The Register

Icons from a more civilized time Windows deposits a huge number of files onto a user's PC, some of which are essential for the operating system, and others that are a reminder of gentler times. Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen this week took another trip down memory lane to the pixel-tastic world of moricons.dll on his Old New Thing blog....

Laurie Leshin to leave in June Laurie Leshin, director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), is stepping down in June and will be replaced by JPL veteran David Gallagher....

Claims human warehouse workers will still live long and prosper Internet souk Amazon has unveiled a new robot for its warehouses and claims the machine uses a sense of "touch" to shift around 75 percent of the types of packages handled....

Euro space agency insists it's reliable and desirable in face of 'abusive spouse' NASA's "skinny" budget has rattled its allies. After years of close cooperation, the European Space Agency (ESA) is looking jilted, while others describe the US space scene as adrift in gloom and doubt....

Dev creates official Clippy 'love letter' to query AI models on your box Clippy is back - and this time, its arrival on your desktop as a front-end for locally run LLMs has nothing to do with Microsoft....

Ubuntu 25.10 fitted with Rust-written admin tool by default for memory safety's sake Canonical's Ubuntu 25.10 is set to make sudo-rs, a Rust-based rework of the classic sudo utility, the default - part of a push to cut memory-related security bugs and lock down core system components....

Newly completed substation will help bear the load Elon Musk's xAI is removing about half of the temporary gas-turbine generators powering its Colossus AI datacenter over the next two months, according to the Memphis Chamber of Commerce, not due to environmental concerns, but because a new nearby substation now supplies the needed power....

Now individual school districts extorted by fiends An education tech provider that paid a ransom to prevent the leak of stolen student and teacher data is now watching its school district customers get individually extorted by either the same ransomware crew that hit it - or someone connected to the crooks....

CEO: Neural net tech 'flattens our hiring curve, helps us innovate' CrowdStrike - the Texas antivirus slinger famous for crashing millions of Windows machines last year - plans to cut five percent of its staff, or about 500 workers, in pursuit of "greater efficiencies," according to CEO and co-founder George Kurtz....

Officials demand device registration, location locking, logs of user activity India's telecom regulator has signaled it's ready to let Starlink and other satellite-broadband providers operate - but only if they agree to strict conditions, including setting up special monitoring zones" within 50km of land borders where law enforcement and security agencies are permitted to monitor users....

Eddy Cue tells DC court Safari to rope in Anthropic, OpenAI and co Updated An Apple executive's backhanded endorsement of AI as a replacement for traditional internet searches has sent Google stock tumbling....

Chocolate Factory promises early-stage capital to atomic upstart Elementl Google has signed a strategic agreement with nuclear project developer Elementl Power to support the early development of three potential fission reactor sites in the US....

Judge allows aspects of passenger lawsuit to proceed A federal judge has cleared the runway for a class action from disgruntled passengers against Delta Air Lines as turbulence from last year's CrowdStrike debacle continues to buffet the carrier....

We were shocked - SHOCKED - by the answer Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the slurpiest mobile browser of them all? The answer, according to VPN vendor Surfshark, is Chrome....

Modern Linux, vintage kernel Good news for those fond of crimson headwear - Fedora 42 is now an official distro on Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2)....

United Airlines canceling flights as chaos mounts Air traffic controllers for Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey were horrified when all radar and radio equipment, including backup systems, failed last week, cutting communication with aircraft for 90 seconds....

Shifts data services to containers and goes back to the future with Pure Storage tie-in Next Nutanix is moving beyond its hyperconverged roots by creating containerized versions of its data services and more external storage options, in ways that make it a better target for those migrating away from VMware....

Blackouts less frequent in 2024, still a PITA when the datacenter downtime demons visit Datacenter outages are less frequent and severe, but human error remains one of the most persistent challenges, with between two-thirds and four-fifths of major wobbles involving some element of meatbag-related cause....

Plus it is solving the 'I can't find the settings' problem with AI. That's what you wanted, right? Microsoft has confirmed what some Windows Insiders are already noticing - the Windows 11 Start Menu is getting a revamp and a panel for Phone Link....

It's not rocket science, it's budgeting NASA's people analytics group has swapped its Neo4j graph database for Memgraph due to costs....

Lead dev likens flood to 'effectively being DDoSed' Curl project founder Daniel Stenberg is fed up with of the deluge of AI-generated "slop" bug reports and recently introduced a checkbox to screen low-effort submissions that are draining maintainers' time....

Windows 11's hardware requirements: Sales ploy or security play? Comment Retired Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer has weighed in on the increasingly heated discussion regarding the impending end of Windows 10. Are Windows 11's hardware requirements all about security or just a sales ploy in disguise?...

Get in the bin: For the first time since 2012, some older CPU generations are being chopped Kernel 6.15 is taking shape and it looks like it will eliminate support for Intel's 486 chip and its contemporaries....

Leave it to the Borg? Scribe David D. Levine slams 'use of planet-destroying plagiarism machines' Fans and writers of science fiction are not necessarily enthusiastic about artificial intelligence - especially when it's used to vet panelists for a major sci-fi conference....

Seeing as the company's CEO is big at DOGE, this is delicious World War Fee Citrix has found a new use for virtualization: Avoiding tariffs....

Prime Minister bemoans bullying, addiction, and inappropriate content - but isn't planning a rapid vote New Zealand's government has signaled its support for a bill to ban social media for children under 16, but without explicitly making it a government initiative....

But a multi-billion dollar contract with Oracle for a pile of Instincts and Epycs should take the edge off AMD expects the Trump administration's newly implemented export controls on GPUs and AI accelerator sales to China to take a $1.5 billion byte out its 2025 revenues, executives revealed on a Tuesday earnings call with Wall Street....

We'd be shocked, just shocked, if Big Tech's renewable energy ambitions aren't known in the White House The Attorneys General of 17 states and Washington, DC have sued the Trump administration over an executive order halting all federal approvals for wind energy projects....

Don't f&#k with Zuck A California jury has awarded Meta more than $167 million in damages from Israeli surveillanceware slinger NSO Group, after the latter exploited a flaw in WhatsApp to allow its government customers to spy on supposedly secure communications....

Just days after judge held Cupertino in contempt over Epic antitrust injunction A developer of mobile sports apps has filed a proposed class-action lawsuit against Apple, seeking to recover commissions iBiz allegedly collected in violation of a federal injunction intended to allow developers to use alternative payment systems....

Zog brain hurt. Zog want Google help make read easier Exasperated by the prolix verbiage and gratuitously convoluted phraseology that so often permeates technical treatises, philosophical discourses, or the meandering expositions of journalists afflicted by a lack of rhetorical economy? Then Google has a new AI feature for you - provided you use iOS, that is....

What was the plan, showing her his big iron? A now-former manager at Computacenter claims he was unfairly fired after alerting management that a colleague was repeatedly giving his girlfriend unauthorized access to Deutsche Bank's server rooms....

Just 1 in 4 bets paying off so far Only a quarter of AI initiatives have delivered the expected return on investment, according to an IBM survey of 2,000 CEOs....

Schemes like this are just a license to pollute for tech giants, or so critics say Microsoft has expanded its deal with Stockholm Exergi to buy 500,000 tonnes of permanent carbon removal annually over ten years. Critics argue such deals give polluters cover rather than drive real climate action....

(If only that would keep folks off unsanctioned chat app side quests) The US Department of Defense (DoD) is overhauling its "outdated" software procurement systems, and insists it's putting security at the forefront of decision-making processes....

Easyjson library's presence in numerous open source projects alarms security biz Easyjson, a software library for serializing data in Golang applications, is maintained by developers affiliated with Russia's VK Group....

Brussels rolls out 500M plan to lure boffins with grants and actual respect for research The European Commission (EC) is looking to make Europe the home of science by tempting researchers and scientists to relocate to the continent amid a more hostile stance toward academic freedom in the US....

Data giant backs federal austerity push, saying it's 'the right thing' for US Palantir, the controversial US surveillance and analytics firm, says it welcomes scrutiny of government spending by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the controversial cost-cutting agency led by Elon Musk....

Feldman calls US's AI Diffusion rules bad policy' Cerebras Systems' dinner-plate-sized chips currently power the latest AI inference offerings from Meta and, soon, those of IBM, but US trade policy weighs heavy on its prospects worldwide....

Azure Virtual Desktop App attach users might want to sit this one out for a bit longer Microsoft is celebrating the milestone of Windows 11 24H2 reaching broad availability with... yet another "known issue." This time, it is related to Azure Virtual Desktop applications....

From ubiquitous go-to system for early Noughties startups to a legacy like no other Before Donald Trump became US president and the UK left the EU - both arguably the result of a new kind of online politics - a rather nervous-looking Mark Zuckerberg shuffled out onto a Harvard University lecture hall floor to offer some insight into the inner workings of a website he had created less than two years earlier....

Too much hot air brings down Manchester Uni based neural network project Exclusive The brain-inspired SpiNNaker machine at Manchester University suffered an overheating incident over the Easter weekend that will send a chill down the spines of datacenter administrators....

'Trust us, we're from Trumpland' may not help Microsoft as much as it hopes Opinion It is a nation's first duty to protect its citizens from harm. A fine maxim, and one we can all agree on, even in these disagreeable times. Sadly, that's as far as it goes. What the harm is and how to protect against it is where light turns to heat....

One distro has to be the most extra - and here it is A Commodore-themed talking Linux desktop, complete with hundreds of games, makes for the biggest distro we've seen yet....

Can we turn to govt, academic models instead? RSAC Corporate AI models are already skewed to serve their makers' interests, and unless governments and academia step up to build transparent alternatives, the tech risks becoming just another tool for commercial manipulation....

A few million here, a few million there, pretty soon you're talking real money Microsoft partners can now tailor private offers that allow buyers to vary the amount and timing of payments for some SaaS products and services....

And declares hypervisor independence after being tied to vSphere Omnissa, the company that acquired VMware's end-user compute portfolio, is moving beyond its traditional territory of managing endpoint devices and into server management....

State-backed chip slinger inches closer to cloud-scale relevance Chinese chip designer Loongson claims more than 100 products now run on its homegrown LoongArch architecture, including an OpenStack-based cloud stack from domestic hyperscale heavyweight Inspur....

Because who needs cybersecurity when there's culture wars to win President Trump's dream 2026 budget would gut the US govt's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, aka CISA, by $491 million - about 17 percent - and accuses the organization of abandoning its core mission in favor of policing online speech....

Tech gigs slide, or so this analysis of US jobs data claims The US jobs market grew faster than expected in April, but most IT pros aren't among the beneficiaries....