The Register

Hackers take personal data bytes from the brand with three stripes Adidas is warning customers some of their data was stolen after an "unauthorized" person lifted it from a "third-party customer service provider."...

Marc Benioff eyes up all those lovely data tools for AI push Salesforce is to buy Informatica, the enterprise data management and analytics biz, for around $8 billion....

Commercial customers, STEM students all feeling the pain after mega outage of engineering data-analysis tool Software biz MathWorks is cleaning up a ransomware attack more than a week after it took down MATLAB, its flagship product used by more than five million people worldwide....

Taxpayers on hold for 798 years might wish for a better service The UK's tax collector has confirmed plans to contract out call center services with an associated price tag of 500 million ($677 million)....

Prediction: General-purpose AI could start getting worse Opinion I use AI a lot, but not to write stories. I use AI for search. When it comes to search, AI, especially Perplexity, is simply better than Google....

Or, rediscovering the KISS principle, the long way round Comment Linux distro wars are nothing new. "Advocacy" (a euphemism for angry argument) about hardware, OSes, programming languages and editors goes back as long as different computers have existed. Computers appeal to geeky folks, and geeky folks readily get a little too attached to things - and then become possessive and defensive about them....

Nothing will change while big tech sets the rules. We'll need someone even scarier Opinion How much harm does AI cause the environment? As a report from the MIT Technology Review just confirmed, nobody knows, and almost nobody cares enough to try and find out. Even if lots of people did care a lot, it wouldn't change things. The driver of AI's insane energy addiction is no more amenable to argument than a labrador in possession of an entire roast chicken....

No, not Amazon. China's SHEIN is in the spotlight for fake discounts, grubby greenery, and evading inquiries The European Commission has warned Chinese e-tailer SHEIN to clean up its act, after finding several practices on its website breach local consumer law....

Taiwan's tech expo dishes up the usual oddities - some less bonkers than they seem Computex Taiwan's Computex conference sprawls across four exhibition halls in which almost 1,500 exhibitors jostle for attention....

Chipmaker Hygon, which recently teased a 128-core, 512-thread CPU, merges with server-maker Sugon China has spawned a supercomputing contender....

Life in a corporate aquarium didn't go swimmingly Who, Me? Another Monday has arrived, bringing with it the chance for work-in-progress meetings at which managers will recite corporate cliches with astounding sincerity. Which is why The Register always opens the week with a new edition of Who, Me? It's the column in which you share stories of trying to meet your KPIs and somehow escaping when you don't....

But pauses tech-adjacent threat to slap all Euro-imports with 50 percent duties World War Fee US president Donald Trump has threatened a tariff that would apply only to Apple, and appears to have referred to the European Union's treatment of American tech companies as part of a threat to slap the bloc with higher tariffs....

PLUS: Interpol kills more malware; GoDaddy settles in awful infosec case; Giant stolen creds DB exposed Infosec In Brief Secrets of the Trump administration may have been exposed after a successful attack on messaging service TeleMessage, which has been used by some officials....

PLUS: Original emoji retired; Xiaomi's custom silicon; Pakistan dedicates 2,000 MW to AI and crypto Asia In Brief China last week approved rules that will see Beijing issue identity numbers that netizens can use as part of a federated identity scheme that will mean they can use one logon across multiple online services....

Neural net devs are finally getting serious about efficiency Feature If you've been following AI development over the past few years, one trend has remained constant: bigger models are usually smarter, but also harder to run....

Chinese manufacturers are advertising how they dodge tariffs, and tech leaders know they're in a new world Computex Every time I attend Taiwan's Computex exhibition I'm bewildered by the dozens of vendors selling unremarkable keyboards and mice....

But it's still going to come in through the back door Comment As AI pilots within enterprises increasingly flame out, OpenAI is making a pivot to consumers, suggesting AI is more likely to sneak into the enterprise through users than walk in through the front door. But IT departments will still have to deal with it once it arrives....

Michael Daniel also thinks Uncle Sam should increase help to orgs hit by ransomware INTERVIEW Uncle Sam's cybersecurity apparatus can't only focus on China and other nation-state actors, but also has to fight the much bigger damage from plain old cybercrime, says former White House advisor Michael Daniel. And the Trump administration's steep cuts to federal government staff are making that a lot harder....

The original leak site that never sold out, never surrendered Obituary John Young, the co-founder of the legendary internet archive Cryptome, died at the age of 89 on March 28. The Register talked to friends and peers who gave tribute to a bright, pugnacious man who was devoted to the public's right to know....

Computing pioneer's personal papers expected to fetch tens of thousands Precious scientific papers once belonging to wartime codebreaking genius Alan Turing - rescued from an attic clear-out where they faced destruction - are set to fetch a fortune at auction next month....

SQL Server and Cosmos DB added to data lake platform as lure for building AI features into transactional systems Microsoft is throwing more transactional database systems into its Fabric analytics and data lake environment in expectation the proximity will help users that are adding AI to their systems....

Bank accounts, personal details all hoovered up in the attack Nova Scotia Power on Friday confirmed it had been hit by a ransomware attack that began earlier this spring and disrupted certain IT systems, and admitted the crooks leaked data belonging to about 280,000 customers online. The stolen info may have included billing details and, for those on autopay, bank account numbers....

Fastly acquisition asks that redirects be set up before December 31 Three years after confirming its acquisition by Fastly, Glitch is pulling the plug on its app hosting platform....

Cyberbaddies are coming for your M365 creds, US infosec agency warns The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is warning that SaaS companies are under fire from criminals on the prowl for cloud apps with weak security....

A simple text editor that dates back to Windows 1.0 is getting smartified Microsoft has continued to shovel AI into its built-in Windows inbox apps, and now it's rolling out a Notepad update that will use Copilot to write text for you....

The coffee shows no signs of cooling Feature It was 30 years ago when the first public release of the Java programming language introduced the world to Write Once, Run Anywhere - and showed devs something cuddlier than C and C++....

From bit barn to algae farm? Euro datacenter operator Data4 is trialling a project to reuse heat from its servers and captured carbon dioxide to grow algae that can then be used in the agri-food or pharmacology sectors....

Aircraft Hazard Area now stretches 1,600 nautical miles Updated The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has given SpaceX the go-ahead to launch Starship Flight 9, but has nearly doubled the size of the vehicle's Aircraft Hazard Area (AHA)....

AI-optimized CPUs promise 4.6GHz clocks, at least for one in eight cores Computex When Nvidia first teased its Arm-based Grace CPU back in 2021, many saw it as a threat to Intel and AMD. Four years later, the Arm-based silicon is at the heart of the GPU giant's most powerful AI systems, but it has not yet replaced x86 entirely....

Worries about uncertainty, even as AI pushes revenue and profit higher Chinese hardware giant Lenovo thought it had prepared for a trade war, but its plan proved insufficient once the US started to rapidly change its tax policies in imported goods....

It's not radical, but it is slim and pretty - usually a winning combination AnduinOS, a one-man project from a Chinese Microsoft engineer, is quite a new Ubuntu remix that reshapes GNOME in the image of Windows 11....

Care board defers decision to adopt national system Greater Manchester Integrated Care Board (ICB) has decided not to adopt a national data platform - prescribed by the UK government and run by Palantir - until it has more evidence of the benefits and risks....

Callous fraudster tricked elderly gents into smuggling meth hidden in chocolate truffles A ruthless cyber conman who duped elderly pensioners - including an 80-year-old man - into smuggling deadly class A drugs was this week locked up....

Annoyed at poor or missing salary increase offer as Brit telco pays out dividend BT is facing a revolt over pay from its line managers, with unions complaining today about the telco giant dishing out increased dividends to shareholders from its fiscal 2025 earnings....

For once, the IT department was rewarded for finding the fix, and the perfect-if-unexpected fixer On Call Welcome to a fresh instalment of On-Call, The Register's reader-contributed column in which you share your tales of tech support triumph, and we try to retell them in an amusing fashion....

Says it will serve half of humanity but testing that claim produced a hilarious ChatGPT fail Stargate, the Open AI led consortium that aims to build giant AI datacenters, has picked the United Arab Emirates as its first non-US destination....

Consumer affairs Minister is not happy with Uber for following local players with this scheme to encourage rapid pickups India's consumer affairs minister has criticized Uber for adding a feature that allows users to tip their driver before a trip as an incentive to take a job....

And the associated fraud'n'spy botnet is about to be shut down The US Department of Justice has unsealed indictments against 16 people accused of spreading and using the DanaBot remote-control malware that infected more than 300,000 computers, plus operating a botnet of the same name, and appears set to shutter its operations....

If it ain't broke? A suspected Chinese government spy group is behind the rash of attacks that exploit two Ivanti bugs that can be chained together to achieve unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE), according to analysts at threat intelligence outfit EclecticIQ....

Blackmailed teen allegedly scared into carving his handle onto her arm The FBI has filed an affidavit detailing how it identified a US Navy man who was allegedly distributing child sex abuse material (CSAM) through Discord....

Agents thought they shut this all down in 2023, but the duck quacked again Uncle Sam on Thursday unsealed criminal charges and a civil forfeiture case against a Russian national accused of leading the cybercrime ring behind Qakbot, the notorious malware that infected hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide and helped fuel ransomware attacks costing victims tens of millions of dollars....

Open the pod bay door Anthropic on Thursday announced the availability of Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4, the latest iteration of its Claude family of machine learning models....

Budget slashing has 'outsized impact' on us, says commander who fears branch not ready for orbital war The US Space Force has been struggling to achieve its technological goals, and Chief of Space Operations General B. Chance Saltzman told senators this week that civilian layoffs and budget cuts aren't helping matters at all....

Intrusions began weeks before Trimble patched the Cityworks hole A suspected Chinese crew has been exploiting a now-patched remote code execution (RCE) flaw in Trimble Cityworks to break into US local government networks and target utility management systems, according to Cisco's Talos threat intelligence group....

Data sovereignty fears fuel pitch to hyperscalers Investment biz Bain Capital is getting further into the datacenter sector with the launch of an operation serving hyperscalers in Europe, potentially positioning itself to benefit from customer unease over US hyperscalers....

Vendor's AI-infused pitch at Sapphire marred by backlash over support costs News that SAP users face a 30-50 percent premium to get some cloud products - including core ERP - to industry-standard service levels threatens to overshadow the German vendor's annual conference as new pricing models, performance, and partner arrangements dominate the conversation....

Case in Germany could derail Zuck's plans, noyb tells El Reg fight isn't over The Irish Data Protection Commission has cleared the way for Meta to begin slurping up the data of European citizens for training AI next week, ongoing legal challenges notwithstanding....

4-year trial is second major initiative this year that clamps down on 'illegal immigrants' Foreigners in Moscow will now be subject to a new experimental law that affords the state enhanced tracking mechanisms via a smartphone app....

A media-ready remix with KDE, codecs, and clutter from its BeOS-flavored past Neptune is a moderately tweaked Debian remix with KDE Plasma 5, a few alternative app choices, and a longer history than we anticipated....

Chat app blocks Windows' screenshot-happy feature from peeking at private convos Chat app biz Signal is unhappy with the current version of Microsoft Recall and has invoked some Digital Rights Management (DRM) functionality in Windows to stop the tool from snapshotting private conversations....