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Down and out for hour, claims CDN biz. No, say users, more like three There was a disturbance in the force on July 14 after Cloudflare borked a configuration change that resulted in an outage, impacting internet services across the planet....

Westinghouse taps Big G's cloud smarts to speed up atomic plant builds and keep the grid humming While AI systems are known to spew wrong information and make up facts, Google and Westinghouse Electric are now pressing generative AI models into service to transform how nuclear reactors are constructed and optimize their operation....

Observations of HOPS-315 align with theories of how our own solar system began to take shape The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has helped provide a snapshot of the formation of a planetary system around a young star for the first time, according to astroboffins....

Someone's OVERSTEPing the mark Updated Unknown miscreants are exploiting fully patched, end-of-life SonicWall VPNs to deploy a previously unknown backdoor and rootkit, likely for data theft and extortion, according to Google's Threat Intelligence Group....

Gentoo derivative is the most popular Linux distro, but its days are apparently numbered Google's Android president has confirmed the platform is set to replace ChromeOS - but not when....

AI boom can't mask trade gloom, says Dutch lithography giant World War Fee Shares in ASML fell by more than 8 percent after it warned that tariff uncertainty over future trade was increasing and net sales were down on the previous quarter....

Supermarket announces white hat education scheme as four suspects released on bail Co-op Group's chief executive officer has confirmed that all 6.5 million of the organization's members had their data stolen during its April cyberattack - Scattered Spider is believed to be behind the digital heist....

Attack enters day 11 and still no public disclosure of what insider claims to be 'deep breach' of Active Directory Exclusive Aviation insiders say Serbia's national airline, Air Serbia, was forced to delay issuing payslips to staff as a result of a cyberattack it is battling....

Peter Kyle promised alternative to 'ball and chain' of legacy systems, but he has no plan and little power Comment Last week, UK minister for science, innovation and technology Peter Kyle spoke at Google Cloud Summit in London to tell the audience: "Now, sometimes I'm accused of being 'too close to big tech'," with the Chocolate Factory's multi-colored logo looming behind him....

Former staffers of struggling UK biz say they don't expect to be paid for July UK cybersecurity shop Adarma has confirmed it has entered administration....

CEOs will chase illusory profits as workers are left to pick defective items from an agentic production line Column Agentic AI will make jobs - but many will involve picking its failures off automated conveyor belts....

Second major change in 18 months will be most unwelcome for many - as will critical flaws announced today Exclusive VMware has advised partners its current channel program will end, and it seems that smaller players won't be invited back....

Network update reports median 25 ms latency - in the US - as capacity rockets upwards Elon Musk's space broadband service Starlink has hinted that Elon Musk's Starship will be ready for commercial flights in 2026....

Coming soon, somewhere in the Middle East or Asia Rideshare OG Uber has announced a plan to roll out thousands" of robo-taxis from Chinese tech giant Baidu....

Waiting for license approval but plans to resume shipments of the MI308 accelerator soon-ish The US government has cleared AMD to resume exporting some accelerators to China....

Maintainers struggle to handle growing flow of low-quality bug reports written by bots Daniel Stenberg, founder and lead developer of the open-source curl command line utility, just wants the AI slop to stop....

File this one under what not to search if you've committed a crime A former US Army soldier, who reportedly hacked AT&T, bragged about accessing President Donald Trump's call logs, and then Googled "can hacking be treason," and "US military personnel defecting to Russia," pleaded guilty to conspiring to break into telecom firms' databases and extort at least $1 million....

Let us delve swiftly into meticulous inquiry with our AI masters Like it or not, ChatGPT and other large language models are changing the world, including affecting how we speak, claims a group of researchers, and the end results could be an erosion of linguistic and cultural diversity....

Apache-licensed plan takes aim at costlier options Mistral has released an open automatic speech recognition (ASR) software bundle called Voxtral in a bid to undercut rivals on price and quality....

MP Materials aims to deliver US-made, recycled magnets by 2027 Apple has signed a deal with the only active rare earth mine under American control to begin sourcing magnets for its iDevices from the US - but not from the mine itself: Apple's going to recycle....

They might pay more, but don't expect a mega salary anymore If you're looking for top dollar and job satisfaction as an IT professional, try for a role in the biggest, most faceless mega-corporation you can find - at least that's what mid-year US salary survey data suggests....

Inventories stack up stateside as Apple and co prep for import tax tweaks The global smartphone industry is taking a hit from increasing uncertainty and volatility in the marketplace caused by a certain US President's unpredictable trade policies....

Big Red's changes to Java licensing also inspire exodus to open source A survey of 500 IT asset managers in organizations that use Oracle Java has found that 73 percent have been audited in the last three years....

S&P 500 businesses warn investors they may never see ROI in SEC filings America's largest corporations are increasingly listing AI among the major risks they must disclose in formal financial filings, despite bullish statements in public about the potential business opportunities it offers....

The never Nvidia networking party just got another option Chip vendors like AMD may be closing the gap with Nvidia on GPU FLOPS, memory bandwidth, and HBM capacity, but without a high-speed interconnect and switch, like NVLink and NVSwitch, their ability to scale that performance remains limited....

Outfit was accused of charging for specialist IT labor performed by uncertified folks A Maryland IT, cloud, and security consultancy will have to pay the US government at least $14.75 million to settle multiple allegations that it issued false invoices between 2018-2023....

Simular is starting with industries like insurance and healthcare with tons of forms to fill When Ang Li, co-founder of agent software biz Simular, started working at Google DeepMind in 2017, software engineers at the search giant were skeptical about the usefulness of machine learning, or artificial intelligence (AI) as it has come to be called....

Uncertainty to blame as businesses wait to see what US Prez Trump does next World War Fee Gartner has trimmed its growth forecast for worldwide IT spending in 2025 as an "uncertainty pause" hits net new spending, caused in part by the unpredctability of US President Donald Trump's trade tariff policy....

Exos and IronWolf drives show spinning rust isn't going anywhere Seagate has released two 30 TB hard drives based on its HAMR technology, pitching them as more energy efficient cheaper options for datacenter operators dealing with AI workloads....

Stealth jets can't fight, can't fly much, and can't shoot UK missiles, says NAO The F-35 stealth fighter is not meeting its potential in British service because of availability issues, a shortage of support personnel, and delays in integrating key weapons that are limiting the aircraft's effectiveness....

First, Zuck takes Manhattan. Then he might actually deliver a product that matters Meta overlord-for-life Mark Zuckerberg has revealed he plans to build several multi-gigawatt datacenter clusters, with the first to come online in 2026....

Off-the-charts gravitational waves ripple out from merged dead stars Researchers have observed the largest ever collision between two massive black holes witnessed by humans, a finding that's sent astrophysicists back to their calculators to re-think models....

Maybe CEO Jensen Huang's million-dollar meal at Mar-a-Lago has paid off in the form of permission to sell the H20 and a new RTX Pro GPU Nvidia has announced the US government will allow it to resume sales of its GPUs to Chinese customers....

Stricter regulation follows last week's tariff whack The government of Malaysia on Monday closed a back door that may have allowed the export of AI chips to China....

Anyone investigated Grok? Just sayin'... Someone hacked Elmo's X account on Sunday, making it appear as if the lovable Sesame Street monster with the habit of referring to themselves in the third-person spewed a series of now-removed antisemitic, racist, and anti-Trump posts....

Looks like DoD FOMO struck Silicon Valley The Pentagon's embrace of the AI industry just put up to $800million on the table as the Department of Defense has issued a quartet of contracts bringing the biggest names in the biz officially into the fold....

Rowhammer returns for more memory-meddling fun The Rowhammer attack on computer memory is back, and for the first time, it's able to mess with bits in Nvidia GPUs, despite defenses designed to protect against this kind of hacking....

With half the AI devs in the world, if China can't build on American hardware, they'll build on their own, Jensen warns If the US military wouldn't be caught dead building supercomputers using Chinese kit, there's no reason to think the People's Liberation Army would risk doing the same, argues Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang....

Neil Smith has been trying to get the railroad industry to listen since 2012, but it took a CISA warning to get there When independent security researcher Neil Smith reported a vulnerability in a comms standard used by trains to the US government in 2012, he most likely didn't expect it would take until 2025 to sort the matter out, but here we are....

Latest release handles NBD and bcachefs, but you'll need 64-bit hardware to boot it GParted Live is a tiny live CD image that can copy, move, and resize partitions. It can be a lifesaver - but not for i686 any more....

Delivers specs in the form of user stories Amazon Web Services has created what it's calling an "agentic IDE" that it claims avoids the pitfalls of vibe coding....

MechaHitler? Garbage In, Garbage Out Opinion So, on the 4th of July, a big deal to those on my side of the pond, Elon Musk announced, "We have improved @Grok significantly." On Tuesday, July 8, the results of those changes appeared....

Just because a student reads a book doesn't mean Midjourney gets to eat Disney A research paper commissioned by the European Parliament has called for an EU law to pay writers, musicians, and artists whose work has been used to train GenAI models....

First US-Soviet joint mission showed detente in action, but astronauts had a close call on return home It is 50 years since the last hurrah of the Apollo program, with a mission that saw the final launch of an Apollo vehicle, and a subsequent docking with a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft in orbit....

We need more paranoid Androids. And, well, everything else Opinion The 21st century is turning out weirder than we thought. For the entire history of art, for example, tools could be used and abused and would work more or less well, but generally helped the wishes and skills of the user. They did not plot against us. Now they can - and do....

Cross-Channel pact aims to bolster navigation and timing tech as satellite signals face growing jamming threats Britain and France are to work more closely on technology to back up the familiar Global Positioning System (GPS), which is increasingly subject to interference in many regions around the world....

Report on serious organized crime fails to account for differences, agency says The UK's National Crime Agency (NCA) has hit back at a think tank after it assessed its US counterpart, the FBI, to be nearly three times more effective....

For the lack of a little documentation, two techies did a lot of accidental damage Who, Me? Alas, the weekend is over, but The Register tries to make your entry to the working week a little more enjoyable by bringing you a fresh installment of Who, Me? - the column in which you explain your worst slip-ups....

Warned that ChatGPT and Copilot had already lost, it stopped boasting and packed up its pawns Google's Gemini chatbot declined to play Chess against the Atari 2600, after learning the vintage gaming console had already vanquished other AIs....

Despite loathing the USA, Iran wants providers who match NIST's definition of cloud computing The Information Technology Organization of Iran (ITOI), the government body that develops and implements IT services for the country, is looking for suppliers of cloud computing....