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Test run offers hope for a rail system long past its best-before date Deutsche Bahn (DB) and Siemens Mobility have managed to get an ICE test train to 405 km/h (251 mph) on the Erfurt-Leipzig/Halle high-speed line....

CISPE floats reforms to avoid new costs, fragmentation, and infrastructure flight The Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers in Europe (CISPE) trade body has put forward recommendations for the EU's Water Resilience Strategy, perhaps mindful that datacenters are perceived as hugely wasteful of precious water resources....

Like being hard to spot? They'd much rather you didn't Opinion There are few tech deceptions more successful than Chrome's Incognito Mode....

Sensible CEO wouldn't let our hero take the blame - a shoddy supervisor got the slap Who, Me? Welcome again to Who, Me? It's the Monday morning column in which readers of The Register admit to making big mistakes and somehow swerving the consequences....

Paying for successful problem resolution is a better business model, argues Dimitri Masin interview Dimitri Masin, CEO of Gradient Labs, argues that companies using AI agents for customer support should only pay when the bot does its job....

Which it will, happily, to create a networking biz that's still far smaller than Cisco's or Nvidia's The US Department of Justice (DoJ) has cleared the way for HPE's $14 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks....

Chipmaker Loongson says server CPUs on par with 2021's Ice Lake, as local press tout kit to manage 1,024-qubit systems Chinese chip designer Loongson last week announced silicon it claims is the equal of western semiconductors from 2021....

PLUS: Broadband blimps to fly in Japan; Starbucks China put ads before privacy; and more! Asia In Brief Canada's government has ordered Chinese CCTV systems vendor Hikvision to cease its local operations....

PLUS: Crooks target hardware crypto wallets; Bad flaws in Brother printers; ,O365 allows takeover-free phishing; and more Infosec in Brief Despite warnings not to pay ransomware operators, almost half of those infected by the malware send cash to the crooks who planted it, according to infosec software slinger Sophos....

More fiction than science Feature IT consultancy Gartner predicts that more than 40 percent of agentic AI projects will be cancelled by the end of 2027 due to rising costs, unclear business value, or insufficient risk controls....

Watch out for supply chain hacks especially interview The ceasefire between Iran and Israel may prevent the two countries from firing missiles at each other, but it won't carry any weight in cyberspace, according to former NATO hacker Candan Bolukbas....

'This is not a copyright message' Before plug and play was blowing up Windows 98 on a Comdex stage, Windows 95 engineers were grappling with the technology - and on one fateful day they found some unusual text in the BIOS of several PCs that they had to work around....

$61B business offers $10K-$50K grants to assess AI's job-market impact AI biz Anthropic is trying to recruit academics to find out exactly how much its technology could crater the jobs market....

Taking advantage of the ridiculously complex US healthcare billing system Criminals masquerading as insurers are tricking patients and healthcare providers into handing over medical records and bank account information via emails and text messages, according to the FBI....

Over 18? Prove it The US Supreme Court has ruled that Texas' age certification law for viewing sexually explicit content is valid, meaning that viewers of such material will have to prove their age....

When AI is a nesting doll of networks, so why reinvent the wheel when you can license it instead feature GPUs dominate the conversation when it comes to AI infrastructure. But while they're an essential piece of the puzzle, it's the interconnect fabrics that allow us to harness them to train and run multi-trillion-parameter models at scale....

'Memory vulnerabilities pose serious risks to national security and critical infrastructure,' say CISA and NSA The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the National Security Agency (NSA) this week published guidance urging software developers to adopt memory-safe programming languages....

AI will make 'significant changes' to economy, labor market It may not happen today or even tomorrow, but US Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell is confident that someday soon AI is going to seriously change the US economy and labor market....

The AI boom needs power, and startup The Nuclear Company aims to help build Palantir has become the latest tech company to jump on the nuclear power bandwagon - not by making a datacenter deal like Microsoft or Amazon, mind you, but by providing its data analytics software to a startup aiming to help build nuclear plants faster and cheaper....

Now play dead, like a lot of NASA science programs if the White House gets its way The team behind NASA's 19-year-old Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has been busy teaching an old spacecraft new tricks, persuading the vehicle to perform a 120-degree roll to peer more clearly into the red planet....

Getting it in might mean re-racking the entire datacenter and rebuilding the network, though Cisco is talking up the integration of security into network infrastructure such as its latest Catalyst switches, claiming this is vital to AI applications, and in particular the current vogue for "agentic AI."...

'No impact on safety,' FAA tells The Reg update Hawaiian Airlines said a "cybersecurity incident" affected some of its IT systems, but noted that flights are operating as scheduled. At least one researcher believes Scattered Spider, which previously targeted retailers and insurance companies, could be to blame....

No replacement in the wings for info streamed from past their prime rigs, 'termination will be permanent' Satellite data used for hurricane forecasting is to be abruptly cut off from the end of June due to "recent service changes."...

Pen Test Partners hijack data from Renault Clio to steer, brake, and accelerate in SuperTuxKart Cybersecurity nerds figured out a way to make those at-home racing simulators even more realistic by turning an actual car into a game controller....

When it was all about the baud rate The world of datacenter networking is crammed with exotic technology and capabilities beyond the imaginings of administrators charged with running big iron decades ago. However, while it might have been a slower and more proprietary time, it was also perhaps a little simpler....

Finance, health, and national identification details compromised Multinational grocery and retail megacorp Ahold Delhaize says upwards of 2.2 million people had their data compromised during its November cyberattack with personal, financial and health details among the trove....

Or so hear members of Parliament in the UK UK lawmakers have learned there is no international protocol for making decisions over how to respond to a prospective life-threatening asteroid strike on Earth....

Masked networking costs are coming to AI systems Analysis Moore's Law has run out of gas and AI workloads need massive amounts of parallel compute and high bandwidth memory right next to it - both of which have become terribly expensive. If it weren't for this situation, the beancounters of the world might be complaining about the cost of networking in the datacenter....

True digital sovereignty begins at the desktop Opinion Microsoft, tactically admitting it has failed at talking all the Windows 10 PC users into moving to Windows 11 after all, is - sort of, kind of - extending Windows 10 support for another year....

Pick a provider based on how good their local 4G and 5G coverage is The UK's telecoms regulator has released an overhauled tool comparing mobile coverage and performance across the country, claiming this will help the millions of Brits missing out on the best local network....

When police come to investigate tech support, make sure you have your story straight On Call Welcome once again to On Call, The Register's Friday column that celebrates the frolicsome fun that readers have experienced when asked to deliver tech support....

But like cloud computing and digital transformation, this may be a buzzword they can't ignore forever HPE Discover 2025 HPE envisions a future where customer systems are filled with its agentic AI products, but reactions from the HPE Discover show floor in Las Vegas this week suggest the company has a way to go to convince folks to buy in....

Brazil debuts, Japan bounces back, and tiny Tuvalu soars on Elon's broadband birds Eight more nations have passed at least 50 percent IPv6 deployment, according to the Internet Society (ISOC)....

Regulator acknowledges that won't stop video nasties, but welcomes extra friction'

Authors are having a hard time protecting their works from the maws of the LLM makers Updated Californian courts have not been kind to authors this week, with a second ruling going against an unlucky 13 who sought redress for use of their content in training AI models....

At least the BSOD acronym will still work The infamous Windows Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) will be replaced later this summer by a new black screen as part of Microsoft's Windows Resiliency Initiative (WRI)....

Pro tip: Don't use your personal email account on BreachForums The notorious data thief known as IntelBroker allegedly broke into computer systems belonging to more than 40 victims worldwide and stole their data, costing them at least $25 million in damages, according to newly unsealed court documents that also name IntelBroker as 25-year-old British national Kai West....

Czech researcher lays out a business case for reducing reliance on Redmond Comment A sharply argued blog post warns that heavy reliance on Microsoft poses serious strategic risks for organizations - a viewpoint unlikely to win favor with Redmond or its millions of corporate customers....

837 megawatt reactor now expected in 2027, energy CEO says A revamped Three Mile Island nuclear plant could be fueling Microsoft's AI datacenters sooner than first thought, according to Constellation Energy executives....

A 10.0 and a 9.8 - these aren't patches to dwell on Cisco has dropped patches for a pair of critical vulnerabilities that could allow unauthenticated remote attackers to execute code on vulnerable systems....

22 years on from the last spec, you can now animate your PNGs The free graphics format that people actually know how to pronounce has been updated....

The idea of handing off networking chores to DPUs persists even if it hasn't caught on beyond hyperscalers Analysis In 2013, Amazon Web Services announced a new C3 instance type and made vague references to what it described as "enhanced networking" enabled by an Intel Virtual Function interface....

You are not prepared for 5 GW datacenters, Deloitte warns Power required by AI datacenters in the US may be more than 30 times greater in a decade, with 5 GW facilities already in the pipeline.....

Cosmic research on hold while engineers investigate a problematic motor NASA's NICER X-ray telescope is pausing operations just weeks after the US space agency boasted that a January repair and reconfiguration had improved its daytime measurements....

Business data is fragmented and change management is hard Interview Adoption of generative AI for enterprise customers isn't taking off in the manner many in the industry expected - and there are major obstacles in the way, according to Rania Succar, recently appointed CEO at Kaseya....

Nothing confirmed but authority is operating under the assumption that data has been stolen A cyberattack on Glasgow City Council is causing massive disruption with a slew of its digital services unavailable....

Pathology outage caused by Synnovis breach linked to harm across dozens of healthcare facilities The NHS says Qilin's ransomware attack on pathology services provider Synnovis last year led to the death of a patient....

Apple's advanced next-generation Lisp is still being maintained as FOSS OpenDylan is a Lisp without all the parentheses - just as John McCarthy originally intended for LISP-2....

Aircraft meant to bolster NATO deterrent will rely on allied support to stay airborne The UK government is to buy 12 F-35A fighters capable of carrying nuclear weapons as part of the NATO deterrent, but there's a snag: the new jets are incompatible with the RAF's refueling tanker aircraft....

Privacy campaigner brands Iceland's use of 'Orwellian' camera tech 'chilling,' CEO responds: 'It'll cut violent crime' Privacy campaigners are branding frozen food retailer Iceland's decision to trial facial recognition technology (FRT) at several stores "chilling" - the UK supermarket chain says it's deploying the cameras to cut down on crime....