The Register

Memory boom funds $10B punt on 'solutions' outfit that's still light on details SK hynix is surfing the AI hype wave by setting up what it nebulously describes as a solutions biz to further exploit the hysteria....

How a cold morning, failed O-rings, and flawed decision-making led to tragedy Forty years ago, Space Shuttle Challenger disintegrated 73 seconds into its flight, killing its crew of seven and exposing the management culture and decision-making process that led NASA to launch on a freezing January day....

Chatbot banned - for now - after it dreamed up West Ham match that never happened West Midlands Police's acting Chief Constable has suspended use of Microsoft Copilot following a controversy that led to the early retirement of his predecessor over a recommendation to ban Israeli football fans from a Birmingham match....

Google researcher sits on UAC bypass for ages, only for it to become valid with new security feature Microsoft patched a bevy of bugs that allowed bypasses of Windows Administrator Protection before the feature was made available earlier this month....

If only there were some technology to boil things down to bullet points Opinion Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has published a novella-length essay about the risk of superintelligent AI, something that doesn't yet exist....

Home Office white paper promises millions for LFR, a new Police.AI unit, and a bespoke legal framework Police in England and Wales will increase their use of live facial recognition (LFR) and artificial intelligence (AI) under wide-ranging government plans to reform law enforcement....

You can't cheaply recompute without re-running the whole model - so KV cache starts piling up Feature Large language model inference is often stateless, with each query handled independently and no carryover from previous interactions. A request arrives, the model generates a response, and the computational state gets discarded. In such AI systems, memory grows linearly with sequence length and can become a bottleneck for long contexts....

But did it falter? Oracle debuts Schrodinger's cloud Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) users reported an outage late last week in its London region, yet despite complaints from Register readers, Big Red is staying quiet....

Cascading backend failures kept users locked out until home time Microsoft Azure, or at least the part of it that handles the OpenAI service in the Sweden Central region, was down and out for the count yesterday, leaving users facing errors for much of the working day....

AWS and Capgemini loom large in HMRC's procurement pipeline The UK's tax collector is budgeting to spend more than 2 billion on new tech deals in the next couple of years, including a contract set for AWS and another for Capgemini to be awarded without competition....

'Follow-on' agreement lasts 3 years as US techies protest vendor's ICE contract Stateside The UK's Ministry of Defence (MoD) has directly awarded a 240.6 million contract to US technology company Palantir to continue to licence and support its data analytics work....

Connection secured. Not so sure about the installation Bork!Bork!Bork! Behold an ATM crying out for a man-in-the-middle attack. An obsolete Microsoft operating system cannot be blamed here. This is all about the hardware....

Meta also replaces a legacy C++ media-handling security library with Rust Users of Meta's WhatsApp messenger looking to simplify the process of protecting themselves are in luck, as the company is rolling out a new feature that combines multiple security settings under a single, toggleable option....

Agency looks to understand the extent of identifying information available to its masked agents It's not enough to have its agents in streets and schools; ICE now wants to see what data online ads already collect about you. The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement last week issued a Request for Information (RFI) asking data and ad tech brokers how they could help in its mission....

Researchers with the Tech Transparency Project found all sorts of apps that let users create fake non-consensual nudes of real people The mobile app emperors have no clothes. Apple and Google have made millions of dollars from AI apps that let users undress people even as both companies claim to ban such software from their stores, according to a new study....

Plus, the gang says it got in via Microsoft Entra SSO ShinyHunters says it stole several slices of data from Panera Bread, but that's just the yeast of everyone's problems. The extortionist gang also claims to have stolen data from CarMax and Edmunds, in addition to three other organizations it posted to its blog last week....

An expandable tablet, and a phone that reboots into desktop Windows For most mobile devices, the OS is either Android or iOS, but a pair of new systems promises a host of additional OS options you can dual boot into. The Android phone can run Linux and boot into Windows 11 where it functions as a PC while the tablet runs a smorgasbord of Google-free OSes....

The massively hyped agentic personal assistant has security experts wondering why anyone would install it Security concerns for the new agentic AI tool formerly known as Clawdbot remain, despite a rebrand prompted by trademark concerns raised by Anthropic. Would you be comfortable handing the keys to your identity kingdom over to a bot, one that might be exposed to the open internet?...

IDC and Lenovo say enterprises are pressing ahead with pilot deployments despite mixed evidence on returns Despite a growing number of reports that AI is not benefiting many businesses, Lenovo and IDC say that firms in EMEA are pushing ahead with pilot deployments and still expect it to drive growth and transform how they operate....

No salvation from the memory winter, though - plant won't start churning out chips until 2028 Flush with cash from skyrocketing memory prices, Micron continued its fab expansion this week, this time breaking ground on a $24 billion manufacturing complex that will eventually produce chips used in storage devices....

Analytics features arrive first; agentic AI comes later Salesforce is getting cosier with the US Army via a deal worth up to $5.6 billion, selling cloud analytics as the groundwork for a future agentic AI push across the service and the wider DoD....

Vicar of Rome decries naive and unquestioning reliance on technology Catholics need to develop critical thinking skills to counter the dark side of AI and counter unnatural attachments to chatbots, the pope said this week in a message marking the Church's social communications day....

Reports say Salt Typhoon attackers accessed handsets of senior govt folk Chinese state-linked hackers are accused of spending years inside the phones of senior Downing Street officials, exposing private communications at the heart of the UK government....

GAO urges NWS to firm up its AI language plans as policy shifts slow multilingual warnings US spending watchdogs have called on the National Weather Service (NWS) to deliver an updated plan for its AI language translation project to reduce the risk posed by extreme weather events to people not proficient in English....

Communication attempts ongoing for stricken spacecraft NASA is setting up an anomaly review board to look into the fate of its Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft, which was last heard from on December 6....

French govt says state-run service 'Visio'will be more secure. Now where have we heard that name before? France has officially told Zoom, Teams, and the rest of the US videoconferencing herd to take a hike in favor of its own homegrown app....

Conclave doc outlines path to eternal releases The Linux kernel project has finally answered one of the biggest questions gripping the community: what happens if Linus Torvalds is no longer able to lead it?...

RIKEN links up with Argonne, Fujitsu, and Nvidia to build next-gen infrastructure Japan's RIKEN scientific research institute and Fujitsu are working with America's Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) and Nvidia to build and operate next-gen compute infrastructure for AI and high-performance computing (HPC), in line with President Trump's Genesis Mission....

Austrian education ministry unaware of tracking software until campaigners launched case Updated Microsoft illegally installed cookies on a school pupil's devices without consent, according to a ruling by the Austrian data protection authority (DSB)....

Victim and Big Brother Watch will argue the Met's policies are incompatible with human rights law The High Court will hear from privacy campaigners this week who want to reshape the way the Metropolitan Police is allowed to use live facial recognition (LFR) tech....

In space, no one can hear you bork NASA has confirmed that its planet hunter, TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), entered safe mode due to a command error that inadvertently left the spacecraft's solar arrays angled away from the Sun....

Developer behind it is sick with worry he might have changed software development in nasty ways Feature Open source developer Geoff Huntley wrote a script that sometimes makes him nauseous. That's becaues it uses agentic AI and coding assistants to create high-quality software at such tiny cost, he worries it will upend his profession....

Another actively abused Office bug, another emergency patch - Office 2016 and 2019 users are left with registry tweaks instead of fixes. Microsoft has issued an emergency Office patch after confirming a zero-day flaw is already being used in real world attacks....

40 years later, mission boffin recalls being told to pronounce it correctly It is 40 years since Voyager 2 performed the first and, so far, only flyby of the planet Uranus. The resulting trove of data, however, was a bonus that almost didn't happen....

Analysts say today's capped deals may become tomorrow's cost shock Gartner is warning Salesforce users that a capped enterprise agreement for its AI and data platforms will not be available when they come to renew, leaving a struggle to predict costs and understand value....

A thoroughly modern piece of public transport infrastructure deserves a thoroughly modern bork Bork!Bork!Bork! London's Elizabeth Line is the latest thing in urban development (at least as far as the UK is concerned). So it seems appropriate that its borks should be similarly up to date, and its emoticons rotated so the intent cannot be mistaken....

Researchers argue AI coding tools disrupt community and hinder returns to maintainers Tailwind Labs CEO Adam Wathan recently blamed AI for forcing him to lay off three workers....

The cloud giant talks loudest about what scares it most. Here's what should terrify it For a decade, AWS's position on multi-cloud was clear: don't....

Atlassian, RingCentral, ZoomInfo also among tech targets ShinyHunters has targeted around 100 organizations in its latest Okta single sign-on (SSO) credential stealing campaign, according to researchers and the criminal group itself....

Robin Rowe talks about coding, programming education, and China in the age of AI feature TrapC, a memory-safe version of the C programming language, is almost ready for testing....

Inference-optimized chip 30% cheaper than any other AI silicon on the market today, Azure's Scott Guthrie claims Microsoft on Monday unveiled a new in-house AI accelerator to rival Nvidia's Blackwell GPUs....

The new US-based joint venture blamed a datacenter power outage, but hasn't elaborated TikTok's new life under majority American ownership is off to a rough start, after users complained of widespread service disruptions the company blamed on a datacenter power outage....

An official Model Context Protocol extension Anthropic's Claude can now present the interfaces of other applications within its chat window, thanks to an extension of the Model Context Protocol (MCP)....

But CEOs remain frozen in place More than 400 tech workers have urged their CEOs to "call the White House and demand ICE leave our cities" after masked federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti over the weekend and the world's richest and most powerful chief executives remained silent....

Points to a use-case problem AI adoption in the workplace stalled in the fourth quarter of 2025, but those who have already started using it are making increased use of it, according to a survey by pollster Gallup. Don't let that fool you into thinking AI is taking over work, though: frequent AI users are still a tiny minority of overall workers....

Even agents checking other agents can still get it wrong Agents may be the next big thing in AI, but they have limits beyond which they will make mistakes, so exercise extreme caution, a recent research paper says....

Latest data from Cloudflare shows cable cuts, power failures, and network faults drive steady run of internet outages The internet spent the closing months of 2025 being knocked over by cut cables, broken power grids, bad weather, military strikes, and the occasional self-inflicted technical wound, according to Cloudflare's latest global traffic data....

Bad luck, BSDs - although alternatives still work KDE Plasma 6.6 is approaching, and one of its more controversial changes is a new login screen that depends on systemd - meaning that it won't work on the non-Linux operating systems KDE still nominally supports....

Thankfully they only sufffered two outages in 2025. And now it has flown in experts to play with configurations Alaska Air's CEO says IT outages last year damaged the company on multiple fronts despite "triple redundancies" built into its disaster recovery plan....

The seminal shooter finds yet another unlikely home Not content with rendering Doom in PCB design software or playing it on an oscilloscope, engineer Mike Ayles has got the 1990s shooter running in a computer-aided design (CAD) modeler....