The Register

Elon thinks taxis and androids will succeed where car sales are stalling Tesla reported 2025 revenue of $94.8 billion, down 3 percent year-on-year and marking the first annual revenue decline since the electric car maker began publishing financial results in 2010....

Apply fixes within a few hours or face the music, say the pros What good is a fix if you don't use it? Experts are urging security teams to patch promptly as vulnerability exploits now account for the majority of intrusions, according to the latest figures....

Terrible start to 2026 offset by optimistic operating system numbers Microsoft is famously reticent about operating system usage figures unless it has something to boast about. So CEO Satya Nadella stating that Windows 11 had reached one billion users raised a few eyebrows....

Zuck bets big on 'personal superintelligence' with $135B splurge Meta is to nearly double its capital investments aimed at AI this year, spending more on infrastructure than the entire output of some mid-sized economies, as the AI datacenter feeding frenzy shows no sign of ending....

'What we are finding is that people hate AI' Interview Vivaldi has raised a middle finger to the influx of AI in the browser space with its latest version....

Close call after an apparently deliberate attempt to starve a country of energy at the worst time Cybersecurity experts involved in the cleanup of the cyberattacks on Poland's power network say the consequences could have been lethal....

150-strong 'surge team' deployed as 8,500 retirees left high and dry, some waiting 9 months for legally owed cash The UK Cabinet Office is being forced to promise "interim support measures" for struggling retired government workers as Capita's botched takeover of the Civil Service Pension Scheme (CSPS) lurches from bad to worse....

Five years after its planned go-live, the system remains incomplete as costs balloon more than sevenfold Birmingham City Council's SAP-to-Oracle project is set to cost 144.4 million - more than seven times earlier estimates - as it waits for a fully functioning system five years after its planned go-live date....

It's not your fault Opinion It's not your fault Amazon hired you for a position that it no longer deems necessary - blame bad planning or unanticipated market conditions. Everybody guesses wrong sometimes, even with the power of the most sophisticated business analysis software and the smartest prognosticators one can hire....

The jobs that will be eradicated by our AI overlords The UK government will work with supplier Anthropic to build an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant for job seekers, despite its chief executive's doom-laden views of the job market....

Happier days at Intel nailed to the wall of discount retailer Bork!Bork!Bork! Lidl is a well-known purveyor of inexpensive groceries, random goods via the Middle of Lidl, and now... bork....

All the promises in the world won't pay the GPU bills when the music stops What should have been a banner second quarter for Microsoft was met with tepid apprehension on Wall Street on Wednesday, sending its share price down by 6 percent in after-hours trading....

The world's most popular browser has gained a dedicated sidebar for AI browsing Google has reworked its Chrome browser to include a new side panel for interacting with the company's Gemini model, in an effort to support AI-assisted interactions with websites....

80 billion workflows makes a difference Though some recent studies cast doubt on the ability of AI agents to complete complex tasks, ServiceNow boasts that its bots are better, because they can rely on 20 years and 80 billion workflows worth of experience. The underlying model, they say, is just a small part of the product....

Cybercrime solved. The end Ransomware crims have just lost one of their best business platforms. US law enforcement has seized the notorious RAMP cybercrime forum's dark web and clearnet domains....

Developers remain unsure how to prevent access to sensitive data Don't you hate it when machines can't follow simple instructions? Anthropic's Claude Code can't take "ignore" for an answer and continues to read passwords and API keys, even when your secrets file is supposed to be blocked....

Russians, Chinese spies, run-of-the-mill crims ... Come one, come all. Everyone from Russian and Chinese government goons to financially motivated miscreants is exploiting a long-since-patched WinRAR vuln to bring you infostealers and Remote Access Trojans (RATs)....

Redmond has pledged to be carbon-negative by 2030 It's no secret that datacenters use a ton of water for cooling, a demand that can strain local supplies. Despite reported internal forecasts showing sharply higher water use by 2030, Microsoft continues to splash cash on new AI bit barns....

AI automation, now as simple as point, click, drag, and drop Hands On For all the buzz surrounding them, AI agents are simply another form of automation that can perform tasks using the tools you've provided. Think of them as smart macros that make decisions and go beyond simple if/then rules to handle edge cases in input data. Fortunately, it's easy enough to code your own agents and below we'll show you how....

More work for admins on the cards as they await a full dump of fixes Things aren't over yet for Fortinet customers - the security shop has disclosed yet another critical FortiCloud SSO vulnerability....

Only the biggest businesses are up to the challenge, says Redis CEO Anyone scanning the news might think it's pedal to the metal as far as AI agent implementations go, but there is a slump in rollouts as many organizations figure out what to do next, Redis CEO Rowan Trollope told The Register....

Memory boom funds $10B punt on 'solutions' outfit that's still light on details SK hynix is surfing the AI hype wave by setting up what it nebulously describes as a solutions biz to further exploit the hysteria....

How a cold morning, failed O-rings, and flawed decision-making led to tragedy Forty years ago, Space Shuttle Challenger disintegrated 73 seconds into its flight, killing its crew of seven and exposing the management culture and decision-making process that led NASA to launch on a freezing January day....

Chatbot banned - for now - after it dreamed up West Ham match that never happened West Midlands Police's acting Chief Constable has suspended use of Microsoft Copilot following a controversy that led to the early retirement of his predecessor over a recommendation to ban Israeli football fans from a Birmingham match....

Google researcher sits on UAC bypass for ages, only for it to become valid with new security feature Microsoft patched a bevy of bugs that allowed bypasses of Windows Administrator Protection before the feature was made available earlier this month....

If only there were some technology to boil things down to bullet points Opinion Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has published a novella-length essay about the risk of superintelligent AI, something that doesn't yet exist....

Home Office white paper promises millions for LFR, a new Police.AI unit, and a bespoke legal framework Police in England and Wales will increase their use of live facial recognition (LFR) and artificial intelligence (AI) under wide-ranging government plans to reform law enforcement....

You can't cheaply recompute without re-running the whole model - so KV cache starts piling up Feature Large language model inference is often stateless, with each query handled independently and no carryover from previous interactions. A request arrives, the model generates a response, and the computational state gets discarded. In such AI systems, memory grows linearly with sequence length and can become a bottleneck for long contexts....

But did it falter? Oracle debuts Schrodinger's cloud Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) users reported an outage late last week in its London region, yet despite complaints from Register readers, Big Red is staying quiet....

Cascading backend failures kept users locked out until home time Microsoft Azure, or at least the part of it that handles the OpenAI service in the Sweden Central region, was down and out for the count yesterday, leaving users facing errors for much of the working day....

AWS and Capgemini loom large in HMRC's procurement pipeline The UK's tax collector is budgeting to spend more than 2 billion on new tech deals in the next couple of years, including a contract set for AWS and another for Capgemini to be awarded without competition....

'Follow-on' agreement lasts 3 years as US techies protest vendor's ICE contract Stateside The UK's Ministry of Defence (MoD) has directly awarded a 240.6 million contract to US technology company Palantir to continue to licence and support its data analytics work....

Connection secured. Not so sure about the installation Bork!Bork!Bork! Behold an ATM crying out for a man-in-the-middle attack. An obsolete Microsoft operating system cannot be blamed here. This is all about the hardware....

Meta also replaces a legacy C++ media-handling security library with Rust Users of Meta's WhatsApp messenger looking to simplify the process of protecting themselves are in luck, as the company is rolling out a new feature that combines multiple security settings under a single, toggleable option....

Agency looks to understand the extent of identifying information available to its masked agents It's not enough to have its agents in streets and schools; ICE now wants to see what data online ads already collect about you. The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement last week issued a Request for Information (RFI) asking data and ad tech brokers how they could help in its mission....

Researchers with the Tech Transparency Project found all sorts of apps that let users create fake non-consensual nudes of real people The mobile app emperors have no clothes. Apple and Google have made millions of dollars from AI apps that let users undress people even as both companies claim to ban such software from their stores, according to a new study....

Plus, the gang says it got in via Microsoft Entra SSO ShinyHunters says it stole several slices of data from Panera Bread, but that's just the yeast of everyone's problems. The extortionist gang also claims to have stolen data from CarMax and Edmunds, in addition to three other organizations it posted to its blog last week....

An expandable tablet, and a phone that reboots into desktop Windows For most mobile devices, the OS is either Android or iOS, but a pair of new systems promises a host of additional OS options you can dual boot into. The Android phone can run Linux and boot into Windows 11 where it functions as a PC while the tablet runs a smorgasbord of Google-free OSes....

The massively hyped agentic personal assistant has security experts wondering why anyone would install it Security concerns for the new agentic AI tool formerly known as Clawdbot remain, despite a rebrand prompted by trademark concerns raised by Anthropic. Would you be comfortable handing the keys to your identity kingdom over to a bot, one that might be exposed to the open internet?...

IDC and Lenovo say enterprises are pressing ahead with pilot deployments despite mixed evidence on returns Despite a growing number of reports that AI is not benefiting many businesses, Lenovo and IDC say that firms in EMEA are pushing ahead with pilot deployments and still expect it to drive growth and transform how they operate....

No salvation from the memory winter, though - plant won't start churning out chips until 2028 Flush with cash from skyrocketing memory prices, Micron continued its fab expansion this week, this time breaking ground on a $24 billion manufacturing complex that will eventually produce chips used in storage devices....

Analytics features arrive first; agentic AI comes later Salesforce is getting cosier with the US Army via a deal worth up to $5.6 billion, selling cloud analytics as the groundwork for a future agentic AI push across the service and the wider DoD....

Vicar of Rome decries naive and unquestioning reliance on technology Catholics need to develop critical thinking skills to counter the dark side of AI and counter unnatural attachments to chatbots, the pope said this week in a message marking the Church's social communications day....

Reports say Salt Typhoon attackers accessed handsets of senior govt folk Chinese state-linked hackers are accused of spending years inside the phones of senior Downing Street officials, exposing private communications at the heart of the UK government....

GAO urges NWS to firm up its AI language plans as policy shifts slow multilingual warnings US spending watchdogs have called on the National Weather Service (NWS) to deliver an updated plan for its AI language translation project to reduce the risk posed by extreme weather events to people not proficient in English....

Communication attempts ongoing for stricken spacecraft NASA is setting up an anomaly review board to look into the fate of its Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft, which was last heard from on December 6....

French govt says state-run service 'Visio'will be more secure. Now where have we heard that name before? France has officially told Zoom, Teams, and the rest of the US videoconferencing herd to take a hike in favor of its own homegrown app....

Conclave doc outlines path to eternal releases The Linux kernel project has finally answered one of the biggest questions gripping the community: what happens if Linus Torvalds is no longer able to lead it?...

RIKEN links up with Argonne, Fujitsu, and Nvidia to build next-gen infrastructure Japan's RIKEN scientific research institute and Fujitsu are working with America's Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) and Nvidia to build and operate next-gen compute infrastructure for AI and high-performance computing (HPC), in line with President Trump's Genesis Mission....

Austrian education ministry unaware of tracking software until campaigners launched case Updated Microsoft illegally installed cookies on a school pupil's devices without consent, according to a ruling by the Austrian data protection authority (DSB)....