The Register

A desire for cycle accuracy results in 32 million recorded CPU states derived entirely from original hardware The developer of MartyPC, an emulator for vintage Intel-compatible hardware that targets cycle accuracy, has released a test suite for Intel's classic 80286 processor and compatibles - created, in a fit of raw enthusiasm and hyperfocus, by single-stepping a physical chip from the mid-1980s through the execution of almost 1.5 million instructions....

'Actually not terrible' says industry watcher Corey Quinn - but pricing plans have disappeared AWS has introduced daily usage limits and a user waitlist for Kiro, its preview spec-driven AI editor, citing unexpectedly high demand as it works to scale the system....

The End of Windows 10 is looming. The world needs a simpler, easy, quick, snackable alternative Comment Dear Santa. For Windows-10-end-of-support-day in October, please may we have a dead simple bulletproof all-free OS that gets old PCs online without a Google account, and does nothing else?...

Hams for the win: Amateur-built decoder taps SSMIS satellite data amid NOAA cutoff With the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) set to shut down a key satellite data stream used in US hurricane forecasting, a group of amateur radio enthusiasts has stepped in with a decoder they say could fill the gap....

Persians added snooping capabilities to DCHSpy after Israeli bombs fell Four new samples of Android spyware linked to the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) that collects WhatsApp data, records audio and video, and hunts for files by name, surfaced shortly after the Iran-Israel conflict began....

Peter Connelly inflated turnover and claimed second payment when only entitled to one Sad news for the three people who fondly remember the soundtracks to turn-of-the-millennium Tomb Raider - their composer, Peter Connelly, has been sentenced to 16 months behind bars for COVID-19 loan fraud....

But an emergency fix for SharePoint Server 2016 is still MIA Microsoft is releasing out-of-band security updates for SharePoint Server 2019 and SharePoint Server Subscription Edition, following a warning that vulnerable versions were now under attack....

Getting carded is one thing. A full strip search? Welcome to Britain Opinion On June 10, social network Bluesky announced that in 15 days it would introduce age verification for UK users, to comply with the UK Online Safety Act. As this law threatens non-compliant content companies with eight-figure fines from July 25, you can see why. The how, however, is breathtakingly inexcusable....

'This, many considered, was bad' Who, Me? Welcome again to "Who, Me?" - The Register's Monday column in which readers admit to making mistakes and explain how they managed to keep their careers going afterwards....

Now flying again, but not saying what went wrong UPDATED US carrier Alaska Airlines has grounded its fleet due to an unspecified IT issue....

PLUS: Perplexity AI scores 360-million-customer win in India; Australian billionaire's political party suffers data breach, won't contact victims; and more Asia In Brief Japan's National Astronomical Observatory last week announced the discovery of a small body with an orbit beyond Pluto's, and scientists think its presence means the Planet 9" theory should be revisited....

AI ignored instruction to freeze code, forgot it could roll back errors, and generally made a terrible hash of things The founder of SaaS business development outfit SaaStr has claimed AI coding tool Replit deleted a database despite his instructions not to change any code without permission....

PLUS: China upgrades smartphone surveillance tools; Ring eases anti-snooping stance; and more Infosec In Brief Microsoft has warned users of SharePoint Server that three on-prem versions of the product include a zero-day flaw that is under attack - and that its own failure to completely fix past problems is the cause....

Foreign worker program represents betrayal of US computer science students, advocacy group argues The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) intend to reevaluate how H-1B visas are issued, according to a regulatory filing....

Fancy Bear can't keep its claws out of Outlook inboxes The UK government is warning that Russia's APT28 (also known as Fancy Bear or Forest Blizzard) has been deploying previously unknown malware to harvest Microsoft email credentials and steal access to compromised accounts....

OpenAI delayed its promised open-weights model since GPT-2, leaving the Middle Kingdom clearly in the lead Comment OpenAI was supposed to make good on its name and release its first open-weights model since GPT-2 this week....

Keep It Simple, Stupid Interview Scattered Spider and Iranian government-backed cyber units have more in common than a recent uptick in hacking activity, according to Ariel Parnes, a former colonel in the Israeli Defense Forces' cyber unit 8200....

Moolenaar demands answers from Commerce Secretary The Republican chair of the US House Select Committee on China has protested the Trump administration's decision this week to lift restrictions on the sale of Nvidia H20 GPUs and similar processors, warning the chips could be used to advance Chinese AI and military interests....

GPAI code asks for transparency, copyright, and safety pledges Two weeks before the EU AI Act takes effect, the European Commission issued voluntary guidelines for providers of general-purpose AI models. However, Meta refused to sign, arguing that the extra measures introduce "legal uncertainties" beyond the law's scope....

That's just... checks notes... two years behind everyone else Japanese foundry upstart Rapidus says it's on track to begin volume production of 2nm process tech after achieving a major milestone this week....

And we're the ones building it Comment A tech executive's alleged affair exposed on a stadium jumbotron is ripe fodder for the gossip rags, but it exhibits something else: proof that we need not wait for an AI-fueled dystopian surveillance state to descend on us - we're perfectly able and willing to surveil ourselves....

Jon Prosser and alleged accomplice accused of stealing trade secrets from development device Apple has sued tech YouTuber Jon Prosser for allegedly leaking iOS 26 information to the public ahead of its reveal at WWDC in June....

Big Red incentivizes perpetual licenses with 76% savings as it parks racks in hyperscaler datacenters Oracle began incentivizing perpetual licenses in favor of subscription deals as it introduced its database systems via rival cloud vendors, say licensing experts....

WeTransfer added the magic words 'machine learning' to its ToS and users reacted predictably Analysis WeTransfer this week denied claims it uses files uploaded to its ubiquitous cloud storage service to train AI, and rolled back changes it had introduced to its Terms of Service after they deeply upset users. The topic? Granting licensing permissions for an as-yet-unreleased LLM product....

2.6.1 adds Plucky Puffin and Firefox actually works this time Rescuezilla 2.6.1 has introduced a new version based on the latest interim Ubuntu release, while also updating its existing builds on older versions....

With watchdog set to publish report into health of market next month, will it hold AWS and Microsoft's feet to the fire? Comment The UK's ambition to become a global AI superpower hinges on a vibrant and competitive cloud market. The next few days will show if its competition regulator really appreciates both the pace of change and the scale of remedies needed to achieve both of these things....

We spoke to the smoot's namesake Interview On a chilly October evening in 1958, a group of MIT students shuffled onto the Harvard Bridge, which separates the university town of Cambridge from Boston proper. The shortest among them lay down on the sidewalk at the bridge's start, his friends marked his length, he got up, moved forward, and repeated the process....

This job was a car wreck in more than one way On Call Welcome once again to On Call, The Register's Friday column that shares your terrifying tech support stories....

Pay-as-you-go model, privacy protections agreed - but critics say it just buys 'Microsoft more time to lock in customers' A trade group of European cloud providers has claimed a small victory in bringing lower prices and more flexibility in deploying Microsoft software on their infrastructure, though the Coalition for Fair Software Licensing has blasted it as a "stalling tactic" by the software giant....

Analysts have warned Broadcom may slow innovation VMware on Wednesday announced it has extended the time between major releases from two years to three and extended support for those releases to six years....

LLM given keys to the web, told to behave and observe safeguards OpenAI's ChatGPT has graduated from chatbot to agent, at least for paying subscribers....

Insiders tell The Register that a company-wide automation push means jobs are disappearing Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy's predictions that automation would cost jobs at the company have proven accurate at Amazon Web Services....

Ads giant complains of damage to its reputation and finances ... and crime, too Google has filed a lawsuit against 25 unnamed individuals in China it accuses of breaking into more than 10 million devices worldwide and using them to build a botnet, called BadBox 2.0, and then to carry out other cybercrimes and fraud....

Running on Amazon Bedrock, it aims to pave the path from prototype to production Video Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Wednesday previewed a service called Bedrock AgentCore to help organizations put AI agents into business-ready production....

Shovels in the dirt at Fab 3 as Fab 2's 3nm ramp charges in several quarters early TSMC says it will ramp up production at its second fab site in Arizona earlier than initially expected as it looks to shift nearly a third of its leading-edge wafer output stateside....

Three perfect 10s in the last month - ISE, ISE, baby Cisco has issued a patch for a critical 10 out of 10 severity bug in its Identity Services Engine (ISE) and ISE Passive Identity Connector (ISE-PIC) that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to run arbitrary code on the operating system with root-level privileges....

Maybe finish ripping and replacing your telco networks first? Uncle Sam has decided it's time to free US-connected undersea cables from Chinese influence....

Linking can be helpful - but not always... while disinformation can spread like a virus Beware: the people behind PuTTY, the renowned FOSS SSH client for Windows, are not the same people as those behind the PUTTY.ORG website....

Non-competitive 220M datacenter deal with tax collector tops 510M pile of public money Fujitsu has been awarded around 510 million ($682 million) in UK public sector contracts since a TV dramatization of the Horizon Post Office scandal - including a recent 220 million ($294 million) deal with the UK tax collector, awarded without competition....

Computer scientist Peter Gutmann tells The Reg why it's 'bollocks' The US National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) has been pushing for the development of post-quantum cryptographic algorithms since 2016....

New spin on speculative decoding works with any model - now built into Transformers We all know that AI is expensive, but a new set of algorithms developed by researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Intel Labs, and d-Matrix could significantly reduce the cost of serving up your favorite large language model (LLM) with just a few lines of code....

The universe contains more matter than antimatter, and a paper hints at one reason for that happy disparity Scientists have analyzed data gathered from CERN's Large Hadron Collider to advance our understanding of why anything exists....

It did get sourced, but nobody cared The result of the pioneering joint Psion and Nokia smartphone effort is still out there on GitHub....

It looks like enough of you are struggling to migrate that Redmond is willing to help out - for a price that might buy nothing Microsoft has extended its security update programs for Exchange Server 2016 and 2019, and Skype for Business 2015 and 2019....

Bayesian optimizations apparently build better slabs Social media giant Meta has created an AI model to come up with new forms of concrete and used one of the resulting recipes to underpin a new bit barn....

Our sources tell us mostly back office staff were let go, and that the mood in the office is very pessimistic Updated Intel has filed documents that reveal plans to fire around 5,000 staff, mostly in California and Oregon....

The Microsoft cofounder breathed that sigh of relief in a Cipher News interview - just before it folded Despite Trump's budget bill slashing many mature clean-energy tax credits, Bill Gates is less worried, since new nuclear incentives, including those his TerraPower venture will leverage, survived intact....

'Deeply penetrated' Gaskar 'to the very tonsils of demilitarization' Ukrainian hackers claim to have taken out the IT infrastructure at Russia's Gaskar Integration plant, one of the largest suppliers of drones for its army, and also destroyed massive amounts of technical data related to drone production....

Two Russian suspects in cuffs, seven warrants out International cops shut down more than 100 servers belonging to the pro-Russian NoName057(16) network this week as part of the Europol-led Operation Eastwood....

'Everything breaks when you scale that quickly' Thank heavens for former OpenAI engineers inspired to blog about their time at the famously secretive firm, for without them we would have no idea what a wild mess it is in there....