The Register

Vendor's AI-infused pitch at Sapphire marred by backlash over support costs News that SAP users face a 30-50 percent premium to get some cloud products - including core ERP - to industry-standard service levels threatens to overshadow the German vendor's annual conference as new pricing models, performance, and partner arrangements dominate the conversation....

Case in Germany could derail Zuck's plans, noyb tells El Reg fight isn't over The Irish Data Protection Commission has cleared the way for Meta to begin slurping up the data of European citizens for training AI next week, ongoing legal challenges notwithstanding....

4-year trial is second major initiative this year that clamps down on 'illegal immigrants' Foreigners in Moscow will now be subject to a new experimental law that affords the state enhanced tracking mechanisms via a smartphone app....

A media-ready remix with KDE, codecs, and clutter from its BeOS-flavored past Neptune is a moderately tweaked Debian remix with KDE Plasma 5, a few alternative app choices, and a longer history than we anticipated....

Chat app blocks Windows' screenshot-happy feature from peeking at private convos Chat app biz Signal is unhappy with the current version of Microsoft Recall and has invoked some Digital Rights Management (DRM) functionality in Windows to stop the tool from snapshotting private conversations....

Claude passed 80% of tasks assigned in a recent study Freelance coders take solace: while AI models can perform a lot of the real-world coding tasks that companies contract out, they do so less effectively than a human....

Barriers stack up: Datacenter capacity, egress fees, platform skills, variety of cloud services. It won't happen, say analysts European organizations wanting to break free of American cloud operators may find their hopes dashed, according to industry analysts, for a number of reasons including a sheer lack of datacenter capacity....

And other ways to get that Amiga feeling on a budget The FOSS recreation of AmigaOS is making progress. A new edition runs entirely from a USB key, so you can temporarily turn your PC into an Amiga - without any tricky installation process....

Parents and teachers have personal info, ID documents leaked online, but exam season mostly unaffected Scotland's West Lothian Council has confirmed that data was stolen from its education network after the Interlock ransomware group claimed responsibility for the intrusion earlier this month....

Report slates end of perpetual licenses, death of monthly pay-as-you-go model, and 'punitive' changes by Broadcom Broadcom has upped VMware licensing costs by between eight to 15 times since it took over the organization, and a lack of alternatives in the tech industry means trade and end customers have no choice but to play ball....

Names spies, web hosts, GPS jammers, fishing (not phishing) biz The European Union has sanctioned Russia-linked entities it says jammed GPS signals, sabotaged undersea cables, and ran a web hosting business that aided "information manipulation interference and cyber-attacks."...

Don't panic! It's related to an earthly bug, eats gelatin, not astronauts, and may have adapted to life in space Chinse scientists have found a previously unknown species of microbe on the nation's Tiangong space station, and it may have evolved characteristics that help it to survive in space....

Cable Labs predicts two percent packet loss and 10ms latency in some buildings unless more spectrum freed Rapid growth in Wi-Fi use means the 6 GHZ band's carrying capacity may soon be exhausted, according to CableLabs, the nonprofit networking think tank run by cable television operators....

The agentic era may not be all that it's cracked up to be google i/o At Google I/O this week, the Chocolate Factory argued for its AI supremacy, making the case with benchmark-topping machine learning models, developer tools, and a few promising products....

AT&T, Verizon, T-Mo failed to alert lawmakers about surveillance, senator says AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile US failed to set up systems to notify lawmakers when government snoops came calling for their phone records - a contractual obligation that went ignored until recently, according to US Senator Ron Wyden....

The 19-year-old and a partner first tried to extort an unnamed telco, but failed A 19-year-old student has agreed to plead guilty to hacking into the systems of two companies as part of an extortion scheme, and The Register has learned that one of the targets was PowerSchool....

LLM trained on decades of weather data claimed to be faster, and cheaper Scientists have developed a machine learning model that can outperform official agencies at predicting tropical cyclone tracks, and do it faster and cheaper than traditional physics-based systems....

Chocolate Factory comes for Meta's Ray-Bans with Warby Parker pact Google I/O Google and eyeglass maker Warby Parker have partnered to create a more stylish successor to Google Glass, which cofounder Sergey Brin quipped will actually be polished before launch this time....

And it gets even harder when you try to estimate CO2 emissions A single person with a serious AI habit may chew through enough electricity each day to keep a microwave running for more than three hours. And the actual toll may even be worse, as so many companies keep details about their AI models secret....

Their connection? Aiding Ukraine, duh Russian cyberspies have targeted "dozens" of Western and NATO-country logistics providers, tech companies, and government orgs providing transport and foreign assistance to Ukraine, according to a joint government announcement issued Wednesday....

Credit card theft losses in 2023 alone totaled $36.5M International cops working with Microsoft have shut down infrastructure and seized web domains used to run a distribution service for info-stealing malware Lumma. Criminals paid $250 to $1,000 a month to get access to the infostealer....

Bribed support staff identified, fired Coinbase says the data of nearly 70,000 customers was handed over by overseas support staff who were bribed by criminals to give up the goods....

When 'AI-powered' means 'mostly humans and bad decisions' Comment The collapse of Builder.ai has cast fresh light on AI coding practices, despite the software company blaming its fall from grace on poor historical decision-making....

Every hardware claim is equal, but some are more equal than others Veteran Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen has explained another Windows oddity - this time, why the operating system can appear to report two different CPU speeds....

CS remains hopeful damages will be limited to seven figures CrowdStrike is "confident" that the worst-case scenario of its pending lawsuit with Delta will result in it paying the airline a sum in the "single-digit millions."...

From air-gapped bunkers to partner-run platforms, sovereignty is suddenly in vogue Google has updated its sovereign cloud services, including an air-gapped solution for customers with strict data security and residency requirements, as customers grow uneasy over US digital dominance....

In practice, it'll cost many times that and almost certainly won't work In a White House press conference on Tuesday President Trump announced his plans for a defensive network of missiles, radar, space surveillance, and attack satellites that he promised would protect America....

Will the US President take credit for that one as well? NASA was already considering reducing crew size on the International Space Station (ISS) before cuts to the agency's budget were proposed....

No need for thumbscrews when your chatbot never lets up Large language models (LLMs) are not just about assistance and hallucinations. The technology has a darker side....

Care board draws red lines over use of UK government-backed Federated Data Platform A report for a Northern England health authority says its analytics platform is more capable than anything offered under a controversial central government deal with Palantir....

Downtime stings retailer, with technical recovery costs coming at a later date Marks & Spencer says the disruption related to its ongoing cyberattack is likely to knock around 300 million ($402 million) off its operating profits for the next financial year (2025/26)....

After 60 years+ cooperation on space and military ops, worrying 'rhetoric' from Team Trump has Brits examining options The current rhetoric coming from the US is "alarming" for the UK, which depends on a continuation of their long-standing co-operation around space and military tech for the future, the UK's second parliamentary chamber heard this week....

Crew ain't done hopping sectors, Unit 42 threat hunter warns interview Scattered Spider snared financial services organizations in its web before its recent spate of retail attacks in the UK and US, according to Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42....

Being human and working on a team is the job, not writing code Column Whenever I read the news these days, I see the same warning to developers: Watch out, AI is going to replace you....

Argues the world needs China's AI researchers working on his chips so the rest of us benefit Computex Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has said the USA's ban on exports of his company's most powerful accelerators to China is precisely the wrong policy" and a failure"....

RDNA 4 makes workstation debut with 32GB R9700 Computex AMD aims to extend its lead over Intel in the high-end desktop (HEDT) and workstation arenas with its 9000-series Threadripper workstation CPUs teased at Computex this week....

Nothing like insecure code in security suites The "ongoing exploitation" of two Ivanti bugs has now extended beyond on-premises environments and hit customers' cloud instances, according to security shop Wiz....

Choc Fac brings gen mods to Android, Chrome, pretty much everywhere else Google IO Google technical folk laid out a menu of geeky delights on Tuesday at Google I/O, in the hope that software developers will pay to build upon the Chocolate Factory's platforms and services....

Search? That's now artificial intelligence, too Google IO Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and its Google subsidiary, opened the 17th annual Google I/O developer conference on Tuesday, evangelizing the transformational power of artificial intelligence, as he did last year and the year before that....

Republican defense of states' rights doesn't apply to curtailing LLMs, apparently State attorneys general and activists are sounding the alarm over a provision of President Trump's budget proposal, which passed out of committee over the weekend and is headed to the House for a potential vote that would strip states of the ability to regulate AI....

Mix Master Mike will spin up Nutanix, VMware, and Red Hat on the same beastly cluster Dell has created a private cloud that isn't actually a private cloud - but will let users create private clouds built on software stacks from VMware, Nutanix, and Red Hat....

Creative Cloud Pro arrives with more AI, higher prices, and a familiar feeling of deja vu New generative AI products mean new higher prices for individual Adobe Creative Cloud customers, unless they downgrade to a version with fewer features....

Update before that proof-of-concept comes to bite Security researchers are sounding the alarm over a fresh flaw in the JavaScript implementation of OpenPGP (OpenPGP.js) that allows both signed and encrypted messages to be spoofed....

Say something nice? At least France has nuclear power, though its grid needs work Europe's largest AI datacenter campus is to be built near Paris in France, according to blueprints released by a joint venture formed by Nvidia, Mistral AI, the French national investment bank, and United Arab Emirates (UAE) investment fund MGX....

I'm altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further The union representing American actors has complained about Llama Production, which is owned by Epic Games, over the use of generative AI in a new character for Fortnite....

Fast, compact, useful? Who are you, and what did you do with Windows? Build Microsoft has brought back an old favorite to the Windows command line interface: Edit, a text editor harking back to the halcyon days of DOS and text mode applications....

Peter Green Chilled supplies all the major UK chains It's more bad news for UK supermarkets with chilled and frozen food distribution business Peter Green Chilled confirming a ransomware attack with customers....

Behold Project Battlematrix' Computex When it comes to AI accelerators, Intel isn't very competitive, and its newly announced Battlemage workstation cards don't do much to change that. But at least they're cheap. Really cheap....

Even well-optimized models only likely to use 35 to 45% of compute the silicon can deliver GPU accelerators used in AI processing are costly items, so making sure you get the best usage out of them ought to be a priority, yet the industry lacks an effective way of measuring this, says the Uptime Institute....

There's something wrong with keyboard design, but we can't put our finger on it Opinion Linus Torvalds is the global hero most of the world doesn't even know exists. There are no big movies about him, no best-selling biographies, no ardent Torvaldian cultists with home altars and gilded icons. At least, we hope not....