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Could it be an AI model builder? A Chinese e-tailer? Perhaps a TikTok mass migration Oracle has landed a mystery customer that will add more than $30 billion to the database giant's annual revenues, more than doubling the size of its current cloud business....

Resulting in two indictments, one arrest, and 137 laptops seized The US Department of Justice has announced a major disruption of multiple North Korean fake IT worker scams....

It could just be the new 'proficient with MS Word' ai-pocalypse For job seekers wondering which AI skills to bone up on, the answer appears to be simple based on a look at the past year of employment data: Just learn to use it....

Ask a model to guess a number from 1 to 50 and it's likely to answer 27 Asked to guess a number between 1 and 50, OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4, Google's Gemini 2.5 Flash, and Meta's Llama 4 all provided the same answer: 27....

Someday, my prince will come Google has agreed to purchase 200 megawatts of fusion energy from Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS). That's assuming, of course, the Massachusetts-based startup can actually get the miniaturized sun to make more power than it consumes, something even the Chocolate Factory admits is a bit of a "moonshot."...

Don't leave the door open to disgruntled workers A judge has sentenced a disgruntled IT worker to more than seven months in prison after he wreaked havoc on his employer's network following his suspension, according to West Yorkshire Police....

Oh, you have to divide by 100? Thousands of Norwegians mistakenly thought they'd won life-changing sums in last week's Eurojackpot after a manual coding slip at state-owned operator Norsk Tipping....

Time ticking for defenders as social engineering pros weave wider web Just a few weeks after warning about Scattered Spider's tactics shifting toward the insurance industry, the same experts now say the aviation industry is now on the ransomware crew's radar....

NASA's future Artemis booster sputters during test video Old Space has shown itself to be just as adept at explosive malfunctions as New Space, with Northrop Grumman encountering an anomaly during a static fire test of an updated solid rocket booster design....

During which he coded Lotus 1-2-3 and co-founded Mozilla and the EFF The man behind Lotus 1-2-3 and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has wrapped up a master's degree at MIT Sloan, decades after dropping out to help kickstart the PC software boom....

Court says State arm cannot be left without maintenance, patches and upgrades because of Broadcom's new licensing model Broadcom's VMware subsidiary must provide a Dutch government organization with continued software support for at least two years while it manages a migration to an alternative platform, according to a court ruling, or else face fines up to 25 million ($29 million)....

Device compromises and deep-seated access to critical infrastructure exposed surveillance vulnerabilities in agency's work A major Mexican drug cartel insider grassed on his fellow drug-peddlers back in 2018, telling the FBI that a cartel "hacker" was tracking a federal official and using their deep-rooted access to the country's critical infrastructure to kill informants....

If you didn't like 24H2, you're probably not going to like 25H2 Microsoft has confirmed that Windows 11 25H2 is almost here. However, the upgrade will be little more than an exercise in feature enablement since Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2 share the same source code....

Server shipments surge 70% in 2025, still shy of datacenter dominance goal Arm-based servers are rapidly gaining traction in the market with shipments tipped to jump 70 percent in 2025, however, this remains well short of the chip designer's ambitions to make up half of datacenter CPU sales worldwide by the end of the year....

Test run offers hope for a rail system long past its best-before date Deutsche Bahn (DB) and Siemens Mobility have managed to get an ICE test train to 405 km/h (251 mph) on the Erfurt-Leipzig/Halle high-speed line....

CISPE floats reforms to avoid new costs, fragmentation, and infrastructure flight The Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers in Europe (CISPE) trade body has put forward recommendations for the EU's Water Resilience Strategy, perhaps mindful that datacenters are perceived as hugely wasteful of precious water resources....

Like being hard to spot? They'd much rather you didn't Opinion There are few tech deceptions more successful than Chrome's Incognito Mode....

Sensible CEO wouldn't let our hero take the blame - a shoddy supervisor got the slap Who, Me? Welcome again to Who, Me? It's the Monday morning column in which readers of The Register admit to making big mistakes and somehow swerving the consequences....

Paying for successful problem resolution is a better business model, argues Dimitri Masin interview Dimitri Masin, CEO of Gradient Labs, argues that companies using AI agents for customer support should only pay when the bot does its job....

Which it will, happily, to create a networking biz that's still far smaller than Cisco's or Nvidia's The US Department of Justice (DoJ) has cleared the way for HPE's $14 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks....

Chipmaker Loongson says server CPUs on par with 2021's Ice Lake, as local press tout kit to manage 1,024-qubit systems Chinese chip designer Loongson last week announced silicon it claims is the equal of western semiconductors from 2021....

PLUS: Broadband blimps to fly in Japan; Starbucks China put ads before privacy; and more! Asia In Brief Canada's government has ordered Chinese CCTV systems vendor Hikvision to cease its local operations....

PLUS: Crooks target hardware crypto wallets; Bad flaws in Brother printers; ,O365 allows takeover-free phishing; and more Infosec in Brief Despite warnings not to pay ransomware operators, almost half of those infected by the malware send cash to the crooks who planted it, according to infosec software slinger Sophos....

More fiction than science Feature IT consultancy Gartner predicts that more than 40 percent of agentic AI projects will be cancelled by the end of 2027 due to rising costs, unclear business value, or insufficient risk controls....

Watch out for supply chain hacks especially interview The ceasefire between Iran and Israel may prevent the two countries from firing missiles at each other, but it won't carry any weight in cyberspace, according to former NATO hacker Candan Bolukbas....

'This is not a copyright message' Before plug and play was blowing up Windows 98 on a Comdex stage, Windows 95 engineers were grappling with the technology - and on one fateful day they found some unusual text in the BIOS of several PCs that they had to work around....

$61B business offers $10K-$50K grants to assess AI's job-market impact AI biz Anthropic is trying to recruit academics to find out exactly how much its technology could crater the jobs market....

Taking advantage of the ridiculously complex US healthcare billing system Criminals masquerading as insurers are tricking patients and healthcare providers into handing over medical records and bank account information via emails and text messages, according to the FBI....

Over 18? Prove it The US Supreme Court has ruled that Texas' age certification law for viewing sexually explicit content is valid, meaning that viewers of such material will have to prove their age....

When AI is a nesting doll of networks, so why reinvent the wheel when you can license it instead feature GPUs dominate the conversation when it comes to AI infrastructure. But while they're an essential piece of the puzzle, it's the interconnect fabrics that allow us to harness them to train and run multi-trillion-parameter models at scale....

'Memory vulnerabilities pose serious risks to national security and critical infrastructure,' say CISA and NSA The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the National Security Agency (NSA) this week published guidance urging software developers to adopt memory-safe programming languages....

AI will make 'significant changes' to economy, labor market It may not happen today or even tomorrow, but US Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell is confident that someday soon AI is going to seriously change the US economy and labor market....

The AI boom needs power, and startup The Nuclear Company aims to help build Palantir has become the latest tech company to jump on the nuclear power bandwagon - not by making a datacenter deal like Microsoft or Amazon, mind you, but by providing its data analytics software to a startup aiming to help build nuclear plants faster and cheaper....

Now play dead, like a lot of NASA science programs if the White House gets its way The team behind NASA's 19-year-old Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has been busy teaching an old spacecraft new tricks, persuading the vehicle to perform a 120-degree roll to peer more clearly into the red planet....

Getting it in might mean re-racking the entire datacenter and rebuilding the network, though Cisco is talking up the integration of security into network infrastructure such as its latest Catalyst switches, claiming this is vital to AI applications, and in particular the current vogue for "agentic AI."...

'No impact on safety,' FAA tells The Reg update Hawaiian Airlines said a "cybersecurity incident" affected some of its IT systems, but noted that flights are operating as scheduled. At least one researcher believes Scattered Spider, which previously targeted retailers and insurance companies, could be to blame....

No replacement in the wings for info streamed from past their prime rigs, 'termination will be permanent' Satellite data used for hurricane forecasting is to be abruptly cut off from the end of June due to "recent service changes."...

Pen Test Partners hijack data from Renault Clio to steer, brake, and accelerate in SuperTuxKart Cybersecurity nerds figured out a way to make those at-home racing simulators even more realistic by turning an actual car into a game controller....

When it was all about the baud rate The world of datacenter networking is crammed with exotic technology and capabilities beyond the imaginings of administrators charged with running big iron decades ago. However, while it might have been a slower and more proprietary time, it was also perhaps a little simpler....

Finance, health, and national identification details compromised Multinational grocery and retail megacorp Ahold Delhaize says upwards of 2.2 million people had their data compromised during its November cyberattack with personal, financial and health details among the trove....

Or so hear members of Parliament in the UK UK lawmakers have learned there is no international protocol for making decisions over how to respond to a prospective life-threatening asteroid strike on Earth....

Masked networking costs are coming to AI systems Analysis Moore's Law has run out of gas and AI workloads need massive amounts of parallel compute and high bandwidth memory right next to it - both of which have become terribly expensive. If it weren't for this situation, the beancounters of the world might be complaining about the cost of networking in the datacenter....

True digital sovereignty begins at the desktop Opinion Microsoft, tactically admitting it has failed at talking all the Windows 10 PC users into moving to Windows 11 after all, is - sort of, kind of - extending Windows 10 support for another year....

Pick a provider based on how good their local 4G and 5G coverage is The UK's telecoms regulator has released an overhauled tool comparing mobile coverage and performance across the country, claiming this will help the millions of Brits missing out on the best local network....

When police come to investigate tech support, make sure you have your story straight On Call Welcome once again to On Call, The Register's Friday column that celebrates the frolicsome fun that readers have experienced when asked to deliver tech support....

But like cloud computing and digital transformation, this may be a buzzword they can't ignore forever HPE Discover 2025 HPE envisions a future where customer systems are filled with its agentic AI products, but reactions from the HPE Discover show floor in Las Vegas this week suggest the company has a way to go to convince folks to buy in....

Brazil debuts, Japan bounces back, and tiny Tuvalu soars on Elon's broadband birds Eight more nations have passed at least 50 percent IPv6 deployment, according to the Internet Society (ISOC)....

Regulator acknowledges that won't stop video nasties, but welcomes extra friction'

Authors are having a hard time protecting their works from the maws of the LLM makers Updated Californian courts have not been kind to authors this week, with a second ruling going against an unlucky 13 who sought redress for use of their content in training AI models....

At least the BSOD acronym will still work The infamous Windows Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) will be replaced later this summer by a new black screen as part of Microsoft's Windows Resiliency Initiative (WRI)....