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90% of schools already compliant, but at least now there's paperwork Ministers are moving to turn England's patchwork of school phone bans into law, after peers backed fresh changes to the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill in a Monday vote....

Spoiler: There's no magic value. Just a timer, some kernel calls, and too much coffee Windows has always had a built-in portal to the very recent past: Task Manager's CPU usage meter....

Fake emails already doing the rounds as ransomware crew boasts about what it allegedly stole UK enterprise software consultancy The Adaptavist Group is investigating a security breach after an intruder logged in with stolen credentials, while a ransomware crew claims it grabbed far more than the company is currently admitting....

Admins are tired of taking photos, so this enables secure on-site unattended enrolment Japanese industrial giant Panasonic has created a new form of QR code it says will only work on designated devices and environments....

And China is loving it Iranian media is claiming that the US used backdoors and/or botnets to disable networking equipment during the current war, and Chinese state media is dining out on the allegations....

Dud contracts, proprietary designs, and zero-experience supplier make for quite the mess The NASA Office of Inspector General, the aerospace agency's auditor, fears that work on next-generation spacesuits won't finish in time to use them for the planned Artemis III Moon landing mission in 2028....

Remember what we promised when you subscribed for a year? Well, we've got a new deal that's better for us. Microsoft's GitHub has stopped accepting new Copilot individual subscriptions while the code hosting biz figures out how it can meet its service commitments without breaking the bank....

A lesson in how not to respond to vulnerability reports UPDATED Vibe-coding platform Lovable is pooh-poohing a researcher's finding that anyone could open a free account on the service and read other users' sensitive info, including credentials, chat history, and source code. However, the company's story keeps changing: First it attributed the publicly exposed info to "intentional behavior" and "unclear documentation," then threw bug-bounty service HackerOne under the bus....

The struggles continue for Fermi America's 17 GW bit barn ambitions It's been a weekend filled with dizzying changes in the boardroom at datacenter wannabe Fermi America as it hopes eventually to expand its West Texas campus to about 17 gigawatts of behind-the-meter generation capacity....

Tim Cook is handing the reins to John Ternus at Apple Have you heard? Apple's Tim Cook is stepping down after 15 years leading the iMaker's business. He'll become executive chairman and hand the reins over to John Ternus, a senior VP of hardware engineering, effective September 1....

Official involved in deal tells El Reg number doesn't paint entire picture of datacenter's economic benefit When Rockland County, New York, approved nearly $77 million in tax breaks for JPMorgan Chase's datacenter expansion in 2024, no one showed up to object. Two years and a whole lot of bit barns in the news cycle later, government watchdogs are calling foul over the project's lone permanent job....

Installation and pre-approval without consent looks dubious under EU law One app should not modify another app without asking for and receiving your explicit consent. Yet Anthropic's Claude Desktop for macOS installs files that affect other vendors' applications without disclosure, even before those applications have been installed, and authorizes browser extensions without consent....

Good news for those working with Windows, bad news for Paragon Software The feature list for Linux kernel 7.1 is taking shape, and a standout addition has already landed: a new read-write NTFS driver....

Tyler Buchanan admits role in scheme that stole at least $8 million in virtual currency A Scottish man linked to the Scattered Spider cybercrime crew has pleaded guilty in the US to a phishing and SIM-swap scheme that stole at least $8 million in cryptocurrency....

It won't provide much juice, but its creator calls it a 'nanowatt nuclear power plant' It's illegal and impractical to construct a nuclear power plant in your backyard. But a DIY tritium nuclear battery is far less dramatic - just don't expect any appreciable amount of energy from it....

Excessive friendliness may cause users to forget they're talking to a very confident autocomplete A study into how humans interact with chatbots suggests the fastest way to make an LLM feel human isn't making it smarter - it's making it seem nicer....

US-based cloud providers could have to disclose certain data under American legal orders The European Commission has awarded four contracts designed to advance cloud sovereignty in the EU, but one uses services from S3NS, a joint venture between Thales and Google Cloud, raising questions about its real independence....

Google previews Android CLI as agentic development continues to snowball Google has introduced a new Android command-line interface built specifically for AI agents, claiming a 70 percent cut in token usage and three times reduction in task completion time....

Out-of-band or out of control? Microsoft has pushed out an out-of-band update to address the restart loop that hit some Windows Server devices after its April update....

Bit barns need to worry more about space, access to grid - overstuffed center no longer a must, say experts UK AI datacenter capacity could migrate away from London as power shortages, planning constraints and reduced reliance on low-latency connections to financial firms make other locations more attractive....

Companies get to keep IP developed for government projects The UK government is opening 80 million in AI procurement talks with tech firms, drawing on its 500 million sovereign capability fund....

Workstations that made distant desktops feel local is headed for a slow shutdown HP is quietly pulling the plug on its Teradici-derived remote desktop business, shelving HP Anyware and its zero client hardware barely a few years after betting big on the tech as the backbone of its hybrid work push....

Wouldn't be the first time a Jeff Bezos company left a package in the wrong place Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket nailed the landing this weekend, but failed at the crucial part of delivering a satellite to a usable orbit....

330M deal leaves service with no ownership of software built to connect trusts to the platform The UK government is considering ending Palantir's involvement in a central NHS data platform after coming under fire from MPs, unions, and campaigners....

Committee launches inquiry into emerging chip designs to curb datacenter energy use MPs are probing whether radically different, low-energy chip designs can stop AI from turning the UK's power grid into a bottleneck....

We've been here before. This time, we may not get out Opinion Fans of the creative arts often find out where creators gather to talk among themselves, then sneak in to eavesdrop on what those masters of the art talk about. Golden insights, daring concepts, cutting-edge thinking? Not a bit. Gossip, if you're lucky. Travel miseries, if you're not. Mostly, they talk about money....

Blames outfit called Context.ai, which reckons an agentic OAuth tangle caused the incident Vercel, the company that created the open source Next.js web development framework, has a data leak that led to compromise of some customer credentials, and blamed an outfit called Context.ai for the mess....

You can't fix what you can't see - especially when your workspace is a maelstrom Who, Me? Welcome to yet another Monday, and therefore to this week's edition of Who, Me? For those unfamiliar, it's The Register's reader-contributed column that shares your stories of workplace messes, and how you tried to clean them up without dirtying your career prospects....

Tests scheduled for May can't come soon enough after VGER 1 power glitch led to instrument shutdown NASA has revealed it's working on a plan called The Big Bang" that it hopes will extend the working lives of the Voyager probes....

PLUS: India bins ID app pre-install plan; Robot wins Beijing half-marathon; AI writing Manga speech bubbles; and more! Asia In Brief Indonesia's Ministry of Communication and Digital Affairs has suspended the nation's game rating system (IGRS) after claims the service leaked developer creds and video of unreleased games....

Aren't we all just prompting tokens of linguistic meaning and hoping the other person isn't bullshitting us? kettle It's a week of the year, which means there's been the discovery of yet another prompt injection attack that will force supposedly well-guarded AI bots to spill secrets by asking the right way....

Passing the buck, and the blame, down the road shows lack of AI companies' maturity OPINION AI vendors: "You need to use AI to fight AI threats (and do everything else in your corporate IT environment)." Also AI vendors: "That's not a security flaw; it's working as intended."...

Non profit loses several staffers including its executive director Ruby Central, a nonprofit that supports the Ruby programming language ecosystem, in is "real financial jeopardy," according to a missive from its board members....

Agent Memory stores AI chat scraps off to the side and recalls them when needed Not only is hardware memory scarce these days, but context memory, the conversational data exchanged with AI models, can be an issue too....

From August 17, the outfit will collect customer metadata by default unless you pay for the top tier Unless a customer pays for the most expensive enterprise license, or the law forbids it, Atlassian is going to collect their data to train its AI models. And you can't fully opt out....

Stripped-down Ultra for laptops and low-power edge boxes Intel brought a few more chips home from Taiwan this week, with a new round of budget-oriented Core Series 3 processors fabbed right in the US-of-A....

The bar for creating visual assets has been lowered to the ability to converse with a model Anthropic is known for its industry-leading Claude Code that writes programs, but why stop there? The company, on Friday, introduced a research preview service called Claude Design that creates visual assets, potentially putting some folks out of work....

Bug hiding in plain sight for over a decade lands on KEV list CISA is sounding the alarm on a newly-exploited Apache ActiveMQ bug, ordering federal agencies to patch within two weeks as attackers circle a flaw that's been quietly lurking for more than a decade....

Or, how public information and a 5 tracker exposed an avoidable opsec lapse Militaries around the world spend countless hours training, developing policies, and implementing best operational security practices, so imagine the size of the egg on the face of the Dutch navy when journalists managed to track one of its warships for less than the cost of some hagelslag and a coffee....

We hear Sweden is lovely place for workloads to visit Microsoft Azure capacity woes are back, and worse than ever, judging by the complaints of UK users....

Starts new one on boot loops More than a year after giving administrators an unwelcome surprise with a security update that turned out to be a Windows Server 2025 upgrade, Microsoft has marked the incident as "resolved."...

Rosalind Franklin moving again, though another budget cut looms NASA is moving ahead with its contribution to the European Space Agency's (ESA) long-delayed Rosalind Franklin Mars rover despite another attempt by the Trump administration to cut funding for the effort....

Users who stream their own media files ticked off as Plex warns Alexa skill will die on June 15 Plex is pulling the plug on its Alexa integration, leaving anyone who relied on voice commands to wrangle their media library out of luck....

University student says he plans to move to Android, but concedes iOS engineers acting fast Apple is finally working on a fix for a bug that has locked some users out of their iPhones for months, The Register understands....

Jack might be on Track, but the order screen certainly isn't Bork!Bork!Bork! It was not so much Jack in the Box as Bork on the Screen at a US drive-through fast food outlet the other day. Luckily, a Reg reader was there to take it all in....

Top civil servant tells MPs bid was strong on quality and value for money The UK government awarded Capita a 239 million contract to run the Civil Service Pension Scheme (CSPS) after assessing its past performance, despite the rollout later leaving thousands of retirees waiting for payments, a senior civil servant has said....

All that kit, and the fix was simply stepping aside On Call Life is filled with random events, but The Register tries to make readers' lives just a little more predictable by always using Friday morning to bring you a new instalment of On Call - the reader-contributed column that shares your tech support stories....

Pause your Mythos panic because mainstream models anyone can use already pick holes in popular software Anthropic withheld its Mythos bug-finding model from public release due to concerns that it would enable attackers to find and exploit vulnerabilities before anyone could react....

Fast WAN consortium thinks neoclouds are ripe for hookups The IOWN Global Forum will likely focus on datacenter interconnect use cases in the, to help diverse providers of AI infrastructure ply their trade....

Fix for critical flaw is an OS update you may not be able to make because the junk data uses all memory More than 230 different models of Cisco Wi-Fi access points may be writing 5MB a day of nonessential data, filling their onboard flash memory to the point at which they lack space for future software updates....