The Register

Microsoft's AI-centric code editor and IDE adds the ability to rollback misguided AI prompts The Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code) team has rolled out version 1.103 with new features including GitHub Copilot chat checkpoints....

Joburg and Warsaw among the hotspots for sprawling server farm construction Lagos, Warsaw and Dubai are among the fastest growing cities for colocation services - with metro areas in the Asia-Pacific and EMEA regions expanding more rapidly than traditional datacenter hotspots....

Legacy tech for nation's farmers must migrate ... contract swells to 245M The UK's government department for agriculture and the countryside has upped the potential contract value on offer for cloud and datacenter hosting by more than 100 million....

Home Office officials reportedly concede Brit government on back foot as Trump moves to protect US Big Tech players Analysis The Home Office's war on encryption - its most technically complex and controversial aspect of modern policymaking yet - is starting to look like battlefield failure after more than ten years of skirmishes....

Taskforce delivers damning interim report on next generation of energy generation An independent taskforce commissioned by the UK government has warned of the nation's "unnecessarily slow, inefficient, and costly" approach to nuclear power (and weaponry)....

Sysadmins, your job is safe Automating IT operations using AI may not be the best idea at the moment....

Don't laugh, a French nuclear power plant just shut down for a while after invertebrates overwhelmed its intakes Proponents of increased use of nuclear energy to power datacenters have a new foe: Jellyfish....

Outages, degraded service, and login troubles hit 10 regions and 27 services IBM Cloud experienced a Severity One outage on Monday that left customers unable to access resources....

70W TDP means the new RTX Pro 4000 SFF and RTX Pro 2000 won't blow power budgets Nvidia's latest Blackwell GPUs are a pair of itty-bitty workstation cards that aim to deliver the highest performance possible for professional visualization and local AI workloads within a 70-watt energy diet....

Biden-era program has reduced FedRAMP processing times to just five weeks from previous year or more The US Government's process for certifying cloud services safe for official use has long been slow, but that's no longer the case. Approvals so far this fiscal year are more than double the total for all of FY 2024....

And shave 15% of the top no doubt. Nerfed versions of Nvidia's Blackwell GPUs could soon join its H20 on the list of AI accelerators approved for sale in China....

A few weeks earlier 'zeroplayer' advertised an $80K WinRAR 0-day exploit Russia-linked attackers found and exploited a high-severity WinRAR vulnerability before the maintainers of the Windows file archiver issued a fix....

Code hosting biz takes a back seat within Microsoft's CoreAI division GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke plans to leave the company and corporate parent Microsoft will not appoint a successor....

The alleged perpetrators remain at large The US Department of Justice is trying to recoup around $1 million that three IT specialists secretly working for the North Korean government allegedly stole from a New York company....

He wants Microsoft to keep supporting Windows 10 until its market share drops below 10% Many are unhappy about Microsoft's Windows 10 retirement plans, but a California man appears to be angrier than most. He's sued Redmond over the matter, and is demanding continued free Win 10 updates until the OS's popularity wanes....

The bad news? The machines, and their operators, are coming on fast Black Hat/DEF CON At the opening of Black Hat, the largest security shindig in the Hacker Summer Camp week ahead of DEF CON and BSides, the opening keynote speaker suggested the current state of AI slightly favors defenders over attackers, but he warned that was not a given for much longer....

But it can contest if it lands up in 'Category 1,' and the move hurts operations, says judge Wikipedia today lost a legal battle against the UK's tech secretary to tighten the criteria around the Online Safety Act 2023 (OSA), as it seeks to exclude itself from the strictest regulations....

Making a bit of a FOSS with Virtual Environment update Viennese virtualization veteran Proxmox has updated its hypervisor and its storage offering to new, Debian 13 versions....

A symphony of screeching come to an end! Parent Yahoo! confirms! From the department of "Want to feel old?" comes news that AOL is finally pulling the plug on dial-up Internet access....

Tech biz tweaks GPT-5, brings back 4 and others as options after customer backlash OpenAI has brought back GPT-4o after a weekend of user protests - mostly about removal of model choice - following the rollout of GPT-5....

Amid hints by president he may announce 100% tariffs on imported chips, semiconductors Intel boss Lip-Bu Tan reportedly has an appointment at the White House today, just days after President Donald Trump called for his resignation. The move comes as Intel's former CEO Craig Barrett weighs in on the troubled chipmaker's future....

By video, picture, and voice - the fakers are coming for your money DEF CON While AI was on everyone's lips in Las Vegas this week at the trio of security conferences in Sin City - BSides, Black Hat, AND DEF CON - there were a lot of people using the F-word too: fraud....

Veteran of four spaceflights dies at 97 Obit Jim Lovell, the former US astronaut and commander of the Apollo 13 mission, has died at the age of 97....

Many core offerings now back in action, says retailer British retailer Marks and Spencer updated its website today, confirming its Click & Collect service is once again available to customers....

Well, at least he didn't drop the F-bomb Linux head honcho Linus Torvalds has put a kernel developer "on notice" for waiting until the eleventh hour to supply a patch set for Linux on RISC-V systems which "makes the world actively a worse place to live" - in a scathing missive harkening back to his invective-laden tirades of old....

Pressure difference between the space station, space suits increases congestion, say boffins In space, no one can hear you sneeze - but that hasn't stopped a team of boffins researching exactly what happens when an astronaut gets a case of the sniffles, and why. The key takeaway, should you find yourself on board a space station and in need of a tissue: maybe skip the spacewalk....

AR games mingle with underground assets in the data plan for 200-year-old Ordnance Survey Feature Britain's Ordnance Survey (OS), founded in 1791, is interloping in the digital age. Minecraft, AR gaming, and EV charger locations have all become part of its portfolio, alongside the paper-based maps beloved by the nation's legion of cagoule-clad outdoor types....

And yes, that means (retch) catering to AI searchers The job market is queasy and since you're reading this, you need to upgrade your CV. It's going to require some work to game the poorly trained AIs now doing so much of the heavy lifting. I know you don't want to, but it's best to think of this as dealing with a buggy lump of undocumented code, because frankly that's what is between you and your next job....

Grace Hopper and GitHub have more in common than capital letters Opinion Here are two snapshots of AI in coding in mid 2025. The CEO of GitHub, coding's universal termite mound, says that AI is going to do all the coding and that's a good thing. Meanwhile, real life AI coding tools make coders less productive while spreading the hallucination that they're more so....

Instructor ended up teaching a lesson in how to get away with mistakes Who, Me? Welcome once more to Who, Me? It's The Register's Monday column in which we celebrate your SNAFUS and rejoice in your recoveries....

Current plan calls for Taikonaut touchdown around 2030 China's Manned Space Engineering Network says the country's first crewed lunar lander last week completed a comprehensive landing and takeoff verification test, bringing it closer to landing on Luna - and leaving it again afterwards....

Brain the size of a planet and probably trained on Sci-Fi that's full of anxious and depressed robots Google is aware that its Gemini AI chatbot can sometimes castigate itself harshly for failing to solve a problem and plans to fix it....

Trump administration's licenses come with an IOU Nvidia and AMD will reportedly be allowed to resume sales in China if they cough a license fee amounting to 15 percent of sales....

PLUS: Huawei open sources its CUDA equivalent; China boosts brain-computer interfaces; Scientists to visit penguins Trump taxed; And more! Asia In Brief Indian services giant Tata Consultancy Services will shed over 10,000 staff but will give pay rises to most of those who remain....

PLUS: Crypto mixer founders plead guilty; Another French telco hacked; Meta fights WhatsApp scams; And more! Infosec In Brief A critical vulnerability in the on-prem version of Trend Micro's Apex One endpoint security platform is under active exploitation, the company admitted last week, and there's no patch available....

Five pilot deployments are just a drop in the bucket, so it's time to turbo scale def con A DEF CON hacker walks into a small-town water facility...no, this is not the setup for a joke or a (super-geeky) odd-couple rom-com. It's a true story that happened at five utilities across four states....

Decision to use MXFP4 makes models smaller, faster, and more importantly, cheaper for everyone involved Analysis Whether or not OpenAI's new open weights models are any good is still up for debate, but their use of a relatively new data type called MXFP4 is arguably more important, especially if it catches on among OpenAI's rivals....

Acting Administrator has selected a lucky orbiter, but won't say which one The NASA acting Administrator has picked a Space Shuttle to move to Houston, and the lucky vehicle is... NASA's not telling....

It turns out no one was clean on OPSEC DEF CON On Saturday at DEF CON, security boffin Micah Lee explained just how he published data from TeleMessage, the supposedly secure messaging app used by White House officials, which in turn led to a massive database dump of their communications....

Not everyone wants to be simulated after they're gone People die but their data may endure, which troubles legal scholar Victoria Haneman....

Yes, 2024 - the prizes in the 40th anniversary edition prizes were just awarded The IOCCC, as it's familiarly known, is back after a four-year gap, giving the entrants more time to come up with some remarkably devious code....

Does 40 quid from the supplier sound all right for waiting over 6 weeks for a fix? The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero plans "tough new obligations" for energy suppliers to boost the long-delayed and heavily over-budget UK rollout of smart meters, while promising better support for those who have already received such a device....

To keep toxic content from damaging brands, both people and machines have a place Human content moderators still outperform AI when it comes to recognizing policy-violating material, but they also cost significantly more....

In misinformation, Russia might be the top dog but the Chinese are coming warns former NSA boss DEF CON A cache of documents uncovered by Vanderbilt University has revealed disturbing details about how a Chinese company is building up a database of US politicians and influencers with whom to share propaganda....

LLMs still struggle with accurate text within graphics hands on OpenAI's GPT-5, unveiled on Thursday, is supposed to be the company's flagship model, offering better reasoning and more accurate responses than previous-gen products. But when we asked it to draw maps and timelines, it responded with answers from an alternate dimension....

Bugs in the current LTS are getting squished The latest point release of the current Ubuntu LTS is here, with a new kernel and a host of improvements for server and desktop alike....

Fun feature found in Debian 13: send your selected text to China - in plaintext As Trixie gets ready to debut, a little-known app is hogging the limelight: StarDict, which sends whatever text you select, unencrypted, to servers in China....

'Although the incident has been marked resolved, in practice it lingers,' admin tells us A problem with resources for virtual machines is still affecting users in Azure's East US region after more than a week, frustrated admins have told us, despite Microsoft saying the incident is now resolved....

Tells The Reg China's ability to p0wn Redmond's wares 'gives me a political aneurysm' Comment Roger Cressey served two US presidents as a senior cybersecurity and counter-terrorism advisor and currently worries he'll experience a "political aneurysm" due to Microsoft's many security messes....

Science budget? Whatever. It's all about beating China and Russia NASA's Acting Administrator, Sean Duffy, has directed the US space agency to come up with a plan to deploy a nuclear reactor on the Moon....