The Register

Telegram to get 50% cut of xAI subscriptions too Telegram founder Pavel Durov on Wednesday announced that the Dubai-based messaging service will make unspecified Grok models from Elon Musk's xAI available to users....

Also in preview: a settings backup feature to support OS upgrades Microsoft is previewing a Windows Update orchestration platform for app developers and management tool vendors, aiming to centralize update scheduling across Windows 11 devices....

Jensen be limbo, Jensen be quick, Jensen go under the Uncle Sam's limbo stick Over the past few years, Uncle Sam has made it progressively harder for US chip designers to flog their AI wares in China. But not impossible....

'Everyone's holding their breath' Interview It's hard to pinpoint exactly when the "culture of fear" began to permeate America's top cyber-defense agency....

Prototype packs triple the energy density of lithium-ion, they claim MIT boffins have built a prototype fuel cell using liquid sodium and air that could one day power aircraft, and may help capture carbon through its byproducts....

So much for buttering up ChatGPT with 'Please' and 'Thank you' Google co-founder Sergey Brin claims that threatening generative AI models produces better results....

Data analytics and risk management biz says software dev platform breached, not itself LexisNexis Risk Solutions (LNRS) is the latest big-name organization to disclose a serious cyberattack leading to data theft, with the number of affected individuals pegged at 364,333....

Latest kernel includes 14,612 changesets, Penguinistas been busy Over the holiday weekend, Linus Torvalds released the latest Linux kernel - signalling the end of the line for 486-class chips....

Open source in-process OLAP system launches rival to Iceberg and Delta Lake table format, and more With a combined market value of around $150 billion, Snowflake and Databricks have divergent visions on how to get customers' analytics and machine learning tools to their data, which is often spread across different systems....

Project shutdowns at Mozilla are not encouraging, though Another month, another new version of Firefox, with several handy changes. The future is less certain, though....

IT leaders in region eyeing American hyperscalers escape hatch Amid the economic uncertainty of Trump 2.0, dependence on American tech has become a growing concern for many businesses, and a survey of 1,000 IT leaders claims that data sovereignty is now one of the most pressing issues....

The latest in a long line of techies to face Putin's wrath A Russian programmer will face the next 14 years in a "strict-regime" (high-security) penal colony after a regional court ruled he leaked sensitive data to Ukraine....

Researchers find AI models weak for medical reasoning when it comes to X-rays and CT scans AI is not ready to make clinical diagnoses based on radiological scans, according to a new study....

Easy, medium, and the sledgehammer approach - or any combination you fancy hands on If you're thinking about switching to Linux but there are a few Windows apps you just can't do without, you do have options... and some of them are free....

Space broadband and space-linked phones all very well, but someone's got to track them Satellites have evolved, thanks to SpaceX's Starlink and incomer AST SpaceMobile pumping out high-speed broadband and cellular services for everyday phones delivered from low Earth orbit (LEO) hardware....

And it's all your fault There is growing dissatisfaction over cloud computing, according to Gartner, and much of this can be put down to unrealistic expectations or customers simply not implementing the tech properly....

More cases about 2015 software swindle stuck in legal traffic jam Germany's Braunschweig Regional Court has reportedly sentenced four Volkswagen executives to jail over Dieselgate" - the 2015 scandal in which the automaker was found to have fudged software used to test its vehicles' pollution emissions....

SimpleHelp was the vector for the attack DragonForce ransomware infected a managed service provider, and its customers, after attackers exploited security flaws in remote monitoring and management tool SimpleHelp....

Musk's rocket co fails to deploy any dummy satellites either SpaceX's Starship has failed, again....

Really strong USB ports make a difference too by reducing the need for motherboard replacements Computex Analysts rate Taiwan's ASUS the world's fifth most prolific PC-maker, but the company wants to climb the charts by targeting business buyers, according to Shawn Chang, Head of Go-To-Market for the outfit's Commercial Business Unit....

Millions may fall for it - and end up with malware instead A group of miscreants tracked as UNC6032 is exploiting interest in AI video generators by planting malicious ads on social media platforms to steal credentials, credit card details, and other sensitive info, according to Mandiant....

He was responding to a gripe from a Russian IT provider about competition from Microsoft and Zoom Russian President Vladimir Putin said foreign tech providers still operating in Russia should be "strangled" as the country develops domestic alternatives....

400,000 GB200s could be more than a 1.2GW datacenter can chew Oracle will reportedly shell out around $40 billion on Nvidia's most advanced GPUs to provide compute power to OpenAI from the first US Stargate datacenter in Abilene, Texas, assuming the site can deliver enough electricity to handle the load....

No more features for the design darling - now it's all about chatting with your tabs like they're sentient AI is rapidly reshaping how we use the web, or so The Browser Company founder Josh Miller argues. That belief helped drive his team's decision to stop building new features for its Arc browser and shift focus to an "AI browser" dubbed Dia....

'Your well-honed customer experience is noise to an agent' As software agents powered by foundation models become more commonplace, marketers need to revisit their assumptions about website design and advertising....

Dutch intel services, Microsoft go big-game hunting A previously unknown Kremlin-linked group has conducted cyber-espionage operations against Dutch police, NATO member states, Western tech companies, and other organizations of interest to the Russian government since at least April 2024, according to Dutch intelligence services and Microsoft....

The rebellion grows and it seems resistance is not futile Despite high-profile calls for employees to get their butts back behind their desks in a traditional workplace setting, more people - at least in the UK - are ignoring return-to-office mandates, a study has found....

He'll need to be way more aggressive than a 25% tariff, say analysts, and even then it would take years US President Donald Trump can huff, puff, and threaten to blow Tim Cook's house down with a 25 percent iPhone import tariff, but analysts say even that threat is unlikely to bring Apple's manufacturing home....

Nick Clegg, former politico and Zuckcorp policy Prez, seems confused, can Reg readers help him? Former British deputy PM and Meta apologist Sir Nick Clegg says that forcing AI companies to ask for the permission of copyright holders before using their content would destroy the AI industry overnight....

Hackers take personal data bytes from the brand with three stripes Adidas is warning customers some of their data was stolen after an "unauthorized" person lifted it from a "third-party customer service provider."...

Marc Benioff eyes up all those lovely data tools for AI push Salesforce is to buy Informatica, the enterprise data management and analytics biz, for around $8 billion....

Commercial customers, STEM students all feeling the pain after mega outage of engineering data-analysis tool Software biz MathWorks is cleaning up a ransomware attack more than a week after it took down MATLAB, its flagship product used by more than five million people worldwide....

Taxpayers on hold for 798 years might wish for a better service The UK's tax collector has confirmed plans to contract out call center services with an associated price tag of 500 million ($677 million)....

Prediction: General-purpose AI could start getting worse Opinion I use AI a lot, but not to write stories. I use AI for search. When it comes to search, AI, especially Perplexity, is simply better than Google....

Or, rediscovering the KISS principle, the long way round Comment Linux distro wars are nothing new. "Advocacy" (a euphemism for angry argument) about hardware, OSes, programming languages and editors goes back as long as different computers have existed. Computers appeal to geeky folks, and geeky folks readily get a little too attached to things - and then become possessive and defensive about them....

Nothing will change while big tech sets the rules. We'll need someone even scarier Opinion How much harm does AI cause the environment? As a report from the MIT Technology Review just confirmed, nobody knows, and almost nobody cares enough to try and find out. Even if lots of people did care a lot, it wouldn't change things. The driver of AI's insane energy addiction is no more amenable to argument than a labrador in possession of an entire roast chicken....

No, not Amazon. China's SHEIN is in the spotlight for fake discounts, grubby greenery, and evading inquiries The European Commission has warned Chinese e-tailer SHEIN to clean up its act, after finding several practices on its website breach local consumer law....

Taiwan's tech expo dishes up the usual oddities - some less bonkers than they seem Computex Taiwan's Computex conference sprawls across four exhibition halls in which almost 1,500 exhibitors jostle for attention....

Chipmaker Hygon, which recently teased a 128-core, 512-thread CPU, merges with server-maker Sugon China has spawned a supercomputing contender....

Life in a corporate aquarium didn't go swimmingly Who, Me? Another Monday has arrived, bringing with it the chance for work-in-progress meetings at which managers will recite corporate cliches with astounding sincerity. Which is why The Register always opens the week with a new edition of Who, Me? It's the column in which you share stories of trying to meet your KPIs and somehow escaping when you don't....

But pauses tech-adjacent threat to slap all Euro-imports with 50 percent duties World War Fee US president Donald Trump has threatened a tariff that would apply only to Apple, and appears to have referred to the European Union's treatment of American tech companies as part of a threat to slap the bloc with higher tariffs....

PLUS: Interpol kills more malware; GoDaddy settles in awful infosec case; Giant stolen creds DB exposed Infosec In Brief Secrets of the Trump administration may have been exposed after a successful attack on messaging service TeleMessage, which has been used by some officials....

PLUS: Original emoji retired; Xiaomi's custom silicon; Pakistan dedicates 2,000 MW to AI and crypto Asia In Brief China last week approved rules that will see Beijing issue identity numbers that netizens can use as part of a federated identity scheme that will mean they can use one logon across multiple online services....

Neural net devs are finally getting serious about efficiency Feature If you've been following AI development over the past few years, one trend has remained constant: bigger models are usually smarter, but also harder to run....

Chinese manufacturers are advertising how they dodge tariffs, and tech leaders know they're in a new world Computex Every time I attend Taiwan's Computex exhibition I'm bewildered by the dozens of vendors selling unremarkable keyboards and mice....

But it's still going to come in through the back door Comment As AI pilots within enterprises increasingly flame out, OpenAI is making a pivot to consumers, suggesting AI is more likely to sneak into the enterprise through users than walk in through the front door. But IT departments will still have to deal with it once it arrives....

Michael Daniel also thinks Uncle Sam should increase help to orgs hit by ransomware INTERVIEW Uncle Sam's cybersecurity apparatus can't only focus on China and other nation-state actors, but also has to fight the much bigger damage from plain old cybercrime, says former White House advisor Michael Daniel. And the Trump administration's steep cuts to federal government staff are making that a lot harder....

The original leak site that never sold out, never surrendered Obituary John Young, the co-founder of the legendary internet archive Cryptome, died at the age of 89 on March 28. The Register talked to friends and peers who gave tribute to a bright, pugnacious man who was devoted to the public's right to know....

Computing pioneer's personal papers expected to fetch tens of thousands Precious scientific papers once belonging to wartime codebreaking genius Alan Turing - rescued from an attic clear-out where they faced destruction - are set to fetch a fortune at auction next month....

SQL Server and Cosmos DB added to data lake platform as lure for building AI features into transactional systems Microsoft is throwing more transactional database systems into its Fabric analytics and data lake environment in expectation the proximity will help users that are adding AI to their systems....