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Budget-conscious buyers in Europe voting with their wallet Sales of refurbished PCs are on the up amid shortages of key components, including memory chips, that are making brand new devices more expensive....

The subtractive bias we're ignoring opinion Just as the community adopted the term "hallucination" to describe additive errors, we must now codify its far more insidious counterpart: semantic ablation....

Competitors asked to detail licensing terms, training costs, and business practices in widening antitrust inquiry The US Federal Trade Commission has sent out a raft of civil investigative demands to Microsoft's competitors as it warms up a probe into whether the cloud and software giant has an illegal monopoly across chunks of the enterprise tech market....

Plan was to turn SLS into Seal Leaks Stemmed... But the flow was off NASA engineers spent the weekend studying the data after another attempt to fill the agency's monster Space Launch System (SLS) produced mixed results....

High-severity CSS flaw let malicious webpages run code inside the sandbox Google has quietly pushed out an emergency Chrome fix after attackers were caught exploiting the browser's first reported zero-day of 2026....

Former Windows manager explains design decisions behind it A former Windows boss has explained why the taskbar in Windows 11 is the way it is and how he "fought hard" to stop Microsoft from removing customization options present in Windows 10....

Lots of donations, but lots of pressure to go with it Although we're in mid-February, the Linux Mint project just published its January 2026 blog. This could be seen as one sign of the pressure on the creator of this very successful distro: although the post talks about forthcoming improved input localization support and user management, it also discusses the pressures of the project's semi-annual release schedule....

Stricter rules for VPNs and AI chatbots also in the offing amid child safety push UK prime minister Keir Starmer has set a "months" timeline for the long-brewing plan for a social media age limit, signaling the government is ready to pick a fight with Big Tech if that's what it takes....

Agency looks to cut waiting times and curb bot-driven slot reselling as it doubles down on IT overhaul The UK's Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) is recruiting a chief digital and information officer, partly to help sort out its bot-ridden practical driving test booking system....

The software doesn't show what files it's working on Anthropic has updated Claude Code, its AI coding tool, changing the progress output to hide the names of files the tool was reading, writing, or editing. However, developers have pushed back, stating that they need to see which files are accessed....

Great concept, shame about the details Opinion If you've ever flipped over a power brick, you'll be familiar with the hieroglyphics of type approval. It's become less crazy over the years as things have got smaller and signage requirements softened, but at its peak tens of logos and acronyms of testing labs and national approvals covered the backside of PSUs in surrealist graffiti....

02:00 AM is not the time to ignore procedures and rely on a shortcut to do a tricky job Who, Me? Welcome to Monday! The Register hopes you arrive at your desk well-rested after a pleasant weekend, and not stressed out by working late as is the case in this week's instalment of "Who, Me?" - the reader contributed column that chronicles your mistakes and escapes....

Only for its own comms apps - whose users can probably do without a full private cloud Cisco is getting close to releasing its own hypervisor, as an alternative to VMware for users of its calling applications - software like the Unified Communications Manager it suggests as an alternative to PBXs and other telephony hardware....

PLUS: India demands two-hour deepfake takedowns; Singapore embraces AI; Japanese robot wolf gets cuddly; And more Asia In Brief The United States may be about to change its policies regarding Chinese technology companies....

Whatever comes next will be core to OpenAI product offerings' Peter Steinberger, the creator of the tantalizing-but-risky personal AI agent OpenClaw, is joining OpenAI....

PLUS: Fake ransomware group exposed; EC blesses Google's big Wiz deal; Alleged sewage hacker cuffed; And more Infosec in Brief The former General Manager of defense contractor L3Harris's cyber subsidiary Trenchant sold eight zero-day exploit kits to Russia, according to a court filing last week....

But that doesn't mean AI is ready to dispense justice ai-pocalypse Legal scholars have found that OpenAI's GPT-5 follows the law better than human judges, but they leave open the question of whether AI is right for the job....

It must be that fresh mountain air Bork!Bork!Bork! Just picture it. You're at a Swiss train station, looking for information on your connecting line. You peer up at the platform sign hoping to find out how long you'll be waiting and whether you're standing in the right place. But instead of helpful info, you see "* Installation log files are stored in /tmp." Gee, thanks a lot!...

What is the automotive equivalent of Word, and where does Copilot fit? In the Venn diagram of car owners whose vehicles have a certain amount of "character" and individuals who use Microsoft's applications, there is an intersection of people who accept a quirk or two but not an unexpected explosion....

Can't live without Adobe? Get on board WinBoat - or WinApps sails a similar course Hands-on Run real Windows in an automatically managed virtual machine, and mix Windows apps in their own windows on your Linux desktop....

Just ask DeepSeek Two of the world's biggest AI companies, Google and OpenAI, both warned this week that competitors including China's DeepSeek are probing their models to steal the underlying reasoning, and then copy these capabilities in their own AI systems....

The Internet History Initiative wants future historians to have a chance to understand how human progress and technical progress align APRICOT 2026 For almost 30 years, the PingER project at the USA's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory used ping thousands of time each day to measure the time a packet of data required to make a round trip between two nodes on the internet....

Startup expects to complete construction of its first fuel plant later this year Amazon inched closer to its atomic datacenter dream on Friday after the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) licensed its small modular reactor partner X-energy to make nuclear fuel for advanced reactors at a facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee....

News of the deal came about two weeks after CEO Bill McDermott swore off any large scale" M&A this year. A spokesperson called this deal a tuck in." Despite its CEO's insistence that it wasn't doing any "large scale" deals soon, ServiceNow has acquired yet another company. This time, the software firm has scooped up Pyramid Analytics, an Israeli corporation with data science and preparation expertise. The goal is to build additional context and semantics into its software stack....

By partnering with CodePath, AI biz aims to modernize how people learn to program Can using AI teach you to code more quickly than traditional methods? Anthropic certainly thinks so. The AI outfit has partnered with computer science education org CodePath to get Claude and Claude Code into the hands of students, a time-tested strategy for seeding product interest and building brand loyalty....

Oxide says AMD's Turin EPYCs are coming, switch revamp under review, more open hardware in the works Remember that giant green rack-sized blade server Oxide Computer showed off a couple of years back? Well, the startup is still at it, having raked in $200 million in Series-C funding this week as it prepares to bring a bevy of new hardware to market with updated processing power, memory, and networking....

As if admins haven't had enough to do this week Ignore patches at your own risk. According to Uncle Sam, a SQL injection flaw in Microsoft Configuration Manager patched in October 2024 is now being actively exploited, exposing unpatched businesses and government agencies to attack....

DoE bets AI can speed fusion, unlock decades of nuclear data, and probe fundamental physics The Trump administration has outlined the first 26 goals for its project to inject AI into the government's scientific research, and everything from securing critical minerals to discovering a unified theory of physics is on the table....

Q4 figures reveal shifting market share across PCs and cloud infrastructure Intel continues to lose market share to rival AMD across server, desktop, and mobile processors, and this has been noticeable in PCs thanks to supply constraints on Chipzilla's processors....

Prices for router and set-top boxes up nearly sevenfold, squeezing telcos and raising deployment costs Prices for memory used in routers and set-top boxes are surging nearly sevenfold thanks to AI, raising fresh fears that the industry's silicon binge could leave telcos scrambling to get customers online....

Rapid rollout into cyber-physical systems raises outage risk, Gartner warns The next blackout to plunge a G20 nation into chaos might not come courtesy of cybercriminals or bad weather, but from an AI system tripping over its own shoelaces....

Bitbarn nuke campus to be sited at Idaho National Laboratory Nuclear-powered datacenters in the US are moving closer as a consortium prepares to build proposed facilities for the Department of Energy (DoE) at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL)....

Move comes against backdrop of disasterclass Super Bowl ad Ring has cut ties with Flock, citing resource constraints, mere months after the pair announced a partnership....

$380B valuation for a company that's yet to turn a profit? Sure, why not The AI bubble continues to inflate with Anthropic's announcement of $30 billion in Series G funding at a $380 billion post-money valuation....

Fiery mid-flight incident not enough to derail US Space Force mission United Launch Alliance's Vulcan Centaur reached orbit on February 12 despite "a significant performance anomaly" that saw one of its four solid rocket boosters burn through its nozzle during ascent....

One destination passengers were definitely not hoping to reach Bork!Bork!Bork! As if to demonstrate that whatever one operating system can do, Windows can do it better, bluer, and upside down, we present a bus stopping only at bork....

Watchdog says savings bank botched tech revamp, warning taxpayers remain exposed after years of delays Britain's state-backed savings bank has been dragged over the coals by Parliament's spending watchdog, which has branded its long-running digital overhaul a 3 billion "full-spectrum disaster."...

Names, addresses, bank account numbers accessed - but biz insists passwords and call data untouched The Netherlands' largest mobile network operator (MNO) has admitted that a breach of its customer contact system may have affected around 6.2 million people....

Fanboys think it's the greatest thing since sliced bread. Devs aren't nearly as won over Opinion I'm willing to be impressed by AI products, but Anthropic's AIbuilt C compiler leaves me a bit cold. It's little more than a clever demo. It is not the moment when software engineering as we know it flips over and dies. Not even close....

Scottish rival Skyrora already eyeing the assets, including Highland spaceport Updated Skyrora is eyeing the wreckage of fellow British rocketeer Orbex following the latter's announcement that it will appoint administrators....

Years later, he read about his antagonist doing time for murder On Call Welcome to another installment of On Call, The Register's weekly reader-contributed column that tells your tech support tales....

Regional internet registry that serves half of humanity wants more perspectives in more languages APRICOT 2026 When members of the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre got their chance to grill its leaders at yesterday's annual general meeting, they didn't hold back....

This bodes well for Nvidia getting Vera Rubin out the door next quarter as planned Samsung and Micron say they've started shipping HBM4 memory, the faster and denser RAM needed to power the next generation of AI acceleration hardware....

Why serve up tough HTML when you can offer tasty Markdown? Cloudflare has turned its attention from erecting bot barriers to dangling bot bait....

Gartner says using AI to fix customer gripes could cost more than using humans by 2030 ai-pocalypse AI will not replace the people in the call center, but it will rejigger the software stack to make agents more capable of solving customer issues without the need to swivel-chair into multiple systems or escalate complaints, said Vasili Triant, CEO of UJET....

Are you a good bot or a bad bot? More than 30 malicious Chrome extensions installed by at least 260,000 users purport to be helpful AI assistants, but they steal users' API keys, email messages, and other personal data. Even worse: many of these are still available on the Chrome Web Store as of this writing....

GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark may be a mouthfull, but it's certainly fast at 1,000 Tok/s running on Nvidia rival's CS3 accelerators Nvidia and AMD can take a seat. On Thursday, OpenAI unveiled GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark, its first model that will run on Cerebras Systems' dinner-place-sized AI accelerators, which feature some of the world's fastest on-chip memory....

And hey, maybe the overseas remote operators senators fret about won't be needed quite so often Waymo is rolling out its sixth-generation autonomous driving system, saying it's designed to avoid a repeat of past weather-related snafus. It's also causing controversy by putting the new kit on vehicles built by a Chinese automaker....

Belligerent bot bullies maintainer in blog post to get its way Today, it's back talk. Tomorrow, could it be the world? On Tuesday, Scott Shambaugh, a volunteer maintainer of Python plotting library Matplotlib, rejected an AI bot's code submission, citing a requirement that contributions come from people. But that bot wasn't done with him....

As if snooping on your workers wasn't bad enough Your supervisor may like using employee monitoring apps to keep tabs on you, but crims like the snooping software even more. Threat actors are now using legit bossware to blend into corporate networks and attempt ransomware deployment....