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Campaigners brand Home Office's lack of transparency as astonishing' and dangerous' Privacy groups report a surge in UK police facial recognition scans of databases secretly stocked with passport photos lacking parliamentary oversight....

New SaaS system awaits a 'fully costed and deliverable integrated plan' before it can support 280,000 employees The UK's pensions and social security department has modified a 12-year-old contract with Sopra Steria, tacking on more than 100 million to allow it to run legacy systems for another three years....

It's 'more than a temporary trend,' Decodo claims Amid the furor around surging VPN usage in the UK, many users are eyeing proxies as a potential alternative to the technology....

Modern language features plus high performance FrankenPHP app server make PHP worth another look The PHP team is considering adding a partial implementation of generics to the language, has confirmed that a pipe operator will be in the forthcoming 8.5 release, and has formally adopted the FrankenPHP app server into the PHP Foundation....

We're going out on a limb here... why not branch out from things like retina displays and get a little more fine grained? Feature In a world where resolution, refresh rates, and frames per second can generate furious discussion, sometimes it's good to kick back and let a wood-flipping robot take the strain. Welcome to Kilopixel....

A Microsoft Exit strategy isn't just a good idea, it's vital. It must go a long way beyond a farewell to Redmond Opinion One of the dangers of stories based on big cash numbers is distraction. The numbers get all the attention, the bigger story behind them gets missed....

Documentation was so substantial, staff measured it in feet On Call Welcome once again to On Call, The Register's Friday column that shares your stories of helping confused, caustic, and curmudgeonly customers to crank their computers into correct configurations....

Will someone think of the deals politicians are making? Opinion You might think, since I write about tech all the time, my degrees are in computer science. Nope. I'm a bona fide, degreed historian, which is why I can say with confidence that the UK's recently passed Online Safety Act is doomed to fail....

Home of Manchester Baby can't bid for talent, baby Institutions in the North of England are being left out of the government's Global Talent Fund (GTF), designed to attract top scientific brains from abroad to come and work in Britain....

Fears adversaries will use them in the belief they can take plenty of punishment The US Air Force wants to blow up two Tesla Cybertrucks....

A new connector may be on the cards, too The PCI Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG) has confirmed that version 8.0 of the PCI Express (PCIe) specification will allow up to 256 gigatransfers per second, which equates to up to 1 TB/s bi-directionally in a x16 configuration....

Backer SoftBank isn't fussed, is excited that Arm will provide half of new cloudy CPUs this year The $500 billion Stargate project that aims to build a network of AI datacenters around the globe is off to a slow start, but its main backer - Japan's SoftBank - isn't worried....

A pair of German researchers showed how easy it is Black Hat Four countries have now tested anti-satellite missiles (the US, China, Russia, and India), but it's much easier and cheaper just to hack them....

That totally makes up for the single-digit benchmark gains, right? OpenAI unveiled its most capable model yet on Thursday with the launch of GPT-5....

Hello loophole could let a rogue admin, or a pwned one, inject new facial scans Black Hat Microsoft is pushing hard for Windows users to shift from using passwords to its Hello biometrics system, but researchers sponsored by the German government have found a critical flaw in its business implementation....

What, you don't expect them to keep using Microsoft with its Chinese cloud admins, do you? The US government is about to get more AWS in more places thanks to a new $1 billion deal between Uncle Sam and Amazon....

No reported in-the-wild exploits...yet Microsoft and the feds late Wednesday sounded the alarm on another high-severity bug in Exchange Server hybrid deployments that could allow attackers to escalate privileges from on-premises Exchange to the cloud....

Aiming to shrink the post-ISS gap, but less orbit time for NASA astronauts? NASA has moved the goalposts for companies seeking to replace the aging International Space Station (ISS) and changed the minimum capability required to four crew for one-month "increments." The change means that the permanent occupation of the ISS will be a thing of the past, at least as far as the US space agency is concerned....

Nothing to see here - just removing that old Emoluments Clause and habeas corpus Several sections of the online annotated US Constitution maintained by the Library of Congress vanished recently due to what the Library maintains was a coding error. However, the content of the now-restored sections has raised suspicions that the move was political....

Tells The Reg they never were ... 'and this will not change' The second Trump administration has repeatedly complained about Europe's tech laws targeting Silicon Valley's finest, but now its antipathy is going into overdrive....

The Reg goes behind the scenes of the conference NOC, where volunteers 'look for a needle in a needle stack' Black Hat Neil "Grifter" Wyler is spending the week "looking for a needle in a needle stack," a task he'll perform from the network operations center (NOC) that powers the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas....

Indications of compromise and Sigma rules report for your security scanners amid ongoing 'ToolShell' blitz CISA has published a malware analysis report with compromise indicators and Sigma rules for "ToolShell" attacks targeting specific Microsoft SharePoint Server versions....

Chipzilla boss accused of huge conflict of interest US President Donald Trump has called for the immediate resignation of Intel's recently installed chief exec, following concerns raised by a Republican Senator over his links with China....

No need to spin up separate Apache Spark clusters, vendor claims Snowflake is launching a client connector to run Apache Spark code directly in its cloud warehouse - no cluster setup required....

Watch out, the phishermen are about, customers told European airline giants Air France and KLM say they are the latest in a string of major organizations to have their customers' data stolen by way of a break-in at a third party org....

Privacy campaigner Max Schrem's NOYB is back on Zuck's back Updated Meta's enthusiasm for training its AI on user data is not shared by the users themselves - at least for some Europeans - according a study commissioned by Facebook legal nemesis Max Schrems and his privacy advocacy group Noyb....

Forensics experts say the state of the K8's battery suggests it led to the living room blaze A Scottish woman who suffered a house fire in 2018 has won her case against LG after a judge ruled that her work-issued phone caused the blaze....

Bold, clean, much less legacy tech - and a bit less like old SUSE A release candidate of openSUSE Leap 16.0 is here. It boldly strips out more established legacy tech than almost any other Linux we've seen....

'IOWN' backers think it can replace the PCI bus, reinvent servers, and rewire motherboards In December 2024, Japanese tech giant NTT revealed two impressive feats of high-speed networking....

Veteran engineer explains the fall of 'Fall' in Windows release Veteran Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen has explained why the megacorp ditched its increasingly twee naming conventions for Windows 10 releases in favor of the blander H1 and H2....

Meanwhile, users complain the code shack is getting slower thanks to React GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke has stated in a personal blog that the most advanced developers have "moved from writing code to architecting and verifying the implementation work that is carried out by AI agents."...

Human rights org calls for greater accountability and stronger enforcement of Online Safety Act Amnesty International claims Elon Musk's X platform "played a central role" in pushing the misinformation that stoked racially charged violence following last year's Southport murders....

Lightsockets lovingly hooked up to power supply by passionate, vivacious owners. Would suit professional who wants to read after dark Feature "Deceptively spacious." "Prime location." "Up-and-coming area." "Some original features," which occasionally turn out to be asbestos. Estate agents are known for sometimes stretching the truth in pursuit of a sale, but the generative AI boom appears to have thrown things into overdrive - providing an easy way to present images of properties which simply don't reflect reality....

Government plans 1.9B annual spending during five-year MoU The UK public sector expects to spend around 9 billion on Microsoft products and services over five years under its current contract....

All you need is 24GB of RAM, and unless you have a GPU with its own VRAM quite a lot of patience Hands On Earlier this week, OpenAI released two popular open-weight models, both named gpt-oss. Because you can download them, you can run them locally....

Exemptions available for chipmakers who promise to build American fabs World War Fee US president Donald Trump appears to have settled his semiconductor tariff strategy....

Rideshare giant wants to use AI for delivery of hyper-personalized offers Uber has revealed its ambition to offer hyper-personalized offers to its customers, but to do so it needs more of them to use more of its apps....

It's a step toward The Terminator, built 20 times faster than people can program Computer scientist Peter Burke has demonstrated that a robot can program its own brain using generative AI models and host hardware, if properly prompted by handlers....

Quick - someone ask Siri if there are still tariffs on India US President Donald Trump and Apple CEO Tim Cook made a joint announcement from the White House on Wednesday of another Apple pledge to move manufacturing back to the United States, with an additional $100 billion in funding for domestic projects. The move could keep Apple one step ahead of Trump's unpredictable tariff policy, which threatens to increase costs on iPhones manufactured overseas....

Project Ire promises to use LLMs to detect whether code is malicious or benign Microsoft has rolled out an autonomous AI agent that it claims can detect malware without human assistance....

Three jurisdictions now want browser engine variety for a better mobile market Apple now faces challenges to its WebKit browser requirement in three jurisdictions, as authorities around the globe try to jumpstart competition in the mobile software industry....

But strife and criticism continue Regional internet registry the African Network Information Centre (AFRINIC) is now the subject of an investigation ordered by the government of its home country, Mauritius....

gpt-oss-20b can't seem to decide who won the election, but tried to convince us that it was Biden If you're still struggling to come to terms with the results of the 2024 US presidential election, you're not alone. OpenAI's new open-weight language model is also a bit confused....

A good deal, like beauty, is in the ISP of the beholder, after all - at least if you want BEAD funding US states that want to make use of rural broadband deployment funds had better not require ISPs to offer what they consider affordable service. According to the Trump Administration, "affordable" is for the ISP alone to define....

ShinyHunters suspected in rash of intrusions Google confirmed that criminals breached one of its Salesforce databases and stole info belonging to some of its small-and-medium-business customers....

Chip contract manufacturer declines to comment Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is "coming over and spending $300 billion in Arizona, building the biggest plant in the world for chips and semiconductors," US President Donald Trump said Tuesday....

Timber! Meta is following in Microsoft's footsteps and trying out wood as a construction material for its datacenters in a bid to cut greenhouse gas emissions....

Thanks to LLMs, CEO expects to see networks 'back-end and front-end converge' Arista Networks is expecting the AI datacenter industry to be dominated by open standards such as Ethernet or UALink in the near future, and has upped financial forecasts on the back of those hopes....

Act now and Uncle Sam will throw in ChatGPT Enterprise for your agency for just $1 It's just become a lot easier for US government agencies to procure AI products from Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI, as the firms and the feds have signed a government-wide agreement to streamline purchasing....

A crock of what now? Microsoft is reportedly preparing to unleash its latest product on the public: limited edition XP-themed Crocs....