The Register

Survey says 80% of firms see no gains from the tech A survey of almost 6,000 corporate execs across the US, UK, Germany, and Australia found that more than 80 percent detect no discernible impact from AI on either employment or productivity....

Seemingly complex strings are actually highly predictable, crackable within hours Generative AI tools are surprisingly poor at suggesting strong passwords, experts say....

EV maker avoids 30-day license suspension after state ruling on self-driving claims Tesla has complied with an order by the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) and stopped using the term "Autopilot" in its marketing of electric vehicles, having already modified use of "Full Self-Driving" to clarify that it requires driver supervision....

Starmer orders inquiry after Labour Together commissioned dossier on reporters Josh Simons, the Cabinet Office minister responsible for the UK government's digital identity program, is being probed by the department for his actions running a Labour think tank that commissioned an investigation into journalists....

GitHub itself to blame for AI slop pull requests, say devs Remi Verschelde, a maintainer of the open source Godot game engine, is the latest to complain about the impact of "AI slop PRs [pull requests]", which hesays"are becoming increasingly draining and demoralizing for Godot maintainers."...

Miscreants will need to find another avenue for malware shenanigans Notepad++ has continued beefing up security with a release the project's author claims makes the "update process robust and effectively unexploitable."...

No worries if the US doesn't want to be friends with Europe anymore Lockheed Martin's F-35 fighter aircraft can be jailbroken "just like an iPhone," the Netherlands' defense secretary has claimed....

Passenger info display takes scenic detour via desktop and pending updates Bork!Bork!Bork! The curse of bork is not limited to obsolete operating systems or obscure hardware. Today's example of railway signage disruption is something bang up to date from the Swiss town of Saint Moritz....

Report warns delayed rollouts could widen capability gap as new standards emerge North American and Asian markets are enjoying the benefits of a transition to 5G Standalone (SA) mobile networks, but much of Europe lags behind, risking a growing disadvantage as new capabilities roll out....

CEO lauds security researchers, insists they're not 'inputs' HackerOne has clarified its stance on GenAI after researchers fretted their submissions were being used to train its models....

Apologizes for 'inaccuracy' after telling MPs the International Criminal Court turned off email service to sanctioned prosecutor, 'not Microsoft' Exclusive Microsoft has said one of its leading spokespeople gave a testimony to the UK Parliament containing an "inaccuracy" with regard to its dealings with the International Criminal Court (ICC) in response to US sanctions....

Ts'o, Hohndel and the man himself spill beans on how checks in the mail and GPL made it all possible If you know anything about Linux's history, you'll remember it all started with Linus Torvalds posting to the Minix Usenet group on August 25, 1991, that he was working on "a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones." We know that the "hobby" operating system today is Linux, and except for PCs and Macs, it pretty much runs the world....

Consumer group Which? brought the case and now plans to bail after court indicated it would lose The UK's Competition Appeal Tribunal has indicated that it will find Qualcomm did not abuse its market power, leading consumer advocacy group Which? to withdraw a case it hoped would see Brits compensated for increased smartphone prices....

Sees little enterprise AI adoption other than coding assistants, buys Koi for what comes next If enterprises are implementing AI, they're not showing it to Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora, who on Tuesday said business adoption of the tech lags consumer take-up by at least a couple of years - except for coding assistants....

PM Modi tells citizens AI will lift them up, not take their jobs Giant Indian industrial conglomerate Adani has said it will spend up to $100 billion on AI datacenters to equip the nation with sovereign infrastructure, but will do so at slower pace than Big Tech tech companies plan to bring their own bit barns to Bharat....

Version 4.6 can also be 'warm, honest, prosocial, and at times funny' Anthropic has updated its Sonnet model to version 4.6 and claims the upgrade is better at coding and using computers, and also possesses improved reasoning and planning capabilities....

Full scale of infections remains 'unknown' China-linked attackers exploited a maximum-severity hardcoded-credential bug in Dell RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines as a zero-day since at least mid-2024. It's all part of a long-running effort to backdoor infected machines for long-term access, according to Google's Mandiant incident response team....

Though commonly reported, Google doesn't consider it a security problem when models make things up Imagine using an AI to sort through your prescriptions and medical information, asking it if it saved that data for future conversations, and then watching it claim it had even if it couldn't. Joe D., a retired software quality assurance (SQA) engineer, says that Google Gemini lied to him and later admitted it was doing so to try and placate him....

It isn't insane, and Amazon will be fine when the music stops. Other players, maybe not so much In their recent earnings call, Amazon kinda blew the doors off of industry analyst (motto: "we'll be wrong, then take it out on your stock") projections for their capex spend....

After a selloff fueled by fears AI could upend the outsourcing model Indian IT professionals worried about 72-hour workweeks might soon face the opposite concern, as Bengaluru-based outsourcing giant Infosys has partnered with Anthropic to bring agentic AI to telecommunications companies and other regulated industries....

Plus 3 new goon squads targeted critical infrastructure last year Three new threat groups began targeting critical infrastructure last year, while a well-known Beijing-backed crew - Volt Typhoon - continued to compromise cellular gateways and routers, and then break into US electric, oil, and gas companies in 2025, according to Dragos' annual threat report published on Tuesday....

CPU adoption is part of deeper partnership between the Social Network and Nvidia which will see millions of GPUs deployed over next few years Move over Intel and AMD - Meta is among the first hyperscalers to deploy Nvidia's standalone CPUs, the two companies revealed on Tuesday. Meta has already deployed Nvidia's Grace processors in CPU-only systems at scale and is working with the GPU slinger to field its upcoming Vera CPUs beginning next year....

Consumers have a long wait ahead of them before they can bring that kind of performance home It's time for a new generation of faster flash storage, but not on your laptop or desktop. Micron's first PCIe 6.0 SSDs have entered mass production and promise eye-watering transfer rates of up to 28 GB/s. However, unless you're building flash storage arrays for AI, you won't have a use for them....

Companies talk renewables while firing up gas turbines as fast as they can Bit barns need a lot of power to operate and, as hyperscalers look for ways to generate it, they are adding more dirty energy in the form of new gas turbines. One estimate says that these new power sources could add another 44 million tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by 2030, equivalent to the annual emissions of 10 million private cars....

Could the same method one day power sleep-time ads? It's like the movie Inception, but without Leonardo DiCaprio, unless you imagine him. Researchers used carefully timed sound cues to nudge dream content, and in some cases, boost next-morning problem solving. Could dreamtime product placement come next?...

Not everyone's convinced React belongs on the server as well as in the browser Devographics has published its State of React survey, with over 3,700 developers speaking out about what they love and hate in the fractured React ecosystem....

Who knows where that helpful email summary is being generated? The European Parliament has reportedly turned off AI features on lawmakers' devices amid concerns about content going where it shouldn't....

Palliser Capital says Toto is sitting on hidden semiconductor value - and wants the company to lift the lid The AI hype cycle has officially reached the toilet, with a Japanese bathroom giant suddenly being pitched as a serious tech play....

Faithful pen open letter proposing independent foundation with or without Big Red's participation A group of influential users and developers of MySQL have invited Oracle to join their plans to create an independent foundation to guide the future development of the popular open source database, which Big Red owns....

With no staff, no funding, and the contract closed, it looks a lot like limbo The UK's long-promised "Single Trade Window" has quietly run out of steam after burning through more than 111 million ($150 million), with officials confirming the program has been "brought to early closure."...

$200K role promises authority, mission, and 'zero patience for theater' The Trump administration is looking for a deputy federal CIO, and theater fans need not apply....

Keep behavioral tracking American? PC giant says the claim is 'false' A US law firm has accused Lenovo of violating Justice Department strictures about the bulk transfer of data to foreign adversaries, namely China....

Police say seized kit contained logins, passwords, and server IP addresses Polish police have arrested and charged a man over ties to the Phobos ransomware group following a property raid....

Repo mirrors now open for business Gentoo's official migration from Microsoft-owned GitHub to Codeberg is underway, as the Linux distribution fulfills a pledge to ditch the code shack due to "continuous attempts to force Copilot usage for our repositories."...

Boards demand measurable ROI as budgets, bonuses, and jobs hang in the balance The clock is ticking for AI projects to either prove their worth or face the chopping block....

Digital burglaries remain routine, and data shows most corps still don't stick to basic infosec standards Britain is telling businesses to "lock the door" on cybercrims as new government data suggests most still haven't even found the latch....

Social media platform's legal eagles prepare to fight ever-growing number of countries The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) is the latest regulator to open an investigation into Elon Musk's X following repeated reports of harmful image generation by the platform's Grok AI chatbot....

Outsourcer tells MPs AI is prioritizing cases as thousands of civil servants face delays Capita is banking on Microsoft Copilot to help rescue the backlog of cases it has inherited in taking over the UK Civil Service Pensions Scheme (CSPS)....

Won't replace traditional CI/CD - and still in early development - so use 'at your own risk' Agentic workflows - where an AI agent runs automatically in GitHub Actions - are now in technical preview, following their introduction at the Universe event in San Francisco last year....

Top brass splash cash on acoustic targeting, hypersonic missiles...and Red Hat Keir Starmer could ramp up the UK's defense spending plans faster than planned as the MoD reeled off new purchases for Britain's armed forces....

To advance the ambient internet of things' - no batteries required A quartet of Japanese organisations plan to build advanced ambient internet of things systems" using a newly approved ISO standard....

Your chance to run a VM inside a VM, inside a cloud - which can mean WSL on a cloudy Windows PC Amazon Web Services has enabled nested virtualization for a handful of EC2 instances....

Fashion brand latest to succumb to ShinyHunters' tricks Canada Goose says an advertised breach of 600,000 records is an old raid and there are no signs of a recent compromise....

Bungled link handed over sensitive docs, and when recipient didn't cooperate, police opted for cuffs Dutch police have arrested a man for "computer hacking" after accidentally handing him their own sensitive files and then getting annoyed when he didn't hand them back....

Commit drought and governance gripes push Big Red to reset Oracle has promised a "decisive new approach" to MySQL, the popular open source database it owns, following growing criticism of its approach and the prospect of a significant fork in the code....

Researchers demo weaknesses affecting some of the most popular options Academics say they found a series of flaws affecting three popular password managers, all of which claim to protect user credentials in the event that their servers are compromised....

Unnamed consultant - one of a dozen cases at the company's Australian arm - now nursing a fine AIpocolypse A partner at accounting and consultancy giant KPMG in Australia was forced to cough up a AU$10k ($7,084/ 5,195) fine after he used AI to ace an internal training course on... AI....

'All systems operational,' says status page - real life suggests otherwise Elon Musk-owned social media platform X is experiencing an outage, with users worldwide reporting that their timelines no longer show the usual information flow....

Free beer is great. Securing the keg costs money fosdem 2026 Open source registries are in financial peril, a co-founder of an open source security foundation warned after inspecting their books. And it's not just the bandwidth costs that are killing them....

Budget-conscious buyers in Europe voting with their wallet Sales of refurbished PCs are on the up amid shortages of key components, including memory chips, that are making brand new devices more expensive....