The Register

What hath science wrought? A clump of living human brain cells wired into a silicon chip has answered the internet's most important computing question: yes, it can run Doom....

Inference at scale is much more complex than more GPUs, more tokens, more profits feature By now you've probably heard AI datacenters called factories. It's an apt description: power goes in and tokens come out....

'There's a naive techno-utopianism in Whitehall' Brits are worried that AI will dehumanize public services, leading to less human contact and oversight as well as job losses, according to people questioned by pollster Ipsos....

Remembering the day the Venera 3 impacted Venus It is 60 years since humanity first got up close and personal with another planet, with the impact of the Soviet Union's Venera 3....

Meta supposedly considering untapped capacity in deal brokered by Nvidia OpenAI and compute partner Oracle have reportedly abandoned a planned expansion of their flagship Stargate datacenter, after negotiations were stalled by financing and Sam Altman's apparent fear of commitment....

It's the end of the world as we know it, and AI feels fine Anthropic economists Maxim Massenkoff and Peter McCrory report that AI is not eliminating as many jobs as experts have predicted....

US unemployment ticked up to 4.4% The US economy shed 92,000 jobs in February, a dramatic downturn from analyst expectations that it would add about 50,000 jobs. The shortfall stoked growing fears that AI could be contributing to higher unemployment....

Now if only device makers would deliver higher quality components Thanks to Anthropic's AI and its bug-detecting abilities, Firefox users can now enjoy stronger security. Unfortunately, if browser crashes rather than security flaws are the problem, Claude probably can't help....

Steals SMS messages, location data, contacts ... and delivers it to Hamas-linked crew Hamas-linked attackers are dropping spyware disguised as an emergency-alert app on Israelis' smartphones via SMS messages, according to security researchers....

Bad legislation, but an especially big headache for FOSS Many web sites, social media services, and other platforms require age verification on the theory that it will protect kids from seeing inappropriate content. But now some US states want to require the operating system itself to check your age and that could cause big headaches for FOSS vendors....

Switchzilla says flaws could allow file overwrites or privilege escalation Just when network admins thought the Cisco SD-WAN patch queue might finally be shrinking, Switchzilla has confirmed miscreants are exploiting more vulnerabilities in its SD-WAN management software....

Brands Trump administration decision 'legally unsound' and has 'no choice but to challenge it in court' AI giant Anthropic says that it has "no choice" but to sue the US government after being officially designated a supply chain risk to national security....

Humanity and its neighbor safe from this menace at least Scientists have ruled out the possibility that the near-Earth asteroid 2024 YR4 might hit the Moon on December 22, 2032....

Draft rules could force Nvidia and AMD to seek government approval before selling abroad The Trump administration is reportedly planning new restrictions on GPU exports, aimed not only at controlling who gets them, but at driving AI investment back into the US....

Crooks tweak familiar copy-paste ruse so that victims run malicious commands themselves A new twist on the long-running ClickFix scam is now tricking Windows users into launching Windows Terminal and pasting malware into it themselves - handing the credential-stealing Lumma infostealer the keys to their browser vault....

House of Lords committee says ministers must not trade a 124B sector for promises of future tech growth Britain's creative industries will face significant damage unless the government strengthens AI copyright law, according to a House of Lords committee....

Admins get another year before migration pressure ramps up Microsoft has delayed the opt-out phase for the new enterprise version of Outlook to 2027, giving administrators another 12 months to get ready for migration....

FBI and French GIGN swoop on Saint Martin, John Daghita in cuffs The son of a government contractor was arrested in the Caribbean after allegedly stealing more than $46 million in seized cryptocurrency from the US Marshals Service, the FBI says....

Its aim is wide, covering everything from social networks to GenAI Norway's Forbrukerradet consumer council is taking aim at the creeping enshittification of modern life in a 100-page report - and a splendid four-minute video which we highly recommend....

Released from the curse of the update bork fairy Microsoft has finally fixed a Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) bug it introduced in Windows 10's final update....

It promised 1.15B... but finance ministry yet to show 'formal commitment' to adopt Workday SaaS, watchdog says The UK's Treasury is yet to fully commit to joining a multi-billion pound ERP and HR shared services program it has agreed to fund, potentially slashing any resulting savings, according to a report from the National Audit Office....

Attackers accessed systems holding data tied to millions of Oyster and contactless users Transport for London has confirmed that a 2024 breach exposed the data of more than 7 million people - a far larger crowd than the few thousand customers originally warned that their details might be at risk....

Seven-year Freedom of Information battle heads to tribunal Exclusive The UK's Department for Transport (DfT) is assembling government lawyers to fight the Information Commissioner's decision that it must release a document summarizing the lessons from the 2018 Gatwick drone chaos....

OpenAI CEO's principles lasted about 12 hours before $200M check arrived Opinion A week ago today, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he'd draw the same lines as Anthropic. By that night, he'd signed a Department of Defense deal that included no such AI protections. What's going on here?...

Discovering, and explaining, the bizarre cause was harder than the job he was sent to do On Call Welcome to another instalment of On Call, The Register's weekly reader-contributed column that tells tales of times when tech support turned troublesome....

focusgroup' has nothing to do with market research, offers devs faster coding and faster websites for everyone Microsoft has started a preview of technology that eases the task of developing websites with complex navigation elements that don't need a pointing device to operate....

Remember: Truth is the first casualty of war Iranian publisher Fars News Agency, which is aligned with the country's government, has claimed the drone strikes on Amazon Web Services' Middle East datacenters were deliberate and had strategic significance....

Call to do better with chips and put AI everywhere is more than rhetoric because China's scientists are sprinting ahead China's government has again made reducing reliance on imported digital technology a major goal....

Alarm bells are ringing in the open source community, but commercial licensing is also at risk Earlier this week, Dan Blanchard, maintainer of a Python character encoding detection library called chardet, released a new version of the library under a new software license....

Of the 90 zero-days GTIG tracked in 2025, 43 hit enterprise tech Zero-day exploitation targeting enterprise tech products reached an all-time high last year, with China-linked cyber-espionage groups remaining the most prolific state-backed users, according to Google....

It's ok, Todd. You're only paranoid if you're wrong. Okta chairman and CEO Todd McKinnon said he believes it would be difficult for an LLM alone to replicate the quality of SaaS applications his company provides, but that doesn't stop him from worrying about competition from bots....

Don't flip the switch until the NRC says you can, okay? Bill Gates-backed nuclear outfit TerraPower finally has approval to build its Natrium reactor. However, it may still face issues finding a steady fuel supply. And, oh yeah, it hasn't built any reactors like this before....

MOIS-linked MuddyWater crew has a new, custom implant An Iranian cyber crew believed to be part of the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) has been embedded in multiple US companies' networks - including a bank, software firm, and airport, among others - since the beginning of February, with more activity in the days following the US and Israeli military strikes, according to security researchers....

Bit tricky enforcing this. What's the penalty if they go up anyway? Seven of the top US AI companies and hyperscalers have officially agreed to protect American consumers from price hikes due to datacenter energy and infrastructure increases caused by the AI build boom....

You made a time machine vapemobile ... out of a Delorean G-Wiz? The world would be a better place if all of us were as willing to upcycle as aggressively as YouTuber Chris Doel, who has demonstrated that batteries from 500 disposable vapes can actually power one of the UK's most famous electric vehicles....

LibreOffice steward says Commish undermines its own standards by asking for feedback via Excel spreadsheet The Document Foundation has taken a swipe at the European Commission over its consultation on guidance for the EU's Cyber Resilience Act - because the feedback template is only available as a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet....

Authorization Act seeks to keep lights on until commercial stations are ready The NASA Authorization Act of 2026 has been approved, and alongside a directive for NASA to establish a permanent Moon base, the legislation includes language extending the International Space Station to 2032....

Euro productivity suite appears to be hosted Nextcloud and Collabora Online In the battle of the online office suites, a new contender has entered the ring... but under the wrestler's mask, we think there may be a familiar face....

FCC not pleased about EU space tech reqs to enter Common market, among other things Updated The US government is consulting with the telecoms industry about "reciprocity" in satellite services, in a move that could see another dispute erupt with the European Union over regulations....

Project initiated by Nuxt lead Daniel Roe attracts wide support thanks to multiple issues with the official interface A new browser for the npm registry has launched in alpha, following grassroots demand for an alternative to the official npmjs.com interface....

Embeds Edge into AI assistant, ignores questions about opt-in Microsoft is rolling out a Copilot update to Windows Insiders that embeds web browsing directly into the assistant, opening links in a side panel rather than launching your default browser....

Contractors tasked with improving AI reportedly had access to intimate footage captured through wearables Britain's privacy watchdog is asking questions about Meta's AI-powered smart glasses after reports that human contractors reviewing recordings from the devices were exposed to extremely private moments captured by unsuspecting users....

Veteran spacecraft overcome computer glitches as atmosphere 'flooded by electrons' Almost two years ago, a solar storm hit Earth, triggering auroras that were seen as far south as Mexico. The storm also reached Mars and was detected by a pair of ESA spacecraft, Mars Express and ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO)....

Bots hunt deformed RF contacts inside the collider's 27 km vacuum tubes The UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) and CERN have jointly developed a "mouse-sized robot" to inspect parts of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that are out of reach to humans....

Project dialed back, BT asked to keep current system for another 54 months The UK Ministry of Justice (MoJ) will pay telco BT 94.6 million plus VAT to keep its in-cell Prisoner Telephony Service (PTS) going for another 54 months after repeatedly pushing back procurement of its replacement....

Geopolitical tensions turn up the pressure for European legislators The UK is still in the design phase of digital currency as the EU comes under political pressure to accelerate the development of a digital euro to bolster the bloc's sovereignty and resilience....

Survey of UK bosses find 62 percent of bosses rely on LLMs for help Most business leaders in the United Kingdom appear to have outsourced a lot of their decisionmaking to machine learning models, according to a survey of 200 suits published by data streaming tools vendor Confluent. /p>...

Lower app store fees are on the way, plus an on-ramp for third party digital bazaars Google has spelled out changes it will make to the fees it charges developers who use its app store and payment services, and says they represent the end of its long legal battle with Epic Games....

Offers booming customer accelerator biz as evidence, while VMware props up its software business Broadcom will soon deploy multiple gigawatts worth of custom accelerators at Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic, a feat it says shows AI companies and hyperscalers can't successfully develop and deploy their own silicon any time soon....

Meanwhile Chipzilla's 18A process tech could see external deployment after all Intel's Foundry division is near to sealing a deal for its advanced packaging technology that would contribute billions of dollars a year to the struggling chipmaker, CFO David Zinsner said on Wednesday....