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The first one's always free - or at least deeply discounted for the first year Not wanting to miss the opportunity to grow its federal footprint, ServiceNow has signed a deal to offer the US government discounts on its latest AI innovations....

World's largest foundry operator joins Samsung and SK Hynix, which recently lost their validated end-user status The Trump administration terminated the world's largest foundry operator's validated end-user (VEU) status this week in an apparent bid to push Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) out of China....

AI-powered ransomware, extortion chatbots, vibe hacking ... just wait until agents replace affiliates It's no secret that AI tools make it easier for cybercriminals to steal sensitive data and then extort victim organizations. But two recent developments illustrate exactly how much LLMs lower the bar for ransomware and other financially motivated cybercrime - and provide a glimpse to defenders about what's on the horizon....

Now you've gone and done it: Privacy lawyer says he's working on challenge to 2023 Data Protection Framework The European Union General Court (EGC) has rejected a challenge to the US-EU Data Privacy Framework (DPF) allowing data to continue flowing across the pond, but the challenges are unlikely to stop there....

From cloud IDEs to autonomous assistants, company says future is agentic Gitpod, best known for cloud-hosted dev environments, has rebranded as Ona and is now pitching itself as an AI agent platform....

New Alabama HQ to be named the Donald J. Trump Space Command Center, says local Senator The US President, Donald Trump, has announced his intention to relocate the US Space Command headquarters from its current location in Colorado to Huntsville, Alabama....

Engineers wrangle 55 TB restore and traffic replay as millions of messages queue up A RAID failure has taken the Matrix.org homeserver offline, leaving users of the decentralized messaging service unable to send or receive messages while engineers attempt a 55 TB database restore....

The beatings will continue until usage improves Techie hiring service Andela says it has trained 200 software developers in the nuances of GitHub Copilot as part of a multi-year effort to bridge the alleged AI talent gap....

But it's OK to use it for docs and translations The latest status report from the FreeBSD Project says no thanks to code generated by LLM-based assistants....

Claude maker hits $183B valuation as bubble fears grow Opinion Anthropic has just pocketed another $13 billion, pushing its valuation to a staggering $183 billion - fresh proof that investors still can't kick their AI habit....

Six years in the making, but some features do not work yet, and has the tool been overtaken by AI? JetBrains has updated ReSharper, its .NET plugin for Visual Studio, with an out-of-process design that achieves a 61 percent reduction in UI freezes, the company claims. However, the new mode has reduced functionality....

Board calls move a mutual decision but offers no details on what went wrong The GNOME Foundation is once again hunting for a new boss after executive director Steven Deobald departed less than four months into the role, a move the board described as mutual....

Warnings of internal skills shortages fail to quell appetite for hand-holding The UK Home Office has upped its planned spending on external data and tech consultants by 100 million to a maximum of 350 million....

Goes after Computacenter too, seeks 100 million damages UK supermarket giant Tesco has sued Broadcom for breach of contracts pertaining to its VMware licenses, named Computacenter as a co-defendant, and warned it may not be able to put food on the shelves if the situation goes pear-shaped....

Universities are being used to proxy offensive government operations, turning research access decisions political' Censys Inc, vendor of the popular Censys internet-mapping tool, has revealed that state-based actors are trying to abuse its services by hiding behind academic researchers....

It's been to space. It likely won't launch India as a semiconductor superpower India's government yesterday celebrated an important milestone" in the development of its semiconductor industry, and therefore the nation's ambition to become a global contender, but the celebrations seem premature because the chip that was the star of the show is nothing special....

Ad giant won't be broken up, forced to offload Chrome or Android, thanks to AI Champagne will be flowing at Google HQ after US District Judge Amit Mehta decided to do very little to rein in the monopolistic web giant....

Show of hands: who WASN'T targeted? The list of victims keeps growing, as yet another company -Cloudflare - today disclosed that some of its customers' data was also compromised in the Salesloft Drift breach....

Enough governments love it and it's highly lucrative Governments can't get enough of hacking services to use against their citizens, despite their protestations that elements of the trade need sanctioning....

Privacy advocates don't care if Paragon is based in the US now - they still don't want ICE armed with spyware ICE may soon have a new weapon in its arsenal. The White House has reversed a Biden-era decision to suspend the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)'s purchase of software from commercial spyware maker Paragon Solutions....

A host of plugins also make it a better business tool Mistral AI can now remember personal details about you and use them to offer better prompts. It also has new MCP connectors that businesses can deploy to connect their users to third-party tech services....

Joins Google, Palo Alto Networks in the ever-growing supply chain compromise Zscaler is the latest company to disclose some of its customers' data was exposed in the recent spate of Salesloft Drift attacks affecting Salesforce databases....

Free Copilot for any agency who actually wants it Microsoft, the latest tech firm to agree to big software discounts for the US government, is digging even deeper into its bargain bin than the competition by offering a year of free Copilot access to government agencies willing to put up with its other problem products....

Benioff boasts bots now handle half of customer chats as doubts over reliability linger Speaking ahead of Labor Day - celebrated in the US to recognize the nation's labor movement - Salesforce CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff said the company had slashed 4,000 customer support roles through the application of AI agents....

Software glitch means glass may clamp down harder than intended Tesla vehicles sold in Australia have been recalled over a window that could "close with excessive force" on a body part of an unwary driver....

Security firm's Salesforce instance accessed using credentials stolen from Salesloft's Drift platform breach Palo Alto Networks is writing to customers that may have had commercially sensitive data exposed after criminals used stolen OAuth credentials lifted from the Salesloft Drift break-in to gain entry to its Salesforce instance....

XR, XS, and XS Max owners left with $268M worth of scrap The pending release of Apple's iOS 26 could see around 75 million iPhones rendered obsolete, generating more than 1.2 million kilograms of e-waste globally, according to new research....

Preview build drops as end-of-support deadline looms for predecessor Microsoft has made Windows 11 25H2 available to Windows Insiders in the Release Preview channel, as market share figures show the company's flagship operating system continues to enjoy a lead over its doomed predecessor, Windows 10....

'Leading provider of AI-powered digital transformation' plays buzzword bingo as 'seasoned leaders' climb on board A publication less kind than The Reg might couch Atos's latest leadership intake as the recruitment of more expensive execs coming armed with buckets to bail water from a sinking vessel....

Investment bank predicts capacity surge to 92 GW by 2027 but remains on high alert for market weakness Datacenter capacity is forecast to surge 50 percent by 2027 driven by AI demand, with the sector's energy consumption doubling by 2030, according to the latest research from Goldman Sachs. But the financial services biz says it's watching for signs that AI adoption may fall short of current hype....

Brit limb books just 188M in revenue - down 85% since 2019 Huawei's business in Britain has dwindled in the half-decade since the UK acquiesced to demands from the US to ban the Chinese networking giant from local telco networks....

Major flaws uncovered in Copeland controllers: Patch now Ten vulnerabilities in Copeland controllers, which are found in thousands of devices used by the world's largest supermarket chains and cold storage companies, could have allowed miscreants to manipulate temperatures and spoil food and medicine, leading to massive supply-chain disruptions....

As government says 9B could end up in Redmond, poll says it's time for new thinking Register debate series Register readers are backing a shift away from Microsoft software as a default across the UK public sector after the government confirmed it expects to spend 9 billion with the software giant over five years....

Bloc working on anti-jamming measures and plans extra sat to help A plane carrying European Commission (EC) president Ursula von der Leyen to Bulgaria was forced to resort to manual navigation techniques after GPS jamming that authorities have pinned on Russia....

Cisco finds hundreds of Ollama servers open to unauthorized access, creating various nasty risks Cisco's Talos security research team has found over 1,100 Ollama servers exposed to the public internet, where miscreants can use them to do nasty things....

eBPF, shared SmartNICs, and smart scheduling have improved reliability and cut costs Chinese web giant Alibaba has reduced network outages by 92 percent, cut load balancing costs by 18.9 percent, and found ways to improve SmartNIC performance by offloading workloads to idle infrastructure....

Taylor Otwell says skip the clever code, keep it simple Taylor Otwell, inventor and maintainer of popular PHP framework Laravel, is warning against overly complex code and the risks of bypassing the framework....

Could dramatically reduce latency between datacenters and on mobile nets A team of networking boffins has published fresh research on hollow fiber cables that it claims could offer the lowest ever recorded optical loss for a fiber - meaning the signal would weaken less as it travels, leading to faster speeds and lower latencies....

Executive order adds space agency to National Security Exclusions, voiding collective bargaining rights for staff Happy Labor Day. The US administration has removed union recognition from NASA as budget cuts and layoffs loom....

Cloud customers left reeling as forecasts leap hundreds of percent Some Microsoft Azure customers have had a worrying few days after a problematic account migration caused forecast costs for the cloud service to skyrocket, triggering budget alerts....

Oracle billionaire funds project to predict immunity and develop treatments for hard-to-prevent diseases A research group funded by tech billionaire Larry Ellison is set to invest 118 million ($169.6 million) in applying AI to vaccine research with the UK's Oxford University....

BAE's sub hunter production line warms up - shame it's not for Britain Norway has ordered British-made Type 26 frigates in a contract valued at roughly 10 billion to the UK economy, but this may delay the introduction of the Royal Navy's own desperately needed ships....

Don't worry, there's a twist at the end Opinion Agatha Christie stuck a dagger in the notion that crime doesn't pay. With sales of between two and four billion books - fittingly, the exact number is a mystery - she built a career out of murder that out-bloodied Jack the Ripper. It's a fair bet that had she chosen to write about accountancy fraud instead, her sales would be between two and four billion fewer. Some crime is sexy. Some is not....

Trust and believe - AI models trained to see 'legal' doc as super legit Researchers at security firm Pangea have discovered yet another way to trivially trick large language models (LLMs) into ignoring their guardrails. Stick your adversarial instructions somewhere in a legal document to give them an air of unearned legitimacy - a trick familiar to lawyers the world over....

Superfast electrons traced back to the Sun The European Space Agency's (ESA) Solar Orbiter probe has pinpointed the source of electrons expelled by the Sun, with implications for forecasting space weather....

At last, enough hours in the day to RTFM Who, Me? No two mistakes are the same, but The Register thinks they're all worth celebrating each Monday when we serve up a fresh edition of Who, Me? - the reader-contributed column in which we share your most magnificent messes, and your means of making it out alive....

Sites at yourcountry.gov may also not bother with HTTPs Internet traffic to government domains often flows across borders, relies on a worryingly small number of network connections, or does not require encryption, according to new research....

PLUS: Spain cancels Huawei deal; Sony wants to use only recycled gold; Video of Alibaba's uncanny FOSS digital humans; and more Asia In Brief China's State Council last week announced a new IT policy called AI +", the successor to 2015's Internet +"....

PLUS: Microsoft ends no-MFA Azure access; WorkDay attack diverts payments; FreePBX warns of CVSS 10 flaw; and more Infosec In brief A flaw in Meta's WhatsApp app may have been exploited in a sophisticated attack against specific targeted users."...

"Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship" About 1,000 of a set of 15,000 open access scientific journals appear to exist mainly to extract fees from naive academics....