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Updated 2026-02-08 14:17
Containers, cloud, blockchain, AI – it's all the same old BS, says veteran Red Hatter
After decades in the trenches, this engineer is done with hype cycles Opinion The real opponent of digital sovereignty is "enterprise IT" marketing, according to one Red Hat engineer who ranted entertainingly about the repeated waves of bullshit the industry hype cycle emits....
Machine learning could yield faster, cheaper lithium-ion battery development
Researchers claim model can cut years from testing cycles Scientists have developed a machine learning method that could dramatically slash the cost and energy required to develop new lithium-ion batteries that the modern world is becoming increasingly reliant....
Whether they are building agents or folding proteins, LLMs need a friend
AI pioneer Vishal Sikka warns to never trust an LLM that runs alone interview Don't trust; verify. According to AI researcher Vishal Sikka, LLMs alone are limited by computational boundaries and will start to hallucinate when they push those boundaries. One solution? Companion bots that check their work....
Study confirms experience beats youthful enthusiasm
Research shows productivity and judgment peak decades after graduation A growing body of research continues to show that older workers are generally more productive than younger employees....
Openreach turns up the heat to force laggards off legacy copper lines
Half a million businesses face successive price hikes ahead of PTSN shutdown Openreach is warning British businesses that the old phone network shuts down in less than a year, with half a million commercial lines still unmigrated....
AI video company arouses fury by boasting about replacing creative jobs
Marketing stunt backfires with creators The first rule of AI-generated job loss is you don't talk about AI-generated job loss ... if you're the company that caused it. Higgsfield.ai, a startup offering AI video creation tools, recently generated outrage when it claimed it had caused artists to hit the unemployment line....
Let there be light! DARPA seeking physics-defying photonic computers to supercharge AI
There's about $35M up for grabs if your circuits can beat today's limits It's no lightweight matter. DARPA is putting about $35 million in total funding on the table in the hope that it will spur researchers to work around fundamental physical constraints and build much larger-scale photonic circuits that do more of the computing with light, not electronics....
Four horsemen of the AI-pocalypse line up capex bigger than Israel's GDP
Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft eye $635B in infrastructure spend Four tech megacorps intend to collectively fork out roughly $635 billion this year on capex, much of it for datacenters and AI infrastructure - more than the entire output of Israel's economy and well beyond all global cloud infrastructure services revenue generated last year....
Flickr emails users about data breach, pins it on 3rd party
Attackers may have snapped user locations and activity information, message warns Legacy image-sharing website Flickr suffered a data breach, according to customers emails seen by The Register....
DDoS deluge: Brit biz battered as botnet blitzes break records
UK leaps to sixth in global flood charts as mega-swarm unleashes 31.4 Tbps Yuletide pummeling Cloudflare says DDoS crews ended 2025 by pushing traffic floods to new extremes, while Britain made an unwelcome leap of 36 places to become the world's sixth-most targeted location....
Summoning the spirit of the BBC Micro with a Pi 500+ and a can of spray paint
Rhapsody in beige An enterprising engineer has evoked the spirit of Acorn's BBC Micro with a custom paintjob for a Raspberry Pi 500+ computer-in-a-keyboard and a natty set of replacement keycaps....
Supermarket sorry after facial recognition alert flags right criminal, wrong customer
System worked as intended, but staff then kicked out innocent bystander A British supermarket says staff will undergo further training after a store manager ejected the wrong man when facial recognition technology triggered an alert....
Microsoft starts the countdown for the end of Exchange Web Services
Windows giant might try turning it off and on again to see who notices Microsoft has laid out a timeline for the disablement and shutdown of Exchange Web Services (EWS) in Microsoft 365 and Exchange Online....
CISA orders federal agencies to rip out EOL edge kit before cybercrooks move in
A year to replace end-of-support firewalls, routers, and VPN gateways America's federal agencies have been told to hunt down and rip out aging firewalls, routers, and other network gatekeepers before attackers use them as skeleton keys into government systems....
Romanian rail workers accused of bribery turned to ChatGPT for legal tips
Corruption probe takes detour as staff facing trial reportedly asked AI if seat-blocking scams caused financial damage More than 30 Romanian railway employees accused of running a bribery and ticket resale racket allegedly tried to crowdsource their legal strategy from ChatGPT....
Smartphones cleared for launch as NASA loosens the rulebook
Crew-12 and Artemis II astros may soon snap, shoot, and share from orbit NASA's Administrator has stated that smartphones will accompany the Crew-12 and Artemis II astronauts on their missions....
DWP considers chatbot work coaches as AI-fueled job losses loom
Benefits system trials automation amid growing interest in universal basic income AI-pocalypse Britain's welfare system is experimenting with AI to manage Universal Credit claimants - even as evidence piles up that artificial intelligence may soon be pushing more people onto benefits in the first place....
UK council digs deeper into capital assets to keep Oracle project afloat
West Sussex plans to triple use of property sales as ERP budget blows past original estimates In a budget-busting leap from SAP to Oracle, West Sussex County Council is trebling its raid on capital assets such as buildings to fund its "transformational" ERP project....
Summer in Australia means beers, beaches, and bork
Supermarket printer error gets holiday off to a shabby start BORK!BORK!BORK! When this vulture excuses himself from The Register's Australian eyrie for a little rest and recreation, I first avoid pyromaniac birds and carnivorous koalas, before settling into a bucolic beach town to catch a few waves, read a few books, and tune out from the world of tech....
New hire fixed a problem so fast, their boss left to become a yoga instructor
Poking around in deep menus found a fault that flummoxed old hands On Call Change is a constant - and so is On Call, the reader-contributed column The Register runs every Friday to share your tech support tales....
Pakistan to test students for real-world skills before they graduate from IT degrees
Government decides theoretical knowledge vs. experience debate is worth settling Pakistan's Higher Education Commission (HEC) has introduced a competency test for students who take degrees in IT, to assess whether they emerge with skills employers will find useful....
Atlassian swears it can handle AI without blowing out costs, or being swamped
CEO feels under-appreciated amid year-long value slump Atlassian has assured investors it can add AI to its services without blowing out its costs or shrinking margins....
Amazon can't build AI capacity fast enough, throws another $200B at the problem
'As fast as we install this AI capacity, we are monetizing it,' says Amazon CEO Andy Jassy AWS has an open cash spigot for AI infrastructure, with Amazon CEO Andy Jassy telling investors the company has been monetizing compute capacity as fast as it brings it online and it plans to double capacity by the end of 2027....
Ad blocking is alive and well, despite Chrome's attempts to make it harder
The end isn't nigh after all Chrome's latest revision of its browser extension architecture, known as Manifest v3 (MV3), was widely expected to make content blocking and privacy extensions less effective than its predecessor, Manifest v2 (MV2)....
OpenClaw reveals meaty personal information after simple cracks
Skills marketplace is full of stuff - like API keys and credit card numbers - that crims will find tasty Another day, another vulnerability (or two, or 200) in the security nightmare that is OpenClaw....
OpenAI chases business bucks with confusingly named Frontier platform
IPO, we're halfway there: AI, livin' on a prayer OpenAI, a maker of frontier models, has announced a platform called Frontier to help enterprises implement software agents. That's not confusing at all....
Substack says intruder lifted emails, phone numbers in months-old breach
Contact details were accessed in an intrusion that went undetected for months, the blogging outfit says Newsletter platform Substack has admitted that an intruder swiped user contact details months before the company noticed, forcing it to warn writers and readers that their email addresses and other account metadata were accessed without permission....
Asia-based government spies quietly broke into critical networks across 37 countries
And their toolkit includes a new, Linux kernel rootkit A state-aligned cyber group in Asia compromised government and critical infrastructure organizations across 37 countries in an ongoing espionage campaign, according to security researchers....
Stash or splash? Lawmakers ask NASA to find alternatives for International Space Station
What about storing it in high orbit? US lawmakers have asked NASA to look into storing the International Space Station (ISS) in a higher orbit at the end of its operational life, instead of sending the structure hurtling into the ocean when the time comes....
Anthropic apes OpenAI with cheeky chatbot commercials
The Claude maker wants you to know about ChatGPT's ad plans AI companies are looking for new ways of burning cash other than by handing it to hyperscalers for model training. So now they're setting money on fire by buying Super Bowl ads that mock rivals....
SpaceX wants to fill Earth orbit with a million datacenter satellites
The FCC is taking public comments - now's your chance to tell them this plan is bonkers Elon Musk's pie-in-the-sky plan to launch a massive orbital datacenter satellite constellation has taken a rapid step closer to reality with the Federal Communications Commission advancing SpaceX's application for public comment, technical feasibility be damned....
Most SAP migrations bust budgets and project timelines, research finds
As 2027 ECC support cliff looms, half choose not to re-engineer processes in critical ERP upgrade Nearly 60 percent of SAP migration projects are delayed and over budget as organizations underestimate complexity, allow expansion of scope, and fail to understand internal constraints, according to research from ISG....
Betterment breach may expose 1.4M users after social engineering attack
Breach-tracking site flags dataset following impersonation-based intrusion Breach-tracking site Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) claims a cyberattack on Betterment affected roughly 1.4 million users - although the investment company has yet to publicly confirm how many customers were affected by January's intrusion....
Microsoft declares 'reliability' a priority for Visual Studio AI
Perhaps a little less focus on AI would help as well? Microsoft says "reliability is the priority" for AI in Visual Studio - a reassurance that may raise eyebrows among developers already living with Copilot's quirks....
UK's 'world-first' deepfake detection framework unlikely to stop the fakes, says expert
Home Office enlists Microsoft to set industry standards as AI-generated forgeries surge from 500K to 8M in two years The UK government claims it will develop a "world-first" framework to evaluate deepfake detection technologies as AI-generated content proliferates....
Microsoft sets Copilot agents loose on your OneDrive files
AI helpers can now rummage through multiple documents Microsoft has made OneDrive agents generally available, allowing users to query multiple documents simultaneously through Copilot instead of just one at a time....
Curse of AI to push up PC prices as memory and CPU shortages bite
Component supply is being diverted toward datacenters, squeezing the consumer market PC buyers can expect price hikes as chipmakers continue to prioritize AI production over all else, restricting the supply of key components across the tech industry....
Italy claims cyberattacks 'of Russian origin' are pelting Winter Olympics
Right on cue, petulant hacktivists attempt to disrupt yet another global sporting event Italy's foreign minister says the country has already started swatting away cyberattacks from Russia targeting the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics....
n8n security woes roll on as new critical flaws bypass December fix
Patch meant to close a severe expression bug fails to stop attackers with workflow access Multiple newly disclosed bugs in the popular workflow automation tool n8n could allow attackers to hijack servers, steal credentials, and quietly disrupt AI-driven business processes....
CentOS is coming to RISC-V soon if you have the kit
The RHELatives are more versatile than you might realize FOSDEM 2026 CentOS Connect 2026 took place in Brussels last week, over the two days preceding the sprawling FOSDEM festival of FOSS - the nerd world's Glastonbury, complete with the queues and the questionable hygiene....
Cloud sovereignty is no longer just a public sector concern
Businesses still chase the cheapest option, but politics and licensing shocks are changing priorities, says OpenNebula Interview Sovereignty remains a hot topic in the tech industry, but interpretations of what it actually means - and how much it matters - vary widely between organizations and sectors. While public bodies are often driven by regulation and national policy, the private sector tends to take a more pragmatic, cost-focused view....
UK justice system unplugs from ancient datacenters after five-year slog
37 court applications shifted off failing kit, though some are camping in a temporary hosting facility The courts system in England and Wales has moved 37 applications out of two outdated datacenters, although some will use a temporary hosting facility until they are replaced, according to the senior civil servant responsible....
Britain courts private cash to fund 'golden age' of nuclear-powered AI
Framework aims to lure investors into powering the compute boom The British government today launched the Advanced Nuclear Framework to attract private investment in next-generation nuclear technology for factories and datacenters....
Three clues that your LLM may be poisoned with a sleeper-agent back door
It's a threat straight out of sci-fi, and fiendishly hard to detect Sleeper agent-style backdoors in AI large language models pose a straight-out-of-sci-fi security threat....
Satya Nadella decides Microsoft needs an engineering quality czar
Picks chap who used to lead Redmond's security, lures replacement from Google Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has decided Microsoft needs an engineering quality czar, and shifted Charlie Bell, the company's executive veep for security, into the new role....
AI’s lust for memory drags down the smartphone industry, and Qualcomm with it
On the upside, House of the Snapdragon has started shipping its own AI silicon Qualcomm has warned that soaring memory prices will mean the smartphone industry will slow, news that so spooked investors they sent the company's share price sliding by 11 percent....
It's bubble or nothing for Google as search giant looks to plow ~$180B into datacenters this year
With revenue topping $400B for the first time, the Chocolate Factory is at no risk of putting itself in the poor house Google's parent Alphabet is doubling down on generative AI in 2026. On Wednesday's earnings call, the search and advertising giant boosted its full-year capital expenditures target to between $175 and $185 billion, roughly twice what it spent last year....
Ghost gun legislation casts shadow over 3D printing
Proposed bills in New York and elsewhere threaten makers, Adafruit says State and federal lawmakers have stepped up their efforts to prevent the creation of 3D printed guns. But Adafruit, a maker of electronics kits, warns that the proposed legislation is so broad it threatens everyone involved in open source manufacturing and technology education....
Workday reveals around 400 staff soon won't have to work another day
Job cuts to fall hardest on non-revenue generating roles on the Global Customer Operations team Workday is laying off about two percent of its staff in a bid to align its people with its highest priorities," but at a significant cost to its margins for the quarter and the year, the company announced on Wednesday....
Bots are taking over the internet and AI users are to blame
RAG bots could overtake human visitors on publisher sites this year, trackers tell us The AI bot takeover of the internet continues apace, and the latest data suggests the surge is being driven less by model-training scrapes and more by the growing use of AI tools as a stand-in for web search....
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