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Updated 2026-01-31 02:00
January blues return as Ivanti coughs up exploited EPMM zero-days
Consider yourselves compromised, experts warn Ivanti has patched two critical zero-day vulnerabilities in its Endpoint Manager Mobile (EPMM) product that are already being exploited, continuing a grim run of January security incidents for enterprise IT vendors....
'Hey! I’m chatting here!’ Fugazi answers doom NYC’s AI bot
Lying means dying Lying means dying, at least for one falsehood-peddling government AI. A Microsoft-powered chatbot that New York City rolled out to help business owners answer frequently asked questions - but was often wrong - has been silenced as the city grapples with a $12 billion budget shortfall....
Ex-Googler nailed for stealing AI secrets for Chinese startups
Network access from China and side hustle as AI upstart CEO aroused suspicion A former Google software engineer has been convicted of stealing AI hardware secrets from the company for the benefit of two China-based firms, one of which he founded. The second startup intended to use these secrets to market its technology to PRC-controlled organizations....
Thousands more Oregon residents learn their health data was stolen in TriZetto breach
Parent company Cognizant hit with multiple lawsuits Thousands more Oregonians will soon receive data breach letters in the continued fallout from the TriZetto data breach, in which someone hacked the insurance verification provider and gained access to its healthcare provider customers across multiple US states....
Feeling taxed by layoffs, IRS turns to AI helpers
Fewer humans, more bots - just in time for filing season Tax season 2026 could be an interesting one as the IRS seeks to replace the staff it sent to the unemployment line with AI. Bots could handle tasks ranging from reviewing an org's request for tax-exempt status to processing amended individual filings....
Backblaze says AI traffic and neoclouds could shape future networks
The western US saw the most activity overall Cloud storage firm Backblaze says that a sharp rise in AI-driven data traffic to neocloud operators may signal a shift from internet-style traffic patterns to large, high-bandwidth flows characteristic of large-scale model training and inference work....
Oracle seeks to build bridges with MySQL developers
Big Red promises 'new era' as long-frustrated contributors weigh whether to believe it Oracle is taking steps to "repair" its relationship with the MySQL community, according to sources, by moving "commercial-only" features into the database application's Community Edition and prioritizing developer needs....
Autonomous cars, drones cheerfully obey prompt injection by road sign
AI vision systems can be very literal readers Indirect prompt injection occurs when a bot takes input data and interprets it as a command. We've seen this problem numerous times when AI bots were fed prompts via web pages or PDFs they read. Now, academics have shown that self-driving cars and autonomous drones will follow illicit instructions that have been written onto road signs....
Want digital sovereignty? That'll be 1% of your GDP into AI infrastructure please
Analyst predicts massive spend on domestic AI stacks Countries intent on digital sovereignty will need to invest at least 1 percent of their entire gross domestic product (GDP) into AI infrastructure by 2029, according to analyst biz Gartner....
OpenAI gives ChatGPT models the chop – two weeks' notice, take it or leave it
GPT-4o gets second death sentence after last year's reprieve, but this time barely anyone's bothered OpenAI is sunsetting some of its ChatGPT models next month, a move it knows "will feel frustrating for some users."...
Phones down, brooms up: HashiCorp co-founder lectures business hopefuls
Stock management also important, says Mitchell Hashimoto HashiCorp co-founder Mitchell Hashimoto took to X this week to unveil the secret of workplace success: stay off your phone, sweep the floor, and clean the machines after that....
Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native
Just because you're paranoid about digital sovereignty doesn't mean they're not after you Opinion I'm an eighth-generation American, and let me tell you, I wouldn't trust my data, secrets, or services to a US company these days for love or money. Under our current government, we're simply not trustworthy....
Mechanical mutts make it official: Now full-time at Sellafield's hot zones
Spot's new cleanup gig involves gamma rays, alpha particles, and considerably less PPE than fleshy colleagues Bark!Bark!Bark! Sellafield Ltd is to use Boston Dynamics' Spot robot dogs in "routine, business-as-usual operations" amid the ongoing cleanup and decommissioning of the notorious UK nuclear site....
NS&I's IT car crash considers cutting legacy links to stop the bleeding
1.3B over budget and four years late, bank searches for a way to not to bust new timetable and funding pot A British state-owned bank is reconfiguring its modernization project, including considering reducing connections with legacy systems, as it tries to claw back schedule and budget overruns that are far beyond early plans....
In-house techies fixed faults before outsourced help even noticed they'd happened
60-minute SLA was effectively useless and the contractor admitted it On Call Welcome to another instalment of On Call, The Register's weekly reader-contributed column that shares your stories of weird and wonderful tech support jobs....
Deciphering the alphabet soup of agentic AI protocols
Tools, agents, UI, and e-commerce - of course each one needs its own set of competing protocols MCP, A2A, ACP, or UTCP? It seems like every other day, orgs add yet another AI protocol to the agentic alphabet soup, making it all the more confusing. Below, we'll share what all these abbreviations actually mean and share why they are important for the future of AI....
Java developers want container security, just not the job that comes with it
BellSoft survey finds 48% prefer prehardened images over managing vulnerabilities themselves Java developers still struggle to secure containers, with nearly half (48 percent) saying they'd rather delegate security to providers of hardened containers than worry about making their own container security decisions....
Maybe CISA should take its own advice about insider threats hmmm?
The call is coming from inside the house opinion Maybe everything is all about timing, like the time (this week) America's lead cyber-defense agency sounded the alarm on insider threats after it came to light that its senior official uploaded sensitive documents to ChatGPT....
Musk distracts from struggling car biz with fantastical promise to make 1 million humanoid robots a year
To what end? Who knows? Tesla isn't even using them in its own factories yet Elon Musk's car company is getting ready to be Skynet. Tesla, facing an 11 percent decline in automotive revenue in Q4 2025, has committed to $20 billion in capex spending this year on manufacturing and compute infrastructure. The goal: build lots of humanoid robots....
Google's Project Genie could put even more game developers out of work
A Labs prototype turns prompts into short, explorable 3D worlds Google has put the video gaming industry on notice with the rollout of Project Genie, an experimental AI world-model prototype that generates explorable 3D environments from text or image prompts....
Agents gone wild! Companies give untrustworthy bots keys to the kingdom
'We're letting thousands of interns run around in our production environment' Corporate use of AI agents in 2026 looks like the Wild West, with bots running amok and no one quite knowing what to do about it - especially when it comes to managing and securing their identities....
Dow Chemical says AI is the element behind 4,500 job cuts
The 129 year old chemical company uses Palantir-rival C3's AI as its software of choice. ai-pocalypse The jury is still out when it comes to determining how much job loss AI is causing. However, we now have another case study. Dow Chemical blames AI automation for its plans to cut 4,500 jobs, about 12.5 percent of its work force....
AI datacenter boom triples US gas power builds, filling the air with more CO2
Reduce emissions? Screw that - we have money to lose and memes to generate Fossil fuel-fired power plant development is roaring back to life in the US thanks to the AI datacenter boom, with data from 2025 suggesting we're reaching the point where the renewable energy transition - and efforts to ease carbon emissions - may well be doomed....
To stop crims, Google starts dismantling residential proxy network they use to hide
The Chocolate Factory strikes again, targeting the infrastructure attackers use to stay anonymous Crims love to make it look like their traffic is actually coming from legit homes and businesses, and they do so by using residential proxy networks. Now, Google says it has "significantly degraded" what it believes is one of the world's largest residential proxy networks....
AV vendor goes to war with security shop over update server scare
eScan lawyers up after Morphisec claimed 'critical supply-chain compromise' A spat has erupted between antivirus vendor eScan and threat intelligence outfit Morphisec over who spotted an update server incident that disrupted some eScan customers earlier this month....
Uncle Sam dangles nuclear campuses for states while watering down safety rules
Governors offered atomic megasites and federal cash as hundreds of pages of regulations go missing The Department of Energy (DOE) is inviting US states to host "Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campuses" to revitalize atomic power amid reports the agency has weakened safety rules governing the way nuclear sites operate....
Systemd daddy quits Microsoft to prove Linux can be trusted
Lennart Poettering's Amutable aims to bring 'cryptographically verifiable integrity' to the other OS Linux celeb Lennart Poettering has left Microsoft and co-founded a new company, Amutable, with Chris Kuhl and Christian Brauner....
IBM says AI is insane in the mainframe as z17 sales surge
Big Blue leaning on software smarts to modernize COBOL estates and cut costs IBM's leader has trumpeted an AI-on-the-mainframe future as generative AI fills in the COBOL gap left by earlier generations of techies....
ShinyHunters swipes right on 10M records in alleged dating app data grab
Extortion crew says it's found love in someone else's info as Match Group plays down the impact ShinyHunters has added a fresh notch to its breach belt, claiming it has pinched more than 10 million records from Match Group, a US firm that owns some of the world's most widely used swipe-based dating platforms....
Banker claims Oracle may slash up to 30,000 jobs, sell health unit to pay for AI build-out
Cerner, though acquired in 2022, is nothing to multibillion black hole Oracle could cut up to 30,000 jobs and sell health tech unit Cerner to ease its AI datacenter financing challenges, investment banker TD Cown has claimed, amid changing sentiment on Big Red's massive build-out plans....
Tesla revenue falls for first time as Musk bets big on robots and autonomy
Elon thinks taxis and androids will succeed where car sales are stalling Tesla reported 2025 revenue of $94.8 billion, down 3 percent year-on-year and marking the first annual revenue decline since the electric car maker began publishing financial results in 2010....
Patch or perish: Vulnerability exploits now dominate intrusions
Apply fixes within a few hours or face the music, say the pros What good is a fix if you don't use it? Experts are urging security teams to patch promptly as vulnerability exploits now account for the majority of intrusions, according to the latest figures....
Sat Nad declares Windows 11 has a billion users – just don't bother asking for details
Terrible start to 2026 offset by optimistic operating system numbers Microsoft is famously reticent about operating system usage figures unless it has something to boast about. So CEO Satya Nadella stating that Windows 11 had reached one billion users raised a few eyebrows....
Meta to pour the GDP of Kenya into AI infrastructure push in 2026
Zuck bets big on 'personal superintelligence' with $135B splurge Meta is to nearly double its capital investments aimed at AI this year, spending more on infrastructure than the entire output of some mid-sized economies, as the AI datacenter feeding frenzy shows no sign of ending....
Latest Vivaldi release surfs a wave of anti-AI sentiment
'What we are finding is that people hate AI' Interview Vivaldi has raised a middle finger to the influx of AI in the browser space with its latest version....
Cyberattack on Poland's power grid could have turned deadly in winter cold
Close call after an apparently deliberate attempt to starve a country of energy at the worst time Cybersecurity experts involved in the cleanup of the cyberattacks on Poland's power network say the consequences could have been lethal....
Capita pension portal 'fiasco' forces Cabinet Office into damage control
150-strong 'surge team' deployed as 8,500 retirees left high and dry, some waiting 9 months for legally owed cash The UK Cabinet Office is being forced to promise "interim support measures" for struggling retired government workers as Capita's botched takeover of the Civil Service Pension Scheme (CSPS) lurches from bad to worse....
Birmingham City Council's Oracle ERP fiasco now £144M and still not working
Five years after its planned go-live, the system remains incomplete as costs balloon more than sevenfold Birmingham City Council's SAP-to-Oracle project is set to cost 144.4 million - more than seven times earlier estimates - as it waits for a fully functioning system five years after its planned go-live date....
If you're one of the 16,000 Amazon employees getting laid off, read this
It's not your fault Opinion It's not your fault Amazon hired you for a position that it no longer deems necessary - blame bad planning or unanticipated market conditions. Everybody guesses wrong sometimes, even with the power of the most sophisticated business analysis software and the smartest prognosticators one can hire....
Irony alert: Anthropic helps UK.gov to build chatbot for job seekers
The jobs that will be eradicated by our AI overlords The UK government will work with supplier Anthropic to build an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant for job seekers, despite its chief executive's doom-laden views of the job market....
Bork ventures to the Middle of Lidl
Happier days at Intel nailed to the wall of discount retailer Bork!Bork!Bork! Lidl is a well-known purveyor of inexpensive groceries, random goods via the Middle of Lidl, and now... bork....
Microsoft investors sweat cloud giant's OpenAI exposure
All the promises in the world won't pay the GPU bills when the music stops What should have been a banner second quarter for Microsoft was met with tepid apprehension on Wall Street on Wednesday, sending its share price down by 6 percent in after-hours trading....
Google to foist Gemini pane on Chrome users in automated browsing push
The world's most popular browser has gained a dedicated sidebar for AI browsing Google has reworked its Chrome browser to include a new side panel for interacting with the company's Gemini model, in an effort to support AI-assisted interactions with websites....
ServiceNow boasts about years of sweat equity that went into making its AI agents smarter
80 billion workflows makes a difference Though some recent studies cast doubt on the ability of AI agents to complete complex tasks, ServiceNow boasts that its bots are better, because they can rely on 20 years and 80 billion workflows worth of experience. The underlying model, they say, is just a small part of the product....
Ransomware crims forced to take off-RAMP as FBI seizes forum
Cybercrime solved. The end Ransomware crims have just lost one of their best business platforms. US law enforcement has seized the notorious RAMP cybercrime forum's dark web and clearnet domains....
Claude Code's prying AIs read off-limits secret files
Developers remain unsure how to prevent access to sensitive data Don't you hate it when machines can't follow simple instructions? Anthropic's Claude Code can't take "ignore" for an answer and continues to read passwords and API keys, even when your secrets file is supposed to be blocked....
Everybody is WinRAR phishing, dropping RATs as fast as lightning
Russians, Chinese spies, run-of-the-mill crims ... Come one, come all. Everyone from Russian and Chinese government goons to financially motivated miscreants is exploiting a long-since-patched WinRAR vuln to bring you infostealers and Remote Access Trojans (RATs)....
Microsoft plans more server farms, despite water worries
Redmond has pledged to be carbon-negative by 2030 It's no secret that datacenters use a ton of water for cooling, a demand that can strain local supplies. Despite reported internal forecasts showing sharply higher water use by 2030, Microsoft continues to splash cash on new AI bit barns....
Yes, you can build an AI agent - here’s how, using LangFlow
AI automation, now as simple as point, click, drag, and drop Hands On For all the buzz surrounding them, AI agents are simply another form of automation that can perform tasks using the tools you've provided. Think of them as smart macros that make decisions and go beyond simple if/then rules to handle edge cases in input data. Fortunately, it's easy enough to code your own agents and below we'll show you how....
Fortinet unearths another critical bug as SSO accounts borked post-patch
More work for admins on the cards as they await a full dump of fixes Things aren't over yet for Fortinet customers - the security shop has disclosed yet another critical FortiCloud SSO vulnerability....
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