The Register

Not-onamous by a long shot Nobody likes folding laundry, but you really have to hate it to spend $7,999 on a robot that'll fold it for you with a whole heap of limitations - including company employees getting the occasional peep at your tough-to-fold unmentionables....

12-strong founding team down to 6 as boss looks Moonwards Elon Musk has framed the recent exodus of talent from his artificial intelligence startup, xAI, as a necessary growing pain, saying the company's evolution "required parting ways with some people."...

Visual Studio Code extension faces March shutdown with no transition guidance Microsoft has abruptly announced the deprecation of Polyglot Notebooks with less than two months' notice, throwing the future of the .NET Interactive project into doubt....

Flaw abused 'in an extremely sophisticated attack against specific targeted individuals' Apple patched a zero-day vulnerability affecting every iOS version since 1.0, used in what the company calls an "extremely sophisticated attack" against targeted individuals....

DRAM doubles, NAND jumps 70% as corporate buyers race the clock Exploding memory prices are pushing corporate buyers to fast-track PC purchases before costs climb further....

Anticipated summer launch is cutting it fine NASA has ended most science operations on its Swift observatory to keep the spacecraft in orbit a little longer....

Researchers say breaches link identity abuse, SaaS compromise, and ransomware into a cascading cycle Cybercriminals are turning supply chain attacks into an industrial-scale operation, linking breaches, credential theft, and ransomware into a "self-reinforcing" ecosystem, researchers say....

That's not a good idea Open Source Policy Summit 2026 SUSE recommends that companies should run on FOSS - but an accidental revelation from a company exec, live on stage, reveals it doesn't practice what it preaches. It's not alone....

Legal teeth sold separately The UK government claims a new Telecoms Consumer Charter will stop customers being hit by unexpected bill increases and offer clearer pricing when signing up to deals....

Whoever gets it will steer UK department's IT, AI strategy, and megabucks vendor deals The UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) is offering between 270,000 to 300,000 for a senior digital leader who will oversee more than 4.6 billion in spending and more than 3,000 specialist staff....

Department for Education dropped 27,118. The rest, little to nothing Most UK government departments have spent little or nothing with social media platform X since July 2024 following an unpublished 2023 evaluation by the Cabinet Office. But the Department for Education has bucked the trend, spending 27,118....

Meanwhile, IP-stealing 'distillation attacks' on the rise A Chinese government hacking group that has been sanctioned for targeting America's critical infrastructure used Google's AI chatbot, Gemini, to auto-analyze vulnerabilities and plan cyberattacks against US organizations, the company says....

Low-earth orbit broadband is a no-brainer for remote area connectivity, but a brain teaser for lawmakers and networkers APRICOT 2026 Starlink can sometimes shift data more quickly than is possible on terrestrial networks, and improves connectivity in remote areas. But the space broadband service also presents new technical and regulatory challenges, according to speakers who took to the stage on Tuesday at the Asia Pacific Regional Internet Conference on Operational Technologies (APRICOT) in Jakarta, Indonesia....

Switchzilla is only getting a small slice of the AI boom, but sees a campus refresh wave cresting Cisco has increased the prices for its hardware to cover the increased cost of memory and says the resulting bigger bills are not changing customers' buying habits....

Businesses are embedding prompts that produce content they want you to read, not the stuff AI makes if left to its own devices Amid its ongoing promotion of AI's wonders, Microsoft has warned customers it has found many instances of a technique that manipulates the technology to produce biased advice....

Compute it leases from Amazon, MIcrosoft, and Google... that's another story Model-maker and SaaS-y AI outfit Anthropic has committed to covering any increases in energy prices paid by consumers caused by its power-hungry datacenters....

Add-ons with 37M installs leak visited URLs to 30+ recipients, researcher says They know where you've been and they're going to share it. A security researcher has identified 287 Chrome extensions that allegedly exfiltrate browsing history data for an estimated 37.4 million installations....

Only for three days, though, then it's back to the misery feed Meta has decided to let Threads users make custom tweaks to its all-important algorithm, but don't expect your preferences to stick and do expect to bring your best manners....

Allies that don't align on chip controls could face US component curbs, they argue Banning sales to Chinese-government-affiliated companies, apparently, is not enough. A bipartisan group of American lawmakers this week called on the Trump administration to enact a blanket ban on the sale of equipment used in the production of advanced semiconductors to all of China....

Like a puppy, a fun new toy soon turns into an unrelenting taskmaster A Harvard Business Review study is answering the question what will employees do if AI saves them time at work?' The answer: more work....

This AI is so network native, the telco tells us, that it all works on existing hardware - no datacenters involved T-Mobile is claiming it's now the first wireless carrier to integrate generative AI "directly into a wireless network," and it's rolling out real-time call translation as the first feature delivered on top of its new AI-filled cellular network....

The more you share online, the more you open yourself to social engineering If you've seen the viral AI work pic trend where people are asking ChatGPT to "create a caricature of me and my job based on everything you know about me" and sharing it to social, you might think it's harmless. You'd be wrong....

Learn about how tech leaders are scaling AI in practice Promo AI projects fail at scale not because models don't work or GPUs lack performance. They fail because data can't keep pace....

Genetic study finds domestic pigs' year-round breeding sped gene flow into wild boar Back in 2021, in the thick of pandemic mania, The Register gleefully reported that "radioactive hybrid terror pigs" were thriving in Japan's Fukushima exclusion zone....

No known issues, no .NET Framework 3.5, but only for new Snapdragon X2 hardware right now Microsoft has released Windows 11 26H1 but is warning the vast majority of users that it is not for them....

Curious port filtering and traffic patterns suggest advisories weren't the earliest warning signals sent Telcos likely received advance warning about January's critical Telnet vulnerability before its public disclosure, according to threat intelligence biz GreyNoise....

Action Plan calls for EU-wide drills, industry forums, and expanded identification requirements The European Commission wants to see stronger EU-wide cooperation over malicious drones via a new action plan. Proposals include a central counter-drone test facility, changing the current rules governing civilian use, and a development boost to Europe's own drones and counter-drone systems....

Has the OS also jumped the shark? Microsoft's Raymond Chen has revealed an unexpected use for the company's lawyers: securing permission from the cast of Happy Days so a Weezer music video could ship on the Windows 95 CD....

200,000-strong union says spy-tech firm's ICE work undermines patient trust British doctors are being urged to pull back from the NHS Federated Data Platform (FDP) after their union called on members to stop non-clinical use of the Palantir-built system....

Attackers using social engineering to exploit business processes, rather than tunnelling in via tech Exclusive When fraudsters go after people's paychecks, "every employee on earth becomes a target," according to Binary Defense security sleuth John Dwyer....

Mac faithful aghast at helpful wallet-emptying suggestions Apple fanbois are realizing what the Creator Studio subscription means for its productivity apps, and many are unhappy with the direction of travel....

Judge agrees with Virtzilla's argument that the case should be heard in the US, not Germany VMware appears to have secured an early procedural win in the case it brought against German industrial giant Siemens over its alleged use of unlicensed software....

Smug faces across all those who opposed the WordPad-ification of Microsoft's humble text editor Just months after Microsoft added Markdown support to Notepad, researchers have found the feature can be abused to achieve remote code execution (RCE)....

Report warns skills shortages and grid bottlenecks threaten to stall region's capacity push Only 20 percent of datacenters are considered AI-ready across Europe and the Middle East, despite the growing demand for infrastructure to accelerate AI processing....

Breaking a big hard problem up into smaller ones? That'll never catch on FOSDEM 2026 Isaac Freund's River compositor brings a little old-fashioned modularity and customizability to the brave new Wayland world....

If launching it was crazy in 1999, then what's trying to use it today? FOSDEM 2026 Michal Pleban knows his old kit inside out, and his talk on the CIDCO MailStation was one of the most interesting of FOSDEM for us - as well as the funniest....

UK government grilled over progress made to prevent a second life-threatening leak Legacy IT issues are hampering key technical measures designed to prevent highly sensitive data leaks, UK government officials say....

The Chocolate Factory isn't showing ads in Gemini, but AI Mode is fair game As OpenAI walks the advertising tightrope to balance revenue gains against credibility and safety, ad kingpin Google is roaring ahead to use AI to improve its advertising products....

Because AI won't only run in Big Tech's giant GPU garages, and won't tolerate slow connections The Open Compute Project (OCP) wants to develop specs for distributed datacenters and has decided the all-optical Innovative Optical and Wireless Network (IOWN) stack can make them possible....

Just change the name to CAIsco already, Chuck Cisco is on track to deliver its unified management tool Cloud Control later in 2026, but while its users wait for that moment it's pumping out plenty more agentic tools to manage their networks - and make sure agents behave....

'Claude DXT's container falls noticeably short of what is expected from a sandbox' LayerX, a security company based in Tel Aviv, says it has identified a zero-click remote code execution vulnerability in Claude Desktop Extensions that can be triggered by processing a Google Calendar entry....

Great time to be a liquid cooling startup GPUs are so hot right now - literally and metaphorically - that they're driving mergers and acquisitions in the datacenter cooling industry....

Roses are red, violets are blue ... now get patching What better way to say I love you than with an update? Attackers exploited a whopping six Microsoft bugs as zero-days prior to Redmond releasing software fixes on February's Patch Tuesday....

Someday Microsoft wants you to know that it has found a new way of saving power at its datacenters using high-temperature superconducting (HTS) power delivery systems. And good news: it'll be possible ... someday....

Academics look at problematic algorithm to inform regulatory discussion A picture is worth a thousand words or, perhaps, a hundred thousand dollars in extra salary. Academics claim that personality traits inferred using AI photo analysis can predict how depicted individuals will fare in the labor market....

Nvidia, Qualcomm, and Altera among the first to trial EDA giant's AI chip design agent The idea of machines that can build even better machines sounds like sci-fi, but the concept is becoming a reality as companies like Cadence tap into generative AI to design and validate next-gen processors that also use AI....

Zero-click prompt injection can leak data when AI agents meet messaging apps, researchers warn AI agents can shop for you, program for you, and, if you're feeling bold, chat for you in a messaging app. But beware: attackers can use malicious prompts in chat to trick an AI agent into generating a data-leaking URL, which link previews may fetch automatically....

CFO and general counsel both step down IBM services spin-out Kyndryl said it was reviewing its accounting practices after it announced revenue below market expectations and the departure of its CFO....

As the governance policy designed to protect regional internet registries nears completion APRICOT 2026 After years of strife, the African Network Information Centre (AFRINIC) is weeks away from signing off on a budget and action plan, activity that one of the organization's newly appointed executives believes demonstrates it is back on track....

As communities push back on utility costs, White House tells Big Tech to fund their own AI expansion The Trump administration continues its AI push, working to defuse public opposition to datacenter energy and water consumption - while dangling a promise to exempt hyperscalers from chip tariffs to help them stock their facilities with GPUs and accelerators....