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S&P 500 businesses warn investors they may never see ROI in SEC filings America's largest corporations are increasingly listing AI among the major risks they must disclose in formal financial filings, despite bullish statements in public about the potential business opportunities it offers....

The never Nvidia networking party just got another option Chip vendors like AMD may be closing the gap with Nvidia on GPU FLOPS, memory bandwidth, and HBM capacity, but without a high-speed interconnect and switch, like NVLink and NVSwitch, their ability to scale that performance remains limited....

Outfit was accused of charging for specialist IT labor performed by uncertified folks A Maryland IT, cloud, and security consultancy will have to pay the US government at least $14.75 million to settle multiple allegations that it issued false invoices between 2018-2023....

Simular is starting with industries like insurance and healthcare with tons of forms to fill When Ang Li, co-founder of agent software biz Simular, started working at Google DeepMind in 2017, software engineers at the search giant were skeptical about the usefulness of machine learning, or artificial intelligence (AI) as it has come to be called....

Uncertainty to blame as businesses wait to see what US Prez Trump does next World War Fee Gartner has trimmed its growth forecast for worldwide IT spending in 2025 as an "uncertainty pause" hits net new spending, caused in part by the unpredctability of US President Donald Trump's trade tariff policy....

Exos and IronWolf drives show spinning rust isn't going anywhere Seagate has released two 30 TB hard drives based on its HAMR technology, pitching them as more energy efficient cheaper options for datacenter operators dealing with AI workloads....

Stealth jets can't fight, can't fly much, and can't shoot UK missiles, says NAO The F-35 stealth fighter is not meeting its potential in British service because of availability issues, a shortage of support personnel, and delays in integrating key weapons that are limiting the aircraft's effectiveness....

First, Zuck takes Manhattan. Then he might actually deliver a product that matters Meta overlord-for-life Mark Zuckerberg has revealed he plans to build several multi-gigawatt datacenter clusters, with the first to come online in 2026....

Off-the-charts gravitational waves ripple out from merged dead stars Researchers have observed the largest ever collision between two massive black holes witnessed by humans, a finding that's sent astrophysicists back to their calculators to re-think models....

Maybe CEO Jensen Huang's million-dollar meal at Mar-a-Lago has paid off in the form of permission to sell the H20 and a new RTX Pro GPU Nvidia has announced the US government will allow it to resume sales of its GPUs to Chinese customers....

Stricter regulation follows last week's tariff whack The government of Malaysia on Monday closed a back door that may have allowed the export of AI chips to China....

Anyone investigated Grok? Just sayin'... Someone hacked Elmo's X account on Sunday, making it appear as if the lovable Sesame Street monster with the habit of referring to themselves in the third-person spewed a series of now-removed antisemitic, racist, and anti-Trump posts....

Looks like DoD FOMO struck Silicon Valley The Pentagon's embrace of the AI industry just put up to $800million on the table as the Department of Defense has issued a quartet of contracts bringing the biggest names in the biz officially into the fold....

Rowhammer returns for more memory-meddling fun The Rowhammer attack on computer memory is back, and for the first time, it's able to mess with bits in Nvidia GPUs, despite defenses designed to protect against this kind of hacking....

With half the AI devs in the world, if China can't build on American hardware, they'll build on their own, Jensen warns If the US military wouldn't be caught dead building supercomputers using Chinese kit, there's no reason to think the People's Liberation Army would risk doing the same, argues Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang....

Neil Smith has been trying to get the railroad industry to listen since 2012, but it took a CISA warning to get there When independent security researcher Neil Smith reported a vulnerability in a comms standard used by trains to the US government in 2012, he most likely didn't expect it would take until 2025 to sort the matter out, but here we are....

Latest release handles NBD and bcachefs, but you'll need 64-bit hardware to boot it GParted Live is a tiny live CD image that can copy, move, and resize partitions. It can be a lifesaver - but not for i686 any more....

Delivers specs in the form of user stories Amazon Web Services has created what it's calling an "agentic IDE" that it claims avoids the pitfalls of vibe coding....

MechaHitler? Garbage In, Garbage Out Opinion So, on the 4th of July, a big deal to those on my side of the pond, Elon Musk announced, "We have improved @Grok significantly." On Tuesday, July 8, the results of those changes appeared....

Just because a student reads a book doesn't mean Midjourney gets to eat Disney A research paper commissioned by the European Parliament has called for an EU law to pay writers, musicians, and artists whose work has been used to train GenAI models....

First US-Soviet joint mission showed detente in action, but astronauts had a close call on return home It is 50 years since the last hurrah of the Apollo program, with a mission that saw the final launch of an Apollo vehicle, and a subsequent docking with a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft in orbit....

We need more paranoid Androids. And, well, everything else Opinion The 21st century is turning out weirder than we thought. For the entire history of art, for example, tools could be used and abused and would work more or less well, but generally helped the wishes and skills of the user. They did not plot against us. Now they can - and do....

Cross-Channel pact aims to bolster navigation and timing tech as satellite signals face growing jamming threats Britain and France are to work more closely on technology to back up the familiar Global Positioning System (GPS), which is increasingly subject to interference in many regions around the world....

Report on serious organized crime fails to account for differences, agency says The UK's National Crime Agency (NCA) has hit back at a think tank after it assessed its US counterpart, the FBI, to be nearly three times more effective....

For the lack of a little documentation, two techies did a lot of accidental damage Who, Me? Alas, the weekend is over, but The Register tries to make your entry to the working week a little more enjoyable by bringing you a fresh installment of Who, Me? - the column in which you explain your worst slip-ups....

Warned that ChatGPT and Copilot had already lost, it stopped boasting and packed up its pawns Google's Gemini chatbot declined to play Chess against the Atari 2600, after learning the vintage gaming console had already vanquished other AIs....

Despite loathing the USA, Iran wants providers who match NIST's definition of cloud computing The Information Technology Organization of Iran (ITOI), the government body that develops and implements IT services for the country, is looking for suppliers of cloud computing....

PLUS: China's massive lithium find; Cisco's new Asia boss; Japan and EU plan satcomms collab; and more Asia In Brief Indonesia's government is investigating possible corruption during a $600 million program that saw around a quarter of a million Chromebooks installed in schools....

PLUS: Bluetooth mess leaves cars exposed; Bitcoin ATMs attacked; Deepfakers imitate US secretary of state Marco Rubio; and more Infosec In Brief Nvidia last week advised customers to ensure they employ mitigations against Rowhammer attacks, after researchers found one of its workstation-grade GPUs is susceptible to the exploit....

Thick resumes with thin LinkedIn connections are one sign. Refusing an in-person interview is another By now, the North Korean fake IT worker problem is so ubiquitous that if you think you don't have any phony resumes or imposters in your interview queue, you're asleep at the wheel....

Many don't realize or forget, but the FOSS world has ideological wings, too Comment The new fork of the X.org X11 server is conservative... and we don't mean just technologically conservative....

Tell me, Mr. Smith ... what good is an agent if it's unable to speak? We have protocols and standards for just about everything. It's generally helpful when we can all agree on how technologies should talk to one another. So, it was only a matter of time before the first protocols governing agentic AI started cropping up....

No reason given for the 6% cull, but the CEO has previously talked up AI taking jobs Recruit Holdings, the Japanese job site conglomerate that owns recruitment job site Indeed and employer reviewer Glassdoor, has eliminated about 1,300 positions....

Predicted a 24% boost, but clocked a 19% drag Artificial intelligence coding tools are supposed to make software development faster, but researchers who tested these tools in a randomized, controlled trial found the opposite....

An announcement so weird it could only come from the Trump administration video Flanked by a pair of buzzing drones that threatened to drown out his voice, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth reached up to grab a memorandum hung from a third drone hovering above his head....

Data poisoning, meet data detox ai-pocalypse Computer scientists say they've devised a way to remove image-based protection mechanisms developed to protect artists from unwanted use of their work for AI training....

As allegations fly regarding fraudulent powers of attorney, one member wants to wind up AFRINIC and start again The receiver of the African Network Information Center (AFRINIC) has not explained why he chose to annul its recent election, prompting ICANN to again warn that it may need to step in, and longtime AFRINIC litigant Cloud Innovation to call for the body to be wound up....

Intruders looked up how to use curl mid-attack - rookie errors kept damage minimal Huntress security researchers observed exploitation of the CVSS 10.0 remote code execution (RCE) flaw in Wing FTP Server on July 1, just one day after its public disclosure....

Hush-hush settlement follows decision to wind down PeopleSoft support Enterprise software support giant Rimini Street has entered into a confidential settlement agreement with Oracle, signaling the two companies may be nearing the end of their long-running legal dispute....

A controversial and polarizing figure, but also widely hailed obituary Matt Trout will be missed by many, even though he was a divisive figure who featured several times on The Register....

Rare earth metals are vital to electronics, and most of them are mined in China There is only one active rare earth mine in the whole of the United States. As of Friday, the Department of Defense has become the largest shareholder in the company that owns and operates it....

A warmer world will affect bit barn resilience, warn consultants Many of the world's top 100 datacenter hubs are at risk from rising global temperatures, as growing cooling requirements push up costs and water consumption, while shutdowns to prevent overheating during heat waves may become more frequent....

One in five users hit by service failures in the last year, research finds A survey of PostgreSQL users has found that the levels of uptime experienced using cloud providers falls well short of their expectations in terms of reliability....

WIndows 11 might have a bigger market share, but Windows 10 is still alive. Kind of Even as its market share is finally eclipsed by Windows 11, Windows 10 is still alive and in need of fixes. Alongside the replacement of the Blue Screen of Death in Windows 11, Microsoft has released a fix for the Extended Security Updates wizard to Windows 10 Insiders....

Intro of package for cloud ERP is creating challenges, and more changes likely next year Biz customers should expect further changes to SAP's licensing as the company introduces the reboot of its Business Suite construct into its product packages, the German-speaking user group has warned....

'Our offer from Broadcom was five times higher than we expected' The German arm of telecoms biz Telefonica has shifted support for its VMware installed base to Spinnaker after Broadcom quoted it a renewal figure five times the size of what it was previously paying....

Last summer's riots show how some content can be harmful but not illegal The Online Safety Act fails to tackle online misinformation, leaving the UK in need of further regulation to curb the viral spread of false content, a report from MPs has found....

Agreement or otherwise expected from CISPE top brass before August Exclusive Microsoft has tabled a fresh set of commercial terms for an association of cloud providers in Europe that earlier filed a complaint with antitrust authorities in the trading bloc over allegations of anti-competitive licensing practices....

First came the dodgy lawyer, then the explosively angry HR person, leaving a whistleblower techie to save his career On Call Welcome once again to On Call, The Register's Friday column that shares your stories of tech support terror and triumph....

'He's useless with computers and can't even install an application' says lawyer A Russian professional basketball player is cooling his heels in a French detention center after being arrested and accused of acting as a negotiator for a ransomware gang....