The Register

Money-losing biz says it does not need help to meet massive infrastructure commitments updated After this story was published, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman took a turn at damage control, following remarks from CFO Sarah Friar suggesting that the company was seeking federal loan guarantees - lanugage she later walked back....

Plus 2 new critical vulns - patch now Cisco warned customers about another wave of attacks against its firewalls, which have been battered by intruders for at least six months. It also patched two critical bugs in its Unified Contact Center Express (UCCX) software that aren't under active exploitation - yet....

Government agencies would also have to report losses due to automation. ai-pocalypse A bipartisan pair of US Senators has introduced a bill that would require companies and government agencies to report AI-related layoffs, and it couldn't come at a better time. October jobs data suggests AI is driving the largest wave of layoffs headed into the end of the year that we've seen since 2003....

Rockstar says it fired staff for leaks, but the IWGB accuses the GTA maker of union-busting Rockstar Games denies claims that it fired several employees over their union activity, insisting that it sacked the team members for leaking confidential information....

Counterfeiter failed to conjure a credible claim, appeals court rules A convicted identity thief has lost his appeal against Uncle Sam after claiming federal agents destroyed a seized hard drive containing cryptocurrency worth more than $345 million....

Amazon's spat with Perplexity shows that technology is not the only blocker for the agentic era Opinion The agentic era remains a fantasy world. Software agents, the notional next frontier for generative AI services, cannot escape the gravity of their contradictions, legal ambiguities, and competitive pressures. Not everyone, especially not competing businesses, wants a bot representing the customer....

Sustainable vision? Who knows Lenovo says that traditional datacenters are not fit for purpose, and must evolve to future-proof businesses across EMEA. This is based on research, but the PC and server biz has come up with some wacky possible designs, including one that is almost literally in the clouds....

It's not a bug, it's a feeling Vibe coding has broken free of tech circles to claim Collins Dictionary's Word of the Year 2025 - a choice that may prompt developers to ask: what could possibly go wrong?...

Shopping bots pick first option and are 'vulnerable to manipulation', Magentic Marketplace trial finds Ready to have your agent talk to my agent and arrange a sale? Microsoft has published a simulated marketplace to put AI agents through their paces and answer a question for the new age: Would you trust AI with your credit card?...

Most of you still can't do better than 123456? 123456. admin. password. For years, the IT world has been reminding users not to rely on such predictable passwords. And yet here we are with another study finding that those sorts of quickly-guessable, universally-held-to-be-bad passwords are still the most popular ones....

Intune is where the party's at, even if admins might prefer the Configuration Manager kitchen Microsoft has officially confirmed that Configuration Manager will transition to an annual release cadence, with Intune as the primary focus for innovation....

Spies, not crooks, were behind digital heist - damage stopped at the backups, says US cybersec biz SonicWall has blamed an unnamed, state-sponsored collective for the September break-in that saw cybercriminals rifle through a cache of firewall configuration backups....

Three hyperscale sheds to double capacity near Heathrow Colt Data Centre Services has secured approval to invest 2.5 billion ($3.3 billion) in three hyperscale data centers at its Hayes Digital Park campus in west London....

Stolen creds let miscreants waltz into 17K employees' chats, spilling info on staff and partners Japanese media behemoth Nikkei has admitted to a data breach after miscreants slipped into its internal Slack workspace, exposing the personal details of more than 17,000 employees and business partners....

Science loses when lab workers grapple with costs and availability, claim researchers Cloud vendors' commercial models poorly serve scientists, forcing them to struggle for value amid tightening budgets, according to research....

Parliamentary report calls for sovereign launch capability and reduced dependence on US services The UK's House of Lords UK Engagement with Space Committee has published a scathing report, "The Space Economy: Act Now or Lose Out," declaring that the 2021 National Space Strategy has "failed to turn its ambitions into reality."...

Middle Kingdom also postpones astronaut return mission after something hit its spaceship China has matched the European Space Agency's feat of taking a snapshot of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS from a Mars orbiter....

Awkward, seeing as they're close partners Qualcomm and Arm have offered differing predictions regarding the market for inferencing silicon....

Even offers refunds if users sign up for AI they don't want, once it fixed a bad link Updated Microsoft Australia has apologized to users of its M365 suite after regulators accused it of steering them towards pricey bundles that include its Copilot AI service....

Some clever networking hacks open the door AI search provider Perplexity's research wing has developed a new set of software optimizations that allows for trillion parameter or large models to run efficiently across older, cheaper hardware using a variety of existing network technologies, including Amazon's proprietary Elastic Fabric Adapter....

Degraded performance and possible dependency problems across AZs Microsoft has warned of a thermal event" impacting Azure users in its West Europe region, and perhaps elsewhere....

Images in the test dataset were all sourced with consent AI models are filled to the brim with bias, whether that's showing you a certain race of person when you ask for a pic of a criminal or assuming that a woman can't possibly be involved in a particular career when you ask for a firefighter. To deal with these issues, Sony AI has released a new dataset for testing the fairness of computer vision models, one that its makers claim was compiled in a fair and ethical way....

For now it works only with the web version of the Microsoft Store hands on Normally, when you install an application in Windows, it comes either from a direct download or as a single choice from the Microsoft Store. But what if you could install several different apps at the same time by creating a custom group?...

An hour's tablet training and a soldier was sending the bird on autonomous errands Who needs a drone when you can fly a Black Hawk from a tablet? DARPA's $6 million award to Sikorsky paid off when a National Guard soldier, trained in under an hour, used a handheld tablet to command an optionally piloted Black Hawk through multiple autonomous missions....

Second time's the charm for after Wiz rejected Google's $23B offer last year Google's second attempt to acquire cloud security firm Wiz is going a lot better than the first, with the Department of Justice clearing the $32 billion deal, which ranks as Google's largest-ever acquisition....

The DoE's planned funding runs through 2030 America's Oak Ridge National Laboratory will receive up to $125 million through 2030 to develop hybrid computing systems that link quantum and supercomputing technologies....

Debian 13 base, minus systemd and RISC-V build Old school enough to favor Debian, but averse to systemd? Good news: Devuan 6 "Excalibur" is here, and all you need to do is draw it from the stone master its installer....

CEO Lisa Su says next-gen MI400 GPUs and architecture gaining traction with hyperscalers AMD plans to launch its Helios rack-scale architecture in 2026 as a direct challenge to Nvidia in the AI infrastructure market, pending successful integration of its next-gen GPUs and processors....

S/4HANA migration? Many still worried about business process change Around two fifths of North America's SAP users have yet to begin migrating to S/4HANA with just two years until mainstream support ends for legacy systems....

Local privileges required to exploit flaw in Ryzen and Epyc CPUs. Some patches available, more on the way AMD will issue a microcode patch for a high-severity vulnerability that could weaken cryptographic keys across Epyc and Ryzen CPUs....

Meanwhile, others tried to social-engineer the chatbot itself Nation-state goons and cybercrime rings are experimenting with Gemini to develop a "Thinking Robot" malware module that can rewrite its own code to avoid detection, and build an AI agent that tracks enemies' behavior, according to Google Threat Intelligence Group....

Memory safety costs money: Maintainers Fund to directly pay developers for their work The Rust Foundation has launched a Maintainers Fund to support developers sustaining the language, addressing a long-standing challenge in open source software....

Buyers still struggling to differentiate data platforms in era of AI Cloud data platform vendor Snowflake has made its set of PostgreSQL extensions open source in a bid to help developers and data engineers integrate the popular open source database with its lakehouse system....

Retailer's tech systems aren't down anymore, but the same can't be said for its rocky financials Marks & Spencer says its April cyberattack will cost around 136 million ($177.2 million) in total....

Supply chains also unprepared for liquid cooling demands A survey of datacenter professionals reveals that supply chain constraints and power availability are hampering the industry's efforts to scale datacenter capacity....

A three-letter person' experiments with the new type-safe C, and is impressed Famed mathematician, cryptographer and coder Daniel J. Bernstein has tried out the new type-safe C/C++ compiler, and he's given it a favorable report....

After a 312M upgrade to the retiring OS, Defra still has 24,000 devices to replace The UK's Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) has spent 312 million (c $407 million) modernizing its IT estate, including replacing tens of thousands of Windows 7 laptops with Windows 10 - which officially reached end of support last month....

Ruled him out just six months ago due to Musky connections US president Donald Trump on Tuesday decided who he wants to lead NASA, despite having ruled out the same person six months ago....

Can't rule out more revenue wobbles given the complexity of big projects Server-maker and designer Supermicro has promised to improve performance, after missing its guided revenue and revealing its margins aren't strong....

Net access cut on election eve, resumed after widely-loathed president was sworn in after disputed poll The African nation of Tanzania has reconnected to the internet after a five day outage....

Perplexity likens Amazon's legal threat to an attempt to ban access to ... wrenches? Amazon.com has sent a cease and desist letter to Perplexity in which it insists the AI company prevent its Comet browser from making automated purchases on behalf of users....

Chocolate Factory's latest moonshot aims to put AI supercomputing cluster in sun-sychronous orbit Google on Tuesday announced a new moonshot - launching constellations of solar-powered satellites packed to the gills with its home-grown tensor processing units (TPUs) to form orbital AI datacenters....

DHS rule would expand biometric collection to immigrants and some citizens linked to them If you're filing an immigration form - or helping someone who is - the Feds may soon want to look in your eyes, swab your cheek, and scan your face. The US Department of Homeland Security wants to greatly expand biometric data collection for immigration applications, covering immigrants and even some US citizens tied to those cases....

When you opt in, your taskbar becomes an extension of the Copilot app, but with some search added in hands on With Microsoft cramming Copilot into every nook and cranny of its software, it's no surprise that everyone's favorite AI assistant is now set to take over the search box. As of the latest Windows Insider Dev and Beta builds, the "Ask Copilot anything" box is available if you know how to switch it on....

They have no need to prove their bonafides Recently, I was spinning up yet another terribly coded thing for fun because I believe in making my problems everyone else's problems, and realized something that had been nagging at me for a while: working with AWS is relatively painful....

Resource Actions expected to hit half of US Infrastructure group IBM this week began notifying several thousand employees that they will be laid off, according to sources familiar with the matter....

Experts disagree about what the ruling means for AI training on copyrighted material London's High Court has dismissed the major portions of Getty Images' lawsuit against generative AI firm Stability AI for training its image-generation model on copyrighted images, which some legal experts say could weaken intellectual property laws.However, others saw daylight for trademark and copyright protection in the judge's ruling....

Curly COMrades strike again Russia's Curly COMrades is abusing Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor in compromised Windows machines to create a hidden Alpine Linux-based virtual machine that bypasses endpoint security tools, giving the spies long-term network access to snoop and deploy malware....

Security program fails to meet federal standards as government cuts drain resources The infosec program run by the US' Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) "is not effective," according to a fresh audit published by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG)....

Only a point up in a year, but that's a 50% leap for Linux gamers The latest edition of Valve's monthly Steam Hardware & Software Survey is out, showing a rise in Steam usage on Linux. Penguin likes to play!...