The Register

Gotta pay for those datacenter buildouts somehow OpenAI's budget ChatGPT Go subscription tier has migrated to the US, soon to be accompanied by advertising. The company's free tier will be similarly afflicted....

It just needs PJM Interconnection, one of the US's biggest grid operators, to green light the auction The Trump administration says it wants big tech companies to take more accountability for the power their datacenters consume in an effort to shield voters from higher power bills at home....

Does that kind of time saving actually pay for itself? Researchers at Dakota State University, in partnership with regional insurance carrier Safety Insurance, devised an experimental chatbot called "Axlerod" to assist independent insurance agents. Whether that assistance was substantial is up for some debate....

Chipmaker claims the four-fab site could expand US-based DRAM production by a factor of 12 Micron broke snowy winter ground in New York on Friday to begin building a chip fab that promises to bring up to 50,000 jobs and much-needed computer memory production to US shores, as the AI boom continues to push memory prices up....

Microsoft claims it's a Secure Launch bug We're not saying Copilot has become sentient and decided it doesn't want to lose consciousness. But if it did, it would create Microsoft's January Patch Tuesday update, which has made it so that some PCs flat-out refuse to shut down or hibernate, no matter how many times you try....

First sign-in restore aims to cut rebuilds when users skip setup options Microsoft has quietly tweaked Windows Backup for Organizations to include restore at first sign-in....

Newer kernel, newer Cinnamon, new tools, and even new icons The timing is right if you're looking to try out Mint. New improved "Zena" is here - still based on Ubuntu Noble, but now with Cinnamon 6.6 and improved Wayland support, plus better internationalization, new System Information and System Administration tools, and clearer icons....

Ransomware kingpin who escaped Armenian custody is believed to be lying low back home German cops have added Russian national Oleg Evgenievich Nefekov to their list of most-wanted criminals for his services to ransomware....

That went well Imagine changing your popular brand to capitalize on an emerging tech trend that never emerged. Mark Zuckerberg did just that, and now Meta is backing away from the virtual reality business in which it invested billions....

Analyst: We'll hit a spot where 'we go from that was a great idea to where's my revenue?' Software vendors and cloud providers are bearing the burden of the expected trillion-dollar increase in AI spending this year, as investment hits $2.52 trillion, according to Gartner....

Gold phone more like fool's gold as none show up six months later Senator Elizabeth Warren is leading calls for the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Trump Mobile for failing to ship gold phones, months after collecting deposits....

Check Point observes 40K+ attack attempts in 4 hours, with government organizations under fire A critical HPE OneView flaw is now being exploited at scale, with Check Point tying mass, automated attacks to the RondoDox botnet....

Agency dodges deep cut and mass mission shutdowns, but ambitious red planet plan gets the boot US Congress has rejected plans to slash NASA's science budget, restoring most funding with one notable exception: Mars Sample Return remains cancelled....

Much of the damage done well before first power-on, in bit barns' childhood, says study Constructing datacenters accounts for 39 percent of their total carbon dioxide emissions, almost as much as operating them, according to an environmental analysis covering the entire lifecycle of a facility....

Owner reverse-engineered his ride, revealing authentication was never properly individualized An Estonian e-scooter owner locked out of his own ride after the manufacturer went bust did what any determined engineer might do. He reverse-engineered it, and claims he ended up discovering the master key that unlocks every scooter the company ever sold....

For trivial projects, it's fine. For serious work, forget about it Opinion Vibe coding got a big boost when everyone's favorite open source programmer, Linux's Linus Torvalds, said he'd been using Google's Antigravity LLM on his toy program AudioNoise, which he uses to create "random digital audio effects" using his "random guitar pedal board design."...

Researcher shows how anyone can access Copenhagen experience attendees' names, videos Exclusive The Carlsberg exhibition in Copenhagen offers a bunch of fun activities, like blending your own beer, and the Danish brewer lets you relive those memories by making images available to download after the tour is over....

You can't park there, mate An enterprising engineer has turned an old parking meter into a jukebox using a Pi Zero 2 and some open source code....

How not to maintain computers On Call Welcome again to On Call, The Register's Friday column in which we take great delight in telling your tech support stories - mostly the ones involving bizarre behavior and heroic fixes....

Microsoft promises to be a responsible copilot The Wikimedia Foundation, the org behind Wikipedia and other open knowledge platforms, has revealed it's signed six more AI companies as enterprise partners', status that gives them preferential access to the content it tends....

2nm process will go large this year, and bring inevitable price rises Taiwanese chipmaking giant TSMC has posted huge growth, says more is on the way as the AI boom is not abating, but also pointed to the inevitability of price rises for its output....

Merge Labs envisions controlling devices using your brain - without implanting hardware in your body OpenAI, having invested heavily in artificial intelligence, is placing a side bet on organic intelligence....

This is a threat to security - and to the weekend for some unlucky netadmins Cisco finally delivered a fix for a maximum-severity bug in AsyncOS that has been under attack for at least a month....

You might call it a RISC-V/NVLink Fusion ... or a bad day for UALink RISC-V champion SiFive has joined a growing number of chip companies by throwing its weight behind Nvidia's proprietary NVLink Fusion interconnect tech, a move that casts doubt on the viability of rival interconnect tech UALink....

The answer seems to be educating the enterprise workforce, and creating smarter use cases More than half of AI projects have been delayed or canceled within the last two years citing complexities with AI infrastructure, according to a research report commissioned by DDN, a data optimization company in partnership with Google Cloud and Cognizant....

What's next for Venezuela? Click on the file and see What policy wonk wouldn't want to click on an attachment promising to unveil US plans for Venezuela? Chinese cyberspies used just such a lure to target US government agencies and policy-related organizations in a phishing campaign that began just days after an American military operation captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro....

Fix landed in July, but OEM firmware updates are required If you use virtual machines, there's reason to feel less-than-Zen about AMD's CPUs. Computer scientists affiliated with the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security in Germany have found a vulnerability in AMD CPUs that exposes secrets in its secure virtualization environment....

Investors upset that company failed to inform them might need to take out even more debt. Datacenters don't come cheap. Oracle debt bond holders are suing the tech giant, because they say that the company didn't tell them it would need to borrow even more money after its original sale, making their purchases less valuable....

Office workers without AI experience warned to watch for prompt injection attacks - good luck with that Anthropic's tendency to wave off prompt-injection risks is rearing its head in the company's new Cowork productivity AI, which suffers from a Files API exfiltration attack chain first disclosed last October and acknowledged but not fixed by Anthropic....

SRAM-heavy compute architecture promises real-time agents, extended reasoning capabilities to bolster Altman's valuation OpenAI says it will deploy 750 megawatts worth of Nvidia competitor Cerebras' dinner-plate sized accelerators through 2028 to bolster its inference services....

The chatbot's challenges no longer just Elon Musk's problem, as campaigners call on tech giants to step in The ongoing Grok fiasco has claimed two more unwilling participants, as campaigners demand Apple and Google boot X and its AI sidekick out of their app stores, because of the Elon Musk-owned AI's tendency to produce illicit images of real people....

And it's 'not unique to AWS,' researcher tells The Reg A critical misconfiguration in AWS's CodeBuild service allowed complete takeover of the cloud provider's own GitHub repositories and put every AWS environment in the world at risk, according to Wiz security researchers....

When margins are this tight, mergers might follow The memory shortage is forecast to push smartphone prices higher in 2026, triggering a market decline and forcing budget phone makers to merge or disappear....

January patch trips up Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365 authentication Microsoft has kicked off 2026 with another faulty Windows update. This time, it is connection and authentication failures in Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365 related to the Windows App....

Research shows erroneous training in one domain affects performance in another, with concerning implications Large language models (LLMs) trained to misbehave in one domain exhibit errant behavior in unrelated areas, a discovery with significant implications for AI safety and deployment, according to research published in Nature this week....

Smart Driver pitched as safety app, but feds claim it's a data-harvesting scheme that jacked up premiums The Federal Trade Commission has banned General Motors and subsidiary OnStar from sharing drivers' precise location and behavior data with consumer reporting agencies for five years under a 20-year consent order finalized January 14....

Suspect assisting West Midlands Police over alleged theft at Walsall GP practice The UK's West Midlands Police has released a woman on bail as part of an investigation into a data breach at a Walsall general practitioner's (GP) surgery....

Transparently runs 16, 32, and 64-bit Windows apps, but still doesn't use the Microsoft store. The latest version of the Wine Windows app runner arrives a year after version 10. Given its annual release cycle, its magic is starting to seem almost boring and routine, but it's far from it....

40 TOPS of inference grunt, 8 GB onboard memory, and the nagging question: who exactly needs this? Raspberry Pi has launched the AI HAT+ 2 with 8 GB of onboard RAM and the Hailo-10H neural network accelerator aimed at local AI computing....

Redmond says cheap virtual desktops powered a global wave of phishing and fraud Microsoft has taken its cybercrime fight to the UK in its first major civil action outside the US, moving to shut down RedVDS, a virtual desktop service used to power phishing and fraud at global scale....

Cold milk poured over 'spicy mode,' but it might not be enough to escape a huge fine Ofcom is continuing with its investigation into X, despite the social media platform saying it will block Grok from digitally undressing people....

ValueLicensing case rumbles on as Windows giant appeals against copyright judgment Microsoft's From Software Assurance (SA) program is the subject of a disclosure application as the long-running spat between Microsoft and ValueLicensing over the resale of software licenses rumbles on....

EU-only ops, German subsidiaries, and a pinky promise your data won't end up in Uncle Sam's hands Amid continued trade and geopolitical volatility between Europe and the US, Amazon Web Services is making its European Sovereign Cloud generally available today and plans to expand so-called Dedicated Local Zones....

Retail giant's disty, reseller, and vendor all say they can't and won't sell Exclusive Dell has filed a claim against VMware in the software licensing dispute brought by supermarket giant Tesco and wants the virtualization giant should fork over at least 10 million under certain circumstances....

Hasn't revealed how much kit did the job, so Nvidia can probably rest easy Chinese outfit Zhipu AI claims it trained a new model entirely using Huawei hardware, and that it's the first company to build an advanced model entirely on Chinese hardware....

Forrester principal analyst JP Gownder says jobs eaten by bots don't come back Interview Analyst firm Forrester's vice president and principal analyst J. P. Gownder remains unconvinced that AI will revolutionize productivity....

Adafruit claims SparkFun aims to shoot the messenger for criticizing corporate tolerance of intolerance Retailer SparkFun Electronics last month said it would no longer do business with electronics kit-maker Adafruit Industries, citing violations of SparkFun's Code of Conduct during online interactions....

Investors didn't present a valid claim, says judge, but they're welcome to try again A group of CrowdStrike shareholders who sued the company over losses sustained following its 2024 global outage will have to head back to the drawing board if they hope to recoup losses, as a Texas judge has deemed they failed to adequately state a claim....

But private data will stay private and won't be used for training, Google says Google on Wednesday began inviting Gemini users to let its chatbot read their Gmail, Photos, Search history, and YouTube data in exchange for possibly more personalized responses....

Cloud-native, 37 plugins ... an attacker's dream A brand-new Linux malware named VoidLink targets victims' cloud infrastructure with more than 30 plugins that allow attackers to perform a range of illicit activities, from silent reconnaissance and credential theft to lateral movement and container abuse....