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Auterion CEO explains how autonomy will change the face of warfare interview The war in Ukraine is increasingly becoming a battle of drones, and defense software firm Auterion has just won a $50 million Pentagon contract to supply 33,000 AI-powered strike kits" that aim to augment Ukrainian UAVs and push them to the front lines....

Alphabet's driverless darling taps Avis to manage the fleet for 2026 debut With Tesla horning in on its Texas territory, robotaxi outfit Waymo has decided to expand to a new city in the Lone Star state: Dallas....

Redmond's last mostly sane OS nears end-of-life as AI nags take over It has been ten years since Microsoft made Windows 10 generally available. With mere months left until the plug is unceremoniously pulled on support for many versions, let's take a look at how the last decade went for the one-time flagship operating system....

Another week, another protest over budget proposals A letter protesting the imminent demise of US research vessel and icebreaker the Nathaniel B. Palmer was this week sent to the National Science Foundation (NSF) amid proposed funding reductions....

Some users keen while others point out pile of unresolved bugs in core product The open source Blender 3D editing suite may be adapted to run on Apple's iPad and other tablets, despite concern from one contributor that the team is already stretched with "thousands of bugs languishing in the tracker."...

Mostly minor changes under the hood - a lot of them Over the weekend, the world's most famous Finn pushed out the latest version of the Linux kernel - and warned of upcoming disruption....

Bumper's 1950 liftoff paved way for thousands of missions from iconic spaceport It is 75 years since the first rocket launch from Cape Canaveral: a two-stage rocket consisting of a German V-2 missile and a US sounding rocket....

5 V-tolerant GPIO opens the way to some intriguing retro-nerdery The Raspberry Pi team has released an update to the RP2350 microcontroller with bug fixes, hardening, and a GPIO tweak that will delight retro hardware enthusiasts....

Changes enacted in Trump's budget cover cost of penalty Electronic design biz Cadence has agreed to plead guilty and pay more than $140 million in fines over charges that it unlawfully sold semiconductor design tools to a university linked with the Chinese military....

Support for migrations to be scrapped come October The clock is ticking for administrators pondering a migration path to Exchange Online from an elderly version of Microsoft's email server. Support for public folder migrations from Exchange Server 2010 and older is set for deprecation....

Troopers to swap radios for Turtle Beaches in preparation for 21st century challenges' The UK's Ministry of Defence (MoD) is doubling down on its endorsement of esports by tasking the British Esports Federation to establish a new tournament to upskill existing servicepeople in the digital skirmishes....

Google's AI Overviews are wrecking its old ad model, but Google's revenue is increasing with ads based on it Opinion Alphabet, Google's parent company, is making money hand over fist. In its latest quarterly report, Google's revenue grew 14 percent year-over-year to $96.4 billion. While Google's cloud revenue, $13.6 billion, with 31 percent year-over-year growth, is growing fast, the bulk of its cash, $54.2 billion worth, still comes from advertising....

Advocacy group tells UK competition watchdog proposal favors Google Exclusive Movement for an Open Web (MOW), an advocacy group that supports web publishers, has filed a complaint with the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) challenging the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) call to eliminate third-party cookies....

Replacement deal not ready, so old one gets 6 more months and budget bump The UK government is extending two major cloud purchasing agreements due to delayed replacement arrangements under frameworks that could be worth an additional 1.65 billion....

'Edge, order two tons of creamed corn...' Microsoft on Monday introduced Copilot Mode in its Edge browser, a way to use voice or text commands to automate web-based tasks via AI....

Look over there! Amidst its own failure to fix a couple of bugs now under mass exploitation and being abused for espionage, data theft, and ransomware infections, Microsoft said Monday that it spotted a macOS vulnerability some months ago that could allow attackers to steal private data. Redmond reported the bug to Cupertino, which issued a fix back in March....

At least big bags of CO can be built faster than a fusion plant Caught in a constant race between its AI power needs and carbon emissions reduction pledges, Google's latest sustainability commitment sees it considering giant bags of carbon dioxide as a solution to dirty energy....

Plus, 60% don't have enough analysts to make sense of it Too many threats, too much data, and too few skilled security analysts are making companies more vulnerable to cyberattacks, according to the IT and security leaders tasked with protecting these organizations from digital threats....

But overall sales are basically flat, says Canalys For the first time, India has overtaken China as the top manufacturing hub for smartphones shipped to the US....

The greatest mathematician-cum-singer-songwriter of all time Obituary The field of satirists and hit singer-songwriters who were also professional mathematicians and lecturers is a very small one, and as such, we feel sure Tom Lehrer was the greatest who ever lived... And he also invented the modern Jell-O shot....

Businesses don't seem to care about exclusive features like Recall Copilot+ PCs are so far failing to penetrate the enterprise as IT decision makers remain understandably unimpressed with the exclusive Windows AI features they offer and other efforts, such as the need to refresh fleets with Windows 11-capable gear, take priority....

But they were supervised by American 'digital escorts' Microsoft has been left with egg on its face after an independent investigation revealed a concerning pattern of using workers based in China to maintain and support US government customers on its Azure cloud....

Europe is acting like the victim of a bully world war fee The US president and EU chief agreed to a deal over the weekend, averting a trade war between the world's two largest economies, but the agreement has a number of European leaders calling foul....

Some heading into retirement, others to private sector Almost 3,900 of NASA's workforce is set to leave the agency thanks to voluntary incentives, with senior staffers among those heading out the door....

Investigators detail persistent background connections and file transmissions despite telemetry opt-out An analysis of data collection in the Trae AI-powered IDE from ByteDance shows extensive network activity, which continued even when telemetry was disabled in settings....

No word on who's behind it, but attack has hallmarks of the usual suspects Financial services biz Allianz says the majority of customers of one of its North American subsidiaries had their data stolen in a cyberattack....

A better minesweeper is needed. Time for an intervention to save Microsoft from itself Workflow. Productivity. Enablement. These are the holy words by which software companies sanctify their ever more plunder-hungry Viking raids on enterprise IT coffers. If only they were true. At least Vikings didn't pretend to be offering monastery renovations and smart haircuts when they turned up....

Musk: 'I will walk the line personally to accelerate the pace of progress' Samsung Electronics has scored a $16.5 billion contract to make the silicon to power Tesla's next-gen self-driving computer hardware. The firm is set to produce this from a new fab it is building in Texas, according to Tesla CEO Elon Musk....

Russia's top airline cancels 49 flights, delays affect many more Russia's largest airline, Aeroflot, canceled numerous flights on Monday morning following what it says was a failure in its IT systems - something hacktivists are claiming responsiblity for....

Local providers squeezed out despite market growth, leaving sovereignty hopes in question European cloud infrastructure companies make up just 15 percent of their own market, and the huge investment the US giants can wield makes their dominance "an impossible hill to climb" for any would-be challengers....

1,400% jump in sign-ups as users try to avoid age verification checks when surfing adult sites Searches and sign-ups for VPN providers have surged in the wake of online age checks that were introduced on July 25 as part of the UK's Online Safety Act....

At least at Chipzookie... TSMC and Global Foundaries may yet continue to try to defy physics Intel chief executive Lip-Bu Tan has warned that he may pull investment from Intel's leading-edge 14A semiconductor process node unless "a meaningful external customer" can guarantee profits - a move which may finally spell the end of the chipmaker's loyal adherence to Moore's Law....

Up to 925M on table as government pushes ahead with project likely to be a decade late The UK government is talking to tech suppliers to provide handsets for the country's emergency services' voice and data network, in a procurement which could be worth up to 925 million ($1.24 billion)....

And was then blamed for not knowing about inaccurate labels Who, Me? Returning to work on Monday morning can feel like a mistake, which is why The Register welcomes readers back to their desks with a fresh instalment of Who, Me? It's the reader-contributed column in which we tell your tales of making a mess at work, and somehow surviving....

Plus, leak site for BlackSuit seized, Tea spilt, and avoid crime if you've got a famous dad Infosec in brief A computer intrusion hit the US spy satellite agency, but officials insist no classified secrets were lost - just some unclassified ones, apparently....

'It looks sexy but it's wrong' - like the improbably well-endowed rat Biomedical visualization specialists haven't come to terms with how or whether to use generative AI tools when creating images for health and science applications. But there's an urgent need to develop guidelines and best practices because incorrect illustrations of anatomy and related subject matter could cause harm in clinical settings or as online misinformation....

Surveillance-based pricing? Two lawmakers say enough Two Democratic members of Congress, Greg Casar (D-TX) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI,) have introduced legislation in the US House of Representatives to ban the use of AI surveillance to set prices and wages....

MAPP program to blame? A week after Microsoft told the world that its July software updates didn't fully fix a couple of bugs, which allowed miscreants to take over on-premises SharePoint servers and remotely execute code, researchers have assembled much of the puzzle -with one big missing piece....

Chipzilla hopes it can pull an Altera with its NEX division, and is now looking for buyers Intel isn't just laying off employees and closing plants in a bid to cut costs - it's also reportedly planning to get rid of its entire Network and Edge Group (NEX) to help right the ship....

AT&T and Verizon refused to hand over the security assessments, says Cantwell US Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA) has demanded that Google-owned incident response firm Mandiant hand over the Salt Typhoon-related security assessments of AT&T and Verizon that, according to the lawmaker, both operators have thus far refused to give Congress....

The latest version of systemd looks to be a big one, with substantial new functionality. More to love - right? Like it or not, systemd is the industry-standard init system these days. A new release is coming, and it's a big one....

Space is hard, especially for racks of fragile computer equipment opinion William Gibson's Neuromancer holds up well after 40 years. One of the cyberpunk novel's concepts was an AI housed in an orbital datacenter (ODC) above the Earth. Today, startup companies and venture capital firms are hoping to turn orbital datacenters into reality to enable AI, believing that free power from the sun and cooling using the emptiness of space will unlock the technology from its terrestrial-based shackles of electric bills and cooling water....

If you've ever logged into a network on your laptop or phone, the password is still there hands-on You're at a place you've been before and your Windows laptop immediately remembers the SSID and password for the Wi-Fi network, logging you on automatically. But your phone, tablet, and your coworker's laptop have never been here before, so they can't connect. If only you remembered the password or had it written down somewhere....

Too much of anything is bad for you, including faux-magical statistical models There are numerous recent reports of people becoming too engaged with AI, sometimes to the detriment of their mental health....

Private sector invited to colocate at legacy nuclear facilities The US Department of Energy (DoE) has identified four sites where private sector firms will be invited to colocate datacenters and energy generation projects, in line with the Trump administration's goal to boost AI development in America....

The FreeBSD Laptop project continues - and plans to offer a very visible change FreeBSD 15 is coming, maybe at the end of this year - and along with other improvements, it may finally offer the option of installing with a graphical desktop....

Zuckercorp blames legal uncertainty under upcoming TTPA law Meta has followed in Google's footsteps in deciding that pending EU political advertising regulations are so onerous to comply with that they're not even going to bother....

Malicious code lurking in over 5,000 downloads, says Socket researcher Developer freelancing platform Toptal has been inadvertently spreading malicious code after attackers broke into its systems and began distributing malware through developer accounts....

We say everything... just not the oldest hardware. Unix Epochalypse less than 13 years away Venerable Linux distribution Debian is side-stepping the Y2K38 bug - also known as the Unix Epochalypse - by switching to 64-bit time for everything but the oldest of supported hardware, starting with the upcoming Debian 13 "Trixie" release....

Under oath in French Senate, exec says it would be compelled - however unlikely - to pass local customer info to US admin Microsoft says it "cannot guarantee" data sovereignty to customers in France - and by implication the wider European Union - should the Trump administration demand access to customer information held on its servers....