The Register

Mobile application management updates mean apps could soon be blocked Today's a critical day for administrators managing a fleet of mobile devices via Microsoft Intune. Without updates, apps - including Microsoft's own - may stop working....

They're not the most sophisticated, but even simple attacks can lead to costly consequences The UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) is once again warning that pro-Russia hacktivists are a threat to critical services operators....

Ships emergency update to fix a Patch Tuesday misfire that prevented systems from switching off Microsoft has rushed out an out-of-band Windows 11 update after January's Patch Tuesday broke something as fundamental as turning PCs off....

Craig Guildford banned Israeli fans based on Microsoft's match report, told MPs 'we don't use AI,' then discovers... they did The chief constable of West Midlands Police has retired after his force used fictional output from Microsoft Copilot in deciding to ban Israeli fans from attending a football match at Birmingham club Aston Villa....

Maine filing confirms July attack affected 42,521 employees and job applicants Ingram Micro disclosed that a July 2025 ransomware attack compromised the personal data of tens of thousands of employees....

Labour's latest U-turn? 61 backbenchers pile pressure for Starmer to back Tory peer's amendment The British government may impose a ban on under-16s using social media, despite Labour prime minister Keir Starmer having previously expressed skepticism over the measure....

Kids return to classrooms after safety infrastructure knocked out A Warwickshire secondary school says it will fully reopen this week after a cyberattack forced a prolonged closure - though staff will return to classrooms with "very limited access" to IT systems....

Traditional considerations back in vogue. On-device AI? Not so much The majority of PCs that commercial resellers shipped to enterprise customers in Q4 were AI-capable, however, it was the traditional levers of price, battery life and performance these biz buyers were mostly sold on....

Capable of carrying 1-ton payload and key to strategy protecting North Atlantic from Russian submarines The Royal Navy has conducted the first flight of a helicopter-sized autonomous drone that is planned to operate from its ships in support of missions, including hunting for hostile submarines....

Freedom can be very contagious if it grows on its own terms. Europe of all places should know that Opinion Europe is famous for having the most tightly regulated non-existent tech sector in the world. This is a mildly unfair characterization, as there are plenty of tech enterprises across the continent, quite a respectable smattering if it wasn't for the US doing everything at least ten times bigger....

Bank staff wore the blame for a silly security slip Who, Me? Welcome to another edition of Who Me?", The Register's Monday column that shares your mistakes and celebrates your escapes....

Revenue growth is sluggish, too India's big four outsourcers - HCL, Infosys, TCS and Wipro - have essentially stopped hiring, perhaps coinciding with their increased use of AI to power their practices....

PLUS: ASUS gets into healthcare gadgets; Vietnam's first fab; Australia's child social ban takes out 4.7 million accounts; And more! Asia In Brief Microsoft is hiring senior managers to ensure its datacenters in Asia can access the energy they need....

PLUS: Navy spy sent to brig for 200 months in brig; Black Axe busted again; Bill aims to crimp ICE apps; and more Infosec In Brief PLUS: Google's security outfit Mandiant last week released tools that can crack credentials in 12 hours, in the hope that doing so will accelerate the death of an ancient Microsoft security protocol....

AMD researchers argue that, while algorithms like the Ozaki scheme merit investigation, they're still not ready for prime time. Double precision floating point computation (aka FP64) is what keeps modern aircraft in the sky, rockets going up, vaccines effective, and, yes, nuclear weapons operational. But rather than building dedicated chips that process this essential data type in hardware, Nvidia is leaning on emulation to increase performance for HPC and scientific computing applications, an area where AMD has had the lead in recent generations....

'OpenSlopware' briefly flowers, fades, falls - but fortunately was forked, fast The splendidly-named "OpenSlopware" was, for a short time, a list of open source projects using LLM bots. Due to harassment, it's gone, but forks of it live on....

Sloppy implementation of Google spec leaves 'hundreds of millions' of devices vulnerable Hundreds of millions of wireless earbuds, headphones, and speakers are vulnerable to silent hijacking due to a flaw in Google's Fast Pair system that allows attackers to seize control without the owner ever touching the pairing button....

Rinse of the machines: A cautionary tale about relying on robots Bork!Bork!Bork! UK water company Severn Trent learned an unfortunate lesson about text-to-speech systems when a robocall to customers went hilariously wrong....

Gotta pay for those datacenter buildouts somehow OpenAI's budget ChatGPT Go subscription tier has migrated to the US, soon to be accompanied by advertising. The company's free tier will be similarly afflicted....

It just needs PJM Interconnection, one of the US's biggest grid operators, to green light the auction The Trump administration says it wants big tech companies to take more accountability for the power their datacenters consume in an effort to shield voters from higher power bills at home....

Does that kind of time saving actually pay for itself? Researchers at Dakota State University, in partnership with regional insurance carrier Safety Insurance, devised an experimental chatbot called "Axlerod" to assist independent insurance agents. Whether that assistance was substantial is up for some debate....

Chipmaker claims the four-fab site could expand US-based DRAM production by a factor of 12 Micron broke snowy winter ground in New York on Friday to begin building a chip fab that promises to bring up to 50,000 jobs and much-needed computer memory production to US shores, as the AI boom continues to push memory prices up....

Microsoft claims it's a Secure Launch bug We're not saying Copilot has become sentient and decided it doesn't want to lose consciousness. But if it did, it would create Microsoft's January Patch Tuesday update, which has made it so that some PCs flat-out refuse to shut down or hibernate, no matter how many times you try....

First sign-in restore aims to cut rebuilds when users skip setup options Microsoft has quietly tweaked Windows Backup for Organizations to include restore at first sign-in....

Newer kernel, newer Cinnamon, new tools, and even new icons The timing is right if you're looking to try out Mint. New improved "Zena" is here - still based on Ubuntu Noble, but now with Cinnamon 6.6 and improved Wayland support, plus better internationalization, new System Information and System Administration tools, and clearer icons....

Ransomware kingpin who escaped Armenian custody is believed to be lying low back home German cops have added Russian national Oleg Evgenievich Nefekov to their list of most-wanted criminals for his services to ransomware....

That went well Imagine changing your popular brand to capitalize on an emerging tech trend that never emerged. Mark Zuckerberg did just that, and now Meta is backing away from the virtual reality business in which it invested billions....

Analyst: We'll hit a spot where 'we go from that was a great idea to where's my revenue?' Software vendors and cloud providers are bearing the burden of the expected trillion-dollar increase in AI spending this year, as investment hits $2.52 trillion, according to Gartner....

Gold phone more like fool's gold as none show up six months later Senator Elizabeth Warren is leading calls for the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Trump Mobile for failing to ship gold phones, months after collecting deposits....

Check Point observes 40K+ attack attempts in 4 hours, with government organizations under fire A critical HPE OneView flaw is now being exploited at scale, with Check Point tying mass, automated attacks to the RondoDox botnet....

Agency dodges deep cut and mass mission shutdowns, but ambitious red planet plan gets the boot US Congress has rejected plans to slash NASA's science budget, restoring most funding with one notable exception: Mars Sample Return remains cancelled....

Much of the damage done well before first power-on, in bit barns' childhood, says study Constructing datacenters accounts for 39 percent of their total carbon dioxide emissions, almost as much as operating them, according to an environmental analysis covering the entire lifecycle of a facility....

Owner reverse-engineered his ride, revealing authentication was never properly individualized An Estonian e-scooter owner locked out of his own ride after the manufacturer went bust did what any determined engineer might do. He reverse-engineered it, and claims he ended up discovering the master key that unlocks every scooter the company ever sold....

For trivial projects, it's fine. For serious work, forget about it Opinion Vibe coding got a big boost when everyone's favorite open source programmer, Linux's Linus Torvalds, said he'd been using Google's Antigravity LLM on his toy program AudioNoise, which he uses to create "random digital audio effects" using his "random guitar pedal board design."...

Researcher shows how anyone can access Copenhagen experience attendees' names, videos Exclusive The Carlsberg exhibition in Copenhagen offers a bunch of fun activities, like blending your own beer, and the Danish brewer lets you relive those memories by making images available to download after the tour is over....

You can't park there, mate An enterprising engineer has turned an old parking meter into a jukebox using a Pi Zero 2 and some open source code....

How not to maintain computers On Call Welcome again to On Call, The Register's Friday column in which we take great delight in telling your tech support stories - mostly the ones involving bizarre behavior and heroic fixes....

Microsoft promises to be a responsible copilot The Wikimedia Foundation, the org behind Wikipedia and other open knowledge platforms, has revealed it's signed six more AI companies as enterprise partners', status that gives them preferential access to the content it tends....

2nm process will go large this year, and bring inevitable price rises Taiwanese chipmaking giant TSMC has posted huge growth, says more is on the way as the AI boom is not abating, but also pointed to the inevitability of price rises for its output....

Merge Labs envisions controlling devices using your brain - without implanting hardware in your body OpenAI, having invested heavily in artificial intelligence, is placing a side bet on organic intelligence....

This is a threat to security - and to the weekend for some unlucky netadmins Cisco finally delivered a fix for a maximum-severity bug in AsyncOS that has been under attack for at least a month....

You might call it a RISC-V/NVLink Fusion ... or a bad day for UALink RISC-V champion SiFive has joined a growing number of chip companies by throwing its weight behind Nvidia's proprietary NVLink Fusion interconnect tech, a move that casts doubt on the viability of rival interconnect tech UALink....

The answer seems to be educating the enterprise workforce, and creating smarter use cases More than half of AI projects have been delayed or canceled within the last two years citing complexities with AI infrastructure, according to a research report commissioned by DDN, a data optimization company in partnership with Google Cloud and Cognizant....

What's next for Venezuela? Click on the file and see What policy wonk wouldn't want to click on an attachment promising to unveil US plans for Venezuela? Chinese cyberspies used just such a lure to target US government agencies and policy-related organizations in a phishing campaign that began just days after an American military operation captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro....

Fix landed in July, but OEM firmware updates are required If you use virtual machines, there's reason to feel less-than-Zen about AMD's CPUs. Computer scientists affiliated with the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security in Germany have found a vulnerability in AMD CPUs that exposes secrets in its secure virtualization environment....

Investors upset that company failed to inform them might need to take out even more debt. Datacenters don't come cheap. Oracle debt bond holders are suing the tech giant, because they say that the company didn't tell them it would need to borrow even more money after its original sale, making their purchases less valuable....

Office workers without AI experience warned to watch for prompt injection attacks - good luck with that Anthropic's tendency to wave off prompt-injection risks is rearing its head in the company's new Cowork productivity AI, which suffers from a Files API exfiltration attack chain first disclosed last October and acknowledged but not fixed by Anthropic....

SRAM-heavy compute architecture promises real-time agents, extended reasoning capabilities to bolster Altman's valuation OpenAI says it will deploy 750 megawatts worth of Nvidia competitor Cerebras' dinner-plate sized accelerators through 2028 to bolster its inference services....

The chatbot's challenges no longer just Elon Musk's problem, as campaigners call on tech giants to step in The ongoing Grok fiasco has claimed two more unwilling participants, as campaigners demand Apple and Google boot X and its AI sidekick out of their app stores, because of the Elon Musk-owned AI's tendency to produce illicit images of real people....

And it's 'not unique to AWS,' researcher tells The Reg A critical misconfiguration in AWS's CodeBuild service allowed complete takeover of the cloud provider's own GitHub repositories and put every AWS environment in the world at risk, according to Wiz security researchers....