The Register

Bipartisan support needed to keep DOGE from the door The proposed cuts to NASA's budget are drawing sharp criticism from US lawmakers, with one saying: "If you cut this budget, you cut into the heart of America's leadership when it comes to space exploration."...

Stopping users shooting themselves in the foot with last century's tech Microsoft has twisted the knife into ActiveX once again, setting Microsoft 365 to disable all controls without so much as a prompt....

Car hire biz takes your privacy seriously, though Car hire giant Hertz has confirmed that customer information was stolen during the zero-day data raids on Cleo file transfer products last year....

You can't keep a good OS down The first Intel-based Mac was 19 years ago, but new versions of apps for both Classic Mac OS and PowerPC Mac OS X still occasionally appear, and we are here for it....

UK's play to win a quantum computing race that is still highly theoretical To mark World Quantum Day, the UK government says it will stump up a 121 million ($158 million) investment in the ever-distant technology that proponents claim has the potential to shake up the world....

See no error, hear no error, speak no error The three wise Microsoft monkeys have spoken. If Windows Update displayed an error after installing the April 2025 Windows Recovery Environment release, you didn't see anything. Best to ignore it and move on....

That would put America on the same level as China for espionage The European Commission is giving staffers visiting the US on official business burner laptops and phones to avoid espionage attempts, according to the Financial Times....

When the power went out, they didn't switch on Google has revealed that a recent six-hour outage at one of its cloudy regions was caused by uninterruptible power supplies not doing their job....

Meanwhile in China, factories that work for Apple and HP are reportedly closing some production lines Tech manufacturers worked overtime in early 2025 to produce hardware before the US imposed tariffs that would increase the prices punters pay for product....

Blackwell production already underway in Arizona with server manufacturing coming to Texas within 15 months Nvidia wants to build and sell up to half a trillion US dollars of American-made AI supercomputer equipment over the next four years, with the help of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, aka TSMC, and its partners....

Copilot vibe coding for OS development? Why not Canny Windows users who've spotted a mysterious folder on hard drives after applying last week's security patches for the operating system can rest assured - it's perfectly benign. In fact, it's recommended you leave the directory there....

Users, unsurprisingly, are not pleased and feel forgotten amid Redmond's Copilot frenzy In June 2024, users of the OneDrive sync client for macOS and Windows began reporting that shared folders had vanished from their local drives, replaced with web shortcuts....

IT admins, get ready to grumble CA/Browser Forum - a central body of web browser makers, security certificate issuers, and friends - has voted to cut the maximum lifespan of new SSL/TLS certs to just 47 days by March 15, 2029....

Buy high, sell low: FPGA biz cost x86 giant $16B decade ago A decade after gobbling up Altera, Intel is loosening its grip. On Monday, the x86 giant said it's flogging a 51 percent stake in the FPGA slinger to private equity firm Silver Lake....

What's the goal here, Homeland Insecurity or something? As drastic cuts to the US govt's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency loom, Rep Eric Swalwell (D-CA), the ranking member of the House's cybersecurity subcommittee, has demanded that CISA brief the subcommittee "prior to any significant changes to CISA's workforce or organizational structure."...

Q1 sector growth unlikely to survive current trade policy Profiteering resellers stateside filled up on smartphone inventory in calendar Q1 before the scheduled imposition of US tariffs, which have rocked global stock prices and US Treasury bonds since April 2....

Sales backstop deal? More like ... Sales? Back, stop! Deal! Arizona electronics supplier Avnet has accused California semiconductor design firm Ampere Computing of going against its word and backing out of a server purchasing deal....

Watchdog wants to know whether EU posts were used without consent under GDPR Elon Musk's social media outfit X is again under the regulatory microscope in Europe - this time for allegedly using EU users' public posts to train its Grok AI chatbot, possibly without the transparency or legal basis required under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)....

Houston, we have a funding problem The US administration appears set to slash NASA's science budget with cuts to spending in the order of almost 50 percent, according to a draft of the White House's proposal....

Safeguard hold finally lifted as Microsoft realizes animated backgrounds aren't the end of the world The day before the release of Windows 11 24H2, Microsoft slapped a compatibility hold on devices using wallpaper customization applications. More than six months later, it is gradually removing the safeguard hold....

Investment delays are inevitable as uncertainty clouds US trade policy, warns investment bank World War Fee Trump administration tariffs are leaving the IT industry in "limbo", with CIOs hitting the pause button on new projects as they're unsure whether budgets set today will be disrupted by taxes tomorrow....

Miyazaki, copyright protection and the 'insult to life itself' of AI images Opinion Many people are having fun making Studio Ghibli-style images with OpenAI's ChatGPT. I see it as copy-and-paste intellectual property stealing on an industrial level....

Royal McBee's desk-sized deskside early computer was the stuff of legend In these days of multi-gig OSes, we cast our eyes back to something both much bigger and much smaller....

Analysts say the bubble won't burst, but it is possible, admits world's largest colo provider Interview Those who ignore history are destined to repeat mistakes of the past and, with signs of an inflating bit barn spending bubble, comparisons are being made with the infamous dotcom bust a quarter of a century ago....

UK holds onto oversight by a whisker, but it's utterly barefaced on the other side of the pond Opinion The UK government's attempts to worm into Apple's core end-to-end encryption were set back last week when the country's Home Office failed in its bid to keep them secret on national security grounds....

Brit retailer says troubled breakup with tech platform of former US owner nearing conclusion Two of the top team behind Asda's 1 billion ($1.31 billion) tech divorce from US retail giant Walmart - which has seen a number of setbacks - are departing the company....

If this techie had been older and slower, this never would have happened Who, Me? Returning to work on Monday often imparts a rude shock, which is why The Register opens the week with a new installment of Who, Me? It's the reader-contributed column in which you admit to your worst moments at work and explain how you survived them....

Home labs and bare bones test rigs matter so Broadcom's back in the game VMware has resumed offering a free hypervisor....

PLUS: Chinese robodogs include backdoor; OpenAI helps spammer; A Dutch data disaster; And more! Infosec In Brief Fortinet last week admitted that attackers have found new ways to exploit three flaws it thought it had fixed last year....

PLUS: India's new electronics subsidies; Philippines unplugs a mobile carrier; Alibaba Cloud expands Asia In Brief Chinese officials admitted to directing cyberattacks on US infrastructure at a meeting with their American counterparts, according to The Wall Street Journal....

Beijing tries to find an off-ramp but also fights back with export bans World War Fee The Trump administration's strategy to use tariffs on imports as an incentive for businesses to move their manufacturing plants to the USA took a new turn over the weekend after it announced exemptions for some goods, denied that the exemptions were new, then said it plans further tariffs on high-tech goods....

Military units, government nerds appear to join the fray, with physical infra in sights Feature From triggering a water tank overflow in Texas to shutting down Russian state news services on Vladimir Putin's birthday, self-styled hacktivists have been making headlines....

Multi-protocol chat client is approaching version 3 In the 2020s you might be forgiven for having forgotten that such a thing as a native chat client exists, but a handful still do and they're still useful. One of these is Pidgin, the artist formerly known as GAIM....

Carbon capture, SMRs, fusion power - tech titans' climate strategies are packed with moon shots Comment AI's appetite for power is exploding. Hyperscalers have only just begun to adopt Nvidia's 120 kW-per-rack systems, and the GPU giant is already charting a course toward 600 kW designs....

No worries, just use neural networks to optimize systems powering neural networks Analysis Global datacenter electricity use is set to more than double by 2030 - slightly surpassing Japan's total consumption - with AI named as the biggest driver....

Hallucinated package names fuel 'slopsquatting' The rise of LLM-powered code generation tools is reshaping how developers write software - and introducing new risks to the software supply chain in the process....

A thing of beauty for map fans and those with kids Have you ever wanted to explore a blocky low-resolution version of the UK? Well, you're in luck, because the Ordnance Survey has created a Minecraft representation of it, claimed to be as realistic as anything ever can be in the game....

Redmond hopes you've forgotten or got over why everyone hated it the first time After temporarily shelving its controversial Windows Recall feature amid a wave of backlash, Microsoft is back at it - now quietly slipping the screenshotting app into the Windows 11 Release Preview channel for Copilot+ PCs, signaling its near-readiness for general availability....

$5.1B cancellations pitched as efficiency move, though costly Trump birthday parade mulled The US Department of Defense (DOD) has canceled contracts for "consulting and other non-essential services" in the latest round of cuts conceived by Elon Musk's DOGE unit....

Middle Kingdom retaliates against White House's 'instrument and weapon to bully and coerce' World War Fee China is upping tariffs on US imports to 125 percent, branding the Trump administration's tax policies a "joke."...

Consumer campaign group says 'we need lifetime transparency for tech Those well-meaning agitators at the Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) are back, this time with an interactive "Electronic Waste Graveyard" cataloging a range of devices tossed aside after software support expires or cloud connections flatline....

Activist investor finds payments groups lobbying against climate action An activist investor has called on IBM to report on its lobbying practices, which he alleges include spending dark money" with organizations that campaign against climate change reporting and legislation....

Plus a fresh version ... nine years after its last After five years, the extremely experimental GoboLinux project is springing back to life with a new maintainer and a new release....

Exec pay outlined in Proxy Statement, and things did not go well for either workforce or calls for climate transparency reports Amazon exec chairman Jeff Bezos may not have a daily operational role at the cloud and e-commerce megacorp he founded, but he still got a bigger compensation package than the person currently pulling the strings from the chief executive's office....

Will future techies feel the same way about Copilot? The results are in, and it appears that -at least as far as The Register's most loquacious commenters are concerned - Windows Server 2000 was Microsoft's peak....

Models get bulkier, burnier, and bank-breakier AI continues to improve - at least according to benchmarks. But the promised benefits have largely yet to materialize while models are increasing in size and becoming more computationally demanding, and greenhouse gas emissions from AI training continue to rise....

Hang on, wasn't Capita already handling things like billing, etc? Ah, AgentSuite comes to the rescue Scandal struck UK utility company Southern Water is extending a long-running managed services contract with Capita, everyone's favorite outsourcing badass, for up to five years at an estimated cost of 92.4 million ($121 million)....

Issues at the very top continue to worsen The UK government's latest annual data breach survey shows the number of ransomware attacks on the isles is on the increase -and many techies are forced to constantly informally request company directors for defense spending because there's no security people on the board....

Sysadmin sent on road trip that required a lot of time doing nothing On Call Some working weeks are full of achievements, and others miserably unproductive. Here at The Register, we always make sure that if nothing else we produce a fresh instalment of On Call, the column that recounts readers' tales of delivering top-notch tech support....

A new alternative for those pondering what to do when vSphere 7.x goes end of life in October VMware has revealed another big upgrade is on the way, this time for its vSphere Foundation suite....