The Register

Esra'a Al Shafei spoke with The Reg about the spy tech 'global trade' interview Digital rights activist Esra'a Al Shafei found FinFisher spyware on her device more than a decade ago. Now she's made it her mission to surveil the companies providing surveillanceware, their customers, and their funders....

At one point, Microsoft's QC was legendary. Now, it's the wrong kind of legend OPINION I have a habit of ironically referring to Microsoft's various self-induced whoopsies as examples of the company's "legendary approach to quality control." While the robustness of Windows NT in decades past might qualify as "legendary", anybody who has had to use the company's wares in recent years might quibble with the word "quality."...

The Zuck better hope his finance bros have deep pockets and a whole lotta patience to pull this off Meta on Friday floated plans to invest $600 billion in US infrastructure and jobs by 2028 as part of a massive datacenter expansion....

All three acquitted a teen in a mock trial based on a case where a judge ruled guilty Law students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Law last month held a mock trial to see how AI models administer justice....

'Precision espionage campaign' began months before the flaw was fixed A previously unknown Android spyware family called LANDFALL exploited a zero-day in Samsung Galaxy devices for nearly a year, installing surveillance code capable of recording calls, tracking locations, and harvesting photos and logs before Samsung finally patched it in April....

Study finds many tests don't measure the right things AI companies regularly tout their models' performance on benchmark tests as a sign of technological and intellectual superiority. But those results, widely used in marketing, may not be meaningful....

Xi and Trump haven't gotten to discuss the chips, though they were supposed to Nvidia's latest generation of Blackwell accelerators won't be available in China anytime soon, according to CEO Jensen Huang, who said there were no "active discussions" about selling the coveted chips to the Middle Kingdom....

It might have the first-ever version of UNIX written in C A tape-based piece of unique Unix history may have been lying quietly in storage at the University of Utah for 50+ years. The question is whether researchers will be able to take this piece of middle-aged media and rewind it back to the 1970s to get the data off....

Netherlands court still overseeing governance at the chipmaker Tensions between China and the Netherlands over the state of chipmaker Nexperia have begun to ease, but the battle for company control doesn't appear to be entirely resolved yet....

Even with more info, web giant says agent can't be trusted to keep you healthy, wealthy, and wise Google's Gemini Deep Research tool can now reach deep into Gmail, Drive, and Chat to obtain data that might be useful for answering research questions....

Multi-year wait for destruction comes to an end for mystery attackers Security experts have helped remove malicious NuGet packages planted in 2023 that were designed to destroy systems years in advance, with some payloads not due to hit until the latter part of this decade....

MIT researchers offer cure for illegible software A pair of MIT researchers have detailed a proposed new model for software that would help both humans and AI code generators alike create better and more transparent applications. No more vibing!...

Behold the one trillion dollar man Tesla is awarding its CEO Elon Musk a package worth a possible $1 trillion, however, it relies in part on a dramatic increase in the value of the electric vehicle manufacturer....

Respecting users choices and offering a hardcore mode among key suggestions. Retired Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer has waded into the argument over where Microsoft has gone wrong with Windows, suggesting that perhaps the OS needs a hardcore mode to offset some of its fluffier edges....

All good things come to an end, and the outpost is unlikely to reach 30 Anyone turning 25 this week has never known a time when humans weren't living in space. The same might not be true when they're 30....

Under shadow of US CLOUD Act, Redmond releases raft of services to calm customers in the EU Microsoft is again banging the data sovereignty drum in Europe, months after admitting in a French court it couldn't guarantee that data will not be transmitted to the US government when it is legally required to do so....

This kind of material economic impact from online crooks thought to be a UK-first The Bank of England (BoE) has cited the cyberattack on Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) as one of the reasons for the country's slower-than-expected GDP growth in its latest rates decision....

Treasury found 1.6 billion for extra tech investment expecting 15 percent efficiency saving. So far HMRC has underwhelmed The UK's tax collector is yet to reach the levels of efficiency its investment in digital services has led auditors to expect, according to a new report....

Lost packets would be cleaned out of routers, dead gopher servers would be pulled out of holes ... On Call Welcome to another instalment of On Call, The Register's Friday reader-contributed column that celebrates the fine art of tech support....

We're months away from AI building AI Taiwanese contract manufacturer Foxconn has confirmed it will use humanoid robots to make Nvidia servers in America....

Grab tried to virtualize macOS, but Apple doesn't make that easy Singaporean super-app company Grab has dumped 200 cloudy Mac Minis and replaced them with physical machines, a move it expects will save $2.4 million over three years....

Redmond's new AI boss is willing to sacrifice performance for the future of our species Microsoft has joined the ranks of tech giants chasing superintelligent artificial intelligence, but the company's AI chief Mustafa Suleyman's vision is markedly different from that articulated by other industry leaders...

Move fast - miscreants compromised a domain controller in 17 hours Gootloader JavaScript malware, commonly used to deliver ransomware, is back in action after a period of reduced activity....

Chocolate Factory's homegrown silicon boasts Blackwell-level perf at massive scale Look out, Jensen! With its TPUs, Google has shown time and time again that it's not the size of your accelerators that matters but how efficiently you can scale them in production....

Money-losing biz says it does not need help to meet massive infrastructure commitments updated After this story was published, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman took a turn at damage control, following remarks from CFO Sarah Friar suggesting that the company was seeking federal loan guarantees - lanugage she later walked back....

Plus 2 new critical vulns - patch now Cisco warned customers about another wave of attacks against its firewalls, which have been battered by intruders for at least six months. It also patched two critical bugs in its Unified Contact Center Express (UCCX) software that aren't under active exploitation - yet....

Government agencies would also have to report losses due to automation. ai-pocalypse A bipartisan pair of US Senators has introduced a bill that would require companies and government agencies to report AI-related layoffs, and it couldn't come at a better time. October jobs data suggests AI is driving the largest wave of layoffs headed into the end of the year that we've seen since 2003....

Rockstar says it fired staff for leaks, but the IWGB accuses the GTA maker of union-busting Rockstar Games denies claims that it fired several employees over their union activity, insisting that it sacked the team members for leaking confidential information....

Counterfeiter failed to conjure a credible claim, appeals court rules A convicted identity thief has lost his appeal against Uncle Sam after claiming federal agents destroyed a seized hard drive containing cryptocurrency worth more than $345 million....

Amazon's spat with Perplexity shows that technology is not the only blocker for the agentic era Opinion The agentic era remains a fantasy world. Software agents, the notional next frontier for generative AI services, cannot escape the gravity of their contradictions, legal ambiguities, and competitive pressures. Not everyone, especially not competing businesses, wants a bot representing the customer....

Sustainable vision? Who knows Lenovo says that traditional datacenters are not fit for purpose, and must evolve to future-proof businesses across EMEA. This is based on research, but the PC and server biz has come up with some wacky possible designs, including one that is almost literally in the clouds....

It's not a bug, it's a feeling Vibe coding has broken free of tech circles to claim Collins Dictionary's Word of the Year 2025 - a choice that may prompt developers to ask: what could possibly go wrong?...

Shopping bots pick first option and are 'vulnerable to manipulation', Magentic Marketplace trial finds Ready to have your agent talk to my agent and arrange a sale? Microsoft has published a simulated marketplace to put AI agents through their paces and answer a question for the new age: Would you trust AI with your credit card?...

Most of you still can't do better than 123456? 123456. admin. password. For years, the IT world has been reminding users not to rely on such predictable passwords. And yet here we are with another study finding that those sorts of quickly-guessable, universally-held-to-be-bad passwords are still the most popular ones....

Intune is where the party's at, even if admins might prefer the Configuration Manager kitchen Microsoft has officially confirmed that Configuration Manager will transition to an annual release cadence, with Intune as the primary focus for innovation....

Spies, not crooks, were behind digital heist - damage stopped at the backups, says US cybersec biz SonicWall has blamed an unnamed, state-sponsored collective for the September break-in that saw cybercriminals rifle through a cache of firewall configuration backups....

Three hyperscale sheds to double capacity near Heathrow Colt Data Centre Services has secured approval to invest 2.5 billion ($3.3 billion) in three hyperscale data centers at its Hayes Digital Park campus in west London....

Stolen creds let miscreants waltz into 17K employees' chats, spilling info on staff and partners Japanese media behemoth Nikkei has admitted to a data breach after miscreants slipped into its internal Slack workspace, exposing the personal details of more than 17,000 employees and business partners....

Science loses when lab workers grapple with costs and availability, claim researchers Cloud vendors' commercial models poorly serve scientists, forcing them to struggle for value amid tightening budgets, according to research....

Parliamentary report calls for sovereign launch capability and reduced dependence on US services The UK's House of Lords UK Engagement with Space Committee has published a scathing report, "The Space Economy: Act Now or Lose Out," declaring that the 2021 National Space Strategy has "failed to turn its ambitions into reality."...

Middle Kingdom also postpones astronaut return mission after something hit its spaceship China has matched the European Space Agency's feat of taking a snapshot of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS from a Mars orbiter....

Awkward, seeing as they're close partners Qualcomm and Arm have offered differing predictions regarding the market for inferencing silicon....

Even offers refunds if users sign up for AI they don't want, once it fixed a bad link Updated Microsoft Australia has apologized to users of its M365 suite after regulators accused it of steering them towards pricey bundles that include its Copilot AI service....

Some clever networking hacks open the door AI search provider Perplexity's research wing has developed a new set of software optimizations that allows for trillion parameter or large models to run efficiently across older, cheaper hardware using a variety of existing network technologies, including Amazon's proprietary Elastic Fabric Adapter....

Degraded performance and possible dependency problems across AZs Microsoft has warned of a thermal event" impacting Azure users in its West Europe region, and perhaps elsewhere....

Images in the test dataset were all sourced with consent AI models are filled to the brim with bias, whether that's showing you a certain race of person when you ask for a pic of a criminal or assuming that a woman can't possibly be involved in a particular career when you ask for a firefighter. To deal with these issues, Sony AI has released a new dataset for testing the fairness of computer vision models, one that its makers claim was compiled in a fair and ethical way....

For now it works only with the web version of the Microsoft Store hands on Normally, when you install an application in Windows, it comes either from a direct download or as a single choice from the Microsoft Store. But what if you could install several different apps at the same time by creating a custom group?...

An hour's tablet training and a soldier was sending the bird on autonomous errands Who needs a drone when you can fly a Black Hawk from a tablet? DARPA's $6 million award to Sikorsky paid off when a National Guard soldier, trained in under an hour, used a handheld tablet to command an optionally piloted Black Hawk through multiple autonomous missions....

Second time's the charm for after Wiz rejected Google's $23B offer last year Google's second attempt to acquire cloud security firm Wiz is going a lot better than the first, with the Department of Justice clearing the $32 billion deal, which ranks as Google's largest-ever acquisition....

The DoE's planned funding runs through 2030 America's Oak Ridge National Laboratory will receive up to $125 million through 2030 to develop hybrid computing systems that link quantum and supercomputing technologies....