The Register

Did we says offshore? We meant, er, hardcore. Amirite, DOGE bros? Comment IBM - a company understood to employ at least one-third of its global workforce in India and Bangladesh - is pledging to spend $150 billion over the next half decade on making America great again....

The OS came first, the foundation later - so what does it do? Interview Many FOSS projects are backed by nonprofit foundations. One such example is the FreeBSD Foundation, started by Meta software engineer Justin T Gibbs. He spoke with The Register about the project's copyright philosophy, what the foundation does, and why it matters....

Damning report says it set a moving target that was way too ambitious The European Chips Act is unlikely to meet its target of hitting a 20 percent share of the global semiconductor market by 2030....

Cyberattack? Bad software update? International oopsie? The cause is unclear, but Iberia is dark A massive power outage has left Spain, Portugal and parts of southern France without electricity, and the cause has yet to be identified....

No more asterisks. Voice typing now reflects the true spirit of your rage Customer feedback wins - Microsoft is adding a toggle to turn off the Windows 11 profanity filter....

It took a 1 year+ probe, plenty of client calls for VeriSource to understand just how much of a yikes it has on its hands Houston-based VeriSource Services' long-running probe into a February 2024 digital break-in shows the data of 4 million people - not just a few hundred thousand as it first claimed - was accessed by an "unknown actor"....

Image board hints that rumors of a poorly maintained back end may be true Clearweb cesspit 4chan is back up and running, but says the damage caused by a cyberattack earlier this month was "catastrophic."...

Government procurement process is very involved Comment It's easy to miss 125 million ($166 million). It could happen to anyone. Take Paul Patterson, for example. In January 2024, the director of Fujitsu Services Ltd emailed the UK government's commercial arm to confirm the Japanese tech services provider would pause bidding for public sector work after the Post Office Horizon scandal became public knowledge....

Spend will come under scrutiny, but projects with good returns still likely to get backing, analyst says The ripple effects of recent US tariffs could hit sectors well beyond those currently in the firing line, or so warns TechMarketView....

Latest profit and loss accounts carry scars of ad spending exodus, but things improving. Maybe not everywhere though In the months following Tesla CEO and Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, now rebranded to X, business collapsed in the UK, according to recently filed profit and loss accounts for the year ended December 31 2023....

Think that next refresh is going to get better? The first step to freedom is admitting there's a problem Opinion Windows is at that awkward stage any global empire has to go through. Around one in five of the world population is a Windows user - 1.5 billion humans. Aside from the relatively small slice that Mac takes, everyone else is happy with smartphones, so until we make contact with credulous aliens, there are no new worlds for Microsoft to conquer. In an industry obsessed with growth, this is untenable....

When your customers work in super-sensitive situations, bad jokes make for bad business Who, Me? Welcome to another Monday morning! We hope your weekend could be described in pleasant terms. That's what The Register strives for at this time of week in each installment of "Who, Me?" - the column that shares your stories of making decidedly unpleasant mistakes and somehow mopping up afterwards....

Redmond reckons $1.50/core/month hotpatch service is worth it to avoid eight Patch Tuesday scrambles each year Microsoft has announced that its preview of hotpatching for on-prem Windows Server 2025 will become a paid subscription service in July....

And just-about bricks some of its older models everywhere Google has given up on smart thermostats in Europe....

PLUS: Microsoft fixes messes China used to attack it; Mitre adds ESXi advice; Employee-tracking screenshots leak; and more! Infosec in brief Samsung has warned that some of its Galaxy devices store passwords in plaintext....

PLUS: Korea's SK Telecom replacing SIMs after attack; India automates satellite docking; China greens its datacenters; and more Asia In Brief Toyota last week launched a range of electric vehicles in China, one of which use Huawei's HarmonyOS...

Jia Rong Low hopes to make registries interesting again Interview Before you get to know Jia Rong Low, the recently appointed director general of the Asia Pacific Network Information Center (APNIC), you might want to check your definition of "the internet."...

Now that's a sum of all fears The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, aka DARPA, believes mathematics isn't advancing fast enough....

One eight-person publisher says it'll be forced to pay $1.5M WORLD WAR FEE The Trump administration's tariffs are famously raising the prices of high-ticket products with lots of chips, like iPhones and cars, but they're also hurting small businesses like game makers. In this case, we're not talking video games, but the old-fashioned kind you play at your kitchen table....

Reg hack pines for simpler times, then tries to recapture them Sometimes, the size and complexity of modern OSes - even the FOSS ones - is enough to make us miss the days when an entire bootable OS could fit in three files, when configuring a PC for production meant editing two plain-text files, which contained maybe a dozen lines each. DOS couldn't do very much, but the little it did was enough. From the early 1980s for a decade or two, much of the world ran on DOS. Then Windows 3 came along, which is arguably the point where the rot set in....

Moscow likely to respawn elsewhere The British government is banning the export of video game controllers to Russia, claiming these can be repurposed for piloting drones on the frontline in Ukraine....

Er, are we sure we want to outsource the welding? Rise of the machines Construction workers could soon find themselves laboring alongside 20-foot (6 meter) tall AI-powered autonomous robots capable of welding, carpentry, and 3D printing buildings. What could possibly go wrong?...

Infosec is a team sport ... unless you're in the White House Opinion Just when it seems they couldn't be that careless, US officials tasked with defending the nation go and do something else that puts American critical infrastructure, national security, and troops' lives in danger....

What next for US-bankrolled vulnerability tracker? It's edging closer to a more independent, global future Kent Landfield, a founding member of the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) program and member of the board, learned through social media that the system he helped create was just hours away from losing funding....

GreyNoise says it is the kind of activity that typically precedes new vulnerability disclosures Ivanti VPN users should stay alert as IP scanning for the vendor's Connect Secure and Pulse Secure systems surged by 800 percent last week, according to threat intel biz GreyNoise....

Where have we heard this before? Feb security update needs its own fix More than one month after complaints starting flying, Microsoft has fixed a Windows bug that caused some Remote Desktop sessions to freeze....

Biofuel lowers pollutants, but won't eliminate 'em, and could mean DCs compete for supplies Datacenter operators are being encouraged to adopt hydrotreated vegetable oil (HVO) as a replacement for diesel in generators, however, analysts say the sustainable stand-in is not emission-free and has its own drawbacks....

One step forward and one step back as earlier hopes of progress dashed by latest update Marks & Spencer has paused online orders for customers via its website and app as the UK retailer continues to wrestle with an ongoing "cyber incident."...

German software giant paywalls details, but experts piece together the clues SAP's latest out-of-band patch is for a perfect 10/10 bug in NetWeaver that experts suspect could have already been exploited as a zero-day....

Remember when NASA was laser focused on that? It was 35 years ago when the Hubble Space Telescope deployed into orbit, sent by a space agency facing an existential crisis. Thirty-five years on, not much seems to have changed....

Still plans to invest $75B in CapEx this year as unable to meet capacity demand Google says the mega capital splurge on datacenters in recent years is putting more strain on its balance sheet due to rising depreciation costs, yet it still plans to splash $75 billion on bit barns in 2025....

Hello, operator? Book me to Memphis, Tennessee Interview For all the talk of the "agentic era" from AI vendors like OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Microsoft, and just about everyone else in the space, corporate use of the technology is still tentative. Virgin Atlantic has been conducting flight tests of its website with an AI agent called Operator, and early results are promising, pointing the way toward how agents might actually be used to help customers book flights....

Successful qualification run for P160C solid-fuel motor in South American spaceport A qualification version of the P160C solid-fuel motor was successfully tested at the European Spaceport in French Guiana on April 24, paving the way for heftier payloads on the Ariane 6 and Vega rockets....

Taxpayers foot bill to get to new platform as Fujitsu package balloons to 2.44 billion The UK's Post Office would have to cope with suboptimal IT, increased risks and costs, and reduced reporting accuracy if it didn't receive 136 million ($180 million) in government aid to keep its disastrous Horizon system running and replace it with a more modern platform....

Third-party data supplier also in hot water with Brit regulator over consent issues Britain's data privacy watchdog has slapped a fine of 90k ($120k) on a business that targeted people with intrusive marketing phone calls, despite them being registered with the official "Do Not Call" opt-out service....

Volts make jolts On Call By the time Friday morning rolls around, starting the day with a stimulating beverage feels like a fine idea. And so does delivering a freshly brewed installment of On Call, The Register's reader-contributed column in which you share tales of tech support triumph and torture....

Because coding phishing sites from scratch is a real pain in the neck Darcula, a cybercrime outfit that offers a phishing-as-a-service kit to other criminals, this week added AI capabilities to its kit that help would-be vampires spin up phishing sites in multiple languages more efficiently....

Thousands face ax, more given RTO orders in quest to suck less Intel's new CEO Lip-Bu Tan is swinging the ax again, with another round of layoffs incoming as Chipzilla tries to reboot its core....

Cursor, Codium makers lose access as add-on goes exclusive Microsoft's C/C++ extension for Visual Studio Code (VS Code) no longer works with derivative products such as VS Codium and Cursor - and some developers are crying foul....

At least it wasn't Harvard Yale New Haven Health has notified more than 5.5 million people that their private details were likely stolen by miscreants who broke into the healthcare system's network last month....

Watch your partitions - GPT and dual-boot don't always mix While The Reg FOSS desk was on spring break, both the latest interim Ubuntu and latest Fedora debuted....

This one weird trick can stop Windows updates dead in their tracks Turns out Microsoft's latest patch job might need a patch of its own, again. This time, the culprit is a mysterious inetpub folder quietly deployed by Redmond, now hijacked by a security researcher to break Windows updates....

UK org backing it promises 'legal certainty' for devs, money for creators... but is it too late? A UK non-profit is planning to introduce a new licensing model which will allow developers of large language models to use copyrighted training data while paying the publishers it represents....

Collecting data from solo players is a Far Cry from being necessary, says noyb For anyone who's ever been frustrated by the need to go online to play a single-player video game, the European privacy specialists at noyb have heard you, and they've filed a complaint against Ubisoft in Austria dealing specifically with the issue....

'Inventory accumulation' as vendors hoard HBM amid tariff and other pressures South Korean memory maker SK Hynix is reporting a sales bounce due to the demand for AI systems, helped by US businesses stockpiling HBM supplies amid tariff uncertainty....

Something broke on Windows 11 24H2, but dev who discovered it tells El Reg this time Microsoft's not to blame Microsoft's Windows 11 24H2 update is frustrating some users, but it isn't the operating system at fault this time. Instead, it's down to a 20-year-old error in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas....

Alleges semi designer tried to obstruct Qualy's build of Arm-compatible custom cores Qualcomm has amended its complaint against Arm in a 2024 lawsuit, adding more allegations about Arm's purported breach of license agreements and accusing it of "misrepresenting" their relationship by intending to make its own rival chips....

Get a new, clean (maybe suspiciously empty) install up to speed - and keep it there When you install a fresh, clean copy of Windows - say, if you're switching to the LTSC edition - Ninite is here to kickstart provisioning the new OS....

Extreme weather is such a problem when building bit barns... hmmm, wonder what could be causing that? When it comes to building datacenters, reducing the environmental impact of the project is still not seen as a major concern - it is lower on the list than cost of equipment and materials, skills shortages, a possible downturn in projects, and even bad weather....

Customers told to expect further delays as contactless payments still down UK high street retailer Marks & Spencer says contactless payments are still down following its "cyber incident" and order delays are likely to continue....