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Threat to quit still preferred to commuting on packed public transport Years after the pandemic reshaped working practices across the world, many staff are still resisting corporate efforts to get them to return to the office preferring instead to quit in favor of a more flexible employer....

Scheme involving bribes, bid rigging and insider info may have cost US taxpayers $1.3M Four defendants have pleaded guilty in a US government IT procurement fraud case, which prosecutors claim has cost taxpayers at least $1.3 million in losses....

Blue Ghost's first time, and second time lucky for Japanese company ispace? SpaceX has successfully completed the 100th launch of a Falcon rocket from pad 39A and sent two landers on their way to the Moon....

Collective Proceedings Order seeks 1.5B from iGiant Seven weeks of court action began this week as a case over alleged breaches of competition law by Apple is heard at the UK's Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT)....

Rising costs blamed, although any excuse to do more with less British companies are looking to AI as a way of cutting investment in staff, according to new research....

Good ol' spreadsheet data could benefit from 'revolutionary' approach to ML inferences Move over ChatGPT and DALL-E: Spreadsheet data is getting its own foundation machine learning model, allowing users to immediately make inferences about new data points for data sets with up to 10,000 rows and 500 columns....

Azure Local is about hybrid management, not hybrid resource pools, and is catching up with virtual rivals Microsoft's latest on-prem Azure offering is more about unified management than hybrid cloud as an enabler of elasticity or flexible resource pools....

No such problems at Airbus, which cruised at a high level and shipped almost two planes a day last year Beleaguered aerospace outfit Boeing has revealed how many commercial aircraft it shipped in 2024, and the news isn't good....

This'll be good for you, don't you worry, CFO tells venture fund while pulling back the sling Stricken silicon giant Intel has decided it doesn't want to be the sole investor in its venture capital operation, so will spin it out for others to plow money into....

Plus: SpaceX rocket re-entries spark airline delays America's financial watchdog has sued Elon Musk, alleging the billionaire failed to disclose his acquisition of Twitter shares in a timely manner and was therefore able to acquire the social network for $150 million less than would otherwise have been the case....

Plus: Excel hell, angst for Adobe fans, and life's too Snort for Cisco Patch Tuesday The first Patch Tuesday of 2025 has seen Microsoft address three under-attack privilege-escalation flaws in its Hyper-V hypervisor, plus plenty more problems that deserve your attention....

SCOTUS unlikely to save it, no time to find a buyer. Hi, Xiaohongshu! Comment TikTok is just about out of options to save itself from a looming ban in the United States, though that hasn't stopped one US senator from planning a bill to extend the divest-or-dumped deadline another 270 days past this Sunday....

Insurance giant sued by Texas for using surveillance without consent to jack up premiums, deny coverage Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Monday filed a lawsuit against Allstate Corporation and its mobile analytics subsidiary, Arity, alleging the American insurance giant conspired with mobile app developers to collect telematics data on millions of motorists without consent, in violation of consumer protection laws....

Hey, Xi: Zai jian! The FBI, working with French cops, obtained nine warrants to remotely wipe PlugX malware from thousands of Windows-based computers that had been infected by Chinese government-backed criminals, according to newly unsealed court documents....

Watt's the problem? Not enough energy to win the arms race? US President Joe Biden on Tuesday signed an executive order that aims to ensure American AI leadership doesn't lag because of shoddy energy infrastructure....

Attorney Jennifer Scullion on allegations of algorithmic suppression of competition Interview Price fixing - an agreement between competitors to set price levels - has been illegal under the US Sherman Antitrust Act since 1890....

Fewer giant contracts, but many more smaller ones, in bit barn feeding frenzy Datacenter merger activity soared to new heights in 2024, with $57 billion in deals closed over the 12 months. If you're looking for a reason, you guessed it: anticipated gains around generative AI....

38-year veteran Edward Screven led technology and architecture decisions since Sun merger One of Oracle's longest-serving senior team members, chief corporate architect Edward Screven, has announced plans to retire on a comfortable sum....

Double-digit reduction only served to 'stimulate some interest' Microsoft and its close circle of PC maufacturers slashed the price of Copilot+ PCs being sold into Europe in Q4, an analyst confirmed to The Register, yet it still didn't make the impact hoped....

Third front opened amid continued scrutiny from US, Euro regulators The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is the latest regulator investigating Google's position in the search and search advertising business....

'Let's not do this again please'... days before release date Intel and AMD engineers have stepped in at the eleventh hour to deal with a code contribution from a Microsoft developer that could have broken Linux 6.13 on some systems....

Packages removed, vendor said to have apologized to AI code editor as onlookers say it could have been a test Updated Developer security company Snyk is at the center of allegations concerning the possible targeting or testing of Cursor, an AI code editor company, using "malicious" packages uploaded to NPM....

He could buy 49,766 and a half MacBook Pros with that Apple supremo Tim Cook bagged an 18 percent pay rise in 2024, taking his total compensation to $74.6 million, according to a regulatory filing....

That niche forum running for 20 years - get ready, there's work to do Analysis A little more than two months out from its first legal deadline, the UK's Online Safety Act is causing concern among smaller online forums caught within its reach. The legislation, which came into law in the autumn of 2023, applies to search services and services that allow users to post content online or to interact with each other....

Linux distros that don't exist, but we wish did Analysis In an overcrowded field full of distributions, there are still many empty gaps. The Register would like to point in the direction of a few....

Stronger proposals may also see private sector applying for a payment 'license' A total ban on ransomware payments across the public sector might actually happen after the UK government opened a consultation on how to combat the trend of criminals locking up whole systems and taxpayers footing the bill....

Knee-deep in the markup There is a race to see who can bend the PDF file format to do the most impressive thing. Considering the more-than-30-year-old shooter, Doom, has been ported to many unexpected places, it was inevitable it would turn up in a PDF file....

Export controls would limit shipments of GPUs to large swaths of EU The European Commission is displeased with the Biden administration's plans to extend export controls on AI chips and models to most of the world....

Free Our Feeds solicits funds to foster AT Protocol that powers decentralized social media In a challenge to billionaire-controlled social media platforms, a group of nine less affluent technology leaders have formed a group that aims to raise $30 million to support the development of decentralized social media platforms....

Sailesh Kottapalli sees a once-in-a-career opportunity' at the house of Snapdragon - maybe server CPUs or AI silicon? Intel fellow Sailesh Kottapalli, a 28-year Chipzilla veteran who worked as lead engineer on many of Xeon server processors, has left the company and joined Qualcomm....

Board appoints interim leader to stay in tune with its turnaround song, both execs hear sweet sound of cash landing in the bank Smart speaker outfit Sonos has parted ways with CEO Patrick Spence, who oversaw the release of an app that was billed as an upgrade but instead made the company's products worse and riled customers....

WordPress.org accounts cancelled, dissidents told to fork off WordPress co-founder Matthew Mullenweg on Saturday deactivated the WordPress.org accounts of five members of the WordPress community, and justified his actions by saying it will encourage them to fork the open source content management system....

Ransomware 'not off the table,' Arctic Wolf threat hunter tells El Reg Miscreants running a "mass exploitation campaign" against Fortinet firewalls, which peaked in December, may be using an unpatched zero-day vulnerability to compromise the equipment, according to security researchers who say they've observed the intrusions....

That's Cray cray Hewlett Packard Enterprise has reportedly secured a contract to supply Elon Musk's X, the site better known as Twitter, with more than $1 billion in AI-accelerating servers....

Nad lad says 30 years of change happening in 3 years ... we're certainly feeling the compression of time Microsoft has revealed it's created an engineering team that CEO Satya Nadella feels is needed to cope with a potential huge change to software development processes and applications unleashed by AI....

This is what happens when you publish PoCs immediately, hm? "Several cloud deployments" are already compromised following the disclosure of the maximum-severity vulnerability in Aviatrix Controller, researchers say....

Rent-a-GPU outfit's latest datacenters are packed to the brim with H200s As the UK government reaffirms its aspirations to become an AI superpower, CoreWeave says two new GPU bit barns packed to the brim with Nvidia accelerators are ready for business....

Scumbags stole API keys, then started a hacking-as-a-service biz, it is claimed Microsoft has sued a group of unnamed cybercriminals who developed tools to bypass safety guardrails in its generative AI tools. The tools were used to create harmful content, and access to the tools were sold as a service to other miscreants....

It's fixed, mostly, after Europeans had a manic Monday Microsoft's multi-factor authentication (MFA) for Azure and Microsoft 365 (M365) was offline for four hours during Monday's busy start for European subscribers....

'Sweden has changed,' PM warns as trio of warships join defense efforts Sweden has committed to sending naval forces into the Baltic Sea following yet another suspected Russian attack on underwater cables in the region....

Plus: Man who tossed Bitcoin drive worth millions barred from digging in dump A man of God is in the sin bin with Uncle Sam's prosecutors over a cryptocurrency investment business that he claims came to him in a dream....

'New rule threatens to squander America's hard-won technological advantage' says GPU supremo Nvidia has hit back at the outgoing Biden administration's AI chip tech export restrictions designed to tighten America's stranglehold on supply chains and maintain market dominance....

'Codefinger' crims on the hunt for compromised keys A new ransomware crew dubbed Codefinger targets AWS S3 buckets and uses the cloud giant's own server-side encryption with customer provided keys (SSE-C) to lock up victims' data before demanding a ransom payment for the symmetric AES-256 keys required to decrypt it....

Software snafu can fry computer components for owners of Musk's electric buggies Days after the US's Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) began an investigation into the company's Actually Smart Summon technology, Tesla is is now recalling almost a quarter of a million vehicles over a separate issue - glitches with rearview cameras on some models....

Government adopts all 50 venture capitalist recommendations but leaves datacenter energy puzzle unsolved Britain's government is adopting all 50 recommendations made by a venture capitalist to use AI to drive economic recovery, without even acknowledging the resulting energy challenge this strategy likely poses....

Vehicle subsystem concerns blamed for scrub Blue Origin has given up on today's lift-off attempt for its New Glenn rocket, confirming that it was standing down a little more than two hours into the vehicle's launch window....

Think you're good at spotting trends? Try these on for size Opinion This column may be out of date two days after publication. That's when the US Supreme Court decides whether the Constitutional right to free speech overrides the laws against online porn adopted by many southern states....

Unauthorized activity detected, but no backdoors found UK domain registry Nominet is investigating a potential intrusion into its network related to the latest Ivanti zero-day exploits....

Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project designation could tear down more restrictions Britain's planning system is still seen as a significant barrier to the development of datacenters....

Or ignore documentation that warns you are about to do something dangerous Who, Me? Rise and shine, dear readers, it's Monday and therefore time to sink your teeth into a new week of work, a fact The Register celebrates with a new edition of Who, Me? This is the column in which you share stories of when you bit off more than you can chew, but fumbled through....