The Register

Consumer org forces Redmond to expunge list of requirements for free ESU in Euro Economic Area, just need a Microsoft account Microsoft will give consumers in the European Economic Area no-strings extended support for the soon-to be-EOL Windows 10....

Companies must realize they can be more than pure consumers, and public sector ought to go beyond 'promotion' Feature It is 2025. Linux will turn 34 and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) 40. For the EU and Europe at large, which is famously experimental with government deployments of open source tech, behind initiatives to promote open licensing, and whose governments promote equal opportunity for FOSS vendors in public tendering, it's a crunch point....

Manager's quality control priorities were upside down On Call Welcome again to On Call, The Register's weekly column in which readers share stories of earnestly trying to fix broken tech, and end up feeling broken afterwards....

They would say that, wouldn't they? Apple and Google have both urged the European Union to revisit its Digital Markets Act (DMA), which both tech giants say is failing....

Apple prices meet Dell style Dell has entered the earbud market with a product you can manage from the cloud....

Accident causes major copper mine to suspend operations, as commodity and share prices soar In recent years technology buyers have endured hardware price rises due to a pandemic and its impact on supply chains, the global wave of inflation that followed, tariffs, and surging demand for AI technologies that allowed vendors to charge higher prices. Now, 800,000 tons of mud has pushed copper prices higher....

Chipzilla seeks investment from its top fab frenemy Intel has reportedly sought an investment from rival chipmaker TSMC....

You'll see the results next year, but it's not the end of Googly lappies Video Google has confirmed it will merge its ChromeOS and Android operating systems, and that the mobile OS will emerge triumphant....

Brad Smith says 'we do not provide technology to facilitate mass surveillance of civilians' The president of Microsoft has said it's cutting parts of the Israeli military off from Azure after reports that the army was using the platform in a mass surveillance operation against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza....

Plus the Snapdragon 8 Elite turns 5 Qualcomm revealed the second act in its bid to overtake Intel and AMD as the leading laptop CPU maker this week with the paper launch of its Snapdragon X2 Elite and Elite Extreme processors. The company seeks to bring the kind of battery life and performance Apple has gotten out of its Arm-based M-series silicon to the Windows market....

Keeping Pyongyang's coffers full North Korean-linked crews connected to the pervasive IT worker scams have upped their malware game, using more advanced tools, including a backdoor that has much of the same code as Pyongyang's infamous Lazarus Group deploys....

Former FTC chair Khan not happy her legal wrath ended in settlement worth just 14% of Amazon's quarterly net Amazon has settled the Federal Trade Commission's case against it for making it too hard to quit Prime, and while it naturally didn't admit to any wrongdoing, it's still going to pay out one of the largest settlements in FTC history to make the matter go away....

Elon Musk's AI appears to be more ideological than competitors Despite protest letters, concerns that it's biased and untrustworthy, model tweaks to appease its billionaire boss, and even a past incident where it called itself "MechaHitler," xAI's Grok is still being made available to government agencies for mere pennies....

Images of toddlers and home addresses leaked in reprehensible landmark attack A cyber criminal crew has targeted Kido International, a preschool and daycare organization, leaking sensitive details about its pupils and their parents....

Productivity gains promised, but humans still expected to audit the bots At its Unscripted event in London, DevOps company Harness presented its latest AI-driven modules, including an AI pipeline builder, AI test automation, autonomous code fixing when builds fail, AI AppSec (application security) and even AI-driven chaos testing, where resiliency is tested by introducing random failures....

New research program seeks energy-aware' ML that balances performance with power draw It's notoriously difficult to consistently measure the energy usage of AI models, but DARPA wants to put an end to that uncertainty with new "energy-aware" machine learning systems....

While EC suspects vendor's practices stifle competition, it argues it is in line with industry standards The European Commission has launched a formal investigation into SAP's behavior in the aftermarket for maintenance and support services in Europe....

Ruby Central is accused of ousting maintainers from core gems under pressure from Shopify Ruby Central is said to have quietly snatched control of several flagship Ruby open source projects from their long-time maintainers without their consent, following pressure from Shopify, one of its biggest backers....

Mountain View gripes over slow-moving regulators while Redmond rakes it in Google is like a dog with a bone over Microsoft's cloud licensing policies, not letting Euro regulators forget about what it sees as anti-competitive practices that penalize those wanting to run Windows software on rival cloud platforms....

Ballooning leverage and shaky customer funding could strain Big Red's balance sheet Oracle has raised $18 billion in debt, which could help fund massive datacenter investments aimed at meeting surging demand from AI model builders and enterprise customers....

The latest in a run of serious networking bugs gives attackers root if they have SNMP access Cisco has confirmed a new IOS and IOS XE zero-day, the latest in a string of flaws that attackers have been quick to weaponize....

Performance of new version mostly good, but future uncertain The bcachefs file system, now "externally maintained" outside the Linux kernel codebase, offers packages of its first version to be loadable on the fly....

Business Suite nostalgia unlikely to ease customers' public cloud journey SAP experts are doubting the enterprise software giant's message that it is simplifying licensing after the changes were discussed at the German-speaking user group conference....

Biometric Entry/Exit System phased in from October to 29 Schengen countries Travelers including Britons and Americans visiting most European countries will have to register their fingerprints and faces under a system that goes live next month....

Supermarket says the hack that shut down systems and emptied shelves has turned profits into losses The Co-operative Group has revealed the cyberattack that knocked its systems offline earlier this year will leave it nursing an 80 million hangover....

Guidance follows privacy complaints over sharp increase in police searches of travel doc and visa pic libraries The Home Office has told police forces to check their own photo databases before asking it to search its libraries of passport and visa facial images, as well as avoiding urgent requests "unless it is absolutely necessary."...

Big performance on offer, but be prepared to spend $200 HANDS ON Raspberry Pi has unveiled a fully loaded version of its computer-in-a-keyboard, featuring oodles of RAM, an SSD, and a clicky, mechanical keyboard. However, you'll pay a relative premium for these features....

By supporting efficient video codecs in hardware, which to be fair will also help punters Google, Meta, and Vodafone have called on chipmakers and smartphone manufacturers to support the AV1 video codec in hardware, especially in midrange devices, a suggestion that's not entirely altruistic....

As ban on under-16s using some sites looms, cyber-safety regulator sends Microsoft's code locker a letter Australia's eSafety Commissioner has written to GitHub to ask it to consider if it's a social network that endangers children....

More datacenters in familiar territories, too, and AI everywhere Alibaba Cloud yesterday announced its first datacenters in Brazil, France, and The Netherlands, plus expansion of its presence in five other countries outside China....

Redmond wants more flavors of ML than OpenAI can cook up Microsoft has sealed a deal with Anthropic to give users of Microsoft 365 Copilot the option to use the Claude AI engine....

Chipzilla can't say it's changed much, but could be a handy backup to TSMC After a painful breakup and a bout of financial turmoil, Intel is looking to rekindle the relationship with its old flame Apple....

Lambda's latest innovation with bit barn builder ECL only supports a handful of Nvidia racks, but it's a start Rent-a-GPU outfit Lambda says its latest Nvidia GB300 NVL72 system is not only powered entirely by hydrogen fuel cells but doesn't consume a single ounce of water....

In good news, battery replacement is a lot easier than earlier models Video Owners of Apple's iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max have been reporting that the shell of their pricey handsets is getting scratched up already, and the reason appears to be a shift to aluminum....

It's all Biden's fault, Chocolate Factory claims Google has taken a page out of Mark Zuckerberg's playbook, telling House Republicans that the Biden administration pressured it to push down COVID-19 content that didn't violate its rules, and pledging its commitment to free expression on political issues....

If you recently got an email asking you to verify your credentials to a PyPI site, better change that password The Python Software Foundation warned users of a new string of phishing attacks using a phony Python Package Index (PyPI) website and asking victims to verify their account or face suspension, and advised anyone who did provide their credentials to change their password "immediately."...

TrendForce warns of Q4 memory hikes as suppliers squeeze consumer markets PC memory prices are set to rise as the major suppliers allocate manufacturing capacity to the more lucrative server DRAM and HBM instead amid reports of tightening supplies....

Windows, macOS, Cinnamon, even iPadOS - all just a layout switch away Although Zorin doesn't aim to closely track its Ubuntu upstream, version 18 of its eponymous OS has been a long time coming....

AWS, Google, and Oracle admitted they can't support current setup Microsoft has the US Navy over a barrel, as the service admits it can't separate its custom-built cloud environment from Azure infrastructure without a complete rebuild "from the ground up."...

Industry looks like it's going to come up short - by about $800B The AI craze is fueling massive growth in infrastructure, but the industry will need to hit $2 trillion in revenue by 2030 to keep funding this habit. Consultants at Bain & Company think it is going to come up short....

Financial services firm admits it may mean fewer staff US banking giant Citi has revved the Stylus Workspaces AI platform it has been rolling out to employees, touting that it is "now powered by agentic AI."...

Mandiant CTO anticipates 'hearing about this campaign for the next one to two years' Unknown intruders - likely China-linked spies - have broken into "numerous" enterprise networks since March and deployed backdoors, providing access for their long-term IP and other sensitive data stealing missions, all the while remaining undetected on average for 393 days, according to Google Threat Intelligence....

Most organizations use AI in dev, the question now is how to use it properly, claims report Google Cloud's 2025 DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) report is out, claiming that since 90 percent of respondents now make some use of AI for software development, the question is not whether to adopt it but how to realize its value....

After air passenger travel hit across the Atlantic, organized crime agency strikes The UK's National Crime Agency has arrested a man as part of an investigation into a ransomware attack that disrupted airports around the world last weekend....

Attackers hit jackpot after targeting Boyd Gaming Hotel and casino operator Boyd Gaming has disclosed a cyberattack to US regulators, warning that hackers may have stolen personal information belonging to employees and other individuals....

Report uncovers widespread clock blocking, coffee badging UK workers totally understand why bosses want to get them back into the office - but would still jump ship if they were forced to give up remote working....

Labour accused of sneaking in plans it denied before the general election Seven campaign groups have written to UK prime minister Keir Starmer urging him to scrap plans for a mandatory digital identity system - a project that is expected to be announced imminently, as part an effort to tackle unauthorized migration....

Covid-style financial support? Nothing to confirm yet, say MPs The chair of the UK's business and trade committee says the situation at Jaguar Land Rover is likely to get "harder and harder over the next week or two," but stopped short of confirming that the government might intervene with financial support....

System meant to go live in 2021 costing 20M awaits reimplementation with new 170M price tag Europe's largest local authority has delayed the introduction of a vital income management system (IMS) amid confirmation that total spending on a disastrous Oracle implementation could hit 170 million (c $230 million)....

HMCTS expands investigation into IT flaw after whistleblowers draw Horizon comparisons The UK's HM Courts and Tribunals Service (HMCTS) is continuing to check whether an IT bug that could hide documents and data affected the outcome of any cases, a government minister has said....