The Register

Arrangement follows big tech tie-ins claiming to offer 31B investment The UK has struck a defense deal with US spy-tech biz Palantir, which the government says will unlock 1.5 billion ($2 billion) of investment in Britain....

It will hit outsourcing companies hardest On Friday, President Trump signed a presidential proclamation to sharply raise the cost of employing H-1B workers by restricting entry unless employers make a $100,000 payment with the petition....

With new electricity sources for AI datacenters, the company will have some juice left over AI model training and serving require vast quantities of power, but not necessarily all at once. With the first of several gigawatt-scale datacenters due to come online next year, Meta is looking at ways to offload excess energy capacity by selling it on the wholesale market....

Could this bot-prevention technique now be obsolete? ChatGPT can be tricked via cleverly worded prompts to violate its own policies and solve CAPTCHA puzzles, potentially making this human-proving security mechanism obsolete, researchers say....

Training costs detailed in R1 training report don't include 2.79 million GPU hours that laid its foundation Chinese AI darling DeepSeek's now infamous R1 research report was published in the Journal Nature this week, alongside new information on the compute resources required to train the model. Unfortunately, some people got the wrong idea about just how expensive it was to create....

Unnamed org compromised with two malware sets An unknown attacker has abused a couple of flaws in Ivanti Endpoint Manager Mobile (EPMM) and deployed two sets of malware against an unnamed organization, according to the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency....

Latest marketing blitz for a solution seeking a problem... and a killer app Comment Microsoft suspects that a "transformative shift" is being driven in personal and enterprise computing by its Copilot+ PCs and an expanding Windows on Arm ecosystem....

It's also spinning twice as fast than thought, making a tricky rendezvous even trickier Japan's Hayabusa2 probe faces a tougher mission after new measurements revealed its target asteroid is nearly three times smaller and spinning about twice as fast as originally estimated....

Outside experts say the vulnerability has probably already been exploited Budding ransomware crooks have another shot at exploiting Fortra's GoAnywhere MFT product now that a new 10/10 severity vulnerability needs patching....

Judge rules there's no quick fix for 1,700+ axed grants, leaving labs scrambling for cash while the lawsuit plays out A US court has cleared the way for the National Science Foundation to press ahead with the cancellation of more than 1,700 research grants worth upwards of $1 billion....

Bad opsec Thalha Jubair, one of the two UK teens arrested on Tuesday and accused of being members of the notorious Scattered Spider cybercrime gang, allegedly played a role in bilking more than 100 organizations out of at least $115 million in ransom payments. The cops nabbed him after following a number of clues, including paying for gift cards from a wallet on the same server that also held wallets receiving extortion payments....

Until Microsoft lobbed it into a virtual volcano A security researcher claims to have found a flaw that could have handed him the keys to almost every Entra ID tenant worldwide....

Leo XIV voices concerns about AI taking jobs - and not just his own Pope Leo XIV has crucified the idea of creating an AI version which would've allowed Catholics around the world to have a virtual audience with him - without the need for a trip to Vatican City....

DSAG criticizes separate regimes for public, private cloud, says users need more time to upgrade in uncertain times SAP's German-speaking user group has warned that the enterprise software giant's current licensing regime is creating unwanted difficulties in launching cloud migration and upgrade projects....

Radware says flaw enabled hidden email prompts to trick Deep Research agent into exfiltrating sensitive data ChatGPT's research assistant sprung a leak - since patched - that let attackers steal Gmail secrets with just a single carefully crafted email....

Another blow for the legislation as Parliament continues to hear stakeholder views As UK ministers continue to quiz stakeholders over the effectiveness of the Online Safety Act, one charity chief raised concerns over the robustness of Ofcom's enforcement of the controversial legislation....

Q: How many Excel users do you need to correctly set the number formatting of a cell? A: Monday, January 1st, 1900 The inaugural finals of the UK Excel Championship have come and gone, and there is now one spreadsheet wrangler to rule them all, at least in the United Kingdom....

Contractor sneakily fired after pointing out odious ignorance On Call Welcome to another installment of On Call, The Register's Friday frolic through your tales of delightful tech support encounters....

YouTube vids explain digital tradecraft to reach spooks over Tor or VPN without blowing your cover The UK's Secret Intelligence Service, aka MI6, has created a dark web portal called Silent Courier" that it hopes would-be foreign informants will find a suitably secure means of sharing secrets....

Collaborationware CEO tried to smooth things over, but Hack Club now plans a strategy shift Slack sent a nonprofit hacking club for teens a demand for $50,000, payable within a week, and threatened to delete the club's message archive if it did not pay....

Teams with UAV operator Flytrex for service that moves meals in minutes Flying pigs may soon be on their way to some US households, after rideshare and food delivery behemoth Uber teamed with drone operator Flytrex for food delivery services....

Thanks for the memories, Akatsuki Japan's Aerospace Exploration Agency has decided to abandon its Akatsuki Venus orbiter, after losing contact with the craft last year....

In a state known for dairy, football, and broken tech dreams Microsoft's CEO has claimed the operating system-slinger is building the "world's largest datacenter."...

But still no hero customer for Chipzilla's Foundry biz Nvidia is set to become one of Intel's largest shareholders after the GPU giant announced on Thursday it would invest $5 billion in the struggling chipmaker under a co-development agreement targeting PCs and datacenter infrastructure....

Why browse the web yourself when an AI sidekick can spoon-feed it to you? Now that it knows it won't be forced to sell its browser, Google is cramming AI into every vacant corner of Chrome it can find, whether you like it or not....

Sixth such Chrome flaw this year spotted by the Chocolate Factory, already in play Google pushed an emergency patch for a high-severity Chrome flaw, already under active exploitation. So it's time to make sure you're running the most recent version of the web browser....

Aussie CEO promises AI everywhere, and clearer views of what your devs are up to Atlassian has continued its AI spending spree with a $1 billion takeover of developer analysis biz DX, a move it promised would give devs "less friction and more flow."...

Inject this synthetic phage into E. coli and it kills better than the real thing A group of Stanford bioengineers claim that they've created synthetic bacteriophages using AI-generated designs that not only work in the real world, but are far more infectious than their naturally-occurring counterparts....

Vendor pulls plug on cloud backup feature, urges admins to reset passwords and re-secure devices SonicWall is telling some customers to reset passwords after attackers broke into its cloud backup service and accessed firewall configuration data....

Copilot+ PC users can run the AI models locally. Others may need a subscription. Microsoft is continuing to shovel AI functionality into its Notepad application, with Windows Insiders the first test subjects....

Three US medical centers fess up to serious breaches Cybercriminals broke in and stole nearly a million Americans' data in the space of a week, in the course of three digital burglaries at healthcare providers....

Layoffs to stand following $1.1B AI acquisition Activist investors have taken a $2 billion stake in Workday, signaling approval of its direction and saying they "look forward to continued collaboration with the company."...

Decisive action comes nearly a year after the attack and first arrest took place Two teenagers are set to appear in court today after being charged with offences related to the cyberattack on Transport for London (TfL) in August 2024....

Dashboard loop caused API outage that was hard to troubleshoot Cloudflare has confessed to a coding error using a React useEffect hook, notorious for being problematic if not handled carefully, that caused an outage for the platform's dashboard and many of its APIs....

Wake-up call for dozed and confused chap who had to turn on runway lights In the high-stress and safety-critical world of air traffic control, "don't fall asleep" probably comes pretty far toward the top of the rule book, and yet that's apparently the reason for the landing delay of an Air Corsica Airbus A320 this week....

VC giant rebuilt boxes, patched holes, and says it's beefed up security - but won't say who did it Venture capital giant Insight Partners has confirmed that a January ransomware attack compromised the personal data of more than 12,000 people, including employees, former staff, and the firm's usually-secretive limited partners....

Proofpoint spots efforts to spy on US economic policy nerds Chinese state-aligned online attackers are back at it, targeting US trade policy wonks as Washington and Beijing spar over economic ties....

Model can also explain its answers, researchers find Chinese AI company DeepSeek has shown it can improve the reasoning of its LLM DeepSeek-R1 through trial-and-error based reinforcement learning, and even be made to explain its reasoning on math and coding problems, even though explanations might sometimes be unintelligible....

And knits a graph DB out of LinkedIn cast-offs Microsoft is extending its Fabric cloud-based data platform by including Oracle and Google's BigQuery data warehouse in its mirroring capability, and launching a new graph database based on an in-house LinkedIn project....

'Just a hobby, won't be big and professional like GNU...' Open Source Summit At OSS EU, LWN editor and long-time kernel developer Jonathan Corbet shared a long-term perspective on how and why Linux has thrived for a third of a century....

LEGO Mindstorms, PlayStation 2 and Furby all resonate today in their own way Column Twenty-five years ago this month I published a book called The Playful World that explored a simple idea: that the seeds of the future can be found in the present by considering the dazzling toys we started giving our children at the turn of the millennium....

On the same day that fellow Chinese giant Tencent says its overseas cloud clientele doubled Chinese tech giant Huawei has kicked off its annual Connect" conference by laying out a plan to deliver increasingly powerful AI processors that look to have enough power that Middle Kingdom users won't need to try getting Nvidia parts across the border....

As old-school virtual desktop player Omnissa distances itself further from VMware Microsoft thinks cloudy PCs might be overkill for some users, so has started streaming individual apps instead as part of its Windows 365 service....

It's worst when going over older code, one user tells us AI coding service Replit is in trouble again as users are protesting steep cost increases and some glitches when employing the newest version of its service....

Huawei or another, we're gonna getcha off Nvidia Nvidia has reportedly been cut off from the Chinese market after regulators in Beijing ordered the nation's top tech companies to suspend testing and cancel orders of the GPU giant's accelerators....

As the Trump administration guts efforts to counter election disinfo The Russian troll farm that in the lead-up to the 2024 US presidential election posted a bizarro video claiming Democratic candidate Kamala Harris was a rhino poacher, is back with hundreds of new fake news websites serving up phony political commentary with an AI assist....

Datacenters galore, plus some vague cooperation on AI, nuclear, quantum, and more America and the UK have announced a $42 billion (31 billion) trade pact, funded by Microsoft, Google, and others, that predicts bit barns will spring up over Britain's green and pleasant Land. But there's a lot more than money involved....

First up: $41M to use human annotators to label all that unstructured military data. What could go wrong? Data curation firm Scale AI has partnered with the Pentagon to deploy its AI on Top Secret networks - a move its interim CEO says is necessary if the US wants AI to be useful for national security....

House of Zen promises 3.5x improvement in inference and 3x uplift in training perf over last-gen software AMD closed the performance gap with Nvidia's Blackwell accelerators with the launch of the MI355X this spring. Now the company just needs to overcome Nvidia's CUDA software advantage and make that perf more accessible to developers....

You didn't really trust the crims to keep their word, did you? Spiders don't change their stripes. Despite gang members' recent retirement claims, Scattered Spider hasn't exited the cybercrime business and instead has shifted focus to the financial sector, with a recent digital intrusion at a US bank....