to live) for the Claude Code prompt cache from one hour to five minutes for many requests, but said this should not increase costs despite users reporting faster depleting quotas....

AI gubbins still there, just tucked under 'Writing Tools' Copilot is on its way out of Notepad, but a return to the basic text editor is not on the cards....

Travel giant says names, contact details, dates, and hotel messages potentially exposed Booking.com is warning customers that their reservation details may have been exposed to unknown attackers, in the latest reminder that the travel giant still can't quite keep a lid on the data flowing through its platform....

Controlled Feature Rollouts headed for the trash among other changes Microsoft is giving the Windows Insider program another makeover in the hope of making it less baffling....

Department putting systems in place to manage 'restrictive licensing practices' A federal spending watchdog has found the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) faced "challenges" in understanding the correct number of licenses it should hold for the top five vendors in its $985 million annual software expenditure....

MoD plans rapid procurement of Cambridge Aerospace's Skyhammer system at home and abroad Britain is set to buy interceptors from a homegrown startup to counter Iranian Shahed-style attack drones, equipping both its own armed forces and allies in the Persian Gulf region....

Reader and Acrobat flaw let booby-trapped documents profile targets and hijack machines Adobe has released a fix for an Acrobat and Reader zero-day that attackers had been exploiting for months....