The Register

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....

So much for Jensen's million-dollar dinner at Mar-a-Lago World War Fee The Trump administration's latest salvo in the US-China trade war has forced Nvidia to take a $5.5 billion charge, the GPU goliath revealed in a Tuesday regulatory filing that sent its stock tumbling in after-hours trading....

Because vulnerability management has nothing to do with national security, right? US government funding for the world's CVE program - the centralized Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures database of product security flaws - ends Wednesday....

Trump's tremendous trade tussle triggers troubling twist, theoretically World war fee Well, well, well. If it isn't the consequences of thine actions. The Trump administration's global trade war is threatening to hit US military readiness....

800K? Make that double, and we'll need a double, too, for the pain A Texas firm that provides backend IT and other services for American insurers has admitted twice as many people had their info stolen from it than previously disclosed....

Who said this opt-out approach is OK with GDPR, was it Llama 4, hmm? Meta on Monday said it plans to start training its AI models using public posts and comments shared by adults in the EU, along with interactions users have with its chatbot....

Source code, moderator info, IP addresses, more allegedly swiped and leaked Thousands of 4chan users reported outages Monday night amid rumors on social media that the edgy anonymous imageboard had been ransacked by an intruder, with someone on a rival forum claiming to have leaked its source code, moderator identities, and users' IP addresses....

There's a new tariff in town World War Fee Uncle Sam is kicking off a probe into the national security risks associated with America relying on imported foreign-made semiconductors....

Beijing claims NSA went for gold in offensive cyber, got caught in the act China's state-run press has taken its turn in trying to highlight alleged foreign cyber offensives, accusing the US National Security Agency of targeting the 2025 Asian Winter Games....

Login green-lit for lone staffer if he's trained, papered up, won't pull an Elez A federal judge has partly lifted an injunction against Elon Musk's Trump-blessed cost-trimming DOGE unit, allowing one staff member to access sensitive US Treasury payment systems. This access includes personally identifiable financial information tied to millions of Americans....

Pricier successor due in July. Three months is plenty of time to test it, right? Microsoft has warned administrators that less than half a year remains until support ends for Exchange Server 2016 and 2019. However, the follow-up, Exchange Server SE, won't arrive for another few months....

Table format loved by Apple and Netflix gets boost after Databricks merger Databricks, the machine learning and data lake biz valued at around $62 billion, is contributing to the open source Iceberg table format preferred by rivals in the market....

Prefab SmartRun kit from Vertiv promises 85% faster deployment and fewer plumbing headaches With rack space at a premium amid unrelenting demand for datacenter capacity, more modular solutions are hitting the market to speed deployment times, even for infrastructure prefabricated for AI training....

Let the espionage and access resale campaigns begin (again) A cyberspy crew or individual with ties to China's Ministry of State Security has infected global organizations with a remote access trojan (RAT) that's "even better" than Cobalt Strike, using this stealthy backdoor to enable its espionage and access resale campaigns....

Bipartisan support needed to keep DOGE from the door The proposed cuts to NASA's budget are drawing sharp criticism from US lawmakers, with one saying: "If you cut this budget, you cut into the heart of America's leadership when it comes to space exploration."...

Stopping users shooting themselves in the foot with last century's tech Microsoft has twisted the knife into ActiveX once again, setting Microsoft 365 to disable all controls without so much as a prompt....

Car hire biz takes your privacy seriously, though Car hire giant Hertz has confirmed that customer information was stolen during the zero-day data raids on Cleo file transfer products last year....

You can't keep a good OS down The first Intel-based Mac was 19 years ago, but new versions of apps for both Classic Mac OS and PowerPC Mac OS X still occasionally appear, and we are here for it....

UK's play to win a quantum computing race that is still highly theoretical To mark World Quantum Day, the UK government says it will stump up a 121 million ($158 million) investment in the ever-distant technology that proponents claim has the potential to shake up the world....

See no error, hear no error, speak no error The three wise Microsoft monkeys have spoken. If Windows Update displayed an error after installing the April 2025 Windows Recovery Environment release, you didn't see anything. Best to ignore it and move on....

That would put America on the same level as China for espionage The European Commission is giving staffers visiting the US on official business burner laptops and phones to avoid espionage attempts, according to the Financial Times....

When the power went out, they didn't switch on Google has revealed that a recent six-hour outage at one of its cloudy regions was caused by uninterruptible power supplies not doing their job....

Meanwhile in China, factories that work for Apple and HP are reportedly closing some production lines Tech manufacturers worked overtime in early 2025 to produce hardware before the US imposed tariffs that would increase the prices punters pay for product....

Blackwell production already underway in Arizona with server manufacturing coming to Texas within 15 months Nvidia wants to build and sell up to half a trillion US dollars of American-made AI supercomputer equipment over the next four years, with the help of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, aka TSMC, and its partners....

Copilot vibe coding for OS development? Why not Canny Windows users who've spotted a mysterious folder on hard drives after applying last week's security patches for the operating system can rest assured - it's perfectly benign. In fact, it's recommended you leave the directory there....

Users, unsurprisingly, are not pleased and feel forgotten amid Redmond's Copilot frenzy In June 2024, users of the OneDrive sync client for macOS and Windows began reporting that shared folders had vanished from their local drives, replaced with web shortcuts....

IT admins, get ready to grumble CA/Browser Forum - a central body of web browser makers, security certificate issuers, and friends - has voted to cut the maximum lifespan of new SSL/TLS certs to just 47 days by March 15, 2029....

Buy high, sell low: FPGA biz cost x86 giant $16B decade ago A decade after gobbling up Altera, Intel is loosening its grip. On Monday, the x86 giant said it's flogging a 51 percent stake in the FPGA slinger to private equity firm Silver Lake....

What's the goal here, Homeland Insecurity or something? As drastic cuts to the US govt's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency loom, Rep Eric Swalwell (D-CA), the ranking member of the House's cybersecurity subcommittee, has demanded that CISA brief the subcommittee "prior to any significant changes to CISA's workforce or organizational structure."...

Q1 sector growth unlikely to survive current trade policy Profiteering resellers stateside filled up on smartphone inventory in calendar Q1 before the scheduled imposition of US tariffs, which have rocked global stock prices and US Treasury bonds since April 2....

Sales backstop deal? More like ... Sales? Back, stop! Deal! Arizona electronics supplier Avnet has accused California semiconductor design firm Ampere Computing of going against its word and backing out of a server purchasing deal....

Watchdog wants to know whether EU posts were used without consent under GDPR Elon Musk's social media outfit X is again under the regulatory microscope in Europe - this time for allegedly using EU users' public posts to train its Grok AI chatbot, possibly without the transparency or legal basis required under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)....

Houston, we have a funding problem The US administration appears set to slash NASA's science budget with cuts to spending in the order of almost 50 percent, according to a draft of the White House's proposal....

Safeguard hold finally lifted as Microsoft realizes animated backgrounds aren't the end of the world The day before the release of Windows 11 24H2, Microsoft slapped a compatibility hold on devices using wallpaper customization applications. More than six months later, it is gradually removing the safeguard hold....

Investment delays are inevitable as uncertainty clouds US trade policy, warns investment bank World War Fee Trump administration tariffs are leaving the IT industry in "limbo", with CIOs hitting the pause button on new projects as they're unsure whether budgets set today will be disrupted by taxes tomorrow....

Miyazaki, copyright protection and the 'insult to life itself' of AI images Opinion Many people are having fun making Studio Ghibli-style images with OpenAI's ChatGPT. I see it as copy-and-paste intellectual property stealing on an industrial level....

Royal McBee's desk-sized deskside early computer was the stuff of legend In these days of multi-gig OSes, we cast our eyes back to something both much bigger and much smaller....

Analysts say the bubble won't burst, but it is possible, admits world's largest colo provider Interview Those who ignore history are destined to repeat mistakes of the past and, with signs of an inflating bit barn spending bubble, comparisons are being made with the infamous dotcom bust a quarter of a century ago....

UK holds onto oversight by a whisker, but it's utterly barefaced on the other side of the pond Opinion The UK government's attempts to worm into Apple's core end-to-end encryption were set back last week when the country's Home Office failed in its bid to keep them secret on national security grounds....

Brit retailer says troubled breakup with tech platform of former US owner nearing conclusion Two of the top team behind Asda's 1 billion ($1.31 billion) tech divorce from US retail giant Walmart - which has seen a number of setbacks - are departing the company....

If this techie had been older and slower, this never would have happened Who, Me? Returning to work on Monday often imparts a rude shock, which is why The Register opens the week with a new installment of Who, Me? It's the reader-contributed column in which you admit to your worst moments at work and explain how you survived them....

Home labs and bare bones test rigs matter so Broadcom's back in the game VMware has resumed offering a free hypervisor....

PLUS: Chinese robodogs include backdoor; OpenAI helps spammer; A Dutch data disaster; And more! Infosec In Brief Fortinet last week admitted that attackers have found new ways to exploit three flaws it thought it had fixed last year....

PLUS: India's new electronics subsidies; Philippines unplugs a mobile carrier; Alibaba Cloud expands Asia In Brief Chinese officials admitted to directing cyberattacks on US infrastructure at a meeting with their American counterparts, according to The Wall Street Journal....

Beijing tries to find an off-ramp but also fights back with export bans World War Fee The Trump administration's strategy to use tariffs on imports as an incentive for businesses to move their manufacturing plants to the USA took a new turn over the weekend after it announced exemptions for some goods, denied that the exemptions were new, then said it plans further tariffs on high-tech goods....