The Register

This couldn't possibly be about Chinese model builders taking some of the shine off US rivals, could it? +Comment Anthropic has urged the White House to further tighten so-called AI diffusion rules - which are already set to hurt Nvidia and co by limiting or blocking the sale of higher-end GPUs and accelerators outside the US and a select few allies from mid-May....

For now it's a potential bug-finder and friend to defenders RSAC Former NSA cyber-boss Rob Joyce thinks today's artificial intelligence is dangerously close to becoming a top-tier vulnerability exploit developer....

Oligarch's crew makes audits harder, US comptroller general tells Congress The US Government Accountability Office has confirmed it launched audits of Elon Musk's Trump-blessed cost-trimming DOGE unit amid concerns that its access to agency systems may be complicating oversight and involving sensitive data....

Caffeine addicts evidently not thrilled to see cafes become walk-in vending machines Starbucks, smarting from disappointing second-quarter earnings, says that trying to replace staff with machines was a mistake....

Cybersecurity is national security, says Jen Easterly RSAC America's top cyber-defense agency is "being undermined" by personnel and budget cuts under the Trump administration, some of which are being driven by an expectation of perfect loyalty to the President rather than the nation....

Feds say $970K scheme defrauded 13+ companies A Maryland man has pleaded guilty to fraud after landing a job with a contractor working on US government software, and then outsourcing the work to a self-described North Korean developer in China....

Asus implements droop detector for PCIe slots as GPUs now so heavy they risk toppling out Graphics cards are now getting so bulky and heavy that device maker Asus has decided customers need a way to detect any sagging or movement of the GPU in its PCIe slot....

We'll see if messaging client can keep up with sibling browser Mozilla has lobbed out Firefox 138, and subsidiary MZLA's Thunderbird 138 isn't far behind. The venerable messaging client is picking up the pace and finally syncing its stride with the browser that spawned it....

No specific law against it yet, but that's set to change A spate of high-profile swatting incidents in the US recently forced the FBI into action with its latest awareness campaign about the occasionally deadly practice....

Former Space Shuttle boss's blog booted from Trump-era agency website NASA has excised former Space Shuttle manager Wayne Hale's blog from its website in a reminder that nothing is forever....

Brad Smith commits org to facing off with US govt in court to protect them Microsoft is responding to mounting "geopolitical and trade volatility" between the US administration and governments in Europe by pledging privacy safeguards for customers worried about using American hyperscalers, and vowing to fight the US government in court to protect Euro customers' data if needed....

The tryhard's favorite distro wins an approved home in Microsoft's OS There have been unofficial versions for years, but Arch Linux is now officially on the menu for people using Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)....

Sycophantic update to GPT-4o rolled back after AI gets over-enthusiastic with the 'glaze' OpenAI has hurriedly rolled back the latest ChatGPT model days after it was released because it was deemed to be too "sycophant-y and annoying."...

Snappy surfer eyes Apple's EU engine requirements Alternative browser Flow now passes 90 percent of web-platform-tests....

Go ahead, please do Bash static analysis Shell scripting may finally get a proper bug-checker. A group of academics has proposed static analysis techniques aimed at improving the correctness and reliability of Unix shell programs....

Minister, platform providers disagree on whether law would have helped avoid last summer's riots MPs heard a range of interpretations of UK law when it comes to the spread of misinformation online, a critical factor in the riots across England and Northern Ireland sparked by inaccurate social media posts about the fatal stabbings at a children's dance class on 29 July last year....

What? Why? It's an update to its Outposts racks hybrid cloud rigs aimed at bankers and telcos Amazon Web services has created new elastic compute cloud instance types for its on-prem Outposts racks, the second generation of which was announced on Tuesday....

Satya Nadella reveals attempts to merge Word, PowerPoint and Excel - which may now succeed thanks to AI Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has revealed about thirty percent of code in the company's repositories was written by an AI....

And of course - sigh - they look like women with long blonde hair Chinese carmaker Chery has started using its own humanoid robots as sales staff in its showrooms....

Yet more strife for server-maker sees its share price slump by 15 percent Supermicro shares slumped 15 percent in after-hours trading as the company warned next week's quarterly results will see it miss forecast revenue by up to $1.5 billion....

Kirsty Noem argues cyber-agency's job is defending America, not becoming 'Ministry of Truth' RSAC Uncle Sam's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, aka CISA, has gone off the rails by trying to dispel disinformation, according to US Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem....

If Lip Bu Tan can't sell you his LLM accelerator, he's more than willing to build yours Direct Connect Intel has revealed a pair of variants of its long-awaited 18A process node to make it better suited for, one, manufacturing mass-market processors and, two, complex multi-die semiconductors for - of course - AI....

Revealing import taxes would be 'hostile and political' to Dear Leader World War Fee On Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt denounced Amazon after it was reported the tech giant intended to show how much President Trump's import tariffs would inflate the price of stuff sold through its internet souk....

Cryptographers' panel a bit gloomy this year RSAC It was a somewhat gloomy Cryptographers' Panel at the RSA Conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, with two of the industry's sages in a pretty grim mood....

Sharing is caring when your entire business is built on it Meta is scrambling to grab some of that ChatGPT and Grok buzz with the launch of its own standalone AI app. Built on its Llama 4 LLM, the assistant touts personalization and smoother voice chats, but the most visible feature is a Discover feed showing off how other users interact with it, and even that feels more like a gimmick than a game-changer....

Good intentions, terrible wording - and Trump can't wait to use it because 'nobody gets treated worse than I do' Federal legislation that would protect people from having explicit images of themselves posted and shared online without their consent is set to become law in the USA after passing the House on Monday....

Google dumped io_uring after $1M in bug bounties A proof-of-concept program has been released to demonstrate a so-called monitoring "blind spot" in how some Linux antivirus and other endpoint protection tools use the kernel's io_uring interface....

Luis von Ahn says small quality hits are a price worth paying to ride the wave Duolingo has become the latest tech outfit to attempt to declare itself 'AI-first,' with CEO Luis von Ahn telling staff the biz hopes to gradually phase out contractors for work neural networks can take over....

As Big Tech gets used to the pain, smaller vendors urged to up their game Google says that despite a small dip in the number of exploited zero-day vulnerabilities in 2024, the number of attacks using these novel bugs continues on an upward trend overall....

Cloud storage biz says 'baseless allegations' are attempts by analysts to profit Cloud storage and backup provider Backblaze has denied accusations made by financial analysts of "sham accounting" and "insider dumping," as well as claims it inflated cash flow forecasts to hide its real performance....

Former Rear Admiral calls for National Guard online deployment and corporates to be held accountable RSAC Russia used to be considered America's biggest adversary online, but over the past couple of years China has taken the role, and is proving highly effective at it....

The OS refresh brings Ryzen AI and Arrow Lake compatibility Fresh from their respective bunkers, OpenBSD 7.7 and a new version of Plan 9 fork 9Front have dropped, bringing hardened security, obscure charm, and, oddly enough, artwork from the same designer....

Top voices warn that political retaliation puts democracy and national defense at risk The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and numerous infosec leaders are lobbying US President Donald Trump to drop his enduring investigation into Chris Krebs, claiming that targeting the former CISA boss amounts to bullying....

The good news: everyone's using it. The bad news: have you seen how they're using it? OpenLogic's 2025 State of Open Source Report offers a slightly different perspective on modern corporate adoption of FOSS - and it's not a reassuring one....

Artificial intelligence is helping Beijing's goons break in faster and stay longer RSAC The biggest threat to US critical infrastructure, according to FBI Deputy Assistant Director Cynthia Kaiser, can be summed up in one word: "China."...

'We thought it was a really obvious way to build a processor and everybody would be doing it' It is 40 years since the first Arm processor was powered up, and the UK's Centre for Computing History (CCH) celebrated in style, with speakers to mark the event, hardware on show, and a countdown to the anniversary....

FBI and others list how to spot NK infiltrators, but AI will make it harder RSAC Concerned a new recruit might be a North Korean stooge out to steal intellectual property and then hit an org with malware? There is an answer, for the moment at least....

HMRC kicks off procurement to modernize customer service after scathing reports The UK's tax collector plans to appoint a new CRM vendor to manage its vast interactions with citizens over their tax affairs....

'When we look at the economic outcomes, it really has not moved the needle' Instead of depressing wages or taking jobs, generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini have had almost no wage or labor impact so far - a finding that calls into question the huge capital expenditures required to create and run AI models....

They're sorry/not sorry for testing if bots can change minds by pretending to be a trauma counselor or a victim of sexual abuse Researchers from the University of Zurich have admitted to secretly posting AI-generated material to popular Subreddit r/changemyview in the name of science....

One launch down, 80-plus to go, for a pittance compared to planned AWS spending Amazon's first attempt to hoist production versions of its Project Kuiper broadband-beaming satellites appears to have succeeded....

Who could possibly be behind this attack on an ethnic minority China despises? Researchers at Canada's Citizen Lab have spotted a phishing campaign and supply chain attack directed at Uyghur people living outside China, and suggest it's an example of Beijing's attempts to target the ethnic minority group....

Florida man altered allergen info, DoSed former colleagues Former Disney employee Michael Scheuer was sentenced to 36 months in prison and fined almost $688,000 for screwing up a software application the entertainment giant used to cook up its restaurant menus....

Sometimes, silence is the best option An Oklahoma City cybersecurity professional accused of installing spyware on a hospital PC confirmed on LinkedIn key details of the drama....

Whistleblowing, email is evidential mail, HR is not your friend, and more discussed by CxO panel RSAC Chief security officers should negotiate personal liability insurance and a golden parachute when they start a new job - in case things go sideways and management tries to scapegoat them for a network breach....

Homeland Security boss Noem added as last-minute keynote, mind you RSAC There's a notable absence from this year's RSA Conference that kicked off today in San Francisco: The NSA's State of the Hack panel....

Dem Sens demand action to stop SpaceX oligarch from turning watchdogs into corporate yes-men The Trump-blessed DOGE unit could help its boss Elon Musk avoid more than $2.37 billion in potential legal liabilities by stripping power from the regulators tasked with supervising the billionaire's businesses....

As astronomers gripe about sats screwing observations AST SpaceMobile says it is working with US astronomers and America's National Science Foundation (NSF) to mitigate the impact of satellites on observations, after a prototype became one of the brightest objects in the sky a couple of years back....

But what it can't do is 'unilaterally claw back a community project and its infrastructure, assets, and branding' The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) has filed a petition with the US Patent and Trademark Office to prevent Synadia from using the logo and domain for NATS, the open source messaging system....

Demotion of cyberspace policy team, closure of others, not a great look The US State Department announced a major reorg this month, and the changes could weaken America's ability to counter China's growing technological influence....