The Register

Nobody knows why they need one, but folk seem to be buying them HP says AI PCs now make up a quarter of its sales, boosting revenue thanks to their higher price tags and the Windows 11 refresh....

Senior officials summoned to science and tech committee to explain further Senior officials are being summoned to the UK's Science, Innovation and Technology Committee to explain why the government has not fully implemented the security recommendations made in a secret review following the 2021 Afghan data breach....

Microsoft shifts cellular management to Settings and the web Microsoft is to permanently hang up on its Mobile Plans app, directing users to the web and the Windows Settings app in the future....

Hang on, what happened to gov.UK's bitbarn-favoring Industrial Strategy? Datacenter developers in the UK are turning to gas for power generation amid lengthy wait times for a connection to the electricity grid....

The once mighty Wintel supercontinent is cracking in more ways than you might think Opinion Say what you like about its role in the destruction of civilization, the net is still good for a few party games. Take bets on when the "Wintel Empire" was first reported as under attack, and by what. Then go and find out....

Maybe someday we'll just call it 'data processing' again Feature In IT, terms and categories come and go. Distinctions disappear as computing evolves and as something that was shiny and new simply becomes the way that we do things....

Network Time Protocol sometimes needs help from a temporal cops On Call Why, look at the time! 7:30 AM on Friday morning, the moment at which The Register regularly runs a fresh instalment of On Call, the reader-contributed column that shares your finest tech support stories....

700 meters under a mountain, a 20,000-tonne detector and a giant sphere await elusive particles More than a decade after construction began, China has commenced operation of what it claims is the world's most sensitive neutrino detector....

Supports several Chinese chips and GPUs - and of course it has AI inside China's KylinSoft has delivered a major update to its flagship Linux, which Beijing hailed as a great leap forward for the nation's ambition to develop operating systems that match and exceed the capabilities of western products....

Plus millions of other people across 80+ countries China's Salt Typhoon cyberspies hoovered up information belonging to millions of people in the United States over the course of the years-long intrusion into telecommunications networks, according to a top FBI cyber official....

They use AI more but also check it more For those who thought AI vibe coding was just for the youngsters, newly published research shows that developers with over 10 years of experience are more than twice as likely to do it....

Microsoft AI honcho insists partnership with Sam Altman's brainbox behemoth is alive and well Microsoft has introduced two home-grown machine learning models, potentially complicating negotiations with its current favored model supplier, OpenAI....

My brain hurts a lot Claude creator Anthropic has given customers using its Free, Pro, and Max plans one month to prevent the engine from storing their chats for five years by default and using them for training....

But private cloud contender sees upside in its modernization mission Donald Trump's DOGE cost-cutting unit has made it harder to do business with the US federal government, according to private cloud contender Nutanix....

Nor is its Arm port When VMware delivered its Cloud Foundation 9 suite in June, it marked the end of a two-year push to integrate its compute, storage, and networking products. What's next for the Broadcom business unit? At the VMware Explore conference this week, The Register sniffed out a few other items on its to-do list....

Our drones are OK, but those other drones? The US Department of Homeland Security has revealed plans to spend more than $100 million on systems designed to take out hostile drones....

Web browsing belongs to the people, not the bots Jon von Tetzchner, CEO of Norway-based browser maker Vivaldi, believes the tech industry's efforts to automate web browsing using generative AI models have gone too far....

$6.4M VerifTools marketplace offline The FBI and Dutch police today said that they seized two domains and a blog tied to VerifTools, an international criminal marketplace that sold identity documents for as little as $9....

'The homeland is no longer secure,' says Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency leader The Pentagon outfit responsible for preventing foriegn agents from infiltrating defense agencies says the US isn't doing a very good job of preventing state secrets from falling into Chinese hands....

Only a few Android phones will be able to support the service Users of Google Pixel and Samsung Galaxy phones could soon find themselves able to make voice calls via a satellite connection, if Skylo Technologies can get all its ducks in a row....

Media multitool taps Vulkan for GPU encoding, adds VVC support, and dusts off some ancient formats FFmpeg 8.0 brings GPU-accelerated video encoding via Vulkan - and can now subtitle your videos automatically using integrated speech recognition....

Also, not one but two new models of the classic 1200 The new native 68K AmigaOS web browser leans on the machines' underlying emulation system to offer modern facilities on a retro OS....

Think BYOC will solve all your sovereignty and privacy worries? You might be missing the point INTERVIEW Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) is a concept gaining traction as companies seek ways to resolve sovereignty and privacy issues, but its implementation can vary widely depending on interpretation....

Because not every bot wants to live inside Microsoft's walled garden Google and code editor company Zed Industries have introduced the Agent Client Protocol (ACP) as a standard way for AI agents to integrate with an IDE, with the idea that this will prevent developers getting locked into VS Code....

Regulator points to lack of 'basic access controls' between internet-facing systems, internal network South Korea's privacy watchdog has slapped SK Telecom with a record 134.5 billion ($97 million) fine after finding that the mobile giant left its network wide open to hackers through a catalog of bungles....

Company cleared to launch again after April failure Firefly Aerospace has been given the green light to resume launches after its April failure....

Credit agency offers own services as compensation Credit scoring and monitoring biz TransUnion says that it recently suffered a breach affecting nearly 4.5 million individuals....

Shadowserver counts more than 13,000 appliances still wide open - including thousands in US, Germany, and UK Thousands of Citrix NetScaler appliances remain exposed to a trio of security flaws that the vendor patched this week, one of which is already being actively exploited in the wild....

Miljodata meltdown leaves 200 local authorities scrambling over 1.5 BTC Sweden's municipal governments have been knocked offline after ransomware crooks hit IT supplier Miljodata, reportedly demanding the bargain-basement sum of $168,000....

Microsoft blames incoming UK Online Safety Act, says you have until 2026 Microsoft has begun emailing users of its Xbox gaming platform with likely unwelcome news: users will need to verify their age if they want to keep access to the company's various social services, and it's blaming the UK Online Safety Act....

US payments platform back in action, says it's informing affected customers Shoppers and merchants in Germany found themselves dealing with billions of euros in frozen transactions this week, thanks to an apparent failure in PayPal's fraud-detection systems....

Apology issued after names tied to redress scheme revealed in mass mailing A London law firm leaked the details of nearly 200 people who requested to receive updates about the redress scheme set up for victims of abuse at the hands of the Church of England (CoE)....

Labor group says new technologies could increase inequality if we're not careful AI-Pocalypse Over half of the British public are worried about the impact of AI on their jobs, according to employment unions, which want the UK government to adopt a "worker first" strategy rather than simply allowing corporations to ditch employees for algorithms....

UK starts early warning system combing through stuff that folks flush away The UK Health Security Agency is looking to set up an early warning system ahead of future pandemics, launching a 1.3 million (around $1.75 million) program to identify "cutting-edge technologies" which could turn people's pee and poop into valuable data on the spread of viruses....

Idit Levine on going from startup to a billion-dollar valuation Interview "I feel that a founder always needs to be a little bit stupidly optimistic." Solo.io CEO Idit Levine has been on an interesting journey in cloud computing since starting the networking and API management company in 2017....

13 governments sound the alarm about ongoing unpleasantness China's Salt Typhoon cyberspies continue their years-long hacking campaign targeting critical industries around the world, according to a joint security alert from cyber and law enforcement agencies across 13 countries....

Stolen painting still mising, sadly Police in Argentina reportedly raided a home in a coastal town on Monday after someone spotted a real estate ad that included images of art the Nazis looted in the Second World War....

If regulators heed the lessons of Fukushima, testing will have to jump Godzilla-sized hurdles Japan's Nuclear Regulation Authority has requested extra funds to experiment with AI-powered nuclear plant inspectors....

Harvard researchers find model guardrails tailor query responses to user's inferred politics and other affiliations OpenAI's ChatGPT appears to be more likely to refuse to respond to questions posed by fans of the Los Angeles Chargers football team than to followers of other teams....

China would be a $50 billion a year market for Nvidia if Uncle Sam would let us sell competitive products, says Jensen Huang Nvidia's top brass urged Washington to approve the sale of Blackwell accelerators to China during the GPU giant's Q2 earnings call on Wednesday....

VMware tweaked its licenses to suit submarines VMware has tweaked its software licensing so submarines can keep their computers running when they're beneath the waves....

Starting at $2,999, tiny doesn't mean cheap Hot Chips Back in 2023, Nvidia's superchip architecture introduced a new programming model for accelerated workloads by coupling the CPU to the GPU via a high-speed NVLink fabric that makes PCIe feel positively glacial....

There's also a rogue Russian on the list The US Treasury Department has announced sanctions against two Asian companies and two individuals for allegedly helping North Korean IT workers fake their way into US jobs....

AI lowers the bar for cybercrime, Anthropic admits comment Anthropic, a maker of AI tools, says that AI tools are now commonly used to commit cybercrime and facilitate remote worker fraud....

Not a disaster recovery option, but good enough for a migration Microsoft continues to take what's familiar to ordinary users and offer it to enterprises. The latest functionality is Windows Backup for Organizations....

Fast-glob is widely used in government, security lab says updated A Node.js utility used by thousands of public projects - and more than 30 Department of Defense ones - appears to have a sole maintainer whose online profiles identify him as a Yandex employee living in Russia....

Feature rolls out to Microsoft 365 Insiders, stashing unnamed files in OneDrive by default Ever get that sinking feeling when Word crashes before you've made your first save? An application update is set to save the day by automatically enabling autosave to the cloud for new documents, before you've even given them a filename....

Feature bloat, or added value for this JavaScript toolkit? The Bun team has released version 1.2.21 of its JavaScript bundler and runtime, written in Zig, adding features including built-in drivers for MySQL and SQLite, a YAML parser, and a secrets manager for tools and local development....

Stolen dev credentials posted to GitHub as attackers abuse CLI tools for recon Nx is the latest target of a software supply chain attack in the NPM ecosystem, with multiple malicious versions being uploaded to the NPM registry on Tuesday evening....

No stew on the stove, but plenty of heat as devs compete to flag suspect Medicare data Seeking to rein in healthcare fraud, the US Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is seeking explainable AI models that can identify patterns suggestive of malfeasance....