The Register

Palliser Capital says Toto is sitting on hidden semiconductor value - and wants the company to lift the lid The AI hype cycle has officially reached the toilet, with a Japanese bathroom giant suddenly being pitched as a serious tech play....

Faithful pen open letter proposing independent foundation with or without Big Red's participation A group of influential users and developers of MySQL have invited Oracle to join their plans to create an independent foundation to guide the future development of the popular open source database, which Big Red owns....

With no staff, no funding, and the contract closed, it looks a lot like limbo The UK's long-promised "Single Trade Window" has quietly run out of steam after burning through more than 111 million ($150 million), with officials confirming the program has been "brought to early closure."...

$200K role promises authority, mission, and 'zero patience for theater' The Trump administration is looking for a deputy federal CIO, and theater fans need not apply....

Keep behavioral tracking American? PC giant says the claim is 'false' A US law firm has accused Lenovo of violating Justice Department strictures about the bulk transfer of data to foreign adversaries, namely China....

Police say seized kit contained logins, passwords, and server IP addresses Polish police have arrested and charged a man over ties to the Phobos ransomware group following a property raid....

Repo mirrors now open for business Gentoo's official migration from Microsoft-owned GitHub to Codeberg is underway, as the Linux distribution fulfills a pledge to ditch the code shack due to "continuous attempts to force Copilot usage for our repositories."...

Boards demand measurable ROI as budgets, bonuses, and jobs hang in the balance The clock is ticking for AI projects to either prove their worth or face the chopping block....

Digital burglaries remain routine, and data shows most corps still don't stick to basic infosec standards Britain is telling businesses to "lock the door" on cybercrims as new government data suggests most still haven't even found the latch....

Social media platform's legal eagles prepare to fight ever-growing number of countries The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) is the latest regulator to open an investigation into Elon Musk's X following repeated reports of harmful image generation by the platform's Grok AI chatbot....

Outsourcer tells MPs AI is prioritizing cases as thousands of civil servants face delays Capita is banking on Microsoft Copilot to help rescue the backlog of cases it has inherited in taking over the UK Civil Service Pensions Scheme (CSPS)....

Won't replace traditional CI/CD - and still in early development - so use 'at your own risk' Agentic workflows - where an AI agent runs automatically in GitHub Actions - are now in technical preview, following their introduction at the Universe event in San Francisco last year....

Top brass splash cash on acoustic targeting, hypersonic missiles...and Red Hat Keir Starmer could ramp up the UK's defense spending plans faster than planned as the MoD reeled off new purchases for Britain's armed forces....

To advance the ambient internet of things' - no batteries required A quartet of Japanese organisations plan to build advanced ambient internet of things systems" using a newly approved ISO standard....

Your chance to run a VM inside a VM, inside a cloud - which can mean WSL on a cloudy Windows PC Amazon Web Services has enabled nested virtualization for a handful of EC2 instances....

Fashion brand latest to succumb to ShinyHunters' tricks Canada Goose says an advertised breach of 600,000 records is an old raid and there are no signs of a recent compromise....

Bungled link handed over sensitive docs, and when recipient didn't cooperate, police opted for cuffs Dutch police have arrested a man for "computer hacking" after accidentally handing him their own sensitive files and then getting annoyed when he didn't hand them back....

Commit drought and governance gripes push Big Red to reset Oracle has promised a "decisive new approach" to MySQL, the popular open source database it owns, following growing criticism of its approach and the prospect of a significant fork in the code....

Researchers demo weaknesses affecting some of the most popular options Academics say they found a series of flaws affecting three popular password managers, all of which claim to protect user credentials in the event that their servers are compromised....

Unnamed consultant - one of a dozen cases at the company's Australian arm - now nursing a fine AIpocolypse A partner at accounting and consultancy giant KPMG in Australia was forced to cough up a AU$10k ($7,084/ 5,195) fine after he used AI to ace an internal training course on... AI....

'All systems operational,' says status page - real life suggests otherwise Elon Musk-owned social media platform X is experiencing an outage, with users worldwide reporting that their timelines no longer show the usual information flow....

Free beer is great. Securing the keg costs money fosdem 2026 Open source registries are in financial peril, a co-founder of an open source security foundation warned after inspecting their books. And it's not just the bandwidth costs that are killing them....

Budget-conscious buyers in Europe voting with their wallet Sales of refurbished PCs are on the up amid shortages of key components, including memory chips, that are making brand new devices more expensive....

The subtractive bias we're ignoring opinion Just as the community adopted the term "hallucination" to describe additive errors, we must now codify its far more insidious counterpart: semantic ablation....

Competitors asked to detail licensing terms, training costs, and business practices in widening antitrust inquiry The US Federal Trade Commission has sent out a raft of civil investigative demands to Microsoft's competitors as it warms up a probe into whether the cloud and software giant has an illegal monopoly across chunks of the enterprise tech market....

Plan was to turn SLS into Seal Leaks Stemmed... But the flow was off NASA engineers spent the weekend studying the data after another attempt to fill the agency's monster Space Launch System (SLS) produced mixed results....

High-severity CSS flaw let malicious webpages run code inside the sandbox Google has quietly pushed out an emergency Chrome fix after attackers were caught exploiting the browser's first reported zero-day of 2026....

Former Windows manager explains design decisions behind it A former Windows boss has explained why the taskbar in Windows 11 is the way it is and how he "fought hard" to stop Microsoft from removing customization options present in Windows 10....

Lots of donations, but lots of pressure to go with it Although we're in mid-February, the Linux Mint project just published its January 2026 blog. This could be seen as one sign of the pressure on the creator of this very successful distro: although the post talks about forthcoming improved input localization support and user management, it also discusses the pressures of the project's semi-annual release schedule....

Stricter rules for VPNs and AI chatbots also in the offing amid child safety push UK prime minister Keir Starmer has set a "months" timeline for the long-brewing plan for a social media age limit, signaling the government is ready to pick a fight with Big Tech if that's what it takes....

Agency looks to cut waiting times and curb bot-driven slot reselling as it doubles down on IT overhaul The UK's Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) is recruiting a chief digital and information officer, partly to help sort out its bot-ridden practical driving test booking system....

The software doesn't show what files it's working on Anthropic has updated Claude Code, its AI coding tool, changing the progress output to hide the names of files the tool was reading, writing, or editing. However, developers have pushed back, stating that they need to see which files are accessed....

Great concept, shame about the details Opinion If you've ever flipped over a power brick, you'll be familiar with the hieroglyphics of type approval. It's become less crazy over the years as things have got smaller and signage requirements softened, but at its peak tens of logos and acronyms of testing labs and national approvals covered the backside of PSUs in surrealist graffiti....

02:00 AM is not the time to ignore procedures and rely on a shortcut to do a tricky job Who, Me? Welcome to Monday! The Register hopes you arrive at your desk well-rested after a pleasant weekend, and not stressed out by working late as is the case in this week's instalment of "Who, Me?" - the reader contributed column that chronicles your mistakes and escapes....

Only for its own comms apps - whose users can probably do without a full private cloud Cisco is getting close to releasing its own hypervisor, as an alternative to VMware for users of its calling applications - software like the Unified Communications Manager it suggests as an alternative to PBXs and other telephony hardware....

PLUS: India demands two-hour deepfake takedowns; Singapore embraces AI; Japanese robot wolf gets cuddly; And more Asia In Brief The United States may be about to change its policies regarding Chinese technology companies....

Whatever comes next will be core to OpenAI product offerings' Peter Steinberger, the creator of the tantalizing-but-risky personal AI agent OpenClaw, is joining OpenAI....

PLUS: Fake ransomware group exposed; EC blesses Google's big Wiz deal; Alleged sewage hacker cuffed; And more Infosec in Brief The former General Manager of defense contractor L3Harris's cyber subsidiary Trenchant sold eight zero-day exploit kits to Russia, according to a court filing last week....

But that doesn't mean AI is ready to dispense justice ai-pocalypse Legal scholars have found that OpenAI's GPT-5 follows the law better than human judges, but they leave open the question of whether AI is right for the job....

It must be that fresh mountain air Bork!Bork!Bork! Just picture it. You're at a Swiss train station, looking for information on your connecting line. You peer up at the platform sign hoping to find out how long you'll be waiting and whether you're standing in the right place. But instead of helpful info, you see "* Installation log files are stored in /tmp." Gee, thanks a lot!...

What is the automotive equivalent of Word, and where does Copilot fit? In the Venn diagram of car owners whose vehicles have a certain amount of "character" and individuals who use Microsoft's applications, there is an intersection of people who accept a quirk or two but not an unexpected explosion....

Can't live without Adobe? Get on board WinBoat - or WinApps sails a similar course Hands-on Run real Windows in an automatically managed virtual machine, and mix Windows apps in their own windows on your Linux desktop....

Just ask DeepSeek Two of the world's biggest AI companies, Google and OpenAI, both warned this week that competitors including China's DeepSeek are probing their models to steal the underlying reasoning, and then copy these capabilities in their own AI systems....

The Internet History Initiative wants future historians to have a chance to understand how human progress and technical progress align APRICOT 2026 For almost 30 years, the PingER project at the USA's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory used ping thousands of time each day to measure the time a packet of data required to make a round trip between two nodes on the internet....

Startup expects to complete construction of its first fuel plant later this year Amazon inched closer to its atomic datacenter dream on Friday after the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) licensed its small modular reactor partner X-energy to make nuclear fuel for advanced reactors at a facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee....

News of the deal came about two weeks after CEO Bill McDermott swore off any large scale" M&A this year. A spokesperson called this deal a tuck in." Despite its CEO's insistence that it wasn't doing any "large scale" deals soon, ServiceNow has acquired yet another company. This time, the software firm has scooped up Pyramid Analytics, an Israeli corporation with data science and preparation expertise. The goal is to build additional context and semantics into its software stack....

By partnering with CodePath, AI biz aims to modernize how people learn to program Can using AI teach you to code more quickly than traditional methods? Anthropic certainly thinks so. The AI outfit has partnered with computer science education org CodePath to get Claude and Claude Code into the hands of students, a time-tested strategy for seeding product interest and building brand loyalty....

Oxide says AMD's Turin EPYCs are coming, switch revamp under review, more open hardware in the works Remember that giant green rack-sized blade server Oxide Computer showed off a couple of years back? Well, the startup is still at it, having raked in $200 million in Series-C funding this week as it prepares to bring a bevy of new hardware to market with updated processing power, memory, and networking....

As if admins haven't had enough to do this week Ignore patches at your own risk. According to Uncle Sam, a SQL injection flaw in Microsoft Configuration Manager patched in October 2024 is now being actively exploited, exposing unpatched businesses and government agencies to attack....

DoE bets AI can speed fusion, unlock decades of nuclear data, and probe fundamental physics The Trump administration has outlined the first 26 goals for its project to inject AI into the government's scientific research, and everything from securing critical minerals to discovering a unified theory of physics is on the table....