The Register

Malicious actor reportedly sought to expose AWS 'security theater' The official Amazon Q extension for Visual Studio Code (VS Code) was compromised to include a prompt to wipe the user's home directory and delete all their AWS resources....

Subsidy cliff edge and tariffs threaten Musk biz, but being caught between luxury and mass market may be a worse fate Opinion Speaking to Tesla investors last night, CEO Elon Musk was optimistic about the future of his automotive manufacturer....

If it passes, the law would redefine the boundaries of fair use A bipartisan pair of US Senators introduced a bill this week that would protect copyrighted content from being used for AI training without the owner's permission. Content creators from large media companies to individual bloggers could effectively block Google, Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, and others from appropriating their work....

'Industry, national governments, and the EU' must pay for maintainers. El Reg says charity shouldn't start at home GitHub, owned by money-bags Microsoft, has called upon the European Union to create a publicly funded "Sovereign Tech Fund" (EU-STF) to boost the open source software ecosystem....

You don't become a 'superpower' overnight Significant hurdles stand in the way of the UK government's push to become a global AI superpower, including energy constraints, planning difficulties and the datacenter investment required for it all....

French fashion house dishes out notices after hackers raided a client database - ShinyHunters suspected Updated Fashion house Dior has begun dropping data breach notices after cybercrooks with a taste for high-end targets made off with customer data....

How the MITS Altair 8800, a $264 RAM board, and some BASIC changed the world This week marked the 50th anniversary of the birth of several empires. On July 22, 1975, Bill Gates and Paul Allen signed a deal with Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems....

The "is" package was infected with cross-platform malware after a scam targeting maintainers The popular npm package "is" was infected with cross-platform malware, around the same time that linting utility packages used with the prettier code formatter were infected with Windows-only malware....

CISPE cites recent channel changes, but the deal was decided on different matters +COMMENT Trade group Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe (CISPE) has filed a formal appeal before the European General Court to seek annulment of the European Commission's decision to approve Broadcom's acquisition of VMware....

Sometimes, one small tweak can make a very big difference. There are ten people in the world who could decide tomorrow to make IT better, and it would become better. Not better for some, not better for a while, but better for all and forever....

G-Cloud on track for $50 billion revenue as AI creates a new generation of Google-eyed youth Google's parent company Alphabet has increased its capex budget for the year by $10 billion and now expects to spend $85 billion this year, and more in 2026....

French model dev hopes to inspire others to adopt standards-based reporting While it's widely known that the computers powering generative AI use a ton of water and power, its actual impact on the environment is often harder to pin down....

Nvidia's Jensen Huang just had a win with his argument that the world needs China's AI brains, now this Amazon Web Services has closed its AI lab in Shanghai, China....

'Build, baby, build', and forget about regulation and wokeness is the gist of it The White House on Wednesday announced its AI Action Plan, unveiling a sweeping anti-regulatory approach that disengages the brakes from AI development and datacenter construction in the US. The plan also promises to clamp down on what it called "ideological bias" in AI models....

But it has no way to compel scofflaws to comply In a sweeping and unprecedented legal opinion, the United Nations' highest court has decreed that "The consequences of climate change are severe and far-reaching" and constitute an "urgent and existential threat." What's more, it stated that action must be taken to not only ameliorate that threat but also to determine the legal consequences for those states whose actions harm others....

A working copy of your site can run under Windows Subsystem for Linux hands on If you're building a website that will eventually be hosted on a Linux server (as so many are), you have a couple of choices about where you do your development work. You can create a beta version of the site at your web host and upload all of the files there or you can create a local test server that sits in your home or office....

From scams to violence, the crimes extend beyond the digital realm A subset of an online group that recruits children and teens for contract shootings, kidnappings, and other real-life violent crimes poses a growing threat to youth, according to the FBI....

No screenshots for you! In an effort to protect user privacy, Brave browser 1.81 will prevent Microsoft Recall from screenshotting it by default....

Goal is 'to enrich our workplace experience' Exclusive Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has announced an instant five-day return-to-work mandate for US workers, and warns that staff will be monitored and called out if they don't comply....

Huge models are error-prone and expensive Enterprise CIOs have been mesmerized by GenAI claims of autonomous agents and systems that can figure anything out. But the complexity that such large models deliver is also fueling errors, hallucinations, and spiraling bills....

Unlike traditional input, no cameras or surgery needed, they claim Researchers at Meta have come up with a wristband that picks up your muscle twitches and turns them into real-time computer commands - no cameras or implants required....

US DOE among breached government agencies More than 400 organizations have been compromised in the Microsoft SharePoint attack, according to Eye Security, which initially sounded the alarm on the mass exploitation last Friday, even before Redmond confirmed the critical vulnerabilities....

Loads of unexplained ones, too. Maybe normalize providing a freaking reason for multi-hour outages, mmm? The previous quarter was a busy one for internet disruptions, according to Cloudflare, with government-mandated shutdowns in several nations, a massive power outage hitting Spain's infrastructure, damage to fiber optic cabling, and technical issues hitting North America....

The 2026 tax year ought to be fun A quarter of the Internal Revenue Service's IT staff has departed since President Trump's workforce reduction efforts began earlier this year, and that has officials worried the 2026 tax season could be a mess....

Despite pledging help for those who don't sign for subs, Broadcom says validating their entitlements will delay support Exclusive Some customers of Broadcom's VMware business currently cannot access security patches, putting them at greater risk of attack....

Thingiverse ditches downloadable designs at the urging of Manhattan District Attorney, who wants more companies to do likewise A leading 3D printing site has agreed to purge its library of downloadable gun designs at the urging of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. However, it's unlikely to slow the proliferation of 3D printed weapons, as many other sites offer downloadable gun designs and parts....

Vendor sees 'slight deceleration' in cloud backlog as it offers mixed results SAP is warning of uncertainty in global markets after reporting revenue of 9 billion ($10.55 billion) for caledar Q2, up 9 percent year-on-year....

Hand us the mind bleach, we want to flush our memories of attack Clorox is suing its service desk provider, Cognizant, for $380 million in a California state court, alleging the IT support crew "enabled a cybercriminal to gain a foothold in Clorox's network" by handing over staffers' passwords to attackers after they simply requested them....

Total Recall: Capturing everything you do on your PC screen to become a 'true companion' Microsoft is again throwing AI at Windows 11 to see what sticks, releasing features including the even more eyebrow-raising successor to its controversial Recall, a screen-streaming remotely processed backseat driver dubbed Copilot Vision....

Uncertainty continues to knock tech industry confidence More tariff turmoil emerged this week as Nokia slashed its profit guidance for the year due to looming US levies on imported goods, while Texas Instruments' shares took a beating over fears that growth seen in Q2 will fall away following customer stockpiling to avoid import duties....

But there are tweaks for everyone - even if some are less welcome than others Mozilla has delivered the latest version of its web browser, alleviating a long-standing irritation for Linux users... but making its "AI" integration even more pervasive....

Deal adds to a string of relationships based on improving data and analytics NatWest Group has announced a five-year contract with AWS and Accenture intended to improve its analytics performance for customer data....

In space, no one can hear you step on a plastic brick The Lego bricks are being dusted off for a final time - at least for the Apollo program - to recreate the Apollo Soyuz Test Project via the medium of the plaything....

Science friction at the far end of time for SpaceX and astronomy Opinion Elon Musk's Starlink flying circus is many things. It's a multi-thousand satellite global internet provider, growing by hundreds of new orbiting relays a month. It's part of intricate geopolitical power games between the Pentagon, the US government, Ukraine, and Musk himself....

Organic waste to be pumped out of sight as part of 4.9M-tonne CO removal deal Microsoft has signed a contract with a company that will pump shit underground for it in exchange for carbon credits....

Boffins think worry and stress during the plague years changed our wetware, and that the damage can be reversed A longitudinal study of nearly 996 healthy adults found that the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated ageing of their brains....

Already reeling from staff cuts, the health agency is choking on slop ai-pocalypse Amid expectations that the Trump administration will introduce an AI Action Plan on Wednesday to boost the use of AI in government, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) are pleading for less of it....

176.5 Exabytes of the stuff shipped in 2024, another double-digit jump Shipments of tape storage media increased again in 2024, according to HPE, IBM, and Quantum - the three companies that back the Linear Tape-Open (LTO) Format....

Suggests buying local tech to avoid infosec worries China's Ministry of State Security has spent the week warning of backdoored devices on land and at sea....

Who's picking up the tab again? AI hype man and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has convinced his buddies at Oracle to bring an additional 4.5 gigawatts of datacenter capacity online in the US as part of the startup's Stargate initiative....

AI-nxiety is real, and it's causing some bizarre behavior ai-pocalypse If you're one of those people who pretend to use AI at work, then worry not: there are likely another 15 of you per hundred employees in your company. That's the finding of a survey from nearshoring tech recruitment company Howdy.com....

No more consideration of affordability or 1 Gbps speed goal if Chairman Carr gets his way The next edition of the Federal Communications Commission's broadband expansion progress report is going to paint a rosier reality than usual, if a proposal being put to a vote at next month's meeting gets a pass....

CyberSentry work grinds to a halt Government funding for a program that hunts for threats on America's critical infrastructure networks expired on Sunday, preventing Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory from analyzing activity that could indicate a cyberattack, theprogram director told Congress on Tuesday....

Summarizing online content is good for the search giant, not so much for publishers ai-pocalypse Google Search users are less likely to click on search result links when those pages have AI Overviews, according to the Pew Research Center....

Sotheby's also flogs off dinosaur skeleton for $26M Videos The largest chunk of Mars yet discovered on Earth, a 54-pound (25kg) chunk of the Red Planet, has been purchased at auction for $5.3 million by an unknown bidder....

Turn that Copilot or Scroll Lock key into a media control or extended character. HANDS ON In the era of laptops and tenkeyless keyboards, many of us are living with fewer keys than we had years ago. But even on a small keyboard, you'll find keys that you just don't need....

Testing shows RNGD chips up to 2.25x higher performance per watt than.... five-year-old Nvidia silicon South Korean AI chip startup FuriosaAI scored a major customer win this week after LG's AI Research division tapped its AI accelerators to power servers running its Exaone family of large language models....

The diner is now open in West Hollywood, and Musk wants to start a chain video Facing declining sales and a tarnished reputation, EV manufacturer Tesla is looking to a new industry to generate some revenue: Fast-casual food service....

The distro's greatest asset is arguably also its greatest weakness If you installed the Firefox, LibreWolf, or Zen web browsers from the Arch User Repository (AUR) in the last few days, delete them immediately and install fresh copies....

Fans say low usage no surprise when obscure but beloved feature disabled by default GitHub has "paused" the removal of the command palette,which enables keyboard control of the GitHub web application, following developer protests....