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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....

Researcher finds VoLTE metadata could be used to locate users within 100 meters UK telco Virgin Media O2 has fixed an issue with its 4G Calling feature that allowed users' general location to be discerned by those who called them....

Because nobody wants a random and unverified bot tickling their APIs To unify the proliferating set of would-be standards to govern AI agents, researchers have proposed yet another standard....

Urges world leaders to pay attention because he's already building factories in which GenAI is acing scutwork Computex Foxconn chair Young Liu has predicted the combination of generative AI and robotics will destroy low-end manufacturing jobs and called on world leaders to recognize inevitable geopolitical shifts that will follow....

Fine-print is vague and broad, could easily be abused to blunt protected speech President Donald Trump officially signed Monday the TAKE IT DOWN Act, a bill to criminalize revenge porn - both real and AI-generated. But internet rights groups have repeatedly warned the law is overly broad and vague, and could be used to order the takedown of protected speech....

Brain drain, budget cuts, constant cyberthreats - who wouldn't want this job? The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has a new No. 2: Madhu Gottumukkala, stepping in as the nation's lead civilian cyber agency faces budget cuts, a brain drain, and the never-ending task of defending critical infrastructure....

Police took Big Easy attitude to the rules, says WaPo Since early 2023, facial recognition cameras run by a private nonprofit have scanned New Orleans visitors and residents and quietly alerted police, sidestepping oversight and potentially violating city law, according to a new report....

Never mind the chatbot's recent erratic behavior Microsoft has added xAI's Grok 3 family to its Azure AI Foundry platform, seemingly unfazed by the firm's rivalry with Microsoft investee OpenAI or the chatbot's recent descent into conspiracy territory....

Proving yet again that crims are bad at search hygiene An Alabama man who SIM-swapped his way into the SEC's official X account, enabling a fake ETF announcement that briefly pumped Bitcoin, has been sentenced to 14 months in prison and three years of supervised release....

A fair dinkum disaster Australia's first homegrown rocket launch has been delayed after the vehicle's fairing unexpectedly deployed on the launchpad....

DownDetector reported problems for about 6 hours Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) experienced an outage in Europe earlier today, according to users and online metrics....

800-watt demo breaks distance record for optical energy transmission Wireless power transmission is moving from lab curiosity toward real-world utility, at least if the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's latest test is any indication....

Wants to be the 'HR department for agents' Computex Nvidia has delivered a server design that includes x86 processors and eight GPUs connected by a dedicated switch to run agentic AI alongside mainstream enterprise workloads....

Time to stand on its own two webbed feet? Microsoft has open-sourced the Windows Subsystem for Linux, years after the platform's debut....

Agent mode arrives, for better or worse Build Microsoft's GitHub Copilot can now act as a coding agent, capable of implementing tasks or addressing posted issues within the code hosting site....

Large-scale disinfo campaigns could use this in machines that adapt 'to individual targets.' Are we having fun yet? Fresh research is indicating that in online debates, LLMs are much more effective than humans at using personal information about their opponents, with potentially alarming consequences for mass disinformation campaigns....

Another distro for Windows users - presumably ones who love bling LastOS is a tricked-out version of Linux Mint 22.1 with the Cinnamon desktop and some additional tools to make life easier for Windows folks....

Researchers and TSMC to benefit from expanded infrastructure Computex Against a backdrop of continuing tensions between the US and China, with Taiwan typically stuck in the middle, Nvidia is touting two AI supercomputers for the country....

Veteran OS might be almost out of support, but there's still time for Microsoft to break it As Microsoft's Build developer shindig begins, many users are once again facing a familiar problem: broken Windows....

Cybercriminals lifted info including addresses, ID numbers, and financial records from agency systems A "significant amount of personal data" belonging to legal aid applicants dating back to 2010 in the UK was stolen by cybercriminals, the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) confirmed today....

Highest recorded jump in skills gap for more than a decade, recruiter finds The number of UK tech leaders reporting a dearth in AI skills has more than doubled in the last year, according to research....

Enormous org has been hit by ransomware again and again, on multiple fronts, over the past year Top cybersecurity officials within the UK government and the National Health Service (NHS) are asking CEOs of tech suppliers to pledge their allegiance to sound security by signing a public charter....

CEO Cristiano Amon teases plans for high-speed-low-power inferencing products Computex Qualcomm is preparing products for the datacenter....

Yard of Eden just doesn't have the right ring to it Who, Me? Translating one's life from the wonders of the weekend to the madness of a Monday is never easy, but The Register tries to ease the change by delivering a new installment of Who, Me? It's our reader-contributed column in which you admit to making messes and share your escape routes....

One of the two just needs to be made by Nv Computex Nvidia has opened the NVLink interconnect tech used to stitch its rack-scale compute platforms together to the broader ecosystem with the introduction of NVLink Fusion at Computex this week....

PLUS: Euro-cops take down investment scammers; Fancy Bear returns to Ukraine; and more Infosec In Brief The Alabama state government is investigating an unspecified "cybersecurity event" that it said has affected some state systems, but didn't involve the theft of citizen's personal info....

PLUS: South Korea signs for massive supercomputer; HCL gets into chipmaking; US tariffs slow APAC tech buying; and more Asia In Brief Chinese company Guoxing Aerospace last launched a dozen satellites, each packing a 744 TOPS of computing power, in the first step towards creating an orbiting constellation of 2,800 such satellites....

Plus, Co-op tells The Reg: 'we took early and decisive action' to block the crooks INTERVIEW The call came into the help desk at a large US retailer. An employee had been locked out of their corporate accounts....

It'll even help you develop technical skills Systems Approach From 2014 to 2020 I had a title of CTO at VMware, first for the networking business and then for the Asia Pacific region as a Field CTO....