The Register

They're cheap and grew up with AI ... so you're firing them why? Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman has suggested firing junior workers because AI can do their jobs is "the dumbest thing I've ever heard."...

Web giant reworks AI infra to improve utilization, with mix of chips from home and away Chinese web giant Baidu's robot taxi operations in China are breaking even when measured as a standalone business - and is confident they will be profitable once the company rolls into global markets....

Great Firewall took out all traffic to port 443 at a time Beijing didn't have an obvious need to keep its netizens in the dark China cut itself off from much of the global internet for just over an hour on Wednesday....

Redmond doesn't bother informing customers about some security fixes UPDATED Microsoft has chosen not to tell customers about a recently patched vulnerability in M365 Copilot....

Digitally enabled omniscience is neat, if you can bear the cost of being constantly monitored by an AI agent The headline-making Harvard duo who turned a pair of Meta smart glasses into a privacy violation machine last year now have their own pair of smart specs to sell, which they tell The Register will make people "super intelligent" by listening in on their conversations 24/7 and offering unsolicited feedback....

At 3% US market share, we don't think Cook & Co are sweating Video In a celebrity-studded launch event on Wednesday, Google showed off its Pixel 10 hardware, including four smartphones, an updated smartwatch, and earbuds. Unsurprisingly, every gadget comes with a heavy dose of AI....

Move along, nothing to see here Amazon has quietly fixed a couple of security issues in its coding agent: Amazon Q Developer VS Code extension. Attackers could use these vulns to leak secrets, including API keys from a developer's machine, and run arbitrary code....

Have a complaint? Need a benefit? Agentforce now has a bot for that American citizens seeking help from the federal government may soon find themselves being assisted by an AI agent, if Salesforce's new public sector offering is a success....

Dragging DNS into the modern age. And if that means fewer people need to buy IPv4, so much the better A pair of networking researchers have proposed that the Internet Engineering Task Force define support for IPv6 as a best practice for operators of DNS resolvers - the servers that translate URLs into IP addresses - and one of them hopes adoption of the idea will accelerate the demise of IPv4....

Rival Brave flags prompt injection vulnerability, now patched updated To the surprise of no one in the security industry, processing untrusted, unvalidated input is a bad idea....

Performance-tuned and optimized spin seems to be winning fans CachyOS bills itself as a Blazingly Fast & Customizable Linux distribution and that seems to be winning it friends. In the last month, it's the number one distro on the popularity chart on the widely-used DistroWatch comparison site....

Snarfing up config files for 'thousands' of devices...just for giggles, we're sure The FBI and security researchers today warned that Russian government spies exploited a seven-year-old bug in end-of-life Cisco networking devices to snoop around in American critical infrastructure networks and collect information on industrial systems....

GSA AI chief says market can do better but the feds needed a kickstart The Trump administration just launched a detailed, AI-pushing platform for federal agencies last week, but a government leader is already promising to kill it....

Plessey sold to Haylo Labs, financed by $100M Goertek loan The UK's Plessey Semiconductors has been acquired by Haylo Labs, using funding supplied by a Chinese company, Goertek Inc. The move was cleared by the British government....

Researchers disclosing their findings said 'it's as bad as it sounds' Researchers at watchTowr just published working proof-of-concept exploits for two unauthenticated remote code execution bug chains in backup giant Commvault....

iiNet breach blamed on single stolen login, with emails, phone numbers, and addresses exposed Aussie telco giant TPG Telecom has opened an investigation after confirming a cyberattack at subsidiary iiNet....

No word yet on when any homegrown hardware production begins Texas fabless chip firm Cirrus Logic has announced a new partnership with GlobalFoundries on next-generation bipolar-CMOS-DMOS (BCD) and gallium nitride (GaN) parts....

Epic boss brands the changes 'malicious compliance' Google has announced changes to its Play Store rules in an effort to appease the European Commission and dodge Digital Markets Act (DMA) fines....

Government says move will cut red tape, but startups fear sector could be sidelined The UK Space Agency (UKSA) is set to join the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) in an effort to "cut red tape" and, presumably, save some cash....

Hmmm, state ownership of private corps... what does that remind us of? The US government is considering taking a stake in Intel and other semiconductor companies that benefit from CHIPS Act funding, according to officials from the Trump administration. The move follows SoftBank's $2 billion investment in the faltering chip giant....

LLMs flop at selling Fair Trade - unless you're a true believer Interview Large language models stumble when trying to sway buyers with moral arguments, according to research from the SGH Warsaw School of Economics and Sakarya Business School....

Good start, but you have to keep it up, say key players Feature It's not easy to grow a national chip industry. Semiconductor startups are a risky investment. They chew through early-stage capital, often with little to show for it, making them a long-term proposition. Those that pay off can deliver big, but success is far from guaranteed....

Redmond scrambles to undo damage after tools borked by August patch Microsoft has moved swiftly to remove the bullet it fired into its own foot with the August 2025 Security Update reset and recovery bug....

Rotten is as Rotten does Opinion It's 1976, and in the country of the Beatles, another guitar band is giving it some. Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols isn't so keen on love and blackbirds. Instead, he sings lustily that he wants to be an anarchist, destroying passers-by and in general promoting anarchy in the UK....

Chipzilla quietly fixed the problems without responding to the person who found them Security boffin Eaton Zveare has highlighted some serious holes in the online infrastructure of chip giant Intel - walking through services with coding flaws to gain access to supposedly internal documentation, from non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) to the personal details of more than 270,000 Intel staffers....

Burger slinger gets a McRibbing, reacts by firing staffer who helped A white-hat hacker has discovered a series of critical flaws in McDonald's staff and partner portals that allowed anyone to order free food online, get admin rights to the burger slinger's marketing materials, and could allow an attacker to get a corporate email account with which to conduct a little filet-o-phishing....

Researchers use LLM in 'AI Space Cortex' to automate robotic extraterrestrial exploration Businesses may be struggling to find meaningful ways to use artificial intelligence software, but space scientists at least have a few ideas about how to deploy AI models....

Produces advice in a single day instead of two weeks - without job losses The Australian arm of consultancy firm KPMG wrote a 100-page prompt to create an agentic system that prepares tax advice far faster than humans....

Memory bandwidth boost appears to be the secret sauce in chips used for new memory optimized instance types Amazon Web Services has revealed it's started running some custom cuts of Intel's Xeon 6 processors....

Rami Sinno led Trainium and Inferentia development at Amazon British chip designer Arm Holdings has reportedly recruited one of Amazon Web Services' top chip engineers....

Reconfigure local app settings via a 'simple' POST request A now-patched flaw in popular AI model runner Ollama allows drive-by attacks in which a miscreant uses a malicious website to remotely target people's personal computers, spy on their local chats, and even control the models the victim's app talks to, in extreme cases by serving poisoned models....

Intruders hoped no one would notice their presence Criminals exploiting a critical vulnerability in open source Apache ActiveMQ middleware are fixing the flaw that allowed them access, after establishing persistence on Linux servers....

When is a duck not also a rabbit? When it's a canard Vision language models exhibit a form of self-delusion that echoes human psychology - they see patterns that aren't there....

Don't be afraid of the dark HANDS ON Even when you have dark mode enabled in Windows 11, some important dialog boxes stay white. But that could be changing, if a new, hidden beta feature becomes widely available....

It's that or a replacement for its aging H200 NVL PCIe cards Nvidia is reportedly prepping a new Blackwell-based GPU for the Chinese market that'll outperform its controversial H20 accelerators....

$1 trillion of new deployment needed by 2030 Colocation capacity in North American datacenters has dropped to a record low, with much of the construction pipeline already pre-leased, making this a key brake on growth. Keeping up with demand could take as much as $1 trillion in fresh datacenter builds before the decade is out....

But 3.13 adoption lags as most devs stick with earlier releases The Python Software Foundation (PSF), in association with tools vendor JetBrains, has published the eighth Python Developer Survey, with more than 30,000 contributors, making it the biggest yet....

Funding fights and Starship stumbles could still bring it back down to Earth NASA has begun assembling the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket that will send humans on a lunar landing mission in 2027....

Plan includes chatbots 'with full user context and data access' - what could go wrong? US government buyers have been busy getting AI into the hands of federal agencies, and now they're taking a moment to ask the industry how some of that AI magic could work for them....

Toronto company says weekend cyber raid hit internal IT, not punters' wallets Canadian casino software slinger Bragg Gaming Group has disclosed a "cybersecurity incident," though it's adamant the intruders never got their hands on customer data....

Unexpected news from Pine64, but there are other goodies to compensate Pine64 is moving from Arm kit to RISC-V. As a result, its higher-end open smartphones is for the chop - but not the lower-end model....

Dame Rachel de Souza says under-18s are laughing off the Online Safety Act's age blocks England's children's commissioner has urged the government to shut down one of the most obvious loopholes in its new age-blocking regime: kids firing up a VPN....

Report recommends that the UK become a leader in chip design The British government's advisory body on science and technology thinks the country could be a world leader in designing AI chips, if it could just get the right investment and skills in place....

Want to pass on that old PC? Perhaps wait until out-of-band patch arrives Microsoft has broken the Windows reset and recovery functionality so badly, it must push an out-of-band update....

500, 600, 1200, 2000... what's your number? Hands on The Commodore Amiga turned 40 this year, and the event has been marked by The National Museum Of Computing in the UK with a hands-on exhibition of models from the archives....

Tulsi Gabbard boasts Washington forced Blighty to drop iPhone encryption fight The UK government has reportedly abandoned its attempt to strong-arm Apple into weakening iPhone encryption after the White House forced Blighty into a quiet climb-down....

Developer demand for sovereign cloud from tech giant is on the rise, says exec Interview Google's President of Customer Experience, Hayete Gallot, offered some words of comfort to developers who are looking nervously at the rise of AI assistants while also laying out her vision for cloud sovereignty....

Takes two percent stake as rumours swirl Uncle Sam could do something similar Japanese tech investment concern SoftBank has made a $2 billion investment in Intel....

CEO says if you buy all your infosec stuff from him, life under assault from bots will be less painful Brace for a new round of browser wars, according to Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora....

Single spacesuit now worn 20 times Taikonauts aboard China's Tiangong space station used an AI model to prepare for a spacewalk....