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Could dramatically reduce latency between datacenters and on mobile nets A team of networking boffins has published fresh research on hollow fiber cables that it claims could offer the lowest ever recorded optical loss for a fiber - meaning the signal would weaken less as it travels, leading to faster speeds and lower latencies....

Executive order adds space agency to National Security Exclusions, voiding collective bargaining rights for staff Happy Labor Day. The US administration has removed union recognition from NASA as budget cuts and layoffs loom....

Cloud customers left reeling as forecasts leap hundreds of percent Some Microsoft Azure customers have had a worrying few days after a problematic account migration caused forecast costs for the cloud service to skyrocket, triggering budget alerts....

Oracle billionaire funds project to predict immunity and develop treatments for hard-to-prevent diseases A research group funded by tech billionaire Larry Ellison is set to invest 118 million ($169.6 million) in applying AI to vaccine research with the UK's Oxford University....

BAE's sub hunter production line warms up - shame it's not for Britain Norway has ordered British-made Type 26 frigates in a contract valued at roughly 10 billion to the UK economy, but this may delay the introduction of the Royal Navy's own desperately needed ships....

Don't worry, there's a twist at the end Opinion Agatha Christie stuck a dagger in the notion that crime doesn't pay. With sales of between two and four billion books - fittingly, the exact number is a mystery - she built a career out of murder that out-bloodied Jack the Ripper. It's a fair bet that had she chosen to write about accountancy fraud instead, her sales would be between two and four billion fewer. Some crime is sexy. Some is not....

Trust and believe - AI models trained to see 'legal' doc as super legit Researchers at security firm Pangea have discovered yet another way to trivially trick large language models (LLMs) into ignoring their guardrails. Stick your adversarial instructions somewhere in a legal document to give them an air of unearned legitimacy - a trick familiar to lawyers the world over....

Superfast electrons traced back to the Sun The European Space Agency's (ESA) Solar Orbiter probe has pinpointed the source of electrons expelled by the Sun, with implications for forecasting space weather....

At last, enough hours in the day to RTFM Who, Me? No two mistakes are the same, but The Register thinks they're all worth celebrating each Monday when we serve up a fresh edition of Who, Me? - the reader-contributed column in which we share your most magnificent messes, and your means of making it out alive....

Sites at yourcountry.gov may also not bother with HTTPs Internet traffic to government domains often flows across borders, relies on a worryingly small number of network connections, or does not require encryption, according to new research....

PLUS: Spain cancels Huawei deal; Sony wants to use only recycled gold; Video of Alibaba's uncanny FOSS digital humans; and more Asia In Brief China's State Council last week announced a new IT policy called AI +", the successor to 2015's Internet +"....

PLUS: Microsoft ends no-MFA Azure access; WorkDay attack diverts payments; FreePBX warns of CVSS 10 flaw; and more Infosec In brief A flaw in Meta's WhatsApp app may have been exploited in a sophisticated attack against specific targeted users."...

"Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship" About 1,000 of a set of 15,000 open access scientific journals appear to exist mainly to extract fees from naive academics....

Running AIs on your own machine lets you stick it to the man and save some cash in the process Feature After a decade or two of the cloud, we're used to paying for our computing capability by the megabyte. As AI takes off, the whole cycle promises to repeat itself again, and while AI might seem relatively cheap now, it might not always be so....

We are drowning in code, but at least some folks are swimming opinion To fight the enshittification of software, the first step is to pinpoint why and how it happens. Some observers are trying to do that....

All good things must come to an end All good things must come to an end, and so too must the blocky glory of the Kilopixel. As the wood and robotic marvel crested the 200,000-pixel mark, its creator pulled the metaphorical plug....

End of verified end user status means South Korean memory vendors will need licenses to bring restricted chipmaking tech into Chinese fabs The US government already has a lot to say about what products chipmakers can and can't sell in China. This week the Commerce Department moved to make it harder for South Korean memory vendors Samsung and SK Hynix to continue manufacturing in the region....

The controls were left wide open on Pudu's robots A researcher caught the world's leading supplier of commercial service robots using shoddy admin security that let attackers redirect the delivery machines to anywhere and make them follow any command....

Chinese cloud provider reportedly joins the homegrown silicon party Alibaba has reportedly developed an AI accelerator amid growing pressure from Beijing to curb the nation's reliance on Nvidia GPUs....

Bias, a lack of safety reporting, and the whole 'MechaHitler' thing are all the evidence needed, say authors Public advocacy groups are demanding the US government cease any use of xAI's Grok in the federal government, calling the AI unsafe, untested, and ideologically biased....

GMP library test meltdown has AMD looking for answers Chipmaker AMD is looking into a report from the GMP project about two Ryzen processors that failed during testing. Could too much math be to blame?...

But the cure may ruin the web.... Opinion With AI's rise, AI web crawlers are strip-mining the web in their perpetual hunt for ever more content to feed into their Large Language Model (LLM) mills. How much traffic do they account for? According to Cloudflare, a major content delivery network (CDN) force, 30% of global web traffic now comes from bots. Leading the way and growing fast? AI bots....

Look who's visiting the watering hole these days Amazon today said it disrupted an intel-gathering attempt by Russia's APT29 to trick Microsoft users into unwittingly granting the Kremlin-backed cyberspies access to their accounts and data....

Platform's staffer complains security review was 'rushed' Microsoft-owned collaborative coding platform GitHub is deepening its ties with Elon Musk's xAI, bringing early access to the company's Grok Code Fast 1 large language model (LLM) into GitHub Copilot. However, a whistleblower has claimed that the rollout suffers from inadequate security testing and an engineering team operating under duress....

'It blows my mind,' says SecDef The Pentagon has formally kiboshed Microsoft's use of China-based employees to support Azure cloud services deployed by US government agencies, and it's demanding Microsoft do more of its own digging to determine whether any sensitive data was compromised....

The $5.7B check has cleared, CFO says Intel's agreement with the US government incudes a clause that would allow the feds to take an additional five percent stake in the chipmaker if it ceases to have a controlling share in its foundry business....

Chocolate Factory says people keep marking them as such, so QED The Trump administration has accused Google of discriminating against Republicans' emails and warned that the tech giant could be in line for a crackdown....

A remarkable mixture of different components, but it works RefreshOS is a Debian and KDE-based distro with a difference: it casts its net a lot wider for tools and components....

Limited Run Games swaps in silicon to emulate Super FX chip and hit 20 fps Forget Windows 95, it's 30 years since Doom was released on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. And thanks to the Raspberry Pi RP2350 microcontroller, the game is back in cartridge form....

Up to 29,000 organizations and potentially 370,000 security and IT pros affected Australian development house Click Studios has warned users of its Passwordstate enterprise password management platform to update immediately if not sooner, following the discovery of an authentication bypass vulnerability that opens the doors to an emergency administration account with nothing more than a "carefully crafted URL."...

Nobody knows why they need one, but folk seem to be buying them HP says AI PCs now make up a quarter of its sales, boosting revenue thanks to their higher price tags and the Windows 11 refresh....

Senior officials summoned to science and tech committee to explain further Senior officials are being summoned to the UK's Science, Innovation and Technology Committee to explain why the government has not fully implemented the security recommendations made in a secret review following the 2021 Afghan data breach....

Microsoft shifts cellular management to Settings and the web Microsoft is to permanently hang up on its Mobile Plans app, directing users to the web and the Windows Settings app in the future....

Hang on, what happened to gov.UK's bitbarn-favoring Industrial Strategy? Datacenter developers in the UK are turning to gas for power generation amid lengthy wait times for a connection to the electricity grid....

The once mighty Wintel supercontinent is cracking in more ways than you might think Opinion Say what you like about its role in the destruction of civilization, the net is still good for a few party games. Take bets on when the "Wintel Empire" was first reported as under attack, and by what. Then go and find out....

Maybe someday we'll just call it 'data processing' again Feature In IT, terms and categories come and go. Distinctions disappear as computing evolves and as something that was shiny and new simply becomes the way that we do things....

Network Time Protocol sometimes needs help from a temporal cops On Call Why, look at the time! 7:30 AM on Friday morning, the moment at which The Register regularly runs a fresh instalment of On Call, the reader-contributed column that shares your finest tech support stories....

700 meters under a mountain, a 20,000-tonne detector and a giant sphere await elusive particles More than a decade after construction began, China has commenced operation of what it claims is the world's most sensitive neutrino detector....

Supports several Chinese chips and GPUs - and of course it has AI inside China's KylinSoft has delivered a major update to its flagship Linux, which Beijing hailed as a great leap forward for the nation's ambition to develop operating systems that match and exceed the capabilities of western products....

Plus millions of other people across 80+ countries China's Salt Typhoon cyberspies hoovered up information belonging to millions of people in the United States over the course of the years-long intrusion into telecommunications networks, according to a top FBI cyber official....

They use AI more but also check it more For those who thought AI vibe coding was just for the youngsters, newly published research shows that developers with over 10 years of experience are more than twice as likely to do it....

Microsoft AI honcho insists partnership with Sam Altman's brainbox behemoth is alive and well Microsoft has introduced two home-grown machine learning models, potentially complicating negotiations with its current favored model supplier, OpenAI....

My brain hurts a lot Claude creator Anthropic has given customers using its Free, Pro, and Max plans one month to prevent the engine from storing their chats for five years by default and using them for training....

But private cloud contender sees upside in its modernization mission Donald Trump's DOGE cost-cutting unit has made it harder to do business with the US federal government, according to private cloud contender Nutanix....

Nor is its Arm port When VMware delivered its Cloud Foundation 9 suite in June, it marked the end of a two-year push to integrate its compute, storage, and networking products. What's next for the Broadcom business unit? At the VMware Explore conference this week, The Register sniffed out a few other items on its to-do list....

Our drones are OK, but those other drones? The US Department of Homeland Security has revealed plans to spend more than $100 million on systems designed to take out hostile drones....

Web browsing belongs to the people, not the bots Jon von Tetzchner, CEO of Norway-based browser maker Vivaldi, believes the tech industry's efforts to automate web browsing using generative AI models have gone too far....

$6.4M VerifTools marketplace offline The FBI and Dutch police today said that they seized two domains and a blog tied to VerifTools, an international criminal marketplace that sold identity documents for as little as $9....

'The homeland is no longer secure,' says Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency leader The Pentagon outfit responsible for preventing foriegn agents from infiltrating defense agencies says the US isn't doing a very good job of preventing state secrets from falling into Chinese hands....

Only a few Android phones will be able to support the service Users of Google Pixel and Samsung Galaxy phones could soon find themselves able to make voice calls via a satellite connection, if Skylo Technologies can get all its ducks in a row....