The Register

'The operating system couldn't be loaded' is never a great message Microsoft's latest Patch Tuesday update is failing to install on some Windows 11 machines, mostly virtual ones, and dumping them into recovery mode with a boot error. Its only recommendation to avoid the problem for now is to dodge the update....

It's hard to predict the future, but trying might get Amodei a seat at the regulatory table Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is worried that AI could eliminate half of entry-level white collar jobs in five years....

House Homeland Security Committee takes a field trip to Silicon Valley Chinese government spies burrowed deep into American telecommunications systems and critical infrastructure networks for one reason, according to retired US Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster....

18F says the whole thing was political Former employees of the US government's 18F tech modernization team have filed an appeal of their termination, arguing that the DOGE-led shuttering of their entire unit was illegal....

Banks and Warren accuse chip maker of habitual 'disregard for US national security and support for autocratic regimes' Nvidia is reportedly planning to open a new research and development facility in Shanghai, China, drawing sharp criticism from a pair of US lawmakers....

Businesses need to adopt AI, says WEF, but uncertainty is a blocker There are two things keeping chief economists awake around the globe, if the World Economic Forum's latest survey is any indicator: US President Donald Trump's trade policies and AI....

No formal attribution made but two separate probes hint at the same suspect Thousands of Asus routers are currently ensnared by a new botnet that is trying to disable Trend Micro security features before exploiting vulnerabilities for backdoor access....

One of the new smaller monthly releases - and how to tweak it Mozilla subsidiary MZLA has released the latest version of its messaging client, with some handy extras....

No, that's not someone on your team who doesn't pull their weight Salesforce is promising every Slack user a "digital teammate" to help with tasks such as providing summaries of channels and taking notes from meetings. And responding to office banter on the user's behalf, The Register can only assume....

Against backdrop of EU rules on spread of misinfo plus UK probing role of online hate in far right riots The US government says it'll refuse visas to foreign officials judged to have censored social media posts of American citizens - a move aimed at countries trying to stem the flow of online misinformation....

Law enforcement crackdowns are gathering pace but online marketplaces still teeming with valuable tokens A VPN vendor says billions of stolen cookies currently on sale either on dark web or Telegram-based marketplaces remain active and exploitable....

Users leaving App Store to make a third party payment must be free of charge, says Euro Commish The European Commission (EC) this week released the full text of its decision that found Apple in violation of its digital competition rules, known as the Digital Markets Act (DMA)....

Even when instructed to allow shutdown, o3 sometimes tries to prevent it, research claims A research organization claims that OpenAI machine learning model o3 might prevent itself from being shut down in some circumstances while completing an unrelated task....

Sick of paying the US tech tax and relinquishing talent to other continents, politicians finally wake up The European Commission (EC) has kicked off a scheme to make Europe a better place to nurture global technology businesses, providing support throughout their lifecycle, from startup through to maturity....

Wiggles tiny price for FishOS Ceph-based wares as deprecation of Ceph continues Updated Sardina hopes to entice anyone still using SUSE Enterprise Storage (SES) over to FishOS instead with a price-based hook: a license fee of 1 per core, regardless of storage volume....

Tianwen 2 probe launched Thursday and will also get up close with a comet China's National Space Agency today launched the nation's first asteroid sample mission....

Hiked prices and thinks that will make buyers nervous HP Inc. is close to ending production of North-America-bound products in China, after US tariffs kicked a hole in its quarterly profits....

Consumers will not tolerate deceit' Minister tells Amazon, Apple, Samsung and Uber India's government has reminded big tech companies that it has rules that prohibit the use of dark patterns - deceptive design practices that deliberately mislead and confuse customers of online services and apps - and called for an end to their use....

Hardware biz gets a reprieve but administration's plans are unchanged World War Fee The USA's Court of International Trade has ruled the Trump administration improperly implemented its Liberation Day" tariff policy, effectively blocking the imposition of the duties....

But don't worry, sales are still up 69 percent US export controls blocking the sale of Nvidia's H20 GPUs to will cost the company $10.5 billion in lost revenues in the first half of the 2026 fiscal year, executives revealed on Wednesday's Q1 earnings call....

Knickers outlet knackered Underwear retailer Victoria's Secret's website has been down for three days, with the company blaming an unspecified security problem....

Telegram to get 50% cut of xAI subscriptions too Telegram founder Pavel Durov on Wednesday announced that the Dubai-based messaging service will make unspecified Grok models from Elon Musk's xAI available to users....

Also in preview: a settings backup feature to support OS upgrades Microsoft is previewing a Windows Update orchestration platform for app developers and management tool vendors, aiming to centralize update scheduling across Windows 11 devices....

Jensen be limbo, Jensen be quick, Jensen go under the Uncle Sam's limbo stick Over the past few years, Uncle Sam has made it progressively harder for US chip designers to flog their AI wares in China. But not impossible....

'Everyone's holding their breath' Interview It's hard to pinpoint exactly when the "culture of fear" began to permeate America's top cyber-defense agency....

Prototype packs triple the energy density of lithium-ion, they claim MIT boffins have built a prototype fuel cell using liquid sodium and air that could one day power aircraft, and may help capture carbon through its byproducts....

So much for buttering up ChatGPT with 'Please' and 'Thank you' Google co-founder Sergey Brin claims that threatening generative AI models produces better results....

Data analytics and risk management biz says software dev platform breached, not itself LexisNexis Risk Solutions (LNRS) is the latest big-name organization to disclose a serious cyberattack leading to data theft, with the number of affected individuals pegged at 364,333....

Latest kernel includes 14,612 changesets, Penguinistas been busy Over the holiday weekend, Linus Torvalds released the latest Linux kernel - signalling the end of the line for 486-class chips....

Open source in-process OLAP system launches rival to Iceberg and Delta Lake table format, and more With a combined market value of around $150 billion, Snowflake and Databricks have divergent visions on how to get customers' analytics and machine learning tools to their data, which is often spread across different systems....

Project shutdowns at Mozilla are not encouraging, though Another month, another new version of Firefox, with several handy changes. The future is less certain, though....

IT leaders in region eyeing American hyperscalers escape hatch Amid the economic uncertainty of Trump 2.0, dependence on American tech has become a growing concern for many businesses, and a survey of 1,000 IT leaders claims that data sovereignty is now one of the most pressing issues....

The latest in a long line of techies to face Putin's wrath A Russian programmer will face the next 14 years in a "strict-regime" (high-security) penal colony after a regional court ruled he leaked sensitive data to Ukraine....

Researchers find AI models weak for medical reasoning when it comes to X-rays and CT scans AI is not ready to make clinical diagnoses based on radiological scans, according to a new study....

Easy, medium, and the sledgehammer approach - or any combination you fancy hands on If you're thinking about switching to Linux but there are a few Windows apps you just can't do without, you do have options... and some of them are free....

Space broadband and space-linked phones all very well, but someone's got to track them Satellites have evolved, thanks to SpaceX's Starlink and incomer AST SpaceMobile pumping out high-speed broadband and cellular services for everyday phones delivered from low Earth orbit (LEO) hardware....

And it's all your fault There is growing dissatisfaction over cloud computing, according to Gartner, and much of this can be put down to unrealistic expectations or customers simply not implementing the tech properly....

More cases about 2015 software swindle stuck in legal traffic jam Germany's Braunschweig Regional Court has reportedly sentenced four Volkswagen executives to jail over Dieselgate" - the 2015 scandal in which the automaker was found to have fudged software used to test its vehicles' pollution emissions....

SimpleHelp was the vector for the attack DragonForce ransomware infected a managed service provider, and its customers, after attackers exploited security flaws in remote monitoring and management tool SimpleHelp....

Musk's rocket co fails to deploy any dummy satellites either SpaceX's Starship has failed, again....

Really strong USB ports make a difference too by reducing the need for motherboard replacements Computex Analysts rate Taiwan's ASUS the world's fifth most prolific PC-maker, but the company wants to climb the charts by targeting business buyers, according to Shawn Chang, Head of Go-To-Market for the outfit's Commercial Business Unit....

Millions may fall for it - and end up with malware instead A group of miscreants tracked as UNC6032 is exploiting interest in AI video generators by planting malicious ads on social media platforms to steal credentials, credit card details, and other sensitive info, according to Mandiant....

He was responding to a gripe from a Russian IT provider about competition from Microsoft and Zoom Russian President Vladimir Putin said foreign tech providers still operating in Russia should be "strangled" as the country develops domestic alternatives....

400,000 GB200s could be more than a 1.2GW datacenter can chew Oracle will reportedly shell out around $40 billion on Nvidia's most advanced GPUs to provide compute power to OpenAI from the first US Stargate datacenter in Abilene, Texas, assuming the site can deliver enough electricity to handle the load....

No more features for the design darling - now it's all about chatting with your tabs like they're sentient AI is rapidly reshaping how we use the web, or so The Browser Company founder Josh Miller argues. That belief helped drive his team's decision to stop building new features for its Arc browser and shift focus to an "AI browser" dubbed Dia....

'Your well-honed customer experience is noise to an agent' As software agents powered by foundation models become more commonplace, marketers need to revisit their assumptions about website design and advertising....

Dutch intel services, Microsoft go big-game hunting A previously unknown Kremlin-linked group has conducted cyber-espionage operations against Dutch police, NATO member states, Western tech companies, and other organizations of interest to the Russian government since at least April 2024, according to Dutch intelligence services and Microsoft....

The rebellion grows and it seems resistance is not futile Despite high-profile calls for employees to get their butts back behind their desks in a traditional workplace setting, more people - at least in the UK - are ignoring return-to-office mandates, a study has found....

He'll need to be way more aggressive than a 25% tariff, say analysts, and even then it would take years US President Donald Trump can huff, puff, and threaten to blow Tim Cook's house down with a 25 percent iPhone import tariff, but analysts say even that threat is unlikely to bring Apple's manufacturing home....

Nick Clegg, former politico and Zuckcorp policy Prez, seems confused, can Reg readers help him? Former British deputy PM and Meta apologist Sir Nick Clegg says that forcing AI companies to ask for the permission of copyright holders before using their content would destroy the AI industry overnight....