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This wasn't what most had in mind when Redmond promised to make the feature 'great again' Microsoft is to try out "recommendations" - ads for apps in the Microsoft Store - in the Windows 11 Start Menu, but only for a small set of US Beta Channel Windows Insiders at first....

System alerts were pinging but cat had no way of knowing what was happening A developer named Danny Guo has shared a story of the time his cat alerted him to a DDoS attack....

Neither side can afford to lose, but one surely must Opinion Twice it was tried, twice it failed. In Germany, Munich and Lower Saxony both decided to switch to open source for official IT. Both projects, to some extent or another*, returned to Microsoft. Now the state of Schleswig-Holstein is hoping for third time lucky. It's been planning the same thing for three years, and now it's pressing the button....

Kernel 6.8, GNOME 46, and more apps in Snap packages The beta version of this year's Ubuntu LTS release is out, complete with a new, and automatable, installation program....

Thanks to sensors and math, machines can 'learn' to adapt to new mediums Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a new method for 3D printing, which they claim greatly reduces the time taken to adapt machines to using different materials....

If you're too exhausted to think, maybe you shouldn't be doing tech support who, me? Welcome once again, gentle reader folk, to the comfy corner of The Register safe space we call Who, Me? wherein readers share their stories of times when they were not perhaps at the very peak of their technical brilliance....

First rise in five years varies between 9.26 and 16.67 percent for different products - for no apparent reason Microsoft has foreshadowed significant price rises for its Dynamics 365 cloudy business applications....

Reconaissance vessels first, then set a course for armed drones South Korean industrial giant HD Hyundai's maritime arm announced on Sunday it will collaborate with controversial software developer Palantir Technologies to develop an unmanned surface vessel (USV) that can conduct reconnaissance for the world's navies....

Investors get excited about using AI to make AI easier Supercolossal SaaS seller Salesforce is reportedly poised to acquire cloud data management outfit Informatica....

PLUS: Chinese chipmaker Nexperia attacked; A Microsoft-signed backdoor; CISA starts scanning your malware; and more Infosec in brief US Congress nearly killed a reauthorization of FISA Section 702 last week over concerns that it would continue to allow warrantless surveillance of Americans, but an amendment to require a warrant failed to pass....

PLUS: AWS expands India payment options; Alibaba co-founders unite in criticism; Korea invests in AI; and more Asia In Brief The Australian operations of Estonian cloud and web hosting outfit BlueVPS have been struck by a multi-day outage that commenced on or about April 9 and is ongoing at the time of writing....

Industrial revolution didn't give us human mimics, so why should AI think like us, this computer scientist wonders Interview While the likes of OpenAI and Google DeepMind chase after some fabled artificial general intelligence, not everyone thinks that's the best use of our time and energy in developing AI....

'Something is stopping it, even though it clearly can do it' AI models become better at foretelling the future when asked to frame the prediction as a story about the past, boffins at Baylor University in Texas have found....

'Not all AI content is spam, but I think right now all spam is AI content' interview We know Google search results are being hammered by the proliferation of AI garbage, and the web giant's attempts to curb the growth of machine-generated drivel haven't helped all that much....

There's no Huawei we saw that coming Years after Uncle Sam ordered US telecommunications providers to rip and replace Huawei kit from their networks, Beijing is telling telcos in China to strip out American-made chips....

Dev teams must beware inflated expectations of tech leadership, Gartner warns Global tech research company Gartner estimates that by 2028, 75 percent of enterprise software engineers will use AI code assistants, up from less than 10 percent in early 2023....

Slow but bona fide made in China Loongson's current-generation 3A6000 processor, one of the fastest designed and made in China for consumers, is now available in a line of mini PCs....

Beijing will be thrilled by this nerfed silicon Intel is set to launch two China-exclusive models of its Gaudi 3 AI accelerator, and they'll be substantially crippled to fit in with US sanctions....

Out of the PAN-OS and into the firewall, a Python backdoor this way comes Palo Alto Networks on Friday issued a critical alert for an under-attack vulnerability in the PAN-OS software used in its firewall-slash-VPN products....

Another one bytes the dust In an incredibly rare move, Google is killing off one of its online services - this time, VPN for Google One....

That 30% app tax may turn out to be a hefty liability Apple's attempt to get the UK Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) to toss a lawsuit over its 30 percent App Store tax has failed, meaning the iMaker could eventually be forced to fork over 785 million ($980 million) in compensation to developers....

Not touching copyrighted material with a barge pole Adobe is building its own AI model capable of transforming text into video and, unlike other companies, will actually pay creators of the material used to train it....

The most secure Unix-like OS to date? The OpenBSD project's 56th release is arguably the most secure Unix-like OS to date....

Self-preferencing pushback in Europe and US seems to have had some effect Amazon's search results have become less likely to favor the company's own products, according to research from a University of Minnesota economist....

Affected federal agencies must comb through mails, reset API keys and passwords The US government's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) warns that Russian spies who gained access to Microsoft's email system were able to steal sensitive data, including authentication details and that immediate remedial action is required by affected agencies....

Windows Server 2025 will let you run a VM with 2,048 vCPUs, 240 TB RAM, and 68 network adapters Microsoft has announced new scalability ceilings for its Hyper-V hypervisor....

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a hard drive! A UK IT maintenance outfit is testing out drones to deliver equipment to customers, claiming this will help with sustainability measures of all things....

Gloucestershire reluctant to set new date in S/4HANA migration saga The UK's Gloucestershire County Council has failed to introduce its new 7.3 million ($9.3 million) cloud-based SAP system in time for the new financial year, as its director of finance promised back in January....

Linux kernel cut it loose, now leading FOSS compiler lands depth-charge on Itanic GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) 14 should appear any month now, and when it does, it will no longer build binaries for IA64 - or Itanic, as The Reg dubbed it....

Shifts its transmission from vendor neutral into open source gear Opinion Since its founding, the Linux Foundation has been a vendor-neutral supporter of Linux and open source software. Now, though, it's actively promoting such open source projects as OpenTofu and Valkey....

And be paid danger money while he did it On Call Welcome once again to On-Call, The Register's weekly wander through readers' recollections of being asked to perform tech support under all sorts of strange circumstances, most of them difficult. But not always....

Billions in investment? Yeeeah, right - looks more like ensuring only select few developers thrive The UK's competition watchdog sniffed around the AI industry with a bit more interest than usual on Thursday at an antitrust event in the US....

Embarrassing, as its officials are in the US to discuss Olympics cyber threats Several French municipal governments' services have been knocked offline following a "large-scale cyber attack" on their shared servers....

Report claims India's government, which is accused of using Pegasus at home, was displeased Apple has made a significant change to the wording of its threat notifications, opting not to attribute attacks to a specific source or perpetrator, but categorizing them broadly as "mercenary spyware."...

As the rest of Virtizilla's users face a pause in support and education services due to apparent SAP-to-Oracle migration VMware's end user compute products appear likely to be rebranded as Omnissa after being sold off....

Asking for emir few billion bucks to pay for lots of fabs, datacenters, and nuclear power plants OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's latest stop on his AI emperor roadshow was in the United Arab Emirates, where he floated the idea of a global consortium of governments and private interests to fund, power, and supply the artificial intelligence industry....

China, Russia have muscled up, and whoever wins up there wins down here The commander of the US Space Force (USSF) has warned that America risks losing its dominant position in space, and therefore on Earth too....

Export restrictions and sanctions working well, we see A sprawling industrial complex being built by Huawei near Shanghai will be used to research and develop chipmaking equipment to help the tech giant overcome restrictions imposed on it by the US, local sources are reportedly saying....

And Andy Jassy will happily take your money along the way It's safe to say Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is pretty jazzed about generative AI's potential to drive profits....

'A strategy of half-promises and unnecessarily complicated hedges' The right to repair movement just scored a major win with Apple's announcement that it plans to begin supporting iPhone repairs with used parts this fall....

But for how much longer? Intel's Meteor Lake-based Core Ultra CPUs will power Huawei's newest MateBook X Pro, the company's first AI PC....

We sat though these conferences so you didn't have to Kettle This week kicked off with two conferences, Intel Vision and Google Cloud Next, that as you can imagine had artificial intelligence at the heart of them....

But don't expect them to compete with human pros anytime soon Large language models (LLMs) can now be put to the test in the retro arcade video game Street Fighter III, and so far it seems some are better than others....

Not that $110M will go very far, mind The Japanese and US governments have announced new academic AI partnerships that are getting a $110 million cash infusion from Nvidia, Microsoft, and a group of Japanese firms....

TSMC turns advanced packaging production knob to 11 Dell lead times for computers with GPUs like Nvidia's H100 have come down to eight to 12 weeks, a significant reduction from nearly 40 weeks late last year....

Could have been worse - last time researchers checked it was 98.6% Hospitals - despite being places where people implicitly expect to have their personal details kept private - frequently use tracking technologies on their websites to share user information with Google, Meta, data brokers, and other third parties, according to research published today....

Complainants smack back after hardware giant moves to dismiss lawsuit HP "sought to take advantage of customers' sunk costs," printer owners claimed this week in a class action lawsuit against the hardware giant....

Computing giant will appeal ruling, which found infringement was not 'willful' A jury has ordered Amazon Web Services to pay $525 million for infringing distributed data storage patents in a case brought by a technology outfit called Kove IO....

And rePalm may yet bring real PalmOS to new hardware ... even the Raspberry Pi PumpkinOS is a somewhat usable runtime environment that can run some Palm apps on top of Windows or Linux, without using or needing real PalmOS....

Agreement on consent and compensation has failed to materialize UK lawmakers have slammed the government for its lack of action in protecting copyright holders against the infringement of their intellectual property by developers of artificial intelligence technologies....