The Register

Deal promises sovereign datacenters, AI, and cybersecurity to strengthen communication links with US The UK's Ministry of Defence has signed a 400 million ($540 million) contract with Google sovereign cloud to support security and analytics workloads....

Slack's complaint sparked a five-year investigation, but Redmond walks away fine-free The EU has signed off on Microsoft's concessions over Teams bundling, letting Redmond dodge a monster antitrust fine in a deal that will barely rock the boat for anyone....

Big Brother Watch says a so-called BritCard could turn daily life into one long identity check - and warn that Whitehall can't be trusted to run A national digital ID could hand the government the tools for population-wide surveillance - and if history is anything to go by, ministers probably couldn't run it without cocking it up....

UK data watchdog says students behind most education cyberattacks The UK's data protection watchdog says more than half of cyberattacks in schools are caused by students, and that parents should act early to prevent their offspring from falling into the wrong crowds....

Science fiction? Battle bots already used in Ukraine Opinion I've read military science fiction since I was a kid. Besides the likes of Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers, Joe Haldeman's The Forever War, and David Drake's Hammer's Slammers books, where people held the lead roles, I read novels such as Keith Laumer's Bolo series and Fred Saberhagen's Berserker space opera sf series, where machines are the protagonists and enemies. Even if you've never read war science fiction, you certainly at least know about Terminators. But what was once science fiction is now reality on the Ukrainian battlefields. It won't stop there....

Ethical concerns raised after crook offered themselves up on silver platter Security outfit Huntress has been forced onto the defensive after its latest research - described by senior staff as "hilarious" - split opinion across the cybersecurity community....

Traceroute was also a mystery to this mountebank On Call The very premise on which The Register is built is that our readers know quite a lot about information technology, and that stories featured each Friday in On Call - our weekly tales of your support experiences - therefore reflect your working lives....

Incorruptible e-government AnswerBot Djella', which reportedly runs in Azure, given job of running public procurement Albania's prime minister has proposed appointing an artificial intelligence as a minister....

One console to manage multiple clusters is table stakes, but some users are betting on mixed environments Open source virtualization suite Proxmox has taken an important step towards becoming a stronger contender for those considering VMware alternatives by commencing beta testing for a datacenter management tool that can control multiple hardware clusters....

On the plus side we'll all be getting fewer unwanted emails Microsoft confirmed a major email service outage across North America that is stopping inboxes from filling up and may be hitting other apps when logging in....

Ronak Singhal will be moving onto better and brighter opportunities at the end of the month The chief architect behind Intel's Xeon line of server CPUs is leaving Chipzilla for greener pastures....

Atlantic Council warns US investors are fueling a market that undermines national security After years of being dominated by outsiders, the computer surveillance software industry is booming in the United States as investors rush into the ethically dodgy but highly lucrative field....

For whom the bill tolls Content creation and delivery companies have introduced a digital licensing mechanism in an effort to compensate media makers when AI companies use their work....

Okta uncovers new phishing-as-a-service operation with 'multiple entities' falling victim Multiple attackers using a new phishing service dubbed VoidProxy to target organizations' Microsoft and Google accounts have successfully stolen users' credentials, multi-factor authentication codes, and session tokens in real time, according to security researchers....

Still far short of the 50% market share Arm infra chief was hoping for Nvidia isn't the only one riding the AI boom. During the second quarter, Arm CPUs captured a quarter of the server market, according to a recent Dell'Oro Group report....

It all started with a May report saying that some bot training may need licensing or permission A US appeals court has thrown a wrench into the White House's attempt to oust US Copyright Office director Shira Perlmutter, ruling that the president likely has no authority to fire her....

It's a Republican pressing after DOGE whistleblower flags hostile work environment A US Senator is demanding answers after a Social Security Administration (SSA) employee who blew the whistle on Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) dealings involuntarily resigned last month, citing workplace hostility in response to his concerns....

Original author of open source database 'not surprised' but 'saddened' as critics slam vendor's layoffs Oracle has instigated "widespread layoffs" across its core MySQL development team, sparking concern about the future of one of the world's most popular open-source databases....

Shady, China-based company, all the apps needed for a fully automated attack - sounds totally legit Villager, a new penetration-testing tool linked to a suspicious China-based company and described by researchers as "Cobalt Strike's AI successor," has been downloaded about 10,000 times since its release in July....

Benchmark bonanza shows big wins across JSON, compression, JIT, and more The first release candidate of .NET 10 is out, complete with a "go-live" license, meaning that Microsoft supports production use. The company has also detailed performance improvements in this long-term support release, translating to real-world savings for users....

The technology isn't the hard part, says enterprise business services SVP, it's managing people At Walmart, "everybody's using AI every day across the enterprise," according to David Glick, senior vice president of the retail behemoth's enterprise business services....

FastNetMon says 1.5 Gpps deluge from hijacked routers, IoT kit nearly drowned scrubbing shop A DDoS mitigation provider was given a taste of the poison it tries to prevent, after being smacked by one of the largest packet-rate attacks ever recorded - a 1.5 billion packets per second (1.5 Gpps) flood that briefly threatened to knock it off the internet....

Slicing Windows 11 to the bone while Microsoft piles on the features How low can Windows 11 go? Storage-wise, it can take up less than 3 GB, as demonstrated by some impressive engineering from the same individual behind the Nano11 "diet" build....

AMD Zen hardware and Intel Coffee Lake affected If you thought the world was done with side-channel CPU attacks, think again. ETH Zurich has identified yet another Spectre-based transient execution vulnerability that affects AMD Zen CPUs and Intel Coffee Lake processors by breaking virtualization boundaries....

That won't even warm the plasma America's Department of Energy (DOE) has earmarked $134million in funding for two programs aimed at securing US leadership in emerging fusion technologies. The move comes amid renewed interest in nuclear power sparked by surging datacenter energy demands....

Ron Wyden urges FTC to probe failure to secure Windows after attackers used Kerberoasting to cripple Ascension Microsoft is back in the firing line after US Senator Ron Wyden accused Redmond of shipping "dangerous, insecure software" that helped cybercrooks cripple one of America's largest hospital networks....

Graph database fave also punts for transactional workloads Neo4j has introduced "property sharding" which, according to one analyst, will help overcome its earlier struggles with scalability, while also allowing transactional workloads on the same system....

$50 standalone bots now bundled in $30 package Microsoft is re-badging its Sales, Service, and Finance Copilots and slashing what it charges for them....

Over 600 security boffins say planned surveillance crosses the line Europe, long seen as a bastion of privacy and digital rights, will debate this week whether to enforce surveillance on citizens' devices....

Major UK player cagey on specifics but latest attack follows string blamed on 'third party' suppliers One of the UK's largest rail operators, LNER, is the latest organization to spill user data via a third-party data breach....

Academics and OSA stakeholders say watchdog needs to amend how controversial legislation is enforced Industry experts expressed both concern and sympathy for Ofcom, the Brit regulator that is overseeing the Online Safety Act, as questions mount over the effectiveness of the controversial legislation....

Battery powered now, fuel-cells tomorrow - all packed in a shipping box Following a series of trials, defense biz BAE Systems says it is readying an autonomous military submarine for the end of next year....

Not yet gone and not yet forgotten, but on their way Microsoft has added a raft of web components to its list of deprecated features, including legacy Edge developer tools and hosted web apps....

Admins can't stop checking their portals, survey finds A new survey confirms what many IT pros already know: downtime doesn't exist, with dashboards and alerts intruding on their free time....

Rust coreutils, TPM encryption, and GNOME 49 line up for October debut The Quokka is a small, furry, and perpetually smiling marsupial from Australia. It's very cute - and now it's freezing....

CedarDB pushed to the limit in improbable gaming experiment The world has moved on from making Doom run on increasingly ridiculous devices. Now it's all about porting it to the most inappropriate of languages. Cue DOOMQL, a version of the shooter written in pure SQL....

You don't need to be a rocket scientist to figure out the reasons why NASA has barred Chinese nationals from accessing its premises and assets, even those who hold visas that permit them to reside in the USA....

Ovoid-themed in-memory malware offers a menu for mayhem EggStreme' framework looks like the sort of thing Beijing would find handy in its ongoing territorial beefs Infosec outfit Bitdefender says it's spotted a strain of in-memory malware that looks like the work of Chinese advanced persistent threat groups that wanted to achieve persistent access at a military company" in the Philippines....

Gartner says migrations remain a risky multi-year nightmare, but selective re-platforming can pay off More than a third of workloads currently running under VMware will run on another platform by 2028, with its own trusted hosting partners pushing some customers to make the move....

Tick tock Sam, just fifteen months before your first bill is due OpenAI will pay Oracle $300 billion over the course of five years to fuel Sam Altman's AI ambitions by providing five gigawatts of compute capacity....

Patch, turn on MFA, and restrict access to trusted networks...or else Affiliates of the Akira ransomware gang are again exploiting a critical SonicWall vulnerability abused last summer, after a suspected zero-day flaw actually turned out to be related to a year-old bug....

We went through two hours of Senate hearings so you didn't have to Video As the Trump administration pushes to loosen federal rules on AI, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) has introduced legislation to give AI developers a two-year waiver from certain regulations, renewable for up to a decade....

Using GPUs to design better bit barns for GPUs? It's the circle of AI With the rush to capitalize on the gen AI boom, datacenters have never been hotter. But before signing that multi-billion dollar purchase order on GPUs, Cadence Systems suggests using a few of them to simulate whether that fancy new bit barn of yours can actually handle the heat....

'We do believe that this was likely the creation of a cybercrime group,' threat hunter tells The Reg ChillyHell, a modular macOS backdoor believed to be long dormant, has likely been infecting computers for years while flying under the radar, according to security researchers who spotted a malware sample uploaded to VirusTotal in May....

The usual cadre of scientists who disproved previous findings are stumped If you were ever wondering where you'd be when NASA announced peer-reviewed evidence hinting at extraterrestrial life - long dead, if it existed at all - look around, because this is it....

Nearly 100 requirements laid down by 10 separate oversight and advisory groups leave agencies tangled in red tape The US government wants AI in every corner of government, but the unstoppable force of new tech is running into the immovable object of bureaucracy - a growing mass of AI rules....

Classes moved to VBA, but upgrading and testing is unavoidable With the end of Windows 10 looming, Microsoft has reminded hard-pressed admins that other critical technologies are on the endangered list, notably VBScript....

Systems offline as specialists continue to comb through wreckage Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) says "some data" was affected after the luxury car maker suffered a digital break-in early last week....

New look for Visual Studio but the core still runs on the old .Net Framework Microsoft has released a preview of Visual Studio 2026, the first major version update since 2021, promising deeper AI integration and a new look and feel....

Arbitrarily inflated lock-in-tastic fees curbed as movement charges must be cost-linked Updated Most of the provisions of the EU Data Act will officially come into force from the end of this week, requiring cloud providers to make it easier for customers to move their data, but some of the big players are keener than others....