The Register

Ross Ulbricht's family are now appealing for donations to support his reintegration into society Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht is now a free man after US President Donald Trump made good on his promise to issue a federal pardon upon taking office....

But no changes to bcachefs Linux kernel 6.13 is here, but don't get too excited. It's not a biggie and, given the timing, probably won't appear in many familiar distros....

Amazon doesn't break out figures, but then again neither do Microsoft nor Google As more businesses shift an ever greater number of workloads to the cloud, hyperscalers aren't doing enough to help CIOs or tech buyers, who are already under legislative pressure, to be more transparent about their own corporation's carbon footprint regarding compute services....

Everyone agrees defense matters. How to do it is up for debate Feature The Trump administration came to office this week without a detailed information security policy, but analysis of cabinet nominees' public remarks and expert comments suggest it will make significant changes in the field....

Cut off nearly 44k peeps who had been waiting 70 minutes for advice on unavoidable chore The UK tax collector must "take responsibility for its own failings to offer sufficiently effective digital services to customers," according to a committee of MPs which accused HMRC of "deliberately" poor phone service to push callers online....

Interim appointment after former head booted out for not being 'sufficiently focused on growth' The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has a new chair after the sudden departure of the previous incumbent....

The nascent tech enters Hype Cycle's downward slope, says Gartner Tech analysts have forecast 9.8 percent year-over-year growth in worldwide IT spending in 2025, reaching $5.61 trillion and driven by continuing AI investments, despite moonshot" projects seeing a high failure rate....

That invitation to a Teams call on which IT promises to mop up a spamstorm may not be what it seems Two ransomware campaigns are abusing Microsoft Teams to infect organizations and steal data, and the crooks may have ties to Black Basta and FIN7, according to Sophos....

1,066 seconds of steady-state high-confinement plasma operation and all that China's Hefei Institutes of Physical Science has claimed a new world record for maintaining a steady-state high-confinement plasma operation, a feat needed to create a fusion reactor that in theory will produce vast amounts of energy at little cost....

Nobel Prize winner Demis Hassabis thinks human trials will happen soon Clinical trials of the first drugs designed with the help of artificial intelligence could commence this year, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis suggested Tuesday....

Plus: Google stuffs Gemini into Workspace, with a hidden off switch? Ready or not, generative AI assistants and productivity aids are getting harder to avoid with a growing number of software vendors enabling them by default....

SoftBank, Oracle, MGX form Stargate Project with ChatGPT maker, intend to outspend Microsoft this year OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank, and investment firm MGX on Tuesday announced plans to spend $500 billion on AI infrastructure in America over the next four years, to be used by the ChatGPT super-lab....

Lawsuits pile up after database accessed by miscreants Canada's largest school board has revealed that student records dating back to 1985 may have been accessed by miscreants who compromised software provider PowerSchool....

El Reg asked a lawyer to explain WTH is going on Analysis President Trump's executive order stalling the enforcement of the TikTok ban in the United States has created legal uncertainty for companies hosting or distributing the app. To further confuse the matter, it's not even clear that Trump's decree is within his power to issue or enforce....

Same, Big A, same If you were unable to access Atlassian's Bitbucket Cloud today, it's because in the words of the IT giant, the service was "hard down."...

Seven days after disclosure and little action taken, data shows Fortinet customers need to get with the program and apply the latest updates as nearly 50,000 management interfaces are still vulnerable to the latest zero-day exploit....

Also, prepare for paused wind projects and the Gulf of America from Trump 2.0 - and that's just day 1 US President Donald Trump has wasted no time in culling Biden-era programs, including the elimination of the prior administration's executive orders on AI safety and electric vehicles, and freezing funds for EV infrastructure....

Researchers aim to tackle unmet needs for social connection and recreation Scientists in the US have developed a neural interface that enables an individual with paralysis to control a virtual quadcopter by decoding brain activity into distinct finger movements....

So you want to go to the Red Planet. How deep are your pockets and how much time do you have? Comment "America is going to Mars," said Elon Musk at yesterday's inauguration of US President Donald Trump. America is already there, thanks to decades of robotic exploration....

Under Digital Services Act, monitors will be allowed to report abusive language and platforms should respond in 1 day Online platform companies, including X and Meta, have signed up to a new code of conduct aimed at targeting online hate speech, which the European Commission has now baked into the Digital Services Act....

It's a feature not a bug, and what the US electorate voted for, says analyst As US president Donald Trump's inauguration passes into history, tech leaders face uncertainty as they wait to see if repeated promises of global US import tariffs are put into action....

Incident response protocols engaged following claims of source code burglary Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is probing assertions made by prolific Big Tech intruder IntelBroker that they broke into the US corporation's systems and accessed source code, among other things....

From fighters to friends in six months, despite AWS voting against it Exclusive Microsoft is to become the latest member of CISPE months after negotiating a settlement with the trade association of European cloud providers over alleged anti-competitive software practices. However, not all in the group are happy with the enrollment....

Ring a bell? Suite of tools named after Yes Minister's master of manipulation The UK government is striving to end its checkered record in managing large-scale projects with a "plan to put technology to work across public services."...

Supermarket taking 'pragmatic approach' to 'Europe's largest IT transformation program' Asda has postponed the tech transition of 55 stores to its new systems as US retail giant Walmart continues to support IT at outlets it sold to the new owner in 2021....

Now if only the councils could afford to fill them An oft-repeated myth is that potholes form through a combination of surface cracks, water, and traffic, but they're actually caused by chronic levels of underinvestment in public infrastructure....

And possibly even more so if you don't start planning yours soon If the changes Broadcom brought to VMware have you thinking of a move to an alternative virtualization platform, expect a long, costly, and risky project - and perhaps a longer, costlier, and riskier one if you put off pondering the move....

Geopolitical rumblings one day, geological rumblings the next Taiwan has experienced an earthquake so significant that chipmaking champ TSMC has shuttered plants....

US Digital Service re-named and told to audit government tech and work on data-sharing US President Donald Trump has re-named the US Digital Service the Department of Government Efficiency and given it a mission to modernize government technology....

President Trump allows vid app to keep running for 75 days while he reviews security concerns and develops a policy Updated China appears to have softened its stance on the possible sale of TikTok's US operations and is now perhaps open to the idea....

Semantic indexing does some discreet rifling through local drawers of Insiders Windows Search is improved in the latest Dev Channel Windows Insider build, but you'll need a Snapdragon-powered Copilot+ PC to use it....

Both the Ubuntu and Debian-based editions get Cinnamon 6.4 and other goodies It's a bit later than we were expecting, but the latest Mint is here and should start to be offered as an upgrade soon....

Cloud giant explains its thinking behind support for Apache open table format AWS bet on the Apache Iceberg open table format (OTF) across its analytics, machine learning, and storage stack as a concerted response to demand from customers already using its popular S3 object storage....

Taipei invites infosec bods to come and play on its home turf Picture this: It's 2030 and China's furious with Taiwan after the island applies to the UN to be recognized as an independent state. After deciding on a full military invasion, China attempts to first cripple its rebellious neighbor's critical infrastructure....

Ready or not, here I come Microsoft has begun distributing Windows 11 24H2 to user devices as the company enters the next stage of the operating system's rollout....

Only one called exploding a rocket over the Caribbean 'entertainment' SpaceX is not the only company involved in a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) mishap inquiry. Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin has also come under scrutiny after losing its New Glenn rocket's first stage....

Crypto critics unhappy as BTC hits all-time high and Melania launches her own currency Donald Trump, US president again by the time many of you read this, launched his own cryptocurrency -$TRUMP - on the Solana blockchain network on Friday night. By the weekend, it had hit a market cap of nearly $15 billion, although by Sunday, that value dropped when First Lady Melania Trump launched her own meme coin....

Clear rules and guaranteed consequences concentrate the mind wonderfully. Just ask a Russian Opinion "As obsolete as warships in the Baltic" was a great pop lyric in Prefab Sprout's 1985 gem, Faron Young. Great, but ironically obsolete itself. Sweden has just deployed multiple warships in that selfsame sea to guard against the very modern menace of underwater cable cutting....

Students have work to complete at home in the meantime A UK high school will have to close for at least two days, today and tomorrow, after becoming the latest public-sector victim of ransomware criminals....

Your battery might be flat, but the Wi-Fi signal is going to be great UK telecom giant BT is pulling the plug on its EV charging ambitions after falling a long way short of the 60,000 street cabinets it reckoned could be repurposed....

A whole different kind of 'technical debt' turned into real-world trouble Who, Me? Accidents will happen, and every Monday The Register celebrates them - and your escape from the consequences - in a fresh instalment of Who, Me? It's the reader-contributed column that details the downside of working in tech....

'Minor issue' with showing accounting customers 'unrelated business information' required repairs Sage Group plc has confirmed it temporarily suspended its Sage Copilot, an AI assistant for the UK-based business software maker's accounting tools, this month after it blurted customer information to other users....

While Microsoft pushes AI PC experiences, Nvidia is busy wooing developers Comment Nvidia is the uncontested champion of AI infrastructure - at least in the datacenter. In the emerging field of AI PCs, things aren't so clear cut....

PLUS: Allstate sued for allegedly tracking drivers; Dutch DDoS; More fake jobs from Pyongyang; and more Infosec in brief Hogwarts doesn't teach an incantation that could have saved Harry Potter publisher Scholastic from feeling the power of an online magician who made off with millions of customer records - except perhaps the wizardry of multifactor authentication....

PLUS: Salt Typhoon and IT worker scammers sanctioned; Alibaba Cloud's K8s go global; Amazon acquires Indian BNPL company Asia In Brief When food delivery superapps" started operations in Indonesia, users started putting on weight - and that's not an entirely bad thing....

Incoming president promises to allow ongoing operations for 90 days just as made-in-China app started to go dark US president-elect Donald Trump appears to have proposed the government he will soon lead should acquire half of made-in-China social media service TikTok's stateside operations....

The S in LLM stands for Security OpenAI's ChatGPT crawler appears to be willing to initiate distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on arbitrary websites, a reported vulnerability the tech giant has yet to acknowledge....

Security feature widens out to more Windows 11 users, including those at home Microsoft is trying a new way of enabling Administrator Protection in Windows 11. The latest Windows Insider Canary build adds a setting that removes the requirement for IT admins to activate the feature....

Gaia makes its final science observation The European Space Agency's (ESA) Milky Way mapper Gaia has completed the sky-scanning phase of its mission, racking up more than three trillion observations over the past decade....

With added manga and snark. What's not to like? Opinion Windows 1 and 2 flopped almost as badly as OS/2 did. How did Microsoft stage one of the greatest comebacks ever with Windows 3?...