The Register

Cheaper electricity to lure bit barns north as planning fast-track kicks in While UK households face some of the world's highest energy prices, datacenter operators are set to receive electricity discounts under government plans to accelerate AI infrastructure development....

Case alleges loyal customers continued to pay bundled rates after minimum contract terms ended Britain's biggest mobile phone companies face legal action over claims they overcharged customers through a "loyalty penalty" after a tribunal permitted the cases to proceed....

Consumer group Which? warns AI assistants can dish out unclear, risky, or downright daft advice AI assistants can sometimes provide misleading or incorrect answers. However, almost half of British consumers using the services put more faith in them than they maybe should....

Researchers think SpaceX needs to revisit its resilience regime Researchers have found Starlink's efforts to mitigate the effects of solar storms can create degraded performance that persists for a day or more after geomagnetic conditions ease....

Yet Chinese giant wants users to ask any question, big or small, anytime, anywhere!' Chinese tech giant Alibaba yesterday launched a new chatbot that reported errors soon after launch and is very touchy about some subjects Beijing doesn't like to discuss....

VCF users wrestling with bill shock may get a little relief VMware has admitted that its guidance about the hardware needed to run its vSAN virtual storage arrays has been wrong for years....

Nvidia's Ian Buck on the importance of FP64 to power research, in a world that's hot for inferencing Interview Scientific computing is about to undergo a period of rapid change as workloads inject AI....

Aisuru botnet strikes again, bigger and badder Azure was hit by the "largest-ever" cloud-based distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, originating from the Aisuru botnet and measuring 15.72 terabits per second (Tbps), according to Microsoft....

Ready, aim, mire Loose lips sink ships, the classic line goes. Information proliferation in the internet age has government auditors reiterating that loose tweets can sink fleets, and they're concerned that the Defense Department isn't doing enough to stop sensitive info from getting out there....

ORCA benchmark trips up ChatGPT-5, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Claude Sonnet 4.5, Grok 4, and DeepSeek V3.2 In the world of George Orwell's 1984, two and two make five. And large language models are not much better at math....

Claims he reported the attack in January after fraudsters tried to scam him A security researcher says Coinbase knew about a December 2024 security breach during which miscreants bribed its support staff into handing over almost 70,000 customers' details at least four months before it disclosed the data theft....

EuroHPC's biggest iron still has more to give with Universal Cluster expansion expected to come online next year SC25 Europe has officially entered exascale orbit. On Monday, EuroHPC's Jupiter supercomputer became the fourth such machine on the Top500 list of publicly known systems to exceed a million-trillion floating point operations a second in the time-honored High-Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark....

Documenting code can be dull, but explaining the source code of a complex project is hard for AI to get right Google has previewed Code Wiki, an AI project that aims to document code in a repository and keep it up to date by regenerating the content after every code change....

Vendor leans on Nvidia tie-up so hard you can hear the GPUs squeak SC25 Dell continues to push itself as a one-stop shop for enterprise AI infrastructure with a wave of products and services, including updates to servers, storage, and software to expand its offerings....

Four US citizens tried it, and the DoJ just secured guilty pleas from all of 'em It sounds like easy money. North Koreans pay you to use your identity so they can get jobs working for American companies in IT. However, if you go this route, the US Department of Justice promises to catch up with you eventually....

Law enforcement agency's referral blitz hit gaming platforms hard, surfacing thousands of extremist URLs Europol's Internet Referral Unit (EU IRU) says a November 13 operation across gaming and "gaming-adjacent" services led its partners to report thousands of URLs hosting terrorist and hate-fueled material, including 5,408 links to jihadist content, 1,070 pushing violent right-wing extremist or terrorist propaganda, and 105 tied to racist or xenophobic groups....

Microsoft claims it listens to feedback while complaints mount over everyday usability Rather than enjoying some downtime at the weekend, Windows boss Pavan Davuluri made the classic mistake of reading the replies to his post about the operating system's "agentic" future....

Named after titan who stole fire from the gods and was punished for eternity... Amazon warehouse staff know the feeling Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is returning to the CEO seat - though not at his best-known creation....

Readiness metrics have flatlined since 2023, with most sectors slipping backward as teams fumble crisis drills Teams that think they're ready for a major cyber incident are scoring barely 22 percent accuracy and taking more than a day to contain simulated attacks, according to new data out Monday....

Disruption left customers unable to track support cases, upgrades, or patching work SAP has apologized for the recent outage of its SAP for Me portal, a cloud-based tool that gives users a view of their SAP functions, metrics, and service. But the downtime has opened up some reliability questions....

Regulator reports suggest telco was extorted, but company remains coy as to whether it paid French telco Eurofiber says cybercriminals swiped company data during an attack last week that also affected some internal systems....

Partnership with UK-based 'AI upskilling platform' aims to boost software's usage Palantir is working with "AI upskilling platform" Multiverse to provide an apprenticeship program specific to its Federated Data Platform (FDP), the NHS analytics system being run under a controversial contract....

Civil recovery order targets PlugwalkJoe's illicit gains while he serves US sentence British prosecutors have secured a civil recovery order to seize crypto assets worth 4.11 million ($5.39 million) from Twitter hacker Joseph James O'Connor, clawing back the proceeds of a scam that used hijacked celebrity accounts to solicit digital currency and threaten high-profile individuals....

Expect Sloppy Updates? On the eve of its Ignite conference, Microsoft has managed to break the first Extended Security Update (ESU) for many commercial Windows 10 customers....

Top of the slops signposts the undiscovered country for an industry Opinion Remember when the hottest news in the schoolyard was which band was the hottest this week? Those days are back, baby. An AI-generated band called Breaking Rust has just hit the top of the Billboard Country chart in the US with a song called Walk My Walk. Some questions will never be answered - could it ever release a sea shanty, and will all the albums be compilations? What this means for the future of the music industry, the AI industry, and music itself, is less funny....

Yes, he knows the 40x increase could have been avoided with some pretty simple automation Who, Me? Welcome to another week of work, a moment The Register celebrates with a new installment of Who, Me? It's the reader-contributed column in which you 'fess up to follies, false moves, and faux pas - and explain how you escaped....

It's time to think about a replacement, says Gartner The market for server virtualization tools is about to fragment, according to analyst firm Gartner....

PLUS: Active noise cancellation for entire rooms; More trouble for Korea Telecom; The Wiggles apologize for bad batteries; and more Asia In Brief India's Tata Motors, owner of Jaguar Land Rover, has revealed the cyberattack that shut down production in the UK has so far cost it around 1.8 billion ($2.35 billion)....

PLUS: CISA still sitting on telecoms security report; DoorDash phished again; Lumma stealer returns; and more INFOSEC IN BRIEF The US Senate passed a resolution in July to force the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to publish a 2022 report into poor security in the telecommunications industry but the agency has not delivered the document....

Who needs 600 kilowatt racks when a single computer can span entire datacenters? Exclusive Nvidia-backed photonics startup Ayar Labs announced a new collaboration with Global Unichip Corp (GUC) on Sunday to integrate its optical I/O chiplets intothe Taiwanese semiconductor design services provider's XPU reference designs....

Digital Realty CTO Chris Sharp weights impact of densification on the datacenter and the rise of the AI factory Interview In the datacenter biz, power is the product. You either have it or you don't, Chris Sharp tells El Reg....

When is an app not an app? When it's a mini app inside another app Apple has cut its take to 15 percent on purchases inside mini apps running within other iOS apps, and reached a parallel agreement with Tencent that brings WeChat's vast mini-program ecosystem into its revenue net....

Leaving buyers to cry, AI AI AI If you haven't noticed, DRAM memory has gotten a lot more expensive in recent weeks....

Who guards the guardrails? Often the same shoddy security as the rest of the AI stack Large language models frequently ship with "guardrails" designed to catch malicious input and harmful output. But if you use the right word or phrase in your prompt, you can defeat these restrictions....

More than a month after PoC made public Fortinet finally published a security advisory on Friday for a critical FortiWeb path traversal vulnerability under active exploitation - but it appears digital intruders got a month's head start....

Enterprise Linux vendors keep jostling to see who can prop up geriatric distros the longest Last year, Canonical increased its paid extended support lifespan to 12 years. Now, it's increasing it again, to 15 years ... for a price....

Amazon spilled the TEA Yet another supply chain attack has hit the npm registry in what Amazon describes as "one of the largest package flooding incidents in open source registry history" - but with a twist. Instead of injecting credential-stealing code or ransomware into the packages, this one is a token farming campaign....

Just when you thought virtual collaboration couldn't get worse, OpenAI stuffs a bot into your group conversations Feel like your team's group chat is a bit lifeless? Remote coworkers not really collaborating as well as they should be? There's a new way to stir the pot now that OpenAI has piloted ChatGPT group chats: cram a chatbot into the conversation and let it chime in whenever it thinks it should....

Mercury Research blames stockpiling and low-end shortages for unusually flat CPU market AMD continues to claw market share away from Intel in CPU shipments, growing faster than its rival in most segments. Meanwhile business in the x86 processor arena is unusually flat overall, likely due to stockpiling over tariff fears....

Starlink challenger drops the codename, but full-blown service still years out Amazon has rebranded its satellite broadband plan from Project Kuiper to Amazon Leo. And no, Leo doesn't stand for "Late Entrants Only," even though the project is years behind Starlink and still not ready for anyone to use....

Crooks spoof US insurers, threaten bogus extradition to pry loose personal data and cash Chinese speakers in the US are being targeted as part of an aggressive health insurance scam campaign, the FBI warns....

VDURA boss: Your x86 clusters are obsolete, metadata is eating 20% of I/O, and every idle GPU second burns cash The supercomputing landscape is fracturing. What once was a relatively unified world of massive multi-processor x86 systems has splintered into competing architectures, each racing to serve radically different masters: traditional academic workloads, extreme-scale physics simulations, and the voracious appetite of AI training runs....

Advisory updated as leading cybercrime crew opens up its target pool The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has issued new guidance to organizations on the Akira ransomware operation, which poses an imminent threat to critical sectors....

Company behind THESPECTRUM brings the holiday season early for retro computing fans Retro Games Ltd (RGL), the company behind THESPECTRUM and THEA500 Mini, has started accepting pre-orders for its full-size Amiga 1200 replica, THEA1200....