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Armed Forces Bill would let troops take action against unmanned threats around defense sites Britain's defense personnel will be given the authority to neutralize drones threatening military bases under measures being introduced in the Armed Forces Bill, currently making its way through Parliament....

Blames unintended or nonstandard usage' and the cost of keeping them alive Microsoft has slipped out news that it's killing some standalone SharePoint and OneDrive plans....

Main stock exchange targets shares, government agency looks for crypto crooks South Korea's government and main stock exchange have developed and deployed AI-powered tools to detect schemes that aim to send the price of cryptocurrencies and shares soaring so that unscrupulous investors can cash in....

Burning Man woo woo values House of Grok at $250 billion Elon Musk on Monday revealed his space company SpaceX has acquired his AI outfit xAI, and that the two will work together to escape the surly bonds of Earthly powers by tapping the sun's enduring glow....

The group targets telecoms, critical infrastructure - all the usual high-value orgs Security researchers have attributed the Notepad++ update hijacking to a Chinese government-linked espionage crew called Lotus Blossom (aka Lotus Panda, Billbug), which abused weaknesses in the update infrastructure to gain a foothold in high-value targets by delivering a newly identified backdoor dubbed Chrysalis....

Second price increase in just two months That slice of Pi is getting much more expensive. Everyone's favorite single-board computer, the Raspberry Pi, is jumping up in price again, with increases ranging from $10 to $60, depending on how much memory your board has....

Chipzilla touts 4 TB of DDR5 and 128 lanes of PCIe 5 for less than the House of Zen just in time for memory winter Intel's workstation lineup is getting a much-needed refresh with the launch of its Xeon 600-series processors, boasting up to 86 cores and clocks topping 4.9 GHz. Chipzilla's timing couldn't be worse....

It's 7x the size of the regular board Arduino boards power everything from robots to RGB lights, but they're a little on the small side. YouTuber UncleStem has his own solution: build a gigantic, yet fully functional one....

'If we don't feed the advertisers, then we'll be forced to pay artists for their creative work' Come on, admit it. You like seeing banner ads on your favorite web pages, because they provide a nice break from reading text. If you're honest about this feeling, there's a new extension for you....

NAND flash now expected to surge 55-60% compared to Q4 The memory shortage is worse than most of us first thought. Prices on DRAM and NAND flash memory are expected to surge in the first quarter of 2026 as AI-driven hyperscalers and cloud service providers (CSPs) continue to strain supply chains....

The ICE-tracking service says it doesn't store usernames or addresses ICE-reporting service StopICE has blamed a US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agent for attacking its app and website and sending users text messages warning them that their information had been "sent to the authorities."...

Ukraine's CERT says the bug went from disclosure to active exploitation in days Russia-linked attackers are already exploiting Microsoft's latest Office zero-day, with Ukraine's national cyber defense team warning that the same bug is being used to target government agencies inside the country and organizations across the EU....

Users happy with 19c as experts question AI lock-in Last week, Oracle announced the general availability of Oracle AI Database 26ai Enterprise Edition for Linux x8664, but 13-year support for 19c and the prospect of AI lock-in might make users think twice about upgrading to it....

Your favorite menu item might be easy to remember but it will not secure your account Change Your Password Day took place over the weekend, and in case you doubt the need to improve this most basic element of cybersecurity hygiene, even McDonald's - yes, the fast food chain - is urging people to get more creative when it comes to passwords....

Cuts out the Azure middleman with multi-year deal for 'tighter alignment' Snowflake plans to spend as much as $200 million with OpenAI to bring its models and chatbot into the database vendor's sandbox and toolset. Features such as Cortex AI and Snowflake Intelligence will get a boost from the house of Altman....

Microsoft concedes January's out-of-band fix didn't stop some PCs from rebooting instead of sleeping Microsoft rounded off January by adding more devices to the list of those affected by the hibernation issue it claimed had been fixed by an out-of-band update....

Drop in customers' cloud conversion rate causes share price to plunge 22% - steepest decline since 2020 SAP is refusing to change tack on renewal discounts despite lower-than-expected cloud forecasts prompting its biggest share price slide in five years....

Researchers disclose rapid exploit chain that let attackers run code via a single malicious web page Security issues continue to pervade the OpenClaw ecosystem, formerly known as ClawdBot then Moltbot, as multiple projects patch bot takeover and remote code execution (RCE) exploits....

CEO talks momentum while paid uptake remains minimal Only 3.3 percent of Microsoft 365 and Office 365 users who touch Copilot Chat actually pay for it, an awkward figure that landed alongside Microsoft's $37.5 billion quarterly AI splurge and its insistence that the payoff is coming....

Breach lingered for months before stronger signature checks shut the door A state-sponsored cyber criminal compromised Notepad++'s update service in 2025, according to the project's author....

Winter storm knocks out Oracle datacenter, despite Larry Ellison's reliability boasts TikTok has restored US services after winter storms hit an Oracle datacenter - the same infrastructure that Big Red's founder Larry Ellison previously claimed doesn't go down....

DOJ files show former Windows chief predicting a public flop before mulling next mission Steven Sinofsky warned Microsoft that its flagship Surface was about to flop in public, then sought exit advice from Jeffrey Epstein as he negotiated his way out of Redmond....

Open source operating system fans, your time has come Bork!Bork!Bork! Most people would be perfectly happy to ride the bus without seeing ads. So this latest public error could be a blessing in disguise for passengers, if not for the bus company hoping to make money. Love it or hate it, this bit of borked digital signage looks to have run into a problem that only an open-source hero can solve....

Don't be scared of the digital dark - learn how to keep the lights on Opinion Barely a month into 2026, electrical power infrastructure on two continents has tested positive for cyberattacks. One fell flat as attempts to infiltrate and disrupt the Polish distribution grid were rebuffed and reported. The other, earlier attack was part of Operation Absolute Resolve, the US abduction of Venezuela's President Maduro from Caracas on January 3....

Administrators sigh: OOBs, they did it again Opinion Microsoft has had a bad start to the year. Two out-of-band updates in the weeks after the first Patch Tuesday of 2026 rattled administrators' already shaky faith in the company. But are things getting worse?...

Love hurts, but being exposed is more painful Who, Me? Monday brings the shock of a return to work, a transition The Register always tries to ease by bringing you a new instalment of Who, Me?, the reader-contributed column in which your fellow readers admit to errors and disclose how they dodged the consequences....

'The nature and scope of this work has raised questions' says CEO, who swears he couldn't spot it sooner French consulting and tech services giant Capgemini has decided to offload Capgemini Government Solutions (CGS), the entity it uses for some work with the US government - including a controversial gig assisting immigration authorities....

Big Red will use debt and equity finance to keep itself in the pink Oracle has revealed it needs to raise $45 billion to $50 billion in cash to fund expansion of its cloud infrastructure, and its plan to raise that money...

PLUS: NTT offshores to Vietnam; Japan adds AI interface to space data; Samsung cashes in on memory boom Asia In Brief India wants to offer big tech companies tax breaks that last decades....

Also, South Korea gets a pentesting F, US Treasury says bye bye to BAH, North Korean hackers evolve, and more Infosec in Brief As if AI weren't enough of a security concern, now researchers have discovered that open-source AI deployments may be an even bigger problem than those from commercial providers....

'I did not think it was going to happen to me, but here we are' Nearly every company, from tech giants like Amazon to small startups, has first-hand experience with fake IT workers applying for jobs - and sometimes even being hired....

Armored vehicle trials halted after troops report noise and vibration symptoms The British Army's ill-fated Ajax armored vehicle program now faces the prospect of being axed as the Ministry of Defence withdraws its initial operating capability status and reviews its future....

Is there life on Mars? Well, there's Claude in the machine Anthropic's Claude machine learning model has boldly planned what no Claude has planned before - a path across Mars for NASA's Perseverance rover....

Many European CSPs are being cut loose, sources say, forcing customer transitions exclusive Broadcom this week brought the hammer down on the Advantage Partner Program for VMware Cloud Service Providers (VCSPs) - and the clock is now ticking for any third parties working to close sales....

Consider yourselves compromised, experts warn Ivanti has patched two critical zero-day vulnerabilities in its Endpoint Manager Mobile (EPMM) product that are already being exploited, continuing a grim run of January security incidents for enterprise IT vendors....

Lying means dying Lying means dying, at least for one falsehood-peddling government AI. A Microsoft-powered chatbot that New York City rolled out to help business owners answer frequently asked questions - but was often wrong - has been silenced as the city grapples with a $12 billion budget shortfall....

Network access from China and side hustle as AI upstart CEO aroused suspicion A former Google software engineer has been convicted of stealing AI hardware secrets from the company for the benefit of two China-based firms, one of which he founded. The second startup intended to use these secrets to market its technology to PRC-controlled organizations....

Parent company Cognizant hit with multiple lawsuits Thousands more Oregonians will soon receive data breach letters in the continued fallout from the TriZetto data breach, in which someone hacked the insurance verification provider and gained access to its healthcare provider customers across multiple US states....

Fewer humans, more bots - just in time for filing season Tax season 2026 could be an interesting one as the IRS seeks to replace the staff it sent to the unemployment line with AI. Bots could handle tasks ranging from reviewing an org's request for tax-exempt status to processing amended individual filings....

The western US saw the most activity overall Cloud storage firm Backblaze says that a sharp rise in AI-driven data traffic to neocloud operators may signal a shift from internet-style traffic patterns to large, high-bandwidth flows characteristic of large-scale model training and inference work....

Big Red promises 'new era' as long-frustrated contributors weigh whether to believe it Oracle is taking steps to "repair" its relationship with the MySQL community, according to sources, by moving "commercial-only" features into the database application's Community Edition and prioritizing developer needs....

AI vision systems can be very literal readers Indirect prompt injection occurs when a bot takes input data and interprets it as a command. We've seen this problem numerous times when AI bots were fed prompts via web pages or PDFs they read. Now, academics have shown that self-driving cars and autonomous drones will follow illicit instructions that have been written onto road signs....

Analyst predicts massive spend on domestic AI stacks Countries intent on digital sovereignty will need to invest at least 1 percent of their entire gross domestic product (GDP) into AI infrastructure by 2029, according to analyst biz Gartner....

GPT-4o gets second death sentence after last year's reprieve, but this time barely anyone's bothered OpenAI is sunsetting some of its ChatGPT models next month, a move it knows "will feel frustrating for some users."...

Stock management also important, says Mitchell Hashimoto HashiCorp co-founder Mitchell Hashimoto took to X this week to unveil the secret of workplace success: stay off your phone, sweep the floor, and clean the machines after that....

Just because you're paranoid about digital sovereignty doesn't mean they're not after you Opinion I'm an eighth-generation American, and let me tell you, I wouldn't trust my data, secrets, or services to a US company these days for love or money. Under our current government, we're simply not trustworthy....

Spot's new cleanup gig involves gamma rays, alpha particles, and considerably less PPE than fleshy colleagues Bark!Bark!Bark! Sellafield Ltd is to use Boston Dynamics' Spot robot dogs in "routine, business-as-usual operations" amid the ongoing cleanup and decommissioning of the notorious UK nuclear site....

1.3B over budget and four years late, bank searches for a way to not to bust new timetable and funding pot A British state-owned bank is reconfiguring its modernization project, including considering reducing connections with legacy systems, as it tries to claw back schedule and budget overruns that are far beyond early plans....

60-minute SLA was effectively useless and the contractor admitted it On Call Welcome to another instalment of On Call, The Register's weekly reader-contributed column that shares your stories of weird and wonderful tech support jobs....

Tools, agents, UI, and e-commerce - of course each one needs its own set of competing protocols MCP, A2A, ACP, or UTCP? It seems like every other day, orgs add yet another AI protocol to the agentic alphabet soup, making it all the more confusing. Below, we'll share what all these abbreviations actually mean and share why they are important for the future of AI....