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Open source Surya system promises early alerts for space weather that can fry satellites and grids Boffins at IBM and NASA have concocted an AI model to help predict the weather, but this time it is taking on space weather that might disrupt satellites and spacecraft, possibly even terrestrial power grids and the internet....

Escort's forgotten cap left techie facing rifles and a debrief On Call Welcome once again to On Call, The Register's reader-contributed column that tells tales of your tech support misadventures....

FTC chair: Companies could face enforcement if they give in The head of America's consumer watchdog has issued a stark warning to some of the biggest names in the tech sphere - don't backdoor encryption or censor content at the behest of foreign governments, or there may be consequences....

Fujitsu doesn't have the project all to itself any more Japanese research institution RIKEN has decided it needs GPUs for its next generation FugakuNEXT" supercomputer and has signed Nvidia to supply them and design the systems needed to get them working....

Radioactive decay produced a warm internal ocean Dwarf planet Ceres, the unpleasant lump of icy rock orbiting between Mars and Jupiter, once had an environment in which microbes might have thrived....

Also fired another AI - GitHub Copilot - after it produced mixed results in utilisation and efficacy' Australia's Commonwealth Bank has decided not to fire 45 workers it planned to replace with an AI chatbot....

Point release retuned with new FP8 datatype for better compatibility with homegrown silicon Chinese AI darling DeepSeek unveiled an update to its flagship large language model that the company claims is already optimized for use with a new generation of homegrown silicon....

Pro tip: When taking revenge, don't use your real name A US court sentenced a former developer at power management biz Eaton to four years in prison after he installed malware on the company's servers....

Because savvy terrorists always use public internet services to plan their mischief, right? Anthropic says it has scanned an undisclosed portion of conversations with its Claude AI model to catch concerning inquiries about nuclear weapons....

Better late than never after SharePoint assault? Microsoft has reportedly stopped giving Chinese companies proof-of-concept exploit code for soon-to-be-disclosed vulnerabilities following last month's SharePoint zero-day attacks, which appear to be related to a leak in Redmond's early-bug-notification program....

Underground forums now recruiting English-speaking social engineers English speakers adept at social engineering are a hot commodity in the cybercrime job market....

Google's Gemini-powered tools tripped up by image-scaling prompt injection Security researchers with Trail of Bits have found that Google Gemini CLI and other production AI systems can be deceived by image scaling attacks, a well-known adversarial challenge for machine learning systems....

Bill would let US President commission white hat hackers to go after foreign threats, seize assets on the online seas It's been more than 200 years since the United States issued a letter of marque allowing privateers to attack the vessels of foreign nations, but those letters may return to empower cyber operators if a bill introduced in Congress actually manages to pass....

If anyone's gonna lock in Uncle Sam's business, it'd better be us! It's now safe to say the gang's all here when it comes to big generative AI model makers signing dollar discount deals with Uncle Sam. Google has joined Anthropic and OpenAI, inking questionable short-term discount terms for government agencies....

Update boosts Microsoft file imports, adds new spreadsheet functions, and drops older Windows LibreOffice 25.8 arrives with a tagline of "smarter, faster and more reliable." That all sounds good. So what's new?...

US pulls back from Trump's threatened 100% levy but not everyone pleased at Europe's concessions World War Fee The US and European Union have fleshed out details on their sweeping trade deal, promising billions in AI chip sales, a 15 percent tariff cap on key sectors including autos and semiconductors, and a framework for digital rule-making that could reshape the transatlantic tech industry....

But the free AI Mode itself can now take your history into account The all-AI search mode Google introduced earlier this year has sprouted a one-trick AI agent - but only those willing to pay top dollar for the privilege....

Latest Windows Insider Build puts time and language options in Settings Microsoft has continued its efforts to nudge users toward the Windows Settings app from the venerable Control Panel, with language and time settings making the jump....

What testing is happening before changes hit production? Microsoft had a midweek meltdown on Wednesday as a chunk of its productivity suite fell out of the cloud....

Everything a criminal needs for targeted attacks exposed, but telco insists 'no critical data compromised' A significant data theft at Orange Belgium has opened hundreds of thousands of its customers to serious cybersecurity risks....

Feds say Mirai-spawned botnet blasted 370K attacks before AWS and pals helped yank its servers RapperBot, a botnet-for-hire blamed for hundreds of thousands of DDoS attacks, has been yanked offline by the Feds, who also hauled in its alleged Oregon-based mastermind....

Another 'extremely sophisticated' exploit chewing at Cupertino's walled garden Apple has shipped emergency updates to fix an actively exploited zero-day in its ImageIO framework, warning that the flaw has already been abused in targeted attacks....

Worried about your data? No probs, says firm, we'll check the dark web crims' list for you! Yes really A week after its services were disrupted by a cyberattack, UK telco Colt Technology Services has gone back on its initial statement to confirm that data has indeed been stolen....

Researcher claims extension didn't start out by exfiltrating info... while dev says its actions are 'compliant' Security boffins at Koi Security have warned of a shift in behavior of a popular Chrome VPN extension, FreeVPN.One, which recently appears to have begun snaffling screenshots of users' page activity and transmitting them to a remote server without their knowledge - and Google has yet to take it down....

One fetcher bot seen smacking a website with 39,000 requests per minute Cloud services giant Fastly has released a report claiming AI crawlers are putting a heavy load on the open web, slurping up sites at a rate that accounts for 80 percent of all AI bot traffic, with the remaining 20 percent used by AI fetchers. Bots and fetchers can hit websites hard, demanding data from a single site in thousands of requests per minute....

Compositional risk from multiple MCP Servers highlighted by report Microsoft has declared general availability for MCP (model context protocol) servers in Visual Studio, likely to be the second most popular IDE after Visual Studio Code and with wide enterprise use....

Fork runs Android apps and keeps old PCs ticking over ... all without signing into an account with the mothership FydeOS is an alternative to ChromeOS Flex, but with a few significant differences - including Google-account-free operation....

US policymakers should take heed, says the Electronic Frontier Foundation opinion Implementation of the UK's Online Safety Act is giving internet users around the globe - including those in US states moving to enact their own age verification laws - real-time proof that such laws impinge on everyone's rights to speak, read, and view freely....

They're cheap and grew up with AI ... so you're firing them why? Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman has suggested firing junior workers because AI can do their jobs is "the dumbest thing I've ever heard."...

Web giant reworks AI infra to improve utilization, with mix of chips from home and away Chinese web giant Baidu's robot taxi operations in China are breaking even when measured as a standalone business - and is confident they will be profitable once the company rolls into global markets....

Great Firewall took out all traffic to port 443 at a time Beijing didn't have an obvious need to keep its netizens in the dark China cut itself off from much of the global internet for just over an hour on Wednesday....

Redmond doesn't bother informing customers about some security fixes UPDATED Microsoft has chosen not to tell customers about a recently patched vulnerability in M365 Copilot....

Digitally enabled omniscience is neat, if you can bear the cost of being constantly monitored by an AI agent The headline-making Harvard duo who turned a pair of Meta smart glasses into a privacy violation machine last year now have their own pair of smart specs to sell, which they tell The Register will make people "super intelligent" by listening in on their conversations 24/7 and offering unsolicited feedback....

At 3% US market share, we don't think Cook & Co are sweating Video In a celebrity-studded launch event on Wednesday, Google showed off its Pixel 10 hardware, including four smartphones, an updated smartwatch, and earbuds. Unsurprisingly, every gadget comes with a heavy dose of AI....

Move along, nothing to see here Amazon has quietly fixed a couple of security issues in its coding agent: Amazon Q Developer VS Code extension. Attackers could use these vulns to leak secrets, including API keys from a developer's machine, and run arbitrary code....

Have a complaint? Need a benefit? Agentforce now has a bot for that American citizens seeking help from the federal government may soon find themselves being assisted by an AI agent, if Salesforce's new public sector offering is a success....

Dragging DNS into the modern age. And if that means fewer people need to buy IPv4, so much the better A pair of networking researchers have proposed that the Internet Engineering Task Force define support for IPv6 as a best practice for operators of DNS resolvers - the servers that translate URLs into IP addresses - and one of them hopes adoption of the idea will accelerate the demise of IPv4....

Rival Brave flags prompt injection vulnerability, now patched updated To the surprise of no one in the security industry, processing untrusted, unvalidated input is a bad idea....

Performance-tuned and optimized spin seems to be winning fans CachyOS bills itself as a Blazingly Fast & Customizable Linux distribution and that seems to be winning it friends. In the last month, it's the number one distro on the popularity chart on the widely-used DistroWatch comparison site....

Snarfing up config files for 'thousands' of devices...just for giggles, we're sure The FBI and security researchers today warned that Russian government spies exploited a seven-year-old bug in end-of-life Cisco networking devices to snoop around in American critical infrastructure networks and collect information on industrial systems....

GSA AI chief says market can do better but the feds needed a kickstart The Trump administration just launched a detailed, AI-pushing platform for federal agencies last week, but a government leader is already promising to kill it....

Plessey sold to Haylo Labs, financed by $100M Goertek loan The UK's Plessey Semiconductors has been acquired by Haylo Labs, using funding supplied by a Chinese company, Goertek Inc. The move was cleared by the British government....

Researchers disclosing their findings said 'it's as bad as it sounds' Researchers at watchTowr just published working proof-of-concept exploits for two unauthenticated remote code execution bug chains in backup giant Commvault....

iiNet breach blamed on single stolen login, with emails, phone numbers, and addresses exposed Aussie telco giant TPG Telecom has opened an investigation after confirming a cyberattack at subsidiary iiNet....

No word yet on when any homegrown hardware production begins Texas fabless chip firm Cirrus Logic has announced a new partnership with GlobalFoundries on next-generation bipolar-CMOS-DMOS (BCD) and gallium nitride (GaN) parts....

Epic boss brands the changes 'malicious compliance' Google has announced changes to its Play Store rules in an effort to appease the European Commission and dodge Digital Markets Act (DMA) fines....

Government says move will cut red tape, but startups fear sector could be sidelined The UK Space Agency (UKSA) is set to join the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) in an effort to "cut red tape" and, presumably, save some cash....

Hmmm, state ownership of private corps... what does that remind us of? The US government is considering taking a stake in Intel and other semiconductor companies that benefit from CHIPS Act funding, according to officials from the Trump administration. The move follows SoftBank's $2 billion investment in the faltering chip giant....

LLMs flop at selling Fair Trade - unless you're a true believer Interview Large language models stumble when trying to sway buyers with moral arguments, according to research from the SGH Warsaw School of Economics and Sakarya Business School....

Good start, but you have to keep it up, say key players Feature It's not easy to grow a national chip industry. Semiconductor startups are a risky investment. They chew through early-stage capital, often with little to show for it, making them a long-term proposition. Those that pay off can deliver big, but success is far from guaranteed....