The Register

E7 arrives with plenty of AI and not much of a discount. Got to keep those shareholders happy Microsoft has finally confirmed that its AI-centric E7 subscription tier - where it licenses AI agent agents like employees - will debut on May 1 for an eye-watering $99 per user per month (pupm)....

An attack on the company's AWS platform may have exposed customers' names and home addresses Exclusive ELECQ, maker of smart electric vehicle (EV) chargers, is warning customers that their personal details may have been stolen in a ransomware attack that encrypted and copied user data from its cloud systems....

But questions remain over long-term commitment to clustering tech in open source After a couple of years of relative calm, the relationship between MariaDB and its open source foundation was ruffled in February, leaving observers with a few unanswered questions....

Plain-text fans rejoice as Writer gains native CommonMark import and export Markdown has been around for more than 20 years, but native support in LibreOffice might suddenly help to make it viable for more people....

Former policy boss Nick Clegg joins Cheryl Sandberg and one-time Yahoo prez Susan Decker Former British deputy prime minister Sir Nick Clegg has landed a board seat at UK-based neocloud Nscale, alongside fellow ex-Meta exec Sheryl Sandberg and former president of Yahoo Susan Decker....

Two-week deadline to fraudsters to fess up or have their faces plastered across every screen in the country Dutch national police are taking a novel stand against scammers - 100 suspects now have less than two weeks to hand themselves in or face public shaming....

Dutch spies flag large-scale campaign to hijack secure messaging accounts Russian-linked hackers are trying to break into the Signal and WhatsApp accounts of government officials, journalists, and military personnel globally - not by cracking encryption, but by simply tricking people into handing over the keys....

Vulcan rocket hardware drafted in amid Artemis reshuffle but still no word on lander NASA has selected United Launch Alliance's Centaur V upper stage for the Artemis missions that aim to return astronauts to the lunar surface for the first time since 1972....

This isn't just a nostalgia trip - billions of legacy microcontrollers may be at risk AI can reverse engineer machine code and find vulnerabilities in ancient legacy architectures, says Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich, who used his own Apple II code from 40 years ago as an example....

UK government slams comments as 'sickening and irresponsible' Elon Musk's AI chatbot Grok is once again under investigation after it began posting explicit and derogatory remarks about historic football disasters when prompted by users on X....

Atomic clocks will tell you when your Waymo is late The British government is to pour 180 million into ensuring the UK keeps up with the times....

Gargantuan ERP and HR overhaul has committed around 1.7B and affects nearly half a million public workers Opinion On the eve of its fifth birthday, the UK's Shared Services Strategy for Government got a couple of presents. With around 1.7 billion already committed to tech suppliers and a 2028 deadline looming, the 450,000 civil servants and military personnel set to depend on these systems might wonder what was in store....

Britain's Ministry of Defence wants a counter-drone system designed, contracted, and delivered within weeks Britain's Royal Navy is urgently seeking a ship-based counter-drone system and recent world events likely explain why....

Ignorance really was the way to achieve bliss Who, Me? Welcome to another working week, and another installment of "Who, Me?" - a weekly reader-contributed column that unearths your errors and reveals how you rebounded afterwards....

Tech-adjacent Dyson, Epson, and Whoop also have a crack World War Fee Tech companies have started suing the US government to seek repayment of tariffs that the Supreme Court recently declared unconstitutional....

You gotta start somewhere, and in this case astroboffins would have been nowhere without help from intrepid volunteers NASA has published new analysis of its 2022 planetary defense test that suggests the mission slowed down the target asteroids, albeit infinitesimally....

Cyber is no longer the hush-hush thing it used to be, as team Trump invades Iran with hackers taking the lead Kettle Unlike previous military conflicts, the cyber domain has been front and center since the Trump administration invaded Iran, upending the traditionally quiet role played by hackers in military conflicts....

PLUS: Indonesia joins kids social media ban; China frets about AI job impacts; India's PC market fails to launch, again; And more China's Ministry of Commerce has warned of further disruption to the global semiconductor supply chain after Dutch chipmaker Nexperia cut access to some of its systems for Chinese staff....

PLUS: Europol takes down two crime gangs; LastPass users phished (again); Crooks increase crypto hauls; And more Infosec In Brief The FBI is investigating a breach of its systems which reportedly affected systems related to wiretapping and surveillance....

Crims 'will do what gets them their objective easiest and fastest,' Microsoft threat intel boss tells The Reg interview AI agents allow cybercriminals and nation-state hackers to outsource the "janitorial-type work" needed to plan and carry out cyberattacks, according to Sherrod DeGrippo, Microsoft's GM of global threat intelligence. North Korea is taking advantage....

What hath science wrought? A clump of living human brain cells wired into a silicon chip has answered the internet's most important computing question: yes, it can run Doom....

Inference at scale is much more complex than more GPUs, more tokens, more profits feature By now you've probably heard AI datacenters called factories. It's an apt description: power goes in and tokens come out....

'There's a naive techno-utopianism in Whitehall' Brits are worried that AI will dehumanize public services, leading to less human contact and oversight as well as job losses, according to people questioned by pollster Ipsos....

Remembering the day the Venera 3 impacted Venus It is 60 years since humanity first got up close and personal with another planet, with the impact of the Soviet Union's Venera 3....

Meta supposedly considering untapped capacity in deal brokered by Nvidia OpenAI and compute partner Oracle have reportedly abandoned a planned expansion of their flagship Stargate datacenter, after negotiations were stalled by financing and Sam Altman's apparent fear of commitment....

It's the end of the world as we know it, and AI feels fine Anthropic economists Maxim Massenkoff and Peter McCrory report that AI is not eliminating as many jobs as experts have predicted....

US unemployment ticked up to 4.4% The US economy shed 92,000 jobs in February, a dramatic downturn from analyst expectations that it would add about 50,000 jobs. The shortfall stoked growing fears that AI could be contributing to higher unemployment....

Now if only device makers would deliver higher quality components Thanks to Anthropic's AI and its bug-detecting abilities, Firefox users can now enjoy stronger security. Unfortunately, if browser crashes rather than security flaws are the problem, Claude probably can't help....

Steals SMS messages, location data, contacts ... and delivers it to Hamas-linked crew Hamas-linked attackers are dropping spyware disguised as an emergency-alert app on Israelis' smartphones via SMS messages, according to security researchers....

Bad legislation, but an especially big headache for FOSS Many web sites, social media services, and other platforms require age verification on the theory that it will protect kids from seeing inappropriate content. But now some US states want to require the operating system itself to check your age and that could cause big headaches for FOSS vendors....

Switchzilla says flaws could allow file overwrites or privilege escalation Just when network admins thought the Cisco SD-WAN patch queue might finally be shrinking, Switchzilla has confirmed miscreants are exploiting more vulnerabilities in its SD-WAN management software....

Brands Trump administration decision 'legally unsound' and has 'no choice but to challenge it in court' AI giant Anthropic says that it has "no choice" but to sue the US government after being officially designated a supply chain risk to national security....

Humanity and its neighbor safe from this menace at least Scientists have ruled out the possibility that the near-Earth asteroid 2024 YR4 might hit the Moon on December 22, 2032....

Draft rules could force Nvidia and AMD to seek government approval before selling abroad The Trump administration is reportedly planning new restrictions on GPU exports, aimed not only at controlling who gets them, but at driving AI investment back into the US....

Crooks tweak familiar copy-paste ruse so that victims run malicious commands themselves A new twist on the long-running ClickFix scam is now tricking Windows users into launching Windows Terminal and pasting malware into it themselves - handing the credential-stealing Lumma infostealer the keys to their browser vault....

House of Lords committee says ministers must not trade a 124B sector for promises of future tech growth Britain's creative industries will face significant damage unless the government strengthens AI copyright law, according to a House of Lords committee....

Admins get another year before migration pressure ramps up Microsoft has delayed the opt-out phase for the new enterprise version of Outlook to 2027, giving administrators another 12 months to get ready for migration....

FBI and French GIGN swoop on Saint Martin, John Daghita in cuffs The son of a government contractor was arrested in the Caribbean after allegedly stealing more than $46 million in seized cryptocurrency from the US Marshals Service, the FBI says....

Its aim is wide, covering everything from social networks to GenAI Norway's Forbrukerradet consumer council is taking aim at the creeping enshittification of modern life in a 100-page report - and a splendid four-minute video which we highly recommend....

Released from the curse of the update bork fairy Microsoft has finally fixed a Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) bug it introduced in Windows 10's final update....

It promised 1.15B... but finance ministry yet to show 'formal commitment' to adopt Workday SaaS, watchdog says The UK's Treasury is yet to fully commit to joining a multi-billion pound ERP and HR shared services program it has agreed to fund, potentially slashing any resulting savings, according to a report from the National Audit Office....

Attackers accessed systems holding data tied to millions of Oyster and contactless users Transport for London has confirmed that a 2024 breach exposed the data of more than 7 million people - a far larger crowd than the few thousand customers originally warned that their details might be at risk....

Seven-year Freedom of Information battle heads to tribunal Exclusive The UK's Department for Transport (DfT) is assembling government lawyers to fight the Information Commissioner's decision that it must release a document summarizing the lessons from the 2018 Gatwick drone chaos....

OpenAI CEO's principles lasted about 12 hours before $200M check arrived Opinion A week ago today, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he'd draw the same lines as Anthropic. By that night, he'd signed a Department of Defense deal that included no such AI protections. What's going on here?...

Discovering, and explaining, the bizarre cause was harder than the job he was sent to do On Call Welcome to another instalment of On Call, The Register's weekly reader-contributed column that tells tales of times when tech support turned troublesome....

focusgroup' has nothing to do with market research, offers devs faster coding and faster websites for everyone Microsoft has started a preview of technology that eases the task of developing websites with complex navigation elements that don't need a pointing device to operate....

Remember: Truth is the first casualty of war Iranian publisher Fars News Agency, which is aligned with the country's government, has claimed the drone strikes on Amazon Web Services' Middle East datacenters were deliberate and had strategic significance....

Call to do better with chips and put AI everywhere is more than rhetoric because China's scientists are sprinting ahead China's government has again made reducing reliance on imported digital technology a major goal....

Alarm bells are ringing in the open source community, but commercial licensing is also at risk Earlier this week, Dan Blanchard, maintainer of a Python character encoding detection library called chardet, released a new version of the library under a new software license....

Of the 90 zero-days GTIG tracked in 2025, 43 hit enterprise tech Zero-day exploitation targeting enterprise tech products reached an all-time high last year, with China-linked cyber-espionage groups remaining the most prolific state-backed users, according to Google....