The Register

Human usage set to double, AI agents might need them too Analyst firm Gartner has declared hosted PCs are now often cheaper to operate than on-prem laptops, and two years away from being cost-effective for 95 percent of workers....

$79 million is a small price to pay to keep China at bay Australia will help to fund the development of two datacenters in the Pacific island nation Vanuatu, an example of tech infrastructure becoming an important diplomatic consideration....

Big Tech is spending vastly more on AI infrastructure but Switchzilla thinks its piece of the pie will be fat and juicy Cisco sold twice as much AI kit as it forecast during its 2025 fiscal year and expects the market for binary brainboxes will continue to boost its bank balance in future....

A tool can become a crutch When doctors use AI image recognition technology to spot and remove precancerous growths known as adenomas during colonoscopies, the detection rate is higher. But take the AI away, and their rate drops to below where it was in the first place....

The world's most powerful known supercomputer stretches its legs with some life-saving science Eggheads working on El Capitan, the world's most powerful publicly known supercomputer, have developed a new tsunami forecasting system that could dramatically improve response times in coastal communities....

Never mind the errors, we've had it with "You're absolutely right!" Developers using Anthropic's Claude Code wish that the AI coding assistant would stop being so effusively supportive....

OPM is the fourth federal agency to get a list of outstanding items from GAO in past two weeks Uncle Sam's HR department has become the latest agency to get a nastygram from federal auditors, who are hoping its recently-appointed director can get his house in order better than his predecessor....

If there's smoke? Fortinet warned customers about a critical FortiSIEM bug that could allow an unauthenticated attacker to execute unauthorized commands, and said working exploit code for the flaw has been found in the wild....

Gotta pay for all those GPUs somehow Comment For all the superlative-laden claims, OpenAI's new top model appears to be less of an advancement and more of a way to save compute costs - something that hasn't exactly gone over well with the company's most dedicated users....

Early 2000s joke now serious problem for coffee shops in the Land of the Morning Calm Take a look at the internet of decades past, and you'll find plenty of jokes about bringing a desktop computer to a coffee shop. For South Korean Starbucks stores, however, that old-time meme is anything but in the past....

Hurricane data, schmurricane data: Have you heard about that Sun burp? The more our Earth-bound society learns to rely on electronics, the greater the risk that weather from the stars shatters our reality. That's why US government space watchers are seeking a company to help them operate the next generation of space weather satellites....

Redmond let dev code loose in production Windows, leading to the bug Microsoft is having difficulty keeping development code out of the Windows event log after another message that users are advised to ignore turned up in the... event log....

How to pick the news sources you want to see more (and less) hands on Even if you have your favorite sites bookmarked or type their URLs in through muscle memory, you probably still spend a lot of time looking for info on Google. Now, you can exert some control over which publishers appear in your results for news stories....

Users want their customizations and their old models back There has been more furious backpedalling from OpenAI following the company's ill-judged launch of GPT-5 and the removal of previous model selection....

CVE-2017-11882 in discontinued Equation Editor still attracting keylogger campaigns despite software being killed off in 2018 Very few people are immune to the siren song of nostalgia, a yearning for a "better time" when this was all fields and kids respected their elders - and it looks like cyber criminals are no exception....

Reliant on two mega customers? Who says GPU-for-rent kingpin is a not a sustainable biz model? Rent-a-GPU biz CoreWeave is still racking up eyewatering debts amid mounting net losses as it continues to burn cash on expanding datacenter capacity....

Hit the button and then go on your own voyage of printer discovery Microsoft has made the "Pull Print" feature of Universal Print generally available, which means confidential print jobs should no longer appear in unintended locations....

But despite the differences, all models excel at making errors and shouldn't be trusted Generative AI coding models have common strengths and weaknesses, but express those characteristics differently due to variations in coding style....

The vendor hops aboard GSA's OneGov train, offering models from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and more Not to be left behind in the flurry of government-wide AI purchasing deals, Box has signed a deal with the feds that'll inject some agentic AI into federal government systems....

Windows 365 Reserve offers 10-day cloud PCs when your machine goes kaput - but you'll still need another device to access them Microsoft is so confident in the reliability and security of its Windows 11 OS that it's now offering businesses the ability to quickly dump users onto temporary VMs in its cloud when, not if, their desktops and laptops break....

Seven additional regions across England will now have access to the controversial tech A fresh expansion of UK crimefighters' access to live facial recognition (LFR) technology is being described by officials as "an excellent opportunity for policing." Privacy campaigners disagree....

Shock news: billionaire techpreneur is not a fan Geek-turned-venture-capitalist Marc Andreessen has weighed in on the arguments surrounding the UK's Online Safety Act, accusing the UK government of leaking his input....

For now at least, even though government buying can improve, open source is not all it's cracked up to be Debate Not for the first time, Microsoft is in the spotlight for the UK government's money it voraciously consumes - apparently 1.9 billion a year in software licensing, and roughly 9 billion over five years. Not surprisingly, there are plenty of voices challenging whether this is good use of public money. After all, aren't there plenty of open source alternatives?...

Foundation warns federated servers face biggest risk, but single-instance users can take their time Updated The maintainers of the federated secure chat protocol Matrix are warning users of a pair of "high severity protocol vulnerabilities," addressed in the latest version, saying patching them requires a breaking change in servers and clients....

You guessed it: looks like it's a so-called AI People are noticing Firefox gobbling extra CPU and electricity, apparently caused by an "inference engine" built into recent versions of Firefox. Don't say El Reg didn't try to warn you....

An encounter with the healthcare system reveals sickening decisions about data Column We already live in a world where pretty much every public act - online or in the real world - leaves a mark in a database somewhere. But how far back does that record extend? I recently learned that record goes back further than I'd seriously imagined....

Agency asks for ideas from US industry as orbit decays NASA is seeking solutions for a way to raise the orbit of the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory despite the spacecraft being marked for termination after FY2026 under the agency's budget proposal....

Minnesota's capital is the latest to feature on Interlock's leak blog after late-July cyberattack The Interlock ransomware gang has flaunted a 43GB haul of files allegedly stolen from the city of Saint Paul, following a late-July cyberattack that forced the Minnesota capital to declare a state of national emergency....

First came the fireball, then a hole in the roof and a dent in the floor In late June media speculated that a meteor entering Earth's atmosphere caused widespread sightings of a celestial fireball during daylight hours across the southeast USA. Scientists have now confirmed space rocks caused the phenomenon, citing as evidence a meteorite they found in a resident's living room....

Federal Court finds Big Tech players abused their market power Australia's Federal Court has given Epic Games another win in its global fight against the way Apple and Google run their app stores....

Tells court 'What I did was wrong and I want to apologize for my conduct' Terraform Labs founder Do Kwon has pled guilty to committing fraud when promoting the so-called "stablecoin" Terra USD and now faces time in jail....

None under active exploit...yet Microsoft's August Patch Tuesday flaw-fixing festival addresses 111 problems in its products, a dozen of which are deemed critical, and one moderate-severity flaw that is listed as being publicly known....

Could the most popular browser change hands? AI search biz Perplexity has offered to pay about twice as much as it is worth to acquire Chrome from Google....

And yes, there's the usual credit monitoring Global staffing firm Manpower confirmed ransomware criminals broke into its Lansing, Michigan franchise's network and stole personal information belonging to 144,189 people, months after the extortionists claimed that they pilfered "all of [the company's] confidential data."...

Keep calm and clear out that inbox. Also maybe lay off the GenAI With many parts of England grappling with a water shortage, the UK's National Drought Group (NDG), which includes both government and non-government agencies, has suggested citizens can help by... clearing out their inboxes....

Don't need to give Uncle Sam any more reason to think kill switches are a good idea Nvidia may have the Trump administration's blessing to resume shipments of its H20 AI accelerators to China, but in Beijing, government officials are now pressuring companies to use what they describe as less-advanced semiconductors....

Last year's attempt failed, but increased concern over the state of the BIS might make the second time the charm The US government agency in charge of keeping advanced technology out of the hands of America's enemies desperately needs an IT modernization to accomplish its mission. So a group of elected officials is trying (again) to get the funds it needs to do so....

Deal could give legislative and judicial agencies access to AI that hallucinated legal citations in a court filing Anthropic has become the latest company to benefit from the US government's frenetic AI adoption pace, inking a deal to get its software into the hands of federal agencies at a deep discount....

Enter a prompt and get back a copyright infringement More and more US companies are using generative AI as a way to save money they might otherwise pay creative professionals. But they're not thinking about the legal bills....

Website, emails, and phones are down for a second day The Pennsylvania's Office of Attorney General (OAG) is blaming a digital blackout of its services on a "cyber incident."...

Efforts to build easier off-ramps are ... err ... ramping up Private cloud platform vendor Platform9 has a new lure for disaffected VMware users: A tool that allows migrations without requiring extra hardware....

'Hung' is out and 'Unresponsive' is in, according to the Academy Software Foundation and the Alliance for OpenUSD A Linux Foundation project has published an Inclusive Language Guide to recommend replacements for common tech terms deemed potentially offensive to some users....

US cops yank servers, domains, and crypto from the Russia-linked gang - but the crooks remain at large In a display of bureaucratic bravado, US law enforcement agencies say they've disrupted" the BlackSuit ransomware gang (also known as Royal), freeing millions of dollars in virtual currency from its clutches....

Long-term support release candidate arrives, general availability comes next month Java 25, an LTS (long-term support) version, is now at release candidate (RC) stage with general availability scheduled for September 16....

Designs scheduled for launch in 2026, developer kit for programmers out today Chip designer Arm is bringing dedicated neural accelerator hardware to its GPU blueprints used in phones. It expects this to deliver higher quality visuals while boosting AI performance....

Aside from glam, includes cool features like standalone GNOME Flashback session with no GNOME shell Debian 13 has arrived, now with RISC-V and preconfigured "blends" right in the main installer....

Chip giant praises 'president's strong leadership,' promises to 'restore this great American company' US President Donald Trump has now reversed his opinion of Intel chief Lip-Bu Tan following their meeting at the White House yesterday, hinting that the two will work more closely together....

Scattered Spider, ShinyHunters, and Lapsus$ spent the weekend bragging to each other on a Telegram channel Prolific cybercrime collectives Scattered Spider, ShinyHunters, and Lapsus$ appear to be working together to break into businesses' networks, steal their data, and force an extortion payment....

Automaker's answer to spate of car thefts is to charge customers for extra Hyundai is charging UK customers 49 ($66) for a security upgrade to prevent thieves from bypassing its car locks....

UK online reseller bought out of administration in -pre-pack agreement, say sources London Stock Exchange-listed Fraser Group is understood to have bought struggling UK online tech bazaar Ebuyer from administrators in a pre-pack agreement, sources have told The Register....