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No, really? That's a shocking surprise An unidentified miscreant is said to have obtained US government communications from TeleMessage, a messaging and archiving app based on the open-source Signal app and used by ousted national security advisor Michael Waltz....

Funny what a public scolding from AI luminaries and a word from state AGs can do OpenAI's contentious plan to overhaul its corporate structure in favor of a conventional for-profit model has been reworked, with the AI giant bowing to pressure to keep its nonprofit in control, even as it presses ahead with parts of the restructuring....

Fake it till you make it doesn't cut it for mission-critical workloads Who, Me? One of the joys of Monday mornings is arriving at work to find messes made over the weekend. The other is reading a new edition of Who, Me? It's The Register's weekly reader-contributed column that shares your stories of somehow recovering from failure....

Hails DOGE operatives for computer skills during interview in which he also flubbed some tech investment figures US President Donald Trump has said TikTok will be very strongly protected" as the made-in-China social network has a warm spot in my heart"....

PLUS: China spring cleans its AIs; South Korea fines Meta, probes Broadcom; and more! Asia in brief India's ambition to become a global semiconductor manufacturing player went backwards last week after two big players changed their plans....

PLUS: AirPlay exploits; Six-year old backdoor opens; Raytheon settles federal charges; and more! Infosec In Brief Microsoft has decided to push its consumer customers to dump password in favor of passkeys....

With North Korean IT workers storming the gates, too RSAC Another RSA Conference has come and gone, with almost 44,000 attendees this year spread across San Francisco's Moscone Center and the surrounding facilities, according to event organizers....

El Reg checks out shop in SF On Thursday, six stores across America opened their doors with a curious proposition: Come on in, let a metal orb scan your irises, and walk out with a new online profile that promises you're an individual human - and a few bucks in crypto for your troubles....

Not, it's not the plot of a sci-fi disaster movie A Soviet probe launched more than half a century ago is due to return to Earth in the next week or two, and there's every chance that the vehicle will make it all the way to our planet's surface....

A look back at two decades of ODF, from open source hopes to patchy real-world adoption It's been 20 years since the Open Document Format (ODF) became a standard, marking a milestone in the push for open, vendor-neutral file formats - and the beginning of a long but largely unsuccessful attempt to loosen Microsoft Office's grip on the desktop....

Proposed cuts would mean: No Lunar Gateway, Artemis hardware to retire, ISS toast in 2030 The White House has proposed slashing NASA's budget by 24 percent, dropping it from $24.8 billion to $18.8 billion. If approved, it would mark one of the agency's deepest single-year cuts in federal support, and crash its inflation-adjusted funding to levels not seen in decades....

Capex could jump by $7B to $72B, Zuckercorp says World War Fee Meta's AI ambitions are going to cost more than expected thanks to increased competition and - who could have seen this coming? - the Trump administration's obsession with tariffs, which is driving up the price tag of key components....

Shakeup in US higher education funding means FOSS incubator is short a quarter of a million bucks Higher education across the USA is facing federal funding cutbacks - and now the Oregon State University (OSU) Open Source Lab (OSL) is in trouble....

Trademark, domain name, GitHub repos stay under control of open source foundation - no word on any forking off for now The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has reached an agreement with Synadia, the company behind open source messaging system NATS, which will see it control the trademark, domain name, and GitHub repositories....

Grab more headroom with the 4 and 8 GB variants Raspberry Pi has bucked tech industry trends and cut prices for the 4 GB and 8 GB variants of its Compute Module 4....

25-year-old fella pleads guilty to stealing, dumping 1.1TB of data from the House of Mouse When someone stole more than a terabyte of data from Disney last year, it was believed to be the work of Russian hacktivists protesting for artist rights. We now know it was actually a 25-year-old California resident....

Real-time video deepfakes? Not convincing yet RSAC Spam messages predate the web itself, and generative AI has given it a fluency upgrade, churning out slick, localized scams and letting crooks hit regions and dialects they used to ignore....

Can't run Windows 11? Microsoft suggests renting it instead Microsoft has announced a price cut for Windows 365 alongside a not-so-subtle suggestion that Windows 10 users might consider taking advantage of the offer to keep security updates flowing....

UK starts prosecution days after FBI vowed to clamp down on the crime Three young Brits are accused of stateside swatting offences and will appear in a UK court today to face their charges after a joint investigation by the FBI and Merseyside cops....

Ireland privacy watchdog says transfers violated GDPR, as Chinese app confirms 1B datacenter in Finland Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC) has confirmed a fine of 530 million ($600 million) against social media biz TikTok for transferring European user data to China....

Report into alternative networks says competition with BT and co making life harder than ever Alternative network providers (altnets) are facing tough competition from the big players in the UK broadband market, with consolidation likely in the face of slowing growth in fiber internet uptake....

Experts suggest the obvious: There is an ongoing coordinated attack on UK retail sector Harrods, a globally recognized purveyor of all things luxury, is the third major UK retailer to confirm an attempted cyberattack on its systems in under two weeks....

Trigger-happy Taiwan headline sparks instant apocalypse vibes World War III might have begun this week, according to British broadsheet The Telegraph....

Easy fix: Telling LLMs to cosplay Lenin makes 'em more gender blind Open source AI models are more likely to recommend men than women for jobs, particularly the high-paying ones, a new study has found....

Used his loaf and found sweet solution for bakery borkage On Call Welcome once again to On Call, The Register's reader-contributed column that each Friday serves up your stories of biting into half-baked tech support problems....

Blu-3 accused of paying off former Mace Group associates UK authorities on Wednesday arrested three individuals in connection with a multi-million-pound bribery probe tied to the construction of a Microsoft datacenter in the Netherlands....

Content players and smartphone makers made it happen six months after regulator floated the idea China has flicked the switch on Minor's mode', a subset of its internet in which under-18s will only see wholesome content....

iGiant shifted production to India and Vietnam but has no idea if that will help after tariff pause ends Apple believes the USA's new tariffs policy will impact its finances by at least $900 million in its next quarter, has re-organized its supply chains to protect itself from whatever comes next, but can't predict the impact on its business....

As military memo makes it official policy The US Army intends to secure the right to repair its own equipment, a right that hasn't always been available under past procurement contracts - and one of the very few things that Democrats in Congress and the Trump administration broadly agree upon....

House Oversight probes missing Musk disclosures, background checks, data mess at NLRB Elon Musk is backing away from his Trump-blessed government gig, but now House Democrats want to see the permission slip that got him in the door....

Seriously, HTF does Reality Labs bleed SIXTY BILLION US DOLLARS in FIVE years? Meta's Reality Labs division continued its losing streak with another $4.2 billion down the drain in the first quarter of 2025. CEO Mark Zuckerberg's stated priorities on Wednesday's earnings call suggest his metaverse dream is well and truly over....

Why optimize code when you can just start running sooner? Microsoft later this month plans to begin loading Word shortly after folks' computers begin booting up - to "optimize performance" or at least improve their perception of it....

This time criminals targeted partner's third-party software It's more bad news from Ascension Health which is informing some of its patients, potentially for the second time in the space of a year, that their medical data was compromised during a major cyberattack....

Keep plugging those LLMs into your apps, folks. This neural network told me it'll be fine Some smart cookies have found that when AI models face a conflict between telling the truth or accomplishing a specific goal, they lie more than 50 percent of the time....

Whole thing gonna be a real PITA for tech sector, says ABI Research World War Fee US tariffs - should they go ahead - are likely to result in price bumps for essential components and construction materials in the datacenter industry, and may even cost America its lead in the AI race as investments are paused or canceled....

Will the personal assistant shop for groceries? Or get hijacked by a teen? RSAC If Amazon's Alexa+ works as intended, it could show how an AI assistant helps with everyday tasks like making dinner reservations or arranging an oven repair. Or things could go terribly wrong: it might turn on the oven and turn dinner plans into a house fire....

New plan may remain too restrictive for some developers Redis, the company behind the popular value-key database of the same name, has returned its main system to an open source license, although the move failed to satisfy some critics....

Xitter sheds EU users. Musk's Grok suggests 'misinformation, hate speech, and a perceived decline in content moderation' to blame Everything is super, over at X (the social media service formerly known as Twitter), which has shed around 10 percent of its European users in the past six months....

McKinsey warns datacenter binge could overshoot actual demand as execs scramble to keep up with hype A report from consultancy McKinsey & Company highlights the widespread unease over AI, pointing to the bewildering sums being invested into infrastructure to support it, while warning that forecasts of future demand are based on little more than guesswork....

President's campaign continues against man he claims covered up evidence of electoral fraud in 2020 Chris Krebs, former CISA director and current political punching bag for the US President, says his Global Entry membership was revoked....

Mission to a metal asteroid lacks xenon pressure NASA is looking into propulsion problems experienced by a probe on its way to orbit the asteroid Psyche....

Switching voltage allows search giant to switch up power delivery system Google is planning for datacenter racks supporting 1 MW of IT hardware loads, plus the cooling infrastructure to cope, as AI processing continues to grow ever more energy intensive....

The spreadsheet from Hell From the department of "but... why?" comes news of Linux running in Microsoft Excel, although all might not be as it seems....

No MFA? No problem - as long as you show you've learned your lesson The UK's data protection overlord is not going to pursue any further investigation into the British Library's 2023 ransomware attack....

We look at the state of AI software development - it's not going away, but risks abound Analysis AI in software development has evolved rapidly since GitHub Copilot caught the world's attention with its June 2021 preview - and shows no sign of slowing down....

Watchdog says transformation effort added costs instead of savings for most businesses The UK tax authority's push to digitize services has backfired, saddling taxpayers with hundreds of millions in extra costs, according to a report by Parliament's public spending watchdog....

Sees economic strife as chance to sell even more stuff than its $70bn Q3 haul Microsoft's capital expenditure was slightly lower than forecast, in part due to normal variability from the timing of delivery of data center leases" that the company was at pains to argue are not in any way bad news....

Good news, everyone: 15 years on, TDE still pushes pixels The long-running fork of KDE 3 has dropped its latest update: Trinity Desktop Environment R14.1.4, now with better distro support and a fresh coat of code. Not bad for a project still chugging along 15 years after KDE itself moved on....

Datacenter build slowdown hurt storage sales but Korean giant sees bit barn rebound Samsung yesterday posted results a little better than it forecast, and attributed some of its record revenue and strong profit to customers rushing to buy kit before the USA raises tariffs on imports....

CEO, senior execs at every turn chose the most anti-competitive option' A federal judge has said Apple execs deliberately ignored an injunction and told lies in court - and so has asked US prosecutors to consider criminal charges against the iPhone titan....