The Register

If you're within 50 miles of Redmond, then it's time to come in Microsoft is rolling out a new return-to-office policy that will see first Redmond, then US, and then global staff getting back on-prem at least three days a week....

'The practice... has since been fixed,' Pentagon official tells The Reg The US Department of Defense, up until this week, routinely left its social media accounts wide open to hijackers via stream keys - unique, confidential identifiers generated by streaming platforms for broadcasting content. If exposed, these keys can allow attackers to output anything they want from someone else's channel....

HelloGym's data security clearly skipped leg day Exclusive Sensitive info from hundreds of thousands of gym customers and staff - including names, financial details, and potentially biometric data in the form of audio recordings - was left sitting in an unencrypted, non-password protected database, according to a security researcher who shut it down....

Microsoft invitation lost in mail after HoloLens made soldiers sick The US Army's troubled attempt at outfitting soldiers with mixed-reality headsets is getting a $354 million boost and a new pair of lead contractors as part of a second attempt to make the kit stick without making troops sick....

Microsoft feared too many machines would end up bricked Microsoft vet Raymond Chen first told the story of HLT and Windows 95 more than 20 years ago. The instruction tells the CPU to effectively shut itself down until the next hardware interrupt - ideal for laptops, since power consumption would be hugely reduced....

Analyst bets smart money on 'proactive digital companion' upgrade cycle Generative AI will supposedly spark a smartphone renaissance, driving both unit shipments and the value of devices sold this calendar year - or so claims a rather optimistic forecast from Gartner's consultants....

For the third time in a decade Streaming platform Plex is warning some users to reset their passwords after suffering yet another breach....

Netherlands based Nebius Group to deliver capacity from facility in New Jersey As the AI frenzy shows no signs of letting up, Microsoft has signed an agreement that could be worth up to $19.4 billion with Netherlands-based Nebius Group - formerly known as Yandex N.V. - in exchange for access to its GPU infrastructure over five years....

First, server products go end of life, now datacenter gets the chop, and larger customers will pay more Atlassian is discontinuing its datacenter products, including Jira, Confluence and Bamboo, in favor of Atlassian Cloud. There is a partial exception for Bitbucket, a source code repository manager, which will have a license option covering both cloud and datacenter....

Dreams of one satellite constellation die so another can live EchoStar has agreed to sell the company's AWS-4 and H-block spectrum licenses to SpaceX in a transaction worth $17 billion....

Contract tender follows 'alarming' safeguarding failure at border with undocumented kids The UK's Home Office is offering 1.3 million ($1.7 million) to developers of age-determining software - a tech it wants to deploy widely across its systems....

Ivalo XE handset targets governments and security critical sectors, though Qualcomm silicon keeps it tied to the US Finnish phone maker HMD Global is launching a business unit called HMD Secure to target governments and other security-critical customers, and has its first device ready to go....

AI security reviews add new risks, say researchers App security outfit Checkmarx says automated reviews in Anthropic's Claude Code can catch some bugs but miss others - and sometimes create new risks by executing code while testing it....

From fast food fiascos to botched databases, there are fresh honors for machine learning misadventures It was bound to happen. The Darwin Awards are being extended to include examples of misadventures involving overzealous applications of AI....

Report warns creaking infrastructure undermines the National Crime Agency's efficiency and effectiveness The UK's National Crime Agency (NCA) clings to legacy systems and relies on an IT strategy that lacks clarity, a policing watchdog has found....

Dev admits the game once ate an entire CPU core Former Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer has come clean and admitted that the worst bug he ever shipped was in... Pinball....

Charities welcome change, but critics warn the law is already too broad Tech companies will be legally required to prevent content involving self-harm from appearing on their platforms - rather than responding and removing it - in a planned amendment to the UK's controversial Online Safety Act....

Prepare to take tests in stuff you already know how to do, just to keep you sharp Using AI may cause some of your skills atrophy, and your employer therefore needs to take steps to keep you sharp....

Including messages sent to users, a potential problem for the privacy-conscious Encrypted messaging app Signal is rolling out a free storage system for its users, with extra space if folks are willing to pay for it....

Brace for loss of functionality' next April, and an upsell conversation before that deadline Citrix on Monday advised its customers that products acquired under its current file-based licensing system will experience loss of functionality and potential impacts on end-users" next April, and that upgrading to a new cloudy licensing scheme is the way to avoid potential problems....

Michelle Johnston Holthaus' tenure as Intel Products CEO lasted just ten months Intel's CEO of Products, Michelle Johnston Holthaus, will leave the business, as part of the latest executive shake-up since CEO Lip Bu Tan seized the company's reins....

Meta shrugs off allegations of improper dismissal, ignoring privacy and security WhatsApp's former head of security, Attaullah Baig, has filed a lawsuit against its parent company, Meta, alleging that the social media megalith retaliated against him for reporting security failings that violated legal commitments....

Why reinvent the CPU wheel when you can spend your time engineering a way out of your dependence on Nvidia? Every quarter, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is asked about the growing number of custom ASICs encroaching on his AI empire, and each time he downplays the threat, arguing that GPUs offer superior programmability in a rapidly changing environment....

'Stop this garbage already!' The latest release candidate for Linux is out, but before its release, Linus Torvalds had something he wanted to get off his chest in his usual style....

Auditors find federal cybersecurity workforce data messy, incomplete, and unreliable The US federal government employs tens of thousands of cybersecurity professionals at a cost of billions per year - or at least it thinks it does, as auditors have found the figures are incomplete and unreliable....

Meanwhile the victim count grows The Salesloft Drift breach that compromised "hundreds" of companies including Google, Palo Alto Networks, and Cloudflare, all started with miscreants gaining access to the Salesloft GitHub account in March....

Popular npm packages debug, chalk, and others hijacked in massive supply chain attack Crims have added backdoors to at least 18 npm packages after developer Josh Junon inadvertently authorized a reset of the two-factor authentication protecting his npm account....

Who needs HBM when you can juggle SRAM speed and LPDDR bulk across racks AI chip startup d-Matrix is pushing into rack scale with the introduction of its JetStream I/O cards, which are designed to allow larger models to be distributed across multiple servers or even racks while minimizing performance bottlenecks....

Plus ties to the Chinese spies who hacked Barracuda email gateways Security researchers have uncovered dozens of domains used by Chinese espionage crew Salt Typhoon to gain stealthy, long-term access to victim organizations going back as far as 2020....

Only a temporary reprieve until GitHub Copilot integration is up and running Microsoft's policy of inserting Copilot into every corner of its portfolio is on brief hiatus, at least in the first preview of SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 22....

$0.25-per-agency deal not finalized, and no FedRAMP approval either - so don't get excited Perplexity has entered the race to inject AI into the federal government with a new public sector version of its AI search engine, another AI discount, and a pledge to start enforcing new security measures for government-related use, which weren't applied by default until now....

Package queues jammed until Monday despite brief downtime When is an outage not an outage? According to Canonical's forum, it's when a 36-minute server disruption creates a multi-day backlog that leaves users unable to install or update Ubuntu systems....

Data4 to secure 40 MW of atomic juice as part of long-term low-carbon strategy The datacenter industry's unquenchable thirst for nuclear energy has seen French bit barn operator Data4 sign a 12 year supply deal with EDF....

Busy lawyers on hold for five hours as staff handhold users into deploying the security measure US courts have warned of delays as PACER, the system for accessing court documents, struggles to support users enrolling in its mandatory MFA program....

Legal, HR, Finance and Accounting moving to IBM from 2026. Engineering and others staying put... for now IBM-owned subsidiary Red Hat is docking a bunch of its back-office staff, along with the techies that support them, into the mothership....

Plus: Google clears up Gmail concerns, NSA drops SBOM bomb, Texas sues PowerSchool, and more Infosec in brief The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has said two flaws in routers made by Chinese networking biz TP-Link are under active attack and need to be fixed - but there's another flaw being exploited as well....

Fallout from latest political drama sparks a changing of the guard UK prime minister Sir Keir Starmer cleared out the officials in charge of tech and digital law in a dramatic cabinet reshuffle at the weekend....

ValueLicensing's David spins the sling for another go at the Windows Goliath Microsoft's tussle with UK-based reseller ValueLicensing over the sale of secondhand licenses returns to the UK's Competition Appeal Tribunal this week, with the Windows behemoth now claiming that selling pre-owned Office and Windows software is unlawful....

Four-year framework hands Canon and pals a license to print money The UK government has awarded 12 suppliers places on a framework deal that could see it spend up to 900 million on printers, photocopiers, and other multifunctional devices....

Have you ever seen the 'Are we the baddies' sketch, Broadcom? Opinion If you're a tech company marketing manager writing white papers, you'll love a juicy pull quote. That's where a client says something so lovely about you, you can pull it out of the main text and reprint it in a big font in the middle of the page....

You're out, forever! Who, Me? Monday mornings see the resumption of endless coopetition between IT folks and those they strive to serve but sometimes disappoint. The Register celebrates that eternal struggle with a new edition of Who, Me? It's the reader-contributed column that offers the chance to admit failures and celebrate escapes....

Expect more slush funds' of this sort, analyst tells El Reg AI upstart Anthropic has agreed to create a $1.5 billion fund it will use to compensate authors whose works it used to train its models without seeking or securing permission....

Analyst firm doesn't rate OpenAI as an enterprise-ready vendor All work in IT departments will be done with the help of AI by 2030, according to analyst firm Gartner, which thinks massive job losses won't result....

PLUS: Lenovo to sell bonkers clip-on-screen; AWS NZ rumblings; Google helps catch South Korean phish Asia In Brief Microsoft has warned that customers of its Azure cloud may experience heightened latency due to a submarine cable outage in the Red Sea....

Researchers also found that more than half of citations didn't rank in top 100 for term Welcome to the age of ouroboros. Google's AI Overviews (AIOs), which now often appear at the top of organic search results, are drawing around 10 percent of their sources from documents written by ... other AIs, according to a recent report....

Powered by plutonium, running on pure stubbornness It is almost half a century since Voyager 1 was launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida on a mission to study Jupiter, Saturn, and the atmosphere of Titan. It continues to send data back to Earth....

And maybe even dictator Brain-in-a-box-as-a-Service Opinion China's President Xi Jinping and Russia's Vladimir Putin were this week reportedly overheard chatting about the possibility that organ transplants might help them achieve immortality....

Insider builds have them now. Everyone else will have to employ other methods Hands on Writers rely on the humble em dash (-) and en dash (-) to add flavor and function to their sentences. But typing these characters, which are slightly longer than a hyphen, has been a challenge in Windows, up until now....

If an employer asks you do to this, demand a trial run so you can learn the rules of this strange new world A startup called Job Bolt has created AI avatars that conduct job interviews. The Register couldn't help but give it a try and can report that it's an unnerving experience....

California, Delaware AGs blast ChatGPT shop over chatbot safeguards The Attorneys General of California and Delaware on Friday wrote to OpenAI's board of directors, demanding that the AI company take steps to ensure its services are safe for children....