The Register

Law enforcement facing huge gap in 'AI adoption' The National Crime Agency (NCA) will "closely examine" the recommendations made by the Alan Turing Institute after it claimed the UK was ill-equipped to tackle AI-enabled crime....

Techie demoed the effect in about 3 seconds, as On Call again tries to break tech-support world records On Call The working week sometimes speeds by, sometimes crawls, and often ends with a crash. Each Friday, we try to avert the latter by delivering a new edition of On Call, The Register's reader-contributed tales of handling ridiculous, ribald, and remarkable tech support requests....

We're not Putin up with this alleged industrial espionage, say the Dutch A Russian national appeared in a Netherlands court on Thursday accused of industrial espionage against ASML, the world's leading manufacturer of chip factory equipment and a key supplier that helps the likes of TSMC pump out top-drawer processors....

Australians checking their pensions are melting down call centres and websites Australian retirement fund operators are scrambling after reports emerged of unauthorized access to customer accounts leading to theft of cash....

Probably still behind western rivals, but improved GPU and higher core count can't hurt Chinese chip designer Loongson, whose products have been promoted by China's government, has teased two new designs that will make it more of a contender for mobile and industrial applications. It may also have a new server up its sleeve....

Classification compliance? Records retention requirements? How quaint A US Department of Defense watchdog has opened an investigation into its own Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, over his use of instant-messaging app Signal to discuss government business....

Shape shifting technique described as menace to national security The US govt's Cybersecurity Infrastructure Agency, aka CISA, on Thursday urged organizations, internet service providers, and security firms to strengthen defenses against so-called fast flux attacks....

And it can be yours for a rather steep $349 Microsoft's Windows 365 Link has reached general availability, although some may question its value....

Simple denial-of-service blunder turned out to be remote unauth code exec disaster Suspected Chinese government spies have been exploiting a newly disclosed critical bug in Ivanti VPN appliances since mid-March. This is now at least the third time in three years these snoops have been pwning these products....

Jeff Bezos' other space business finally shows signs of life with launch scheduled for next week The first batch of Amazon's Project Kuiper satellites is due to be lofted into orbit next week....

It's going to happen to you one day, so get your ducks in a row As Benjamin Franklin famously said: "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure," and that's especially true when it comes to disaster recovery....

Arm-based silicon to help Google hardware muscle in on territory of Microsoft's own Arm-based PCs MediaTek is bringing out a new chip for Chromebooks that blurs the boundary with Copilot+ PCs, sporting an 8-core CPU cluster and a neural processing unit (NPU) rated at 50 TOPS....

Founder shares 4K Altair BASIC source ahead of 50th anniversary Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has shared the 1975 source code for Altair BASIC....

Espionage? Botnets? Trying to exploit a zero-day? Someone or something is probing devices made by Juniper Networks and Palo Alto Networks, and researchers think it could be evidence of espionage attempts, attempts to build a botnet, or an effort to exploit zero-day vulnerabilities....

To be fair, it sounds like the team has ironed out the more controversial features Comment The latest version of Zorin OS, a popular Windows-macOS-like Ubuntu Linux remix, looks good, but there's one change that causes this vulture some concern....

ProtectEU plan wants to have its cake and eat it too The EU has issued its plans to keep the continent's denizens secure and among the pages of bureaucratese are a few worrying sections that indicate the political union wants to backdoor encryption by 2026, or even sooner....

Tariff moves threaten supply chain stability The cost of buying servers for business will inevitably rise as a result of US President Donald Trump's trade policies, at least in the short term, as uncertainty grips the supply chain....

Recovery's never been harder in today's tangled, outsourced infrastructure Comment Disaster recovery is getting tougher as IT estates sprawl across on-prem gear, public cloud, SaaS, and third-party ITaaS providers. And it's not floods or fires causing most outages anymore - ransomware now leads the pack, taking down systems faster than any natural disaster....

Former official also points to processes driving up the cost of IT investment The UK government does not have a clear picture of what it is spending on digital technology, and its approach to buying associated services and products drives up the cost of investment, MPs have heard....

Think tank report backs data mining for machine learning, leaving artists and rights holders behind Opinion Former UK prime minister Tony Blair became famous for standing shoulder to shoulder with allies, even though the fallout from the Iraq war forever sullied his reputation. Nonetheless, the institute that bears his name makes it clear who it stands with when it comes to using copyrighted material to fuel the expansion of machine learning into every human domain....

Stamp it out: Infostealer malware at German outfit may be culprit Britain's Royal Mail is investigating after a crew calling itself GHNA claimed it has put 144GB of the delivery giant's data up for sale, perhaps after acquiring it with the same stolen credentials it used to crack Samsung Germany....

The BBC and Blizzard Entertainment have chipped in with contributions The Open InfraFoundation has delivered a new version of OpenStack named Epoxy" and thinks it's an even better option for those seeking a VMware alternative....

GPT-4o likely trained on O'Reilly books without permission, figures appear to show Tech textbook tycoon Tim O'Reilly claims OpenAI mined his publishing house's copyright-protected tomes for training data and fed it all into its top-tier GPT-4o model without permission....

Crawlers snarfing long-tail content for training and whatnot cost us a fortune Web-scraping bots have become an unsupportable burden for the Wikimedia community due to their insatiable appetite for online content to train AI models....

Tech slugged with higher duties, broad base 10% hike, semiconductors avoid retaliatory levies for now US President Donald Trump has imposed a base ten percent tariff on all imports into America, and higher levies on goods from major producers of digital tech, such as China, South Korea, and Taiwan....

Double-oh-sh... The name's not Bond. It's O'Brien - Keith O'Brien, now-former global payroll compliance manager at the Dublin, Ireland office of HR software-as-a-service maker Rippling....

Seven gas turbines planned to juice datacenter demand by 2027 Developers on Wednesday announced plans to bring up to 4.5 gigawatts of natural gas-fired power online by 2027 at the site of what was once Pennsylvania's largest coal plant, as part of a proposed datacenter campus running AI and high-performance computing workloads....

Bosses say theft now the name of the game with a shift in tactics, apparent branding Big-game ransomware crew Hunters International says its criminal undertaking has become "unpromising, low-converting, and extremely risky," and it is mulling shifting tactics amid an apparent rebrand....

CEO hails 'transformative year' as IPO puts 'puter maker on the big board Updated Raspberry Pi hasn't felt the sting of US tariffs yet, and having its boards built outside China might give it an edge over rivals, analysts reckon....

Fallout shows how what you say must be central to disaster planning Opinion Oracle is being accused of poor incident comms as it reels from two reported data security mishaps over the past fortnight, amid a reluctance to publicly acknowledge all of the events as well as allegedly deleting evidence from the web....

Hike is no joke and users are not laughing Microsoft's Power BI price rises have arrived, with some tiers increasing by up to 40 percent....

Has until month end to make an offer for semiconductor design and licensing shop Qualcomm has confirmed its interest in buying high-speed connectivity module designer Alphawave Semi, a move that could see yet another major British tech operation swallowed up by a foreign business....

Organizational, technological resilience combined defeat the disease that is cybercrime When IT disasters strike, it can become a matter of life and death for healthcare organizations - and criminals know it....

Victims expect to spend considerable time and money over privacy incident, lawyers argue Specialist class action lawyers have launched proceedings against Oracle in Texas over two alleged data breaches....

Tip-lipped for 30 years before becoming an 'unrivaled advocate' for the site Obit Betty Webb MBE, one of the team who worked at the code-breaking Bletchley Park facility in England during the Second World War, has died at the age of 101....

5M in savings? Should've gone to third-party support International optometry company Specsavers has paused the global standardization of its Oracle ERP system and moved to third-party support, saving 5 million ($6.5 million) that can be reallocated to the business....

Boosted human-computer interface promises better communication for patients who lost ability to speak Some smart cookies have implemented a brain-computer interface that can synthesize speech from thought in near real-time....

Cupertino already squashed 'em in more recent releases - which this week get a fresh round of fixes Apple has delivered a big batch of OS updates, some of which belatedly patch older versions of its operating systems to address exploited-in-the-wild flaws the iGiant earlier fixed in more recent releases....

With help from UK operatives, because it's getting tougher to run the scam in the USA North Korea's scamming, thieving, and AI-abusing fake IT workers are increasingly targeting European employers....

But his emails! Sharing them with Google! Senior members of the US National Security Council, including the White House national security adviser Michael Waltz, have been accused of using their personal Gmail accounts to exchange sensitive information....

Thunderbirds are Pro: Open-source email client to get message hosting, appointment scheduling, more Thunderbird, Firefox maker Mozilla's open-source email client, is aiming to reinvent itself as a more comprehensive communications platform....

AI accelerators to see the light, literally Lightmatter this week unveiled a pair of silicon photonic interconnects designed to satiate the growing demand for chip-to-chip bandwidth associated with ever-denser AI deployments....

Chipzilla chief asked customers to be 'brutally honest' ... which will lead to what changes, we wonder Vision Not even Intel's top brass know what's on newly minted CEO Lip-Bu Tan's chopping block....

Nobody's tested the tapes this decade, thinks to back up the Recycle Bin, or takes care when using rm On Call Special How can you avoid a disaster recovery disaster?...

Old naming convention didn't just 'screw up' the NVLink nomenclature - it left money on the table Comment At its GPU Technology Conference last month, Nvidia broke with convention by shifting its definition of what counts as a GPU....

New Glenn landing scuppered by engine problems The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is closing its investigations into both the SpaceX Starship Flight 7 explosion and Blue Origin New Glenn-1 landing failure....

Copilot told us that half a century is 25 years. It feels much longer Microsoft will officially hit the half-century mark on Friday as the Windows giant turns 50 years old. What do you consider the highs and lows of the company's journey to dominance?...

'There needs to be a better economic as well as copyright framework', Thomson Reuters CPO tells us Interview Thomson Reuters, based in Canada, recently scored a partial summary judgment against Ross Intelligence, after a US court ruled the AI outfit's use of the newswire giant's copyrighted Westlaw content didn't qualify as fair use....

Commerce chief threatens to pull grants so firms double down on US spending More doubt is being cast over the US CHIPS Act program with the Trump administration threatening to halt payments unless companies in line to receive funding commit to substantially expand their own investments....

The UK government must be thrilled Google will soon offer end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) email for all users, even those who do not use Google Workspace, and says it'll do so without imposing any undue stress on IT admins....