The Register

When it comes to sales and rebates, PC giant takes 'Keep Reinventing' seriously HP Inc has agreed to pay $4 million to settle a class-action lawsuit in the US that alleged it used deceptive pricing tactics on its website, including fake discounts and misleading limited-time offers....

AI-spoofed Mark joins fellow billionaires as the voice of the street - here's how it was probably done Video Crosswalk buttons in various US cities were hijacked over the past week or so to - rather than robotically tell people it's safe to walk or wait - instead emit the AI-spoofed voices of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg....

Oh. You expected serious suggestions? It isn't just devices unable to upgrade to Windows 11 that are headed to digital landfill this year. The first version of Microsoft's Surface Hub is also destined for the tech trashcan as Windows 10 support ends. So, what do you do with a big black wall ornament?...

Just us or is AI increasingly appearing like an unwanted party guest? Microsoft customers are claiming the Windows giant's Copilot AI service sometimes ignores commands to disable the thing, and thus turns itself back on like a zombie risen from the dead....

Making up subscription limits as it goes? Super encouraging from a code assistant. Anyways, back to int main(enter the void)... In a fitting bit of irony, users of Cursor AI experienced the limitations of AI firsthand when the programming tool's own AI support bot hallucinated a policy limitation that doesn't actually exist....

Using LLMs to pick programs, people, contracts to cut is bad enough - but doing it with Musk's Grok? Yikes A group of 48 House Democrats is concerned that Elon Musk's cost-trimmers at DOGE are being careless in their use of AI to help figure out where to slash, creating security risks and giving the oligarch's artificial intelligence lab an inside track to train its models on government info....

Some in the infosec world definitely want to see Big Red crucified CISA - the US government's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency - has issued an alert for those who missed Oracle grudgingly admitting some customer data was stolen from the database giant's public cloud infrastructure....

MITRE, EUVD, GCVE ... WTF? Comment The splintering of the global system for identifying and tracking security bugs in technology products has begun....

Lad who 'stays in his bedroom on his computer' emerged ready to deliver brilliant tech support On Call It may be a holiday Friday in much of the Reg-reading world but that won't stop us from delivering another installment of On Call, our weekly reader-contributed column that tells your tech support tales....

'Return to client' push coincides with RTO for cloud staff, DEI purge Exclusive IBM, which employees wryly or ruefully say stands for I've Been Moved, is once again moving its employees....

After battle with Uncle Sam over online competition, web giant vows to appeal the bit it lost, celebrates the half it won For the second time in less than a year, a federal judge has found that some parts of Google broke US antitrust law....

Illegitimi non carborundum? Nice password, Mr Ex-CISA Chris Krebs, the former head of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and a longtime Trump target, has resigned from SentinelOne following a recent executive order that targeted him and revoked the security clearances of everybody at the company....

As Huang jets to Middle Kingdom after H20 ban forces $5.5B hit Nvidia's troubles with the US government have just begun: The day after the Trump administration's export restrictions on its AI chips triggered a $5.5 billion charge, US elected officials are now demanding answers about how advanced silicon ended up in China.Meanwhile, CEO Jensen Huang has flown to China to try and smooth things over with the regime there....

Returning crew and a vital supply launch distract managers from chocolate eggs The US Space Agency has a busy few days ahead as a trio of International Space Station (ISS) residents prepare to return to Earth this weekend, and a critical SpaceX Dragon freighter is readied for launch on Monday....

SWOT satellite lets scientists observe small-scale eddies and waves for the first time A NASA-led satellite mission has suggested that swirls and eddies in the middle of the ocean have a bigger influence on Earth's climate system than scientists previously realized....

Re-writing applications takes years, is expensive, in-house expertise needed When moving to the cloud, companies with significant investments in Microsoft infrastructure wares simply can't afford to rewrite everything for Linux, so they end up migrating to Azure to dodge the markups Redmond charges for running its server software in competitors' clouds....

Bookworm 12.10-based release is a few steps ahead of upstream MX Linux 23.6 is here, taking the baseline of Debian 12.10 and adding some selected tweaks and updates of its own....

'It's amazing how fast the change has been' Are customers on the European side of the pond considering a move from US hyperscalers in the wake of recent events? Some of the region's vendors are reporting an uptick in inquiries as organizations mull their options....

Chip contract manufacturer not immune to 'uncertainties and risks' caused by Trump's import taxes TSMC's top brass insist it is not entertaining a joint venture with beleaguered chip biz Intel, though it is steeling itself for potential effects from the Trump administration's ever-changing tariff schemes....

Bit barns in Dublin doubled as battery farms, the rest of the world isn't buying it Analysis The idea of datacenters feeding power back into the electricity grid during peak demand may sound promising, but operators say it's unlikely to catch on beyond a few trials in Ireland because of the cost and technical complexity involved....

Truck-mounted demonstration weapon costs 10p a pop, says MOD British soldiers have successfully taken down drones with a radio-wave weapon....

No signal? No problem. But also no solid commitment to Britcoin yet The Bank of England has shown offline digital payment systems can work but plans to study policy choices before giving them the green light....

Alleges 5B in harm caused by Android deals, anticompetitive actions A British academic has launched a class-action suit against Google, alleging abuse of its market dominance in online search caused 5 billion ($6.6 billion) of damage to advertisers....

Manager of the .us namespace managed to block zoom.us A bad mistake by GoDaddy took Zoom offline for almost two hours on Wednesday afternoon, US time....

Future chargers could re-arrange battery chemistry to make them live longer Researchers at China's Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering have found a way to restore the energy density of old Lithium-Ion batteries by heating them to over 150C....

Ignored infosec rules, exfiltrated data ... then the mysterious login attempts from a Russian IP address began - claim Democratic lawmakers are calling for an investigation after a tech staffer at the US National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) blew the whistle on the cost-trimming DOGE's activities at the employment watchdog - which the staffer claims included being granted superuser status in contravention of standard operating procedures, exfiltrating data, and seemingly leaking credentials to someone with a Russian IP address....

Give Elon an inch and he'll take thousands of miles ... allegedly Tesla has been accused of somehow sneakily altering a customer's odometer to hasten the end of his vehicle's warranty period....

Ah yes, the courts, that'll totally work World War Fee President Trump's reign of tariffs has been challenged on the left and right by the State of California and the Liberty Justice Center....

Redmond talks up preview of AI agents navigating apps through the UI Microsoft will soon let Copilot agents drive computers through the GUI just like humans - by clicking buttons, selecting menus, and even completing forms on screen....

Just make it 420.69 and be done with it, Mr President World War Fee No, it wasn't a typo. Some Chinese imports are indeed subject to a 245 percent tariff in the United States....

Microsoft rewards those who patch early with bricks hurled through its operating system Keeping with its rich history of updates that break Windows in unexpected ways, Microsoft has warned that two recent patches for Windows 11 24H2 are triggering blue screen crashes....

Extraordinary rendition of data, or just dropped it out of a helicopter? CIA Director John Ratcliffe's smartphone has almost no trace left of the infamous Signalgate chat - the one in which he and other top US national security officials discussed a secret upcoming military operation in a group Signal conversation a journalist was inadvertently added to....

Bug or migration strategy for New Outlook, we wonder Far be it from us to suggest Microsoft is trying to force people onto its New Outlook application, but it has admitted Classic Outlook occasionally and mysteriously turns into a system resource hog....

Is that MI in MI308 going to be Mission Impossible? World War Fee Turns out Nvidia's not the only chip shop caught in the crossfire of Trump's tit-for-tat trade battle with China....

Intune policies turn out to be mere suggestions Microsoft has admitted some users are being offered Windows 11 upgrades despite Intune policies configured otherwise....

Timing not ideal with Wall Street fearing recession It's been a little over a year since Adobe abandoned its plans to purchase web-based design tool Figma. Now, the smaller of the two app makers is bucking market uncertainty by filing for an IPO....

Uncertainty is the new certainty In an 11th-hour reprieve, the US government last night agreed to continue funding the globally used Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) program....

Two decades have passed since NASA made two spacecraft collide It is twenty years since NASA's DART mission collided with a satellite after depleting its fuel during a rendezvous attempt....

DPP Law is appealing against data watchdog's conclusions A law firm is appealing against a 60,000 fine from the UK's data watchdog after 32 GB of personal information was stolen from its systems....

Bezos' biz and Google tell regulator higher cost of running Windows Server in their clouds isn't fair AWS estimates that half of the workloads Microsoft enterprise customers run on Azure would migrate to its own datacenters if only the licensing costs of doing so were not prohibitively high and a competitive deterrent....

Dutch lithography king sticks to 35B forecast despite investor jitters Euro tech giant ASML hit its revenue guidance last quarter and still expects the coffers to swell this year, but order bookings are down as Trump's tariff turmoil casts uncertainty over the entire industry....

Vintage phishing varietal has improved with age Russia never stops using proven tactics, and its Cozy Bear, aka APT 29, cyber-spies are once again trying to lure European diplomats into downloading malware with a phony invitation to a lux event....

Outdated and misinformed legal presumptions at the heart of concerns Digital forensics in the UK is in need of reform, says one expert, as the deadline to advise the government on computer evidence rules arrives....

Maybe don't push to production without properly testing first? Microsoft Teams experienced a file-sharing outage overnight that disrupted collaboration for many users and forced the software biz to roll back a recent backend change....

5.2B more thrown at the never-ending quest to modernize HMRC In 2022, the UK's tax collector put 4.5 billion ($5.9 billion) on the table to help its applications become "less dependent upon legacy technologies." The extent to which His Majesty's Revenue & Customs (HMRC) achieved that goal is debatable, but there is no doubt it intends to spend up to 5.2 billion ($6.9 billion) more to continue the job....

It's not DNS. It can't be DNS? Right? TalkTalk Business customers were forced to survive without email nearly a week after a technical fault disrupted domain hosting....

It's LLMs all the way down Apple, having starved its AI models of data by respecting customer privacy, plans to improve its chatbot suggestions by using made-up emails....

It involves a number close to three or six depending on the pickle you're in Ransomware operators jack up their ransom demands by a factor of 2.8x if they detect a victim has cyber-insurance, a study highlighted by the Netherlands government has confirmed....

Fancy a doctorate in semiconductor design? The land of K-Pop wants you to help future-proof its industry South Korea has decided to dish out over $25 billion in help to industries impacted by the USA's new tariff regime....

Won't let the Big G require its apps and search to be installed on smartphones Japan's Fair Trade Commission yesterday ordered Google to stop doing deals that require manufacturers of Android handsets to include its apps....