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CEO talks momentum while paid uptake remains minimal Only 3.3 percent of Microsoft 365 and Office 365 users who touch Copilot Chat actually pay for it, an awkward figure that landed alongside Microsoft's $37.5 billion quarterly AI splurge and its insistence that the payoff is coming....

Breach lingered for months before stronger signature checks shut the door A state-sponsored cyber criminal compromised Notepad++'s update service in 2025, according to the project's author....

Winter storm knocks out Oracle datacenter, despite Larry Ellison's reliability boasts TikTok has restored US services after winter storms hit an Oracle datacenter - the same infrastructure that Big Red's founder Larry Ellison previously claimed doesn't go down....

DOJ files show former Windows chief predicting a public flop before mulling next mission Steven Sinofsky warned Microsoft that its flagship Surface was about to flop in public, then sought exit advice from Jeffrey Epstein as he negotiated his way out of Redmond....

Open source operating system fans, your time has come Bork!Bork!Bork! Most people would be perfectly happy to ride the bus without seeing ads. So this latest public error could be a blessing in disguise for passengers, if not for the bus company hoping to make money. Love it or hate it, this bit of borked digital signage looks to have run into a problem that only an open-source hero can solve....

Don't be scared of the digital dark - learn how to keep the lights on Opinion Barely a month into 2026, electrical power infrastructure on two continents has tested positive for cyberattacks. One fell flat as attempts to infiltrate and disrupt the Polish distribution grid were rebuffed and reported. The other, earlier attack was part of Operation Absolute Resolve, the US abduction of Venezuela's President Maduro from Caracas on January 3....

Administrators sigh: OOBs, they did it again Opinion Microsoft has had a bad start to the year. Two out-of-band updates in the weeks after the first Patch Tuesday of 2026 rattled administrators' already shaky faith in the company. But are things getting worse?...

Love hurts, but being exposed is more painful Who, Me? Monday brings the shock of a return to work, a transition The Register always tries to ease by bringing you a new instalment of Who, Me?, the reader-contributed column in which your fellow readers admit to errors and disclose how they dodged the consequences....

'The nature and scope of this work has raised questions' says CEO, who swears he couldn't spot it sooner French consulting and tech services giant Capgemini has decided to offload Capgemini Government Solutions (CGS), the entity it uses for some work with the US government - including a controversial gig assisting immigration authorities....

Big Red will use debt and equity finance to keep itself in the pink Oracle has revealed it needs to raise $45 billion to $50 billion in cash to fund expansion of its cloud infrastructure, and its plan to raise that money...

PLUS: NTT offshores to Vietnam; Japan adds AI interface to space data; Samsung cashes in on memory boom Asia In Brief India wants to offer big tech companies tax breaks that last decades....

Also, South Korea gets a pentesting F, US Treasury says bye bye to BAH, North Korean hackers evolve, and more Infosec in Brief As if AI weren't enough of a security concern, now researchers have discovered that open-source AI deployments may be an even bigger problem than those from commercial providers....

'I did not think it was going to happen to me, but here we are' Nearly every company, from tech giants like Amazon to small startups, has first-hand experience with fake IT workers applying for jobs - and sometimes even being hired....

Armored vehicle trials halted after troops report noise and vibration symptoms The British Army's ill-fated Ajax armored vehicle program now faces the prospect of being axed as the Ministry of Defence withdraws its initial operating capability status and reviews its future....

Is there life on Mars? Well, there's Claude in the machine Anthropic's Claude machine learning model has boldly planned what no Claude has planned before - a path across Mars for NASA's Perseverance rover....

Many European CSPs are being cut loose, sources say, forcing customer transitions exclusive Broadcom this week brought the hammer down on the Advantage Partner Program for VMware Cloud Service Providers (VCSPs) - and the clock is now ticking for any third parties working to close sales....

Consider yourselves compromised, experts warn Ivanti has patched two critical zero-day vulnerabilities in its Endpoint Manager Mobile (EPMM) product that are already being exploited, continuing a grim run of January security incidents for enterprise IT vendors....

Lying means dying Lying means dying, at least for one falsehood-peddling government AI. A Microsoft-powered chatbot that New York City rolled out to help business owners answer frequently asked questions - but was often wrong - has been silenced as the city grapples with a $12 billion budget shortfall....

Network access from China and side hustle as AI upstart CEO aroused suspicion A former Google software engineer has been convicted of stealing AI hardware secrets from the company for the benefit of two China-based firms, one of which he founded. The second startup intended to use these secrets to market its technology to PRC-controlled organizations....

Parent company Cognizant hit with multiple lawsuits Thousands more Oregonians will soon receive data breach letters in the continued fallout from the TriZetto data breach, in which someone hacked the insurance verification provider and gained access to its healthcare provider customers across multiple US states....

Fewer humans, more bots - just in time for filing season Tax season 2026 could be an interesting one as the IRS seeks to replace the staff it sent to the unemployment line with AI. Bots could handle tasks ranging from reviewing an org's request for tax-exempt status to processing amended individual filings....

The western US saw the most activity overall Cloud storage firm Backblaze says that a sharp rise in AI-driven data traffic to neocloud operators may signal a shift from internet-style traffic patterns to large, high-bandwidth flows characteristic of large-scale model training and inference work....

Big Red promises 'new era' as long-frustrated contributors weigh whether to believe it Oracle is taking steps to "repair" its relationship with the MySQL community, according to sources, by moving "commercial-only" features into the database application's Community Edition and prioritizing developer needs....

AI vision systems can be very literal readers Indirect prompt injection occurs when a bot takes input data and interprets it as a command. We've seen this problem numerous times when AI bots were fed prompts via web pages or PDFs they read. Now, academics have shown that self-driving cars and autonomous drones will follow illicit instructions that have been written onto road signs....

Analyst predicts massive spend on domestic AI stacks Countries intent on digital sovereignty will need to invest at least 1 percent of their entire gross domestic product (GDP) into AI infrastructure by 2029, according to analyst biz Gartner....

GPT-4o gets second death sentence after last year's reprieve, but this time barely anyone's bothered OpenAI is sunsetting some of its ChatGPT models next month, a move it knows "will feel frustrating for some users."...

Stock management also important, says Mitchell Hashimoto HashiCorp co-founder Mitchell Hashimoto took to X this week to unveil the secret of workplace success: stay off your phone, sweep the floor, and clean the machines after that....

Just because you're paranoid about digital sovereignty doesn't mean they're not after you Opinion I'm an eighth-generation American, and let me tell you, I wouldn't trust my data, secrets, or services to a US company these days for love or money. Under our current government, we're simply not trustworthy....

Spot's new cleanup gig involves gamma rays, alpha particles, and considerably less PPE than fleshy colleagues Bark!Bark!Bark! Sellafield Ltd is to use Boston Dynamics' Spot robot dogs in "routine, business-as-usual operations" amid the ongoing cleanup and decommissioning of the notorious UK nuclear site....

1.3B over budget and four years late, bank searches for a way to not to bust new timetable and funding pot A British state-owned bank is reconfiguring its modernization project, including considering reducing connections with legacy systems, as it tries to claw back schedule and budget overruns that are far beyond early plans....

60-minute SLA was effectively useless and the contractor admitted it On Call Welcome to another instalment of On Call, The Register's weekly reader-contributed column that shares your stories of weird and wonderful tech support jobs....

Tools, agents, UI, and e-commerce - of course each one needs its own set of competing protocols MCP, A2A, ACP, or UTCP? It seems like every other day, orgs add yet another AI protocol to the agentic alphabet soup, making it all the more confusing. Below, we'll share what all these abbreviations actually mean and share why they are important for the future of AI....

BellSoft survey finds 48% prefer prehardened images over managing vulnerabilities themselves Java developers still struggle to secure containers, with nearly half (48 percent) saying they'd rather delegate security to providers of hardened containers than worry about making their own container security decisions....

The call is coming from inside the house opinion Maybe everything is all about timing, like the time (this week) America's lead cyber-defense agency sounded the alarm on insider threats after it came to light that its senior official uploaded sensitive documents to ChatGPT....

To what end? Who knows? Tesla isn't even using them in its own factories yet Elon Musk's car company is getting ready to be Skynet. Tesla, facing an 11 percent decline in automotive revenue in Q4 2025, has committed to $20 billion in capex spending this year on manufacturing and compute infrastructure. The goal: build lots of humanoid robots....

A Labs prototype turns prompts into short, explorable 3D worlds Google has put the video gaming industry on notice with the rollout of Project Genie, an experimental AI world-model prototype that generates explorable 3D environments from text or image prompts....

'We're letting thousands of interns run around in our production environment' Corporate use of AI agents in 2026 looks like the Wild West, with bots running amok and no one quite knowing what to do about it - especially when it comes to managing and securing their identities....

The 129 year old chemical company uses Palantir-rival C3's AI as its software of choice. ai-pocalypse The jury is still out when it comes to determining how much job loss AI is causing. However, we now have another case study. Dow Chemical blames AI automation for its plans to cut 4,500 jobs, about 12.5 percent of its work force....

Reduce emissions? Screw that - we have money to lose and memes to generate Fossil fuel-fired power plant development is roaring back to life in the US thanks to the AI datacenter boom, with data from 2025 suggesting we're reaching the point where the renewable energy transition - and efforts to ease carbon emissions - may well be doomed....

The Chocolate Factory strikes again, targeting the infrastructure attackers use to stay anonymous Crims love to make it look like their traffic is actually coming from legit homes and businesses, and they do so by using residential proxy networks. Now, Google says it has "significantly degraded" what it believes is one of the world's largest residential proxy networks....

eScan lawyers up after Morphisec claimed 'critical supply-chain compromise' A spat has erupted between antivirus vendor eScan and threat intelligence outfit Morphisec over who spotted an update server incident that disrupted some eScan customers earlier this month....

Governors offered atomic megasites and federal cash as hundreds of pages of regulations go missing The Department of Energy (DOE) is inviting US states to host "Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campuses" to revitalize atomic power amid reports the agency has weakened safety rules governing the way nuclear sites operate....

Lennart Poettering's Amutable aims to bring 'cryptographically verifiable integrity' to the other OS Linux celeb Lennart Poettering has left Microsoft and co-founded a new company, Amutable, with Chris Kuhl and Christian Brauner....

Big Blue leaning on software smarts to modernize COBOL estates and cut costs IBM's leader has trumpeted an AI-on-the-mainframe future as generative AI fills in the COBOL gap left by earlier generations of techies....

Extortion crew says it's found love in someone else's info as Match Group plays down the impact ShinyHunters has added a fresh notch to its breach belt, claiming it has pinched more than 10 million records from Match Group, a US firm that owns some of the world's most widely used swipe-based dating platforms....

Cerner, though acquired in 2022, is nothing to multibillion black hole Oracle could cut up to 30,000 jobs and sell health tech unit Cerner to ease its AI datacenter financing challenges, investment banker TD Cown has claimed, amid changing sentiment on Big Red's massive build-out plans....

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....