The Register

Everyone gets unlimited 400 Kbps access, oldies get expanded caps, and leaky telcos get their social license back Universal basic income is an idea that hasn't gained much traction, but South Korea on Thursday implemented a universal basic mobile data access scheme....

Just in time to get buyers thinking as physical PC prices rise Microsoft has told its channel partners to get ready for a 20 percent price cut for Windows 365 cloud PCs, effective May 1st....

Urge restraints before AdLand does this without appropriate disclosures Large language models can be very persuasive, and researchers say that's a problem when they're used to create advertising....

Want to run your business on autopilot? For better or worse, Managed Agents might help with that If you need AI agents to do a lot of ongoing tasks for your business, Anthropic has a new answer for you. The Claude maker has introduced Managed Agents, a service to help organizations create and deploy cloud-hosted knowledge work automations....

Custom ASIC biz now running at a $1B annual pace for Intel Google will continue to work with Intel, buying SmartNICs for its public cloud rather than blazing its own trail as AWS has done with its Nitro NICs....

Cops bust latest scam, return $12m to bilked victims US, UK, and Canadian law enforcement Thursday said that they disrupted a $45 million global cryptocurrency scam, freezing $12 million in stolen funds and identifying more than 20,000 cryptocurrency wallet addresses linked to fraud victims across 30 countries....

C-suite forced to take sandwiches into work, cycle home It's going to be hard holding back our tears. The C-suite lieutenants at Amazon didn't exactly get the bumper payday that many El Reg readers would expect, particularly compared with prior years....

Your agent will be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, and numbered AI agents should not be secret agents, at least in corporate environments. But when companies deploy software automations, they don't always have visibility into what their roboscripts are actually doing....

Possible link to Mr. Raccoon's claimed Adobe break-in A new extortion crew has targeted several dozen high-value" corporations through phishing and helpdesk social-engineering, according to Google....

FTC lawsuit lingers, while encouraging signs point to Iowa bill succeeding too Agriculture manufacturing giant John Deere has agreed to a proposed $99 million settlement following a class action lawsuit in Illinois....

ACM salutes Databricks co-founder Matei Zaharia with $250K prize The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has awarded its annual Prize in Computing to Matei Zaharia for his work developing open source data and analytics software, including the widely used Apache Spark analytics engine....

Arm support is on the agenda, too, because AI is going to run on everything Exclusive Nutanix plans to support KubeVirt to allow its customers to run both containers and VMs on the edge....

UK and US customers stuck waiting after fleet management SaaS vendor took affected environments offline A cybersecurity incident has knocked FleetWave into a "major outage" across the UK and US after Chevin Fleet Solutions pulled parts of its SaaS platform offline and left customers scrambling for answers....

Sam Altman's datacenter dreams hit a wall of watts and wonkery, cooling Britain's AI ambitions OpenAI is pausing its planned Stargate datacenter project in the UK just months after announcing it, citing the regulatory environment and cost of energy as reasons for putting it on hold....

Malicious PDFs abuse legit features to harvest system data and decide which victims get a 2nd-stage payload Hackers have been quietly exploiting what appears to be a zero-day in Adobe Acrobat Reader for months, using booby-trapped PDFs to profile targets and decide who's worth fully compromising....

No emails, no warnings, no humans - just bots, catch-22s, and a 60-day appeals queue Microsoft says that it will work on how it communicates with developers after two leading open source figures were suddenly locked out of their accounts, leaving them unable to sign updates....

Memory costs were already through the roof - now freight's spiking too, and budget systems face extinction America's war with Iran is jacking up the pressure on computing markets already struggling with memory shortages and component cost inflation, meaning buyers should brace themselves for even higher prices this year....

Wash your mouth out with digital soap Apple Intelligence, the personal AI system integrated into newer Macs, iPhones, and other iThings, can be hijacked using prompt injection, forcing the model into producing an attacker-controlled result and putting millions of users at risk, researchers have shown....

Departure may accelerate further AI-centric moves for programming tools Julia Liuson, president of Microsoft's developer division (DevDiv), will resign at the end of June, though she will continue in an advisory role....

The core product is solid and priced fairly I've spent over a decade telling anyone who'd listen that S3 is not a filesystem, which in retrospect was a really weird way to start some conversations. So when AWS launched S3 Files on Tuesday - which lets you mount an S3 bucket as an NFS share - I did what any reasonable person would do: I spun up an EC2 instance and started trying to break it....

Attackers slipped into the process and redirected funds, leaving the company scrambling to recover the cash UK-listed oil and gas outfit Zephyr Energy plc has admitted a cyber incident siphoned off roughly 700,000 after a single payment to a contractor was quietly redirected to an attacker-controlled account....

DSIT hiring directors general with packages reaching 260K plus pension The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) is recruiting three directors general to lead aspects of the UK government's digital work, all on pay in excess of the prime minister's salary....

As if the backlog, the bugs, and the chatbot fixes weren't enough Capita has limited the online functionality of its Civil Service Pensions Scheme (CSPS) member portal after confirming an "issue" briefly exposed the personal data of public sector workers....

Home Office hopes tech will help cops target hotspots as ministers push to halve offenses The British government is spending 15 million over the next three years to improve crime mapping in England and Wales, partly to allow more targeted policing of knife crime....

Court of Appeal hearing in ValueLicensing dispute may shape parallel proceedings The Microsoft and ValueLicensing legal tussle will enter an appeals phase this month, attracting the attention of a multibillion-pound class action against the Windows giant....

Even fitness equipment is vulnerable to mischief makers these days PWNED Welcome back to Pwned, the column where we share war stories from IT soldiers who shot themselves - or watched someone else shoot themselves - in the foot. Today's tale shows that even when you're setting up something as simple as fitness gear, there's no excuse for leaving security credentials lying around....

The time is maybe Quantum computing exists in a sort of superposition with regard to cryptography - it's both a pending threat and a technology of no immediate consequence for decryption....

You were the chosen one! It was said that you would destroy the proprietary models, not join them! Nearly two years after extolling the virtues of open source AI, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is singing a different tune....

South Korea's biggest theme park is also riding the VM migration roller coaster Western Union has commenced a migration from VMware to Nutanix after deciding it didn't want to do business with Broadcom....

Helps employees present data in Confluence in various ways Atlassian is modernizing Confluence for the AI era, testing tools and agentic capabilities that give users the chance to turn their written notes into graphics and their ideas into software applications....

If they don't know what they're doing, you might never get your data back interview It's the biggest threat today, but it took her a while to appreciate it. After spending two decades at the FBI and much of that time working to intercept and stop cyber threats from the likes of China and Russia, Halcyon Ransomware Research Center SVP Cynthia Kaiser says she was a "latercomer to really wanting to focus on ransomware."...

Drawback: it's radioactive Forget recharging or swapping out disposable AAs every day. What if you could power energy-hungry devices for months or even years at a time from a single, reasonably-sized battery? A Washington state-based fusion energy startup is helping to make that dream a reality for DARPA, which wants higher-power radioactive batteries for space....

Kubernetes luminary Kelsey Hightower thinks IT pros need to get smart about thriving in a world that's trying to hide deep tech As businesses drink the agentic AI Kool-Aid and go looking for productivity enhancements, IT professionals can deliver by rebranding their existing automations as zero-token architecture," according to Kelsey Hightower, a former Google distinguished engineer and a notable early promoter of Kubernetes....

China-bound Hopper accelerators are also likely to ship in smaller volumes than previously forecast, industry watchers say Nvidia's next-gen Rubin GPUs may end up shipping later and in smaller volumes than anticipated due to supply chain challenges, TrendForce warned on Wednesday....

BAE says trials could offer cheaper way to counter uncrewed aerial threats BAE Systems has successfully tested a laser-guided rocket system with a Typhoon fighter jet from Britain's Royal Air Force (RAF) as a potential anti-drone weapon. It follows earlier trials in the US with the F-15E Strike Eagle....

Sample testing found incorrect payments and delays after college system adopted new HR platform A Workday-based HR platform rollout at Minnesota State universities and colleges likely left more than a thousand faculty and staff with payroll errors....

MATHBAC program wants better machine-to-machine chatter for scientific discovery To supercharge agents' ability to make scientific discoveries, DARPA is looking to improve cross-bot collaboration by developing a "science of AI communication" that will help the models work together to come up with better ideas....

Tangled tale nears end as Redmond classifies it as a tool, not a library Microsoft has set an end-of-support date of April 7, 2027, for ASP.NET Core 2.3, the only supported version on .NET Framework, even though .NET Framework (and the original ASP.NET) will continue to be supported....

Board-led inquiry follows indictment of two employees and a contractor over alleged diversion of Nvidia GPU servers Supermicro has launched an independent investigation after three people associated with the company were charged with violating US export restrictions on China....

To 'minimize disruption,' Bezoscorp offers a 20% discount on new hardware you didn't want Updated Amazon is rewarding long-time Kindle users by ditching support for aging devices, though it is trying to "minimize disruption" for existing customers by dangling a 20 percent discount for new models along with an eBook credit....

Fresh and healthy, just like Windows 11 isn't Bork!Bork!Bork! You might say this bork was bread to fail, but at least it involves a version of Windows that most people actually like....

ChipSoft's website remains down but emails are functioning A Dutch healthcare software vendor has been knocked offline following a ransomware attack, officials say....

Market watcher says money is pouring into British atomic and fusion startups amid massive energy demand Investors are backing nuclear power as a solution to fuel the UK's datacenter buildout, according to researchers tracking investment activity....

Supplier will support the current Oracle E-Business Suite and lead migration to a new Oracle Fusion SaaS platform The UK's largest police force has awarded DXC Technology a contract worth up to 1 billion to develop and run a host of business process outsourcing services - including building a new Oracle ERP system....

Two practice web addresses appear to have been compromised Multiple domains belonging to Scottish healthcare providers have been hijacked and are now pushing links to adult content and illegal sports streams, according to a researcher....

Martin Gillow's 3D recreation lets users explore would-be Enigma successor's mechanics and enciphering logic online An enthusiast has built a digital 3D model of the SG-41 cipher machine, replete with wheels, levers, and stepping logic, accessible via a browser....

Agents will look for info elsewhere unless official sources sharpen up The UK's hopes of fueling cutting-edge AI development and applications with a National Data Library (NDL) could be dashed unless it makes datasets easier to use....

President Brad Smith tells an interviewer that Microsoft is reconsidering datacenter design in light of Iran war Microsoft is reevaluating how it designs and builds datacenters in conflict-prone regions after Iran began targeting Middle Eastern bit barns in retaliation for US military operations....

Opting out of personal data use won't be an option because Minister says that's a 'very big obstacle' to AI adoption Japan's Minister for Digital Transformation Hisashi Matsumoto has declared the nation will become the easiest place in the world to develop AI apps, thanks to legal changes that mean organizations won't need to secure consent to use some personal information....

Hasn't released it to the public, because it would break the internet - in a bad way For years, the infosec community's biggest existential worry has been quantum computers blowing away all classical encryption and revealing the world's secrets. Now they have a new Big Bad: an AI model that can generate zero-day vulnerabilities....