The Register

Crew went farther from Earth than any humans we know about, now they're coming back! In a world wracked b wars, difficult economic conditions, and exploding RAM costs, there's one piece of good news. NASA's Artemis II mission has been an unqualified success, having carried four astronauts farther from Earth than any humans before them....

Hundreds of layoffs, but this smells of geopolitics, not downsizing Red Hat appears to have fired its entire engineering team in China, which it no longer thinks is a country it needs to prioritize. Most of the team will move to India....

Firefox maker warns old web tactics are now shaping AI at the expense of user choice Firefox-maker Mozilla is calling out Microsoft after Redmond said it would scale back some Copilot features in Windows, arguing the rollback shows the company pushed AI too far without enough regard for user choice....

Trade group warns onshoring demands will leave Americans stuck with older gear The Global Electronics Association (GEA) warns that the US ban on foreign-made network routers is impractical because few are made domestically, leaving consumers with little choice and delaying access to next-gen products, just as Wi-Fi 7 adoption should be ramping up....

Six-hour breach turned trusted links into a coin toss between legit tools and credential stealers Visitors to the CPUID website were briefly exposed to malware this week after attackers hijacked part of its backend, turning trusted download links into a delivery mechanism for something far less welcome....

Investors urged to reject proposal for more disclosure on whether AWS expansion risks climate goals Amazon's board of directors is urging shareholders to reject a proposal that would have the megacorp disclose more information on the impact of datacenters on its climate commitments....

Forget about investment value! Call it a 'strategic enabler for enterprisewide transformation,' says KPMG Most UK business leaders will keep AI at the top of their spending priorities, with 65 percent planning to maintain investment whether they see immediate measurable returns or not....

Just what FOSS developers need - a flood of AI-discovered vulnerabilities Opinion Anthropic describes Project Glasswing as a coalition of tech giants committing $100 million in AI resources to hunt down and fix long-hidden vulnerabilities in critical open source software that it's finding with its new Mythos AI program. Or as The Reg put it, "an AI model that can generate zero-day vulnerabilities."...

Four-week call for evidence intended to help shape laws aimed at devices linked to crime The UK government is seeking views on radiofrequency jammers as it prepares legislation to ban the controversial devices....

Sellafield says sticking with German giant is only way off legacy ECC before support runs dry The government-owned company that runs the UK's most important nuclear site has begun plans to replace its legacy SAP ERP - mainstream support for which ends in 2027 - via a 33 million award to the German vendor, without competition....

Most sole traders and landlords ignore marketing campaigns, though fines are coming Fewer than three-tenths of those required to sign up for quarterly software-based Making Tax Digital (MTD) reporting for the latest tax year that started this month have done so, according to HM Revenue & Customs....

The right person for the job didn't have the right passport for the job On Call Welcome to another edition of On Call, The Register's reader-contributed column that shares your stories of tech support incidents that crossed a line....

Annual CEO letter reveals two customers want all Graviton servers, huge drone rollout, a million robots, and more megalomania Amazon CEO Andy Jassy on Thursday delivered his annual letter to shareholders and it's full of interesting news about the cloud and e-tail giant....

Everyone gets unlimited 400 Kbps access, oldies get expanded caps, and leaky telcos get their social license back Universal basic income is an idea that hasn't gained much traction, but South Korea on Thursday implemented a universal basic mobile data access scheme....

Just in time to get buyers thinking as physical PC prices rise Microsoft has told its channel partners to get ready for a 20 percent price cut for Windows 365 cloud PCs, effective May 1st....

Urge restraints before AdLand does this without appropriate disclosures Large language models can be very persuasive, and researchers say that's a problem when they're used to create advertising....

Want to run your business on autopilot? For better or worse, Managed Agents might help with that If you need AI agents to do a lot of ongoing tasks for your business, Anthropic has a new answer for you. The Claude maker has introduced Managed Agents, a service to help organizations create and deploy cloud-hosted knowledge work automations....

Custom ASIC biz now running at a $1B annual pace for Intel Google will continue to work with Intel, buying SmartNICs for its public cloud rather than blazing its own trail as AWS has done with its Nitro NICs....

Cops bust latest scam, return $12m to bilked victims US, UK, and Canadian law enforcement Thursday said that they disrupted a $45 million global cryptocurrency scam, freezing $12 million in stolen funds and identifying more than 20,000 cryptocurrency wallet addresses linked to fraud victims across 30 countries....

C-suite forced to take sandwiches into work, cycle home It's going to be hard holding back our tears. The C-suite lieutenants at Amazon didn't exactly get the bumper payday that many El Reg readers would expect, particularly compared with prior years....

Your agent will be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, and numbered AI agents should not be secret agents, at least in corporate environments. But when companies deploy software automations, they don't always have visibility into what their roboscripts are actually doing....

Possible link to Mr. Raccoon's claimed Adobe break-in A new extortion crew has targeted several dozen high-value" corporations through phishing and helpdesk social-engineering, according to Google....

FTC lawsuit lingers, while encouraging signs point to Iowa bill succeeding too Agriculture manufacturing giant John Deere has agreed to a proposed $99 million settlement following a class action lawsuit in Illinois....

ACM salutes Databricks co-founder Matei Zaharia with $250K prize The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has awarded its annual Prize in Computing to Matei Zaharia for his work developing open source data and analytics software, including the widely used Apache Spark analytics engine....

Arm support is on the agenda, too, because AI is going to run on everything Exclusive Nutanix plans to support KubeVirt to allow its customers to run both containers and VMs on the edge....

UK and US customers stuck waiting after fleet management SaaS vendor took affected environments offline A cybersecurity incident has knocked FleetWave into a "major outage" across the UK and US after Chevin Fleet Solutions pulled parts of its SaaS platform offline and left customers scrambling for answers....

Sam Altman's datacenter dreams hit a wall of watts and wonkery, cooling Britain's AI ambitions OpenAI is pausing its planned Stargate datacenter project in the UK just months after announcing it, citing the regulatory environment and cost of energy as reasons for putting it on hold....

Malicious PDFs abuse legit features to harvest system data and decide which victims get a 2nd-stage payload Hackers have been quietly exploiting what appears to be a zero-day in Adobe Acrobat Reader for months, using booby-trapped PDFs to profile targets and decide who's worth fully compromising....

No emails, no warnings, no humans - just bots, catch-22s, and a 60-day appeals queue Microsoft says that it will work on how it communicates with developers after two leading open source figures were suddenly locked out of their accounts, leaving them unable to sign updates....

Memory costs were already through the roof - now freight's spiking too, and budget systems face extinction America's war with Iran is jacking up the pressure on computing markets already struggling with memory shortages and component cost inflation, meaning buyers should brace themselves for even higher prices this year....

Wash your mouth out with digital soap Apple Intelligence, the personal AI system integrated into newer Macs, iPhones, and other iThings, can be hijacked using prompt injection, forcing the model into producing an attacker-controlled result and putting millions of users at risk, researchers have shown....

Departure may accelerate further AI-centric moves for programming tools Julia Liuson, president of Microsoft's developer division (DevDiv), will resign at the end of June, though she will continue in an advisory role....

The core product is solid and priced fairly I've spent over a decade telling anyone who'd listen that S3 is not a filesystem, which in retrospect was a really weird way to start some conversations. So when AWS launched S3 Files on Tuesday - which lets you mount an S3 bucket as an NFS share - I did what any reasonable person would do: I spun up an EC2 instance and started trying to break it....

Attackers slipped into the process and redirected funds, leaving the company scrambling to recover the cash UK-listed oil and gas outfit Zephyr Energy plc has admitted a cyber incident siphoned off roughly 700,000 after a single payment to a contractor was quietly redirected to an attacker-controlled account....

DSIT hiring directors general with packages reaching 260K plus pension The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) is recruiting three directors general to lead aspects of the UK government's digital work, all on pay in excess of the prime minister's salary....

As if the backlog, the bugs, and the chatbot fixes weren't enough Capita has limited the online functionality of its Civil Service Pensions Scheme (CSPS) member portal after confirming an "issue" briefly exposed the personal data of public sector workers....

Home Office hopes tech will help cops target hotspots as ministers push to halve offenses The British government is spending 15 million over the next three years to improve crime mapping in England and Wales, partly to allow more targeted policing of knife crime....

Court of Appeal hearing in ValueLicensing dispute may shape parallel proceedings The Microsoft and ValueLicensing legal tussle will enter an appeals phase this month, attracting the attention of a multibillion-pound class action against the Windows giant....

Even fitness equipment is vulnerable to mischief makers these days PWNED Welcome back to Pwned, the column where we share war stories from IT soldiers who shot themselves - or watched someone else shoot themselves - in the foot. Today's tale shows that even when you're setting up something as simple as fitness gear, there's no excuse for leaving security credentials lying around....

The time is maybe Quantum computing exists in a sort of superposition with regard to cryptography - it's both a pending threat and a technology of no immediate consequence for decryption....

You were the chosen one! It was said that you would destroy the proprietary models, not join them! Nearly two years after extolling the virtues of open source AI, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is singing a different tune....

South Korea's biggest theme park is also riding the VM migration roller coaster Western Union has commenced a migration from VMware to Nutanix after deciding it didn't want to do business with Broadcom....

Helps employees present data in Confluence in various ways Atlassian is modernizing Confluence for the AI era, testing tools and agentic capabilities that give users the chance to turn their written notes into graphics and their ideas into software applications....

If they don't know what they're doing, you might never get your data back interview It's the biggest threat today, but it took her a while to appreciate it. After spending two decades at the FBI and much of that time working to intercept and stop cyber threats from the likes of China and Russia, Halcyon Ransomware Research Center SVP Cynthia Kaiser says she was a "latercomer to really wanting to focus on ransomware."...

Drawback: it's radioactive Forget recharging or swapping out disposable AAs every day. What if you could power energy-hungry devices for months or even years at a time from a single, reasonably-sized battery? A Washington state-based fusion energy startup is helping to make that dream a reality for DARPA, which wants higher-power radioactive batteries for space....

Kubernetes luminary Kelsey Hightower thinks IT pros need to get smart about thriving in a world that's trying to hide deep tech As businesses drink the agentic AI Kool-Aid and go looking for productivity enhancements, IT professionals can deliver by rebranding their existing automations as zero-token architecture," according to Kelsey Hightower, a former Google distinguished engineer and a notable early promoter of Kubernetes....

China-bound Hopper accelerators are also likely to ship in smaller volumes than previously forecast, industry watchers say Nvidia's next-gen Rubin GPUs may end up shipping later and in smaller volumes than anticipated due to supply chain challenges, TrendForce warned on Wednesday....

BAE says trials could offer cheaper way to counter uncrewed aerial threats BAE Systems has successfully tested a laser-guided rocket system with a Typhoon fighter jet from Britain's Royal Air Force (RAF) as a potential anti-drone weapon. It follows earlier trials in the US with the F-15E Strike Eagle....

Sample testing found incorrect payments and delays after college system adopted new HR platform A Workday-based HR platform rollout at Minnesota State universities and colleges likely left more than a thousand faculty and staff with payroll errors....

MATHBAC program wants better machine-to-machine chatter for scientific discovery To supercharge agents' ability to make scientific discoveries, DARPA is looking to improve cross-bot collaboration by developing a "science of AI communication" that will help the models work together to come up with better ideas....